International Society for Neurofeedback & Research (ISNR) 18th Annual Conference
Denver, Colorado Sept 30-Oct 3, 2010
ISNR invites you to their 18th Annual Conference for Health Professionals, Education Professionals, Researchers & Students. This conference offers workshops by the leading clinicians and researchers in the field of neuroscience. There will be many workshops and keynote talks on clinical as well as theoretical applications in the neuroscience field.
Consciousness: An Emergent Property Of Mind-Brain Interaction – presented by Jay Gunkelman
A model of consciousness will be illustrated with physiological data from EEG and Event related potentials. Using millisecond level time resolution, a working model of the interaction between the mind and the brain will be constructed.
The Slow Cortical Potentials generated by Glial activity and the faster gamma activity reflecting activity of bound neural networks will be used to illustrate this model. The physiological correlates of concepts like intention, attention, memory, perception, awareness, sensory differentiation and conscious awareness will all be discussed within the framework of this model. Advanced concepts like neural network binding, nested rhythms, cross-spectral correlation, and the bispectrum will be discussed.
The DC potentials cause an instantaneous phase resetting and binding of a neural network, which can initiate synchronous activity within these neural networks. Current work using this model in clinical work on severe disorders of consciousness, including work by the International Brain Research Foundation on recovery of consciousness in coma cases will be reviewed. The simplest expression of the model: when the DC potentials reflecting activity of the mind interact with gamma activity reflecting neural activity in the brain, the emergent property of this interaction is consciousness.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv-msnzTk7o[/youtube]
This is the first of a few posts with a variety of ways the EEG can show an epileptogenic process. The morphology of the underlying process are quite dramatically varied.
The two images below show the referential and sequential montage display of an active right temporal-parietal spike and slow wave focus, seen in a child clinically diagnosed with an attachment disorder. There was no history of convulsion, nor any suspicion of the actual underlying pathophysiological basis for the behavioral presentation.
Epilepsy and EEG have been inextricably linked since the 1930s, when Frederick and Erna Gibbs discovered that epileptic events were visible in the EEG. The evolution of other medical imaging in the 1970s and 1980s provided a better way to localize tumors, and the clinical use tapered off in areas other than epilepsy and encephalopathies. Even with the multiplicity of other methods, the EEG remains the gold standard for identification of epilepsy.
In modern neuroscience centers, the EEG is still the tool of choice in evaluation of convulsive epilepsy, as well as some other non-convulsive forms, such as staring episodes seen in “absence epilepsy” typically as a 3/second spike and wave dominant anteriorly, or temporal lobe epilepsy, which is seen as a “notched” slow wave discharge fronto-temporally.
The scientific and academic press is now considering Neurofeedback as one of the ways neural plasticity can be induced/enhanced. The paper below shows the NF training changing the brain’s plasticity measurably within a single feedback session.
This may not surprise too many old-time NF practitioners, except that it is now being proven with well done studies in the traditional neuroscience literature! Neurofeedback can induce changes in brain plasticity!
Jay
First Direct Evidence of Neuroplastic Changes Following Brainwave Training
ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2010) — Significant changes in brain plasticity have been observed following alpha brainwave training.
A pioneering collaboration between two laboratories from the University of London has provided the first evidence of neuroplastic changes occurring directly after natural brainwave training. Researchers from Goldsmiths and the Institute of Neurology have demonstrated that half an hour of voluntary control of brain rhythms is sufficient to induce a lasting shift in cortical excitability and intracortical function.
Remarkably, these after-effects are comparable in magnitude to those observed following interventions with artificial forms of brain stimulation involving magnetic or electrical pulses. The novel finding may have important implications for future non-pharmacological therapies of the brain and calls for a serious re-examination and stronger backing of research on neurofeedback, a technique which may be promising tool to modulate cerebral plasticity in a safe, painless, and natural way.
Continued at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100310114936.htm
AAPB is traveling to San Diego, California for its 41st Annual Meeting. Mark your calendars for March 24-27, 2010 to attend this gathering of experts in biofeedback, neurofeedback, and applied psychophysiology. You won’t want to miss this educational event and the networking opportunities available!
We are honored to welcome several high-profile speakers, including:
Is the Mind Room Helping the Vancouver Canucks run to the Stanley Cup?
An excellent story regarding the use of Neurofeedback in sports. The Mind Room utilizes the Thought Technology Procomp Infiniti equipment. The follwing article from the Vancouver Sun gives us a bit of insight in to the 2011 Stanley Cup run of the Vancouver Canucks.
Canucks work on secret mind room where they can be programmed to think happy thoughts
In director Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, a violent criminal named Alex DeLarge undergoes experimental aversion therapy as authorities try to psychologically reprogram him.
DeLarge, brilliantly played by Malcolm McDowell, has his eyelids clamped open and is forced to watch graphic nasty bits of ultra-violence on film while suffering drug-induced nausea all to the music of Beethoven. DeLarge quickly associates his suffering with violence and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and is cured. Completely disarmed psychologically, he returns to the community stripped of any coping skills and soon tries to kill himself.
Dr. Hal Myers, president of Thought Technology Ltd. hooked up to ‘Mind Room’, a physiological-psychological instrument that prepares athletes mentally to deal with nail-biting experiences. -Montreal Gazette MindRoom technology worked for the Italian national team at soccer’s last World Cup and it could soon be working for the Vancouver Canucks.
The concern regarding the Mitsar amplifier expressed with so much vigor by those with competing interests has met the reality test of actual recorded data. The concern expressed was over a theoretical time skewing error due to the data sampling of an older version of the Mitsar amplifier.
I suggested at the time that all the emotion was merely an example of someone yelling “the sky is falling”, like Chicken Little. There was no real problem, just lots of crying out and hand wringing.
I requested in an open international forum for anyone to send me a sample of the problem, and none could be produced. I suspected there was no real problem, as the sample issue was concerning a 500 sample/second device having a time skew… though this was in comparison to a database collected on a 100 sample per second device, with the waveforms interpolated from these samples.
As the technologies advance and the software speed starts to allow derived measures to be used for feedback, the field is being offered many new tools for neurofeedback, including ICA based feedback, LORETA based feedback, and Z-score feedback.
All of these new tools will require clinical validation prior to being able to be considered standard techniques within our field’s armamentarium of efficacious techniques and clinical applications. All of these techniques offer great hope at this time with preliminary results, but careful clinical outcome studies remain to be performed.
In this brief note I will discuss Z-score feedback. This promising technique offers to set normative boundaries around the mean of many features of the EEG, and allow feedback to be controlled by these parameters. This obviously offers great hope to clinical outliers, as their Z-score divergence should be related to their pathology. One difficulty is that database Z-scores also show divergence when an adaptive or counter-balancing feature is used to cope with an abnormal finding. A crutch is not a normal finding, but you can’t walk without it if you have a broken leg.
On this episode of the Doctors Dr Michael Linden helps “Noah” with his ADD. Part 1 of this story give a bit of information about what Noahs parents have been dealing with and the struggle they face with deciding whether or not to medicate their young child.
In Part 2 you see how Noah parents learn there are alternatives to Ritalin and other drugs that may be given to their child. Learn about how Neurofeedback and EEG Brain Mapping may be able to help without the use of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs.
Dr. Linden is a Clinical Psychologist and Nationally Certified in Neurofeedback and Biofeedback. He is the director of The Attention Learning Center, which has offices located in San Juan Capistrano, Irvine and Carlsbad, California.
Dr. Linden is a regular contributor to the Journal of Neurotherapy and has been a speaker in many seminars and conferences related to ADD/ADHD and neurotherapy.