qEEG – Page 4 – qEEGsupport.com

The Art of Aging: Limitless Potential of the Brain

This is an excellent video talking about how seniors can help keep their brains young.

How can we live a fuller and healthier lifestyle as we get older? Perhaps keeping our body and brain engaged can help. That seems to be the case in Japan where the number of centegenarians is greater than 20,000.

THE ART OF AGING:THE LIMITLESS POTENTIAL OF THE BRAIN introduces a number of these “super-seniors” who lead healthy lives at nearly 100-years-old and, through them,searches for the “keys” to living a healthy and vital life regardless of age.

[veoh]http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/lifestyle/watch/v19832384XKk8wQ5m[/veoh]

Related article from BBC July 3,2013 Active brain ‘keeps dementia at bay’

Three Sets of Data from the Same EEG

This is three sets of data from the same underlying EEG, all with varying coherence results, and with the weighted average showing the alpha hypercoherent pattern with better fidelity than any other for this data.

AAPB 41st Annual Meeting : Personalized Medicine in the Age of Technology: Psychophysiology & Health

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:

Personalized Medicine in the Age of Technology – Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, MD, PhD; Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute

Regeneration and Stress at Work: Strategies for Improved Employee Health – Tores Theorell, MD, PhD; Professor Emeritus at the University of Stockholm, Sweden

An Overview of Mind Body Healing – C. Norman Shealy, MD, PhD; founder of the American Holistic Medical Association, and past president of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine

Neurotherapy in the Treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury: A Physiological Hypothesis – Paul Rapp, PhD; Professor in the Department of Military and Emergency Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

Drug exposure and EEG/qEEG findings

A technical guide by Jay Gunkelman, QEEG-D

General comments:

There is a generally reciprocal effect between alpha and beta, as brain stem stimulation desynchronizes the alpha generators, beta is seen. During states of under-arousal, this relationship is not seen, as when the subject is alerted, when both alpha and beta increase.

The point is that the arousal level changes the EEG responses expected, as when a stimulant is given to an under-aroused subject, increasing alpha. In a normally aroused subject, stimulants decrease alpha, and in an anxious (low voltage fast EEG variant) subject alpha will not be seen as changed by a stimulant.

Though there is a response stereotype for each medication, there are also individual responses, which vary. Mixtures of medications become too complex to evaluate each individual medication’s contribution, not to speak of synergistic effects not seen with any single medication, which may be seen in polytherapy.

The following pages represent a summary of many articles, papers, reviews and books on medications and the CNS function, and finally nearly 30 years of experience in clinical and research EEG. The difficulty in this area is the definitions of bands varies, the methods of analysis range from visual inspection of the raw EEG to quantitative measures, not all of which are clearly defined… and thus the need for a brief summary which puts this into a concise form for reference.

Concern Regarding the Mitsar Amplifier

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.

Neurofeedback and the Brain

Neurofeedback is an emerging neuroscience based clinical application, and understanding the underlying principles of neurofeedback allows the therapist to provide referrals or treatment, and provides clients with a framework for understanding the process. The brain’s electrical patterns are a form of behavior, modifiable through “operant conditioning,” with the excessive brain frequencies reduced, and those with a deficit are increased. The learning curve for EEG has been described (Hardt, 1975).

Neurotherapy using slow cortical potentials also shows promise in the treatment of epilepsy (Kotchoubey et al., 2001; Birbaumer et al., 1981; Sterman, 2000). Neurotherapy has also been used for ADD/ADHD (Monastra, Monastra, & George, 2002) depression (Rosenfeld, 1997), anxiety (Vanathy, Sharma, & Kumar, 1998), fibromyalgia (Donaldson, 2002), and for cognitive enhancement (Budzynski, 2000; Klimesch, et al.). Commonly reported success rates of 60 to 90% are reported (Wright & Gunkelman, 1998).

Neurofeedback is an emerging neuroscience based clinical application based on the general principles of biofeedback or cybernetics. The Neurofeedback process involves training and learning self regulation of brain activity. Understanding the underlying principles of this process allows the therapist to provide referrals or treatment to their clients with some added understanding, and provides clients with a framework for understanding the neurofeedback process. The following short paper will provide a quick review of the brain’s function, and the underlying process involved in neurofeedback, a technique that will allow the client to better regulate and operate their brain.

The brain controls its own blood supply through the dilation and constriction of the blood vessels, and the blood flow is directed to areas that are more active through this self-regulation. The blood supply’s flow, along with the utilization of the oxygen and glucose the blood carries is measured as “perfusion,” a measure that is clearly seen in some of the modern imaging techniques, such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and SPECT technology. Though these techniques are invasive, requiring the injection of small amounts of very short half-life radioactive materials, they do give good resolution of the perfusion due to the emission of the positrons, which are emitted from where the brain utilizes the oxygen and burns the glucose carried by the blood flow.

Brain Power

This video was recently shown again on CBS 60 Minutes. It is a great video talking about using brain controlled interfaces.

Brain Power – Harnessing the Power of the Brain

August 9, 2009 4:35 PM

People who are completely paralyzed due to illness or trauma are getting help communicating with a new technology that connects their brains to a computer. Scott Pelley reports.

Thalamic Involvement in the Generation of the Alpha Rhythms

Alpha… it’s not a simple idling rhythm… let’s look at alpha generators:

The thalamic involvement in the generation of the alpha rhythm is being under-valued when looking at the LORETA images of alpha current source generators. The alpha power may come from the sources that LORETA identifies, but the thalamus is intimately involved in alpha rhythm generation, and this is not part of the LORETA image of the sources.

The polarization within the thalamus sets the base frequency of the alpha, but the cortical rhythm requires a complex multi-layer feedback loop from the thalamus to the cortex, and back to the thalamus. Without the cortex, there is a total disruption of the normal spatio-temporal distribution of the alpha wave’s spike trains within the thalamus, and cortical damage often disturbs coherence due to this mechanism.

The thalamus distributes the alpha posteriorly via specific sensory relays, which have a simple return circuit. Like the white matter relay from the lateral geniculate of the thalamus to the occipital lobe’s primary visual areas, and directly back. This thalamo-cortical-thalamic loop is relatively faster than the loop seen frontally. The frontal return circuitry is not simple, but the descending routes are complex and somewhat circuitous, taking more time, and thus it is common for the frontal lobe’s alpha to be at the slower end of the individual’s alpha frequency range. The frontal lobe has a return path through the striatum.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran MD, PhD Video Collection

A collection of great videos on the brain from Vilayanur S. Ramachandran MD, PhD

The Boy with the Incredible Brain

This is the breathtaking story of Daniel Tammet. A twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities, Daniel is one of the world’s few savants. He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. This documentary follows Daniel as he travels to America to meet the scientists who are convinced he may hold the key to unlocking similar abilities in everyone.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease: LORETA findings

Thanks to Jay Gunkelman who made a very informative post on January 27 on this forum entitled Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. There he described the EEG patterns that we should expect and detect when evaluating for AD or other dementias.

I’d like to just throw out there a few other findings that were discovered in a few exploratory investigations while working on some studies with our colleague Alicia Townsend, at the time at Univ. of North Texas. Lexicor funded these projects and now the arrangements are such that I can’t disclose more than was published in the abstracts from our talks at ISNR and AAPB. I did at least want to point to these very preliminary findings because theoretically they are in concert with your explanations.

First, we explored 10 participants between the ages of 65 and 85 were recruited at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Each was diagnosed by the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale and a medical interview. The aim of the study was to identify current source density markers in AD. EEG recording of the eyes closed condition of an AD group was compared to an age-sex matched control group using within-subject multiple t-test procedures. sLORETA difference maps in nine frequency bands were investigated. Interestingly the results showed that there was a significant increase in current source density in the delta and theta bands in the Brodmann Area (BA) 39 of the right temporal lobe and BA 31, the cingulate gyrus respectively. Additionally there were decreases in alpha in the BA 21 of the right temporal lobe and right inferior parietal lobule (Sherlin, Townsend & Hall, 2006).