Neurofeedback Demonstrated on “The Doctors”

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.

BRAINnet – Innovative Integration Analysis Challenge

From BRAINnet – Brain Research And Integrative Neuroscience Network

The purpose of this challenge is to promote a more integrative and innovative approach to Brain (EEG) – Body (Heart Rate) analysis. Brain Resource is sponsoring the challenge with the winner to receive $5,000USD.

The Challenge

Take 20 EEG and Heart Rate recordings from children diagnosed with ADHD and 20 recordings from a control population, and develop an analysis method that demonstrates any new insight relevant to ADHD using the data. The insight may have a basic science or applied clinical perspective.

Each dataset was recorded during a Go/NoGo paradigm and contains EEG, Heart Rate, respiration and Sweat Rate (skin conductance) channels, as well as stimulus and response information. The data sets are sourced from the Brain Resource International Database via BRAINnet.

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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.

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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.

New research shows: Neurofeedback is an ‘Evidence-Based’ treatment for ADHD.

Nijmegen, July 16th 2009 – Neurofeedback – also called EEG Biofeedback – is a method used to train brain activity in order to normalize Brain function and treat psychiatric disorders. This treatment method has gained interest over the last 10 years, however the question whether this treatment should be regarded as an Evidence-Based treatment was unanswered until now. Tomorrow a study will be published in the scientific journal ‘EEG and Clinical Neuroscience’ demonstrating that Neurofeedback can indeed be regarded as an evidence-based treatment for Attention Deficit- / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Neurofeedback is a treatment where real-time feedback is provided for specific brain activity (most often EEG) in order to learn the brain to suppress or produce specific brain activity. This method was initially discovered for the treatment of Epilepsy and from 1976 investigated further for the treatment of ADHD. This technique has become more popular by clinicians worldwide, and is currently provided for the treatment of several disorders. Critics have often questioned the efficacy of Neurofeedback and whether it can be considered an Evidence Based treatment or not.

In collaboration with researchers from Tübingen University (Germany), Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands), Brainclinics and EEG Resource Institute a so-called meta-analysis was conducted on all published research about Neurofeedback treatment in ADHD. This meta-analysis included 15 studies and 1194 ADHD patients. Based on this study – which will be published in the July issue of EEG and Clinical Neuroscience – it could be concluded that Neurofeedback can indeed be considered an Evidence-Based treatment for ADHD. The results show that neurofeedback treatment has large and clinically significant effects on Impulsivity and Inattention and a modest improvement of Hyperactivity.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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A discussion on LORETA software use and licensing.

April 30, 2009
Leslie Sherlin, PhD

There recently has been some discussion regarding the use of low resolution brain electromagnetic tomography or LORETA, sLORETA and eLORETA. I felt compelled to make a few comments regarding this since there may be some confusion of how LORETA works and the usage of LORETA as an inverse solution specifically the licensing agreements of the KEY Institute for Brain-Mind Research at the University Hospital of Psychiatry, Zurich.

My intention is to very briefly explain the license agreement so that the end user can be informed. I’ll do so in an informal way by telling the story of the implementation of these methods from my perspective. For a more formal description of the use of LORETA families and some examples you can see a recently written chapter 4 by myself (Sherlin, 2009) in the latest edition of the book Introduction to Quantitative EEG and Neurofeedback edited Budzynski, Budzynski, Evans & Arbarbanel.

In 2000 I had the great privilege to visit with Roberto Pascual-Marqui PhD, the developer of the LORETA family, with my colleague and fellow student Marco Congedo. At this time the LORETA-Key software (Pascual-Marqui, 1994, 1999), had not been widely distributed and utilized in the United States. Marco had significant interest in using LORETA for visualizing brain activity and for exploring newer methods for neurofeedback and had many questions for Roberto. So upon the invitation of Roberto, Marco found funding to travel to Zurich and learn the details from the creator and I happen to be standing in the right spot at the right time. Roberto Pascual-Marqui trained us extensively on how to use his software, named LORETA-Key, which had been already released as free academic software. The LORETA-Key software is a collection of independent modules that the user must run in sequence in order to get from raw EEG to LORETA images.

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