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.
In his role as the Managing Director of the Foundation for Neurofeedback and
Applied Neuroscience John Fisher recently announced the Foundation’s selection of a recipient of the Neurofeedback Foundation Award.
The Foundation gives an award to the author(s) of the publication which has
“contributed the most to furthering the field of neurofeedback” during the
past year. Past recipients have included Drs Rob Coben, John Gruzelier, as
well as Johan Levesque and Mario Beauregard.
This year the Foundation has chosen Professor Dr. Juri Kropotov as recipient
of this years award, based on his book and the body of work Juri has
contributed over the years.
This award selection was announced recently at the EEG Spectrum Clinical
Interchange Conference in Los Angeles. The award includes a gorgeous plaque
as well as an honorarium.
We salute both the Foundation for helping promote the fiend of NF, as well
as all the award recipients for their publications and the substantial
contributions they all have given to our field.
St Joseph’s Regional Medical Center on behalf of the participants of the International Conference on Behavioral Health and Traumatic Brain Injury invites you on March 12, 2009 at 11:00am to a Congressional Briefing.
The participants of the International Conference on Behavioral Health and Traumatic Brain Injury will be holding a Congressional Briefing hosted by:
Congressman Bill Pascrell and Congressman Todd Platts
Co-Chairs, Congressional Brain Injury Task Force presenting recommendations to improve the care of our wounded warriors NOW!
In October of 2008, St Joseph’s Regional Medical Center hosted the International Conference on Behavioral Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. 100 doctors, researchers and scientists from around the globe discussed issues facing our wounded warriors, identified the barriers to treatment and strategized on the improvements for continuum of care. This briefing will present their reccomendations.
The meeting will be held @ the Capitol Visitors Center- Congressional Meeting Room South
RSVP – rsvp@susandavis.com
According to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, addiction is currently one of the most significant health and social problems in America, affecting ~12.5% of the population. Medical costs can be up to 300% higher for an untreated alcoholic than a treated alcoholic. Other costs to society have reached almost $500 billion, taking into account unemployment, lost productivity, increased crime and justice system/incarceration costs, health care system strain, increased insurance costs, child abuse/neglect and even workplace violence. It is estimated that every dollar spent on treatment saves $4–$7 in costs from drug-related crime and can help reduce the spread of infectious diseases.
There are many in the field of Neurotherapy who do not perform qEEGs prior to designing a clinical intervention. These people are currently practicing well within the standard of practice for this rapidly evolving field. Many within this group have standard protocols which are used on all clients, with various alterations to respond to the client’s reported experiences during the treatment.
I often get questions about Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and the EEG.
Whenever a client presents with the question of dementia, all other forms of
dementia need to be ruled out before you are left with the diagnosis of AD.
There are many EEG signatures of various forms of dementia, all of which are
helpful in evaluating a client’s presentation of dementia.
Done by experts in EEG in dementia, the EEG and qEEG may be of substantial
additive value in the differential diagnosis puzzle that all cases of
dementia represent clinically.
One EEG pattern seen in dementia is the presence of periodic triphasic
slowing in the EEG, which is actually diagnostic of subacute sclerosing
panencephalitis (SSPE). SSPE is a “spongiform encephalopathy” where the
brain becomes like “Swiss cheese”, with holes scattered throughout. This
periodic triphasic finding is differentiated from MULTIFOCAL triphasics
which are diagnostic of Crutzfeld-Jacob Syndrome (CJD), which in lay terms
is a form of mad cow disease in humans.
The P300 component of the ERP, occurring 300–600 ms post-stimulus, is the most widely used ERP in psychiatry and other clinical applications (Polich et al. 1994; Polich and Herbst 2000; Pritchard 1981, 1986; Pritchard et al. 2004). The amplitude of the P300 reflects the allocation of attentional resources, while the latency is considered to reflect stimulus evaluation and classification time (Katayama and Polich 1998; Polich and Herbst 2000). The P300 is usually obtained in an oddball paradigm, wherein two stimuli are presented in a random order, one of them frequent (standard) and another one rare (target) (Polich 1990). A modification of the oddball task has been used where a third, also rare stimulus (distracter), is presented along with standard and target stimuli. It was reported that these infrequent distracters elicit a frontocentral P300, so called P3a, whereas the rare targets elicit a parietal P300, so called P3b (Katayama and Polich 1996, 1998). The P3a is recorded at the anterior scalp locations and has been interpreted as reflecting frontal lobe activity (Gaeta et al. 2003; Knight 1984). Though the P300 response in general is thought to represent ‘‘context updating/closure,’’ in a three-stimuli oddball task the P3a is interpreted as ‘‘orienting,’’ and the P3b is viewed as an index of the ability to maintain sustained attention to target (Na¨a¨ta¨nen 1990). The anterior P3a indexes the contextual salience of the rare stimuli, whereas the posterior P3b is indexing task-relevance of the stimuli (Gaeta et al. 2003).
T. M. Sokhadze – email: tato.sokhadze@louisville.edu
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Louisville School of Medicine, Louisville, KY, USA
R. L. Cannon – email: rcannon2@utk.edu
Department of Psychology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA
D. L. Trudeau – email: trude003@maroon.tc.umn.edu
Department of Family and Community Health, School of Health Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Electroencephalographic (EEG) biofeedback has been employed in substance use disorder (SUD) over the last three decades. The SUD is a complex series of disorders with frequent comorbidities and EEG abnormalities of several types. EEG biofeedback has been employed in conjunction with other therapies and may be useful in enhancing certain outcomes of therapy. Based on published clinical studies and employing efficacy criteria adapted by the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback and the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research, alpha theta training—either alone for alcoholism or in combination with beta training for stimulant and mixed substance abuse and combined with residential treatment programs, is probably efficacious. Considerations of further research design taking these factors into account are discussed and descriptions of contemporary research are given.
This brief summary will discuss the various EEG findings seen in head injury when it results in a brain injury, though any given head injury may or may not result in traumatic brain injury. When an injury is incurred by the brain there are a few varieties of findings seen in the EEG, ranging from spectral changes associated with either white or gray matter damage, to the changes in “connectivity”, seen as changes in coherence or correlation measured across the cortex, or between more distant functionally related areas.
Identifying subtypes of specific disorders is an attractive exercise, as it expands our understanding of the individual’s response to therapy, but it remains attached to the approach based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is rooted in behavior and frequently does not predict therapeutic response by any individual within the DSM grouping. Phenotypes are an intermediate step between genetics and behavior. These proposed electroencephalography (EEG) phenotypes are semistable states of neurophysiological function. The author proposes a framework allowing one to describe much of the observed EEG variance with a small number of phenotypical categories. These groupings cut across the DSM categories, and unlike the DSM, the phenotypes predict the individual’s response to therapy, for neurofeedback as well as for medication.