Have you ever been driving in a car before and after cleaning the windscreen and noticed just what a difference that one action can make? The clarity. Everything looks fresh and new. You feel more connected to your environment, more energised, and you have a clear view of where you’re going. That’s what neurofeedback is like.

Neurofeedback is a means of coaching the brain to improve the way it self-regulates so that optimal states can be effortlessly accessed as required.

Sensors are placed on the scalp for measuring the brain’s electrical activity with specialised computer software providing moment-by-moment visual and auditory feedback that lets the trainee know when they are producing appropriate brainwave patterns and when they are not. As the brain picks up on these cues and begins to function more appropriately, improvements are often seen in a number of areas, including sleep, behaviour, attention, communication, emotional regulation, sensory integration, and academic/work performance.

It should be noted that neurofeedback is NOT an invasive intervention. It does not “zap” you or do anything TO your brain. It simply measures the brain’s electrical signal and then gives visual and auditory feedback that lets the brain know when it is performing appropriately and when it isn’t. In the same way that behavioural psychologists use positive outcomes to reward incremental improvements in individual behaviour, neurofeedback rewards the brain for improving its performance with the reward being, for example, entertaining videos that play when the brain is performing appropriately and pause when it isn’t. Over time the brain adjusts its performance so that the reward of seeing the video can be achieved.

Historically, neurofeedback has been used to help a variety of conditions in which the brain is not working as well as it might, such as epilepsy, ADHD, autism, insomnia, anxiety, depression, mild traumatic brain injury, PTSD, addictions, and many other related areas.

The reality, though, is that any brain can benefit from this type of training. Several players from the Italian soccer team did neurofeedback as a form of peak performance training prior to them winning the FIFA World Cup in 2006. Indeed, many people such as elite athletes, business executives, musicians, and other performers seeking to maximise their potential have used neurofeedback for peak performance and flow state training or even as a means of enhancing their contemplative practices such as meditation and yoga.

By way of a little history, the whole notion that it might be possible to train the brain’s electrical activity first came to the fore in the late 1960s when Professor M. Barry Sterman from UCLA discovered that cats were able to produce a 12-14 Hz rhythm across the sensorimotor cortex of the brain when they were rewarded for doing so. This rhythm, which Sterman dubbed the sensorimotor rhythm (SMR), is associated with calm motor behaviour. When the cats produced SMR activity they were rewarded with a mixture of milk and chicken broth, but when SMR activity decreased there was no reward. Over several sessions the occurrence of this rhythm, along with calm behaviour, increased in this group of cats.

This might have remained an isolated experiment except for one of those accidental discoveries that science is famous for. In unrelated research sponsored by the US Air Force, Sterman was attempting to determine why astronauts on the test range sometimes suffered from hallucinations and seizures. NASA believed it was a result of monomethyl hydrazine fumes leaking from the rocket fuel. Sterman tested this assumption by exposing a group of cats to the substance concerned. While some of the cats had seizures as expected, there was a group of ten cats that either took much longer before they had a seizure or didn’t have a seizure at all. This finding mystified Sterman, until he checked back through his records and discovered that the ten cats that were resistant to seizures had all received EEG training in the earlier experiment with the milk and chicken soup.

Having already repeated the experiment with primates, Sterman then used neurofeedback to treat human epilepsy patients. The results, which showed a significant decrease in the frequency and severity of seizure activity, were replicated some 20 times by 12 different research teams across the remainder of the century. In 2000, Sterman conducted a meta-analysis of every published study investigating the effect of neurofeedback on epilepsy and found that across all studies 86% of subjects showed a clinical improvement, with an average 70% reduction in seizure activity.

From those singular beginnings, it soon became obvious that if neurofeedback could help people with seizure disorders, then it could probably benefit a whole range of different situations in which the brain wasn’t self-regulating as expected. In the intervening years the research has proven that this is indeed the case. Brains with all sorts of challenges can be trained towards optimal performance when provided with the tools to do so.

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