Wednesday, March 17, 2010

One Word of Advice

In a memorable line in the 1970s film The Graduate, someone offers advice to a young man seeking his way in the world. “One word,” the advisor says. “Plastics.” For people interested in the brain, however, the word of advice is plasticity. In the 1990s, the Decade of the Brain, the greatest discovery in the field of neurology was that the brain is malleable, not static – in other words plastic.

This is of course what neurofeedback has capitalized on since the 1960s. Neurofeedback – which is also known as brainwave training and EEG feedback -- could also be called directed plasticity. With sensors on the scalp we can read what the brain is doing, and guide it to move into realms that can mitigate or eliminate problems such as anxiety, attention deficit disorder, depression and chronic pain. In other words it teaches us to engage and use our plasticity.

A study just published in the European Journal of Neuroscience shows that just half an hour of feedback causes a lasting shift “in cortical excitability and intracortical function.” That means essentially that the brain becomes less reactive. The researchers, from two laboratories at the University of London, call for more funding for neurofeedback “to modulate plasticity in a safe, painless and natural way.”

With the Open Focus approach, we have been using neurofeedback since the 1970s to help people gain voluntary control over the plasticity in their central nervous system. But the goal is to eventually teach them to do it without neurofeedback, by changing the way they pay attention. Attention, in other words, is a powerful tool that also engages and directs the brain’s plasticity, and we can learn to mitigate and eliminate anxiety, depression, pain and host of other problems simply by learning how to use the different ways of attending that are at our disposal.

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