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.

Treating Pain With Flexible Attention

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." That statement, by someone whose name is lost to history, is true wisdom. Pain is something that happens to us, and then we have choices on how to relate to it. How much we suffer is one of those choices.
It is determined by how we attend to our pain.
By learning to pay attention to pain in more than one way, we can change the suffering part of the equation.
Some pain is inevitable. We bang a shin or strain a shoulder and it hurts. But pain that endures for no apparent reason, or even a pain that endures for a known reason, can be localized and dissolved as an experience of and in the body. But pain is actually generated by circuitry in the brain.
Take the case of phantom limb pain. People who have lost an arm for example, years later report pain, often severe pain, in the missing hand or elbow. Why? Because the circuitry of the brain that represents the missing arm become active.
But it’s not just that brain circuitry is active and the pain has a life of its own, beyond on our control. How we pay attention to pain, is something within our control.
We all tend to pay attention to pain in the high arousal mode of attention, we call narrow, objective focus, which is how the attention style we habitually use fights and avoids the pain. If we let pain in, we think, it will hurt more. But the opposite is true – it’s more painful over time to try to avoid it in a rigid narrow objective focus of attention.
The strategy then is to broaden our aperture of attention with Open Focus exercises by establishing a general awareness of space. With our awareness so much larger, the pain becomes a small part of one’s experience and is no big deal. It often dissolves on its own, or we can easily dissolve it.