Neurofeedback
Neurofeedback shows us how powerful we are.
—JOURNALIST JIM ROBBINS1
In his book A Symphony in the Brain,2 science writer Jim Robbins recounts the poignant story of a boy named Jake who was born three months prematurely to a Helena, Montana, couple named Ray and Lisa. Jake weighed barely one pound at birth. When he was just three days old he underwent open-heart surgery and spent the next two months in intensive care. He survived, but he suffered brain damage.
At age four, Jake suddenly experienced his first of many grand mal seizures—a type of epileptic seizure that affects the entire brain—and became unconscious. Drugs diminished the seizures’ severity but could not prevent them. Ray and Lisa often drove their son to the hospital emergency room, where all doctors could do was give him Valium injections to stop the convulsive attacks. Jake also suffered from petit mal seizures, during which his mind “turned off” and he could not hear or speak for several seconds.
As time went on, Jake’s problems kept piling up: he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, and speech problems. Moreover, his sleep was disturbed and he frequently woke up several times in the night.
At age five Jake began taking Depakote and Tegretol, two powerful anti-seizure drugs that produced troubling side effects, including fatigue and lethargy. His parents were worried, and Lisa described him as being “zoned out all the time.”3 Ray and Lisa began searching for alternatives to these medications. When they heard about neurofeedback, they felt this might give their son a chance to control his seizures on his own, without drugs.
Neurofeedback is a type of biofeedback, a re-training process in which individuals use real-time information about their body’s responses (such as heart rhythm or muscular tension) to learn how to change aspects of their own physical functioning, and improve health and performance. Biofeedback instruments measure various kinds of physiological activity—including brain waves, heart function, breathing, muscle activity, and skin temperature—and rapidly feed this information back to the user. Using this information, while monitoring changes in how they are thinking and feeling, people can learn to produce at will the targeted physiological changes. Eventually, these changes can persist without the continued use of an instrument for feedback and monitoring.4
The goal of neurofeedback is specific: to learn to control the brain’s electrical activity, described in terms of “waves” measured at cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz). These waves are measured with electroencephalography (EEG) using sensors (electrodes) attached to the scalp. These variations in brain activity may be slower or faster throughout the day, depending on various factors.
The slowest, delta waves (less than 4 Hz), are produced during sleep. Slightly faster, theta waves (4–7 Hz) occur with deep meditation. The so-called alpha state is an experience of relaxation that generates alpha waves of about 8–12 Hz. When we are solving problems, or sorting through issues, we produce beta waves (13–38 Hz). The fastest waves of all are gamma waves—39–100 Hz. These waves are associated with higher mental activity.
After the electrodes are attached to the user’s scalp (a painless, noninvasive procedure) the brain’s activity is displayed to the user using sounds and images. Instantaneous changes in sounds and image—movement of a character in a video game, or a sound that decreases in pitch—let the user know how close he or she is to the desired target range of brain waves. If the change in the brain’s electrical activity is not in the desired direction, no positive feedback is given. As users attempt to produce the desired sound or image, they are training themselves to control their brain waves.
When Ray and Lisa went on a search of neurofeedback training for Jake, the nearest site was located in a hospital in Jackson, Wyoming, three hundred miles away. They decided to make a series of appointments over the course of a week and make their son’s treatment a family vacation. At Jackson’s neurofeedback clinic, Jake, now eight, underwent two one-hour sessions every day that resembled games rather than the standard medical treatments he’d known his entire life.
Jake sat in the neurofeedback training room and stared attentively at a computer screen showing a Pacman that was beeping while gobbling dots. A small electrode attached to his scalp was connected to an EEG, recording his brain waves: now Jake’s brain waves were directly influencing the Pacman, and Pacman’s actions were giving Jake the feedback he needed to make adjustments in his brain waves. When Jake was able to produce the target frequencies by being more focused or breathing profoundly, the Pacman gobbled several dots and beeped a lot. When he was not in the target frequencies, the Pacman stopped gobbling and beeping. Jake quickly discovered how to adjust his brain waves in order to make the Pacman gobble dots and beep all the time, learning to calm himself in the process.
The results were profound. Following the week of neurofeedback training, Jake’s sleep problems quickly disappeared. He was calmer and more focused, began to carry on conversations, and his motor skills greatly improved. Later, the neurofeedback protocol was repeated for another week. After this second week of training, Jake went to see his pediatric neurologist, Don Wright, who examined Jake and confirmed to Ray and Lisa what they already knew: the treatment had indeed been effective.
Jake’s parents bought a neurofeedback machine and made it available to the people of Helena, and Don Wright decided to incorporate this technique into his clinical practice. Jake continued to train and improve. In 1999, he was evaluated for his individualized education program in the public schools. Lisa later told Robbins: “He was an emergent reader going into second grade and after a year of steady training, he was reading at a fourth-grade level. One of the teachers called Jake’s rate of improvement explosive, and I think it was.”5
Today, biofeedback and neurofeedback are commonly used techniques. But for a long time, researchers in physiology believed that humans could not have conscious control over brain activity. Fortunately, a few serendipitous discoveries during the second half of the twentieth century showed this assumption to be totally wrong.
Toward the end of the 1950s, University of Chicago psychology professor Joe Kamiya was wondering whether it would be possible for individuals continuously informed about their own brain waves to control them at will. Kamiya first designed an experiment to test whether a person could discriminate among his or her own brain wave categories and how he or she would describe the state. He focused on alpha waves because they are easy to produce. The participants in the experiment would lie in a dark chamber, eyes closed, and attached to an EEG machine. Kamiya then presented a sound, and asked participants by intercom to guess whether their brains were producing alpha waves. Using the EEG recordings, he could determine if the participants’ guesses were correct and would respond “Correct” or “Wrong.”
The first participant was Richard Bach, a graduate student. Kamiya placed an electrode to the left side of Bach’s occiput (the back of the head), where alpha brain waves are naturally more abundant. In the first session, which consisted of sixty sounds and sixty guesses, Bach’s guesses were about half correct. On the second day of testing, Bach reported correctly 65 percent. On the third day, he was 85 percent correct. Excited, Kamiya presented the sound four hundred times on the fourth day. Bach provided a correct answer each time.
In the second part of the experiment, Joe Kamiya asked Bach and other students to enter into the alpha state when a bell rang once, and not to enter into the alpha state when the bell rang twice. Quite a few students were able to enter and remain in the alpha state at will. This landmark experiment, which demonstrated that brain waves could be voluntarily controlled, initiated the field of neurofeedback.
Neurofeedback became widely known a decade later, when an article about this remarkable discovery was published in the popular magazine Psychology Today. In this article, Kamiya mentioned that some people reported feeling revivified and alert when they came out of the alpha state, and others reported experiencing feelings of tranquility and reverie or surges of creativity.6
University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) neuroscientist Barry Sterman is another early pioneer in the field of neurofeedback. In 1965, he was investigating brain activity during internal inhibition—the process whereby a conditioned response is inhibited through lack of reinforcement. In one experiment, thirty cats were brought to his lab. Kept in a cage and deprived of food, these cats were trained to press a lever with a paw to receive a reward—a dose of chicken broth and milk. EEG electrodes were put on each cat’s sensorimotor cortex, the part of the brain involved in sensory functions, and the control and execution of movements.
Once the cats were well conditioned to press the lever and obtain the reward, the conditioning procedure was modified. Now the cats had to wait until a sound stopped before they could press the lever and obtain the reward. The cats learned to remain completely still, yet very alert, while waiting for the sound to cease. Barry Sterman found that an unknown EEG rhythmic signal between 12 and 16 Hz was accompanying this motor stillness. He dubbed this new EEG signal the sensorimotor rhythm (or SMR). Sterman naturally wondered whether a cat could be conditioned to produce SMR. For about a year, his assistants trained ten cats for an hour a day, three to four times a week. Sure enough, the cats learned to generate SMR.
Not long after, the U.S. Air Force asked Sterman if he wanted to test the negative cognitive effects of exposure to monomethylhydrazine. This rocket propellant was known to induce epileptic seizures and was thought to be affecting workers who were producing the substance, and even seemed to be affecting astronauts. Sterman accepted the Air Force’s proposition. He injected the chemical into fifty cats. After an hour, most of these cats went into seizures. Three cats, however, did not suffer any seizure. Sterman realized that these three cats had been involved in his previous experiment and had learned to produce SMR. He hypothesized that the SMR training had enhanced resistance in the motor cortex of these cats against the slow theta waves responsible for triggering seizures.
Sterman’s next step was to explore whether SMR could be found in human beings. EEG recordings performed in patients who, because of cancer, had a part of the skull removed, confirmed the existence of this rhythm in humans. Sterman decided to test the idea that people should be able to produce SMR.
He instructed his lab technician, Sid Ross, to build a neurofeedback machine—a simple electronic box with two lights on it, one red and the other green—that he used with his first human subject, in 1972, twenty-three-year-old Mary Fairbanks. Since the age of eight, she had suffered from severe grand mal seizures two or more times every month. Sterman found that when Fairbanks was producing SMR and inhibiting low-frequency waves conducive to seizures, the green light came on. When she was not in the SMR range or was unable to block the slow waves, the red light appeared. Sterman asked Fairbanks to keep the green light on and the red light off as much as possible. She trained for an hour a day, twice a week, over the course of three months. At the end of the training, she was virtually seizure-free.
Sterman wrote a scientific article about Mary’s experience.7 In 1976 he received a grant from the Neurological Disease and Stroke Branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct a pilot study aimed at demonstrating the efficacy of the SMR training protocol. This study was based on an A-B-A design.
Eight epileptic patients were trained for three months to augment their SMR waves and inhibit low frequency waves. As expected, the number of seizures decreased markedly. (This was the first A segment of the study.) After three months the protocol was changed: the patients—who were not told what they were doing—were taught to increase low-frequency waves and decrease SMR. Unsurprisingly, they started experiencing seizures more frequently (the B part of the study). Three months later the protocol was modified again. Now, as in the first phase of the study, the patients had to reduce the frequency of their seizures by enhancing their SMR. Again the frequency of seizures diminished significantly. (This is the second A.) These impressive results were published in the Epilepsia journal in 1978.8 A few years later, thanks to another NIH grant, Sterman was able to reproduce his findings, this time in twenty-four patients.
Since the 1970s, Sterman’s pioneering work has been replicated in several other laboratories. During the past decade, two independent meta-analyses have been performed to evaluate the impact of SMR training in epilepsy. Overall, these meta-analyses included eighty-seven studies. Their results indicate that the SMR protocol leads to a significant reduction in seizure frequency in approximately 80 percent of the epileptics undergoing this type of neurofeedback training even when anti-seizure drugs are not working.9
Studies indicate that approximately five percent of children are affected by attention deficit disorder (also known as ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (or ADHD),10 developmental problems that commonly appear during childhood. Children with these disorders are inattentive, impulsive, and in the case of ADHD, hyperactive. They have trouble sitting still and paying attention to one thing for a prolonged period of time. ADD and ADHD negatively affect academic performance and lead to increased risk for antisocial disorders and drug abuse in adulthood.11
ADHD children have high amounts of theta waves in the frontal lobe—a part of the brain that plays an important role in organizing behavior and controlling emotions. Some researchers believe that this excess of slow waves prevents the frontal lobe from communicating effectively with other cerebral structures.
In 1972, Joel Lubar, a research psychologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, had already been investigating ADD/ADHD for several years. When he came across the first paper published by Barry Sterman about neurofeedback training in people with epilepsy, he immediately recognized a possible application of this work with people suffering from ADD/ADHD. In 1976, Lubar moved to Los Angeles to work with Sterman for one year.
In his preliminary investigation, Lubar applied the Sterman’s protocol to four children diagnosed with ADHD. He also used an A-B-A design, as Sterman did. The children were trained until psychological tests showed that their symptoms had vanished. Then they were trained in the reverse way until the tests demonstrated that their symptoms were back. Finally, the children were trained again until the tests and the EEGs confirmed that the symptoms were not present anymore. The protocol worked superbly and Lubar’s insight was confirmed.
Since this early work, Lubar has conducted more than twenty-five studies regarding the effect of neurofeedback training in individuals with ADD or ADHD, and many studies have been carried out by other researchers. A meta-analysis published in 2009 indicates that the effects of neurofeedback in the treatment of ADD and ADHD can be regarded as clinically efficacious.12
Russell Barkley is a professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina and an internationally recognized authority on ADHD. He has carried out several studies for drug companies and is an outspoken advocate of the use of psychostimulant drugs, such as Ritalin, to treat ADHD. Barkley claims that there is little evidence that neurofeedback works at all. He believes that a high placebo effect may explain why ADHD children get better following neurofeedback training. Barry Sterman agrees that a part of the results produced by neurofeedback training may be related to the placebo effect. However, this effect usually lasts only a short time, whereas clinical studies show that the results of neurofeedback tend to be long lasting.13
We do not, as yet, completely understand the neural mechanisms that underlie the effect of neurofeedback training. To explore this question, Johanne Lévesque (who was a postdoctoral fellow in my lab) used fMRI to measure the impact of neurofeedback training on brain regions implicated in selective attention (intentional, focused attention) and response inhibition (the suppression of an action that is inappropriate in a given context).14 She recruited twenty children with ADHD, aged eight to twelve years. Fifteen children were randomly assigned to an experimental group, and received neurofeedback training. The other five children were assigned to a control group and did not undergo neurofeedback. All of the children were scanned one week before and one week after the end of training. While they were scanned, the children performed tasks that measure selective attention and response inhibition.
Neurofeedback training significantly improved performance on these tasks and decreased inattention and hyperactivity. This training also markedly enhanced the activation of brain areas involved in focused attention and the capacity to inhibit a response. No such changes were noted in the members of the control group. These findings indicate that neurofeedback training can improve the functioning of the brain regions implicated in attention and motor control.15 In other words, neurofeedback can functionally reorganize the brain. It is plausible that such a functional reorganization is mediated by a strengthening of existing connections between neurons. It is also conceivable that new neuronal connections are created.
About this issue, Jimmy Ghaziri, one of my graduate students, recently found that the density of the white matter pathways linking brain regions implicated in attention is increased following a neurofeedback training protocol aimed at improving attentional performance in university students. This suggests that neurofeedback can reinforce neuronal connections between areas of the brain involved in cognitive functions. No white matter change was noted in participants who received sham neurofeedback.
At the end of the 1980s, clinical psychologist Eugene Peniston and research psychologist Paul Kulkosky carried out a neurofeedback study at the Fort Lyon, Colorado, Veterans Hospital. Thirty men participated in this study. Twenty were alcoholic veterans who were back in the hospital for another round of in-patient treatment for alcoholism.
These patients were randomly divided into two groups. Ten received talk therapy and took part in a twelve-step process. Ten others received the same treatments and, in addition, the neurofeedback protocol. During training, the men who received neurofeedback were lying back in a recliner with eyes closed. They were instructed to allow sounds and the voice of a therapist to guide them into a deeply relaxed state associated with alpha and theta waves produced in the occipital cortex, the part of the brain lying in the back of the head.16 They were also asked to use positive mental imagery (for example, being sober, refusing offers of alcohol, living confidently and happy) as they moved toward the trancelike alpha-theta state. Ten non-alcoholic men served as a control group.
The three groups of participants were administered EEGs and psychological tests before and after the twenty-eight-day treatment. The results in the patients receiving the alpha-theta protocol were striking. Their EEGs showed a considerable enhancement in occipital alpha and theta waves. This change in brain activity indicated that these patients were less anxious. Furthermore, the scores on the psychological tests revealed positive personality changes, and a marked decrease in negative emotional states. Eight out of the ten alcoholics who received the Peniston-Kulkosky protocol stopped drinking, and the ten patients who received traditional treatments were re-hospitalized within eighteen months. The abstinence lasted in the neurofeedback group. Three years later, only one participant had relapsed. These statistics are exceptional; in the field of substance abuse, a relapse rate of 70 to 80 percent is considered the norm.17
A few years later, Peniston used a similar approach with Vietnam War veterans who were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a frightening event in which serious physical harm occurred or was threatened. People with PTSD have persistent terrifying thoughts and memories that are responsible for nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, phobias, anxiety, and depression.
Two groups of veterans were included in this study. In one group, fourteen vets received traditional treatments—including psychotropic medications, individual therapy, and group therapy. In the other group, fifteen different vets received the alpha-theta training in addition to the traditional treatments. At the end of the study, nightmares, flashbacks, and the amount of psychotropic drugs had significantly diminished in the members of the neurofeedback group. No such changes were noted in the control group. A follow-up study was conducted thirty months later. All fourteen vets in the control group had relapsed, while twelve of the fifteen vets who had received the Peniston-Kulkosky protocol were now living normally.18
Peniston has proposed that during an alpha-theta session, the veterans’ peaceful physiology allows traumatic memories to smoothly emerge into awareness. He also speculated that in the theta state they feel like detached observers, so they do not need to reexperience the painful memories. This neutral mode of being would thus allow traumatic events to become painlessly integrated into the psyche.
As these neurofeedback studies show, it is relatively easy to learn to control our brain waves measured with EEG. But this technique has poor spatial resolution—that is, it does not allow researchers to precisely localize the brain regions that produce the electrical activity recorded at the scalp level. Given this limitation, it is not possible to determine with certainty whether one can learn to control activity in a particular brain region using EEG.
During the last decade, however, progress in neuroimaging technology has led to the development of the real-time functional MRI (rtfMRI). FMRI measures changes in blood flow and blood oxygenation that are closely related to the activity of neurons. The advantage of rtfMRI is that data are analyzed as they are collected. This small computation time allows scientists to quickly provide scanned individuals with visual feedback of ongoing activity in specific brain regions.19
Several rtfMRI neurofeedback studies have been conducted in recent years. In these studies, participants have to learn to control activity in a given brain region by employing the type of mental activity (thoughts, emotional feelings) that will maximize or minimize its activation. In one of these studies, researcher Christopher deCharms and his colleagues sought to determine the degree to which healthy individuals can learn to control activity in the somatomotor cortex, the motor portion of the brain.20
Participants were asked to imagine moving their dominant hand as they saw an image analog of the current level of activity in the somatomotor cortex. They were also instructed to increase activity in this region. Through training, participants succeeded in specifically enhancing their control over brain activity that was anatomically specific in the somatomotor cortex. Following training, using motor imagery alone, participants could increase at will activity in this brain region that was comparable in magnitude to the somatomotor activation measured during actual movement of the dominant hand. Notably, the participants were able to maintain their control over somatomotor activity even when real-time fMRI information was no longer provided.
In another study, deCharms and his co-workers used the same approach to train participants to control the activity levels in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), a region of the brain known to be involved in the perception of pain.21 The participants had to learn to increase (up-regulate) and decrease (down-regulate) the activity of the rACC while they received painful thermal stimulation. Remarkably, successful up-regulation of rACC activity—while the painful thermal stimulus was administered—resulted in subjectively higher reports of pain; in contrast, effective down-regulation of rACC activity during painful stimulation culminated in lower ratings of pain.
Other rtfMRI neurofeedback studies have shown that healthy people can quickly learn to control brain regions implicated in visual perception and hearing. It is possible that rtfMRI-based neurofeedback training might eventually be used to enhance performance—to stimulate activity in brain areas involved in memory, for example. In the future, rtfMRI-based neurofeedback might also be applied to anxiety and mood disorders.
J. Paul Hamilton, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, and his colleagues recently investigated whether individuals could use rtfMRI neurofeedback to learn to control the activity of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sACC).22 This other subdivision of the anterior cingulate cortex is thought to be involved in the production of emotional states, and has been implicated in major depression. In their study, Hamilton and co-workers asked eight women to down-regulate sACC activity by increasing positive mood. These women succeeded in diminishing activity in the sACC. This finding raises the possibility that cerebral structures that function abnormally in mood disorders can be controlled with the help of rtfMRI neurofeedback.
But neurofeedback is just one application of BCIs—brain-computer interfaces.
Matt Nagle was paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a stabbing. In 2005, he became the first person to control an artificial hand using a BCI. A 96-electrode implant had been placed on the surface of the motor portion of his brain, over the area associated with his dominant left hand and arm. This implant also allowed Nagle to mentally control TV and check e-mails.23
A BCI first detects changes in brain signals that reflect the intention of the user and then translates these changes in signals into commands that carry out the desired action. Their main objective is to restore impaired or abolished movement, sight, and hearing. These communication pathways link the mind and brain of the users with their environments, allowing them to learn to control external devices, such as word-processing programs, switches, wheelchairs, televisions, and neuroprostheses.24
BCI systems can be driven by electrophysiological signals obtained from the scalp or directly within the brain. For example, a person can learn to use SMR activity by using various kinds of motor imagery to indicate “Yes” or “No” to control a cursor on a computer screen or a neuroprosthetic arm.25 At the moment, BCI systems are beneficial mostly for people with major motor disabilities that prevent them from using voluntary muscle control. Such disabilities are seen in people with injuries to the spinal cord, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), severe cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophies, and acute disorders causing extensive paralysis (such as “locked-in syndrome”).
Toward the end of the 1990s, German neuroscientist Niels Birbaumer and his colleagues developed a “mental typewriter” for ALS patients. These patients were trained to produce slow cortical potentials (SCPs)—negative or positive polarizations of the EEG—upon the command of an auditory cue. After achieving more than 70 percent control, the patients saw letters or words presented on a computer screen or heard them spoken by a word program. The patients were selecting letters by creating SCPs after the appearance of the desired letter.26
An increasing amount of BCI research is performed to allow humans to control their environment through their thoughts. It is quite likely that noninvasive BCIs will soon be used by people who are not disabled. About this possibility, researchers at the IDIAP Research Institute, an organization specializing in the development of BCIs, recently reported a fascinating experiment. During the experiment, two healthy individuals succeeded in mentally moving a robot between several rooms, using an EEG-based BCI.27
Not long ago, Tzyy-Ping Jung, a researcher at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California–San Diego, and his colleagues developed a new BCI that could help severely disabled people communicate. This BCI allows users to place a call on a cell phone by thinking of the number—dialing with their thoughts. It is composed of an EEG headband that is connected to a Bluetooth module, which sends the EEG signals wirelessly to a Nokia cell phone. This BCI sounds like science fiction, but it is nearly 100 percent accurate for most users after only a short training period. Eventually, this psychoneurophone might be used by able-bodied cell-phone users.28
Working along the same lines, NeuroSky Inc., a venture company based in San Jose, California, has created a prototype that reads EEG brain waves using sensors attached to the user’s forehead. This prototype, presented at the 2008 exhibition of the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry, displays the processed EEG signals on the screen of a mobile phone to show the degree of the user’s relaxation. These signals can also be used to control the movement of a video game character who is shown on the screen of the mobile phone. NeuroSky is currently planning the development of BCIs that control home game consoles and home-use audio-visual equipment.29
Not surprisingly, mind control of brain activity has attracted the attention of the toy and games industry. A few years ago, the Mattel toy company marketed Mind Flex, a game that relies on NeuroSky’s technology. Players wear a headset apparatus containing a forehead sensor that measures EEG activity. This activity is translated into a signal that is transmitted as a radio frequency. If the players concentrate hard enough, they can activate a fan that will make a ball rise and navigate through a tabletop obstacle course. The participants’ ability to control their brain waves determines their success in guiding the ball through the course.
The Force Trainer is another game based on NeuroSky’s brain-wave technology, this time a game that trains Jedi warriors. As with Mind Flex, a wireless headset reads the players’ EEG activity. Players must get into a state of deep concentration and harness their brain waves to control a small ball moved by a flow of air inside a clear ten-inch-tall training tower. They can progress through several levels of training, from Padawan to Jedi, as they learn to use “The Force.” Players are aided by instructions delivered by Yoda himself, the master of all Jedi Masters.30
Neurofeedback is efficient at reducing epileptic seizures, inattention, hyperactivity, and substance abuse.31 And, as its use in gaming shows, this approach can also be used to optimize performance in healthy individuals. Because most amateur and professional athletes seek to sharpen their skills and enhance their performance, the world of sports is experiencing an increasing amount of interest in neurofeedback.
Vietta Wilson, a renowned sports psychologist and a professor at York University in Toronto, believes that the most central element of athletic performance during competition is the control of mind. During the past three decades, she has trained athletes in many different sports, such as basketball, archery, track and field, and wrestling. Her work has shown that worries and negative thoughts are the worst enemies of athletic performance, and that bio- and neurofeedback can help athletes to control their mind and physiology.32
In 2002, sports psychologist Bruno Demichelis—who was then head of Sports Science for the professional soccer team AC Milan—studied under Vietta Wilson. Next, he created a “secret weapon” that he called the Mind Room. In this room, the AC Milan players lay down on reclining chairs, their bodies connected to biofeedback machines that were measuring their brain waves, heart rate, and muscular tension. Demichelis taught them how to promptly attain and remain in a relaxed state while they were watching videos of their mistakes. The players eventually learned to acquire mental and physiological control. In 2006, some of these players helped the Italian team to win the World Cup. The following year, AC Milan won the European championship.33
The Los Angeles Clipper—seven-foot National Basketball Association (NBA) center Chris Kaman—is another athlete who benefited greatly from neurofeedback training. In his early years in the NBA, he could not concentrate and often forgot what he was doing. He was also very impulsive. Recently, he underwent a series of neurofeedback sessions under the supervision of psychologist Tim Royer. Following this training he averaged a career-high 17.9 points, 13.7 rebounds, and three blocks per game, and became a dominant center in the NBA. Kaman attributes his athletic improvements to neurofeedback. Brain wave training helped him gain new abilities, including concentration and impulse control.34
Skier Alexandre Bilodeau also used bio- and neurofeedback to train his mind and body. He won the men’s moguls Gold Medal at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Bioneurofeedback was one of several projects labeled Top Secret, the science and technology component of Own the Podium. This $117-million, five-year plan was engineered to help Canada win the most medals at the last Olympics. Bilodeau was trained by Penny Werthner, a sports psychologist and a professor at the University of Ottawa.
Bioneurofeedback taught Bilodeau how to mentally switch into performance mode for 25 to 30 seconds down the hill, and relax between runs. “Focus takes a lot of energy,” Werthner said. “It’s a very difficult balance to be very intense, committed to do well, and yet have this calmness of ‘I can do this.’ That’s an incredibly hard combination to get. It’s not easy to win an Olympic medal and Alex was brilliant. I found this tool really useful—it’s not some miracle thing by any means—but a useful way to help athletes become much more self-aware, but most important to train to change.”35
Neurofeedback is a potent form of biofeedback that allows us to deliberately change what is going on in our brains. This psycho-neuro technology gives us a glimpse of the remarkable power of our minds. Neurofeedback can enhance our cognitive functions, reduce anxiety and mood disorders, and lead to greater emotional well-being. There is also some evidence indicating that certain types of brain wave training can contribute to the occurrence of transcendent experiences. Moreover, real-time fMRI neurofeedback studies show that we can learn to control the activity of specific brain regions, and BCIs demonstrate that we can influence our environment with our thoughts. For all these reasons, I am convinced that the invention of the neurofeedback technology marks a significant step in our evolution.
But neurofeedback is not the only way we can influence our brains. The next chapter explores recent neuroscience research demonstrating that meditation—a form of mental training almost as old as humankind—can also have a beneficial impact on brain activity. In fact, there is evidence to show that it can, quite literally, “change our brains.”