We are able to go about our day because our brain talks to itself with highly complex waves of energy. These internal dialogues allow us to pay attention and focus on what is going on in our world, to remember what it is we want to know or need to do, to go to and stay asleep, and to color our life with emotional actions and reactions.

Medical professionals have known about these electrical conversations for over 60 years, using a devise called the electroencephalogram (EEG) to record the brain waves. Neurologists (medical doctors that diagnose and treat diseases of the brain and nervous system) find the EEG indispensable, looking for distortions in the brain wave patterning to help diagnose seizures and manage epilepsy, and to help diagnose or rule out a brain tumor, blood clot, or stroke in those with such symptoms as black outs, headaches, or unusual behavior.

The introduction of inexpensive desk top computers in the 1980s allowed advanced brain wave analysis systems to move out of the research laboratories and into university and private sector facilities. As research evolved, it was soon revealed that the Quantitative EEG offered more potential than the detection of brain disease: The technology offered the potential of expanding the EEG from the disease model into a quantifying function, that is, to let us know where and in what way the brain is functioning efficiently and where it is performing poorly.

As interest expanded, biofeedback researchers discovered that when the power of the Quantitative EEG is combined with traditional biofeedback techniques, the brain could be led to enhance its own abilities. Electrodes placed on the scalp pick up the brain’s electrical energy; the brain wave signals are sent to the special computer, which amplifies the signals and rapidly segments the complexity of the brain wave frequencies into small groups of energy; The Neurotherapist selects a frequency group known to be important for focus, strategy, or memory, and returns the information back to the brain as audio tones. As the brain "listens" to the computer-generated audio information, it senses and analyzes the tones, just as it does with all incoming information. Noting the one-to-one relationship between the incoming tones and the nerve cells (frequencies) it is using to perform the task, the brain begins to experiment by increasing or decreasing the energy at that frequency. Finding that increasing the energy improves its performance and decreasing it makes it worse (or vice versa), the brain begins to activate (or deactivate) cells to enhance and maintain the new level of performance.

The brain, in other words, uses the Neurofeedback tones to do what Nature designed it to do: Use information coming in from the outside world to learn or teach itself something. In this instance, the "something" it learns is that increasing (or decreasing) certain frequencies helps it better focus, understand incoming information better, and execute complex tasks in a more efficient way.

There is a fundamental difference between traditional instrumented biofeedback and the more recently developed Neurofeedback training. Biofeedback helps us learn to take conscious control of our internal terrain to better manage stress and stress-related health problems. With Neurofeedback, however, it is not "us" that strives to learn the new behavior: It is our brain. All we have to do is sit and play a video game with an electrode cap on our head. Our brain does all the work; we have all the fun. Just as we learned to walk and ride a bike, all we have to do is go through the motions. Our brain quickly and easily learns what it needs to do for “us” to perform complex tasks in an improved, more efficient way.

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