There is a Buddhist saying, “you can never step into the same river twice.” And it may similarly be true that we never train the same brain twice. One of abiding mysteries about our way of training is that the advantages of optimizing reward frequency can be so obvious to us and yet remain so obscure to others. Many stay with the standard frequencies and their clients appear to do fine. Indeed we used and taught those techniques for many years; we saw nothing wrong with them then; and we got good results overall with the people who stayed with the program.

An answer may lie in a fairly common experience that we encounter in training, to which attention should finally be drawn. When we walk down the reward frequency in the hunt for the optimum, we will often end up toggling back and forth when we near the endpoint in order to verify our observations. In taking the reward frequency back up the person will often respond very differently than what they reported on the way down. This is not an isolated finding. It is more typical than not. We know this phenomenon from the field of magnetism, where it is referred to as hysteresis. The current state of the magnetization of the lump of material is given not only by the current magnetic field in which it is embedded, but also by the prior exposure history. The magnetic material remembers its past history. Matters may be similar with the brain. It responds not only to what we are reinforcing in the moment, but to a certain extent it is affected by its cumulative training history. That is also where the analogy ends. One response to this phenomenon is for us to consider the neurofeedback training as more of a journey, with each step to a certain extent another venture into the unknown rather than being merely a repetition. (more…)