Last week we had a visit from Martha Mack, a Tomatis practitioner in Melbourne Australia. Martha and her husband George have been running the Listen and Learn Center where both auditory training and neurofeedback are being offered. (See www.ListenAndLearn.com.au) Martha emigrated from Argentina some years ago to take up her psychology practice in Australia. The birth of a daughter with auditory processing disorder redirected her focus from a practice oriented to PTSD and chronic pain to one dealing with auditory processing problems. A French psychologist had immigrated to Australia to spread the word about Tomatis, so she got involved in that approach early on. Some five years ago Martha did training with Ron Minson in Denver (who also did our training years ago and gave us our introduction to the Tomatis Method). And Martha adopted The Listening Program as a complement to her practice some three years ago. Movement therapies are part of their offering as well. We met George at the class in Cleveland, where he was brushing up his neurofeedback skills.

At this point, incidentally, the daughter is seventeen years old and the issues around auditory processing have been essentially resolved. There are still some memory and concentration issues outstanding. Recently Martha and George got some notice from the local TV program Second Opinion, so the business side is looking up as well. (more…)

Recently we had occasion to revisit with Dr. Daniel Amen at his clinic in Newport Beach. His colleague Dr. Earl Henslin, a psychologist, happened to be giving a lecture that day on the relevance of brain regulation to relationships. It’s not always a matter of denial, avoidance, or resistance—it could simply be a matter of poor brain function.

He reviewed the principal categories in which these problems are currently being compartmented in the Amen schema. There is, first of all, the matter of frontal lobe function governing attention, focus, planning, and forethought. Pharmacologic intervention here consists of the stimulant class of medications.

The second major category is limbic function, and cingulate function is included here as well. Here we are dealing with moodiness and depression, as well as relationship and bonding issues. Pharmacologic support here is offered through the anti-depressants such as Effexor, Prozac, Celexa, Zoloft, and Paxil, as well as Serezone, Wellbutrin, Lexapro, SAM-E, St. John’s Wort, and 5-HTP. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, in the article “What does Psychology have to do with it?” I mentioned a new research program getting launched at Misericordia Hospital on ADHD. I had welcomed the study earlier as a beneficial fallout of our having taught our course there in September 2001.

I had a number of facts wrong in that little vignette which need correction.
First of all, the hospital did pay for the pediatricians to attend the course, and they did all come at their own initiative, i.e. because of their own interest in neurofeedback.
The hospital is sponsoring the study on ADHD, and the Principal Investigator did attend our course. Further, the psychologist who motivated our doing the course there in the first place is also involved in the research, but he did not wish to serve in the role of Principal Investigator. (more…)

Last Thursday I heard my first symphonic concert at the new Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles. The acoustics of the hall are magical. There are no bad seats, and there is a remarkable “presence” to the sound wherever one sits. It is very suitable to the modern era where we can have high fidelity to the upper treble scales without having to worry about scratches on records marring the experience, or about differential phase delay in speakers muddying the sound. So our hearing is increasingly being challenged by modern music in the upper registers, and without significant penalty. The downside is that in such a live venue as Disney Hall every sound from the audience is heard as well.

When a minimalist piece is being played, one cannot help being aware of the audience. And it prompted me to think about how the whole experience of this orchestra symbolizes the ongoing battle of civilization against entropy–disorder. First there was the construction of this remarkable building–at a cost of over $110 million (or was it $160 million? Maybe it was $200M…), on the site of what had been a parking lot for decades. Then there is the whole enterprise of the Los Angeles Philharmonic itself, this organism of organisms, only understandable if one knits together a knowledge of its long past with the present. And finally there is the elaborate construction of our experience on this particular evening, where all aspects of our environment are so carefully controlled–not only the acoustics, but the speed and volume of the airflow through the building, the exclusion of any external sounds and vibrations, the lighting, and then, finally, the performance itself. What struck me was the ease with which this careful construction of our experience could be disrupted, how fragile it all was. If just one person in the audience of more than a thousand had another agenda, the evening would be ruined for us all. We got to hear a piece that had been commissioned by the Philharmonic itself, and it had been performed only one time previously, at the opening of Disney Hall. So there was an element of uniqueness to the experience as well. One could not just walk out and buy the CD. (more…)

Jay writes on the QEEG-images list:

“Rather than looking at….. EEG/qEEG findings as “subtypes” of a specific disorder, we are now thinking of them as representative of phenotypical patterns seen with various genotypical and physiological presentations, and they speak to the heterogeneity of the pathophysiology of the various disorders. Phenotypes are an intermediate step between genetics and behavior, and they seem to predict the clinical intervention’s success.

The aberrant behaviors point to the neural networks that are not working, but not to the specific failure mode of the various systems involved. Behavior doesn’t predict the EEG (just the neural network), but the EEG data predicts behavior. The equation is not reversible. The pipe-dream of a behaviorally driven approach is thus foundationally and logically flawed, and will always have “outlier” or “subgroup” based problems.” (more…)

Last Friday was the first-ever Symposium on QEEG and Neurofeedback at UCLA under the joint sponsorship of the Psychology, Psychiatry, and Neurology Departments, and of the Brain Research Institute.

Barry Sterman, Professor Emeritus of the Psychiatry Department, started the day off with the comment that it had been 25 years since he last spoke from the podium at the Neuropsychiatric Institute Auditorium. That of course is an indictment of UCLA, not of Barry. That being the case, it is only fitting that the first Symposium of this kind under university sponsorship be held here at UCLA. Barry also had to remind folks that the work he was presenting was by now as much as forty years old. In those early days there were only three laboratories in the country engaged in work with what was called “voluntary controls” that was based on the EEG: Tom Mulholland’s lab in Bedford Mass and Joe Kamiya’s lab at the University of Chicago, and of course his own at UCLA and the Sepulveda VA. Apparently Mulholland’s work was devoted to what is now referred to as the brain-computer interface, in particular using the alpha rhythm to try to communicate, by analogy to Birbaumer’s work with slow cortical potentials. (more…)