After serving in Iraq, wounded Marine Lance Corporal Chris Allen couldn’t shake images of losing his best friend after their Humvee was hit by an RPG; Chris was the sole survivor. He took shrapnel to his knee, thigh, and eye and, after returning home, he turned to alcohol to help numb the emotional and physical pain. Chris was experiencing the classic signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A fellow veteran and former Homecoming for Veteran participant at Neurofeedback Train Your Brain (NTYB) convinced Chris to do neurofeedback.
Most of those who enter the Armed Forces benefit from the training experience, and would agree that life in the military allowed them to improve in their personal competence and skills to a greater degree than if the same amount of time had been spent in civilian life. On the other hand, it is also likely that combat experience exacts a price in a large minority, if not the majority, of service members. This is not easily accepted because it is difficult for any of us to confront our own shortcomings. The burden military discipline imposes is to take full responsibility for one’s own performance. When that is not possible, denial is the likely response. You want to own the problem by any and all means, and go from there.
Homecoming for Veterans, EEG Institute, and the Salvation Army Bell Shelter have instituted a pilot program to provide neurofeedback therapy to veterans living at the shelter.
On first acquaintance, infra-low frequency training requires a lot of explanation because it seems to stand apart from conventional neurofeedback. If that were really the case, however, it would likely not have emerged out of this field at all. Infra-low frequency training did not burst full-grown upon the scene like Venus out of a lotus blossom. Its roots are traceable to the standard SMR training developed by Sterman. It is instructive to review this history and to retrace the path of discovery.
Our brain is autorhythmic and demonstrates amazing stability over a vast array of rhythms spanning multiple time frames ranging from a few milliseconds to several hours. Infra-low frequencies (ILF), those at or below 0.1 Hz (which we call the Omega range) correspond to periods of many seconds to many hours. An ILF of 0.18 mHz, for instance, corresponds to a 90-minute cycle, the time it takes most of us each night to shift between non-REM sleep (also called slow wave sleep) to REM sleep and back again, from restorative cortical activity free of brainstem influences to periods of brainstem-generated excitability and plasticity known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. These cortical excitability cycles are apparent during the day as well in our EEG.
The EEG Info Newsletter circulates via email at least once a month. A variety of topics related to the Neurofeedback / EEG Biofeedback field are covered in over 300 articles.
After serving in Iraq, wounded Marine Lance Corporal Chris Allen couldn’t shake images of losing his best friend after their Humvee was hit by an RPG; Chris was the sole survivor. He took shrapnel to his knee, thigh, and eye and, after returning home, he turned to alcohol to help numb the emotional and physical pain. Chris was experiencing the classic signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A fellow veteran and former Homecoming for Veteran participant at Neurofeedback Train Your Brain (NTYB) convinced Chris to do neurofeedback.
On first acquaintance, infra-low frequency training requires a lot of explanation because it seems to stand apart from conventional neurofeedback. If that were really the case, however, it would likely not have emerged out of this field at all. Infra-low frequency training did not burst full-grown upon the scene like Venus out of a lotus blossom. Its roots are traceable to the standard SMR training developed by Sterman. It is instructive to review this history and to retrace the path of discovery.
By David Kaiser PhD – August 2013
Listen to a recorded conversation about neurofeedback with Siegfried Othmer and interviewer Diana Hoffman of Healing Talk Radio.