The ROSHI Conference

The first ROSHI Conference was held in Pasadena this past weekend. It was a chummy affair in a revitalizing Old Town locale, with a lively group of ROSHI enthusiasts in attendance. Stephen Overcash gave the first formal presentation, on an integrated approach to the use of ROSHI. He goes back to the early days of the field with Tom Budzynski and Chuck Stroebel, so his ties to traditional peripheral biofeedback remain firm. He combines ROSHI with both CES (Alpha-Stim) and TENS. Interestingly he finds no contamination of the EEG signal from the CES unit, which he operates in the low frequency mode. With the pROSHI there should be no issue at all, since it is not EEG-dependent.

Tom Allen spoke later in the conference to the same theme, saying that he personally would never just put an EEG electrode on a person, but rather always insists on some of the peripheral measures as well. Overcash finds the ROSHI helpful for post-anesthesia malaise and cognitive fog. And he has used it with soccer players who have done too many headers. He recommends Tom Budzynski’s audio CDs for homework.

Karen Trocki and Carolyn Robertson spoke about a research project they are getting underway on veterans’ mental health issues. They had successfully recruited a San Francisco psychiatrist to collaborate and lend his name to the project. Nevertheless, it became apparent that there was no great enthusiasm about the project from within the Veterans Administration. There appeared to be a bias against neurofeedback. Not only were they not sending people, but they also stopped returning calls. This confirms my view from the outset that we would have to move forward independently of the VA with our veterans project. It is our hope that this research venture can fit hand-in-glove with our larger program. In fact, some of the research design aspects being developed here could be adopted by other participants in the program.

There was some discussion about non-responders in terms of Electro-Dermal Activity (EDA). Nearly all of these turned out to be cases of old trauma. In one case the boyfriend had been shot to death; another had been tormented by bullies; another had a wife succumb to cancer; another was a case of chronic illness; another was a case where the mother had been raped while pregnant with this person; another had been abandoned by her mother as a young child. Normally the trauma response would lead to enhanced autonomic responsivity. But in these cases of old traumas a kind of “physiological dissociation” had set in, in the words of Gary Schwartz. Tom Allen described it in terms of adrenal exhaustion. Even though the ordinary stress measures don’t pick this up, Tom thought that the vagal system should respond. Some fifty percent of this group used both tobacco and marijuana. None used neither one.

One of our EEG Associates just had a similar experience of “physiological dissociation” at the Winter Brain Conference, where she experienced Hershel Toomim’s heater, which he uses to distinguish the “sensitive person.” In this trial, there was a sudden dropout of the response from one trial to the next. The person had simply shifted to a dissociated state, and now was no longer responsive to the provocation.

George Martin told of how he got started with an early ROSHI (#003) in combination with a BrainMaster. That got him started on the road with the broadband “squash” protocol. He has since migrated to the BioExplorer, which he regards as a kind of erector set for the brain. He has set up several designs that also borrow from the NeuroCarePro philosophy of using range thresholds, or box targeting, in which a reward threshold is paired with an inhibit threshold in each band. The objective is to reduce variability, which correlates with higher “spectral entropy.” The latter is seen as indexing a higher switching rate among available microstates of the brain—hence greater functionality and also stability.

Combining the ROSHI with the box targeting of the BioExplorer seems to offer advantages in terms of reducing variability. A kind of fluidized bed analogy comes to mind, in which the ROSHI keeps the brain in a state of sequential challenges as it also tries to meet the explicit training goals.

Dan Staso also relies on these variability or entropy trainings, and finds that he uses a combination of ROSHI 2+ with BioExplorer for some 90% of his work. One twenty-year meditator found on first exposure that “I reached a depth that I had never reached before.”

Karen Trocki described her journey into feedback. She had an early experience with EEG feedback in a search for the Holy Grail. It was a peak experience, in which she was led to unconditional acceptance. “My whole physiology changed at that moment, and it lasted about three weeks. I had an incredible feeling of energy, of unlimited attention. I could feel other’s needs, and see their auras. This kind of faded away over time. I had not taken any drugs. Clearly my physiology had the capability of feeling better, in fact essentially perfect. I still do not know what happened, but it started me on a journey of understanding. That got me interested in neurofeedback.”

After taking training in feedback with Tom Allen at Stens in 1995, Karen had an experience with the ROSHI at Carolyn Robertson’s office. The effect was not like the 1989 experience. In fact, she never felt an immediate effect of doing the ROSHI, but there was cumulative benefit. After some months a persistent depression had lifted.

Tom Allen told his story of recovery from recurring seizure activity, and his hazard of encountering occasional life-threatening, major seizures. He had been reluctant to try the ROSHI after an earlier experience with Len Ochs’ former system. Tom’s experience speaks volumes about the stabilizing effect of ROSHI-type stimulation, since his brain is quite vulnerable to instabilities, and also since Tom is an exceedingly good observer and knowledgeable interpreter of his own state. Incidentally, Tom has also experienced ecstatic states during his pre-seizure auras, a well-known phenomenon in temporal lobe epilepsy. “Some of them were enough to make me want to go off my medication.”

Jay Gunkelman presented a talk similar to what he showed at the Winter Brain Conference. Some new material has been added. The basic theme remains the same: 1) The famous 40-Hz rhythm cannot be the whole basis of the binding phenomenon; and 2) the dc potential may be the means by which networks are bound. More speculatively, Jay suggests that the dc potential is to be seen as the agency of “mind,” whereas the resulting EEG reveals the agency of the brain. This comes perhaps from the notion of the “Bereitschaftspotential,” the shift in the dc potential that precedes the execution of a motor act. Such a potential shift may be present before we are even conscious of wanting to move. (Jay’s presentation at Winter Brain has been added to the Bulletin Board.) My immediate reaction is that the 40-Hz rhythm cannot be so easily swept aside. Clearly the parallel processing of visual inputs requires a binding mechanism, and 40 Hz is where the action is. That is not so say, however, that the 40 Hz is the highest binding frequency. It could also be an “envelope” that contains binding events that occur at much higher frequencies, but with a 40-Hz repetition rate. One can think of many activities in the brain requiring the temporal binding of neural assemblies, and each of these can be discussed in terms of the binding model. Most of these will not occur at 40 Hz.

The importance of the 40-Hz rhythm follows from the fact that all neuronal synaptic transport carries its timing signature with it, so that the original binding event in visual cortex propagates forward to all the downstream activity that relies upon visual information. It just happens that nearly fifty percent of cortical activity relies on visual inputs to at least some extent. This does not restrict the binding model to any particular frequency.

Then there is the issue of the dc potential. Jay talks of shifts in the dc potential taking place within one millisecond. First of all, this means we are no longer talking about dc, but rather kilohertz bandwidth. If that is the case, then there is really no distinction here between the so-called EEG and the dc potential. What we measure in the EEG is the fluctuations of the electrostatic potential at the point of the scalp electrode. If we measure it at 0.01 Hertz, then it is the slow cortical potential. If we measure it at 10 Hz or 100 Hz, it is the EEG. It is the same physical entity in either case. Just the label is different.

But even if we have that semantic hurdle out of the way, Jay is still saying something significant. What he calls the “dc potential” is a kind of local common-mode signal for the neuronal assembly, getting it to act in unison, and hence to bind into one entity. It has spatial dimension to it, so near neighbors are going to be recruited into acting similarly. Distant locales will see a different local potential, and hence respond differently. It is as if brain activity were taking place on a kind of trampoline, and of course the trampoline moves. Its movement affects everyone on the trampoline, and affects the firing threshold of every neuron. So whether a neuron fires depends on the connection made to other neurons in a particular moment, but also on the dc potential at in that moment. The dc potential is acted upon by the neuronal assembly (as we observe in the EEG), and the fluctuating potential in turn acts back on the neuronal assembly. So far so good.

But then Jay seems to suggest that the timing signature is somehow carried by the dc potential. He makes it sound like it is an independent agent of some sort. More than that, he is suggesting that the “mind” may work its will on the “brain” through the dc potential. He sees hope here of making progress with the conundrum of consciousness: “DC fields in the realm of the mind… interacting with EEG rhythms in the realm of the brain.” And I am afraid that this is where I leave the trolley.

The dilemma of the mind is that it is the one entity in the universe of which we have the greatest certainty and our most intimate experience. And yet it remains elusive as a target of scientific investigation. We are in somewhat the same difficulty here as science has with the hypothesis of God. It is simply not admissible within science to have as a working hypothesis that “God did it.” We look for naturalistic descriptions of nature by assumption. This does not deny the existence of God. It is just oblique to the issues confronted by the scientific method. Similarly with mind, even though in this case there is no mystery that it exists. Whenever we put electrode on scalp we see brain, not mind. So must it be with the dc potential.

But there is a further problem. Jay is bereft of a mechanism. The dc potential has no means of “agency,” of implementing the desired fluctuations. It is clearly “effect” well before it becomes “cause.” (I am speaking in terms of logical rather than temporal sequencing here.) And the real actors were and are the neuronal assemblies. It is just that the dc potential is not merely there to communicate to us information about the EEG. It is not spatially or temporally invariant. And its variation does matter in acting back upon the neuronal assemblies.

My own contribution to this conference consisted largely of a discussion of phase relationships. We now see interhemispheric training as primarily impinging on phase relationships between the two sites, and we can similarly see the ROSHI as setting up a kind of perpetual dissonance between what is going in the brain and the stimulus of the ROSHI. At times this stimulus is simply irrelevant. At other times, it happens to nearly coincide with what is happening in the brain at that moment, and thus “pulls” that activity into resonance. The brain resists this intervention. Whenever the ROSHI is being effective, it is at some variance in terms of phase with the ongoing brain activity.

The two approaches therefore represent opposite and complementary regimes. One involves the careful selection of an operating point—a saddle point in state space–in which the training can be benignly and fruitfully conducted over an extended period of time. The other involves a subtle interference in the brain’s affairs, where the circumstances of that disturbance are sufficiently varied that the potential for state change is minimized.