After five or six sessions, the God-just-painted-the-world effect dissipated, but I noticed other changes. I felt calmer and more centered. I felt more secure in social situations. Particularly important to me was that my mornings were much more productive. I always drink coffee and drag my tail until late morning. Lately I've been getting up, ready to go. By the fifteenth session, the change was unmistakable. As of this writing, it has lasted about a month.
I was also interested in trying another kind of training, known as the alpha-theta protocol. The technique is very different from the work in beta. It takes place in the lower registers of the brain's frequencies. The first EEG-produced study of the effectiveness of the alpha-theta protocol on substance abusers was begun in 1982 by Eugene Peniston, a researcher at the Sam Rayburn Memorial Veterans' Center in Bonham, Texas. He treated ten severe alcoholics with traditional counseling only, and ten more with the added element of the alpha-theta training on a neurofeedback instrument . Penis ton hypothesized that alcoholics drink because they cannot get into alpha states naturally, and therefore cannot produce self-soothing neurotransmitters on their own. Peniston claims an unheard-of 80% success rate with the group who used the neurofeedback--compared to a ceiling of 20% to 30% for traditional therapies. However, because of his small sample size, more studies are needed to buttress his claims. There have been other impressive small studies since then, but again, the cure rate seems improbably high. We won't know the actual impact of this therapy until larger samples are studied. Alfonso Bermea, M.A., of the Life Sciences Institute in Shawnee, Kansas, who has also used this technique says, "With conventional therapy a lot of people take a white-knuckle approach. They say, `Dammit, I'm not going to drink.' With neurofeedback, people no longer have the desire to drink. They're no longer fighting the urge."
Alpha-theta training had a pleasant, if not revolutionary, effect on me when I tried it. I laid down on a mattress in my office, and Bernadette hooked me up. Eyes closed, I started to relax. On the EEG Spectrum machine I was using, a stream began to babble as alpha was produced. Then, as I sank deeper, a series of alpha bings sounded. As theta came into play, I heard a roaring ocean and the deep, resonant bongs of a Tibetan bowl. These sounds held me on the edge of sleep for nearly half an hour. It's an interesting place, that twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness. During that time, my mind produced a host of intriguing, dreamlike images, but none of them, in my few sessions, was revelatory.
FEEDING THE FUTURE
Neurofeedback may be of help in the treatment of a host of problems besides epilepsy, ADD, closed head injuries, and addiction. Its applications are being explored, but all of them have yet to be subjected to controlled studies. EEG Spectrum has treated more than two thousand people clinically in the past ten years--some for such problems as Tourette's syndrome, PMS, depression, teeth grinding, migraines, insomnia, strokes, menopause, and I chronic pain.
Los Angeles writer Margaret Sachs underwent neurofeedback training for symptoms of menopause after she saw its dramatic effect on her daughter's ADD. "I was waking up in the middle of the night totally drenched with sweat," she says. "And then I started waking up at three or four and I couldn't go back to sleep, as if I was on speed." A congenital heart murmur began acting up, causing a rapid and irregular heartbeat. Dramatic mood swings erupted, and her period became irregular.
After twenty sessions, she claims, every single symptom subsided. "I felt grounded in a way I never had before," the 47-year-old says. "When I got in a situation that normally threw me for a loop, I not only stayed calm, but I thought of all the things I should have thought of, instead of thinking of them later. I felt so in control of myself. It was a wonderful feeling." A few months later, her family moved, and the situation was stressful for a while. The good feeling left her. It took a few refresher sessions to bring it back.
Not surprisingly, there are critics of neurofeedback. Joel Lubar questions claims that neurofeedback can be used to treat problems such as PMS or migraine. "That's speculative," he says. "There need to be studies done for those applications." Many practitioners worry that too much sloppy optimism will damage the reputation of EEG neurofeedback in the same way that unproven claims did to biofeedback in the 1960s.
Much of the criticism has come in the arena of ADD. "There's a tremendous placebo effect in a situation like this," says Russell Barkley, director of psychology and professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts. He is the author of a book about the treatment of ADD, entitled Defiant Children: Management of Difficult Children.
He has not studied the use of neurofeedback, but he has reviewed some of the studies, and he points out that the use of "high technology in a medical environment has a high placebo effect. And some children improve with maturation alone."
On the other hand, "we don't have any studies that say it's bad for you. I don't think it will do harm. Basically, it's 'buyer beware."' Claims that neurofeedback can alter brain physiology, says Dr. Barkley, are "totally unfounded and unethical."
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