Neurofeedback, Symphony in the Brain

  “When I heard that there was a new kind of biofeedback that amplifies your brain waves and allows you to make your brain stronger, I thought, wasn’t biofeedback something that came and went in the 1970’s?    I had never tried it, but I associated it vaguely with the seventies, the Beatles, and transcendental meditation.  Biofeedback had a New Age whiff about it.  Add the words “brain wave” and it sounded even wackier.  Yet I was hearing interesting things about it, and I have always believed that the human mind is the last great frontier.  I was battling chronic fatigue syndrome and had exhausted the traditional medical route, so I sold an editor on a magazine story about the new biofeedback and traveled to Santa Fe to test this “neurofeedback” and a variety of other technologies designed to enhance the performance of the brain at a weekend symposium put on by Michael Hutchinson, author of a book called Megabrain.     I hooked up to a neurofeedback instrument for my first session.  After training for a half hour, my mind was tired, my thoughts muddled.  But an hour or so after I finished, I experienced what is known as the clean windshield effect.  The world looked sharp and crystaline and I had a quiet, energetic feeling that lasted a couple of hours.  It was the first time I had felt that way in years.  And it convinced me to look a little deeper.  This new biofeedback was something very different, I was told, a technique that could treat attention deficit disorder and closed-head injuries and depression and a long list of other problems.  I looked into the research and found that the technique had been spawned by solid laboratory research on epilepsy in the 1960s and 1970.”  pp.1-2.  From A Symphony in the Brain by Jim Robbins.     Most find their way to neurofeedback via a friend or the internet.  Drs. Kelsey