Neurofeedback Training in Florida

 

Florida is an important place for neurofeedback.  It is the home of the Florida Biofeedback Society which is based in Boynton Beach, Florida.  This is one of the most active biofeedback organizations in the nation.  It is a resource for potential clients looking for biofeedback and neurofeedback providers.  The website is  http://www.floridabiofeedback.org/  They also have workshops where providers can receive training and continuing education credit.  The Florida Biofeedback Society offers a membership that includes a subscription to its Florida Biofeedback publication, networking opportunities, as well as other perks.

Applied Neurosciences Inc. is an EEG software company based in Saint Petersburg, Florida.   They develop software for clinical and research applications of EEG including brain mapping and neurofeedback training.  The company was founded by Robert Thatcher.  Their flagship software product is the NeuroGuide software program.  It is one of the most known and important software programs in the neurofeedback field.  Many neurofeedback practitioners use NeuroGuide and other Applied Neurosciences software.

There are many drug treatment centers in Florida partly due to the continuing opioid problems there.  Neurofeedback is also used as a therapy for substance abuse.  Although only some centers currently offer neurofeedback, I expect that more of these centers will be offering this service.

Florida is a popular retirement destination.  Incontinence is a problem that many older people suffer with.  Biofeedback is an excellent therapeutic intervention for incontinence.  Its efficacy is highly rated.

Many older people are also concerned with loss of cognitive function and memory.  Neurofeedback is effective for improving cognitive function and shows promise in the area of memory because of its ability to stimulate neuronal connections.

Another important connection between biofeedback and Florida is Dr. Bernie Brucker.  He was the director of the Brucker Biofeedback Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.  He served as past president of the Academy of Rehabilitation Psychology, past President of the State of Florida Brain and Spinal Injury Advisory Council Association, and president of the Academy of Rehabilitation Psychology and the Florida Brain Injury Association.  He was known for using surface EMG biofeedback and operant condition protocols for helping people with paralysis and other disorders, regain muscle function in Southern Florida.

As you can see, neurofeedback and biofeedback training are well established and important in the state of Florida.  I am looking fo biofeedback training rward to continuing to help people get started in learning these skills by offering training in the area.  Training opportunities are posted at www.biofeedbackinternational.comas well as www.bcia.org

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

More Info :  Neurofeedback Training in Florida

Neurofeedback Equipment Applications

 

What is neurofeedback equipment used for?  It is used for assessment, clinical therapy, and performance enhancement/peak performance.  There is also medical EEG equipment that is used diagnostically without the purpose of using the EEG measurement therapeutically.  I will not be addressing medical EEG equipment in this article.  Neurofeedback means that the EEG is being measured and the data fed back to the subject in a way that they can learn to regulate the activity.

There are a variety of devices from ones that measure from one location on the head to ones that measure up to 32 or more locations on the brain.  The ones with 19 or more channels are designed for doing brain mapping.  During this process, EEG data is recorded from 19 or more sites.  The accompanying software compares the data to that from a normative database to determine which locations have “normal” activity and which have an activity that is 1, 2, 3, or more standard deviations lower or higher than normal.  This information, along with information from a client intake, is used to determine if dysregulated EEG activity is associated with presenting symptoms.  A protocol is recommended or developed to then train the brain using the neurofeedback equipment to a more regulated state with the hopes of decreasing symptoms.

The follow-up neurofeedback training sessions may be done with the same 19 or more channel systems or equipment with fewer channels.  Even 1 channel can be used to train EEG activity to change in a single area.  Some other protocols require 2-4 channels so that the left and right and or front and back of the brain can be trained at the same time.  19 or more channels may be trained so that the entire brain is trained including certain networks, or different areas that work together can be trained together.

Examples of the clinical applications of neurofeedback equipment include ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder), Anxiety, Depression, Insomnia, TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), and Substance Abuse.

Examples of non-clinical peak performance/performance enhancement applications include improving cognitive function for academic performance, reducing test anxiety for academic performance, reducing anxiety and improving focus for sports or other types of performance, and using neurofeedback equipment as an aid for helping people to get into a meditative state by monitoring brain wave activity and giving feedback when the brain is in a meditative state and when it is not.

Harry L. Campbell

914-762-4646 – Harry@biofeedbackinternational.com

Author of What Stress Can Do, Available on Amazon.com

Biofeedback Resources International Corp.

www.biofeedbackinternational.com

More info :   Neurofeedback Equipment Applications

Performance/life Enhancement Training Integrating Biofeedback with Special Emphasis on Neurofeedback

 

R. Adam Crane BCIA Senior Fellow, BCIAEEG, NRNP Diplomate

This is an edited excerpt from our forthcoming book, The Process, and given as a talk at the Palm Springs Neurofeedback conference in February 1998.

I’m Adam Crane, president of American BioTec and CapScan corporations. We have decided to substantially increase our commitment to the emerging art and science of Peak Performance, Optimum Functioning, or as we prefer to call it Performance / Life Enhancement. We have introduced the term MindFitness which we believe will work well as informal language for the general public. BioFeedback and especially NeuroFeedback is a critically important component of our first program, which is called The Process- MindFitness- Stage I .

We believe that NeuroFeedback provides a niche opportunity in the MindFitness, sub clinical symptom, educational market for those practitioners ready and able to enhance their own lives by making a place for themselves in this already huge and growing field. Those of you who want to get into the nitty gritty of our program, The Process, can come to our workshop or even better our three-day training program in June. But the purpose of this talk is to try to overview the big picture together and perhaps suggest some ways we can improve cooperation, creativity and productivity in our field.

As we enter this adventure of the mind (body & spirit) one of the earliest challenges we face is communication – what we really mean with each other. There already exists and is evolving both a formal and an informal language. The better we understand and use that language the more the phenomenon of intelligence unfolds in our own individual lives and like a stone hitting the water spreads in waves touching the lives of others. In some cases igniting these concepts in their minds, in other cases adding fuel to a flame already begun. For me the term Peak Performance refers to a subset of what we are so excited about. I prefer the admittedly awkward / double barreled term of Performance/Life Enhancement . Optimum Functioning has a nice feel to it as well, but for this talk let’s adopt Performance Life Enhancement or MindFitness. The director of the Center for Performance Enhancement at West Point military academy recently joined our faculty. Note they have been using the term Performance Enhancement for many years.

I’m sure everyone in this room already understands there is something extraordinary emerging out of the marriage of MindFitness and sublclinical symptoms with NeuroFeedback. It is also clear that we are all doing rather different versions of it. Frankly, I believe our version, dubbed The Process, may be self limiting because we are extremely aggressive about making it as heuristic a program as possible (define) and we have some unusual ideas about the role that winning and competition play in determining quality of life. We define heuristic as the method in which the learners discover for themselves while reducing dependence on past experience and outside authority to the minimum wisdom deems necessary.

Now, we think we can adapt our program to a number of different markets (Business, Education, Sports, Art and Personal Growth) and still stay true to heuristic principles but the proof is in the doing. Rob Kall challenged me to outline our two-hour workshop in one paragraph and although we go much further than this.

That paragraph reads:

1. Garfield is correct, the most important thing is a sense of mission. NeuroFeedback can play a powerful role in the alignment of that sense of mission with highest personal values. This adds power.
2. MindFitness is already a substantial industry. NeuroFeedback is adjunctive and provides a niche opportunity if used extremely skillfully. We are tiny tree frogs ambitiously contemplating conquering the sea.
3. One of the critical keys to success in this field is a training program that stands on its own with or without NeuroFeedback. Being forced to walk the talk is an uncomfortable blessing of infinite potential.
4. MindFitness transcends the limitations of managed care and attracts trendsetters thereby feeding the clinical practice at the same time.
5. The NeuroFeedback component of Performance Life Enhancement requires more training time than clinical NeuroFeedback. Therefore, equipment and per capita training costs must dramatically decrease in order to reach more of the population. This means group training and quality personal trainers.

The purpose of this brief talk is to share with you our view of the big picture and some sense of the underpinnings of our model. Some of these thoughts may be repeated in the workshop since a number of the people coming to the workshop are not with us today. Our view of the best way to deliver The Process is to script the entire 20 hour program… i.e. so many minutes for this concept or exercise, etc

More info :  Performance/life Enhancement Training Integrating Biofeedback with Special Emphasis on Neurofeedback

Slow Waves, Profound Attention, a Compass for the Gifted Thinker

 Presentation at 2nd Annual SSNR Meet Las Vegas May 1994

The late Edward’s Deming is arguably the most inspiring statistical engineer and business thinker of the century. He introduced the term “Profound Knowledge” in order to differentiate between the kind of knowledge which really breeds quality and healthy growth and far less effective even counter productive forms of knowledge.

The historian Oswald Spengler said that a hypothesis does not have to be absolutely correct as long as it is useful. A number of people have told me they consider the following hypothesis useful.

This hypothesis holds that thought is matter and (like movies) thinking is a material process and an image making process based on memory. Furthermore, high order, what could be termed the capability for “Profound Attention” is probably the most important asset a human being can have.

The Capacity for “Profound Attention” can in many if not most human beings be enhanced. This enhanced, “Profound Attention” carries with it the capability of conscious observation of thought and the implications of this are that this ability to watch oneself think is the healthiest possible way to manage and improve the quality of thought. This observation itself is a kind of “field”. Einstein said, “The field is the soul governing agency of the particles”. In this case the particles are thought. The implication follows that one of the most effective ways in the history of learning to enhance this “Profound Attention” and improve the quality of thought is slow wave, relatively synchronous Neurofeedback training.

This hypothesis further asserts that as cartographers of consciousness, we are now being forced to define much more carefully terms that have hitherto been taken far too much for granted. We must now come to much more precise definitions of intelligence, thinking, imagery which transcends thinking, attention, etc in order to clarify what we really want to reach for.

If the ancients (and many of the modern masters) are correct and the problem is that psychothenia, over thinking, “unconscious” or unobserved thinking is the fundamental barrier to the natural intelligence and creativity latent in humans and if it is true that in most “normals” slow wave (ALPHA/THETA) but mostly mid-range ALPHA training can enhance the ability to profoundly attend to internal (thought, archetypical imagery, etc) and external phenomena simultaneously, in real time, then indeed ALPHA/THETA Neurofeedback, skillfully managed is one of the most valuable educational tools ever developed.

More info :  Slow Waves, Profound Attention, a Compass for the Gifted Thinker