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