Understanding Brain State Conditioning Also known as Brain Training or Neurofeedback

by Marlene Tate

Source of Information

This information was compiled by Dr. Marlene Tate from numerous reference books and
magazines. Dr. Tate has a Doctorate in Education from the University of Southern
California, and her interest in understanding brain function started in graduate school
continuing to the present day.

Renewed Interest in the Brain

Right now, it seems that everywhere you look, people are writing about the brain. Activities to improve the brain are recommended on Yahoo; advertised tapes are purported to improve brain functions; and even older, but not well known, programs such as Brain Gym are gaining new visibility. This is an exciting time for people interested in brain functioning. A recent article in the New York Times and International Herald
Tribune was entitled “boomers catch a brain wave.” It listed many places where one can get information on the brain. For example, the AARP organization is offering brain health tips; insurance companies, MetLife and Humana, are pushing brain health, and
Nintendo has a video game called Brain Age, “which gives your prefrontal cortex a workout.” Basically these programs recommend brain stimulation activities, cardiovascular exercise, and heart-healthy foods, which are essentially the same foods
that are good for your brain.

Renewed Importance of the Brain

Dr. Daniel Amen, a clinical neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and brain-imaging expert who heads up the world-renowned Amen Clinics dealing with brain function states: “when our brains work right, we work right—and when our brains have trouble, we have trouble in our lives.” He further states that luckily, it’s never too late as the brain is capable of
change, and when you care for it, the results are amazing. Dr. Amen has published several books including Making a Good Brain Great, and Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. For more information on him, please see www.amenclinic.com. It is just during the past few years that scientists have come to change their view of the brain. The old dogma was that the structure of the brain was fixed, and that as an individual became older, brain cells just continued to die. But the new view is that the brain has lots of “neuroplasticity”, which is the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience at any age. This is an exact quote from the Jan 29, 2007 issue of Time magazine, entitled Mind and Body Special Issue, p.74. One of the references noted describes a study where new brain growth was discovered in the hippocampus of older patients in a hospital in Sweden. There are other studies which document this ability, and, as Dr. Amen states, the ability of the brain to regenerate is a welcome new belief. Dr. Amen also rejects another old belief—the belief that we only use a small portion, maybe ten percent, of our brain power. He states that you may not use every neuron in your brain at the same time but each one is important. The problem is not that’s the brain is not working, the problems is that it is not working efficiently. But the brain is very complex. He puts brain complexity in perspective by explaining “a piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand contains a hundred thousand neurons and one billion synapses, all “talking” to another.”

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