What’s Better than Drugs?
Controlling your own brain without them:
You sit in a chair, facing a computer screen, while a clinician sticks electrodes to your scalp with a viscous goop that takes days to wash out of your hair. Wires from the sensors connect to a computer programmed to respond to your brain’s activity.
Try to relax and focus. If your brain behaves as desired, you’ll be encouraged with soothing sounds and visual treats, like images of exploding stars or a flowering field. If not, you’ll get silence, a darkening screen and wilting flora.
This is neurofeedback, a kind of biofeedback for the brain, which practitioners say can address a host of neurological ills — among them attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression and anxiety — by allowing patients to alter their own brain waves through practice and repetition.
Full article on using neurofeedback to treat ADD, depression and anxiety.
Neurofeedback has been around for more than 40 years. Yet experts still have not established which conditions (or whether) neurofeedback is effective. If you tests something for 40 years and cannot verify it works; then it probably doens’t.
At first glance, it looks like they are mixing modern technology with centuries-old meditation techniques. It would be interesting to compare the success of this neurofeedback with a group of Tibetan monks who do it without the electrodes.
This will be easy once we all become robots.
gah! Brian, why Tibet? why? They try to think themselves into nonexistence, which is not exactly the same as being self-controlled or temperate.
I’ve read about this as it relates to giving birth: most women do ok until things really heat up, and then their concentration crumbles, and they ask for drugs.
I’ve read about how depression changes the way the brain functions. Not sure if concentrating on the brain function would really work.