November 11, 2003

Experiences with NeuroCare Pro

Author: Alan Bachers, Ph.D.

NeuroCARE Pro (NCP) has been developed by Valdeane and Susan Cheshire Brown at their Zengar Institute in Victoria, British Columbia. This article is my approximation of their concepts, having avoided as long as I could Siegfried’s several requests to put something to paper – or digital medium. Given that this is done at his exhortation I will also take the liberty to burden the reader with an occasional off-topic rant. Conflict of Interest Statement: I make a small part of my living training NCP users.

I have two years experience with NeuroCare Pro. I will compare and contrast it with NeuroCybernetics, with which I have ten years experience, BrainMaster, with which I have five years, and Roshi, with which I now three years experience. This is a purely personal report – others may have vastly different perspectives.

NeuroCARE Pro works from the principle that the central nervous system (CNS) is always exploring ways to optimize and renormalize itself. Renormalize means allowing the CNS to return to a flexible and resilient state experienced prior to destructive or traumatic events. This is achieved in NCP by allowing the mean of the median of the amplitude of 16 bilateral hemispheric frequency groups to float within automatically adjusting ranges set by the co-journeyer (therapist) on a “mind mirror” screen displaying 0-42 (or 62) Hz. The simple precept is to adjust the feedback to follow Pareto’s Law – that the best exploration takes place when feedback is delivered about 80% of the time. The most parsimonious instruction is: “Allow the sound to be present and the animation to move” so that it is enjoyable for the client.

The feedback is derived from sensors customarily placed at C3 and C4. The theoretical underpinning of the brain as a Non-Linear Dynamical (NLD) system posits that almost any point can be used to tap into the system’s oscillatory behavior, but central training sites offer the most reliable and, well, “central” access points. From there, putting the CNS in a loop with itself, feedback interruption is triggered in NCP when amplitude varies beyond certain optima of flexibility and resilience (in other models termed rewards and inhibits, respectively).

No big difference here in what we’ve always done, it seems. Well, much of our neurofeedback work could be termed the “meet it and move it” model. We “diagnose” EEG “problems” from statistically, or QEEG, or clinically derived “pathology markers” and go about seeking their rectification by teasing the CNS to go where we think it “should” go. This is termed “Entrainment and Migration” in NLD terms. A really vexing problem for our field, particularly in the earliest work, has been the almost universal improvements seen in target symptoms no matter what protocol we use – even “opposite” protocols. . We also see other forms of classical statistical error when clear improvements in clients’ lives show little improvement, or even worsening, in the EEG, and the converse, worsening of client symptom reports despite having “cured” the EEG. These seeming contradictions suggest that the lenses through which we peek, based on current understandings, may be inadequate to reveal the active ingredients or even the unambiguous signposts of progress.

There are also astonishing changes in increasing numbers of our clients that suggest NF is having a truly revolutionary impact. We see a great many improvements across all human function, but we rarely get credit for these because they’re not part of “killing evil pathology” which constitutes 16% of our Gross Domestic Product – soon to go to 18% with HIPAA requirements. The lack of attribution to NF what it is in fact promoting can be laid at the feet of our evaluation methods. These are focused on pathology rather than on the robust transformation of a life. If therapists doing neurofeedback aren’t seeing these more broad reaching changes in their clients and themselves (assuming they too do the training), their perceptual sphincters are probably too tight, because these are ineluctable effects of NF work. NCP approaches seem to address even more richly this domain of expansion of human capacity and transformation, only a subset of which is the dissolution of what we currently call disease or disorder. While transformation is certainly not exclusive to NCP, its focus forms NCP’s foundation of “training, not treatment.”

NeuroCARE Pro uses the Synchronization through Chaos model of NLD, in which the CNS is encouraged to move toward a state of mathematical chaos, a non-random readiness or potential, similar to the “tabula rasa” or primordial background out of which everything emerges. As this state is approached, brain wave patterns that are over-determined, stuck, or unfriendly to optimal function tend to “adjust” themselves such that the energy captured in these “attractors” is dissolved and made available for the emergence of greater flexibility and resilience. In this model the CNS meets itself in its own complexity and proceeds to do what it does best – adjust itself to optimize its own performance. Profound personal transformations commonly accompany these adjustments. With clients, I often use the analogy of NF as facilitating attainment of “cruise control” for the brain when someone observes the state of being “at one with” or in the “felt control [or release of over-control]” space. This is explained as a more efficient default condition from which decisions can be made to advance or retreat as the need arises. NF is presented as a way to facilitate a larger, continually expanding, increasingly efficient default state less encumbered by attractors (pathology) that trigger needless anachronistic departures. With actually quite minimal training, the CNS, thus freed, is available to propagate these efficiencies in ways we’ll glimpse only when better analytic methods percolate their way into our knowledge base.

My belief is that many of the ways we intervene in NF today will be seen as quaint mythologies derived from our present Newtonian analytic methods that only measure things that can be made, ultimately, to stand still. Seconds of hugely dynamic brain states are stitched together to make a theta/beta ratio or a QEEG map. Often this is sufficient to derive a key by which to unlock a secret protocol door that measurably decreases pathology. A key is found only because the light is bright under this particular analytic engine. However, keys seem to be in abundance almost wherever we look. What’s more, none of the doors appear to be locked! “What, you mean just anybody can wander in and out at will, into the sacred spaces we have told them only WE have the keys for, and by doing that many will be improved, automatically?” Yes, I mean exactly that. We are daily observing nervous systems taking off in unintended and inexplicable ways to make changes far beyond what we imagine – and the vast majority of these changes seem to be in things that are interpreted as improvements. The collateral effects become far more impressive than the treatment.

As bright, highly trained professionals we are captured by the systems of our own “keys.” In initiating neurofeedback we are asking the person to enter the door of OUR choosing. The nervous system, while obeying our dictates, also freely ranges among countless other doors of its own choosing while and where we’re not “looking,” and makes up its own “mind” as to how to change things. A credit to the originator of the nervous system’s design is its inherent resilience to our meddling, or we would have killed off many, many people by now. A real possibility is that by doing ANY neurofeedback, we may be opening the portal through which the CNS accesses what ever it needs, and makes leaps that advance its own (r)evolution. The side effects are experienced as transformation.

One take-away from the recent SNR meeting was that just about anybody who shows up to do NF can expect two standard deviations of improvement on just about any measure they care to look at – and that’s the boring part.

These are philosophic and political changes that using NCP has, in part, wrought. More practically, the shift from “landing with both feet” on a particular site or frequency to either inhibit or reward, to the NCP approach of adjusting most frequency bands to trigger “somewhat” took a long time and was difficult for me. The more interventionist pushing or pulling the brain until it destabilizes as a locator, becomes irrelevant using NCP. Instability shows up as too much or too little amplitude variability in up to 16 frequency groups up to 42 (now 62) Hz. Very often, high variability will be seen, especially early in training, in the .01-2 and 2.5-5.5 Hz bilateral frequency ranges. Facilitating the variability reduction in these ranges by adjusting their prominence in interrupting the feedback can form the beginning point in an individual session, or in training in general. Developing sensitivity for including other frequency ranges in the mix constitutes the real dance of NCP. Bringing ranges into or out of play, letting the struggle continue or easing it, eyes open or closed become the ongoing decisions in addressing progressively more subtle aspects of CNS instability and, simultaneously, performance enhancement and transformation.

Those entering NCP as their first exposure to NF from education, the arts, athletics, or business have an easier time getting to Siegfried’s notion that “All NF is peak performance training.” Those entering from the healing professions, who have been schooled in mechanisms-based “treatment,” take the longest to assimilate the generality of the design philosophy.

Specific observations about NCP:

Any of the now thousands of training screen possibilities can be started in the default position without adjustment.

User invokable graded signal conditioning allows training to continue despite large amounts of electrical interference.

NCP’s continuingly expanding palette of extraordinary analytic functions from other disciplines are providing new ranges of graphic and statistical lenses through which data can be viewed from any desired segment of any session. As other disciplines adopt neurofeedback to their own uses, each having their own inclusion criteria, the more universal appeal of neurofeedback will advance, and our current subset of “truth detectors” will seem increasingly parochial.

The entirety of every session can be saved for offline exploration or replay.

Fewer undesirable side-effects occur because NCP training does not push or pull the client’s nervous system into instability. Most that do occur are a result of my straying into higher demand training out of frustration that not “enough” is happening.

While this newsletter is about how I see and use NCP, I still daily use the other systems in addition. If the general approach of NCP does not seem to be addressing a particular issue that I know I can attack in a mechanisms-based protocol, I will use that. In the unconvinced, who themselves are obsessively symptom-focused and not tuned to the plethora of changes others continue to notice to them, the other systems often provide a persuasive “whack” that something is indeed happening. All the systems I use or supervise the use of daily – NeuroCybernetics, BrainMaster, and Roshi - do neurofeedback admirably. Many of the salutary effects mentioned above in the context of NCP are certainly part of training and treatment using these systems, even if occult to observation.

In summary, I have found that the inclusion of NCP, while not easy at the start, brought a design philosophy and technique set that has expanded the scope, elegance, and future of my neurofeedback career. I am also aware that I am using only a small fraction of the capacity of the system.