Learn to Control Your Own Brain Emotion Networks w/ Real Time fMRI Neurofeedback

Neuro-researchers in the UK and the Netherlands helped establish real-time fMRI neurofeedback as a practical tool for self-controlling emotional networks in healthy subjects, back in 2009 (PDF). Since then, they have studied the use of real time fMRI feedback in the treatment of depression, with some positive results. Here is more from their most recent study:

a) Activation of the insular cortex (INS) bilaterally and the right ventral striatum (VS) supported the neurofeedback task, whereas the temporoparietal junctions (TPJ) of both hemispheres were deactivated. The TPJ is recognised as part of the brain’s “default mode network” that is deactivated during effortful tasks.
plosone

Depression is the mental disorder with the largest impact on public health. Up to 20% of the population suffers from a depressive episode at some point in their lives [1], and major depressive disorder (MDD) is a main source of disability for adults of working age in industrialized countries. At least 30% of patients with MDD do not respond to standard pharmacological and/or psychological treatments [2], and a considerable number of those who do respond initially go on to develop a chronic relapsing-remitting disorder. These patients with no or only a partial response to standard treatments often enter a vicious circle of psychosocial decline with further deterioration of their mood and level of functioning. To prevent relapses new therapeutic strategies have to be developed that aid the restructuring of cognitive schemas and might even prevent the formation and crystallization of dysfunctional thought patterns during early phases of depression.

...In the present study we localized areas responsive to positively valenced visual stimuli adapted from the International Affective Pictures System (IAPS) [15], [10] and then trained patients with unipolar depression to upregulate the activity in this target region over four sessions. We hypothesized that the combination of the physiological upregulation and the reinforced training of positive thought patterns would lead to an improvement of mood, which would not be seen in a control group that engaged in an emotion regulation protocol without neurofeedback. _PLoS ONE

Higher activation of right insula (INS), ventral striatum (VS), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) during presentation of positive compared to neutral images in the localiser runs (for full list of areas see Table 2). The localiser runs were effective in identifying brain areas responsive to positive images, which were used as target regions of interests (ROIs) for the subsequent neurofeedback procedure.
plosone

Patients in the NF group were trained to upregulate brain areas responsive to positive emotions using a procedure modeled on our previous work with healthy participants [10]. A target area was identified by the contrast between responses to positive and neutral images in a localizer scan to ensure that an area involved in positive emotion processing was selected. In the localizer scan, we assessed brain responses to positive, negative and neutral pictures by presenting four pictures of the same emotion category in blocks of 6 s (1.5 s per picture), alternating with a fixation baseline of 12 s. We presented 12 blocks per category in pseudorandom order. We used pictures from the IAPS [15] with negative (mean normative ratings for valence 2.8 [SD.42], arousal 5.63 [SD.55]), positive (valence 6.90 [.55], arousal 6.00 [.74]) and neutral valence (valence 5.45 [.56], arousal 3.44 [.47]). Pictures showed, for example, scenes of danger or disgust in the negative category, and scenes of romance including mild erotica or exciting sports in the positive category. After the localizer scan, patients were trained to upregulate the target area during three neurofeedback scans lasting ca. 7 minutes each per session (Fig. 1). Patients were informed about the general function of the target area but were not given any specific instructions about strategy. The task we set for them was to increase activity in the target area by as much and as consistently as possible.

...For the neurofeedback, a continuous signal from the target area (updated every TR and thus every 2 seconds) was displayed using the picture of a thermometer whose dial indicated the amplitude of the fMRI signal in the target area. Changes in the amplitude were indicated as the percent of signal change, calculated using the current signal intensity value and comparing it with the average value determined from the rest period immediately preceding each upregulation block. The scaling of the thermometer was in steps of 0.05%, with a maximum value of 0.5% (see Fig. 1). A change of background colour every 20 s indicated to participants whether their task was to regulate (green background) or rest (yellow background). The online GLM was computed with one predictor for the regulation state, convolved with a haemodynamic reference function. The top one-third (defined by the t value for the contrast between the regulation predictor and baseline) of the voxels from the target region was used to compute the feedback signal. For runs in which participants failed to upregulate the target area during the regulation periods (negative percent signal change), another target area was selected for the next run, using the cluster with the strongest activation for the regulation predictor. This adjustment in the target area was necessary in 15/32 (47.9%) of the sessions after the first NF run, and in 4 sessions after the second run. The reasons for this approach were two-fold. First, the adjustment of ROIs aided the shaping of mental strategies in the desired direction. Shaping is a common concept in the operant learning of a highly demanding task [11]. Secondly, our focus was not so much on the ability of participants to learn to regulate a specific brain region but on the effects of the NF training procedure on participants’ mood.

...Patients in the NF group reported initially using imagery of the positive scenes in the localizer scan in an attempt to increase activation in the target brain areas, but they later changed to evoking memories and imagery of autobiographically relevant material. For example, the happy memories that they reported as successful strategies included holidays, thoughts about their family being happy, and imagery of beautiful scenes from nature. Some patients attained good self-regulation of the target areas through mental simulation of future successes, and one patient successfully used imagery of an out-of-body experience. Conversely, during rest periods, the patients reported trying to “empty their thoughts” and to meditate. Patients in the IM group were instructed to engage in similar strategies as those reported by the NF patients. At debriefing, they confirmed that they had used these strategies. No patient reported any distress arising from the procedure.

...In the present study, four sessions of non-invasive fMRI-neurofeedback reduced the symptoms of depression with an effect size similar to those obtained with deep brain stimulation (DBS) [3]. Although the mental strategies of positive thoughts, memories, and imagery may have played a considerable part in this improvement, the neurofeedback procedure was crucial as evidenced by the absence of any clinical improvement in the control group. _PLoS ONE

More study details at the link above.

The researchers intend to expand their research in future studies so as to deal with possible confounders, and to introduce increased rigour via randomisation and more sophisticated control procedures.

There are many advantages in the ability to detect and shift the activity in one's own emotion networks. This could be true both in one's professional and personal life. It is also likely that the ability to control specific brain networks will facilitate learning -- particularly in difficult subjects where frustration and apprehension can be a factor.

fMRI neurofeedback is a bit unwieldy, given the bulk and expense of fMRI scanners. Sophisticated EEG neurofeedback can achieve essentially the same results with less expense, although the increased neuroscientific rigour of visualising fMRI network activation and deactivation, is an advantage in the research setting.

Once protocols are developed with fMRI, then parallel protocols using advanced -- but portable -- EEG can be cross-validated using data from the fMRI.

The microprocessor revolution has helped to shrink the size and reduce the weight of a wide range of sophisticated electronic devices. Home EEG equipment is already available which can be used in conjunction with a pad computer or a smart phone. As these devices improve -- and as the protocols for self-control of brain networks continue to be developed and improved -- expect to be able to teach your brain to control itself in more ways than you might currently imagine.

Instant Complex Skills Training, Like in The Matrix?

Scientists in Boston and Tokyo are developing an advanced form of fMRI neurofeedback that promises to make the learning of complex skills both faster and easier. The study was published in the Journal Science.

When we learn complex skills consciously, we typically practise the skill over and over, comparing our performance with an ideal performance. Eventually, our skills generally improve, and become automatic -- bypassing the conscious level. But with advanced neuroimaging feedback, we can skip the long and tedious training period and move directly to the automatic brain plasticity phase.

MedXpress

Boston University post-doctoral fellow Kazuhisa Shibata designed and implemented a method using decoded fMRI neurofeedback to induce a particular activation pattern in targeted early visual areas that corresponded to a pattern evoked by a specific visual feature in a brain region of interest. The researchers then tested whether repetitions of the activation pattern caused visual performance improvement on that visual feature.

The result, say researchers, is a novel learning approach sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance.

What's more, the approached worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning.

"The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned," said Watanabe, who developed the idea for the research project along with Mitsuo Kawato, director of ATR lab and Yuka Sasaki, an assistant in neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"We found that subjects were not aware of what was to be learned while behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed that subjects' visual performance improved specifically for the target orientation, which was used in the neurofeedback training," he said.
The finding brings up an inevitable question. Is hypnosis or a type of automated learning a potential outcome of the research?

"In theory, hypnosis or a type of automated learning is a potential outcome," said Kawato. "However, in this study we confirmed the validity of our method only in visual perceptual learning. So we have to test if the method works in other types of learning in the future. At the same time, we have to be careful so that this method is not used in an unethical way."
At present, the decoded neurofeedback method might be used for various types of learning, including memory, motor and rehabilitation. _MedXpress

It is fascinating to Al Fin cognitivists that the subjects were unaware of the skills which were to be learned, even though a complex type of learning actually occurred inside the brain. Not surprising, but fascinating nonetheless.

In order for complex skills learning to become faster and easier, it must necessarily bypass the slow and tedious conscious levels of learning and pass directly to the fast, hyper-parallel, sub-conscious levels of automatic brain plasticity.

Yes, this technology -- like all powerful technologies -- is extremely dangerous if used improperly. Since the learner is unconscious of what he is to learn, he is at the mercy of the person or program which has designed the learning protocol. Such is the life of an advanced ape species.

But on the more positive side, one of the greatest tragedies of human life has been that the wisdom, knowledge, and skills of highly accomplished persons has never been transferrable to other persons, in any practical way -- other than through a long, limited, awkward, and uncertain apprenticeship process.

Advanced induced neuroplasticity methods -- of which this is only one -- can study the working brains of highly skilled individuals, and learn how the skills are assembled and integrated within brain structures. Then, creating highly abstracted target images, neurofeedback protocols can be designed to quickly build neural foundations for the transferrence of these mental and physical skill sets.

NSF newsrelease

More: Enhanced memory through the blocking of a natural protein

We Are All Cyborgs Now: Getting to Genuine Convergence

Brain Riken Research
Convergent technology refers to the combination of multiple functions into a single device. Consider a computer pad which might be used for web browsing, as a video camera, as a game player, a communications device, a media player, a book reader, a data archiver, a photo album, and so on. With enough storage, a person could download much of his life onto an inexpensive handheld device, for easy reference. Useful for those with memory problems, and for everyone else as well.

But I am referring to a higher order of convergence and interactivity, which approaches the level of cyborg augmented reality. Let's use some recent research from Stanford as a springboard into the concept:

Ian Gotlib's group at Stanford University, California, studies girls aged 10 to 14 years whose mothers suffer from depression. Such girls are thought to be at higher-than-normal risk of developing the condition themselves, in part because they may inherit their mothers' tendency to "amplify" unpleasant information. Although none of the girls has yet experienced a depressive episode, Gotlib has found that their brains already overreact to negative emotional stimuli – a pattern they share with their mothers and other depressed people.


Gotlib is studying whether these young subjects can use interactive software and brain-imaging hardware to "rewire" their brains by unlearning this negative bias. In a pilot experiment, eight girls used a neural feedback display to learn how to control activity in a network of interrelated brain regions that have been linked to depression – these include the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.


The level of activity in this network was measured using an functional MRI scan and displayed to the girls in the form of a thermometer on a computer screen. The girls were shown sad or negative pictures that might ordinarily raise their "temperature", and tried to lower that "temperature" by adopting more sanguine mental states. They were then advised to try to recreate that mindset in their daily lives.


A control group unknowingly watched someone else's scan output instead of their own, so they didn't actually learn how to control their brain activity. _NewScientist

An interesting setup, using fMRI neurofeedback. But the researchers went further, and tested another group of girls with a much simpler setup to see how the two approaches would compare.

Another set of girls in the pilot experiment received their training through a simple computer game instead. In this game, a pair of faces appeared on a screen every few seconds: they would be either neutral and sad, or neutral and happy. Then a dot replaced one of the faces, and the "game" was to click on the dot. For the eight girls in the control group, the face replaced by the dot was selected at random, but for eight girls in the experimental group, the dot always replaced the more positive face in the pair. Over a week of playing this game daily, these girls were in effect being trained to avoid looking at the sad faces.


Gotlib himself originally found this concept, called attentional-bias training, so simplistic that he bet Colin MacLeod, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth who pioneered the technique, that it would not alter psychological symptoms. Gotlib lost his bet.


In his pilot study, both kinds of training significantly reduced stress-related responses – for example, increases in heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels – to negative stimuli. These stress responses are a key marker of depression, and they diminished one week after training. The girls in the experimental groups also developed fewer defensive responses to negative faces, such as startled blinking. Control groups showed no such improvement.


...Gotlib is adding more subjects to the training programme and plans to compare their long-term mental health with a parallel cohort of 200 girls, half of whom have depressed mothers, who aren't participating in the study.


He presented his results at the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Psychopathology in Boston in September. _NS

A simple computer game is much less expensive than a huge fMRI machine. And it would be easier to incorporate into one's pad computer as well. Of course, EEG neurofeedback would serve as well for this purpose as fMRI, and EEG could be incorporated into a pad computer. Can you see the convergence beginning to form?

This type of research could easily lead to much broader applications which could detect when we started to fall into a dysfunctional mental feedback loop, and provide timely stimuli which lead us back toward our predetermined goals. Why might we need such devices? Why not just use willpower and heightened consciousness instead?

The many functions where a human brain is superior to a computer depend upon the way that the brain is wired, and how the different parts of the brain communicate. This is virtually all below the level of consciousness, making us largely subconscious machines -- or zombies -- in many of our most important aspects. But ironically enough, by becoming more cyborg-like, we may be able to become less zombie-like.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are typically thought of in terms of helping persons to either compensate for neurological deficits such as stroke or paraplegia, or to rehabilitate from neurological damage. BCIs are also beginning to be utilised in the gaming world, to provide more intuitive game playing. We can also expect much more use of BCIs in the educational environment, for enhanced learning.

It is difficult to explain the explosively revolutionary impact of this type of technology, when used as neurofeedback for learning, mood enhancement, creative invention, mental focus, relaxation, and social interaction. You may think that intervention with such hyper-convergent technology would begin sometime after the birth of a child, but you would probably be wrong.

Once humans discover the revolutionary impact of hyper-convergent computing and BCIs on child raising outcomes, for large segments of the population there will be no going back. Why? Because it is almost inevitable that new, previously unknown critical developmental windows will be discovered, for high level skills that are currently developed only by accident. These windows will be discovered because the new BCIs will not simply be passive monitoring and feedback devices, but will also be "mental probes" using various modalities. You never know what is there until you go in and look.

This is very dangerous territory, where angels fear to tread. But then, as we approach cyborg-hood, we may find ourselves further away from angelhood. Heightened awareness, knowledge, and competence tend to lead us to test ourselves to greater extremes. Some of the things we try may go catastrophically wrong. We have to accept that in advance and take appropriate precautions as we proceed.

One of the greatest dangers is the danger of losing something essential, something perceptive and wise which keeps us from making fatal mistakes, and from falling into traps and wasting time on dead end enterprises. We could easily grow so dependent upon our machine alter egos that we lose much of our natural strength and competence.

That is why the great majority of humans will remain as a control group. At least at first. It will be difficult to keep persons from adopting a technology which may give them an advantage in life outcome, and which is likely to become both widely available and inexpensive, over time.

In addition, periodic mandatory periods of going "offline" would force us to reclaim our "naked human abilities." Failing to take such precautions could leave us extremely vulnerable to an unexpected failure of our technology.

A recent posting here looked at a program for developing a platform for "rebooting civilisation" in case of catastrophic failure. A simple BCI system would make it much easier to build and maintain these essential machines of basic civilisation. BCIs and wearable computers / data archives, could be stored in secure caches, safe from natural and man-made disaster. A primitive version of that idea was presented in the Niven - Pournelle SF novel, "Lucifer's Hammer," where the astrophysicist character stored a precious collection of reference books in a safe and secure cache -- the books were later used to help reboot civilisation. You can imagine how much more effective full sensory neurofeedback BCI archiving would be.

It may seem a long distance from the Stanford research above to the lifelong cyborg existence described. But it is mostly a matter of engineering and experimentation. When Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Ted Hoff, Robert Noyce, and so many others laid the foundation for cheap, ubiquitous computing, the djinn was already out of the bottle.

Efficient Learning via Brain Priming

Externally modulating the brain's activity can boost its performance. The easiest way to manipulate the brain is through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which involves applying electrodes directly to the head to influence neuron activity with an electric current.

Roi Cohen Kadosh's team at the University of Oxford showed last year that targeting tDCS at the brain's right parietal lobe can boost a person's arithmetic ability - the effects were still apparent six months after the tDCS session (newscientist.com/article/dn19679).

More recently, Richard Chi and Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney, Australia, demonstrated that tDCS can improve a person's insight. The pair applied tDCS to volunteers' anterior frontal lobes - regions known to play a role in how we perceive the world - and found the participants were three times as likely as normal to complete a problem-solving task (newscientist.com/article/dn20080).

Brain stimulation can also boost a person's learning abilities, according to Agnes Flöel's team at the University of Münster in Germany. Twenty minutes of tDCS to a part of the brain called the left perisylvian area was enough to speed up and improve language learning in a group of 19 volunteers (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.20098).

Using the same technique to stimulate the brain's motor cortex, meanwhile, can enhance a person's ability to learn a movement-based skill (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805413106). _NS

In traditional learning psychology, the term "priming" often refers to the concept of "implicit learning (PDF)," where unconscious associations between mental objects often aids recall and memory. But in a larger sense, priming can refer to a wide array of methods to prime the brain for more efficient learning. As mentioned above, different types of direct electromagnetic brain stimulation can serve as "priming" stimuli.

A person can learn to prime the brain for efficient learning to the point where he can eventually dispense with the hardware, once he develops the knack -- using feedback.

Gabrieli and his colleagues used functional MRI scanning to monitor the naturally fluctuating brain activity of 20 volunteers and investigate whether the brain enters such a learning state. While in the scanner, each person was presented with 250 images, one at a time, and asked to memorise them. The volunteers were shown the images again 2 hours later - mixed in with 250 new ones - and asked to remember which they had seen before.

Looking through the results, the team was surprised to find that in the moments before individuals were shown images that they later remembered, they had low levels of activity in the parahippocampal place area - a region of the brain that is known to be highly active during learning. "Maybe the fact that this region was less active meant that the deck was cleared - that it was more open for a stimulus to provoke a response," suggests Gabrieli.

To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants' memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. "There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task," Gabrieli says (NeuroImage, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.07.063).

The MIT team is now working on a way to monitor this "preparedness to learn" using electroencephalography (EEG) - a more portable and much cheaper brain-monitoring technique. Gabrieli's idea is to make learning more efficient by selectively teaching the prepared brain. "You could imagine a computer-based learning system which would stop when the brain is not prepared to learn and restart when it is," he says. _NS

The MIT researchers are able to detect when the brain is ready to learn, by using MRI and EEG. But individuals can teach themselves to detect this "learning readiness state" using neurofeedback.

Using neurofeedback, subjects not only can learn to detect their learning readiness states, but they can learn to actively shift their brain into more efficient learning modes on command. Eventually they can master the skill well enough to do it without the expensive equipment.

This is a type of individual empowerment which is potentially revolutionary and disruptive to society at large. It is particularly threatenting to a power structure which has worked so hard to dominate most levels of academia, media, political agencies, and conventional culture and thought.

Imagine, individuals who are more creative, learn better, can master physical skills more quickly -- and are likely to grow more independent from the herd. It will be interesting to watch these developments.

Sublime Ecstasy and Exquisite Agony

SciAm
Love is a delicate but compelling medley of dynamic brain networks. Swept by a torrent of hormones and neurotransmitters, the brain-in-love is released from many ordinary worries and concerns -- and firmly compelled by others.

When one gives themselves up to their feelings of love -- when she let's herself go -- she can experience one of the ultimate pleasures of life: the beautiful agony.

... researcher Janniko Georgiadis said the OFC may be the basis for 'sexual control', and that by 'letting go' women can induce orgasm.

He said: 'I don't think orgasm turns off consciousness but it changes it.

'When you ask people how they perceive their orgasm, they describe a feeling of a loss of control.' _DailyMail

Beautiful agony - Watch more Funny Videos
The pleasures of love -- both orgasmic and non-orgasmic -- are addictive just as surely as any drug of pleasure. Withdrawal is a painful and disorienting experience, leading many to try to grasp the fading remnants in an iron grip.

But it is the letting go that opens the floodgates of the love experience. That is the hardest to learn.

Cross-posted to Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!
More:

Female Orgasm MRI DailyMail

To create the scans, Dutch researchers stripped strapped the women into an MRI scanner and then allowed their partners to pleasure them to orgasm, all the while taking snapshots of their brain activity.

It is hoped that by comparing the brain scans of women having an orgasm with those who cannot, scientists will be able to 'coach' those with anorgasmia into truly 'letting go'.

Kenneth Casey at the University of Michigan explained that people who suffer from chronic pain conditions can be coached to relieve some of their symptoms by altering how they thought.

Experiments proved that when people watched real-time video of their rostral anterior cingulate cortex - the site of their 'pain' - they were able to reduce their symptoms by mentally adjusting it and watching the results on screen. _DailyMail

Such real-time MRI neurofeedback as described above can be used for far more than the control of physical pain. Pleasure can be enhanced, as can cognitive skills and memory. Unpleasant memories can likewise be minimised.

We are entering a brave new world of understanding, with regard to brain states and networks. What we do with this new understanding is up to us.

More on the neuroscience of love and lust

Can Realtime fMRI Neurofeedback Help Us Learn Wisdom?

How can humans turn "the stampede toward Idiocracy" into a movement toward a wiser, more intelligent society? It seems obvious that there is a current shortage of both intelligence and wisdom at the highest levels of analysis and decision-making.

"Wisdom and intelligence aren't the same thing,"...only 5 percent of the population can be described as truly wise and that advanced insight begins after adolescence as the brain matures.... _Eurekalert

Real-time fMRI (functional MRI) neurofeedback allows a person to observe his brain activity as it happens. This gives him the ability to alter his own thinking, on the fly. By learning to perform thinking tasks more successfully, the brain can be trained to operate more efficiently at below-conscious levels.

"Just like athletes in training benefit from a coach's guidance, feedback from our brain can help us to be more aware of our thoughts," says co-author Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. "Our findings suggest that the ability to control our thinking improves when we know how the corresponding area in our brain is behaving."

For the study, published the current issue of NeuroImage journal, participants performed tasks that either raised or lowered mental introspection in 30-second intervals over four six-minute sessions. fMRI technology tracked real-time activity in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC), the region of the brain involved with higher-order thoughts.

Participants with access to real-time fMRI feedback could see their RLPFC activity increase during introspection and decrease during non-introspective thoughts, such as mental tasks that focused on body sensations. These participants used the feedback to guide their thoughts, which significantly improved their ability to control their thoughts and successfully perform the mental tasks. In contrast, participants given inaccurate or no brain feedback did not achieve any improvement in brain regulation. _SD

Wiser brains think more efficiently, and arrive at workable solutions to problems more quickly -- even in the midst of distractions. Neurofeedback allows persons to train their own brains to focus on the cognitive task at hand. Properly shaped exercises will allow for more efficient functioning of parts of the brain which work together to provide higher level thought, analysis, and decision making.

We know that much of our understanding of the world -- even our scientific understanding -- is based upon belief and "gut instinct". Our early beliefs are based upon the perceived credibility of the source of our "knowledge." Later beliefs are based at least partially on earlier beliefs -- regardless of their validity.

If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. We don’t practice the scientific method. We don’t rationally consider the evidence presented for a theory. We don’t learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were? _PartialObjects _ via _ Slashdot

The same sort of "house of cards" belief systems also come into play in a person's other belief-based "knowledge". Some scientists even claim that they can tell a "political conservative" from a "political liberal" on a brain scan. No doubt more than a little bit of the scientists' own belief systems are coming into play in the research design and interpretation, but scientists are only slightly advanced monkeys -- like everyone else. That is the point -- everyone uses his belief system in every aspect of his life. And all belief systems are prone to bias, irrationality, and prejudice.

Mere intelligence is no safeguard against biased belief systems. Wisdom, on the other hand, can be a safeguard if it is broad and deep enough. Since most people are not naturally wise -- no matter how intelligent -- it follows that if we want a wiser society, we will need to learn to train people to at least be wiser than they are at present.

fMRI Neurofeedback Opening Windows into the Brain

TechnologyReviewWhen most psychologists think of neurofeedback, they think of EEG feedback. Certainly EEG feedback has accomplished some amazing clinical and scientific results, and is even beginning to show up in mainstream gaming applications. But the state of the art in neurofeedback and brain-machine interfacing is shifting to fMRI, due to a superior spatial resolution over the entire brain. (the actual state of the art may be combined EEG plus fMRI, but let's just look at fMRI for now)

U Penn researchers recently used fMRI neurofeedback in an attempt to discover if they could teach cocaine addicts to control certain brain functions.

Childress asked 11 healthy controls and three cocaine addicts to watch a feedback screen while alternately envisioning two 30-second scenarios: Repeatedly swatting a tennis ball to someone, and navigating from room to room in a familiar place. By analyzing whole-brain activity, researchers found that a part of the brain called the supplementary motor area was most active during an imagined game of tennis. They then linked this pattern to an upward movement of a computer cursor. They did the same with the navigation task, linking it to downward movement of the cursor. After four cycles or fewer—less than five minutes of training—the subjects had learned to alternate between the two states of mind, as well as associate each one with its corresponding cursor position. From there onward, they could move the cursor up or down with their thoughts.

...The researchers found that both addicts and healthy people could control their state of mind equally well, something Childress says is encouraging for future studies. "The patients who have trouble controlling their craving could still demonstrate control over this sort of non-emotional test," she says. That confirms what earlier studies had suggested: Addicts' cognitive control issues are not linked to more general thinking, but instead limited to more emotionally charged thoughts, like cravings.

However, Childress's team will need to develop specialized tasks to figure out how to apply this to addiction and other disorders. For therapy, "You really need feedback from localized regions that have to do with their disease, and have people learn to control them," says Rainer Goebel, a professor of psychology at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands who has done similar work with depression patients. _TechnologyReview

As mentioned parenthetically above, the combination of EEG plus fMRI neurofeedback offers a superior tool, in that both spatial and time resolutions are optimised. When using neurofeedback to facilitate a brain-machine interface, one wants to optimise time resolution. When using neurofeedback to train in controlling brain responses, one would want optimal spatial resolution. As training programs become more specialised, each small improvement in spatial and temporal resolution will be treasured by researchers.

Powerful EEG neurofeedback tools have been used for assisting in brain rehabilitation after brain trauma or infarct, in treating severe autism, for treating depression, and in other neuro-psychiatric conditions. Clinicians are typically more daring than researchers when using such relatively safe tools, given the difference between the clinical environment and the research culture. Researchers are quite cautious, and appear almost plodding in their careful step by step approach to scientific knowledge. Clinicians, on the other hand, are often desperate to help in cases which seem hopeless. They are willing to take intuitive leaps, and work with what they find.

The difference between attempting to build a structure of knowledge from the bottom up, brick by brick, vs. the sudden achievement of disconnected but profound findings when taking a leap of faith, contributes to the wall of incomprehension which often grows between the research and the applied branches of a given science.

As fMRI neurofeedback tools (and combined fMRI-EEG tools) eventually move from the hospital and lab into the outpatient clinical setting, the possibilities of sophisticated feedback tools combined with VR techniques in normal brains, should be astounding. Non-invasive, non-toxic tools such as neurofeedback, offer little risk in comparison with surgical, pharmaceutical, invasive electrical, and radiologic tools that might be used in a clinical setting. Clinicians typically feel free to try new and unconventional approaches when there is little to lose and much to gain.

Al Fin Futurists place the transformative potential of advanced neurofeedback technologies at the highest setting.

How Will You Boost Your Brain?

ImageSourceTrue "brain-boosting" can occur when the brain's ability to form new neurons and new synaptic connections is enhanced. Such cognitive enhancement can occur from the use of certain drugs, for example some anti-depressants and even ritalin.

But there are other ways to boost your brain, besides drugs. Deep brain stimulation using electromagnetism can work. And now, new research shows that brainwave training in the alpha frequencies can enhance brain plasticity and synaptogenesis.

Researchers from Goldsmiths and the Institute of Neurology have demonstrated that half an hour of voluntary control of brain rhythms is sufficient to induce a lasting shift in cortical excitability and intracortical function.

Remarkably, these after-effects are comparable in magnitude to those observed following interventions with artificial forms of brain stimulation involving magnetic or electrical pulses. The novel finding may have important implications for future non-pharmacological therapies of the brain and calls for a serious re-examination and stronger backing of research on neurofeedback, a technique which may be promising tool to modulate cerebral plasticity in a safe, painless, and natural way. _SD

The Mindflex device ($80 from Walmart and Amazon) is a fairly inexpensive way to train your brain in alpha wave relaxation. There is also a wide array of brain-machines that claim to entrain relaxation brain-wave frequencies -- including alpha. Learn how to make such a device yourself. Or browse around and see if anything here interests you. Even more here.

These are all tiny little baby steps compared to the type of brain-machine interfaces that are coming. Neurofeedback machines are available at all levels of sophistication and expense. With a sophisticated neurofeedback machine, you can go far beyond simple alpha training. But alpha wave relaxation is not a bad place to start. As long as it is just a start.

In the future, some individuals will use brain-machine interface as an escape from daily problems and challenges. What will be far more exciting is the level of challenges that people will be able to solve using various types of brain training, and machine-assisted brain plasticity.

Portable QEEG Helps Manage Depression Tx

When a depressed person goes for treatment, she doesn't want to wait 8 weeks to learn whether her pills will help her. Because the next pill may not help any better, which means another wasted 8 weeks of suffering. Researchers are learning how to eliminate all the wasted time and unnecessary suffering, using a portable brain analyser called QEEG -- quantitative electroencephalography. The new portable QEEG devices will allow physicians to select the right drug treatment in as little as one week.

Scientists measured brain activity before the patient was on any medication and then again one week after starting the popular antidepressant escitalopram, which targets a chemical messenger called serotonin. The patients were then randomly assigned to one of three groups: one group continued on escitalopram alone; one group was switched to another common antidepressant, bupropion, which acts on the chemical messengers norepinephrine and dopamine; and the third group took both medications.

To predict which patients would respond to escitalopram, the researchers looked for particular changes in brainwave patterns between the first and second QEEG. Using an algorithm that considers various QEEG characteristics, called the antidepressant treatment response (ATR) index, the researchers found that they could accurately predict whether the patient would respond to the escitalopram 74 percent of the time. Leuchter says that's much better than any other method currently available.

Earlier research had shown that the ATR index was relatively accurate at predicting a patient's response to escitalopram. But this study went further, by determining that the biomarker could also be used to determine whether a patient would benefit by switching to another drug. "This is the first study that I am aware of that can predict differential response to two different medications," Leuchter says. The research was published this month in the journal Psychiatry Research. _TechnologyReview

Another added benefit may be the ability to identify patients who may not benefit from drug treatment at all. Such persons could then skip the wasted months of time and expense of unnecessary drug treatment, and go directly to other therapies that are more likely to work.

QEEG and other encephalographic methods have proven invaluable in the diagnosis and neurofeedback treatments of various neurologic diseases, including ADHD and traumatic brain injury. Now, it seems that EEG can be used as an integral part of treatment for depression and some types of schizophrenia.

The portability of the new devices -- such as the one used by the researchers above -- allows for their use in smaller clinics. Traveling therapists will eventually be able to take the equipment with them to remote areas and disaster sites.

Seeing into the brain is a necessary step to allow useful therapeutic intervention.

Smarter Brain Monitoring

In recent years, better sensor technologies and data-processing techniques, as well as more detailed knowledge of the brain, have dramatically improved the information that can be extracted from EEG. For example, scientists now use computationally intense signal processing and pattern-recognition techniques to predict where in the brain a particular signal measured on the surface of the scalp originated or how different parts of the brain are connected. _TechnologyReview_via_ImpactLab

The before and after images on the right demonstrate the effects of two weeks of therapy on the brain of a stroke patient. Evidence of improved brain activity suggests that the therapy is working. Using information from EEG, advanced methods of data analysis can provide clinicians with up to the minute information about functional brain status.

EEG currently has a number of clinical applications--diagnosing sleep disorders or pinpointing the origin of a seizure, for example--but ElMindA and others aim to broaden its clinical use. The company has developed a novel system that calculates a number of different parameters from EEG data, such as the frequency and amplitude of electrical activity in particular brain areas, the origin of specific signals, and the synchronicity in activity in two different brain areas as patients perform specific tests on a computer. "We usually find patterns of activity which are very unique for the specific state of the patient," says Amir Geva, founder of the company and head of the biomedical laboratory at Ben-Gurion University.

The researchers are currently characterizing those patterns in the context of stroke therapy. Intensive rehabilitation after stroke can improve speech and motor problems by helping the brain to rewire, compensating for damaged circuits. At present, choosing the best therapy option for a patient is in part a trial-and-error process that can take weeks. But because healing capacity declines over time, it's imperative to find the most successful treatment as soon as possible after the stroke.

Therapy for stroke, depression, ADHD, etc. can be guided by this new type of "imaging". The equipment is far more portable than MRI scanners and PET scanners and reagents. In fact, using EEG neurofeedback in real time, therapists could actually watch the impact of therapy on brain learning and rehab while it is occurring during therapy.

Metronome Learning in Elementary School--Calibrating the Internal Brain Clock

Mental calibration for optimal learning is an important discipline, particularly for children just beginning to learn how to deliberately learn. One mental calibration method that appears to help elementary school children learn better is the interactive metronome.

...the 9-year-old bobs his head between cowbell tones to help him fixate on the metronome beat. Scores on the computer screen in front of him track his timing with the beat, but unbeknownst to the fourth-grader, the repetitious movements are helping him develop new neural pathways in his brain....Almost a dozen youngsters have been hooked up to the metronome at the school, which includes a hand and floor pad sensor that measures the accuracy of the user's response to the reference tone and shows results on a computer screen.

There are 13 exercises that involve a combination of clapping, tapping the hand sensor and stepping in time to the beat with one foot, and shuffling both feet onto the floor pad sensor. While it may be difficult to fathom how synchronized tapping can improve your brain's ability to process information, studies back up anecdotal evidence that the metronome works.

...After a short stint using Interactive Metronome, teenagers at the school showed a sharp one-year improvement in reading fluency scores. Even more interesting to Taub and his colleagues, there were gains in the students' ability to solve problems in mathematics.

It's an important point because most learning seems to be domain-specific, said Kevin McGrew, an educational psychologist and director of the Institute for Applied Psychometrics, a private consulting company in Minnesota...."It doesn't make you smarter; it doesn't give you more knowledge, but you're better able to manage, focus and concentrate better," said McGrew, a visiting professor in educational psychology at the University of Minnesota.

Source via Kevin McGrew

From the research paper by Gordon Taub et al, referenced by Kevin McGrew, one of the coauthors:

86 participants completed pre- and post-test measures of reading achievement (i.e., Woodcock-Johnson III, Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, Test of Word Reading Efficiency, and Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency). Students in the experimental group completed a 4-week intervention designed to improve their timing/rhythmicity by reducing the latency in their response to a synchronized metronome beat, referred to as a synchronized metronome tapping (SMT) intervention. The results from this non-academic intervention indicate the experimental group’s post-test scores on select measures of reading were significantly higher than the non-treatment control group’s scores at the end of 4 weeks. This paper provides a brief overview of domain-general cognitive abilities believed effected by SMT interventions and provides a preliminary hypothesis to explain how this non-academic intervention can demonstrate a statistically significant effect on students’ reading achievement scores.

Tick Tock Talk

I am more familiar with the Interactive Metronome technique as used for brain rehab. But it makes sense as a mental calibration method for young children--whose brains are rapidly changing. Every athletics coach understands the need for an athlete to "warm up" prior to performing. The same need to calibrate applies for singers and actors. Smarter surgeons will tend to mentally rehearse a complex procedure before beginning.

But the mental calibration of the interactive metronome is at a more basic level than a pre-performance warmup. It is closer to the neuroplasticity shaping that occurs with neurofeedback training. I would expect neurofeedback to be useful from time to time in overseeing metronome therapy. It is only a matter of time before the various parallel calibrations find each other.

Here is a video illustrating basic IM technique

Here is one of many free online metronomes

Neurofeedback: Will We Have to Wait for Video Games to Bring it to Us?

Will we have to wait for video games that incorporate neurofeedback, before this useful tool becomes commonplace and readily available?

The imaging company Omneuron wants to bring fMRI neurofeedback to the public, to aid in treating chronic pain.

But Dr. deCharms says that controlling pain is just one of many possible uses for fMRI feedback. Today, Omneuron is also researching treatments for addiction, depression and other psychological illnesses. In addition, he said. the company has contemplated “several dozen applications,” including the treatment of stroke and epilepsy. Brain scanning could even be used to improve athletic performance, he speculated.

Doctors and drug-abuse experts are particularly excited about the idea of treating addiction using fMRI. While scientists have talked about such an application since the technology was invented, Omneuron is the first to work on a real therapy. “We might have a tool to help control the inner sensation of craving,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped fund Omneuron’s research into addiction.

A growing number of ventures hope to turn fMRI into a business. The most well-publicized is No Lie MRI, which wants to sell brain scanning to law firms and governmental bodies like police departments or security and intelligence agencies as a replacement for the notoriously unreliable polygraph test. No Lie MRI has already begun selling what it calls its truth verification technology for about $10,000 to individuals keen to prove their innocence.

Source

But these companies have to get past government regulatory agencies first. But the government is not the only obstacle to the widespread use of the promising constellation of technologies referred to as neurofeedback. EEG neurofeedback has been around for decades, and the potentials for this therapeutic modality are still being nibbled at around the edges.

It's not unusual to walk into Desney Tan's Microsoft Research office and find him wearing a red and blue electroencephalography (EEG) cap, white wires cascading past his shoulders. Tan spends his days looking at a monitor, inspecting and modifying the mess of squiggles that approximate his brain's electrical activity. He is using algorithms to sort through and make sense of EEG data in hopes of turning electrodes into meaningful input devices for computers, as common as the mouse and keyboard.

The payoff, he says, will be technology that improves productivity in the workplace, enhances video-game play, and simplifies interactions with computers. Ultimately, Tan hopes to develop a mass-market EEG system consisting of a small number of electrodes that, affixed to a person's head, communicate wirelessly with software on a PC.

...Tan expects the technology to be used initially as a controller for video games, since gamers are accustomed to "strapping on new devices," he says. In fact, next year a company called Emotiv Systems, based in San Francisco, plans to offer an EEG product that controls certain aspects of video games. However, the company will not discuss the specifics of its technology, and there isn't widespread consensus on the feasibility and accuracy of the approach.

The true challenge, Tan says, will be to make EEG interfaces simple enough for the masses. He and his team are working on minimizing the number of electrodes, finding a semisolid material as an alternative to the conductive gel, and developing wireless electrodes. A mass-market product could be many years away. But if Tan succeeds, getting a computer to read your thoughts could be as easy as putting on a Bluetooth headset.

Source

To keep up on some of the latest news on neurofeedback, check this link occasionally.

The EEG Spectrum newsletter comes out fairly regularly, and is another place to check for technology upgrades.

This link is another place for good information on neurofeedback.

Electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and real time fMRI, are different technologies that provide fast enough response for feedback purposes. Neurofeedback is vastly underused in Psychiatry, Psychology, Pain Control, recovery from brain injury, and other areas of medicine and mental health. Applications to sports training and personal coaching should be obvious.

A video search on Google Video, etc. will provide a large number of videos dealing with neurofeedback and other biofeedback technologies.

Certainly if you know anyone with disabling migraines, or with a child with ADD/ADHD, you should let them know about neurofeedback.

Sometimes it seems as if videogames and simulated worlds such as Second Life are driving a lot of business and technology in the real world. Neurofeedback may be yet another example of this.

Thinking Makes it Happen

When the brain is working, it generates electromagnetism. A well designed detector of electricity or magnetism can monitor the action of the brain. That is simple EEG or MEG. But if you provide the brain with feedback of its own behaviour, while continuing to monitor the brain, you create a neurofeedback loop.

Clever neuroscientists and computer scientists in Berlin have developed a device that allows persons to operate a computer keyboard using their brainwaves.
This device comes under the category of brain-machine interfaces. It is easy to imagine that if a person can control a computer keyboard with his thoughts, then anything that can be interfaced with an electrical or electromagnetic actuator can be controlled by a person's thoughts.

I find the concept of a wearable robotic exoskeleton, to be one of many things that could be controlled by brainwaves. It would not be hard to equip such an exoskeleton with actuators and brainwave interfaces.
JW Bats of Our Technological Future, reports on this robot hand that detects nerve impulses and moves accordingly. The hand contains pressure sensors, allowing it to pick up and handle very delicate objects.

If one were to combine the brainwave interface with an actuator-equipped exoskeleton, with pressure detecting sensors on the robotic appendages, you might have the basis for an ambulatory device that could replace the wheelchair--for paraplegics, quadriplegics, and victims of disabling neuro/musculo/skeletal diseases. Neurofeedback has a lot of potential.

As I made clear in this post, I prefer biological solutions over hardware solutions. But as I suggested here, and in other posts, I am agreeable to using hardware solutions as a stopgap, while the biological solutions are still being worked out. The goal is full functionality--and more. Getting from here to there will be a winding road.

Hat tip Singularity News.

Beyond Smart Drugs: Getting Smarter

Aubrey de Grey's SENS approach to gerontology may very well help us to live longer, perhaps much longer. Then what? Humans really do need to become smarter. Present levels of human intelligence are just about good enough to get us all killed. To go beyond what was discussed in the posting Smart Drugs, I would like to look toward longer term prospects for boosting intelligence--permanently.

Returning briefly to neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga in his Oct 2005 SCIAM articleSmarter On Drugs, we see the real essence of the problem. Smart drugs temporarily augment the brains we have, but they do not make them better. To do that, we have to go further:

We have isolated one gene involved in intelligence, and others will follow. We know which parts of the brain are influenced by particular genes and which parts correlate with high IQ. We also know some of the neurochemicals involved in learning and memory. With such knowledge, we will gain understanding of what needs to be manipulated to increase intelligence in people who were not blessed with brilliance in their genomes or further increase the intelligence of those who were. Gene therapy could insert, delete, turn on or turn off genes that we find to be associated with intelligence.

We know about the Human Genome Project, and we understand that it is the foundation for much bigger things. We have heard about the International Hapmap Project, and we may have a vague idea of the possibilities that will be generated because of it. Diseases and other human attributes possess significant genetic components. We need to know what they are.

But we must think more broadly than mere genes. Genes are only part of the story. The better understanding of proteins, or proteomics, holds many of the keys we are looking for. In addition, non-coding RNA is a critical piece of the puzzle. The entire control structure of each cell is a highly complex internetwork of feedback systems. If you add the feedback systems of neighboring cells and tissues, then take into account signals coming to the cell from the blood, lymph, nerve terminals, and other meta-control systems--and you begin to see the problem.

We were talking about how to become more intelligent, using the genes. But now we understand that it can never be just the genes. It has to include the entire biological environment of the nervous system, and the entire organism.

But, wait. The organism is not hermetically sealed. The organism has inputs from the outside, and outputs to the outside. We know that growing organisms have to be given adequate nutrition, physical exercise, and mental stimuli to develop normally. They also need emotional nurturing. From Intelligence Testing Blog, we learn from Kevin that even video games may contribute to cognitive enhancement in young children. But what about the mature, developed organism--human? Assuming he is getting optimal nutrition, exercise, mental challenge, and emotional support? What else can be done?

OK, I talked about ampakines, donezepil, and modafinil here. If you are living on the edge of your mental capacity, it might be worth it to you, to try to get your hands on some donezepil. Modafinil should be treated gently, since everyone needs ample sleep, and with modafinil the temptation is to skimp on sleep to get more done, potentially abusing the body in the process. Ampakines are not available yet, but will be relatively soon. These are temporary approaches.

While we are waiting for researchers to understand the genetics, proteomics, and epigenetics of intelligence, there may be more permanent actions we can take to augment our mental capacity.

Assuming your nutrition is indeed optimal, your physical activity regular, your mental stimulation productive, and your emotional supports satisfying--what else can you do?

Neurofeedback is a technology that has been largely ignored by the public and news media, but is an approach that holds enormous potential for mental growth, even for mature and normal human mind/brains. It is still experimental in terms of stimulating mental growth for normal brains, but it is safe and non-invasive.

People with phobias, such as math phobia, are preventing themselves from progressing in the direction of their phobia. Such persons can certainly be helped by neurofeedback and other behavioural approaches.

There are many commercial programs, such as this one, that tries to capitalise on the human desire to improve oneself. This is another group that seems to be taking an even more advanced approach to developing mind improving technology. And while Daniel Amen may be rightly criticised by his peers for jumping too quickly into imaging technology to diagnose common everyday conditions, there is no doubt that Amen is at the leading edge of the curve, and may have the last laugh after all.

Taking nutritional supplements may not be a bad idea, either. In addition to the multivitamins, the extra vitamin C and E, and the minerals, taking curcumin, lipoic acid, and precursors for neurotransmitters might be helpful for many, particulary those with depression, fatigue, or ADD. This is not medical advice, but merely a suggestion for something that might be looked into.

Long life and increased intelligence are not the final goal. To reach the final goal, you must also include enlightenment, and wisdom. Using both sides of the brain to the fullest extent. Mysticism and holism are only part of wisdom. Wisdom also includes the ability to look at the details with exquisite clarity, and being able to place them into dynamic context.

We have some distance yet to travel, many things to learn. There is no reason not to use the footstools, ladders, and knotted ropes dangling above us.

Retraining the Brain

CBS News posts a story about brain plasticity, using various non-drug therapies. Using something called CI Therapy, or Constraint Induced Therapy, some patients are regaining the use of limbs deadened by brain injury. Using another therapy called the "Brain Gym", a software training device, others likewise regain use of facilities previously thought permanently lost.

Hat tip Intelligence testing blog.

Another rapidly growing area of non pharmaceutical brain retraining is Neurofeedback, described in this Wiki article with links.