What is Neurofeedback?

Neurological Feedback, or Neuro-feedback for short, is an advanced technique that stimulates brain waves. The key thing to note about Neuro-feedback is that it works without the use of any medications. The use of neurological Feedback has increased in patients with neurological disorders. It is also beneficial to train your brain.

It is a type of biological Feedback or bio-feedback which is able to align brain waves by using the body’s own available tools. Neuro-feedback is used in sessions, and the aim is to help make the patients self-discipline their brain waves into the normal framework. For this, we give a series of stimuli and then monitor the brain wave activity. The patient knows how to focus on the different stimuli and understand what causes their brain waves to disrupt.

The technique’s first use began in the late ’50s by Dr. Joe Kamiya. He saw that the subjects in his testing would simply change their brain wave activity if we condition them to a reward. Later, this technique evolved into self-disciplining the human brain wave mechanism.

Now you know the answer to What is Neurofeedback. Let’s move forward.

How Does Neurofeedback Training work?

B.F Skinner gave the concept of “Conditioning”, which is a psychological concept. Skinner worked with dogs and observed their salivation. He understood the relation between stimulus and re-enforcement of the behavior. While these are mere aspects of appearance and non-clinical observation, advancements in science led us to understand the complexities within our brain.

The human brain works through electrical impulses generated by the nervous system. These electrical impulses are propagated from one neuron to another, stimulating the many areas of the brain. Due to the creation of the Electroencephalogram or EEG, we now have access to the entire brain’s activity. We found that the electric impulses traveling in our brain create waves. These brain waves operate on specific frequencies.

Through extensive research, we understood that when the brain experiences a stimulus, it creates a short spike in its brain waves. This spike could be hypothetically programmed or conditioned. Now, we use Neurofeedback training to effectively condition brain waves and prevent irregular spikes or disruptions. It takes multiple sessions to show substantial results. This is how you train your brain.

There are tools for at-home Neurofeedback training as well, and they utilize the waves emitted by devices for stimulating Neurofeedback.

Advantages To Train Your Brain For:

Now that you have a good understanding of what Neurofeedback training is and how it works, it’s time to understand the different advantages that it offers.

Improved sleep.
Better impulse regulation.
Understanding addiction triggers.
Improvements in gait and musculoskeletal functioning.
Enhanced cognitive functioning.

The above-mentioned improved areas are highly significant in terms of everyday functioning. These are also the places where patients with different brain disorders have problems. An increment in their functioning helps in improving the quality of life for patients with or without disorders.

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