Ask Slashdot: Neurofeedback At Home, Is It Possible? 68
New submitter sker writes "Mind hackers, self-help junkies, even regular people have heard wild promises of the power of neurofeedback — namely the process of watching a visual representation of your own brain's activity to influence what your brain is doing. Folks are using it to cure ADHD, PTSD, or even to supposedly improve mindfulness meditation. Previously the sole domain of costly hospital and research equipment, the necessary EEG equipment is making its way into the home. From newagey Deepak Chopra-endorsed kits to the for-engineers-only OpenEEG project, the options are rapidly getting unwieldy for curious bystanders to make sense of. Have you had experience with EEG or neurofeedback at home? Do you have advice?"
Re:That reminds me a lot of (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is that for problems where a lack of awareness of what's happening is the primary cause, this sort of thing can be extremely helpful. In other cases (for example, if a shark is chewing on your leg), watching a visual representation of your brain isn't going to help much.
It is complicated, but you can do it at home (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because it IS unwieldy, for anyone. Even EEG done properly is not cheap or simple, and EEG is not a wonderful method of visualising what is actually going on in the brain:
As the parent says, an EEG signal is complicated, noisy, and difficult to interpret. Many of the wild promises are just that; wild promises used to hype business plans. To get an idea of what's currently possible with state of the art research for implanted electrodes (which provide a much better signal than a surface EEG), the following nature video on research at Brown may help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ogBX18maUiM .
If you are still interested, it is very possible to play with EEG signals at home. The OpenEEG project is one place to start. If you are interested in designing your own hardware, the ADS1299 provides much of the functionality in a single chip (and allows you to do much more of the filtering in software where you can play more tricks). Noise is a major issue. You'll want good electrodes (sintered silver-silver chloride are best) and some form of electrode gel. You'll also want to look into signal analysis techniques; this in an active area of research for EEGs. The book "Brain-Computer Interfaces: Principles and Practice" edited by Wolpaw and Wolpaw (ISBN 978-0195388855) provides a good overview.
A small group of us are currently working on an open-hardware EEG-controlled mouse that you can build at home. It's still at an early stage, but we have managed to move a cursor on screen to a series of targets (and show via bootstrapping that we're doing much better than chance). The designs for the board and software prototypes can be found here: https://github.com/ericherman/eeg-mouse [github.com] . If you want to be notified when we have something a little less prototype-like, send one of us an email and we'll start a list. If you want a better description of where we're at, create an issue on github.
You *can* play with this at home - either with your own software/hardware or someone else's. Much like writing a speech recognition engine, however, if you plan on easy success you'll be disappointed, but if you plan on a challenge you'll have a lot of fun.
Re:It really is complicated (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm an electrophysiologist (Score:5, Interesting)
hard call to make - use mod points, or participate. I'm doing my dissertation work in an EEG lab at UCSD, and while I don't actively research neurofeedback training (NFT from hereon out), my adviser and other lab members do. The OP gets it wrong - there is no cure for these psychiatric conditions. NFT may alleviate some of the symptoms, but it is likely the underlying etiology of ADHD, PTSD and Autism (which we investigate) is different enough from individual to individual that this may not be therapeutic for everyone.
A quick crash course in EEG. Neurons in the brain communicate between themselves via chemical signals. Some of these neurotransmitters cause quick voltage changes in their target neurons (either excite with inflow of positive ions like Na+, or inhibit with inflow of negative ions like Cl-). When you have large regions of neurons communicating with others, you'll see synchronized activity - say when someone touches your arm, the part of your parietal cortex that represents that arm will have a large amount of neurons suddenly get excited. When they get excited, they draw in positive charges, and there is a net negative charge left outside of the neurons. You can detect these fluctuations in more or less real time from outside of the head - but there are limitations. Where an electrode sits on the scalp will not give you a good idea of where in the brain the signal comes from. Between the neurons and the sensor on the scalp there are several different protective layers of tissue, some fluid filled with electrolytes, bone, and skin. These electrical signals are more likely to traverse laterally underneath the skull, than to penetrate out. What you record on the outside is a noisy, noisy combination of all the signals from all over your brain, plus some muscle activity (think eye muscles and jaw). In fact, the muscle electricity is a couple orders of magnitude stronger at your scalp electrode than brain electricity. It is mathematically impossible to determine exactly where a signal recorded on the scalp originated in the brain - there are some fancy algorithms to approximate solutions, but that is another thread. Without knowing where the signals come from, one way to try to figure out what brain regions are talking to each other is by decomposing the complex signal into its component frequencies using something like a fourier transform.
Psychiatric therapy directed NFT is supposed to work by identifying different brain frequencies (from hereon out called brain rhythms) at specific locations on the scalp that differ from the general population. There is a database of the general population's brainwaves for this process called QEEG (quantitative EEG, however this is a little misleading because all EEG since digital sampling/recording is quantitative....) and you can take someone with say ADHD and compare their 10 Hz brain rhythm at the site right over the center of their head to the 10 Hz rhythm of the general population. If there is less power (power = amplitude squared) at this electrode site than the general population, a clinician might devise an NFT program to focus on the 10 hz signal at that sensor location.
p00kiethebear describes a very similar protocol for what my lab employs. For instance, we have children with a diagnosis of autism come in and watch videos or play simple games, and when the 10 Hz signal is above the threshold determined by their QEEG diagnosis, the frames will advance. It is in essence a form of guided meditation. The control that a user develops is qualitatively different from person to person. There are no clear instructions you can give someone to help them figure out how to engage a specific brain rhythm. One kid described it as imaging a hand coming out of his head. Another described peeling oranges. I seem to have a stronger 10 Hz rhythm when I imagine kung fu forms. Go figure.
Conceptually, to do this sort of training at home shouldn't be too difficult. If you have the technical savy to follow the open EEG project you'll have the minimum amount of