I want MORE of what was recently called 'this nonsense
group'...it's informative, inspiring and nourishing to me.  It
is a vehicle for added learning and communication with others
in the field.   That has been my experience, consistently.

Michael Andes

on 4/30/07 8:06 PM, Dr. Sue Brown at sue@... wrote:

as you wish....

Sue Cheshire Brown Ph.D.
www.zengar.com

All Truth goes through three stages:
First it is ridiculed
Then it is violently opposed
Finally, it is accepted as self-evident....





On Apr 28, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Lucas wrote:

Just get my out of this nonsense group.
Thanks.

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: neurofeedcommunity@yahoogroups.com <mailto:neurofeedcommunity%40yahoogroups.com>
[mailto:neurofeedcommunity@yahoogroups.com <mailto:neurofeedcommunity%40yahoogroups.com> ] Namens Val Brown
Verzonden: zaterdag 28 april 2007 19:13
Aan: neurofeedcommunity@yahoogroups.com <mailto:neurofeedcommunity%40yahoogroups.com>
Onderwerp: [neurofeedcommunity] In re: to "Connectivity" and where we are

I frequently observe how, over the years, "new" discoveries emerge that
confirm, support
or in line with what we have already been doing in using Zengar NeuroCARE.
This remains
true today, in terms of what the role is of "connectivity", QEEG,
hyper-localized training
(either spatially or be frequency), the role of fundamental percetual and
memory-based
process and the critical importance of sleep-wake cycles, among many others.
Here's a
post from another forum that discusses some of these issues.

Huge numbers of brain cells may navigate small worlds

Bruce Bower

About 40 years ago, the late psychologist Stanley Milgram tapped into the
commonsense notion that "it's a small world." Milgram asked 60 people to
send a folder to a certain individual whom none of them knew. Participants
were given a little information about the target person and asked to mail
the folder to a friend or acquaintance who, in their view, was more likely
to know the stranger than they were. Each recipient of the folder was asked
to do the same, until the material reached its destination.

THINKING RED. Images show extent of high-frequency neural synchronization as
volunteers did nothing (top) or tapped their fingers (middle) in response to
visual cues. Bottom images portray the difference between the two
conditions. Red areas denote greatest synchronization.
Bassett

Only one-quarter of the chains were completed. In those cases, though, the
folder passed through an average of six intermediaries. Milgram's project
inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation" and led to, for example,
people calculating movie actors' working relationships to actor Kevin Bacon.

The small-world phenomenon got a big boost in 1998. Steven Strogatz of
Cornell University and Duncan Watts of New York University used mathematical
simulations to show that all sorts of large networks can be traversed in a
small number of steps. Strogatz and Watts demonstrated how this effect
applies to the more than 4,300 elements of the electric-power grid in the
western United States and to the collaborative relationships of more than
225,000 professional actors.

Strogatz and Watts also demonstrated the relevance of the small-world idea
to the array of 282 brain cells in worms called nematodes.

Small-world networks have a distinctive structure: There's a cluster of
nodes, each connected to its immediate neighbors, with a few that connect to
distant nodes. This structure enhances the power and efficiency of these
systems, Strogatz and Watts argued.

More and more neuroscientists agree. Motivated by Milgram and his
mathematical progeny, researchers are now devising models grounded in the
small-world effect to explain how the human brain works. These scientists
are looking for small-world setups within the brain's massive,
interconnected cell networks and for moment-to-moment electrical
manipulations that, they suspect, foster thinking and learning. Their
efforts are a sharp departure from popular brain-imaging efforts to pinpoint
neural niches that specialize in particular mental capabilities.

"Researchers have just begun to apply a huge arsenal of approaches to
understanding how brain networks are patterned, how they evolve and grow,
and how they generate dynamic structures," says neuroscientist Olaf Sporns
of Indiana University in Bloomington.

Fractal frequencies

The 22 volunteers recruited by neuroscientist Danielle S. Bassett of the
National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., and her colleagues
didn't draw a tough assignment. Each participant simply lay under sensors
that, at 275 points across the scalp, measured the magnetic field produced
by neurons' electrical discharges on the brain's surface. Half watched a
computer screen and tapped their right index fingers when a designated shape
such as a square appeared. The rest saw the shapes but weren't asked to do
anything in response.

Their brains did plenty, though. Bassett's team analyzed the six types of
brain waves that showed up in all the participants. Each wave type crackled
at a specific frequency, the result of millions of cells at various
locations emitting synchronized signals.

From the electrical-activity associations that the researchers noted at
pairs of scalp points, they constructed a simulated brain network. This
provided an outline of which brain areas were working together at each of
the six frequencies. It also revealed that at each frequency, brain networks
exhibited a small-world arrangement. Clusters of closely grouped neural
junctions typically incorporated a few connections to distant locations.

Intriguingly, each frequency-specific brain wave looked like all the others
did, although it operated on a unique scale. Biological patterns that repeat
in this way over different scales of measurement are known as fractals.

Fractal, small-world brain networks reverberate in an electrical limbo state
that almost, but not quite, comes unglued, Bassett's group reports in the
Dec. 19, 2006 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Especially at
higher frequencies, these networks operate "on the edge of chaos," the
researchers say. In that precarious condition, synchronized activity
relegated to a small brain area can rapidly expand into far-flung neural
regions to deal with new challenges or situations, the team proposes.

Although brain networks looked much the same whether volunteers tapped their
fingers or did nothing, one notable difference emerged. During the tapping
task, the networks delineated by the two highest frequencies of synchronized
cell firing displayed novel long-distance connections between the frontal
brain and an area toward the back of the brain. Since high-frequency,
synchronized neural activity may foster perception, memory, and
consciousness (SN: 11/13/04, p. 310: Available to subscribers at
http://www.sciencen <http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041113/fob7.asp> ews.org/articles/20041113/fob7.asp
<http://www.sciencen <http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041113/fob7.asp> ews.org/articles/20041113/fob7.asp> ), Bassett suspects
that this neural response guided a participant's decision to tap when shown
the various visual cues.

Bassett and her colleagues now plan to identify the structures within the
brain that hook up to the synchronized networks on the brain's surface. The
researchers will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a
technique in which scanners measure neural blood-flow changes that reflect
surges or declines in cell activity.

For now, remarks Sporns, the new findings indicate that related brain
networks operate at different electrical frequencies, each of which acts as
a unique channel for transmitting information. The brain needs no
central-control mechanism to direct mental life; interactions within and
among networks do the trick.

The possibility that the brain steeps itself in flexible, chaotic activity
is "an attractive idea," notes neuroscientist Karl Friston of University
College London. He says that Bassett's team now needs to formulate a theory
of how low- and high-frequency synchronized networks collectively respond to
mental challenges.

Perking up

The notion that the brain thrives on chaos, in a mathematical sense, comes
as no shock to neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman of the University of
California, Berkeley. For the past 20 years, he has argued that the brain
churns out a cascade of chaotic electrical activity that serves as a "get
ready" state. From there, he theorizes, vast expanses of brain tissue shift
into electrical-activity patterns that organize thought and perception.

Freeman welcomes the network approach of Bassett and her colleagues. What's
critical, he says, is Bassett's observation that brain waves look the same
at different frequencies. In his view, this feature allows for split-second
transformations from one synchronized network to another.

At the two highest network frequencies measured during the finger-tapping
exercise, brain activity synchronized over an area that's at least 22
centimeters long over the brain's folded surface. Freeman has measured a
comparably sized area of high-frequency synchronization in rabbits and other
laboratory animals as they perform tasks.

"This distance is astonishing, considering that it covers most of each
hemisphere containing several billion neurons," Freeman says. "Explaining
the large-scale reorganization of human brain activity is the central
[neuroscience] issue of our day."

With mathematicians Robert Kozma of the University of Memphis (Tenn.) and
Bela Bollobás of the University of Cambridge in England, Freeman has
developed a model of how clusters of neurons generate chaotic activity in
brains at rest. In that model, when an individual searches for a memory or
performs other mental work, synchronized brain states of increasing
frequency emerge in rapid-fire fashion. As in Bassett's study, each state
produces, on its own scale, the same pattern of electrical activity.

Each brain state goes through three steps, Freeman suggests. Synchronization
first emerges among individual neurons. It then spreads to interconnected
populations of neurons. Finally, large neural structures with specific
duties begin to reverberate in unison on each side of the brain.

This approach to modeling brain function, which Freeman's group has dubbed
neuropercolation, incorporates a small-world network into other neural
features. For instance, the model includes some nodes that depress the
activity of surrounding nodes and others that excite their neighbors, much
as the brain contains cells that specialize in inhibiting or arousing each
other.

Neuropercolation builds on the mathematics of percolation theory, which has
long been used to model the sudden, exponential spread of forest fires and
viruses. Recent research by Freeman's group appears in the March 2006
Clinical Neurophysiology.

Network approaches to the brain will dampen neuroscientists' current passion
for cordoning off patches of tissue presumed to specialize in various mental
functions, Freeman asserts. He says that researchers err when they regard
brightly colored neural spots in fMRI images as areas with unique
responsibilities for a mental function being studied. These "great red
spots" represent hubs of activity in larger, constantly shifting neural
networks, he argues.

Both his group and Bassett's team have found hubs of particularly intense
activity within networks of synchronized brain cells. These hubs arise where
neural connections are especially numerous.

However, fMRI investigators such as Friston still see value in the search
for brain regions with specialized duties. Activity hubs probably integrate
information shuttled in from other brain locations, Friston proposes.

Dark energy

Studies of brain activity, mostly with fMRI, have left neuroscientists with
a puzzling discovery: The additional energy required for the brain to
perform other mental tasks is extremely small compared with the energy that
the brain expends as an individual does nothing at all. New models of brain
networks offer clues to why the resting brain generates so much energy.

a8153_298.jpg

GLOBAL TIES. In a model of neurons arranged on a sphere and engaging in
random activity (left), the units form a small-world structure. Researchers
then transformed a spherical snapshot and electrical-activity recordings of
simulated neural activity (middle) into a more complex map of brain networks
that still exhibited small-world characteristics.
Sporns

In the Nov. 24, 2006 Science, neuroscientist Marcus E. Raichle of Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis refers to the brain's intrinsic
activity as "dark energy" because its functions remain mysterious. Studies
indicate that fewer than 10 percent of neural connections ferry information
from the external world, Raichle points out. This small proportion suggests
that intrinsic activity carries out vital duties, he holds.

Raichle raises three possible explanations for the brain's dark energy. It
may in part stem from a person's random thoughts and daydreams. Intrinsic
activity might also emerge from neural efforts to balance the opposing
signals of cells simultaneously trying to jack up and cool down brain
activity. Or it could occur during an internal process of generating
predictions about upcoming environmental demands and how to respond to them.

The fractal, small-world networks observed by Bassett's team in resting
volunteers, Sporns says, probably create the intrinsic activity that
intrigues Raichle.

Freeman seconds that notion, emphasizing that chaotic network activity at
rest reflects each individual's past experiences and expectations of
upcoming events. "You see what you expect or are trained to see, not what is
there," he says.

In Friston's view, Bassett's findings demonstrate the organized but flexible
nature of intrinsic brain activity but not its purpose.

In an upcoming NeuroImage, neuroscientists Alexa M. Morcom and Paul C.
Fletcher, both of the University of Cambridge, argue that intrinsic activity
holds no special significance in the brain. They say that scientists know
virtually nothing about thinking that occurs spontaneously and should stick
to studies of brain responses during mental tasks.

Other researchers see much significance for background activity in promoting
efficient thinking. For instance, a team led by neuroscientist Michael D.
Greicius of Stanford University School of Medicine reported in 2004 that
memory problems in people with mild Alzheimer's disease coincide with
unusually low amounts of intrinsic activity in several memory-related brain
areas.

Whether or not the brain's dark energy proves important, neuroscientists are
increasingly confident that communication among the brain's 100 billion
neurons requires surprisingly few steps. It may well be a small world in
there after all.

Source: ScienceNews
http://www.sciencen <http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070217/bob8.asp> ews.org/articles/20070217/bob8.asp
<http://www.sciencen <http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070217/bob8.asp> ews.org/articles/20070217/bob8.asp>