What's New in Neurofeedback
A Monthly Summary of News and Events

Vol. 10 No. 11 - November 2007

This newsletter is sponsored by EEG Spectrum Intl Inc,
a leader in providing clinical service and training
professionals. Past issues available at
http://start.eegspectrum.com/Newsletter/
To subscribe or cancel, see newsletter's end.
Opinions related in this newsletter reflect
author's only. Copyright (C) 2007 by EEG Spectrum
Intl, Inc. or David Kaiser. All rights reserved.
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Announcements - News
In the Spotlight - Brief History of Mind
News & Reviews - Books & journal papers
Events & Locations - Conferences, Courses
Last Word - Life is too short to be little
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Announcements

-Bad Memories Stick Better Than Good
-Breakthrough drug for schizophrenia
-Study Probes Roots of Fearful Memories

All links at: news.yahoo.com/fc/Science/Brain_Research
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In the Spotlight

Brief History into Mind

In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed,
ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be
regenerated. It is for the science of the future to
change, if possible, this harsh decree. --Santiago
Ramon y Cajal, 1928, founder of modern neuroanatomy

Our brain is the most adaptable structure in nature,
child or adult. New connections are created and new
neurons born every moment of life (Lledo et al.,
2006; Eriksson et al., 1998). There is still some
question as to the extent of neurogenesis in the
adult brain (Sohur et al, 2006), but the corpus
callosum only gets better with age: it continues to
myelinate in the frontal regions until age 70 and
beyond (Aboitiz et al., 1996). Synaptogenesis,
neurogenesis, and myelination are all life-long, as
is learning. In fact learning and synaptogenesis are
nearly psychobiological synonyms.

Our modern sense of mind emerged in a select few
2,500 years ago and it took the better part of two
millenia before most people joined this experiment in
self-government and self-understanding. One of the
first controversies surrounding the concept of mind
was its surroundings -- where was it? Was it in the
chest? the arms? the eyes? the head? the genitals?
The first mention we have of the brain in an ancient
Egyptian papyrus 2000 BCE speaks nothing about mental
faculties. In fact the brain was considered useless
in the afterlife; Egyptians hooked and pulled it out
through a nostril and tossed it aside during
mummification (whereas viscera were preserved in jars
and the heart was left intact within the body). It
would take the Greeks 700 miles to the north, fifteen
hundred years later, to begin the discussion about
what function the brain might serve.

Aristotle placed the mind in the chest and considered
our brain to be a radiator, cooling the heart. His
teacher Plato and Hippocrates from Socrates'
generation placed their minds in head, a more modern
view, cerebrocentric, but nothing is ever neatly
decided when it comes to self-understanding. The
heart/head controversy remains with us to this day,
although in a more diluted form. Mind may be largly
situated in the brain but how can we discard the
contributions of body? Body must be part mind as it
is our source of sensory information as well as the
end point of interaction with the environment.
(Ironically, Aristotle's cardiocentric view held sway
over the academic world until the 19th century when
enough courage and political will collectively began
to overturn his views of nature.)

Returning to the formative years of neuroscience,
little was known about brain structure during the
Roman empire. Galen, a renown 2nd century physician,
ignited a revolution in medicine with his dissection
of animals and evaluation of wounded gladiators, but
he passed off knowledge of nonhuman neuroanatomy as
human, causing some confusion for later generations.
To his credit he clearly described brain divisions
but he considered the empty spaces more relevant to
function than brain tissue. By focusing on the brain
vesicles, spinal fluid reservoirs within the head,
and assigning executive, sensory, and memory function
to this liquidy realm, he propelled the field forward
while simultaneously pushing it backwards.

In the mid 16th century Andreas Vesalius realized
Galen's description of neuroanatomy was based on
nonhuman primates -- which made sense given Roman
prohibitions against human dissection -- and
correctly described some of the overlooked
peculiarities of human neuroanatomy. As it often
happens in science, moving us closer to truth enrages
those who considered themselves guardians of the
truth, and his publications turned his mentor and the
older generation of physicians against him.

In the 17th century Rene Descartes centralized the
correspondence between mind and body which for him
was soul-to-body. There are a handful of unique,
unduplicated structures in our brain, those
structures which lay in the center between or below
the hemispheres, and he chose perhaps the most
modular central structure, the pineal gland, a
producer of melatonin. Others who followed suggested
the corpus callosum, the fibers connecting cerebral
cortices, as the seat of reason or soul. This search
for locality, where soul meets body, evolved into our
theory of cerebral localization, that specific brain
tissue is dedicated to specific mental operations.

Cerebral localization move to the forefront of brain
science two centuries later when Franz Gall's
childhood observations (1758-1828) ignited a
firestorm of interest and controversy into brain
function. During this school years Franz had been
often bested verbally by a student with bulging eyes
and Gall decided that the boy's overdeveloped sense
of language was due to this bulge, due to additional
brain tissue beneath the boy's eyes. He went on to
speculate as an adult that the shape of a skull
revealed the quality or amount of mind underneath. He
identified 27 personality features which he
associated from skull topography. Phrenology, as it
came to be called, became the rage in Europe, in both
senses of the word. It grew to be extremely popular
with laypeople, a common practice at parties, and it
enraged medical professionals. Today we live in a new
age of phrenology, for good or bad, with the only
real change being greater abstraction of the
behaviors we attempt to map to brain areas. Gall
linked brain areas to large general habits, such as
veneration, criminality, and spirituality, while
modern neuroscientists have whittled behaviors down
to smaller brain habits, such as assigning sounds to
written words and other mental operations. Gall was
also early in associating frontal lobe injury to loss
of language, which is the issue that propelled
(functional) neurology for more than a century
(1850-1981).

Gall's detractors were many. In the early 19th
century Pierre Flourens set up one of the first
neuroscience labs to discredit Gall's mind-brain
equivalence. Ironically, Flourens would in the end
validate Gall' paradigm, although he never recognized
this. Flourens argued that all functions are
everywhere in the brain, based on religious
conceptions, and he cut away brain areas of small
birds and mammals to prove his point. He proved the
opposite. When he removed the cerebrum of pigeons or
rabbits, perceptions, motor function, and judgment
were abolished; removal of the cerebellum affected
equilibrium and motor coordination; destruction of
the brain stem caused death.

"The function of the cerebral lobes is to will, to
judge, to remember, to see, to hear, or - in a word -
to feel. [They] wish and feel; that is their proper
action. The suppression of these lobes weakens the
activity of the entire nervous system." (Flourens,
translated, 1824)

Flourens' rigorous experimentation established
functional localization, though not in line with
those higher functions Gall was concerned with. A few
years later Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796-1881)
defended Gall in debates before French Medical
Academy. The question or thesis of cerebral
localization was very important, polarizing
scientific institutions throughout Europe, as this
question was another step in our endless struggle to
contest the divinity of humankind. The mind may
possess many faculties but the brain must be unitary
to receive the soul, according to prominent thinkers
of the day. Cerebral holism, as it was called, was
losing the day, until neurologist John Hughlings
Jackson considered localization too narrow a concept
to explain brain-mind correspondence and suggested
that the central nervous system might better be
considered as a series of interactive hierarchies,
which is a reasonable medium of localization and
holism.

"To locate the damage which destroys speech and to
localise speech [itself] are two different things."
(Jackson, 1864)

Or as British physician Henry Head more clearly
stated the idea, "The processes which underlie an act
of speech run through the nervous system like a
prairie fire from bush to bush; remove all
inflammable material at any one point and the fire
stops. So, when a break occurs in the functional
chain, orderly speech becomes impossible, because the
basic physiological processes which subserve it have
been disturbed... The site of such a breach of
continuity is not a 'center for speech', but solely a
place where it can be interrupted or changed." (Head,
1926).

The contest between holism and localization of
cerebral function continues to this day, reformulated
into networks versus modules. Where is the mind?
Where is consciousness? Is self-awareness the
function of a single brain area or is it an emergent
network property?

Both, seems to be a common answer.

-DK
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News & Reviews

NEW BOOKS

The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome
by Tony Attwood
From "intersensory marriages" to day-to-day
functioning of AS.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1843104954/eegspectrum

Human Brain and Spinal Cord
by Lennart Heimer
Clinical cases and functional neuroanatomy.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387942270/eegspectrum

How to Be an Adult in Relationships
by David Richo
Guide to healthier love relationships
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1570628122/eegspectrum

Finding Out About Asperger's Syndrome,
High-Functioning Autism and PDD
by Gunilla Gerland
Layperson resource and guide to AS.
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1853028401/eegspectrum

Misdiagnosis And Dual Diagnoses Of Gifted Children
And Adults
by James T. Webb
Discussion of dual diagnoses and giftedness
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0910707642/eegspectrum

Principles of Cognitive Neurology
by M.-Marsel Mesulam
Essential text to important field of study
--www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195134753/eegspectrum

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JOURNAL PAPERS

Efficiency of prefrontal cortex during working memory in ADHD : Evidence of
cognitive and behavioral deficits associated with ADHD are due to low
efficiency of prefrontal cortex.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1788557

Quantitative EEG indices of sub-acute ischaemic stroke : QEEG measures are
helpful for management of stroke patients.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17889600

Left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex imbalance in depression : Left
DLPFC hypoactivity is associated with negative emotional judgment and right
DLPFC hyperactivity with attentional modulation.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17888408

Revised brain symmetry index. : QEEG indexes interhemispheric asymmetry and
diffuse changes better than clinical EEG.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17888719

Bipolar disorder preceded by substance abuse : Bipolar disorder preceded by
substance misuse is likely a milder subtype.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17886170

Attention problems during childhood predict poor teen executive function :
Attention problems reflect impaired response inhibition.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17894607

Persistent white matter alteration after early childhood TBI : White matter
integrity remains abnormal after childhood moderate TBI, notably in genu of
corpus callosum and intrahemispheric pathways.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17905895

Functional neuroimaging of anxiety : PTSD involves emotional dysregulation
beyond exaggerated fear response.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17898336

Does meditation enhance cognition and brain longevity? : Meditation practices
may be neuroprotective, although evidence is spotty.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17905931

Cocaine effect on response to novel objects in familiar environments. : Cocaine
diminishes investigation drive of novel stimuli in animal research.
www.ncbi.nlm.nihgov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17897705
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Events & Locations

Upcoming Courses

A Pathway to Brain Regulation - Neurofeedback helps improve
neuroregulation. It's used by health care professionals for ADHD,
depression, anxiety disorders, LD, mood disorders, and behavioral
problems. This 4-day course, Neurofeedback in a Clinical Practice,
provides the basis for using Neurofeedback clinically. - *28 CEs

4-Day Comprehensive Course Dates (subject to change)

* Portland OR Jan 17-20
* Orlando, FL Jan 24-27
* San Diego, CA Feb 7-10

Our course is a hands-on experience right from the start. Attendees
consistently say this format is a very good way to learn
Neurofeedback.

"Neurofeedback should be viewed as one of the three essential or
primary forms of intervention - psychotherapy, psychopharmacology,
and Neurofeedback. In my experience, neurofeedback is every bit as
important and powerful as the other two forms of treatment." - Dr.
Laurence Hirshberg of Brown University Medical School, a
psychologist specializing in Developmental Disorders and Autism.

Contact Karie Kramer, our training coordinator, for more information
818-789-3456 ext 847 or see www.eegspectrum.com/ Training

*EEG Spectrum International, Inc. is approved by the APA to offer
continuing education to psychologists. ESII maintains responsibility
for the program.


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Conferences for Neurofeedback Clinicians & Researchers

CONFERENCE LOCATION DATES

AAPB - www.aapb.org Daytona Beach, FL May 13-18, 2008
SABA - www.skiltopo.com/saba Tampa Bay area, FL Apr 28-May 1, 2008

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Last Word

Life is too short to be little

My father married 394 women during his lifetime. My
mother was first, followed by hundred that he married
off to other men. My father was a United Methodist minister.
He passed away on Christmas Eve, 2000, gone but not
forgotten. I'm fortunate to possess copies of most of
his written word, along with a sprinkling of audio
and video tapes including my wedding video (one of
those women he married was my wife). His extensive
correspondence is scattered to the winds, but I have
his doctoral dissertation and every sermon he wrote,
160 titles across 45 years (1955-2000), 1,000 pages
of typewritten hand-corrected copy. A few years ago I
assembled his sermons into a chronological
five-volume set which I gave out as Christmas
presents to immediate family. Each volume ran about
200 pages and sported a black-and-white photo of my
father at the time. Volume 1 contained sermons
written between 1955 and 57, 2: 1958-59, 3: 1960-62,
4: 1963-65, and 5: 1966-2000. His favorite sermon,
given 82 times over his career, was "Life is too
short to be little." (That I know the exact number
speaks to my father's organizational skills, not
mine.) This was his "Guest Pastor" sermon, his
greatest hit, which he gave often after they kicked
him upstairs in the 1980s to be District
Superintendent of the United Methodist Church of
Western Mass. and Eastern Connecticut.

Below is an excerpt from "Life is too short to be
little," a sermon which counsels us in a way that is
appropriate to this newsletter (psychological,
spiritual). I cut the sermon short, but it makes the
point, and you may notice a family resemblance in his
writing style.

Life is too short to be little - by B.F. Kaiser,
December 3, 1961 Benjamin Disraeli was one of the
greatest men of the 19th century. At one time he was
prime minister of England and during the last half of
his life he enjoyed a great deal of fame as an
author. He was also a man who possessed a great deal
of practical wisdom, which today we would call
"common sense." In fact he once made a statement
which is one of the profoundest guides for living
that has ever been uttered: "Life is too short to be
little."

The great French novelist Andre Maurois once
commented on this statement: "These words have helped
me through many a painful experience: often we allow
ourselves to be upset by small things we should
despise and forget. Here we are on this earth, with
only a few more decades to live, and yet we lose many
irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that in
a year's time will be forgotten by us and by
everybody. Therefore, let us devote our lives to
worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts,
real affections, and enduring undertakings. For life
is too short to be little."

Now I doubt if any of you would try to refute the
truth of Disraeli's statement that "life is too short
to be little." But while we accept it as
theoretically true, we often deny it in our everyday
lives, and as a result we tend to lead lives that are
emotionally and spiritually stunted when we could be
living on a much higher plane.

And yet life is too short to be little. For one thing
it is too short to be little in our attitudes toward
each other. This is particularly true so far as our
feelings of resentment are concerned. All of us need
to have engraved on our hearts the wise words of
Confucius, who lived six centuries before Christ, "To
be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember
it."

Several years ago I was serving a parish in the
northeastern part of Massachusetts. It was a mill
town and the church sat on a hill which looked out on
Mill Street. One day I idly happened to look out a
side window of the church and saw some children
playing on the other side of the street. One little
boy came down the long sloping sidewalk on a scooter;
you can tell how many years ago this was, as there
are not many scooters around today. He came down the
hill faster than he anticipated and he lost control
at the foot of the hill. He bounced off the curb that
separated the sidewalk from the street, and this
threw him and the scooter over into a yard beside a
paper mill, from whence he arose, skinned, bruised,
and more than a little tearful. Angrily he went over
to the curb and kicked it just as hard as he could.
Of course this hurt him far more than it did the
curb, and he screamed some more.

Now this type of behavior is characteristic of all of
us at times, even though most of us are quite a bit
older than this little boy was at that time. We
resent the injuries and the insults that are
inflicted upon us, as so we harbor personal grudges
against the people who inflicted them upon us, even
though the harboring of such grudges does us far more
harm than it does to those who inflicted the
injuries. Most of us, when we are resentful toward
others, feel that we have good reason to be, and we
may be right. But having a good reason for our
resentment does not justify permanently injuring our
own spirits. After all, it is never a problem of how
our resentment affects the one who offended us, for
it seldom does; rather, it is a question of how it
affects us. I suspect that when Jesus insisted that
we should forgive "seventy times seven" He was not
nearly so concerned about the soul of the person who
needed forgiveness as He was about the one who could
only be saved by forgiving.

Probably the most glorious victory that any of us
will ever win in the spiritual realm is to come to
the point in life that when someone else injures us,
we shall retaliate with kindness and forgiveness.
Granted that it is very hard to do that, but life is
far too short to retaliate with anything else, and
thus lead to an endless string of insults, injuries ,
and bitterness. For resentment is a spiritual cancer,
and it will lead us to spiritual death if we harbor
it in our hearts. Certainly life is too short to
spend time and energy constantly worrying about
personal slights and injuries. For life is too short
to be little.

Life is also too short to be little in our purposes.
All of us have to have some sort of purpose to live,
but far too often, we are content with little
purposes when we should have a far greater purpose
that would really bring out the best that is in us.

A former parishioner of mine once told me that what
he fears most when he stands before the great white
throne of God is to hear the voice of the Lord ask:
"Well, what did you see in My world?" and to have to
answer: "I never had time to see it, Lord. I was
always on the telephone." I suspect that all of us
could identify with that, as we become wrapped up in
our jobs and our everyday lives.

All of us have heard the story, in one form or
another, of the man who was working on a new building
with a hammer and a chisel. Finally, one of the
sidewalk superintendents asked him, "Where does this
stone you're working on fit into the building?" The
man just shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know; I
haven't seen the plans. I just do what they tell me.
I keep hammering away." Oh, what a parable of life
this is! So many of us spend our lives this way, just
hammering away Monday through Friday, occasionally
Saturday and Sunday, just doing what "they" tell us,
with no other purpose except to get through life in
the easiest way possible. And yet life is too short
for this sort of thing. We have only one life to
spend; let us spend it for the highest purposes that
we can find instead of squandering it on anything
that comes along. For life is too short to be little
in our purpose...

Finally, life is too short to be little in our faith.
We often hear today that people do not have as much
faith as they used to have, but don't you believe it.
All of us have faith in a great many things, whether
we realize it or not. We have faith in our doctor, or
we would not go to that doctor for diagnosis and
treatment. We have faith in our bank, or we would not
deposit our money in it. It is never a question of
having faith or not having faith; rather, it is a
question of what we shall put our faith in. Some of
us, often without realizing it, put our faith in the
little god of things, believing that the more things
we have, the better off we will be. Others of us put
our faith in the little god of pleasure, believing
that the chief end of life is to extract every
possible thrill from it that we can. Still others of
us put our faith in the little god of power,
believing that exercising influence and power over
others is the way to the greatest fulfillment in
life. Most of us tend to put our faith in everything
else except Almighty God until we are at life's
extremity. We are like the woman who raced up to the
captain of an ocean liner in the midst of a storm,
asking, "Are we in any danger?" "Madam," he replied,
"we must have faith in God." "Oh, my goodness!" she
said; "are things that bad?" I suspect that we could
all identify with that; are things that bad?..

(Excerpted)
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