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

Vol. 11 No. 6 - June 2008

This newsletter is sponsored by EEG Spectrum International, Inc.,
the leader in providing neurotherapeutic services and training professionals.  

Past issues are available at start.eegspectrum.com/Newsletter/
To subscribe via yahoogroups.com or cancel a subscription, see info at the bottom.
Opinions in this newsletter reflect those of the author only.
Copyright (c) 2008 by ESII or David Kaiser, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

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Announcements        - News

In the Spotlight     - Dominant Hemisphere Identification

News & Reviews       - Books & journal papers

Events & Locations   - Conferences, Courses

Last Word            - Bogen and Consciousness 
 
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Announcements

-Alzheimer's Drug May Help Mild Memory Loss, Imaging Study Suggests
-Brain Plays Key Role In Appetite By Regulating Free Radicals
-Traumatic Response To Bad Memories Can Be Minimized
-Multiple Sclerosis: New MRI Contrast Medium Enables Early Diagnosis In Animal Model
-Data Mining Detects Signs Of Lou Gehrig's Disease In Gene Carriers Long Before Symptoms Appear
-Drug Has Potential To Prevent Alcoholics From Relapsing
-Aging Impairs The 'Replay' Of Memories During Sleep
-Autopsies Reveal Changes To DNA In Major Depression And Suicide
-MicroRNA Implicated As Molecular Factor In Alcohol Tolerance
-Brain Tweak Lets Sleep-deprived Flies Stay Sharp
-Cocaine Addiction Linked To Voluntary Drug Use And Cellular Memory

Links at http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/

 

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In the Spotlight

Dominant Hemisphere ID

   Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world. - Arthur Schopenhauer -

Of the 19 electrodes in the 10-20 electrode placement system (Jasper, 1958), 8 are on the left hemisphere, 8 on the right hemisphere, and 3 are down the midline, but in terms of function, is my C4 your C4?

By this I mean, is activity of my right motor strip (the cortex under site C4, the brain area which controls my left hand and other body parts) equivalent to the activity of your right motor strip? If you're left handed, you surely control your left hand better than I and the activity below C4 will be different than mine, more organized, perhaps less intense, less busy, not all over the place like mine, especially when I try to dribble with my left hand or make a lay-in from this side of the basketball court.

Electrode site F7 lies over or near Broca's area, the cortical tissue involved in speech motor programs for most people. Its homologue, site F8, over the right-brain analog to Broca's area, does very little in terms of speech execution and mostly gets activated in perspective taking and deception detection. In laterality research we talk about "hemisphere dominance" which is shorthand for which cerebral hemisphere houses the speech centers, which side is Broca's area on. Wherever speech lies, so do most language functions, especially those hard-core linguistic elements such as grapheme-phoneme conversion (i.e., converting letter strings into sounds), syntax, function words, as well as abstract and infrequent words. Knowing the location of a person's speech center tells us whether we should analyze activity at site F7 during language processing or whether we ought to relocate the electrode to the other side (F8) to overhear the electric chatter given out by Broca. In the latter cases we call the brain's organization atypical, and we must recognize it as such, especially when we compare individuals to a normative neuroimaging database.

Verbal functions are typically housed in the left hemisphere (LH) and non-verbal functions such as spatial and emotional processes in the right hemisphere (RH). One of the most telling signs of atypical brain organization is one's handedness, especially its degree.

Rasmussen & Milner (1977), a famous study of hemisphere dominance using the Wada (sodium amytal) test, determined that speech occurred in the LH for 96% of right handers and in the RH in 1 out of every 25 right-handers. In left handers, the pattern was different: 7 out of 10 had speech centers in the LH, instead of 96%, and 15 % had speech localized to the RH (as opposed to 4%) and confusing the picture more, the remaining 15% had speech divided across the hemispheres, with spontaneous speech in one brain and naming in the other. Of course the problem with assuming these percentages map to the general population is that they were not derived from the general population, but came from epileptic patients who had one hemisphere, then the other, pharmacologically knocked out via carotid injection in the process of undergoing brain surgery for seizure management. Many of these patients would be expected to have atypical brain organization due to their history.

A better population to compare to healthy adults are those who acquired speech problems randomly from the environment. We can thank WWII for this next set of data. More than 220 WWII British dysphasics (poor speakers) after unilateral damage were studied by Annett, who determined that of those right handed soldiers, 94% had a left-sided lesion and of the left-handers, 67% had a left-sided lesion, nearly the same results of the Wada research. Zangwill (1967) looked at brain injury in general and determined that of those who were right handed and suffered a left-sided lesion were aphasia 57% of the time but only 3% of the time when the lesion was right-sided. For lefties, a left-sided lesion produced aphasia in 54% of patients but a right-sided lesion produced aphasia in 31% of patients. These numbers are harder to pull together because the direction of investigation is reverse of the previous studies (Zangwill looked at who had lesions first, then who had speech problems), but if you do the math, righties were 20 times more likely to have speech centered in the LH and lefties were more like 2:1 odds, which is what the other researchers determined as well.

Recent research by Knecht et al. (2000) used an fMRI machine to assess healthy adults and they determined a simple function between handedness and direction of language dominance, see http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/123/12/2512 In this work, handedness was assessed by the Edinburgh Inventory (Oldfield, 1971), which ranges from –100 for strong left-handedness to +100 for strong right-handedness (see below). As it turns out, the likelihood of right language dominance is the following function: 15 percent minus one's handedness percent divided by 10.

 

Here is a handedness questionnarie you can use, based on Oldfield (1971) and Annett (1970), to compute the likelihood that a client's F7 is actually F8, and vice versa.

With which hand do you...

Write
Draw
Throw a ball
Strike a match
Use scissors
Use a toothbrush
Use a spoon
Use a knife (without a fork)
Use to hold a hammer to strike a nail
Use a broom (upper hand, before tiring)
Deal cards

Score as follows: Always Left (-10), Mostly Left (-5), Either (0), Mostly Right (+5) and Always Right (+10).

Add up the score to the ten questions and that is his or her handedness index. Take this value, which is my case is +100, and compute the probability of atypical (right brain) language dominance. In my case it is 15 percent minus 100 score divided by 10 which equals 5 percent. So if 20 Davids existed, only one would likely have his brain on backwards.

These researchers had an fMRI machine available and although access to bulky machinery is always fun, most of us need quick inexpensive means for assessment brain typicality. Here are two simple and easy techniques:

Assessment #1: Competitive motor task. Have a person tap their finger on the keyboard while they perform a mental operation that is known to be housed in one hemisphere, such as speech or computation. First run a baseline: have the person tap his or her pointer finger of each hand for a minute each. Once the baselines are collected, have the individual perform the designated unihemispheric task while tapping each hand's pointer finger. Compare baseline rate of each hand to task rate and whichever hand suffered the most proportionally from baseline, we assume the contralateral hemisphere was performing the primary task (math, language, etc), to explain the motor performance decline.

For example, I start with my right pointer finger, tap tap tap for a minute as fast as I can any key on the keyboard: rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, then I do the same with the left hand pointer finger.... lllllllllllllll... Using a PC makes counting easy, but this task can be done without any equipment except a timepiece. After I complete my baseline, now I am asked to do an ongoing math task, such as count backwards by 7s from 300 while tapping with my right pointer finger .....rrrrrrrrr .... and then count backwards from 400 by 7s while tapping with my left pointer ... llllllllllll...

Let's assume my right hand baseline tapping rate was 100 taps per minute, and my right-hand task-rate dropped to 60 taps per minute during the counting. This is a 40% decline. Compare this decline with my left hand, which might have a slow baseline of 50 taps per minute but which was nearly matched by the task-rate of 45 during counting, for only a 10% decline. So now I know that the hemisphere that controls my right hand also performs my mathematical computations, and as my right hand is controlled by my LH, so is my math processing (computation).

We can run the same technique again while I visualize objects in my kitchen to test spatial skills, or while I name emotions on the faces of people on TV, etc.

Assessment #2: Lateralized eye movements (LEM). Brain function typicality can be observed in the eye movement we make while thinking. When you ask a person to give three words that are similar to "moving" or "intelligence" or ask them to define "impish," you should task the verbal brain and see it momentarily squash the incoming right visual field so as not to be distracted by perceptual information while it is working. A leftward eye movement means the LH is working hard (its right visual field is squashed), and a rightward movement from your perspective (not theirs) means the RH is working hard. The same range of functions can be tested with LEMs as with competitive motor tasks, spatial to emotional to verbal to math processes. Be warned that LEMs are often quick and subtle, but in many they are obvious. But above all do not inform the person being assessed that you are observing their eye movements -- use a video camera if you must -- else you may get them self-conscious of these movements and they'll stop or go in all directions.

-DK

Selected references:

S. Knecht, B. Dräger, M. Deppe, L. Bobe, H. Lohmann, A. Flöel, E.-B. Ringelstein and H. Henningsen (2000). Handedness and hemispheric language dominance in healthy humans Brain, 123, 2512-2518.

Oldfield RC. The assessment and analysis of handedness: the Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia 1971; 9: 97–113.[

Rasmussen T, Milner B. The role of early left-brain injury in determining lateralization of cerebral speech functions. Ann N Y Acad Sci 1977; 299: 355–69.
 

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News & Reviews

NEW BOOKS

 Chemical Dependence Treatment Documentation Sourcebook
by James R. Finley, Brenda S. Lenz
Sourcebook to free addiction treatment professionals to spend more of their time and energy helping clients instead of "re-inventing the wheel" on admininstrative and documentation tasks. --http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471312851/eegspectrum

Perceptual Neuroscience: The Cerebral Cortex
by Vernon B. Mountcastle
The cerebral cortex, occupying over 70 percent of our brain mass, is key to any understanding of the workings and disorders of the human brain.

--http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674661885/eegspectrum

 The Prozac Alternative: Natural Relief from Depression ...
by Ran Knishinsky
Knishinsky explores a range of subjects from depression, herbs and the health food industry, prescription drugs, St. John's wort, homeopathy, kava, and more.

--http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892817917/eegspectrum

 Rehabilitation of the Adult & Child with Traumatic Brain Injury
by M Rosenthal, JS. Kreutzer, ER Griffith, MR Bond (Eds)
Resource for clinicians and students in health care and related professions; includes substantial pediatric section. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0803603916/eegspectrum

 The A.D.D. Book: New Understandings, New Approaches to Parenting...
by William Sears, Lynda Thompson
Sears and Thompson offer parents dealing with an ADD child an effective choice for treatment in neurofeedback and a refreshingly positive, supportive way for such parents to contemplate their challenging children. They emphasize qualities such as creativity, spontaneity, focus, and high energy in ADD children. --http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316779385/eegspectrum
 

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JOURNAL PAPERS
Psychiatric disorders in children with autism spectrum disorders: prevalence, comorbidity, and associated factors : Autism spectrum disorders are a major public health concern because of early onset, lifelong persistence, and high impairment. 70% of children with ASD have comorbidites, the most common being social anxiety disorder, ADHD, & ODD. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18645422

Perceived sleep quality of psychiatric patients. : More than one-third of psychiatric patients perceived a sleep problem, and two-thirds are assessed as being 'bad sleepers'. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18638206

Right anterior cingulate cortical volume covaries with respiratory sinus arrhythmia magnitude in combat veterans. : Respiratory sinus arrhythmia magnitude was correlated with right but not left hemisphere ACC volume, regardless of PTSD diagnosis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18629753

Neurobiology of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. : ADHD involves catecholaminergic hypofunction. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18644740

Neural mechanisms underlying the vulnerability to develop compulsive drug-seeking habits and addiction. : The transition from controlled to compulsive drug seeking may reflect a shift from prefrontal to striatal control over drug-seeking. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18640910

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Events & Locations Upcoming Courses

4-Day Comprehensive Course on Neurotherapy (dates subject to change)

  Glendale CA, Aug 7-10
  Cleveland OH Oct 16-19
  Durham NC Nov 13-16

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, Brown University Medical School, 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.
 

Conferences for Neurofeedback Clinicians & Researchers
CONFERENCE                    LOCATION                            DATES
ISNR - www.isnr.org         San Antonio, TX          Aug 28-Sep 1 

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 Last Word

Bogen and Consciousness

Until investigators of consciousness give up the belief in conscious singularity they will be looking at the structure of their own preconceptions, rather than the physiological activities subserving consciousness. - JE Bogen

I was fortunate enough to take the graduate level class "Consciousness" by the late Joseph Bogen, the neurosurgeon involved in the split-brain patient series of California and research colleague of Roger Sperry, and I was recently reading a book about Julian Jaynes and his take on consciousness which mentioned Joe so I dug into my personal archive and found out what Joe taught me. Much of what he taught me I have since taken as my own, which is what any good student should do. His Consciousness course was rather neurobiological in nature, as you can see by this opening statement:

"Explaining consciousness physiologically begins by recognizing that the meanings of "consciousness" have in common (as their intersection, see figure) a crucial core here called C, also called subjectivity, awareness, consciousness-as-such, or consciousness per se. A sharp distinction is made between the property C and the contents of consciousness, partial loss of which is typical of cerebro-cortical lesions. The neuronal mechanism producing C also acts as an attention-action coordinator, hence must have widespread connectivity. These requirements are best met by the thalamic intralaminar nuclei (ILN). Although large lesions elsewhere leave C undisturbed, quite small bilateral lesions in ILN engender immediate unresponsiveness. This combination of anatomic and neurologic evidence is bolstered by a variety of physiologic evidence leading to the ocnclusion that further study of the ILN, and their interactions with lower centers as well as cerebral cortex, are most apt to yield a better understanding of consciousness." - JE Bogen

Before he died on April 22, 2005, Joe spent many hours in bed undergoing kidney treatments and the autumn before his passing he passed the time by watching the World Series. He told me he thought of me often as he watched the Red Sox win the World Series as he knew I was a Red Sox nation fanatic, then as now. For his class he made us read the classic works on the neuroscience of consciousness, summarize them, then comment on them. He asked aloud how he was to grade us and I mentioned how another neuroscience professor gave all his graduate students A's if they attended -- he loved that idea an gave everyone in the class an A on the spot. That way we could learn without pressure, I think he said.

Joe asked us to summarize papers and here is my initial salvo, precocious and a slightly arrogant. Joe later taught us how he believed all thalamic creatures possesses consciousness, which is slightly different than what I would call "self-consciousness" or verbal consciousness.

H. W. Magoun (1952) demonstrates the abilities of a cellular aggregation or system in the brainstem of cats which is involved in arousing a creature from sleep, a mesencephalic lesion of afferent paths leaves a cat behaviorally normal -- attentive wakeful, able to sleep and subsequently be aroused by loud noises, etc; but lesions of the ascending reticular activation system (ARAS) at the same level result in an unconscious state for the creature, resembling deep sleep (large slow waves and sleep spindles in EEG record). Decerebellation or decortication does not change the ARAS role in behavior. The author suggests that the ARAS is important fur both facilitating motor behavior and maintaining the "central alertness" of the waking state.
This is useful and groundbreaking work for localizing what initiates conscious (wakeful) activity in the brain, As this paper relates to the course's title, one could promote the ARAS as the foundation of consciousness. However, one must be careful with the term consciousness (which Magoun avoided) -- it is one of the most slippery and difficult terms in neuroscience (and philosophy) to define. If consciousness is defined as alertness or reactivity to stimuli, then bacteria in my stomach possess consciousness; as the state of a normal brain when a creature can direct its own actions purposefully, then most multi-organism have some form of consciousness. The phyloyeny of consciousness is an exciting issue in science, complete with its own set of traps. Jaynes (1976) defines consciousness as a post- linguistic, post-historic invention, a metaphor or system of principles acquired by humans to organized their experience (consciousness, or mental behavior, which is private, conjoined to bodily behavior, which is public). If consciousness is defined as self-recognition, self-representation, or metacognitive skills, it may be attributable to other primates In this case, the behavior and mechanisms of the frontal lobes and other higher cortical regions may be the tip of the iceberg where we can find the origins of that class of behaviors which we call conscious.

Joe dropped a load of visual and attentional neurobiology on us, to soften us up.

Livingstone & Hubel (1988) examined the parvo- and magnocellular systems of vision which revealed two independent and distinct systems of visual perception, which can be detected in perception experiments in humans. The parvo system possesses color sensitivity, low contrast sensitivity, slow temporal resolution, and high spatial resolution; whereas the magno system possesses no color sensitivity, high contrast sensitivity, fast temporal resolution, and low spatial resolution. They assume the parvo-temporal lobe system is suited for visual identification and association and the magno- parietal lobe system is suited for determining the position of objects.

Skinner & Yingling (1977) summarized three types of bioelectric events in the cortex which are related to attention: EEG desynchronization of 8-12 Hz, EPs with larger amplitudes, and a negative slow potential shift, prominently in the frontal cortical regions. The authors conclude that interactions of the MRF (mesoencephalic reticular formation, a new name for the ARAS of Magoun, above) and the mediothalamic frontal cortex system (MTFCS) regulated by the thalamic reticular nucleus (RTN) are involved in all three of these indicators. The MRF and MTFCS behave complementarily. The MTFCS is inhibitory in nature, modality specific, with relatively short effect; its function appears to be to keep orienting reactions under control by selectively inhibiting the ascent of irrelevant sensory stimuli. The MRF is phylogenetically older, excitatory in nature, is not modality specific, and functions more diffusely. Together, with the regulatory capacity of RTN, they act as a highly selective gating mechanisms for what is and is not attended to by higher cortical systems in the animal.

For Yingling & Skinner (1977), RTN is strategically positioned to influence nearly all thalamic and cortical activities. Most of RTN axons project back upon the thalamus, suggesting that it plays a regulatory role on the de/activation of these nuclei. Experiments suggest that it functions as a topographically organized inhibitory feedback mechanism that can control all patterns of input to the cortex from all thalamic nuclei. By regulating the effect of MRF and MTFCS inputs, RTN can selectively delegate and suppress attention to events in the world.

(I still use this model, and this is why distance between cortical sites play no influence in inhibitory rhythms, i.e., coherence and comodulation.)

Schiebel and Schiebel (1966) examine the organization of the NRT using Golgi staining techniques. Evidence from degeneration studies after cortical lesions indicated that the NRT may be the site of final common pathway neurons in the projection of the thalamic non-specific system upon the cortex. The present study finds no evidence for this; instead, they find in 90% of the cases studied that the main axon turns caudally and penetrates the thalamus where it continues on to the mesencephalic tegmentum. Of those neurons whose connections travel rostrally, most or all terminate within the corpus striatum and not the cortex. These findings undermine early speculations as to the role of the NRT; and they conclude that the NRT modulates all ongoing thalamic activity, as well as mediating interactions between the thalamus and cortex.

Hubel (1988) describes the neural organization of vision in the primary visual cortex and how it was discovered. Cortical cells with varying receptive fields may be simple cells which act as line or edge detectors without regard to orientation, complex cells which are orientation-specific in response, and may possess directional sensitivity as well. End stopping cells are also sensitive to relative lengths of stimuli, responding preferentially to edges with certain lengths over others. Spatial summation of effects of cortical cells exist, as well as antagonism, which enables more complex cells to act selectively. Hubel presents a number of simple and logical models of cellular interaction to explain these different natures. Also, visual centers evolved primarily to detect and decipher moving objects, so they must now rely on saccades and microsaccades -- movements of the eyes -- for examination of stimuli which is stationary in the world.

We left neuroscience of consciousness for speculations on our final day of class. One of the speculations about consciousness to this day has to do with machines:

Turing (1950) considers the question "Can machines think?", which was brought to the fore with the invention of digital computers. Our brain is biochemical, a carbon-based physical system, but the question Turing wonders is whether a mind may exist in geochemistry, a non-carbon based physical system. Different objections exist against this possibility -- some theological, some ethical, other stem from mathematical impossibilities or the undefinable nature of consciousness or simply the problem of a continuous state being respresented in a discrete state system. While it's true that a machine can have a syntactical relationship with the world, no one has proven it can have a semantic relationship with the world. According to John Searle, Turing's consideration falls short here. Searle's argument -- known as the Chinese Room argument -- falls short because he never accounted for the electric bill. This is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that we have a conscious mind because it serves our survival, our goals to exist, but if a computer has all its needs met, it need not develop a semantic understanding of the world. Only when the objects of the world impact its existence will consciousness emerge.

Here is Joe's website -- from consciousness to split-brain research to creativity, http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jbogen/

-DK

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