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

Vol. 7 No. 11 - November 2004

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 the author's only. Copyright (C) 2004
by EEG Spectrum Intl, Inc. or David Kaiser. All rights reserved.
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Announcements - News
In the Spotlight - The Year in Neurofeedback - 2004
News & Reviews - Books & journal papers
Events & Locations - Conferences, Courses
Last Word - Hand and Brain

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'Brainwave' cap controls computer
Meditation Gives Brain a Charge
Breakups Can Be Mapped in the Brain
'Faulty wiring' stress death link
Toys have lasting impact on brain
Talent 'changes way brain works'
Brain Area May Control Urge to Hoard
Baby talk key to evolution
Third Language Area in Brain Identified
Smoking is bad for the brain
How Birds Learn to Sing May Give Clues to Human Language

All links at:
http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=science&cat=brain_research

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In the Spotlight

The Year in Neurofeedback - 2004

Below are the journal publications in the field of neurotherapy for
2004, a total of 15 papers and 2 dissertations. This does not
include conference abstracts, nor papers from the related field of
BCI (brain-computer interface) which is in the news, above.

Cho, Baek-Hwan; Kim, Saebyul; Shin, Dong Ik (2004). Neurofeedback
Training with Virtual Reality for Inattention and Impulsiveness.
CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7, 519-526.

Daley KC (2004). Update on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Current Opinions in Pediatrics, 16, 217-26

Duff J (2004). The usefulness of quantitative EEG (QEEG) and
neurotherapy in the assessment and treatment of post- concussion
syndrome. Clinical EEG & Neuroscience, 35, 198-209.

Egner T (2004). The effects of neurofeedback training on the
spectral topography of the electroencephalogram. Clinical
Neurophysiology, 115, 2452-60

Egner T (2004). EEG biofeedback of low beta band components:
frequency-specific effects on variables of attention and
event-related brain potentials. Clinical Neurophysiology, 115,
131-9.

Egner T, Gruzelier JH (2004). The temporal dynamics of
electroencephalographic responses to alpha/theta neurofeedback
training in healthy subjects. Journal of Neurotherapy, 8, 43-57.

Hammond DC, Walker J, Hoffman D (2004). Standards for the use of
Quantitative Electroencephalography (QEEG) in neurofeedback: A
position paper of the international society for neuronal regulation.
Journal of Neurotherapy, 8, 5-27.

Hinterberger T (2004). An EEG-driven brain-computer interface
combined with functional magnetic resonance imaging. IEEE Trans
Biomed Eng, 51, 971-4

Kirlangic ME (2004). A database for therapy evaluation in
neurological disorders: application in epilepsy. IEEE Trans Inf
Technol Biomed, 8, 321-32

Orlando PC, Rivera RO (2004). Neurofeedback for elementary students
with identified learning problems. Journal of Neurotherapy, 8, 5-19.

Quinn JF, Bodenhamer-Davis E, Koch DS (2004). Ideology and the
stagnation of AODA treatment modalities in America. Deviant
Behavior, 25, 109-131.

Rossiter T (2004). The effectiveness of neurofeedback and stimulant
drugs in treating AD/HD: Part I. Review of methodological issues.
Appl Psychophysiol Biofeedback, 29, 95-112

Sime A (2004). Case study of trigeminal neuralgia using
neurofeedback and peripheral biofeedback. Journal of Neurotherapy,
8, 59-71.

Vernon D, Frick A, Gruzelier J (2004). Neurofeedback as a treatment
for ADHD: A methodological review with implications for future
research. Journal of Neurotherapy, 8, 53-82.


FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Holtmann M (2004). [Neurofeedback for the treatment of ADHD in
childhood and adolescence] Z Kinder Jugendpsychiatr Psychother, 32,
187-200


DISSERTATIONS
Congedo, MF (2004). Tomographic neurofeedback: A new technique for
the self-regulation of brain electrical activity. Dissertation
Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences & Engineering, Vol
64(9- B), 2004. pp. 4668.

Van Zile, NJ (2004). The effects of electroencephalographic
biofeedback treatment on trichotillomania: A single-case experiment.
Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences &
Engineering, Vol 64(9-B), 2004. pp. 4602.

In January 2005 there have been eight publications already, so 2005
is likely to be an even stronger year in terms of publications.

Gruzelier J (2005). Critical validation studies of neurofeedback.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 14,
83-104

Hammond DC (2005). Neurofeedback with anxiety and affective
disorders. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North
America, 14, 105-23

Hirshberg LM (2005). Emerging brain-based interventions for children
and adolescents: overview and clinical perspective. Child and
Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 14, 1-19

Kropotov JD, Grin-Yatsenko VA, Ponomarev VA, Chutko LS, Yakovenko
EA, Nikishena IS. (2005). ERPs correlates of EEG relative beta
training in ADHD children. International Journal of
Psychophysiology, 55, 23-34.

Monastra VJ (2005). Electroencephalographic biofeedback
(neurotherapy) as a treatment for ADHD: rationale and empirical
foundation. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North
America, 14, 55-82

Thornton KE (2005). Electroencephalogram biofeedback for reading
disability and traumatic brain injury. Child and Adolescent
Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 14, 137-62

Trudeau DL (2005). Applicability of brain wave biofeedback to
substance use disorder in adolescents. Child and Adolescent
Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 14, 125-36

Walker JE (2005). Neurofeedback treatment of epilepsy. Child and
Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 14, 163-76

-DK
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News & Reviews

NEW BOOKS

Conduct Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence
by Jonathan Hill (Editor)
Comprehensive account of conduct disorder for mental health
professionals.
---www.amazoncom/exec/obidos/ ASIN/0521786398/top100

Neuropsychological Assessment
by Muriel Deutsch Lezak
Manual of neuropsychological assessment tools.
---www.amazoncom/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195090314/top100

Epilepsy in Children
by Alexis Arzimanoglou
Discusses seizure disorders and problems related to classification
of epileptic seizures and epilepsies.
---www.amazoncom/exec/obidos/ASIN/0781726980/top100

PTSD in Children and Adolescents
by Spencer Eth
Review of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in children and adolescents
including evaluation, assessment methods and child trauma in
relation to adult PTSD.
---www.amazoncom/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585620262/top100

An Adult Child's Guide to What's Normal
by John C. Friel Ph.D., Linda D. Friel M.A.
Practical guide to living a healthy life after being raised in an
dysfunctional family.
---www.amazoncom/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558740902/top100

Antisocial Behavior in Children and Adolescents
by John B. Reid, et al
A coercion theory about the development of delinquency and other
antisocial behavior.
---www.amazoncom/exec/obidos/ASIN/1557988978/top100

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JOURNAL PAPERS

EEG analysis of children with ADHD and comorbid reading
disabilities. : ADHD + RD group had more relative theta, less
relative alpha, and a higher theta/alpha ratio than the ADHD group.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15493324

Theory of mind after traumatic brain injury. : Patients with TBI
have inference-making impairments which can combined with linguistic
and working memory limitation to impair theory of mind capability.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15488910

Early neurobiological alternations in teens with PTSD : During
earthquake imagery, PTSD group activated bilateral visual cortex,
bilateral cerebellum and left parahippocampal gyrus, while control
group did not.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15489009

Quantitative EEG and neurotherapy in the assessment and treatment of
post-concussion syndrome. : QEEG can identify post-concussion
syndrome and neurotherapy may redress symptoms of post-concussion
syndrome.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15493535

Media violence exposure and executive functioning in aggressive
adolescents. : Higher amounts of media violence exposure correlated
with deficits in executive functioning.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15468343

Effects of neurofeedback training on the spectral topography of the
electroencephalogram. : Alpha/theta training produced replicable
reductions in frontal beta activity.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15465432

Attention deficit hyperactivity symptoms and Internet addiction. :
Presence of ADHD symptoms is an important risk factor for Internet
addiction.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15482579

Continuous quantitative EEG monitoring in hemispheric stroke
patients : A brain symmetry index may be used to monitor possible
changes of brain function after stroke.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15472102

EEG mapping in patients with social phobia. : Trait anxiety and
depression scores correlated positively with alpha activity and
negatively with theta, suggesting a hyperarousal pathogenetic factor
of anxiety.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15465293

Adolescents with learning disorders have atypical EEG correlation
indices. : Reading was associated with high correlations in EEG
indices within the right hemisphere in reading and writing impaired
students.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15465448

Cognitive neuroscience of memory distortion. : Hippocampus and
several cortical regions contribute to false recognition. The
prefrontal cortex monitors retrieval and it limits the rate of false
recognition.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15450167

Education Modifies the Effect of Alcohol on Memory Impairment :
Alcohol intake has less impact on verbal memory impairment among
more educated subjects than among those with less education.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15459511

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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

Orlando FL Feb 24-27
Phoenix AZ Mar 10-13
Boston MA Apr 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.


Conferences for Neurofeedback Clinicians & Researchers
CONFERENCE LOCATION DATES

AAPB - http://www.aapb.org Austin TX Apr 1-4
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Last Word



Hand and Brain

Which hand is dominant reveals a great deal about your brain, at
least in terms of gross organization, and probabilistically. If you
are right handed, your speech center is in your left hemisphere
(LH), or nearly always so (96% of the time). If your left handed,
your speech center is still in the LH 70% of the time. The remaining
30% of the time it is split, half in the right hemisphere (RH), and
half (15%) in both LH and RH (i.e., both centers needed for
competence). Once we've identified which hemisphere houses the
speech center, by process of elimination we can identify the
hemisphere were spatial and emotional perception and processing are
housed (the other one, the RH in most people). The right hand-speech
connection has been known for millenia; even King David spoke of it
3000 years ago: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand
forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth..."
(Psalm 137).

Such robust behavioral asymmetry is not only rare in the animal
kingdom, it may be unique. We are the only creatures that exhibit a
limb preference at the species level for all tasks. Handedness or
pawedness can be found in individual apes, monkeys, cats, even rats,
but only humans demonstrate consistent handedness as a group. Nine
out of 10 adults are right- handed, 8 out of 10 children are right
handed. We have been aware of this since time immemorial. Although
Plato sought symmetry in all human function, his student Aristotle
(384-322 BC) recognized our natural asymmetry and argued that the
right side initiated all movement -- in all creatures, no less.
Which is interesting given that he was an exception to the rule, a
left- hander.

When did handedness evolve in humans? Preferential wear patterns on
primitive hominid cutting tools suggests right handedness, but not
conclusively so. Coren & Porac (1977) surveyed 5000 years of art
that depicted unimanual tool or weapon use and 93% exhibited right
handness. Some believe that right-handedness was a recent adaptation
during the Bronze age, driven by weapon use, but what little art
remains from this period to address this issue (37 pieces) mostly
show right- handedness as the norm, so our unique characteristic was
probably fully established well before the invention of swords and
spears. For my money the best prehistoric evidence of early hominid
right-handedness comes from hand outlines. A full 70% are of the
left hand, not 50/50. This suggests that the hand that did the
tracing, the one favored by the prehistoric artist to manipulate the
red ochre or scraper, was the hand we don't see, the fine motor
controlling doodler, the right hand. So right- handedness may have
emerged prior to art, prior to even spoken language.

We humans have lived in a right-handed world probably forever. Those
unlucky enough to be born with a dominant left hand often had to
learn to act otherwise. Cultural pressure against sinistrality
(derived from Latin, on the left side) has waned as of late, but
only as of late, and not everywhere in the world. A teenage Ugandan
student of mine told me how her brother was forced into
right-handedness by her parents. The Bible reflects the constant
pressure against the sinister ones: "Of the children of Benjamin,
700 of 26,000 were "restricted in their use of the right hand" -
that is, about 3 % were left handed. This is near the rate we find
in 80 years old individuals today, not the 10-14% we find in
children today. That only 2% of octogenarians are lefties, and 4% of
quintogenerians (50 year olds) are lefties, is partly due to social
pressures during the Coolidge administration and beyond, and partly
due to increased mortality for being born in the wrong parallel
universe. This is a right-handed world, my friends: left-handers are
six times more likely to die from an accident, four time more likely
to die while driving, possibly because they are forced to use their
non-dominant foot to control acceleration and braking. Lefties are
more susceptible to allergies, reading disabilities, migraine
headaches (Geschwind and Behan, 1984) and finger amputation by power
tools (Corliss, 1984), among other obstacles to survival. On the
bright side, there are more left handers proportionally in baseball
and professional tennis than there should be. And more left-handed
artists and architects. Here is a list where left handedness is
overrepresented (i.e., greater than the population norm of 10-14%):
Math prodigies, Gifted children, Recent Presidents, Vegetarians,
Lawyers , Criminals, Autism, Alcoholism, People having paranormal
experiences, Smokers , Sleep difficulties, and stutterers, among
others. As for individuals from history, the follower crafters of
our culture were sinistral: Leonard Da Vinci, Michelangelo
Buonaroti, Albert Einstein, Aristotle (already mentioned), Neil
Armstrong, Henry Ford, Joan of Arc, Winston Churchill, Jack The
Ripper, Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar, and Babe Ruth

Okay, so not all of it is good.

Is right-handedness a product of nature or nuture? In 1940, the
monozygotic concordance rate (identical twins) was 14.5% and the
dizygotic rate (fraternal twins) was 14.0%, whereas the single birth
rate was 8.5%. Twinning is dangerous, to the fetuses and mother; it
is associated with higher rates of pre- and perinatal injury, which
may explain these values. One way to become left-handed in this
world is to be heading into it as a rightie, only to have damage to
the motor strip when you're making your way out. Left handedness is
found in 7.3% of normal elementary schoolchildren, but in 18.2 % in
special education facilities (in 1920), suggesting an association
with early brain injury. But there must be other ways to become a
leftie besides natal strokes and disease, as the list of high
functioning left-handers above attests to.

According to Annett (1974), two factors are involved in human
handedness: we all have a set of genes that forces us to have a
dominant hand. That is the first factor. But which hand will be that
dominant one, this depends on an entirely independent genetic
process. According to her "right shift hypothesis", a separate and
single gene determines which hand will become dominant, but the
shifting is not between right and left but between right and either.
The right shift hypothesis predicts that right- shifting is
dominant, the non-right-shift gene is recessive. Rife (1940)
surveyed more than 2,000 people and found that children of both
right-handed parents (R-R) were themselves right handed 92.4% of the
time. Children of "mixed" marriages (one rightie, one leftie parent)
were themselves righties 80.5% of the time. And the critical test
case, children of two lefties were themselves righties about half of
the time. This data perfectly fits a single-gene Mendelian
combination model, as Annett claims. The major caveat would be the
paucity of L-L parentage in the survey, only 11 pairs. Not much to
work with statistically.

In other primates we do find consistent handedness within
individuals across years of time, so it is feasible that handedness
is a primate or mammalian trait, but right handedness for a species
is due to a single flip of a switch in our genome sometime during
the last 5 million years. In gorilla adults we find equal numbers of
left and right-handed apes, but interestingly in juvenile gorillas
we find human numbers, 90% right handed, 10% left (Shaffer, 1993).
Maybe that single genetic mutation in the deep dark past, which
separated us from all other apes, simply kept us from growing out of
our childish ways.

-DK
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