The Head Trip by Jeff Warren

Author:Jeff Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588366597
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

With all these exciting advances in mind, I began my own neurofeedback sessions, a roller-coaster saga that prompted my friend James at one point to say I had better call the chapter “Fucking Neurofeedback,” since that was the only way I ever seemed to describe it. Needless to say, it was very up and down.

If my take on the training fluctuated wildly, the sessions themselves were reassuringly similar. They all began the same way: one of the trainers wired me up and took a three-minute baseline reading of my muscle tone, my theta levels, and my SMR levels. The last two were averaged into a numeric theta-to-SMR ratio that I would then try to improve upon for the rest of the session, which usually consisted of nine more three-to-five-minute recording periods of me willing different objects on the screen to move: bar graphs, trains, sailboats, even a little Pac-Man-style character in a depressingly large maze. Between recording periods my “trainer” would ask me what I thought was working and what wasn’t, and generally provide coaching tips. The tips themselves changed with the trainer, and some (trainers and tips) were more helpful than others.

The first couple of sessions went well. I was able to consistently improve the amount of SMR I produced throughout the session, and I left the appointments feeling refreshed and invigorated. I now know what I was experiencing was due in part to a phenomenon called the “first time effect”: all this weird technology and the flashy graphics and the fact that my mind was somehow causing all of this—it was all so novel that it galvanized my attention and kept me preternaturally alert. But eventually the novelty wore off, and the real struggle began.

The thing about feedback, of course, is that it can go either way. Positive feedback can get you performing better, but negative feedback can send you into a downward spiral. This is the double-edged sword of self-regulation. In theory it’s empowering because it means you have an element of control over the way you experience the world. But when you’re unable to exert that control, you have no one but yourself to blame. You get frustrated, and things get worse, and all of a sudden you’ve been sitting in front of this stupid computer screen for forty-five minutes and your muscle tone is through the roof and your SMR levels are lower than they were when you came in and your neck hurts and there’s a disappointed silence coming from the computer and your trainer is saying, “Relax, take a deep breath,” and you’re thinking, Am I really paying to be tortured like this? Am I the biggest idiot on the planet or just the one with the most feeble mental abilities?

This is a pretty good description of a typical experience from sessions three to about eight. I felt the way I did when I was fourteen and I used to “practice” telekinesis while lying in my bed, willing a ham sandwich to float

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