“Brain Gym” offers New Hope for Victims of Injuries, Stroke:
For John, the classic rear-end collision – struck while sitting in his car at a traffic light – seemed minor, almost inconsequential, but it turned out that was not the case at all.
As so often happens for these patients, the accident itself was not seemingly severe. There were no major physical injuries, no broken bones, but as often will happen in a rear-end type of collision, the acceleration and deceleration that occurs to the head can produce a range of neuronal injuries that show up in a very diffuse set of symptoms.
For John, the problems came swiftly. A brilliant, young PhD researcher who relied on his intellect as his passport to success, he suddenly found it extraordinarily difficult to focus his attention. Reading became virtually impossible for him and since his symptoms were primarily of a cognitive nature, it really appeared that not much could be done to improve his quality of life.
Until, that is, he enrolled in the Life Quality Resources “Brain Gym.”
How to Train Your Brain
For a patient such as John to benefit from the Life Quality Recovery Program (LQRP), Drs. Dan and Lucy Chartier need to find out what is going on in the brain. Dan Chartier is a licensed psychologist and Lucy Chartier is an Advanced Practice Nurse with a PhD in psychology. She also has completed four years of work with a brain injury specialty clinic.
The starting point of our work is the quantitative electroencephalogram (QEEG). We place electrodes on the scalp to record the brain’s electrical output in the form of wave patterns. The QEEG reflects the state of neural activity in the brain. As we do the QEEG, we ask the patient to engage in a variety of activities, such as silent reading or copying of specific figures that require both visual concentration and motor control. From the data generated by this assessment, we get a detailed look at brain function. Injuries of this type typically show up as a pattern of slow frequency EEG activity.
In many respects, the experience is not unlike going to the gym for an assessment of physical ability to develop a workout plan. First, you are tested on various pieces of equipment, to identify weaker muscles. Then, an exercise program is prescribed: do a certain number of repetitions with certain muscle groups on certain pieces of equipment. In a similar way, that’s what we are doing as we identify areas of the brain that, through the evidence of atypical slow-frequency activity, we know are functioning inefficiently. We then target feedback training of those areas to imporve the functioning.
With John, we saw areas of his brain where slow frequency activity was apparent and found them to be consistent with the areas of the brain that are responsible of those behaviors he was finding difficult – such as reading with comprehension. Then we began the exercise program, working with John every day for multiple hours each day, doing EEG training of various sorts and related therapies.
You might say that each day John went to the “Brain Gym.” There are stations, or pieces of computer equipment, that he interacted with via electrodes on his scalp, which monitored the EEG signals. These feedback systems sent information back to him so that he would know when he was producing the right kind of brain waves. Also, the time spent sitting at the computer punching keys in response to visual displays on the screen exercised his brain in specific ways, such as: recognition, motor control, pattern finding, and the like.”
Remarkable Progress
Each session produces data, so it was easy to chart John’s remarkable progress as he rapidly strengthened his mental abilities. Our goal is to restore brain function rather than just train other regions of the brain to compensate for lost function. Neurofeedback gives the brain direction – it tells the biochemical system which way to go to make its correction. The brain needs guidance, stimulation, and direction.
Dr. Chartier - now president of the Society for Neuronal Regulation, an international professional society for persons working with Neurofeedback research and clinical services – reports that he and colleagues in other parts of the world “are able to quite often achieve a level of mental rehabilitation for a patient in three to six months that might have been achieved in a three to five year period using more traditional approaches.”
LQRP grew out of Dr. Chartier’s work over a nine-year period in both Biofeedback and Neurofeedback. “Eight years ago my colleagues and I first treated a severe head injury patient,” he recalls. “His injury was so severe that he was comatose for a number of weeks, and then remained substantially impaired. At the point we saw him, he had been out of treatment for many years and had substantially rehabilitated himself physically. But cognitively there was a great deal of impairment. His ability to read and write was virtually non-existent. His ability to speak was greatly impaired.”
“As he went through the Neurofeedback process, and worked at recovering and rejuvenating those lost functions in his cortex, he made extraordinary gains. He has since written a compelling 200 page manuscript describing his experience of being in a coma and his recover process. He now gives motivational talks to school groups, speaking very clearly and intelligibly. That kind of success is the inspiration for us to continue our work.” [1]