and i trained in private schools but the quite a combination of that around i fell madly in love with psychology my senior year in high school but in those days that's not something i'm supposed to do however that wasn't going to stop me later on  so i am a volunteer speaker for the foundation for wellness professionals what that means is that i am required to do a minimum of thirty talks a year so it's kind of busy were in our busy season and thank you very much this is a wellness based treat their uniqueness they often get results that others cannot this is about our children yours and mine these are two of my three and in over two hundred toxins actual toxins found in umbilical cord hundreds of thousands of chemicals in use in the united states five percent of them have been vetted for safety and none of those have been vetted for safety in the developing brain so that's something that we all should be concerned about funky births if your child or you heard story then there's the possibility that that affected and so the majority of children that we see had a birth story so if you have a birth story it may well be relevant head injuries poor nutrition i'm talking about not just the standard american  diet but the standard american diet is a serious problem because it is not a nutrient rich diet it is not nutrient dense it doesn't have enough nutrients and so we have starving brains because if you're you know eating  those are not a tree and dense postnatal exposures so various kinds of exposures from what from what we rub on our bodies from what we use to wash our hair is from the air we breathe the water we drink the food we eat there are talks and subsequently everywhere and there's also other kinds of ways that kids get get affected early neglect and or abuse so substances that provoke reactions and susceptible to children food additives sugars processed foods i like to talk about food additives because if anything has a color and a number then that's a food additive and we have found that that really can be a problem for some  it is typically more of a problem for males than females in that we've seen that was most affected by artificial colors have the new girl and they are dos related so the more you have the worse it is the less you have the better it  is sensitivities we test for food sensitivities there are more and more food sensitivities these days and in fact the incidence of cilia disease which is frank severe problems with wheat and gluten is much much higher in this generation than it was in the previous generation so we test for those sensitivities if it's relevant because what happens is that certain parts of the protein ten leak out of the g i system enter the bloodstream and what happens is the body will create antibodies the antibodies cross the blood brain barrier and recap it on the brain so that's why we're concerned about that  connection big idea number one yes that's correct that's right assessment identifies the neurological disruptions so that they can be corrected again this is the child who's getting a so we have a cap on his head and that cap has a bunch of sensors in bedded in it and what we're doing is we are injecting a gel into these sensors this is a flat to syringe it doesn't have a point i was show it to kids unless they're really younger or really impaired and if they are then we just don't let them see it so you can tell he's really fine with what i'm doing to him he's filling out the behavior a they're ready inventory of executive functioning which everyone filled out and he also already filled out the vision function questionnaire we assess for vision in every one assuming that it's again assuming it's relevant because vision trumps everything in the brain so if there's something wrong with the vision if this isn't isn't working whether it's visual acuity or visual function which is another story then we want to know because that's going to rob mental money from the brain and make it very very difficult for the brain to do all the other things it's supposed to do a vision has to do with the eyes tracking a lady able to go back and forth with convergence where we're supposed to look like this far away when we look close the eyes should command it has to do with the eyes working together so we don't have one going out here and the other one not following and it also has to do with accommodation with and then looking close up and having those round muscles around the lens and just engaged states so the raw e g is then analyzed and neuro therapy protocol is developed so when i say increasingly engage states we take a date in three minute intervals for a minute with the eyes closed three minutes with the eyes open three minutes with the person reading to themselves little kids read to us three minutes listening to someone read to the person three minutes watching a silent video that poll for social competence it calls for orientation to novel stimulate and it also is a getting near vision from reading farther away because i have an eyes open record where they look at their thumb in their laps and then farther away when they're watching when math records where they do math on their level for younger children or children who aren't able to do that we have other ways of doing that we substitute so that we get the data that we need so that we can help folks so g electrical signals from the brain are monitored at nineteen locations on the scout using the computer so there were nineteen of those white circles plus an extra one which is called a ground and then there was a sensor on each ear lobe which are called references so the way we derived e g is we take the average of what's going on in the ears and we subtract it from each of the active the electrodes theoretically what's going determine how that individual's brain waves differ from a normal healthy person of that age your feedback treatment protocol is developed with the purpose of changing the e g at specific locations and treatment protocol is you nine is uniquely designed for the individual so there's nothing can do about this if you have a day there's a lot of different ways that your brain can get to eighty days if you have functional vision problems that may be different for each person if you have an auditory processing problem if you're developing background we are looking to see what is your particular brain doing so that we can really zero in that any other time in our lives and there's pruning that goes on from the time of birth and the more we stimulate the brain the more on the connections are preserved in particular areas so for instance children who are fortunate enough to be exposed to more than one language by native speakers are going to preserve more narrow connections in the language centers which is really kind of cool so  so what we find is that we want to enhance the development of those neuronal connections so the way the brain works is the brain is throwing out connections to the frontal lobes and also to what we the underlying physiology and that improves brain function when you have information about what your brain waves are doing your brain can use that information to change how it works these are neurons and they are connected but they're not quite connected what happens is there up taken by the the donor neurons so where interested i know the pharmaceutical industry is very interested in this real estate we're interested in all of this real estate because there's evidence that not only and she ended up having one disease and so she lost her word finding and she got her memory was very very significantly impaired by the disease so along with good treatment  did to language and to memory this is a ground so it's it's screening out all of the andean electricity and these are the reference electrodes so again there's this attraction going on the average of these two war so it starts out with a blank screen and you remember i showed my daughter she's got the sensors on her head so that's what it looks like you know when we're looking at the client and when the put the client is seeing is this computer screen so it starts a blank and then after a quarter of a second of the brain making better language there's a war and the awards in the form of the sun sound at a simultaneous change on the computer screen so we typically use something what has happened over time is screen and screen time has shortened people's ability to pay attention and made it so that people of all ages not just children are on board and then a second so what do we do about that lot simultaneously if you're at a party you know where your partner is you know where your kids are if you brought your dog you know where your dog is you know what's going on in the next group over here you know what's going on over here and so forth we're also standing you read you're controlling across your muscles and all that having the brain do these two things is really not a lot and we have years of pre and post neurofeedback e g data to show that this indeed works and works very a change on the computer screen so i am a scientist and to close the doors to see the fruit trees are one of the parents said on the computer recognizes the brain waves performing correctly it releases a asking the brain to make these slightly faster brain waves smaller and in this case they're overlapping and therefore this particular brain wave does not qualify for reward to th effect of no rehabilitation programs to influence the rate and amount of recovery or take these noninvasive brain retraining approaches are based on operant conditioning this comes from a chapter that my research because we've already established that so there are studies showing i q increases from down to twenty three point five points as measured on the various forms of the in four children you have all the references here twenty three children ages seven kids sixteen diagnosed with mild to moderate mental retardation this is a study that was done very recently in you've just gone into the next level of intelligence what does that mean that means that a lot of things work better are faster are easier storage retrieval processing speed and so forth these are all important things to be able to do well in order to do well in my chest and in order to do well in learning and in life i have an article that i wrote that's on my website actually that analyzes the various scales that are required in order to do well in the various and sundry sub tests in the axis scales and those are some of the things that are needed for another study study developmentally delayed twin girls and they had pro q twenty three twenty four points and that lasted at least fifty four months so what they did is they did knock you on both of these girls they get then did a full run of neural feedback forty sessions is the minimum and then they redid the i q found twenty three points improvement in one year old one for the other and then they waited fifty four months and did that i q again on each of them and found that that improvement had half so one of the things that we think is really really important is the door ability of the improvement that happens from their feedback their feedback is correct it's chaos it's not you know we're going to have you do their feedback to stop them you lose the benefits that's not how it works it's correct a child who has other type he has leads in the majority of cases not one hundred percent in the majority of cases if there is a distinct rupture in a neurological function it's going to affect attention and focus because it affects the f and compensate for that and so it's going to affect your ability to run that orchestra so the majority of people that come in to see us you know what they are presenting criteria for treatment of a d h d seizure disorders anxiety including obsessive compulsive disorder generalized anxiety disorder post traumatic stress disorder and phobias depression reading all in two thousand and nine examined ten studies of patients with seizure disorders now there are hundreds of studies of neural feedback its effect on people with caesar disorders but these ten had enough detail analysis to quoting an e k g operant conditioning was found to produce a significant reduction on seizure frequency this finding is especially noteworthy given the patient group individuals who have been an able to control their seizures with medical treatment so we treat people that have intractable seizure disorder we also treat people who have seizures that having paired other functions and get those other functions to improve we also work with people would their medication and in some cases get them off their medication with that when they present with that looks at the mary kay the american academy of pediatrics in a report dated november twenty eighth and twenty thirteen sell the a a p has found that norm feedback is an effective treatment for a d h b and should be recommended as a primary option big idea number seven your feedback is at least as affected the side with stimulant medication rosters back in ninety five found the twenty sessions of neural feedback produce comparable improvements in attention and concentration to taking ritalin or the repeated that study in two thousand everybody back on their ritalin and he then did a full run of neural feedback with those children after the full run of their feedback everyone had a full medication wash and then he did it e g on everybody again and improvements to middle there's an n i a study on stimulant medication was actually two of them this is one of them one of them was done preschoolers and the other was done on elementary school children this is elementary school children it is called the multi mo treatment study of children with a g eight study and what they did is they monitored six hundred children across the us during the night in ninety nine they published their conclusion and they said after one year of medication work practice both in the u s and europe and resulted in the skyrocketing prescription with a two thousand and seven they published their conclusion so what they did is they continued to follow these children and after three years of following  they fan that quote while drugs such as ritalin and concerted can work well in the short run in children over a three year period they brok you know demonstrably improvements in learning and behavior so that's the reason that you have to keep adjusting medication on ira and also medications get changed from time to time because they stop working palang was one of the co authors of this study he said quote i think we exaggerated the beneficial impact of medication in the first study we have thought that children medicated longer would have better outcomes that didn't happen to be the case the children had a substantial decrease in their rate of growth so they weren't growing as much as other kids in terms of both their height and their weight so for some children those are important factors not all children but for some children that really matters there were no beneficial effects none in the short run medication will help the children learn and behave better in the long run it wants and that information should be made very clear to parents this is your feedback has affected for learning disability and we've found improvements in the areas of sensory integration physical coordination muscle tone whether it's to excess muscle tone or insufficient muscle tonic normalizes muscle tone auditory processing verbal skills such as language and vocabulary social competence social pragmatics reading skills comprehension writing skills and organization your feedback rogers and these are two studies two of many and they have a that they are here to illustrate a particular point study number one after thirty six sessions of non cue e g guided neurofeedback so that you have autism we're going to do this that's not working we'll try to that's not ok we'll try that so it's really a cookbook specifically there was a forty percent a decrease in artistic symptoms compared to the control group both of these have a little bit so the name of the game here is that if you do a q e g assessment it's more patients had still substantial improvement on their eighty d n a d h d symptoms and these changes were maintained so he did this ten years later so we're talking about neurofeedback that was done in the early eighty's so we're talking a long time ago the technology was nowhere near as effective as it is today nonetheless eighty percent of these kids had substantial improvements and held it for ten years these days the research has shown us that our hit rate is about ninety one percent tremors incontinence physical balance essential tremor which means you have a term or we don't know why cerebral palsy and excessive and insufficient muscles are functional improv contact sensory integration sensory seeking reduces social competence and proves comprehension understanding grades s a t s scores where people would come in they take the s a t they've already done their review courses and so forth  although people don't care so much about that these days language and children who are either shy or on spectrum on the autistic spectrum will open up to others so people on the spectrum will come out of themselves which is really lovely t judgment which i have in sigs it's very important having raised three children that went through the lessons and drove my cars coordination physical where nation muscle tone auditory processing visual processing reading dyslexia transitions switching from one thing to another one event to another one thought process to another getting out of the house in the morning for instance initiation and starting things in her bishan which is putting on the brakes motivation in my good for so many different conditions because the real problem is the brain's impaired ability to regulate itself so this brings new meaning to self regulation we're talking about neurological regulation the person's brain controlling itself and therefore being able to control the person so does neurofeedback actually change the brain this is an f m r i study that was one of the studies that the american college of pediatrics used for their level one findings and here's how it went this is a  what this person did is she didn't see that in this location right here again because it's an eye on scientific experiments so they're trying to keep it simple and it turns out that there are projections from these locations to move this location here that have to do with vigilance and inhibition which is about can you maintain your attention and take you keep from being in part is a big idea number eight each brain is unique and requires an individualized treatment plan so well what all of us do in ne back as we start going into a history functional assessment current functional what's going on what's the history of this person's brain and what does it do quantitative e g assessment that's that red cathing treatment protocol is developed and there's a reported finding so the report of findings is pictures and graphs of what we found relating those pictures and graphs to the presenting problems and then discussing what it is that we want to teach the person's brain to do differently we also at that time go over the results of the secular functioning which gives us a baseline because we do that again when we do our follow up e g and also the vision function questionnaire so that we can correlate the information from the functional questionnaire is a good time to do that so we we do a formal review progress every ten session so we do that baseline graph and then every ten sessions we meet again how's this person doing what's going on we start with the gra long term treatment for a minimum number of treatment sessions and forty sessions the reason is that forty four zero the reason is that research and our findings after eighteen years tells us that after forty sessions no matter how much improvement you have you're going to keep it unless there's some what are called reinspection so we sometimes get young men in middle school and they do much much better and so then  sessions depending if if we've got people that just have a simple garden variety a game they're going to be done at one session people that have learning disabilities on the up to suspect them severe behavioral problems and so forth it's more likely that they'll be with us longer that that's not always the case it's really on an individual basis minimum once a week even come more often than that we have people come from internationally they do our intensive program so they're training daily twice a day with a break in between and so they stay for about a month and they do their forty sessions but a minimum once a week and people ask you know how do you make that decision and how frequently and the more  train the war you get and the less you lose it the sessions but the rest of the story is the realities of balancing your realities and the child's realities with the need for neurofeedback so it's really what's practical of all were talks with the these folks but second of all we do our follow up e g in most cases a third sessions once in a while it's at forty but in most cases it's a thirty sessions and what we have found is that the improvements on that e after thirty sessions are more robust than the improvements that we get for people that are caught and also get functional improvements and in other words how well they're doing how well they're reading how well their behavior whatever their target have people keep coming and coming and not get any change that's why we're here for they said we coordinate with a clinic in amman jordan and they have the advantage they're actually not tism and they become any case they draw from the persian gulf from the entire gulf region and most of the people that they see are doing the intensive program and they also get some pretty dramatic improvements in their in their patient review progress every ten sessions and then we add thirty seconds we do a kiwi and a functional assessment and then we redo the behavior rating inventory of executive functioning and we redo the functional vision questioning if a person is on the autistic spectrum there are a couple of different assessments that i use depending on what's appropriate for that individual and then we continue no feedback  i have one child who came in with autism and all he was doing was you know in terms of speeches so if you said something he'd say something that kind of thing at this point i think he's had a little over a hundred sessions with us and at this point he is talking not only talking and carrying on conversations and so forth but he also is speaking in a normal tone of voice and he's not using that artistic tone of voice and there are a lot of other things that have improved so what we do is we've had to do a new graph for them because you know he really kind of got up to the top of the graph because the family was comparing him with autistic children and then what happened is they had the luxury of start starting to compare him with neuro typical children which you know normal children whatever that is and so we redid the graph and we really didn't baseline and we've been following ever since so it's really a question of how much do you situations where someone is not improving they almost always have undiagnosed line disease and we're fortunate we have some doctors that coordinate with us and make it possible for us to test for lyme disease with them before if it's positive obviously i'm not a medical practitioner there are some other types of tests that we do as well because we want to really you know push the envelope with the people that will work a grant but when we're not getting results i'm  know eating away the improvements and so that's not something that we're comfortable that so i insist that people if they're if they are positive they're clearly positive then you know i'm going to really recommend very strongly that they get treatment if they families choose not to get treatment then that's fine we have people that improve that they've got one case that we shall hear of a child that improved and we didn't realise you had one and she got incredible improvements but once in a youngest person i've seen was not quite three and the oldest was in her eighty's so if i can do an a g m somebody then awaken me and help them but we have to do that assessment or we won't know what to do because you know these locations for the with the rest of the brain so in this case this is the left front the left forehead and this is the location self it's where you can really see it and it's coordinating extraordinary well with the rest of the brain she couldn't silverstein really both tori and visual she couldn't do a home work independently at all she was explosive rigid couldn't tolerate changes she had to have a way she had social competence problems problems reading social cues for problem solving she had a younger sister mom was this child from the load she was with this child virtually all the time when she wasn't in school and she was constantly helping this child when believe yourself because she wasn't able to do it not a chance she had a rapid birth mom was told to stop pushing she had there was a huge water weight gain so there's a birth story here is this child's brain do with what we call the signal of gyra she was very very compulsive and rigid and so forth so if you compare location to location you see more of those moderate colors in these locations and especially back here in the back of the brain is we got problems this is everything's fine this is excellent so after neurofeedback everything has gone into the normal range for executive functioning so she had neurofeedback we also use something we call the say i think is illegal she was no longer overwhelmed by stanley she was off medication mom quietly along with the psychiatrist took her off neurontin and prozac and she was doing her homework entirely independent and they to katie cowbell daily of children's hospital boston and harvard medical school in the journal current opinion in pediatrics stated over all these findings these are studies support the use of multimodal treatment including biofeedback in particular providing a sustained a fact even without stimulant treatment parents interested in non pharmacological treatment can pursue the use of complementary and alternative therapy the therapy most promising by recent clinical trials appears to be e g biofeedback so john is five years old anybody here for autism yes while i have a child that's not reading or logically and will wait until the twenty session check in but the whole idea is for that child's brain to be ready to respond to the rewards it sets up if the child's brain isn't ready they're not going  respond so basically the neural feedback is like the blacksmiths fire that makes the eye are soft and systems and the good teaching and the therapies and all of that is like a hammer that molds it and so we want to database of high functioning adults this graze two standard deviations below that in terms of size of brainwaves this phrase two standard deviations above that in terms of size and brain waves read his hand before neural food back and you can see again it's over the singer gyrus which is right along the middle part of the brain here and this is about obsessive compulsive type behaviors getting stuck some of that sort of thing and also we have some problems in the visual centers  he's well within the normal range doing now and this is where the lack of frontal control show up you would think that the problem was actually in the back of the brain but what we find is that the front not doing their control job they're the orchestra leader and if they're not doing their job nothing in the brain is working and working well so this is the australian scale for asperger syndrome like i said i use different scales social interest movement skills and this is a basket other so there was a doof reduced aggression improved sensory integration improved social competence improve attention and focus on this is what's great about follow up i saw these boys eleven years ago and then i saw them last spring a year ago they both came and they were twenty one years old and over the years manteca colleague alex these boys actually did very intensive treatment one what you just heard i'm not going to tell you that that happens with every person that comes in and i'm a realist and the one thing i'm not going to do is misrepresent so do we get to the point where people are functioning as normal people  whatever that is yes is that cure i don't know you know what does that mean is the brain still but vulnerable probably with the brain being more vulnerable the some sort of a reinfection probably so you know what's your yeah i'm fine not exactly but what i can do is i can talk about improvements and function and that's what we really that's what we're all about we're not about diagnoses although i will diagnose if it is are services and that sort of thing but the name of the game as far as we're concerned is improving function and the issue is if the function is in the brain and we can affect it we will treat if i'm not going to be able affected if it's on brain stem or if it's you know something that is not something that i'm going to be able set we're not going to treat and that's obvious that's at the so someone told us that neurofeedback was the most important thing that they  did and i also saw the brother the brother it was interesting and a wandering eye when we saw him and during their feedback treatment his eye came and so i saw him eleven years later in the i was still in we prevented surgery in a lot of young people  and he's currently a national speaker in disability rights so we're pretty proud of these boys mason was four and a half explosive oppositional behavior easily set off one thing goes wrong the whole day's bad he was asked to leave preschool because of his behavior he would throw toys and run around with his friends came and throw toys he didn't hear people when they were talen something he screamed a lot and was very loud poor balance episodes and silly laughter clearly not normal laughter if any of you are really good clinicians who are you know it's wrong of him he never meant to copy what family members did but he was not only artistic spectrum and he was easily overstimulated e g conclusions were consistent with seizure disorder so he came in with an e g that told us he had a seizure disorder and when he was calm he was a normal and sophisticated little boy but if he miss doses medicine he would get angry and have outbursts we did the rapid on native nick we tried to do the rapid out unaided naming test with him we couldn't do it because he couldn't attend long enough so he had seizure disorder in the frontal lobes but they weren't sure if it was actually if the focus was in the frontal lobes or if it was a more general arjun he was on medication so here's his one of his signatures of his mom i said want to be nice we can just focus on his cognition and his would want to deal with his behavior for the seizures will be under control and that's exactly what happened so when she came back to do sort of a follow up on the intake let's see how he's doing these days with both terri it was just so lovely because with the combination of neurofeedback and good neurology with appropriate medication he was able to get back to that that so thirteen months and seventy one sessions later he's like a normal four year old whining crying little frustrations then he gets over it and he goes and he does his lego's he's been riding a two wheeler for a few months is able to pay attention as we're going to go up so questions and we have a couple of parents here which is really really nice parents of kids that have done their feedback with us so let's say i think i have one quote left that we want to talk about this is one symbol at once they go slide on someone with to pervasive developmental delay so he had a language problem we see him he comes in periodical a he was about nine when we first saw him and he's now in high school which is really again kind of cool for this in this location right here it is a very important language area and this has had before neurofeedback this is him after neurofeedback so we have much more coordination here big idea number nine or a feedback is safe it's not invasive self regulated has no known side effects or systematical pharmacological interactions is effective across a wide range of conditions and age group said in an editorial that was published in a journal in two thousand that was entirely dedicated to nor feedback if specifically targeting neurologists he said the literature which lacks any negative studies and substance suggests that  bar feedback therapy should play a major therapeutic well in many difficult areas in my opinion this is sam if any medication had demonstrated such a wide spectrum of efficacy it would be universally accepted and widely used so i already mentioned to you that i offer a free consultation gives you an opportunity if you're interested to talk about the person you're concerned about to ask all the questions that you need to figure out what the funding is and so forth and if i can't help you then i refer you where a holistic health clinic we also use a small number of supplements those are what we call nutraceuticals so they're not medication they're  vitamins another types of supplements they're safe they're very carefully targeted and we get some pretty cool improvement from adding those in when it's appropriate question you par and well my philosophy on medication is medication is something you use unless and until you can get to the root of the problem correct things and not needed anymore but if you need it you use it and so cool you're very very competitive these days in my opinion and i'm not the only one that holds this opinion there's a lot of research on it's toxins and it's not one toxin it's the the various and sundry toxins that children are exposed to literally from the moment of conception eat and so it's up to us to control that as much as we can but the reality is that we can't stop breeding and we can't stop drinking water and you know we have to even sell it and so forth i mean these are the realities that we deal with so there are ways to reduce exposure but you can't eliminate it it's just not possible vitamin d insufficient vitamin d for mom you know there are just a lot of different  the person sitting in a comfortable chair we use recliners and we attach sensors to their heads the sensors monitor the electrical output that information goes through an amplifier to our computer we watch those brain wa the ones that are relevant to the individual because we break it out to me what's relevant to the individual and when the individual is making better brain waves based on those parameters there's a reward and the reward is in the form of a simultaneous change on the computer screen or monitoring we don't input electricity this is you know this is a monitoring device it's safe i got into this as a parent  daughter actually i was told she had the worst a d they'd ever seen worse than the worst kid on ritalin and i should get around ritalin immediately i was told this by your second grade teacher and it turns out that these days at least in connecticut that's called persuasion medicine without a license but in those days i guess that was ok to do but i already had a specialty in behavioral medicine and that wasn't going to be my first line of defense and she never did go on medication she ended up graduating cum loud from the college of her choice pretty yes i've talked done there are feedback with people who are blind and i've also done there are feedback with people who are doing something while they're doing neurofeedback so for instance i had a young man who had a head injury he was eighteen when we met him and the head injury had very very clear really disrupted his visual center and he had struggled all the way through school so the senior in high school and he brought in he had this device that he was doing this with that was designed to open up his visual field his visual field was too narrow so what he did is he's doing less of he's not watching the computer screen he's just getting the auditory feedback and in fact i had a very interesting myself because i tell people you know you have this goes this is between the computer and the brain entirely so i had one situation where i had a couple of a client thickhead loaned me a couple of p b s videos on the brain and i really wanted to see them and i'm horrifically busy so i was doing minor of feedback as being the client which i do and so i'm sitting there in the chair and they had me in a room where they had a very small video player so i said well you know i'm kind of old bring it forward so i can see it so they put it on the chair right at the edge you know past my feet and so i'm saying ok i have to watch this and i have to also process that ok i can do that and what happened is i really really got into watching the video and i was not aware of the sound at all coming from the computer screen and i certainly wasn't see it coming from the computer and i wasn't seeing what was going on and all what's interesting is that happened to be the first session that i did with the new protocol because i have lyme disease it disrupted my visual center and when jim drives this is my house when he's head of our u g team when he drives of if you know he passes a car or if he comes up to the next pack of cars i'm certain out because my visual cent can't process it and looks way too close to me and i think we're going to have an accident so what and he's never had one so so here i am freaking out right so this is the first i said to him will you change my protocol so that you're addressing my visual system so this is the first time i'm doing that visual protocol and i'm clearly not in my awareness processing any of this information the next weekend we go to the cake and no more of this stuff i was fine and so it's nice actually that that happened to be the first time i did a new protocol my been doing their feedback you know being the client for over eighteen years since i got trained so whatever and they're getting the changers and we validate that through a combination of various dependent measures including the follow the yeah the part about how you are  saw those brain waves they were up and down and bigger and smaller and so forth so let's say that the brain this is an analogy is making brain waves that are this big and they're too big which means that the cortex is not doing its control job and we don't have enough blood flow and so forth so what we do is we set the parameters so that there's this big and when ever the brain waves are this big or smaller then that section qualifie waves and reinforcing that and then over time they're better and better but we find that the measure that is most highly correlated with the improvements that we get is those coordination maps and so the improvements in sitting we call good quiet city and we help them do that as long as they're doing a reasonable good quite sitting there going to get benefit if they're moved around a lot then that's going to move the wires and that's what we call artifact so that gets in the way of the computer's ability to monitor the brainwaves but other than that and we need to help them i mean we have some very very no they don't need to do anything they just sit there their brains puts out brain waves which it does all the time and we're catching the brain making better brain waves because the brain wave cycle they get bigger they get smaller they get bigger they get smaller we are catching them and it's a shaking task we don't expect at you know at the beginning for them to be the right size nor do we expect that there's going to be good coordination across cortex but over time the way we improve coordinated action across cortex is in order to get a reward the brain has to do what we ask in all four location simultaneously we may be asking it to do different things in each of those locations but it has to do it in all of those locations hymel tenuously and hold it for at least a quarter of a second in order to get rewards that improves coordination across cort x and we see that in our follow up brain maps in those coordination each session last about an hour it has three different segments of training so there's three different sets of locations that we'll work with each time once in a while we'll do a four location because there's a particular location that we sort of a take about two months to by hand process all of that information mathematically so we have the advantage of desktop and laptop computers little process that information almost in real time so that we're  the some of the improvements in there are a feedback have had to do more with the hardware and the science that the software is based on that's really the most important thing is to have it very rigorously based on the science what we know about how the brain learns and then the rest of the improvements as there's always information coming out about the brain that we can utilize in order to more effectively target what's going on  yes i know but it also shows up in the cream over erion cortex and to the extent that we're able to improve that area we can improve parkinson's but again i'm not going to tell you that would cure parkinson's by any stretch of imagination but i have had par where i've been able to be functioning but unlike most people people with parkinson's and with other progressive the orders they have to keep during the doing your feedback in order to have those improvements hol but i've not yet had occasion to work with people of all time is what i understand is that you can get improvement but again you have to keep training but interestingly enough there were some research that we've done on ten  hospital from harvard and i believe it was eight out of ten of those had the d n a of lyme disease so one possible cause of alzheimers or at least one possible contributing factor  very controversial the good news is that on the end i just got a little bit more money not a lot but with the mandate to develop reliable line testing yes it just giv he cares how it looks he's aware that other people will be looking at him i mean this was just phenomenal and then just between wilson farm and our house we there's a house that has no windows on the front sort of on the second floor in the little windows we cry by this house every day so he notices this house has no windows on the front of the house so just from the second session and it just progressed in a positive way that he noticed himself he noticed things in the world around him he became of their driver we were terrified we were teaching let it drop but we were terrified he didn't he couldn't anticipate what other drivers we do he didn't notice pedestrians or i mean other cyclists whatever he suddenly became a much safer driver so just in general the whole asperger's really les and i think if you met him and had a conversation with humor is actually doing homework on his own he still has executive function difficulties and he still does have some issues with me taking a schedule as many problems putting stuff to bed and when i'm a i'm a definitely doubting thomas kind of person and it's really work is this really work is this really working but that was significant we had family members who had known leah and had one just to give an example one family member said please don't bring her our vacation home because we just can't handle it she would would she just did not have control of her name and heard her executive functioning areas and the biggest jump was that summer because they came back and saw her and said oh my god what are you doing she would actually look at i know this sounds weird if you have very functional fish but she was and she would never look any buddy in the eye she would never most of her communication was at that time accolade in libya a lot of her i can't say all of it but a lot of a large portion of it she was echoing to be able to relate or communicate and she likes being a dog and she relate she becomes an animal to relate in in social situations she was had into our tantrums and that she definitely was that she had kids of pretty severe behaviors and then that summer this is the grandparents mostly the grandparents were they she was going she was saying hello to them she was going up to them she was acting too she's not out of the water believe me but she was acting in a more normal fashion and that was the real pivot for us it was like wow we don't know exactly what happened because we were going to do other things you do other things for your kids so you don't really know if this is that this or that we were pretty clear that that was the neurofeedback shift it was just like all the sudden it was her brain started functioning to where we could actually communicate prior to that i was literally saying how am i going to teach this child to be safe how am i going to how can i not in my mind i was thinking i'm going to have to just constantly protective repetitive must do this you must do this you must do this you must do this because i didn't know what else would do but when that we've gone troops are kind of a month and we have family members that live with us say has she missed a session you know please get her back she's she's got a long route ahead of her but the progress that we have seen has has been so significant and her brain e g f oh my gosh that is the coolest thing to see is you get that you get in she was in the all blue all low low functioning and to to watch that brain activity move into the more normal ranges and then be able to have the related behavior be in more normal ranges as well it's pretty cool  pretty cool yeah i mean she's a second grader she's doing second grade level work she is still in the lab program like i said we're not out of the water with her but we adopted leah so we knew that based on her biological parents we knew that there were as a percent chance of we didn't know what but there was a fifty percent chance of mental and i don't want to say retardation but there was if you counted him think fifty percent chance of mental challenges and so we knew we knew up front that we were up against it and to have her operating where she is today yes she's going to still she somehow support she's in a lab program she will probably continue to have support but to have where she is pretty much and even though it wasn't my daughter on the screen about being kicked out of preschool at three preschool there was definitely her teachers coming up and saying we cannot help her and she was moved into the  the integrated preschool in town to get that kind of help so i related to that to that story because that was my daughter if i quote can't really help her in the main through preschool you know she needs a little bit more help so so that's where we are and like i said we're we're going forward with it lots lots of progress