Join us for a live NeuroNoodle Neurofeedback Podcast Q&A session! π§ β¨ Our expert panel is here to answer your burning questions about neurofeedback, brain training, and mental health! Donβt miss this opportunity to connect and learn! π When: Monday, January 8th at 6 PM CST | 4 PM PST | 7 PM EST π Where: YouTube Live Meet the Hosts: Pete Jansons Dr. Mari Swingle Jay Gunkelman Anthony Ramos Joy Lunt John Mekrut Joshua Moore Santiago Brand Dr. Andrew Hill π Don't forget to support us on Patreon: / neuronoodle π’ Got a question? Ask in the live chat or comment below! π Hit the bell to be notified so you wonβt miss it! #Neurofeedback #NeuroNoodle #MentalHealth #LiveQandA #BrainTraining #NeurofeedbackExperts #BrainHealth
Episode Summary
I joined the panel on the NeuroNoodle Neurofeedback Podcast for a live Q&A alongside Jay Gunkelman and the rest of the crew. The conversation ran from brain-computer interfaces to seizure control to what actually happens in the brain when you come off an SSRI. You can watch the original conversation.
Here is what I want you to take from that discussion, organized by the questions that came up.
Is Neuralink the future of brain-computer interfaces?
I am a conservative neuroscientist. When someone claims an extraordinary result, I want extraordinary evidence. The invasive brain-computer interface work getting the most press right now has a real engineering problem that has not been solved: the electrode wires migrate. Brain tissue under a given location shifts, the wires do not stay put, and you get signals that drift and cannot be recovered. Robotic precision surgery to place those electrodes is a genuine accomplishment. It does not make an implant a working solution for humans.
Cutting better holes in heads will not produce a usable BCI. The cortex is organized in a way that makes direct-contact electrode recording a fundamentally limited science. The money would do more good developing ultra-high-impedance passive electrodes that read EEG with no skin contact. The physics already exists. Research groups have built non-contact cardiac versions where you hold a small ball in your lap and the system produces a three-dimensional EKG image without touching you. The same approach can read brain signals.
Other groups are working on genuinely clever methods: nanotechnology amplifiers powered by ultrasound, injected into the bloodstream, that settle in a region and can be activated and located with ultrasound to map local networks. That gets you implanted-quality data without going through the skull. If you want to understand the non-invasive side of brain-computer work, my brain-mapping guide covers what surface EEG can and cannot resolve.
Can EEG really see deep into the brain?
Everyone agrees you can read the cortex from the surface. Source-localization methods like LORETTA let you see some structures that were not classically visible from scalp recording, including insular cortex and the cingulate (Pascual-Marqui et al., 1994). The first LORETTA analysis Jay described was done at the anterior cingulate for theta.
Claims about reading deep subcortical structures from the surface deserve hard scrutiny. The EEG you record at the scalp is the sum of postsynaptic potentials, event-related potentials, slow cortical potentials, and glial activity across forming and dissolving networks. Structures organized as closed fields, like a Purkinje cell arrangement, cancel their own vectors when they discharge. There is a lot of activity inside the nuclear body, and almost nothing leaks outside it. The odds of resolving the subthalamic nucleus or the nucleus accumbens at a distance from the scalp are slim. A century of EEG says you cannot. If you claim you can, show the data.
People underestimate how much information sits inside a 20-minute recording. We reduce that data aggressively, and a lot is lost in the variable-space reduction alone, before you even get to whether the raw signal was clean. Looking at raw waveforms keeps you honest about the phenomenological data you are actually working with.
How does SMR neurofeedback treat epilepsy?
This is one of the most solid stories in the field, and it goes back to Barry Sterman's cats.
Sterman trained cats to produce sensorimotor rhythm by rewarding the right EEG frequency with stimulation to the reward center. The cats learned to generate large amounts of SMR. Later, NASA brought him in to study seizures caused by the rocket fuel monomethylhydrazine. Rather than discard the trained cats, he exposed them to the fuel. The cats that had been trained on SMR resisted seizures far longer than the untrained animals (Sterman et al., 1969). A human with intractable epilepsy heard about this, volunteered, and had a good outcome.
The meta-analytic work that followed looked at epilepsy and found that a large majority of patients showed reduced seizures after sensorimotor rhythm training (Tan et al., 2009). Sterman and Egner's review reports that a small share of trained patients achieve complete seizure control across the monitoring window, with average reductions around 50 percent (Sterman & Egner, 2006). What I have seen in the QEEG data and client reports is often more dramatic than a 50 percent reduction, though I want to be clear that is observation, not a controlled claim. One caveat: seizure activity tends to push back more than other neurofeedback gains, which often stay put after a few months. Seizure work frequently needs a second round to lock in stability.
Jay's last cases before he retired were all intractable epileptics, and all six ended up seizure-free and medication-free, some for years. In one of those cases the large voltages were on the right temporal lobe, which is where the surgeons wanted to cut. The actual trigger was the small, fast activity in the homotopic area on the left, near the insula. Once that triggered, it went bilateral and the right side produced spikes up to 600 to 1,000 microvolts. Training the left side, rather than the high-voltage right side, was what worked. That is the argument for mapping before you train. The SMR neurofeedback explainer covers the rhythm in more detail.
The training site is usually C4 to PZ. That combination gives you SMR over the somatosensory cortex and alpha at PZ, your default-mode hub. If you can actually see the paroxysm, you can place one electrode where SMR lives and another over the paroxysm and suppress the discharge while training the rhythm. SMR done centrally still helps, but adding direct suppression is what tends to drive cessation rather than partial reduction.
Does neurofeedback help with insomnia?
Yes, and the evidence is real. SMR training for sleep was noticed early. Sterman saw that cats trained on SMR showed quieter sleep, and the sleep connection carried into the human work. The controlled work came later. A group in Salzburg trained students with mild insomnia: SMR training at C4-PZ improved sleep and sleep-dependent memory (Hoedlmoser et al., 2008), and the spindle-related findings were extended in follow-up work from the same group (Schabus et al., 2014). When the group recruited people with severe, professionally diagnosed insomnia, a short course was not enough, and the controlled study found limited specific benefit at that dose (Schabus et al., 2017). More sessions appear to be needed for severe insomnia. The Australian Institute of Sport has assigned SMR training to athletes with sleep complaints after seeing it work. If you want the broader picture on training sleep circuits, see my sleep biohacking guide.
Two participants with epileptiform content in their EEG were set aside in the severe-insomnia study, as the design called for. They would likely have gotten the same sleep benefit plus an anti-seizure effect. SMR helps both.
What happens in the brain during SSRI and benzo withdrawal?
SSRI withdrawal is more severe for some people than they expect. Many just stop and assume there is nothing to it. Step any medication down rather than stopping cold after sustained use, because your body has adjusted to it.
"Brain zaps" are real. People describe small electrical jolts as they come off serotonergic medications (Fava et al., 2015). Celexa was the first I heard producing aggressive zaps; Lexapro and possibly Effexor seem to carry the same withdrawal signature. The subjective brain produces stranger phenomena than this. Exploding head syndrome, where someone feels a pop or explosion inside the head, is benign and well documented (Sharpless, 2014). Alarm-clock headache wakes a person at the same time every morning with searing pain and resolves on its own. If you have something like that, get a sleep lab to rule out vascular pain first.
The real danger is combining serotonergic agents. People on a strong SSRI who also take serotonergic herbs like St. John's Wort build a large amount of serotonin signaling, then add other agents on top of it, and can end up with a profound panic reaction followed by depersonalization, blunted libido, and an inability to feel deeply. I hear about this regularly, because people with strange brain experiences come looking for neurofeedback answers. Both mainstream and alternative medicine have few good answers for that kind of serotonergic injury.
Chronic THC has its own signature. Acutely it slightly slows your background alpha, which is part of why it works as a sleep aid. Taken chronically, it is associated with frontal alpha coherence changes, and that shows up as apathy and lack of initiation a month or so in. You will not get an antidepressant effect from it. You get euphoria up front and a flattened affect over the long term.
Can neurofeedback help while you taper off medication?
You do not have to be off your medication to benefit. Train the floor up to meet you. Once you feel the floor under you, you can taper carefully, and you often find the withdrawal does not drop you because the support is there. For most medications, training straight through is fine. Benzodiazepines and high-dose opiates complicate matters, but barring large levels of those, you can train the brain relative to itself, moment to moment, with whatever is on board.
A caffeinated person can still build muscle at the gym. The same logic applies here. What you cannot always do is run a clean QEEG assessment with everything on board, so you have to be careful with timing on the mapping side. The training itself works on the brain that is sitting in the chair.
For someone tapering an SSRI, I would look hard at frontal-lobe function, because that is where affect regulation typically resides in the research. Address what is driving the demand for the medication in the first place, and that demand often drops, which can make a taper more tolerable. This is coaching and brain-training language, not medical advice, and tapering decisions belong with the prescriber. For more on training the anxiety and stress circuits that often sit underneath an SSRI prescription, see neurofeedback for anxiety and biohacking the fight-or-flight response.
What does the anterior cingulate have to do with OCD?
The first LORETTA was done on theta at the anterior cingulate, and that pattern marks a treatment-resistant form of cingulate dysregulation. When the anterior cingulate is dysregulated, you tend to see a pattern that is either locked-on or locked-off. Locked-off looks like anhedonia and lack of initiation. Locked-on looks like OCD features, oppositional behavior, perseveration, and addiction features. The theta variant of this pattern is the one that typically does not respond to medication.
Frequency matters for the medication-responsive variants. An alpha variant below 10 Hz often responds to an SSRI; way slow, an SNRI; faster than 10 Hz, a tricyclic. The theta variant at the anterior cingulate, which is basal-forebrain driven, does not respond well to medication. There is weak evidence ketamine may help an anterior theta presentation, but that data is not well done. There is a cleaner intervention paper showing N-acetylcysteine, an amino acid supplement, gives meaningful relief from symptoms in a share of medication-resistant pediatric OCD (Grant et al., 2016). NAC has an acute effect; it can cause nausea and, rarely, anhedonia or a blunted feeling.
Theta in children is a different animal. Front-and-central theta in kids is often a relative dopamine deficit in the striatum, not anterior cingulate failure. Methylphenidate, a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, can normalize that picture and reduce the slow activity. The cingulate matures from back to front, which is part of why tic-like phenomena often start at posterior sites before involving frontal regions. My biohacking OCD article walks through the cortico-striatal circuit in more depth.
Can neurofeedback recover repressed memories?
Memory is tricky, and I want to be careful here. People do show traumatic suppression of memory, but "repressed memory" as a broad clinical category is a hot-button topic with a history of harm: suggestible clients, unethical practitioners, and memories created through suggestion rather than recovered (Loftus, 1993). Some of the people disparaged in those cases still practice. The science does not give us a reliable way to work with repressed memory as a general phenomenon.
There is a real mechanism behind why memory work surfaces during Alpha-Theta training. You encode experience in the frequencies available to you at the time. A memory formed at age two or three was encoded when your dominant rhythm sat at 5 to 7 Hz, in the theta range. When you train alpha well and then run theta crossovers, the slower content gets brought up, and material encoded in those slower frequencies can become accessible. By age eight, most people have normal alpha, so memories from that age sit in the alpha band rather than theta.
The abreactive recall, the surfacing of a hard experience, tends to happen during the theta crossovers. That is why this work demands a full support network. Difficult material can come up on the drive home, well outside the training hour. If you are going to do it, do it inside a therapeutic environment with licensed support that can capture the experience and use it, rather than letting it escape as a bad event.
A low-voltage, fast EEG pattern shows up classically in alcohol and some drug addiction; those brains have little alpha to speak of, and the trait is partly heritable (Begleiter & Porjesz, 1999). Training alpha and theta in this population was the basis of the Peniston protocol, where an addiction-treatment program reported lower relapse than usual care (Peniston & Kulkosky, 1989). The alpha-waves explainer covers what alpha is doing in the first place.
What to do next
If you have epilepsy, insomnia, an OCD pattern, or you are looking at tapering a medication, get a QEEG and train the specific pattern your brain is running rather than a generic protocol. Mapping tells you whether the trigger is where the big voltages are or somewhere quieter, and it tells you which frequency your SMR or alpha actually sits at, which varies more than most people assume. You can reach me through Peak Brain Institute or on YouTube, and there is a real shortage of trained providers, so if you want to learn this work, it is needed.
References
- Pascual-Marqui (1994). Low resolution electromagnetic tomography: a new method for localizing electrical activity in the brain. doi:10.1016/0167-8760(84)90014-x
- Tan (2009). Meta-Analysis of EEG Biofeedback in Treating Epilepsy. doi:10.1177/155005940904000310
- Schabus (2014). Enhancing sleep quality and memory in insomnia using instrumental sensorimotor rhythm conditioning. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2013.02.020
- Sharpless (2014). Exploding head syndrome. doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2014.03.001
- Loftus (1993). The reality of repressed memories. doi:10.1037//0003-066x.48.5.518
- Begleiter (1999). Description of the Genetic Analysis Workshop 11 Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism. doi:10.1002/gepi.1370170705
- Peniston (1989). Alpha-theta brainwave training and beta-endorphin levels in alcoholics. doi:10.1111/j.1530-0277.1989.tb00325.x