My Wonderful Winter Brain Conference. Feb 5-10, 2004 Palm Springs, CA.
Here’s my perspective on the 2004 Winter Brain Conference in Palm Springs.
I arrived fresh and eager on Feb 5 at 8:00 am for the Foundation Course. I took 32 pages of notes. I ate it all up and wanted more.
Rob Kall - Global overview: Who’s Who & What’s What.
Peter Rosenfeld – Russia is big on biofeedback – one company has 120 sales reps.
Sig Othmer – A Principle Scientist. I love the way he thinks. We each have our own Performance / Arousal Curve. You want to have a boring EEG.
Mike Cohen – some more foundation at a less dense pace.
Joel Lubar – Filled in some basics for me. Elegant intellect.
Jay Gunkelman – folded electro-physio-anatomy-psychology all together smartly.
Bob Gurnee – QEEG is not a four-letter word.
Anna Wise – EEG for bio monitoring to adjust healers’ intervention. You want to have a shapely EEG.
Tom Collura – The EEG is a volt meter. Milli volts inside the skull, micro volts outside.
Richard Soutar – Heuristic decision tree for protocols. I see that the various masters disagree on big issues.
Nancy White – I’m still working on: “The individual is a transducer of non-local fields.”
Val Brown – Synchronization through chaos. Soaring and swooping perspective.
Les Fehmi – From wavelets to synchrony – all at 10Hz.
Grant Bright – Thou shalt Q. Monitor with 5 arrows on a 3”x5” card. “Doctor, Can I have 5 minutes to discuss what I’m doing with your patient, who is a client of mine?”
Lynda & Michael Thompson – How to be a proper hooker-upper.
KH Wong – Assess, Treatment Plan, Intervention, Evaluation.
Peter Van Deusen – The 10 jobs of an NF trainer. Each one important.
Paul Swingle – Mini-Q, Qowabunga. There are many potentiating adjuncts to NF.
It’s 10:30 pm - Hey, where’d everybody go?
My Wonderful Winter Brain Conference - Feb 6
Caveat 1: All this material is my take on what others said and includes my additions. This is my processed content. So, consider the source, me. Only “quotes” came from the attributed mouth.
Caveat 2: Try any of this at home or office with caution. Seeking helpful professional help is helpful.
The first speaker at 7:00 am Wednesday morning, Kamran Fallapour described The Brain Resource Company www.brainresource.com
Integ Neuro, a Neuropsych assessment on a touch screen;
An international QEEG database. This should take off in a big way.
Wolfdieter Dirsch
Peak Performance ~ Optimal Flow and Functioning.
We are still waiting for broad NF acceptance to be self-apparent. NCP!
Tom & Linda Brownback
They mapped the audience to the brain by distributing 10-20 placements to the room. I became full of voxels. If you itch here, scratch there.
Sig Othmer
Some people are over-clocked, some under-clocked. Presumably the hearty have a broad peak performance zone, the fragile have a narrow and wobbly zone. Super-kudos for being the only guy to offer all his PowerPoint presentations to the participants.
Joel Lubar
There are several kinds of reports of results acceptable to science and we need more studies published! This includes multiple baseline: we tried everything else, but NF worked!
I believe the shortest and most compelling proof for NF is found by entering 5 letters into Google: EEG IQ. Meta results across all IQ levels: 12 point increases. If we are all so smart, how come we aren’t rich and famous? Lubar’s answer: more research is needed
Joe Kamiya, then Jay Gunkelman, Bob Gurnee, Joel Lubar, Linda Thompson
AAPB and-or-vs. ISNR.
I believe we are all currently doing the best we can with what we’ve got.
3 MINUTE EXHIBITOR TALKS.
Tom Collura – www.Brainm.com Brainmaster. Home training has arrived.
Mike Cohen – EEG Spectrum & Neurocybernetics
Dom Greco - Cost, convenience, and compliance. www.SmartBrainGames.com. A $300 EEG on the $200 PlayStation, etc. which the kid already has. Get your territory while they last.
CES - Alpha Stim. They’ve got the research for Anxiety, Depression, Insomnia, Acute & Chronic Pain. Any healthcare pro can prescribe a CES device.
Grant Bright – www.Photosonix.com. Hello to contingent disentrainment. AV stim where you hunt to seek and break attractors by looking through clear glasses. I missed the demo.
ProComp, Infinity, etc. Thought Technology has 45 employees.
Kamran Fallapour kf@neurocog.com –
Wireless EEG has arrived. No more spaghetti and sauce.
A runner up for ‘Best of Conference innovation’. I predict this will be the most historically significant event of the conference.
Kamran unveiled a wireless EEG. www.BraInquiry.com Totally awesome. Kamran talked to us with a funny baseball visor for a while, then pointed to Martijn Arns in the back of the room. There were Kamran’s brain waves on a laptop connected merely with wireless Bluetooth technology. The hook-up is simple; active electrodes cut noise so impedance is not an issue. The EEG with the flexible BioExplorer software cost is $995. Kamran and Martijn have sworn me to secrecy about the extent of interest in this product. But I will repeat that I believe this may be the most historically significant event of the conference.
Val Brown. Clearly an astounding innovator. Obviously several leaps ahead of the staid. NCP is so advanced it is simple to ‘use’, no, rather ‘dance’ with the dendrites. Now with even simpler as ‘NeuroCARE Personal’ for remote training with clinical supervision.
Peter Litchfield. Better breathing by monitoring CO2 levels. A purer measure of breathing efficiency than heart rate or HRV. Over-breathing is more than hyperventilating.
AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS
Sue Othmer - Pain Syndromes.
NF works with brain challenge and response to achieve stability and flexibility. Over-steering creates rebounding reverberations. Either stuck or creaky is vulnerability to pain. A slight trigger will set off the hyper-excitable.
It’s all about inhibition. The human brain (with newer, frontal power) is primarily inhibitory. (A monkey brain made that clear yesterday.) NF is pain management by training inhibitory brain circuits, not tissue.
Sue does 2 minutes at T3-T4 then moves up and reduces frequency by 2Hz on the left. But on the left side, she goes back and increases by 4Hz at each site.
There are inhibit and reward strategies.
Migraines are easy to remediate. Abnormal brain states are not a medical condition. ADHD plus migraines are rare within individuals but not within families.
Treatments schedules are best when more frequent at first then declining in frequency. Meds can get in the way of training. Get an MD you can work with. Include Alpha-Theta training for life integration and a fresh start.
Set positive expectations.
Tom Hartmann – To write a story.
The best presentation on the open secrets of writing success I’ve ever heard.
I will carry some of this coaching with me forever. All my senses exulted in these Palm Springs. I wallowed in the fertile wisdom, absorbing all I could imbibe through my pores. We emerged fresh and fragrant.
I lost weight during the conference from missing meals.
EVENING
Victoria Ibric is the cutest Romanian since Simka and Latka on 'Taxi'.
But only a research-oriented healing angel can document 92% success rate for pain syndromes for those completing more than 20 sessions. Dr. Ibric likes the Roshi to compliment EEG.
Keith Sedlacek reminded us of our biofeedback roots with time-warp slides from the ‘50s on vascular and autonomic disorders such as migraines.
Here, I missed Corwin Corwin Bells presentation on “The Journey to Wild Divine.” www.WildDivine.com I would have started the standing ovation for his triumph. (Yes, I am affiliate # 1011, and proud of it.) His customer list is now a Who’s Who of the neurofeedback community.
Judith Lubar - I didn’t take notes, but was skeptical of the ‘woo-woo’ energy stuff wherever it appeared.
Last up for me was the NCP user group meeting. I learned how to put a whole CD on the hard drive for an hour-long session of Gregorian chants.
Again, I approached an understanding of the C(r) or Cross Correlation of Derivatives, aka the batman curve.
More tips to insure that this ‘hot house flower’ works well on local systems.
I’ve discovered that sustained and continuous intellectual stimulation is physically exhausting, especially after 2:30 EST while in the Pacific time zone. But I just can’t miss the 7:00 am presentation Saturday morning.
My Wonderful Winter Brain Conference – Feb 7
This is my 1st conference, my 3rd day, my take on it.
7:00 – Hyla Cass – a psychiatrist on a nutritional crusade. Thanks for the great articles.
Nutritional supplements and food allergies can also claim to have a huge impact on migraine headaches.
This was my exhibitor day.
I bought a $21 thermometer with hundredths of a degree and 1 second updates from Renée of Human Measurement Systems, 626-201-2437.
QXCI was there, but I clutched my garlic to ward them off and steered clear of the dubious DSP miracle.
I got the regular A-V stim experience from David Paradise and Photosonix. The Roshi A-V stim was much more impressive. But AV stim is short-lived.
Chuck Davis only had 1 minute to give me the real Roshi experience. Instantly I felt like I was in a multi-dimensional roller coaster, constantly careening in unexpected directions. How could it always approach me from my blind side? I didn’t reach divine randomness, but was on my way. I staggered away, with eyes wide, wondering what just happened?
I asked Val Brown to guide me in a NeuroCARE Pro session. He employed all 16 comprehensive boxes, including target frequencies up to 58Hz to contribute feedback during my bursts of excess emergent variability, or the obverse for half of the targets. Merely with occasional feedback interruptions, he gently led me, with subtlety, to presence. Thank you for a splendid dance. My best exhibitor experience.
I found a lovely woman returning from a break to attend her booth and I renewed an earlier conversation. It seems she is a neurofeedback technician and migraine sufferer. She takes care of patients all day and never has any time to take care of herself. Yes, she had a migraine headache right now. Kindly, she let me take her by the hand to the NCP booth. I hooked her up as Sue Brown was alone and engaged in conversation. But the damn machine didn’t work. Sue felt I was brash for just barging in to her booth, I though it rude for her equipment to be too delicate.
So I walked my indulgent suffering friend by the hand to Hershel Toomin’s booth. He wasn’t there, but I started her on pIR HEG. Deb Stokes came along and we worked together. When Hershel arrived, he was delighted that I had formed an impromptu treatment session with observers. But it was a tough environment for more than a demonstration. The level 6 headache remained a 6 when my friend had to return to her booth.
The Journey to Wild Divine wins my award for the Best New Technology of the Show. The GSR & HRV set in a strategy game within a stunning village is a stroke of genius beautifully rendered. Good for treatment room, waiting room, home room or den. Fun for the whole family. This is how neurofeedback will enter schools and institutions. Wild Divine will arrive on laptops and in clubs. I hope they use affiliate code 1011. You can use an old 1GHz computer with more than 256 Megs of RAM and $159.95 to attain the peaceful states and self-awareness for autonomic self-regulation in 40 biofeedback challenges.
I stood behind a woman with a glorious nervous system. I could see her being glorious. She was lovin’ it. Then Corwin Bell put one of the GSR sensors on his finger while she kept one on hers. A fractal algorithm now generated combined images. This dimensionalized the experience. What a contact high! They sold all 125 units they brought to the conference.
Swami Beyondananda - In the Himalayas he saw a breath-arian with a clip on his nose; the show-off was fasting.
My Wonderful Winter Brain Conference – Feb 8.
I slept until 7 a.m. but did not want to miss the DARPA team. The research arm of the military funded Carnegie Mellon students to study creating a super soldier with bio monitoring such as EEG, etc. Just how much information, of what kind, in what media, can a soldier absorb in a ‘Black Hawk Down’ situation? Think of optimizing the rules of a messaging cue modified by bio data. The 3 Edutainment majors are creating a virtual environment and simulation game.
Later I saw them absorbing a NeuroCARE Pro lecturette and making a date for Val to visit their facility next time he returns to an old stomping ground.
On the other hand, the Laughaway.com yogi has lots of laughter clubs around the world. For an hour these groups laughs at each other, in several flavors, clap, breathe, and ha-ha-ha again.
Carl Pribram – to me this math is like Shakespeare: Great lofty stuff; I understand most of the words, but few of the sentences. No actionable information.
Anna Wise does not believe that a boring EEG is best. She likes them shapely. And she knows how to broaden and cinch them with EEG bio monitoring and guided fantasy. In a group she does dial-a-brain to peek at peak experiences.
Ben Strack presented a regular research paper on HRV training boosting HS baseball performance.
Rae Tattenbaum has a structure for peak performance training. Nice sequence with good tools. She even had the courage to do an impromptu demo with a volunteer singer.
Vieta Sue Wilson had lots of fun teaching psychology with tricks and demos of psych oddities. Rotate your right foot clockwise. While doing that with your foot, raise your right hand to write the number 6 in the air. Don’t stop your foot, try again. No, clockwise + 6.
The cheapest EMG demo. Put a piece of scotch tape on your forehead. Now, imagine driving into the sun.
SEMINARS
Keith Sedlacek still just uses good ol’ fashioned traditional, peripheral biofeedback. Breathe, relax, temp, GSR, heart rate, and generalize.
He filled in some migraine info … Experience shows number of sessions related to age.
Did you know the nose is the same temperature as the finger? “Ooo, you’re a hottie, I like that!”
Victoria Ibric: NF Training for Chronic Pain
NF boosts endorphins. Pain lives at 4 Hz. Roshi. Pain remediation really needs at least 20 sessions, but then 90%+ success rates for diverse disorders unified only by pain.
PLENARY
Wes Sime – Golf is good for peak performance because it is such an individual mental game. I’ll let you know if cures my yips. How much is that worth? All I’ve got on some days.
Hershel Toomin. - Regulate emotion with nir HEG. Local work at FP shows up globally on QEEG.
Sig Othmer, then others. – How does NF work? The mechanism of action.
- NF repairs blighted circuitry. What fires together wires together.
- NF does brain activation then relaxation. Like when Dorothy oiled the tin man’s elbow.
- HEG makes your blood redder – both O2 supply and waste removal.
- Then there is the old: challenge and disrupt specific attractors of dysfunction while chaotically synchronizing to basins of functional stability. Leave behind that 3 & 5 Hz junk as all those oarsmen row together downstream at delta rhythms while you sleep.
My Wonderful Winter Brain Conference Feb 10.
The last chapter of my personal notes from the conference in Palm Springs.
7:45 Lesley Parkinson – NF and HEG for incontinence.
Report of clinical success.
8:00 Ed O’Malley – Sleep, a good idea. Amen. The most powerful human drive? All we adults really do need 8 hours of sleep and there is a thin SD on that. Subjective estimates of errors from sleep deprivation are, uh, generous to the subjectee. Are you having trouble combining 2 streams of thought? Did you get your 8 hours?
A pharmacological researcher once corrected me when I asked about side effects. He said there are no side effects, only effects. So, how can we speak about the most common effect of NF being better quality sleep? An added benefit? The importance of re-establishing circadian rhythms suggests we have clients maintain a sleep log.
8:40 PTSD and chronic pain resolve together.
NF is sabotaging self-sabotage.
Think how you would tell the story to a friend. What do you add and withhold?
Tom Boone.
Former pastor rents out NF stations to mother and child. The waiting list for time slots is 3 deep. Price: 3 ½-hour sessions for $35. That’s 39¢ / minute.
Tom promotes with brochures in high traffic areas and prestigious locations, newspaper ads, direct mail and institutional referrals.
Paul Swingle, My newest hero.
Some of his therapists augment and potentiate NF with cranial sacral therapy and therapeutic touch.
EMDR for somato-sensory release. Anybody not doing EMDR is malpracticing.
CES on acupuncture points.
Paul still apologizes for believing is this stuff, but hey, results are results.
People start getting better as soon as they open the door. The energy is right.
The person who referred you here to me, definitely has your best interests at heart.
William C. Scott.
In alpha-theta training, Bill wears a mask and says: “I see that you are not always an honest person.”
There is a state of hootlessness – where you don’t give a hoot.
Nancy White has quite a grandmother, who is planning her 100th birthday.
Not a senior citizen, an “older adult”.
Grant Bright on Business Models.
Firmly rooted in ethics.
Does your liability policy allow them to settle a claim against you without your consent?
“People will buy from a green salesperson, but not a blue salesperson.” - Zig Ziglar.
Have an open house or a “Brain Fair.”
The best way to promote your business is to give speeches.
Paul Swingle says: attract rather than promote. He gets 95% closing ratio and 90% completion rates.
Tom Collura listed traits of successful practitioners.
Len Ochs – How do you feel about raising your fees to $300/hour?
Bill Scott
NF on anti-depressants adds 20 extra sessions.
There will be ups and downs, but the downs will not be worse than your worst.
He can do 12 NF sessions in 4 days.
Assess progress weekly with frequency, intensity and duration of symptoms. I think of this as a volume. Episodes stacking up like layers of a cake. Each layer is an area defined by intensity 0-10, over time.
The Tibetan says: With each breathe the gift of a smile grows. With each exhalation the smile deepens.
When a QEEG says low power, that means global cortical inhibition.
My roommate left me a $20 tip. I don’t quite know how to take that. He also left some oatmeal, I knew exactly how to take that.
Well those are my notes and recollections. I’m glad I could to contribute to discussions with the masters. Thank you all for inviting me into your family. I’ll leave you with these words of Woody Allen: “Ah, the brain, my second favorite organ.”
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