Читать книгу A Symphony in the Brain - Jim Robbins - Страница 10

Introduction

We have not been informed that our bodies tend to do what they are told if we know how to tell them.

—Elmer Green

When I heard that there was a new kind of biofeedback that amplifies your brain waves and allows you to make your brain stronger, I thought, wasn't biofeedback something that came and went in the 1960s and 70s? I had never tried it, but I associated it vaguely with the seventies, the Beatles, and transcendental meditation. Biofeedback had a New Age whiff about it. Add the words “brain wave” and it sounded even wackier. Yet I was hearing interesting things about it, and I've always believed that the human mind is the last great frontier. I was battling chronic fatigue syndrome and had exhausted the traditional medical route, so I sold an editor on a magazine story about the new biofeedback and traveled to Santa Fe to test this “neurofeedback” and a variety of other technologies designed to enhance the performance of the brain at a weekend symposium put on by Michael Hutchinson, author of a book called Megabrain.

I hooked up to a neurofeedback instrument for my first session. After training for a half hour, my mind was tired, my thoughts muddled. But an hour or so after I finished, I experienced what is known as the clean windshield effect. The world looked sharp and crystalline, and I had a quiet, energetic feeling that lasted a couple of hours. It was the first time I had felt that way in years. And it convinced me to look a little deeper. This new biofeedback was something very different, I was told, a technique that could treat attention deficit disorder and closed-head injuries and depression and a long list of other problems. I looked into the research and found that the technique had been spawned by solid laboratory research on epilepsy in the 1970s and 1980s.

Still, the claims being made for neurofeedback seemed far too good to be true. If it was such a good thing, why hadn't I heard of it? Why hadn't it swept its way into the health care system? I've been blessed with a healthy streak of cynicism, however, and as a reporter, I know that the systems that surround us—science, health care, government, even journalism—function far less perfectly than is generally believed. Things fall through the cracks, get overlooked and ignored. It was no great leap to believe that something like neurofeedback could have been missed. And so I persisted, knowing from experience that these oversights are where some of the best stories dwell.

What I found is a small subculture of people who enthusiastically practice brain wave biofeedback: the simple science of quantifying subtle electrical information from a person's brain, amplifying it, and sharing it with that person, who can then control the information in a way that makes the brain more vigorous and able to do a better job of managing body and mind. Many of those who work in the field of biofeedback are passionate about what they do because they believe biofeedback is very effective, and will change the world. The more people I met in the field, the more impressed I was with their intelligence and commitment. Many had been using it for years—in some cases, two or three decades—and some of the results were astounding. At gatherings of neurofeedback practitioners, the stories of people who have had their memory restored, seen their child's hyperactivity or autism or epilepsy significantly improved, and had their lifelong migraine problem disappear are legion and routine. The effects of neurofeedback are not subtle. They are extremely robust. There is nothing else like it, not even other kinds of biofeedback. That's one of the reasons it has languished. There is nothing to compare it to.

Yet neurofeedback is neither miracle nor panacea. It is science. But because the science is young and relatively unknown, because it turns the way we have categorized and thought about illness upside down, because it functions outside of most frames of reference, it seems like mumbo jumbo. It works on a sound scientific principle, though one that was abandoned by the powers that fund science before it was fully investigated. A limited analogy can be drawn to acupuncture. There is no Western medical model to explain the technique, and it has long been dismissed in the West. But it works, and works well, and now Western medical science is grudgingly coming to terms with it and searching for a biological explanation. And many insurance companies pay for acupuncture therapy.

So I decided to tell the story of brain wave biofeedback. It is a journalist's dream. A sprawling, dramatic, multifaceted story, filled with controversial figures and tales of discovery, about a new technique that performs what most of us have been conditioned to think of as miracles. It has slumbered for more than thirty years, under everyone's nose. The most exciting thing is that it is only beginning to come into its own. “I feel like someone has given me a grand piano and I've learned to play a couple of keys,” said Sue Othmer, one of the field's pioneers. I don't know if all of what practitioners claim will prove to be true. But there is enough evidence to know that neurofeedback has changed and will continue to change lives, a great many of them. It can treat serious problems that many people believe they must suffer with for the rest of their lives, without drugs or side effects.

The big question about neurofeedback is no longer whether it works. The questions are why it is as effective is it is, for whom, precisely, and how it can be made more powerful. There is something profound at work with neurofeedback. If the brain's multifaceted effort to create mind and run the body can be compared to conducting a symphony orchestra, its choice of music, its volume, and its tempo are all things we believe we are forced to accept, largely without question. That may no longer be true.