Researchers at Cal State San Bernardino have found that the therapeutic treatment known as "neurofeedback" is highly effective at treating PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And the center's director says that's only the beginning of what it can do. KVCR's Benjamin Purper has more.
Neurofeedback is a therapeutic treatment where patients learn how to self-regulate their brain activity by watching it displayed on a screen. The treatment has proven effective in helping people with anxiety disorders, attention deficit disorders, PTSD, and other conditions manage their symptoms.
Dr. Connie McReynolds is the Director of the Neurofeedback Center at California State University, San Bernardino. McReynolds describes neurofeedback sessions as a one-on-one interaction between the counselor and the patient. As they talk, a sensor placed on the patients’ scalp displays their brain activity onto a screen.
“The sensor goes on a certain location on the scalp, according to protocol that's been established over the years. Then that EEG sensor is feeding the brainwaves into the computer, and then depending on what the person's working on, their training protocol or training plan is going to consist of series of types of video games that have been scientifically designed to tackle that very specific area of processing,” McReynolds says.
“So the child or the adult is interacting using their brain to run the computer, and as they're hitting their target brain wave measurements, they're going to win points, they're going to be scoring things on their games.”
McReynolds says part of the draw of this treatment is that it’s non-invasive, and doesn’t have to trigger a person’s PTSD in order to work.
“Some people, when they re-live that trauma, they're literally reliving that. And it aggravates them, and that limbic system gets fired up even more. And so, for those individuals, this is a really good alternative, because I ask minimal questions about the incident itself. I'm looking more at. how are you living, what's working, what areas do you want to see that could be better in? Tell me that day-to-day life, what are you struggling with” McReynolds says.
The treatment has proven effective in treating PTSD. The Neurofeedback Center recently released a study based on data they collected from practicing neurofeedback therapy on veterans with PTSD.
McReynolds and her team found that after 20 hours of neurofeedback, 60% of the veterans reported improvements in their emotional state and 78% said they were in a positive state of well-being.
The report also revealed another important insight: McReynolds found a correlation between conditions like PTSD and problems with auditory and visual processing in the brain, or how the brain processes auditory and visual information.
The researchers found that neurofeedback works better when they work on those processes along with calming symptoms of anxiety or PTSD.
“So they came in with PTSD, with anxiety, with depression, but we also found that many of them are struggling with some auditory and visual processing problems,” McReynolds said. “What we found is we had improved auditory processing, we'd improved some of the visual processing, and we'd improved their general wellbeing over all.”
This discovery has another important application: helping kids with behavioral problems in the classroom.
“I just did another intake on another little child who was six, [and] has no visual processing. There are things he can learn, but whenever there's a movement in the room, he's distracted. So something scraping, anything sound-wise or visual, he loses track of where he is. And he can't remember what was just said to him. He's throwing chairs in the classroom because he is so frustrated,” McReynolds says.
“I equated it to the person who brought him in, it's kind of like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard all day long for him.”
Give me your toughest kids. Let's start there, and see what we're able to do.
McReynolds is using neurofeedback to help the child improve his auditory and visual processing, in the hopes that that will help him be able to focus in school. She says this kind of treatment has worked in other children with similar problems.
“They become successful in school,” she says, “and the behavioral interventions go down significantly, because now he's able to process what's going on around him instead of throwing a chair because he's so frustrated. Or hitting someone or hurting someone, because he can't stand being in that environment.”
Improvement like that is why McReynolds wants to take neurofeedback into schools. She says that if they could identify the children with these kinds of processing problems and intervene, they could prevent a lot of school drop-outs.
“We could turn a lot of these kids into really good students, who are struggling, having a lot of behavioral problems in the classroom. Is it going to get rid of every behavioral problem in school? Probably not. But if we can reduce the amount of that simply by finding those children who have auditory and visual processing problems, my goodness, wouldn't that be worth the investment?”
Getting neurofeedback into schools is still a long way off, but McReynolds says the Cal State San Bernardino’s Neurofeedback Center can help kids right now.
“We're here, we're interested in helping, we're part of the community, we are at Cal State San Bernardino, and we really see this as a community service,” she says.
“Give me your toughest kids. Let's start there, and see what we're able to do.”
For more information, you can visit neurofeedback.csusb.edu.
