Neurofeedback helps subjects gain control of their brainwaves.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service;
4/29/2004;
Byline: Bill Radford

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. _ The video-game action on the screen in front of him is not just fun and games for Halston Little.

As 9-year-old Halston concentrates, the car on the screen accelerates. He's changing the speed not through the controller in his hands but by the power of his mind, by changing his brainwave activity.

Halston is using the latest technology in neurofeedback, a fast-growing form of biofeedback.

Biofeedback teaches people to regulate skin temperature, blood pressure, heart rate and other bodily functions that aren't usually consciously controlled. Machines monitor those functions through sensors placed on the body, then provide feedback to the subject through visual or auditory cues.

Steven Stockdale, a Colorado Springs, Colo., psychologist, compares it to a ballet dancer adjusting her form by studying herself in a mirror.
"The mirror is a form of biofeedback machinery, it's just not electronic," he says.
Neurofeedback, also called EEG biofeedback, concentrates on changes in brainwave activity. That activity varies depending on how focused or relaxed a person is.
"We're teaching people to consciously learn how to change states," Stockdale says. "What I like to say we're training is cognitive flexibility."

Stockdale started using neurofeedback as a tool with some patients about 15 years ago. Now it's the basis of his practice at the Neuro-Health Center in Colorado Springs, where he treats cognitive issues such as adults with mild closed-head injuries and children with learning problems.

Traditionally, neurofeedback machines have taught patients to change brainwave activity through simple visual displays on a computer screen: A patient might, for example, make a circle grow or keep a bar level by concentrating.

New technology is making the process more engaging, Stockdale says. That technology, developed by NASA to assess pilot attention and spun off by S.M.A.R.T. BrainGames, allows the use of off-the-shelf video games for neurofeedback. Select elements of the game are controlled through brain activity.

Halston, a third-grader, is using the system to help him overcome problems at school.
"We noticed in his school work that he just wasn't concentrating as long and as well as he should," says his mother, Beverley Little.

She heard about neurofeedback from a friend and thought it was worth checking out. So far, it seems to be working, she says. Teachers have sent notes home saying whatever the family is doing, keep it up.
"It's helping me a lot," Halston says softly.

Biofeedback isn't just the province of psychologists. Members of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology & Biofeedback, which recently held its annual conference in Colorado Springs, include neurologists, nurses, physical therapists and others.
"We're a very multidisciplinary field," says Lynda Kirk, immediate past president of the group.

Whether biofeedback is mainstream or alternative therapy depends on whom you ask, Kirk says. Quackwatch.com says biofeedback was popularized before it had scientific support, but "has gained a measure of respectability."
The National Headache Foundation calls biofeedback "an effective non-medicinal modality" for treating tension and migraine headaches. Medicare pays for some use of biofeedback in treating incontinence.

Cost of a biofeedback session is about $50 to $100 or more; treatment ranges from a handful of sessions to dozens.

One sign of growing acceptance is insurance coverage. When Kirk, founder and the executive director of the Austin Biofeedback Center in Austin, Texas, started out more than 20 years ago, "insurance didn't pay anything." A survey by the American Association of Health Plans in 2002 found that about half of insurers cover biofeedback to some degree.