How to Read a Qeeg Brain Map
A Map That Shows You Everything Incorrect With Your Encephalon
Applied science that compares your brain's electrical action to everyone else'south could revolutionize mental-health treatments—or worsen people's obsessions with perfection.
The woman who would be mapping my brain, Cynthia Kerson, had tanned, toned artillery and long silver hair worn loose. Her abode office featured an elegant calligraphy sign reading "Exhale," and also a mug that said "I Accept THE PATIENCE OF A SAINT—SAINT CUNTY MCFUCKOFF."
Kerson is a neurotherapist, which means she practices a form of culling therapy that involves stimulating brain waves until they reach a specific frequency. Neurotherapy has a questionable reputation, which its practitioners sometimes try to counter by putting every bit many acronyms next to their names as possible. Kerson comes with a Ph.D., QEEGD, BCN, and BCB. She'southward besides past president of the Biofeedback Guild of California and teaches at Saybrook University. Withal, somehow it was the tension between those two pieces of office ephemera that fabricated me instinctively want to trust her.
Kerson used to have a dispensary in Marin County, where she primarily saw children with ADHD, using neurotherapy techniques to help them learn to focus. Just she also worked with elite athletes who wanted to improve their performance, likewise as people suffering from chronic pain and anxiety and schizophrenia and a host of other disorders. These days, she'due south so busy didactics and consulting that she no longer runs her individual practice, but she agreed to bring out her encephalon-mapping equipment for me: snug-fitting cloth caps in various sizes; a tube of Electrogel, a conductive goo; a black box made past BrainMaster Technologies that would receive my brain's signals and spit them out into her reckoner.
I'm the kind of person who procrastinates with personality tests; I'm susceptible to the way they target that identify where self-loathing and narcissism overlap. I suppose it stems from the feeling that there is something uniquely and specially wrong with me, and wanting to know all most it.
So I'll admit that I was thinking of this brain map in overly fanciful terms: It would be like a personality test but scientific. I kept thinking about this line I'd read in a book past Paul Swingle, a Canadian psychoneurophysiologist who uses brain maps to identify neurological abnormalities: "The brain tells us everything."
Kerson placed the cap on my head and clipped ii sensors on to my earlobes, areas of no electrical activity, to human action as baselines. As she began Electrogelling the 19 spots on my head that aligned with the cap's electrodes, I was nervous in two different directions: one, that my encephalon would be revealed as suboptimal, underfunctioning, scarce. The other, that information technology would exist fine, average, unremarkable.
* * *
EEG tests, which measure electrical signals in the encephalon, have been used for decades by physicians to wait for anomalies in encephalon-wave patterns that might point stroke or traumatic brain injury. The kind of brain map I was getting used a neuroimaging technique formally known every bit quantitative electroencephalogram, or qEEG. Information technology follows the same full general principle equally EEG tests, but adds a quantitative chemical element: Kerson would compare my brain waves against a database of conventionally functioning, or "neurotypical," brains. Theoretically, this allows clinicians to pick upwardly on more subtle deviations—brain-wave forms that are associated with cognitive inflexibility, say, or impulsivity.
In neurotherapy, qEEGs are by and large a precursor to treatments similar neurofeedback or deep encephalon stimulation, which are used to alter brain waves, or to train people to change their own. Neurotherapy claims it can tackle persistent depression or PTSD or anger issues without resorting to talk therapy or pharmaceutical interventions, past addressing the very neural oscillations that underlie these problems. If y'all run into your brain function in existent time, the idea goes, you tin can trace mental-health issues to their physiological roots—and brand direct interventions.
Just critics debate that neurotherapy's treatments—which might take dozens of sessions, each costing hundreds of dollars—take very piffling research bankroll them up. And although the mainstream medical community is starting to pay closer attention to the field, particularly in Europe, in the U.S. neurotherapy is notwithstanding largely unregulated, with practitioners of varying levels of expertise offer treatments in outpatient clinics. At the near basic level, not everyone who's invested in the engineering that allows them to do qEEG testing is able to correctly interpret the resulting brain map. Certification to administer a qEEG test—a procedure overseen past the International qEEG Certification Board—requires only 24 hours of training, five supervised evaluations, and an examination, with no prior medical feel.
Every bit Jay Gunkelman, an EEG skillful and past president of the International Order for Neurofeedback and Inquiry, puts information technology: "It'southward a Wild West, buyer-beware state of affairs out there."
All this is to say that while skilled interpreters can pick upwardly all sorts of information from an EEG, these tests are likewise "ripe for overstatement," according to Michelle Harris-Love, a neuroscientist at Georgetown's Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. That'south worrisome since, in recent years, EEG applied science has gotten cheaper and more widely available. A qEEG encephalon map can cost as little as a few hundred dollars, which ways more people are taking a peek at their brain waves, not just for diagnostic purposes, but also with optimization in heed.
"People will come in for optimal grooming," Kerson told me every bit she adjusted the sensors in my cap. "But what often happens is nosotros'll find something a picayune pathological. Which I judge depends on your definition of pathological."
NeuroAgility, an "attention and functioning psychology" dispensary in Boulder, Colorado, for case, brainmaps CEOs and so uses neurotherapy to assist them "come from a place of action, rather than reaction." Other clinics promise to utilise the technology to aid athletes and actors get in the zone, every bit Kerson did in her private practice. "There are business executives who want to reduce their obsessive-compulsive traits, or athletes who want to melody up their engines," Gunkelman told me. "At Daytona, they're all fabulous cars, merely every unmarried one of them gets a tune up three times a 24-hour interval. No thing who you are, if you look at encephalon activeness, there are things nosotros can do to go you to function better."
* * *
For the first five minutes my brain was being mapped, I sat with my eyes airtight. My mind felt unquiet; I was thinking nearly what information technology felt like to have a brain, trying to describe to myself the feeling of having thoughts. "Your eyes are moving around a lot underneath your lids," Kerson said. She suggested I put my fingertips on my eyelids to keep my eyes from shifting. I sabbatum like the see-no-evil monkey for the residue of the test, trying to remain thoughtless and keep my jumpy eyes notwithstanding.
When the first half of the test was washed, I spied my brain waves on Kerson's computer screen: xix thin, wobbly grey lines stretching across a white background. My brain activity looked like an Agnes Martin painting. Kerson had me turn the chair around for the second, optics-open half, in case watching the real-time encephalon waves fabricated me cocky-conscious. Her software program chimed out a warning every time I blinked, which turned out to be a lot. "I'm going to turn off the audio so you don't get frustrated," Kerson said.
When nosotros were washed, she scrolled through the 10 minutes of encephalon waves. Two of the lines looked alarming—every few seconds they jolted all over the identify, like some sort of seismic indication of an internal earthquake. Kerson told me not to worry; the EEG also picks upward on muscle movements, and those were my blinks.
"And so there's one thing I see right off the bat," she said. "We'd expect to run across more alpha when you close your eyes. Merely information technology really looks pretty similar whether your eyes are open or airtight. That tells me that you might not sleep well, you might have some anxiety, you might be overly sensitive—your brain talks to itself a lot. You can't quiet yourself." This was all accurate, if not news to me.
Kerson continued to scan through the test, selecting sections that weren't compromised past my blinks, trying to gather plenty make clean data to match against the database. She ran the four good minutes through the program, which spat out an assay of my brain waves that looked something similar a oestrus map, with areas of relative over- and under-functioning indicated by patches of color. By almost measures, my brain appeared a moderate, statistically insignificant green. "You're neurotypical," she said, sounding minorly disappointed.
Kerson nonetheless recommended vitamins to beef up my neural connections, since my amplitudes were a little lackluster. "Meditating would be salubrious, but yous're going to need something else for meditation to work," she told me, noting that I should consider some alpha training, which would involve putting on headphones to listen to sounds that would go my encephalon waves into the correct frequency. I should also probably change out my contacts if I was blinking that much.
Kerson began folding upwards the electrode-studded cap, and I realized with a slight feeling of deflation that that was information technology. "It was nice to meet yous," she chosen out every bit I pulled out of her driveway. "And it was nice to meet your brain!"
* * *
A qEEG may not be annihilation similar a personality test, only it still left me with the aforementioned unsatisfied feeling of being parsed and analyzed but still fundamentally unknown. My listen had been mapped, I had seen the shape of my encephalon waves, only I didn't have any new or amend understanding of my galloping, broken-hearted encephalon, or what happens on those afternoons where I lose hours to online personality tests. Instead, I was just left with the vague sense that in some deep and essential way, I wasn't performing as well equally I could exist.
I decided to seek out a 2nd opinion from Gunkelman, whom several people had described to me every bit the go-to guy for interpreting EEGs. Gunkelman worked as an EEG tech in a hospital for decades, he told me. "In the early 1990s, I figured out that I had read 500,000 EEGs," he said. "And so I stopped counting." When he looked over my results, he grumbled about not having plenty data to work with; for a proper brain map, he needed at least ten minutes each with eyes open up and closed, he said. Merely he nonetheless zipped through the EEG readout with the confidence of someone who's done this more than half a million times earlier.
Similar Kerson, Gunkelman zeroed in on my alpha. "When you close your eyes, you look to see alpha in the dorsum of the head, and we're non really seeing that," he said. That meant that my visual processing systems weren't resting when my eyes were airtight—the aforementioned inability to quiet down that Kerson had noticed. He also saw evidence of light drowsiness: "With an EEG, we tin can tell exactly how vigilant you are," he said. He was correct; I had been sleepy that day.
And so, perhaps to throw my drowsy, overactive brain a os, Gunkelman noted some nice things about my blastoff, too. "The alpha here is 11 or 12 hertz, a little faster than average," he said, which generally correlated with better retentiveness of facts and experiences. But if I wanted optimal functioning, he agreed with Kerson that some blastoff training would help teach my brain to chill out so I could sleep better and be maximally alarm during the twenty-four hours.
There had been something appealing to my anxious, over-alphaed brain about having yet another way to think of myself as an underperforming machine that could be tweaked and tuned up. Merely in the terminate, hearing Gunkelman describe my brain waves in such clinical terms had the opposite upshot. I felt protective of all the means my encephalon was still a mystery to me, and everything the encephalon map couldn't show.
I've kept one of my encephalon-map images every bit my desktop groundwork. I'k non certain why I feel fastened to information technology; I couldn't pick it out of a lineup of other brains, and I didn't actually acquire annihilation new about myself from the feel—the map is not the territory, as they say. But even so, I still like looking at it: my speedy, drowsy, neurotypical, not-quite-optimal encephalon.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/this-is-your-brain-on-qeeg/532035/
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