Cognitive functions, our thoughts and even out moods are all the responsibility of our brain and its combination of processes known as activities which get measured through the complex process of electrical pulses and in turn tells us a lot of how it works and we study this employing Neurofeedback Training.
All our brains have the ability, to not only teach itself to regulate but to also function more cognitively and speedily and all this gets monitored through real-time brain activity monitoring
The most successful way of measuring any brain activity whether good or bad is to monitor the electrical activity of the brain by using an EEG whereby they place its electrodes direct onto your scalp.
These highly sensitive electrodes measure fluctuations given off from ionic currents firing using the voltages that are the result of the brain’s neurons activity.
This whole procedure that helps with Neurofeedback Training to help inform and educate researchers and scientists by monitoring and recording the results of the real-time measurements that can e seen by the various patterned brainwaves.
The brain and subject can learn to regulate themselves better with the help of seeing or visualizing the brainwave activities in real-time.
A typical example of the effects of these activities is the alpha waves (8 to 12 Hz) which usually signifies the relaxed or calm state of mind and will even increase when you shut your eyes and lay back and relax using slow and long deep breaths in and out but will show a major decrease once you open your eyes and start doing something that is mentally exertive like heavy reading or even heavy puzzle solving (playing extreme action, violent and overexciting video games in children).
The neurofeedback uses a process where the subject will get rewarded using visual or auditory stimuli that will be based on positive or negative mental state shown when it was measured by the EEG.
One way of doing this is when they use the test for relaxation and the subject gets into a complete state of calm and relaxation and the mind finds itself in the same state (i.e. intensified alpha brain waves) the researcher will reward the subject with an audible sound of pure nature of the same intensity of relaxation (even happiness) emerging through either soft speakers or earphones but if the mind loses that relaxed or calm state that rewarded sounds will immediately vanish and in this way, the brain will be notified in real-time that that state is gone and it needs to try as much as possible to return to it to regain its rewarded sound.
This proven training is based on the concept of conditional classical training and if used continuously and frequently it will subconsciously train any mind to naturally shift to any desired state it is trained to be in.
This type of Neurofeedback Training has been successful but not FDA approved yet to study the usage in ADHD, PTSD, and OCD.
