Your Location: Home > Help Desk > Media > Wired For Victory

Wired for Victory

(Displaying page 3 of 5) - | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

For the current Dr. Pavlov, a former oncologist, neurofeedback is more than just, say, a toy for winning the gold in Beijing next year. It represents the possibility of subverting what he called "the official mentality of pills and hip replacements." I got the impression that, for Pavlov, neurofeedback is like a better version of homeopathy, prayer, or meditation—better because it can be quantified. "We can teach you how to go into alpha objectively," he told me with quiet, doctorly certainty.

Soon Pavlov's wife, Nicolina, had me under a chenille blanket in a large chair behind a chenille curtain. The scene was very MittelEurope. I expected Harry Lyme to pop out to zither music.

Nicolina attached clips to my ears—one electrode on the top of my head and another on my forehead—and I began to watch my brain on a TV screen. It is a strange sensation the first time you see your mind looking like, of all things, a video game. My strengths, weaknesses, phobias, and obsessions all opened up as a riot of digitalized pulsing bar graphs—pinks, reds, and blues all racing toward nothing. Nicolina had also connected sensors to my index finger and around my waist to measure heart-rate variability and respiration. She taught me—successfully—how to raise my body temperature by imagining that my hands were in hot water: Because athletes are more relaxed, she told me, they have higher peripheral body temperatures than nonathletes. She next tried to show me how to get my breathing and heartbeat in sync, something many athletes can do. Then we worked on getting my beta down and my alpha up, but with limited success. "Chatterbox beta," she tsked me. She showed me my shameful beta-to-alpha coefficient on the screen. It was 30 percent above average. "Writers, people like you, always have the chatterbox brain."

Practitioners say that neurofeedback could potentially improve not just our athletic skills but our professional ones—our sense of organization, how we deal with setbacks, even how we respond when the kids refuse to go to bed. Who would not want a quiet mind on demand? But performance is notoriously hard to measure. The intervention of the neurofeedback practitioner, critics say, is itself often sufficient to bring about improvement. In other words, the placebo effect of just walking into the Mind Room might be enough to make a Milano striker play better. Even Sterman urges caution. "I think neurofeedback is a powerful tool," he told me. But what is still needed "is more research funding in order to get academic labs involved instead of clinicians trying to make a living." Even so, all over America athletes have been quietly training their brains. Almost none will talk about it.

I asked the premier manufacturer of the equipment why. "They don't want their competitors to know they do it," Larry Klein, cofounder of Thought Technology in Montreal, told me. "Because then they would do it too, and take away their advantage." By some estimates there are thousands of neurofeedback practitioners in North America. Many treat epilepsy and attention deficit disorder (sometimes covered by major insurers), while others devote at least part of their practices to improving clients' sports, artistic, or business skills.

  [Back] - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - [Next]

Is this publication helpful to you?

Results: