Posts tagged neurofeedback
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Training brain patterns of empathy using functional brain imaging
An unprecedented research conducted by a group of neuroscientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to train brain patterns associated with empathic feelings – more specifically, tenderness. The research showed that volunteers who received neurofeedback about their own brain activity patterns whilst being scanned inside a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) machine were able to change brain network function of areas related to tenderness and affection felt toward loved ones. These significant findings could open new possibilities for treatment of clinical situations, such as antisocial personality disorder and postpartum depression.
In Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner”, based on the science fiction book ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ by Philip K. Dick, empathy-detection devices are employed to measure tenderness or affection emotions felt toward others (called “affiliative” emotions). Despite recent advances in neurobiology and neurotechnology, it is unknown whether brain signatures of affiliative emotions can be decoded and voluntarily modulated.
The article entitled “Voluntary enhancement of neural signatures of affiliative emotion using fMRI neurofeedback” published in PLOS ONE is the first study to demonstrate through a neurotechnology tool, real-time neurofeedback using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the possibility to help the induction of empathic brain states.
The authors conducted this research at the D’Or Institute for Research and Education where a sophisticated computational tool was designed and used to allow the participants to modulate their own brain activity related to affiliative emotions and enhance this activity. This method employed pattern-detection algorithms, called “support vector machines” to classify complex activity patterns arising simultaneously from tenths of thousands of voxels (the 3-D equivalent of pixels) inside the participants’ brains.
Volunteers who received real time information of their ongoing neural activity could change brain network function among connected areas related to tenderness and affection felt toward loved ones, while the control group who performed the same fMRI task without neurofeedback did not show such improvement.
Thus, it was demonstrated that those who received a “real” feedback were able to “train” specific brain areas related to the experience of affiliative emotions that are key for empathy. These findings can lead the way to new opportunities to investigate the use of neurofeedback in conditions associated with reduced empathy and affiliative feelings, such as antisocial personality disorders and post-partum depression.
The authors point out that this study may represent a step towards the construction of the ‘empathy box’, an empathy-enhancing machine described by Philip K. Dick’s novel.
Training the Brain to Focus
About one in 10 school children suffers from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Linked to measurable differences in children’s brain structures and brain waves, ADHD can have dire effects on children’s academic achievements and lead to disrupted classrooms.
The CDC reports that as many as 3 million American elementary school children now take medications to control their symptoms. But these drugs don’t work for everyone. Worse, their potential side effects can have serious consequences for kids who also have heart conditions, eating or digestive problems or mood disorders such as depression.
In a recent study, Naomi J. Steiner, director of the CATS Project (Computer Attention Training in Schools for children with ADHD) at Tufts Medical Center, and her colleagues found that computer-based attention-training exercises significantly improved the ability of kids with ADHD to focus and pay attention.
The team tested two kinds of computer training systems. The first, computer cognitive attention training, uses computerized brain exercises to strengthen key mental skills such as short-term memory, eye-hand coordination and visual processing through a series of game-like activities. The second, neurofeedback, measures children’s brain waves in real time and provides visual and auditory feedback that can help them harness their ability to focus. The researchers found that both systems ameliorated the symptoms of ADHD, with neurofeedback outperforming computer cognitive attention training.
What’s more, the team found that the effect lasted months after the computer-based training sessions ended. The results of the large-scale clinical trial, published earlier this year in the journal Pediatrics, bolster the positive findings Steiner and her colleagues saw in a pilot study they conducted previously.
That’s encouraging news, because these therapies—some of which are commercially available to the public and many of which have been adopted by school systems in every state—aren’t yet covered by health insurance policies, nor will they be without a data showing their efficacy. Steiner’s body of research is one more step down that road. (See the story “Your Brain on Video Games.”)
(Image: Shutterstock)
Training your brain using neurofeedback
A new brain-imaging technique enables people to ‘watch’ their own brain activity in real time and to control or adjust function in pre-determined brain regions. The study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro, McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre, published in NeuroImage, is the first to demonstrate that magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be used as a potential therapeutic tool to control and train specific targeted brain regions. This advanced brain-imaging technology has important clinical applications for numerous neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions.
MEG is a non-invasive imaging technology that measures magnetic fields generated by nerve cell circuits in the brain. MEG captures these tiny magnetic fields with remarkable accuracy and has unrivaled time resolution - a millisecond time scale across the entire brain. “This means you can observe your own brain activity as it happens,” says Dr. Sylvain Baillet, acting Director of the Brain Imaging Centre at The Neuro and lead investigator on the study. “We can use MEG for neurofeedback – a process by which people can see on-going physiological information that they aren’t usually aware of, in this case, their own brain activity, and use that information to train themselves to self-regulate. Our ultimate hope and aim is to enable patients to train specific regions of their own brain, in a way that relates to their particular condition. For example neurofeedback can be used by people with epilepsy so that they could train to modify brain activity in order to avoid a seizure.”
In this proof of concept study, participants had nine sessions in the MEG and used neurofeedback to reach a specific target. The target was to look at a coloured disc on a display screen and find their own strategy to change the disc’s colour from dark red to bright yellow white, and to maintain that bright colour for as long as possible. The disc colour was indexed on a very specific aspect of their ongoing brain activity: the researchers had set it up so that the experiment was accessing predefined regions of the motor cortex in the participants’ brain. The colour presented was changing according to a predefined combination of slow and faster brain activity within these regions. This was possible because the researchers combined MEG with MRI, which provides information on the brain’s structures, known as magnetic source imaging (MSI).
“The remarkable thing is that with each training session, the participants were able to reach the target aim faster, even though we were raising the bar for the target objective in each session, the way you raise the bar each time in a high jump competition. These results showed that participants were successfully using neurofeedback to alter their pattern of brain activity according to a predefined objective in specific regions of their brain’s motor cortex, without moving any body part. This demonstrates that MEG source imaging can provide brain region-specific real time neurofeedback and that longitudinal neurofeedback training is possible with this technique.”
These findings pave the way for MEG as an innovative therapeutic approach for treating patients. To date, work with epilepsy patients has shown the most promise but there is great potential to use MEG to investigate other neurological syndromes and neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g., stroke, dementia, movement disorders, chronic depression, etc). MEG has potential to reveal dynamics of brain activity involved in perception, cognition and behaviour: it has provided unique insight on brain functions (language, motor control, visual and auditory perception, etc.) and dysfunctions (movement disorders, tinnitus, chronic pain, dementia, etc.).
Dr. Baillet and his team are collaborating presently with Prof. Isabelle Peretz at Université de Montréal to use this technique with people that have amusia, a disorder that makes them unable to process musical pitch. It is hypothesized that amusia results from poor connectivity between the auditory cortex and prefrontal regions in the brain. In an ongoing study, the team is measuring the intensity of functional connectivity between these brain regions in amusic patients and aged-matched healthy controls. Using MEG-neurofeedback, they hope to take advantage of the brain’s plasticity to reinforce the functional connectivity between the target brain regions. If the approach demonstrates an improvement in pitch discrimination in participants, that will demonstrate the clinical and rehabilitative applications of this approach. The baseline measurements have been taken already, and the training sessions will take place over this year.
(Source: mcgill.ca)
Learning to control brain activity improves visual sensitivity
Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL used non-invasive, real-time brain imaging that enabled participants to watch their own brain activity on a screen, a technique known as neurofeedback. During the training phase, they were asked to try to increase activity in the area of the brain that processes visual information, the visual cortex, by imagining images and observing how their brains responded.
After the training phase, the participants’ visual perception was tested using a new task that required them to detect very subtle changes in the contrast of an image. When they were asked to repeat this task while clamping brain activity in the visual cortex at high levels, those who had successfully learned to control their brain activity could improve their ability to detect even very small changes in contrast.
This improved performance was only observed when participants were exercising control over their brain activity.
Lead author Dr Frank Scharnowski, who is now based at the University of Geneva, explains: “We’ve shown that we can train people to manipulate their own brain activity and improve their visual sensitivity, without surgery and without drugs.”
In the past, researchers have used recordings of electrical activity in the brain to train people on various tasks, including cutting their reaction times, altering their emotional responses and even improving their musical performance. In this study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to provide the volunteers with real-time feedback on brain activity. The advantage of this technique is that you can see exactly where in the brain the training is having an effect, so you can target the training to particular brain areas that are responsible for specific tasks.
"The next step is to test this approach in the clinic to see whether we can offer any benefit to patients, for example to stroke patients who may have problems with perception, even though there is no damage to their vision," adds Dr Scharnowski.
Brainwave Training Boosts Network for Cognitive Control and Predicts Mind Wandering
A breakthrough study conducted in Canada has found that training of the well-known brainwave in humans, the alpha rhythm, enhances a brain network responsible for cognitive-control which correlates with reductions in mind-wandering. The training technique, termed neurofeedback, is being considered as a promising method for restoring brain function in mental disorders. Using several neuroimaging methods, a team of researchers working at the University of Western Ontario have now uncovered that functional changes within a key brain network occur directly after a 30-minute session of noninvasive, neural-based training. Dysfunction of this cognitive-control network has previously been implicated in a range of brain disorders including attentional deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.