Video Games and Neurofeedback
Now to the actual training. Sensors are attached to your head. You sit in front of a video screen and watch a video game with perhaps a car at its center. You are instructed to concentrate, and the car starts moving. It moves over all sorts of terrains, up and down hills, in and around corners. It goes faster, crashes into other cars.
Sherlin explains that the car represents when you are producing the correct electrical activity. When you do, the car will move forward. If you are distracted, the car will stop. “Your job is to be an observer,” Sherlin says. “When the car is moving, what is that like? What are you doing? What is the strategy that got you there? What is the thought process? What is the emotion? What does it feel like when you are successful, compared to when you’re not?”
He says that in the beginning you’re just an observer and have no idea. “We’re putting things in your awareness you never knew existed.” After a couple of sessions, however, you begin to be aware of the strategies you use to make the car go … perhaps “visualization techniques, maybe more cognitive, you might remember a particular circumstance, it’s like [a professional football player shared recently], ‘When I’m on the line and listening to the quarterback’s signals.’ ” You imagine the cognitive mental strategy you utilize to make that happen, and by recreating that experience over and over to make the car move forward, you are creating and strengthening a certain brain state.
What’s really going on here is based on two principles that have been around for decades: operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Remember B.F. Skinner’s mouse? Through repetitive experience, the mouse learned that when a light came on, and it pressed a button, it was given a treat. Same concept with Neurotopia and human beings, except it’s done with brainwaves. “When they produce the brain activity … that is most conducive to being in the state we want, when their brain shifts, we give them a reward. That reward is in the form of a visualization of a video game.
When the screen moves — when the spaceship flies, the ball goes back and forth, whatever the feedback is — they know that they did the right thing. They know that was a reward for them and they know they have to reproduce that correct process. And so what’s happening … We have them do the training, we make it more challenging, so we’re gradually nudging that brain activity into a stronger position, and they begin to recognize it. That’s the process of operant conditioning. You do something, I give you a reward. You try to figure out what you did for the reward and try to replicate it.”
Classical conditioning puts the training into action. Sherlin explains, “Okay, now you know how to focus … How does that apply to your serves [in tennis]? So you begin to carry this over, pairing these two things together. When I’m focused, I’m more accurate. When I’m more relaxed and my brain is deactivated, I can focus on the play I’m in, rather than the play two times ago. What did it feel like … let me try to recreate that brain state. There comes a time when you don’t think, the brain has that capability. It just happens.”
In 2002, Gordon A. Uehling III, a 40-year-old former tennis professional, established Courtsense Tennis Academy in Tenafly, New Jersey. This is a multi-site tennis and health complex with state-of-the-art everything. One of the arms of the complex is the Magnus training center, which offers clients a three-dimensional platform of fitness training, metabolic (nutritional) function, and brain training.
Magnus is one of three centers in the United States to offer Neurotopia brain training. Eric Jon Maiss, a certified personal trainer and performance-enhancement specialist, is Magnus’s general manager. Both Uehling and Maiss are big fans of Neurotopia. “It is like using a stethoscope on the brain,” says Uehling. “The training is not invasive. There are no drugs. The brain adapts to the stimulus in a case of mind over matter. [In fact,] numerous studies on the clinical side indicate that neurofeedback is more effective than medication on some disorders, like ADHD. This has more permanence.”
Magnus and Neurotopia agree that everybody’s brain and body are different and that training should be tailored to the individual, which means constantly evolving. The Magnus slogan, If we can measure it, we can train it, is the backbone of the holistic approach they apply to training an individual’s fitness, metabolic, and brain function. A teaching pro for 15 years,
Uehling notes that teaching players how to move their feet, swing, transfer weight is one thing, but it is another thing entirely teaching athletes how to use their minds. “When it comes to learning how to focus,” he says, “Neurotopia really helps.” Having spent a lot of time meditating in the mountains of Idaho and teaching in Asia, Uehling believes that Neurotopia is a “modern version of meditating. Getting immediate feedback on how much you [are] in the present moment. How much were you focused? Or thinking about the past, focusing on that error.”
Maiss notes how clients are often surprised by the results of the QEEG. “Many times, they don’t realize where the strengths or weaknesses exist in their brain.” He likens it to someone struggling with math in school, not knowing that suboptimal brainwaves, which they are fighting, could be the source of that problem. “They wouldn’t know that,” says Maiss, “and they wouldn’t know they could change it through training. Neurotopia provides the real picture and a way to make it better.”
Neurotopia is evolving quickly. With a convenient headset, dry sensors and mobile app, the training can travel with athletes, even onto the field or place of sport. Of course, it’s always good to have trainers and teachers like Uehling and Maiss on hand to help put together a performance-training strategy and monitor growth with challenges. “Ultimately,” says Sherlin, “five years from now, we won’t know where it will be. It will be in multiple domains, classrooms, home, businesses. The potential and opportunities are unlimited.”
