What Is Brain Training?

Your brain is where mind and body come together. Just as you can train your body to build stamina, strength or flexibility, so you can train your brain.

For thousands of years, people have used meditation and prayer to change the brain by training the mind. For the past 50 years, though, biofeedback technology has made a much faster and easier option possible: Change the mind by training the brain directly!

When you give your brain real-time information about its energy levels (a process called neurofeedback), you can teach it to calm down or speed up, to shift more smoothly and become more efficient.

Just as body weight and metabolism are stable around certain “set-points,” so is your brain. Neurofeedback moves your brain from one set-point to another, so changes tend to last.

What Is Being Trained?

Like your heart, your brain operates with rhythmic pulses of electricity. Each level of energy has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Slow pulses (Creative/Intuitive)—you are thinking or dreaming inside your head, out of contact with your environment, using images rather than words, and tending to leap to answers rather than going through steps. Being stuck here, you may have attention or learning problems or be depressed.

Fast pulses (Logical/Rational)—processing with words and using steps and sequences, you may be internally or externally focused. Being stuck here, you may be obsessive, compulsive, addictive or anxious.

Middle speeds (Zone states)—these are pure awareness states. They include peak states in sports or performance, the ability to do things in auto-pilot, mental stillness, physical relaxation and presence in the moment. Being stuck here, you may tend to drift through tasks and appear unmotivated.

Brain Training equipment, like a pulse meter used in aerobic exercise, shows you the pulse rate of your brain, so you can tell when you are speeding it up or slowing it down.

What Can I Change?

Different types of neurofeedback training in different areas of the brain can help you:

• Strengthen attention, focus, learning, memory, creativity and intuition;
• Gain greater control of behavior, emotions, and racing thoughts;
• Brighten and stabilize mood and deal with past traumatic experience;
• Improve sleep, appetite and other physical functions;
• Overcome chronic pain and fatigue conditions;
• Rehabilitate head injuries, seizure activity, migraines and irritable bowel;
• Improve your ability to stay in “the zone” and perform at your peak.

What Happens during Brain Training?

Brain training equipment picks up information from your scalp about how fast or slow your brain is pulsing and sends this information to a computer.

Brain training software selects specific speeds you want to increase or decrease, sets targets for each and provides you with visual or auditory biofeedback to tell you when you have met your goals—even for an instant.

The biofeedback may take the form of music or video or games that start and stop depending on whether or not your brain is hitting its targets.

Brain Training doesn’t teach tricks or techniques. Your brain changes itself. You don’t have to “think about” it or “try”. Your brain gets the feedback when you pay attention to it and moves in the desired direction. Here at The Learning Curve, we offer you the biofeedback equipment, software, and training to get the neurofeedback results you want.

What Will I Learn?

Ideally we want our brains to be able to shift from slow to fast states smoothly and easily and stay in each as long as desired.

Most of us develop energy “habits” and get stuck at one particular speed. We live with its strengths and limitations.

Brain Training doesn’t change personality. It allows you to shift energy levels and maintain them as you wish. These changes carry over into your daily life. A neurofeedback home training program or biofeedback therapy can make this happen.

Learn more about brain patterns.
Learn more about Assessing your own Brain.
Check out the bibliography, abstracts and articles at ISNR.