More than a century has passed since the discovery of ADHD and autism. Since then, people have come to understand and find different kinds of treatments for them. In this episode, we look at neurofeedback and how it has been used in the treatment of ADHD. Therapist, Adam Thompson, uses this method on his clients diagnosed with ADHD, PTSD, and autism. He shares the results of the tests he’s done and the benefits his clients have enjoyed after going through the procedure. Adam explains in layman’s terms how neurofeedback assists in these treatments to put your mind at ease.
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Neurofeedback And Its Use In Treating ADHD And Autism With Adam Thompson
How did you get introduced to neurofeedback?
I got introduced to neurofeedback because I heard it was something that helps with ADD. It’s something I’ve grown up with. It’s something that gave me a horrible time in school. I heard about some of the success stories with mostly younger kids whose parents could see big turnarounds with them. I went and did it as a client. After getting my license, I bought the equipment and trained myself. Neurofeedback works in a couple of different ways. You can disentrain something or you can entrain something new. When you have a mental or emotional problem, something in your head is dysregulated in some way. Things are out of balance and they’re out of sync. The amount of energy your brain is expanding isn’t being allocated in the best way. You can fix that. I want to handout, most of the processes in the brain are electrical, more than 90% of them. There are all these chemical processes going on all the time and you got to get those chemical processes right. The overall functioning tends to be heavily electrical. Neurofeedback is using various different tools and computer programs that can regulate that electrical work.
The disentrainment is where you mix up what’s going on and you disrupt what’s happening. You can use it through light, through sound or through electromagnetic frequencies to breakout patterns you have. My favorite example is PTSD. Your brain gets stuck in these thoughts, these emergency fight or flight responses. Sometimes, it stays there for years. Using electromagnetic frequencies, we can break up those patterns. There are some high data frequencies that are generated through various parts of the brain. It might be in the amygdala, the hippocampus to process these memories. You can break that up. The brain is free to pick up its old patterning. I have one device that only does disentrains things. You send a little electromagnetic frequency into the brain that’s customized to that person’s signal. It’s like what the person’s brain is already doing. The brain has to follow that new signal and it disrupts things. In the process of dealing with that disruption, it smoothens things out. The brain can optimize its process. It’s useful for ADD, anxiety, and a few other things. It tends to work quite well for those three disorders.
You can entrain, which is where you put an electrode on the scalp, one or four, a whole EEG cap full of electrodes. There’s nineteen of them in the cap. You tell the brain what you want it to do. You tell the computer system what you want the brain to do, “I want the two hemispheres of the brain on this spot to function in a similar way on the alpha frequency.” When the brain does that, the computer gives us some feedback. It makes a sound or if you’re watching the video will get brighter. That’s the feedback part of neurofeedback. That’s operant conditioning. You’re watching something and your brain is subconsciously picking up on all these old signals. When you do it for twenty minutes, this happens over and over, the brain picks up. I’m getting the signal every time I do this. Your brain starts naturally doing more of that. It works incredibly well. We pick it up through any of our senses and then we entrain it. The old school neurofeedback is the entraining part. It’s been in service for decades. Mostly it’s about rewarding certain frequencies. If you want more alpha frequencies, you train those up. If you want less data frequencies, you train those down. Does that all make sense?
Yes, it does. You mentioned the operant conditioning and the rewarding. I know the brain operates chemical and electrical. I imagine all these electrical circuits and your software or your equipment is interacting with that. It’s either in disentraining. It’s either disrupting the natural circuitry. Is that accurate?
Yes.
It’s breaking that natural pattern and then the entraining, it’s rewarding a pattern that’s beneficial. How does it reward?
The reward comes through the computer. There are devices we have where the hardware sends a signal to your brain. That’s one way of doing it. The reward comes through the computer, not to the equipment we use. It comes through the monitor and through the speakers. Usually, I will have people watch a movie. The movie will get brighter whenever the reward happens. Your mind wants it to get brighter. It’s more comfortable that way. Your brain picks up on it. There are a few dozen different ways to administer the reward. People have made all these creative software. Kids will play with what feels like a video game, the little boats or the little air crafts will shoot forward whenever you get the reward.
When you have a mental or emotional problem, something in your head is dysregulated in some way. Things are out of balance and out of sync. Click To TweetIt’s the kids watching and waiting for the boat to shoot forward. Every time you do that, your brain gets what it wants. The most effective way I know is to hear a sound because it’s precisely timed with the reward. I’m not sure if it makes a huge difference but it’s a good way to go. Ideally, if I’m treating someone with Attention Deficit Disorder, if they’re up for it, it’s good to allow them to sit and be bored. That’s when the ADD turns on and you train them in that space. They won’t watch a movie. They’ll sit and stare at the screen and they’ll listen to a sound. Maybe it’s a sound of an instrument or a bell. It goes off whenever the brain happens to line up with that pattern that you want.
It doesn’t sound like it’s negative at all.
It’s all positive feedback and positive reinforcement.
You mentioned that this was a challenge you experienced when you were in a school, where you were able to use neurofeedback.
Yes, every system I’ve bought. I used four different systems. Everyone I’ve bought I used on myself to optimize my performance as much as I could. It’s part of the fun of it, “Let’s see how this one works,” and you do everything yourself. That’s part of the experimentation. You talk to multiple colleagues who talk about their experiences and trying these things on themselves. I have one colleague up in Canada whose son is autistic. He talked several times about things he’s tried to his son, what helped calmed him down, and what’s done this or that. It’s exciting and a great process. People respond differently to it. Generally, you want to say, “Wait until after about ten sessions before you decide. This is what it’s doing for me.” Truth be told, I can feel it working when I do it. When I’m hooked up to the computer, I can feel it doing something.
When I use the LENS System. That stands for Low Energy Neurofeedback System. People usually can feel it right after they get up out of a chair. It’s one of the things I like about that specific system. It’s a quick response. Other people don’t feel anything. Their wife comes back to the session with them and says, “He doesn’t get as mad anymore.” Parents say, “He doesn’t like it when we tell him what to do but he does it. Before, he would throw a tantrum. He still throws a tantrum, but now he does what we tell him to do.” Things like that. Sometimes, it starts affecting your behavior when you don’t even realize it. Other times, you can feel that it’s doing something quickly. It depends on the person, their self-awareness, and their sensitivity level.
Does it depend on age? Do you see a stronger response in younger clients or is it more individual?
It is a little more individual than that. I don’t think I could generalize to age. I generalize more to sensitivity. In the LENS System, we have them fill out a questionnaire that asks questions about their sensitivity level. That gives us an idea of how well they’re going to pick up and notice what it’s doing.
There’s sensitivity level to sounds and light?
That’s one of the questions, yes. Also, the weather’s changing. How sensitive are they to changes in their environments or emotional shifts of various kinds? It’s overall sensitivity. It’s hard to quantify it. It’s a list of rather strange questions that we ask. The people who engineered it say that it tends to help and get an idea. Also, not how well they’ll notice but how rigorous the treatment should be. If they’re sensitive, you don’t want to be rigorous. This particular system, the LENS is one where you are feeding an EMS signal into through the scalp and through the skull into the brain. You only do it for a few seconds. That’s the disruptive one. People have great responses to it. You only do it for a few seconds per spot.
Maybe four or ten seconds in a more extreme one, if somebody’s sensitive, you only do one to five spots on their head or four spots on their head. Whereas if somebody isn’t sensitive, you might do ten to fifteen spots depending on all things. You’d have to do that many spots for them to notice anything. I have one therapy client with a lot of trauma behind her. She’s sensitive to everything and keyed into how she feels. She expresses some of her emotions and her mental state well. She paints a picture. I was never able to do more than one spot for three seconds on her head. That’s all she could handle. Otherwise, it put her into a panic. If I did the one, it started bringing her whole life into focus. It’s amazing to hear her describe that.
The goal was to help her get passed her trauma.
To ease anxiety. It made the trauma work when we’re doing in session smoother or more accessible. When she left my office and went home, all the work we’ve done, she could integrate it and get back to daily life and not have it disrupt things much.
To supplement the therapy and make them effective.
My therapy specialty is trauma. I’m an EMDR therapist. I focus on people with PTSD if possible, people with complex PTSD. If I use something like electromagnetic frequencies, I can get the brain to calm down and handle the treatment better. You can do great trauma treatment without any of neurofeedback. The neurofeedback makes it much smoother on someone. I use it to supplement that treatment. It’s a fun experience. Some people respond differently. This woman did well with that specific system. We tried a different system I have, which creates an electromagnetic frequency. Your little paddles and you put them above the head. They blast these subtle EMS frequencies into the brain. Often, we’ll use alpha and beta frequencies and have someone increase those. Often, we’ll do frequencies, which helps disentrain what’s going on to the brain. She liked that a lot more. That’s what we do on her.
There are some fancy things you can do. The man who invented this has an autistic son. He used one system, the LENS on his son for quite a while. He did everything he could with it. He even altered how the LENS works. He hacked the software and pushed it to its ability. He thought, “My son’s brain doesn’t remember what it was like to not be autistic.” He was born hypoxic. That’s what the real cause of the problem was. He said, “If I can just push his brain to do a little more in a certain direction, then we could get it working better.” He was disentraining things. You can only change things so much by breaking up the patterns. His brain didn’t remember what it was like before it had these bad patterns. He thought, “What if we show him what it’s like and not have these bad patterns by introducing new frequencies?” He made this amplifier that generates GMS frequencies and you can program it to do any frequency you want.
When one thing doesn’t work in one part of the brain, the other parts are compensating for it. Click To TweetIt sounds like this therapy is highly individualized. This is the treatment for all students and all clients with ADHD. You are constantly interacting with the client and giving a feel for what’s helping.
Every session I’ll ask, “How are you doing? How did it feel this time? Is anything changing?” When you change one thing on the way your brain works, it has a minimal changed, but it has an effect on multiple parts of the brain. You’re using all of your brain all the time. These regions in the brain are relying on each other to operate right. The signals get sent all over the place. When one thing doesn’t work in one part of the brain, other parts of the brain are wonderful at compensating for it. You can get a part of your brain cut out and find a way to do what that part of the brain was supposed to be doing. Your brain has found an equilibrium.
It’s working for you because you’ve been doing what you’re doing with it for years. You generate a lot of your emotions in the limbic system which is completely sub-perceptual. It’s all subconscious and it’s automatic. Something happens and you have an emotional reaction to it immediately based on the way you were raised, all you chemical circuitry, all the mental habits you’ve built up, and the filters you have. It happens. You move that situation to your frontal cortex where you decide how you want to see it. You make some choices about what you want to consider in that situation. Even in that process of considering something about the situation and thinking about it a little differently changes your mood about it.
When we do the neurofeedback, it gives someone the ability to step back and regulate on purpose rather than having the brain do it for you. It breaks old habits. You can break the habit of being yourself. With almost all clients, I start with a brain map. I do an EEG recording, where I run it through specialized software that gives me a whole lot of numbers and some color-coded charts of what’s going on in the brain. People will come in with ADD and I’ll look at it, “This isn’t a typical ADD brain naturally looks like.” They have problems and they are dysregulated in certain ways here. The map compares your brain to a database of brains. It compares yours to other people of your gender and your age.
These are all high functioning brains that tend to work well and they come up with an average. The brain is represented. The map is represented with this course and standard deviations from the norm. You can look at the different things that are going on. There are three or four standard deviations from normal and you look at where it’s happening. It’s all about location. Where it’s happening in the brain? What’s going on with the neurophysiology of it? Based on that, you can come up with a protocol to adjust it. That’s when you’re doing the entrainment. If you’re disentraining, you don’t necessarily have to do that map.
The map’s expensive. People charge $800 for it in most cases. Some people charge a little less. I charge less than that. They can be a little expensive. Some people want to try disentraining and see if it breaks the old patterns well enough. If that doesn’t work, then I move on to entraining. Some of the stuff I have does entraining and disentraining at the same time. I mentioned introducing an electrical frequency to this other guy. That was the same thing. If you run an electrical current, which is called a Transcranial Direct Stimulation, you run that through someone’s head. That can break up all the old patterns, or some old patterns. You’re also running a specific frequency through the head.
If someone doesn’t create enough low beta frequency which you need to create in order to focus well enough and they’ve got a lot of dysregulation in a certain area, you can see these low beta frequencies to that area. It will both break up what’s going on the other line, and entrain the brain to create more of those frequencies at that spot. You can do that for a little while and then they do the traditional neurofeedback right afterward which is what I generally like to do. You combine the two and you get some great results.
If you’re doing the entrainment, you’re training the brain to do something new. There is something to be said about not putting the cart for the horse. You can see what’s going on. You can say, “This is not normal. We need to fix this.” If your pediatrician or your specialist says, “There are some autistic patterns here.” The kid is old enough for you to see those patterns. It’s probably not too early. The question is can a kid do the feedback? In some cases, they could, you could find a way to make it work. You have a lot of trouble getting a brain map on a young kid. They make electrode caps that are quite small.
Your clients with ADD and autism, you mentioned you found some success there.
ADD is the thing that’s come out the best regarding the research done on neurofeedback. In most studies, they can get a noticeable difference, even though they’re often trying these different protocols. You personalize it. If I’m treating someone with ADD, I always like to get a brain map to see what’s going on. You have two different attention networks and they cover multiple parts of the brain. People like to say that the frontal cortex is where your attention happens. That’s an overgeneralization of where it happens. You use multiple parts of your cortex to respond to stimuli, notice the key and things that you want to notice, and regulate where your attention goes.
I look at how those systems tend to be working together. If the software says that one of those systems or both of them are far off, I like to put the entire cap on someone’s head and train their attention back to the norm. My niece is a good example of that. I did a treatment on her and I have a map. She has a little trouble with attention. The system that’s off is her anxiety system, the network that regulates anxiety. That’s not ultra-uncommon for people to feel like they can’t pay attention to anything. It’s because of an emotional problem or something else that’s pulling them off. It’s not the attention network themselves.
Generalizing it, it’s half to two-thirds of people with true ADD, they produce too many fadeaways. Their brain is operating on a slower frequency. It works well to train those slow frequency down to increase them a little. Train the brain to produce more low beta frequencies where you do your focusing. You do that in specific places. The place matters more than the frequency. You try to speed it up and try to get certain areas working well together. Usually, I will use the electromagnetic frequency and the direct current stimulation to train the new patterns. We use that operate conditioning to get to stick. I also have another device that I like. It’s not neurofeedback. It’s a neurotherapy device where you try and clap within a certain rhythm. This operates and tells you how close you are to the beat. It’s called an interactive metronome. It does an incredible thing.
A man did some research and he found that kids who could hit precisely on a beat and read earlier. He found they had a better working memory, they did better in school in general, and they tended to have a better attention span. He then found out that you can train that same tendency. You can train them to be able to clap to a beat more precisely and they could take up some of those things. They’ve done more research on kids who do after school programs. The ones who do music programs do better scholastically across the board. They have shown better improvement than kids who play sports. That’s despite the fact that sports are great for you and you have a lot of benefits from doing that. Someone got a hold of this research and created the interactive metronome where you train yourself to tap on a beat. The computer tells you within a millisecond how close you are to that beat, whether you’re early or late on every beat. You get automatic feedback. You sit and do it for half an hour. You use your hands and use your feet. You use one hand versus the other. You use both hands and a foot. You train your brain to be more precise in a pattern. It tends to improve people’s attention span quite a bit.
It doesn’t train your cerebral cortex. It trains your cerebellum. This is more information than the readers are looking for. When you do neurofeedback, you’re training parameter cells in the brain. You’re not training all the neurons, just a specific lineup of cells that will show you generally what’s happening. Your cerebellum can’t be trained that way. It has a lot of neurons in it, but it doesn’t have parameter cells lined up in the way your cortex does. You can’t get an EEG reading on what the cerebellum is doing. Your cerebellum has more neurons in it than the rest of your body put together. It’s packed full of neurons. Most of the frequencies that you get through your brain, the feedback, and the input get passed through the cerebellum at some point. It does a lot of information processing. It does a lot of resource regulating. When you get your cerebellum and when you train it to precisely clap on a beat, you are able to more efficiently rally resources in your brain, including resources you need for attention.
I highly recommend the information you have on your website is informational. It helps. It’s well done.
Thank you. I try to get as much in there. I try to get as many tools as I can. When you hear some, it works well. It’s hard for me to say, “What I’ve got is working. I’ll try this.” I have to try that new thing and cover as many bases as I can. People pay quite a bit of money. It’s their whole lives hanging in the balance. It’s their brain. They want to get this to work better. When you find something that on its own has a big impact on someone, you got to look into it. You got to try it out. Some people use this interactive metronome with ADD or sometimes with autism and have good results. I tack it on the end of the session. When people come in, they’ll often be in the office for an hour and a half with me because I’m doing multiple different things to try and regulate the system.
When you find something that on its own has a big impact on someone, you got to look into it and try it out. Click To TweetHow do parents contact you?
People can call. I use my cell phone for my private practice. Call the number that’s on the website and go from there.
Do you have any advice for parents? Is earlier treatment more effective?
If you’re certain there’s a problem, I would say it is. You’re making little adjustments in how the overall brain works but those little adjustments change your life trajectory a few degrees. You know the analogy in California, if you’re a couple of degrees off, you missed Hawaii and you hit Indonesia, if you change that, the earlier the better. Kids who get treatments are able to enjoy school a little more, which enables them to do better, enables them to build confidence, enjoy their social life, and build relationships a little better. Everything gets affected to some degree. If you know there’s a problem, it’s worth looking into getting it fixed.
Early treatment is always more effective.
I would think so.
Thank you so much, Adam. This has been informative.
You’re welcome. It’s been good to talk to you. I appreciate it.
About Adam Thompson
Adam Thompson, a therapist based in Orem, Utah, talks about how he uses neurofeedback in his practice and how it can help clients with ADHD and Autism.
Visit his website advancedneurofeedback.org