26 Dec The wonders of Electrostimulation for reprogramming your brain quickly and easily

It’s that time of the year when we, at the Centre for Applied Neuroscience in Business, sit down and take stock of what we learned over the last year and pass our treasures on to all of you.

What a fantastic year 2013 was for us! It was the year we discovered Electrostimulation and some pretty amazing new applications for Neuroplasticity.

If you had told us in early January of 2013 that:

• We would meet and successfully treat a young man who had been suffering six years of ‘clinical depression’, and do it in the space of a few weeks;
• We would stumble upon the field of electrostimulation, a science that has been practiced since the time of the Egyptian Pharos and is now making its way into Third Millennium prime time;
• We could significantly improve the way our minds work in the space of a few months;
• We would discover how to easily remove chronic pain
• We would learn that it is now possible to rebuild an individual’s concussed brain using a new fancy piece of software and cognitive neurofeedback;

we would have been skeptical to say the least.  But these things all happened, and a whole lot more.

To start with, did you know that if you were to do an MRI brain scan on yourself, you would see different parts of your brain ‘light up’ for the different physical actions you were taking or the emotional feelings you were experiencing?  Did you know that neuroscientists have almost completely mapped those areas of the brain (http://www.fmriconsulting.com/brodmann/Introduction.html) and that we now know how to stimulate each area to produce a desired result (like changing a bad habit, for example, or repairing an ailing part of the body)?

Of course, we have known for a long time that the signals sent and received by the brain are electrical in nature.  It is no wonder, therefore, that so much research has been done in the last century to learn how to modify these electrical signals to change unhealthy behaviour patterns and to train the brain to reprogram itself to correct what are sometimes called “deficits” in neuroscience.

In the course of our continuing research into new ways to help our clients improve and accelerate the reprogramming of their brain, we came across a centuries-old technology called ‘transcranial Direct Current Stimulation’ (tDCS) that has been rediscovered and readapted to our modern world’s technologies.

tDCS is the art and science of passing extremely weak electric currents through the brain.  Yes, we know, it conjures up images of Electro Convulsive Shock Therapy, doesn’t it?   But it is not.  tDCS is very safe and very different than you may initially imagine.  And it is not new.  Some 200 years ago, this remarkable modality was called Faradisation.

Dr. David Siever wrote this article on tDCS http://mindalive.com/default/assets/File/tDCS%20Neuroconnections%20article.pdf to explain the history of tDCS and how it is used today.  Dr. Siever is a prodigious Canadian Neuroplastician, a pioneer and world expert in the field of brain communication, and the inventor of the best tDCS unit on the market.

To illustrate the notion that you don’t have to be sick to get better, Dr. Vince Clark uses a tDCS montage in this video to enhance visual acuity and awareness, one of many possible uses and enhancements available with tDCS.

While researching the applicability of tDCS, we came across a similar technology called ‘Cranial Electro Stimulation’ (CES) that uses Alternating Current (rather than Direct Current used in tDCS) in the hundreds of millionths of an amp range (exceedingly faint).

CES is very, very powerful and safe.  It was pioneered by a group of brilliant Russian scientists about 100 years ago who passed a very faint alternating current through the whole head and brainstem using ear-clip electrodes.  This faint alternating current has an analgesic and ‘de-stressing’ effect on the brain.  In just a few minutes, you start to relax and decompress, and you feel like an enormous weight has been lifted from your shoulders.

Incidentally, the US Army Veterans Affairs uses CES to help relieve Shell Shock and PTSD in their veterans.

As we extended our research on CES, we also learned about ‘Micro Electric Therapy’ (MET).  MET can ‘turn off’ or ‘turn down’ pain proprioceptors in the body. For more information on MET, please read this instructive article and tutorial by Dr. Daniel Kirsch here: https://www.biof.com/onlinestore/alpha/pdf/kirsch-MET.pdf

To help us make sense of what we were learning about Electrostimulation, we read the remarkable book “The Body Electric” by Dr. Robert Becker.  Dr. Becker was a distinguished medical doctor, healer and researcher in electrophysiology/electromedicine, and a former orthopedic surgeon for the US Army Veterans Affairs. His thoughts on the electrical nature of cellular regeneration have helped us get a better grasp on this new (to us) field of Electrostimulation.

Far more people contacted us in 2013 than 2012 about Applied Neuroplasticity and Brain Reprogramming. People are waking up to the idea of applying the Neuroscience of Brain Reprogramming to their own lives and businesses.

One young man contacted us to see if Neuroplasticity could help him rebuild his brain and his life after a horrible car accident three years earlier that damaged several key functional areas of his brain. Concussion is a terrible thing.  More people today are realising the shocking personal cost of head injuries.  As a result, there is a quickly developing network of neuropsychological practitioners worldwide who regularly exchange best practices in Neuroplasticity.  It was through this network that we were introduced to LORETA neurofeedback.

LORETA uses the output from a standard 20-electrode EEG ‘cap’ and in real time computes the location of electrical lesions in the brain, like having a continuous 3D X-ray of the brain.  This lesional information is fed back to the brain so that the brain can practice rewiring itself back together.  LORETA provides instant feedback to the brain on its performance so it is able to develop new connections in the lesional location. Imagine playing videos games with your brain to rebuild the broken circuitry.  That’s what LORETA does.

That’s amazing!!  That’s Neuroplasticity in action.

If you have not yet done so, promise yourself that you will read Dr. Norman Doidge’s extraordinary book “The Brain that Changes Itself”.  You will discover that the brain is far from fixed and can easily and quickly be encouraged to rewire itself.  We’re talking weeks, not years.

If the idea of substantially improving your brain functions excites you, there is no finer book on the shelves today than Dr. Barbara Arrowsmith-Young’s frame- breaking “The Woman Who Changed Her Brain”. Barbara Arrowsmith was born with severely debilitating brain defects and her story is one of implacable courage and determination.  You can see Dr. Arrowsmith briefly describe her discovery that she could and did rebuild her brain in this instructive video.

If you would like to know more about any of these new technologies, drop us a line and we will be happy to share what we have learned with you.