The wurster, the better

It’s really very difficult for me to watch our daughter go through this re-learning phase of her recovery. She gets into everything and doesn’t always listen to us. We are now trying to contact individuals who can provide neuro-reorg services. Sarge is one and The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential is another. Our NFB professional goes along with my thinking that this is important at this stage in the game. Ans so we will try. Unfortunately, none of the other professionals responded to my question to them about this.

Tabitha is on her way to Paris as I write. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her except to yell up the stairs “have a good time”, because I was taking care of her sister who seems to have continual accidents. Nothing ever unfolds as we would like it to. Then I got angry at my wife and daughter because I was upset. I should have realized then, as I do now, that all you can do is what you can do. Wish for nothing and you won’t be disappointed.

It’s been almost a week that I’ve had this cold. It’s really got me down and not feeling much like doing anything. Our water heater also dragged me down last week by breaking. A lot of work getting the water out and drying out the carpets. Luckily my neighbor is a plumber and installed a new water heater that evening. Thanks, Jim. I probably should have called out service company with whom we have a contract, but didn’t even think about that.

I also started helping someone with setting up/designing their forum. He is an interesting guy and I seem to have an affinity for him and what he is doing. Perhaps that’s why I volunteered to help.

We had our last IEP review meeting at Elwyn last week and they know Alicia will be leaving for another placement starting this summer. They were very helpful in the transition and in reinforcing what the school district needs to provide for our daughter (the school district representative mentioned 2 things that our advocate jumped on along with the Elwyn staff). We shall see how this goes over the next week or so. Our daughter really does need that support that seems not to be needed.

Our continuing efforts with biofeedback are not doing well at times. I can’t figure out why. Our daughter takes off the headband sometimes once or many times during the session of 15 to 20 minutes. She doesn’t seem to understand any type of consequence that we might tell her about. This behavior is not something new but is one that os continuing. We are trying to identify a cause to help remedy it.

And now that we have a settlement date of June 27 for my Mom’s house, we need to get everything out and clean it up in only a few short weeks. Gotta start now, at least on what we will be taking from the house.

There are two HEG systems of which I’m aware: nIR (near infrared) and pIR (passive infrared.) Both measure and feedback changes in infrared temperature, which is seen as a measure of metabolic activity. The idea is that the brain can learn to increase metabolic capacity by increasing perfusion of blood into the tissues of the cortex and/or improving the amount of oxygen in that blood. So HEG is primarily oriented toward making it possible for neurons to speed up their firing rates and sustain them for longer periods.

PIR, developed by Jeff Carmen, is basically an infrared thermometer that is held over Fpz in the center of the forehead. It was originally used for Dr. Carmen’s work with migraines, but its use has expanded to cover a wide range of problems.

NIR, developed by Hershel Toomim, includes a blinking red LED, which is held against the skin of the forehead by a headband. The idea is that this light travels through the skin and skull, hits the surface of the brain and, depending on how much red (oxygenated) blood is present, bounces back to be picked up by a sensor on the headband. Training involves a ratio and infrared temperature. It was originally developed as a training approach for attention and focus, though it too has been expanded to many other uses.

There are two main benefits of HEG from my point of view:
1. It works on an area of the brain (the prefrontal cortex), which is both the main executive center of the cortex and is particularly difficult to train with EEG because of the eye and muscle artifact that interferes with brain electrical signals.
2, Unlike EEG, which has a fairly steep learning curve to get started and should be done based on a brain-based assessment, HEG is very easy to learn and generally doesn’t require an assessment.

HEG is generally limited to training the forehead area where there is no hair, though it reputedly can be used in other areas if there is no hair or the hair is light-colored, not too dense and is parted. I’ve never been too clear on how the headbands would actually work outside the forehead area. It is reported that HEG can be trained optimally only once every 4 days. It is also important that it not be overtrained (especially in terms of length of training in a given session. Most suggestions are that it begin with about 10 minutes per session early in training and slowly work up to 30 minutes per session as the client can sustain it.

According to some people who have used both in an organized way, one of the differences is that pIR tends to increase frontal coherences, while nIR tends to reduce it. PIR is generally trained in one site for the entire training period. NIR is usually trained in 3 different sites, splitting the session into thirds.

Hope this is helpful. I’m sure there are others who use HEG who will add to this answer.

Question: Is infrared thermometer same as a (sensitive) digital thermometer ?

I guess if you could find a sensitive digital infrared thermometer that could send a continuous stream of data to the computer, it might be the same. But infrared temperature is not the same as absolute temperature. Infrared is measuring the heat emitted from a source usually from a distance. It is a better measure of metabolic activity. If you measure your body’s temperature with a standard (even very sensitive) thermometer, it will be quite stable, regardless of whether you are running or lying down, thinking or sleeping. The infrared thermometer would show changes in output (depending on what you were measuring) for these various different states.

–
Peter Van Deusen
pvdtlc@gmail.com
http://www.brain-trainer.com
305/433-3160
The Learning Curve, Inc.

Our daughter had been off all medications except for adderrall for a while (perhaps 6 weeks or so). She was doing quite well, except for some new behaviors, like ripping paper. But she seemed to be progressing better than she ever had. She had become more verbal and talking with us ever so slightly. That is great.

The biofeedback sessions have been tricky though. At times, she takes off the headband quite frequently. It started only with me doing the sessions, but then happened with the professional we go to once a week. We don’t know why.

The psychiatrist suggested she be put on abilify and so that started yesterday. Of course, it will be monitored. I really need to look into it as my wife has done.

Also, a new school placement is in the future to help her as best we can in the last year of her education.

It’s been a week since we were told by mother nature there would be more winter to come. But, guess what. We haven’t had winter yet. It’s been amazingly mild.

Last weekend, I went to a climate change conference at Ursinus College. It was a nice experience. I learned a lot and met some new friends. On Sunday, I visited a solar townhome and learned a lot more. My buddy K has not talked to me all in a week. Hmmm!

This past week has been draining on me because of my daughter’s behaviors at home. She has been in constant pain (I guess) from not wanting to go to the bathroom. She screams in pain one second and then is laughing in the next. I don’t know how Maria handles this.

I’ve been working with my Drupal site and learning. There were 2 things that I wanted to do before I felt real comfortable that the site was working well enough for members to join. I looked through the stuff on Drupal, but couldn’t find the answers. So, I looked in different ways by looking through the plugins. I found several that I hipe to use. One of them led me to a site that was set up by someone who just learned Drupal and wanted to share her experiences. As an aside to asking about one of her plugins, I asked my 2 questions. And she answered them. Her name is Nancy and this is her Drupal site Nancy’s Information.

Now, you can feel free to visit my new Southern Chester County Green Drinks community.

This week, I also started video taping my daughter’s biofeedback sessions. I was asked to record the audio and so I thought I would go one step further. It seems to be working fine. The web cam video is large about 1GB for a 15-minute session. So I have to save it in a wmv format by opening it in Windows Story Editor. It cuts the size down to about 60MB. Then I needed a way to get it to the doctor. My solution was to use Windows Live Space SkyDrive, an online storage area of 1GB free space. The limitation is 50MB is the max size for a file. So, I use Windows Media File Editor to manipulate the file into 2 parts. This has worked well so far.