Transcription of Pamela Blodgett for the show Brain Training & T’ai Chi #291
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio. Hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at LoveMaineRadio.com. Here’s some highlights from this week’s program.
Pam Blodgett: That way, when a person who’s curious, let’s say you have a child with ADD, you want to know, “Well, how do I find the best caregiver possible?” Joe Smith down the road said, “They know how to do this. They have, you know, two electrodes hooked up to their car battery and they’re going to fix my problem.” But I would suggest that people go to that site, BCIA.org, and find a caregiver who is certified in either biofeedback or neurofeedback and that means they have passed the minimum standard of efficacy in the field.
Ken Ryan: Again, it’s easy for us to think that, when we see some set of movements, it’s something that’s somebody’s gym teacher thought of two years ago, and so it’s something that’s been in the works for thousands of years. But in Chinese medicine, as you well know, there are organ systems that are identified and worked with and there are particular movements that and points of focus with the mind that helped to activate those particular organ systems, so the meridians that are connected to those organ systems would be particularly in play.
Dr. Lisa B.: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 291. Brain training and tai chi. And for the first time on Sunday, April 16, 2017. We all have within us what we need to be healthy. Today, we speak two people who are helping others create and reinforce optimal patterns for wellness within the brain and body. Pamela Blodgett is a counselor and educator who practices neurofeedback and biofeedback. Ken Ryan is the founder of Maine Coast Taijiquan, where he instructs students in tai chi and qigong. Thank you for joining us.
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Dr. Lisa B.: Today it’s my pleasure to have with me Pam Blodgett who is board-certified in neurofeedback and trained as a counselor and educator. Her office, Brain Training of New England, is located in Kittery. Thanks for coming in today.
Pam Blodgett: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Lisa B.: You and I met at Maine Live. I believe it was last fall, perhaps, and I was pretty immediately fascinated by the work that you do because you’re dealing with brains, which is something that we all have to work with on a regular basis but you’re actually doing some nitty-gritty stuff.
Pam Blodgett: We are. It’s the command central. Without it, we don’t do anything.
Dr. Lisa B.: Yeah. Tell me what it means to be board-certified in neurofeedback. What is that?
Pam Blodgett: For the listeners, I think it’s important that you find a caregiver if you’re trying to fix a problem such as ADD, anxiety depression, brain injury, seizure disorder, post-stroke, any of those things. You want to get the best care possible and most people want to do that as effectively, quickly, and as naturally as possible to optimize what we have between our two ears.
As I was pursuing my training in this field, I’d have a master’s in counseling for 30 years but I started meeting people who were counselors or MDs adding neurofeedback as part of their healing regimen into their practices, and the advice that I got, which I promote to everybody else, is go to the BCIA.org site, which stands for Biofeedback Certification International Alliance.org and they have a list of caregivers who have passed a board certification exam. You have to put in about, in the case of neurofeedback, you can be certified in two tracks: biofeedback or neurofeedback. One’s brains, one’s body, in the most simplistic way.
And you have to pass, you have to complete about 3,000 to 5,000 hours of training that is supervised, you have to have a minimum of a master’s degree, and you have to pass a board certification exam, which I did about three or four years ago.
That way, when a person who’s curious, let’s say you have a child with ADD, you want to know, “Well, how do I find the best caregiver possible?” Joe Smith down the road said, “They know how to do this. They have, you know, two electrodes hooked up to their car battery and they’re going to fix my problem.” But I would suggest that people go to that site, BCIA.org, and find a caregiver who is certified in either biofeedback or neurofeedback and that means they have passed the minimum standard of efficacy in the field.
Dr. Lisa B.: So in your case, you are certified in …
Pam Blodgett: Neurofeedback.
Dr. Lisa B.: Neurofeedback, and just very briefly describe what that process looks like, when you are working with the client and you are doing neurofeedback.
Pam Blodgett: Awesome. A client comes in and I’ll say, “What are your diagnoses to begin with?” Typically they come in and they’ll say, “Well, I have struggled with, you know, attention deficit disorder since I was seven and I have been taking Adderall for the last 20 years. I’m really sick of it. It makes me drop weight and I don’t sleep well. Do you think you could heal this or could my brain get more optimized using neurofeedback?”
The hope of course is always yes, so what will happen is I’ll do an intake with that person and I will be looking for all kinds of things. Everything from post-traumatic experiences to brain injury to developmental disorders. I’ll ask if they’re a righty or a lefty, what their growing up experiences have been, because the brain is a complex closed unit. If one piece is off, it’s going to affect everybody else.
So if a person isn’t sleeping, that informs me that there’s something going on with the occipital lobe. The back of the head. So if they have an attention and focus problem, they may have more of a left front issue, which is more of an executive functioning problem than an actual focus problem, and I’m not going to know that until I put electrodes on their head and watch the live EEG, but I’ll do that intake first then I will determine the best way to treat and we’ll proceed from there. Typically, the commitment is about 20 sessions. Sometimes as few as 10 but it may be as much as 60.
Now that depends. Is that person post-concussive? Have they had been exposed, for example, in the case with a veteran I worked with, more than a hundred blast injuries when they’re in Afghanistan? Or was that person a football player? I’m part of an NFL study and I might get some linebacker who’s had their head smashed thousands of times.
So that person’s brain and how quick they’re going to heal and establish some new neural pathways and to optimize their own brain function is very different than someone who maybe a 50-year-old woman who’s going through menopause who’s having some sleep issues and maybe some memory loss and who wants to optimize her brain. Just different. Everyone is 100% unique, every person who walks through the door.
Dr. Lisa B.: So by putting, by listening to what people have to say and their story and their symptoms and their diagnoses but then also by doing brain wave readings, electrical brain wave readings, you’re able to come up with some way of helping people shift those patterns?
Pam Blodgett: Yes. So a person, each sessions with the equipment that I primarily use, there’s different types of neurofeedback equipment but, in general, the principles are the same. That by putting electrodes on the head, it’s completely … It’s not invasive and it’s not painful so people don’t have to be afraid that it’s electroshock therapy. It’s not transcranial magnetic stimulation. It’s in the level of invasiveness, it goes up.
So I put electrodes on the head. Five of them. One in the back of the neck, two behind the ears. Those are reference points. The one in the neck is a ground and then two are actives and so it’s reading the electricity that is coming off of the head and they can see it on the screen. I have a very wide screen, as if you’re watching a football game, and they get to see their brain live.
And so for example, when I start at the front of the head, I work front to back to front and so when I’m working the frontal lobe, that’s going to inform me, now does that person have a plethora of slow wave activity? If they’re an adult, I’m going to pretend that we have a nice 27-year-old sitting in the chair. There are placements that are based on what’s called the 10-20 system. I don’t want to get too specific here but everyone in neurology learns it and they are classic placements.
So you’ll work from the front. It’s going to inform on the left side, does that person have a logical sequential issue, more of in that executive function domain, or do they have good emotional regulation? So the right hemisphere of the brain is more in charge of emotional regulation, depression, how you approach other people. So again, after that intake in the person’s own complaints and issues that they’re dealing with, I’ll have an idea of what I’m going to be looking at but I’m always surprised.
So I start there and that’s going to inform me. For example, they may say, “These are …,” I’m trying to think of specific clients. I’ll say, “Well, this is interesting that you complain about ADHD and yet I’m not seeing excessive high wave activity at the motor cortex of the brain. The top. I’m pointing to my head and no one could see me doing that, but then there might be, and so I might get surprised.
And I might have a client, I’ll say, “Wow, look at all that high wave activity that’s happening at the top of your head,” where it should be more of an alpha range. More of a focused-yet-relaxed state. And when I see excessive beta wave, that’s a high-speed activity. It’s paying attention or maybe driving your car, that’s in the beta range, or doing your taxes, yay, and I’ll ask them. I’d say, “Well, how do you sleep?” One of the funniest responses I’ve gotten is, “Well, when I wake up in the morning, my pillow’s in the kitchen.” And I said, “Well, how do you manage all this excessive motor activity?” They said, “I have to jog or do something physical every single day, just to calm my body down.”
So those kinds of things inform me, so when I see it in a child, excessive motor activity, I will suggest to the parent, “This is a kid. You need to get out and jog and run and walk and have a skateboard, whatever that activity is, to wear off some of that excessive activity.” In terms of slow wave activity in the front of the brain, I can also be informed, for example, even if a client doesn’t disclose if a person is smoking pot frequently because I’ll see a plethora of alpha wave activity.
And they may be on a medical marijuana card, and I don’t have a problem with that at all. However, if they come in with a complaint of depression and then I found out that they’re smoking pot every night to reduce anxiety, I will inform them and say, “Here’s your brain. This is what it looks like on pot. You might just want to do an experiment.” The same happens with Red Bull use, excessive coffee use, or stimulants. I’ll say, “Well, I understand the choice that you’re making and why. Let’s look at your brain. Here’s what it’s doing. Here’s what it looks like, and you just might want to think about the choices that you’re making and experiment. Just experiment. Let’s see how you feel after a month of no pot. And let’s see what the brain looks like and see how you feel.”
See what your functioning is because an excess of alpha wave in the right frontal lobe will inform me they may feel depressed. And if they do, now they’re a more informed consumer of their own life. They can now make a choice about other ways they might want to deal with their anxiety and depression that is not chemically-based.
Dr. Lisa B.: And you talked about Red Bull, caffeine, other substances. What do you see in the brain waves with those things?
Pam Blodgett: That will jack up the brain so they’ll have more beta wave activity and that might give them anxiety, so if someone comes in and complaints about not sleeping and anxiousness or anxiety or fidgeting excessively, we’ll take a look at their brain and I’ll talk about their habits and what that’s doing and just ask them to make an experiment for themselves. Not for me. I’m not dictating. But I think it helps and I would say nearly 100% of people, when they’re ready and usually by the time they walk in my door, they’re very ready to make their own choices and they’re in their own best interest and I’m just an informant.
Dr. Lisa B.: And what about things like sleep and exercise and other types of healthy activities, what do those do to the brain?
Pam Blodgett: Well, it appears that when a brain can calm itself, meditation is a perfect example. The best brains on the planet, and I say this every day in my office, are owned by meditators. And we know this from QEEG, quantitative electroencephalogram studies that put lots of electrodes on the heads of people who’ve been meditating for 30 years.
When I say I’m the best, it means that we measure intelligence by the level of alpha wave activity in the brain. And a person who’s brain can be the most responsive, meaning they don’t get stuck in certain patterns of response. A person, when you’re in an alpha wave pattern, it’s like in a good idle. You’re aware and anyone who meditates know you close your eyes and your brain will start to make in the frontal lobe more alpha wave. That will allow you to be relaxed yet focused.
You don’t do that driving a car, but you do that when you’re trying to let go of a lot of excessive stress and that will improve your focus and it also raise your IQ. So these are all things that even while I’m treating, putting electrodes on and the brain is … I call it going to the gym. It’s why my business is called Brain Training of New England, and I tell people, “You don’t expect to make a gym membership in January and look like Arnold Schwarzenegger by February.” That’s not a realistic goal.
And training your brain in new patterns, having increased blood flow, making new neural networks … There’s a phrase that I love, I believe it was Dr. Amon who said, “So brain cells that fire together, wire together.” So if you’re making new pathways that are wiring those little pathways in, you’re going to have new ways. If there’s only one way up a mountain and that gets snowed in in February, you’re not going to get up the mountain. But if you have 16 different pathways, there might be one roadway you can get up to the top of the mountain. Same in the brain.
For example, a learning disabled student, and these are all alive people I’m working with that I’m thinking of. I’ve been working with this young eighth grader for three, two and a half years-ish, on and off. And when he came in, he was in all special needs services. Very learning disabled, dyslexic, and not doing very well academically. A lot of anxiety, ADHD. And after two and a half years of on again, off again, adding this as part of his regimen within the school system and privately, he’s now getting As and Bs. He’s about done, and I think that his brain has been optimized to a point where there’s lots of new roadways.
So maybe some of those pathways weren’t optimized when he was born but he has grown them, and now he has more options for seeing a math problem, more ways of looking at English and language. He’s super politically involved, and we have fascinating discussions during treatment, but this is a kiddo who I personally would love to see neurofeedback equipment in all the schools because if you can fix these problems like attention focus issues when they’re little, then you’re not going to end up with a teenager who’s frustrated and has low self-worth by the time they’re 15. I hope I stayed on topic and I answered your questions. I don’t know if I’m being logical sequential enough.
Dr. Lisa B.: Yes. No, that’s very helpful. I was just thinking about people who have had traumatic brain injuries, people who have been in combat situations, people who have been in car accidents, people who have been in domestic violence situations, I mean, there’s some structural things that can cause I guess the brain patterns just go off the rails. How do you work with that? If somebody’s had enough hits in a football game over the course of their lifetime that their brains are bruised, essentially, how can you help that brain get back on track?
Pam Blodgett: I think the exciting thing is this is 2017 and while you and I are sitting here having this conversation, there are thousands of fascinating, intelligent men and women doing research to make better and better and better equipment. So we have amplitude-based training for neurofeedback. We have low energy systems. A wide variety. I don’t want to get too technical but so many options for new equipment that is computer brain interface.
So that’s essentially what I’m doing is we have a brain, we have a computer, and those electrodes connect them so that they can have a better conversation. By working the brain … For example, the most simplistic way of explaining neurofeedback is I would put a movie in, I would set the parameters of the computer to reward the brain when they get within the optimal range. Let’s say you have trouble keeping focus and attention. That reward band is going to be 15 to 18 Hertz. That’s the optimum, low beta range for paying attention, and most folks who get a diagnosis of attention and focus problems, executive function problems or ADHD, their brain, for whatever reason, whether it’s genetic, injury, or those probably the two greatest ones because it’s not always a genetic cost. It can be an injury.
And a lot of folks who come in, such as have been exposed to a football injury, a soccer injury, hitting their head too many times, falling downstairs, domestic violence, that brain goes into a healing pattern. It will, to heal itself, slow everything down and produce more delta, which is a sleep wave, and theta, which is that between waking and sleeping. It slows the brain down.
Think about a person who’s been severely concussed and they go into concussion. What is that person doing? Or when they go into a coma. What are they doing? They’re sleeping. They’ve gone night night to heal their brain, to slow everything down so that it can go into a healing pattern. And, for some reason, the brain can get stuck in that pattern.
So neurofeedback very gently starts to encourage it. To explore different pathways to produce more beta and you reward that. When you’re hooked up to my equipment, you’ll be watching a big screen. When your brain is within that target range that is most optimal for paying attention, the movie plays. When you fall out of range, the movie will stop and you figure out very quickly how to make that movie go. Whether you are five or a hundred. My oldest client is 91.
Dr. Lisa B.: Wow, 91 and still wants to re-pattern the brain.
Pam Blodgett: She has a Ph.D. and she’s been a therapist and she just opened her own art show. She lives in Kittery, Maine, at the age of 90. You know what? We’re just never too old to be fabulous, and she wants to be optimal. She’s fallen on her head three times and she’s had some deficits because of that. Some speech and language issues and, yeah, and so she continues to want to improve her life and is working on her memoirs as we speak. 91.
Dr. Lisa B.: So if you’re, whether you’re 91 or 9 or any age in between and you’re wired up and you’re looking at the screen and the brain … you’re trying to get the brain to do whatever it’s going to do to make that movie play. What is that like inside the person’s head? Do you ask them to think of certain things? Do you ask them to relax? What is the mechanism by which you get that reward?
Pam Blodgett: More just your own experience. Now the brain, at any given moment, is making all of those brain waves. Whether it’s the lowest which is delta, theta, which is that going to sleep, waking up, that optimum state for implanting new thought, which I’d love to talk about another time because each brain state, when it’s predominant, has a function that’s important, alpha for relaxation and focus, and then beta for paying attention. So every neurofeedback person who’s board-certified has to complete at least 30 sessions of neurofeedback on themselves. That’s myself included.
So when I started being curious as a result of when I was a professor at the University of New Hampshire and I was curious about neurofeedback. A friend was doing studies with stuttering patients, and I would hang out and eat burritos and drink beer with him and pick his brain about what was this. Then I started meeting veterans who had been healed using neurofeedback for their traumatic brain injury. So my experience is that I had lyme disease. I had some sleep issues, I had migraine headaches and so those were my presenting issues. And as a perimenopausal woman, I was also having sleep issues. So I went in for that. And those were my predominant goals.
So you put the electrodes on. A movie’s playing, for example, and you just kind of figure out through, within a few seconds, that all of a sudden you will get a reward like the movie will start to play maybe when you’re just a little bit more relaxed or you’re a little bit more focused. It happens so naturally and so easily, before you know it, then the movie’s playing and then you might space out for a second and then the movie will stop. You’ll go, “Oh.” And then you just micro-adjust your own consciousness and away goes the movie. It’s so non-stressful that you don’t think about it. You just experience it and away you go. Anyway …
Dr. Lisa B.: Well, tell me about the theta waves.
Pam Blodgett: Ooh. A lot of people talk about positive thought. How do we think more positively? How do we believe that we’re worthy? How do we believe that we’re a good person? That we’re handsome or pretty or smart or capable? How do we access our own what I would call superpowers, right? So we know from when we’re a tiny child that our brain is in a predominantly slow wave pattern. That’s what kids do. Think about when … You have three children? Is that right, Lisa?
Dr. Lisa B.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Pam Blodgett: Me too. How many adorable pictures do you have of your one-year-old asleep in their spaghetti bowl or their two-year-old asleep on the toilet, right? They just, when they’re tired, they just fall asleep. Their brain is … and infants. Think of a tiny little infant, right? They sleep most of the day. That’s a delta state. And then when they’re kind of sleepy, their little eyes are fluttering, that’s a theta state.
So during those states of starting to go conscious and then moving into an alpha state, the brain is most easily able to implant. Think about people who move here from another country. I do service work in Nicaragua, for example. I’ve done 21 trips. And so I talk a lot with people about their mother tongue and their developing, emerging language and I notice that, when I’m there at the end of the evening, my brain has a harder time thinking in Spanish than it does in English.
English is my mother tongue. That was implanted when I was an infant, right? By hearing my mother speak or my father. People you love. By the same token, if we were lucky and you had a parent who said, “Oh, my goodness. You’re so cute. You’re so good. You’re so smart. Look at you. You tied your own shoe,” that goes in your head. By the same token, someone we loved when we’re tiny said, “It’s a wall. It’s a ceiling. It’s a car.” We do not question that. Those thoughts, that’s just information we took in in that theta state. It’s implanted. It’s a car, it’s a wall, it’s a shoe, it’s me. I’m Pam. You’re Lisa. We don’t question.
Unfortunately, we also were implanted with some thoughts that may not have been so constructive, such as, “Well, that was dumb. Well, that was a stupid thing to do,” and worse. I don’t want to swear on air, but, unfortunately, from somebody who’s worked with trauma survivors for 30 years, I’ve heard stories that make my hair still to this day stand on end. That break your heart.
When I see children, for example, that have terrible self-concept and they repeat things that they obviously heard as a child, those thoughts were implanted somehow by someone. I’m dumb, I’m worthless, I’m stupid, I can’t. For all of the listening audience, if they want to have positive thought implanted in their own brain, do so when you’re waking up and when you’re going to sleep. So that thought of, “I’m wealthy, I’m capable, I’m in the right place at the right time. Everything I need is coming right to me. All of my family relationships are in great condition. I adore my son, my daughter, my husband, whatever that is.”
Those are the times when you want to put by your bedside those little cards of speaking in the positive. I am, I can, it is, and visualizing what you want because that’s when your brain is most susceptible to new thought.
Dr. Lisa B.: Well, that is fascinating. It makes me think of all the times that I have fallen asleep watching something really silly on television and wonder what’s like in my brain now from all of those years of sort of candy television, that I call it. I’m going to have to stop that now.
Pam Blodgett: It’s probably a bad idea. You know, we are what we think. We are what we believe we are and I have worked on myself, you know? I don’t think anyone is given the “perfect childhood”, I’m putting that in quotes, and so we all have areas where we can improve and I work on myself all the time to be a more loving, caring compassionate person, and to be empowered even when things don’t always line up. Then I have other tools that I use, and some of those I share with my clients, actually, while we’re doing a treatment, which is the law of attraction thing or The Work of Byron Katie or working on positive thought and how to have their new brain work most optimally for them.
Dr. Lisa B.: So it sounds like you … patients or clients who contact you, you do an intake, you listen to what they have to say, then you pay attention to what their brain is telling you with the brain waves, then you not only deal with things over the course of so many sessions and helping their brains with the equipment that you have, but you also give them tools that they can use in their everyday lives. Practical suggestions.
Pam Blodgett: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Lisa B.: So you’re kind of you’re dealing in a very holistic way with whatever issues people are coming to you.
Pam Blodgett: Yeah, and I have great referral lists and some people want to work on their diet and, unfortunately, living in Maine, we have a lot of people with lyme disease. Sports injuries are common. I also have a property with walking trails and a labyrinth so the moms who come and bring their kids and we’ll do a session, they can go outside and drink a cup of tea and stare off into the trees.
Dr. Lisa B.: So you’re helping them at the same time.
Pam Blodgett: That’s my goal, always.
Dr. Lisa B.: Well, I appreciate your coming in and having this conversation with me today. It’s been fascinating. Completely illuminating. I’ve been speaking with Pam Blodgett. She’s board-certified in neurofeedback and trained as a counselor and educator. Her office, Brain Training of New England, is located in Kittery and it was great to see you again. It was really I think important that we met each other and met live.
Pam Blodgett: I know. I think it’s really fun. People can find me at my website, www.braintrainingofnewengland.com, and I’m launching a new podcast called the Brain Dot Show next month.
Dr. Lisa B.: Excellent. We will make a link to that in our show notes page as well. Thank you so much for coming in.
Pam Blodgett: No, thanks for having me. Fun.