Neurosoma uses neurofeedback for mind/body health and wellbeing. Not all neurofeedback is the same and we use a particular kind, NeurOptimal®, which you can read about on this website. In short though, it’s taken a lifetime to find a whole mind healing modality which is truly person-centred, person-directed and recovery oriented but which doesn’t require will power to try to override the mind’s natural propensity for thought, the body’s natural inclination to move or the nervous system’s natural response to challenge. In other words, you don’t need to sit in a cave to reach enlightenment before you can have a whole and joyous body/mind.
The discovery of neuroplasticity has revolutionised neuroscience. Where once science taught us that brain cells could not re-grow once they died from trauma, drug and alcohol abuse or altzheimer’s disease, we now know that new neural networks do grow in response to learning and new experiences and that old mental and emotional habits keep neural networks functioning. If the old habit no longer serves us, we can literally grow a new, more healthy one and continue to choose that new behaviour, thought or emotional response until it’s a habit too. Then the old one fades away from lack of use.
This explains why some of the earlier talking therapies didn’t work and why some did and why affirmations or hypnotherapy worked for some people and not for others and why psych meds often work initially but then lock a person into a toxic chemical prison – it’s all so hit and miss. But having a dialogue directly with the Central Nervous System and talking its own language – the language of recognising change – means that there’s no longer a need to try something to see if it works. It works because the mind is doing what’s natural to it – experiencing something new over and over until it’s not new any more – and how the brain facilitates that is to grow a new neural network – the more it’s used the stronger the network becomes until it’s a habit.
NeurOptimal® works by feeding back differences in the rate of change in the brain 256 times per second. The rate of change is the escalation of change, in other words, if a mind process is escalating or increasing in acceleration, it means that the mind is taking an easy pathway – a mental habit. The NeurOptimal® system feeds this back to the brain like a mirror to say “is this a habit that’s still serving you?” or “is this what you want?” (in effect, what happened last time you followed this path? did it lead you where you wanted to go?) Repeated over and over millions of times, this allows the mind to choose differently if the pathway isn’t serving the whole person, or to optimise (or strengthen) a pathway that is.
With this kind of neurofeedback, there is no medically trained person diagnosing you, working out what to do to “fix” your diagnosis and then applying their fix to your condition (because it worked for someone else statistically). NeurOptimal® is diagnostically agnostic and completely safe because there is no external force being applied to your mind. It’s merely the mind having an informed conversation with itself, but unconsciously. Many people doze off during their sessions, especially at first. It’s such a relief….
Neurosoma 