Art / EEG Biofeedback
This week I rediscovered (again...) the joy of making art. I warmed up earlier with a late evening of pen/brush and ink before launching into a big Halloween costume project involving chicken wire and cloth.
I have had a fitful history with respect to creative manual work. Distraction and something like humility prevents me from trying it very frequently, but the combination of the (often prolonged) intensity of the creative act itself and the affirmation that often follows it is enough to tilt my universe a few degrees. "Maybe," I think to myself, "I could be an artist."
About a week ago I met with a friend in Providence who revealed to me that his idiosyncrasies--which had always been forgiven--we due to his suffering from OCD but that he had recently become essentially cured of it through EEG biofeedback therapy. Under this treatment, patients recondition themselves by "playing a game" that rewards them for particular kinds of brainwave activity that, for example, accompanies a normally-functioning corpus callosum or whatever. The result is a kind of direct intervention of the patient on their own neural plasticity for the purpose of altering psychological symptoms over which they would otherwise have little or no control.
This was exciting for me for a few reasons. First, I was obviously overjoyed that my friend was doing so well--he was a changed man. Second, I've had a lot of people close to me with OCD in the past, and the news of a successful treatment that didn't involve what amounts to psychological shock therapy was awesome.
I was also happy to see such a potent vindication of the reductionist program in psychology. Any misgivings about the pollution of psychological discourse and methodology has to answer to the efficacy of intervention on the neural level for causing psychological change. Pharmaceutical therapy has always been a little sketchy for a lot of reasons, but this is a case of an agent being empowered to literally transform themselves through a technical understanding of their own mind. That is awesome.
I have had a fitful history with respect to creative manual work. Distraction and something like humility prevents me from trying it very frequently, but the combination of the (often prolonged) intensity of the creative act itself and the affirmation that often follows it is enough to tilt my universe a few degrees. "Maybe," I think to myself, "I could be an artist."
About a week ago I met with a friend in Providence who revealed to me that his idiosyncrasies--which had always been forgiven--we due to his suffering from OCD but that he had recently become essentially cured of it through EEG biofeedback therapy. Under this treatment, patients recondition themselves by "playing a game" that rewards them for particular kinds of brainwave activity that, for example, accompanies a normally-functioning corpus callosum or whatever. The result is a kind of direct intervention of the patient on their own neural plasticity for the purpose of altering psychological symptoms over which they would otherwise have little or no control.
This was exciting for me for a few reasons. First, I was obviously overjoyed that my friend was doing so well--he was a changed man. Second, I've had a lot of people close to me with OCD in the past, and the news of a successful treatment that didn't involve what amounts to psychological shock therapy was awesome.
I was also happy to see such a potent vindication of the reductionist program in psychology. Any misgivings about the pollution of psychological discourse and methodology has to answer to the efficacy of intervention on the neural level for causing psychological change. Pharmaceutical therapy has always been a little sketchy for a lot of reasons, but this is a case of an agent being empowered to literally transform themselves through a technical understanding of their own mind. That is awesome.