She wasn't on the set of some sci-fi thriller but in the back of an easy-to-miss storefront at 1055 E. 3300 South in Millcreek, home to Brain Harmony Technology. Here, beside cinder block walls painted with words including "peace," "soul" and "joy," Boucher said she was improving her marriage, beating depression and finding sleep-filled nights.
"Once I am balanced, I should never go back to the place I was," the Kearns resident said the evening before her 16th session last month. "It's made a world of difference . . . I'm a much happier person."
Boucher is part of a growing trend of neurofeedback junkies, people who pay thousands of dollars to have their brains conditioned or harmonized. By measuring brainwave activity, then feeding back appropriate sounds through headsets, recipients can learn to modify their thoughts, behaviors and emotions. The benefits, proponents say, can be life-changing. But the question arises: Who's qualified to be slapping electrodes on people's heads?
The neurofeedback business, which is raking in about $1 billion a year according to Siegfried Othmer, chief scientist of The EEG Institute in Woodland Hills, Calif., is still "going through its Wild West phase."
It's a field that has been largely unregulated and developed by people not licensed in psych or neuro fields, explained Othmer, who has been dedicated to neurofeedback work - training others and devising equipment - for more than 20 years. So while neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists are increasingly incorporating neurofeedback in their practices, as the work's efficacy and promise becomes more proven, there are plenty of others swimming in brainwaves.
That has Judy Crawford scared. She's with the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America (BCIA), which establishes and maintains standards recognized by the leading biofeedback and neurofeedback associations. While practitioners who are neither certified by BCIA nor members of associations might be legitimate, she said she would never trust her head to just anybody.
"How can you recreationally work with a brain?" she asked. "Do you want to recreationally take out my appendix?"
Alex Hoggan, owner of Brain Harmony Technology, studied film at the University of Utah and got on board with brain training as an offshoot of his Water & Wellness Center, which he operates next door to Brain Harmony. He can leave a visitor's head spinning with information about the "consciousness" within water crystals.
Dipping into this work seemed a good fit for Hoggan, 42, so he spent three weeks in Scottsdale, Ariz., training at Brain State Technologies, a business that has trained practitioners and issued its own licenses to 114 offices in 15 countries, said owner Lee Gerdes. About $100,000 in business set-up expenses later, Hoggan's conditioning brains.
Gerdes, who had worked in computers and software for 40 years, said his inner geek set him on a path more than seven years ago to explore brain patterns and processing. To find a baseline to develop algorithms to help optimize the brain, he said he enlisted the heads of longtime Tibetan Buddhist monks. A quest for deeper meditation practice is, in part, what brought Marilyn Phipps, of Salt Lake City, to Brain Harmony Technology.
"I can get rid of all the chatter," she said. "I can literally empty my mind."
Hoggan's business claims to subscribe to the spiritual model, not medical model, of neurofeedback. The weight of words became apparent when the Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing in January ordered him to stop "practicing mental health therapy . . . without a license." He said the order was due to language, including the words "depression" and "anxiety," that had been used in a now-discontinued pamphlet.
One of the biggest critics of outfits such as Brain Harmony Technology is D. Corydon "Cory" Hammond, a professor and psychologist at the Universithy of Utah School of Medicine.
He explained the intricacies - much more complex than the Hoggan method - of the neurofeedback work he has used in his clinical practice for 16 years. Hammond heads the standards committee for the International Society for Neurofeedback & Research, one of the two overarching membership organizations, and said his concern is rooted in consumer protection.
"In the last four or five years, we've started to really see an increase in unlicensed, unqualified practitioners," he said. "Neurofeedback can really do some wonderful things, but it is a buyer-beware marketplace."
In a piece Hammond wrote for The National Psychologist, he said there's evidence that "inappropriate neurofeedback training" can "increase seizures, depression, anxiety" and more. But he acknowledged in an interview that these problems could be remedied with proper neurofeedback.
None of this work, no matter where people go, comes cheap. Sessions, which usually need to be committed to in bulk (somewhere between 10 to 20-plus sessions), can run up to about $150 a pop, and that doesn't include the initial brain mapping. All told, someone can easily spend a couple thousand dollars, and they might need tune-ups down the road.
There will come a time, Othmer predicted, when insurance companies will cover neurofeedback treatments and drug companies, which have made a fortune on anti-depressants, may run scared.
Licensed therapists, he added, need not worry about job security. The professionals, he said, simply need to get on board and "be better than everyone else." As neurofeedback goes mainstream, he said demand for professionals - with insurance-covered services - will boom.
All of this, however, is of no concern to Lance Campbell, 47, of South Salt Lake. What matters to him is that he's functioning again, out of his fog, after a FedEx truck he was driving rolled in December and "kind of scrambled my head a bit."
"I noticed some results right off the bat," he said of his initial visits to Brain Harmony. "Until you try it, you have to be open minded . . . You just never know."
jravitz@sltrib.com
The battle for the brains
Around for about 40 years, biofeedback gained popularity in the late 1960s as a way to reach "altered states" and "enter your own domain of spirituality," said Siegfried Othmer, chief scientist of The EEG Institute. "It was a way to have the LSD experience without the LSD," he said. And it was summarily written off as "too weird" and considered "fool's gold" by university psychologists, he explained. So it was the professionals who let biofeedback fall out of their grasp, he added. All these years later, now that they're discovering "it's real gold," he said they want it back, they want to own it, which is why there's a brewing struggle over who has the right to dole out neurotherapy.
Neurofeedback: How it works
* Brainwave activity is measured through electrodes placed on the head.
* Instruments "feed back" information via sounds to train the brain to modify thoughts, behaviors and emotions, and change physiological responses, without use of instruments.
* A brain-trained individual prone to panic attacks, for example, would reportedly learn to recognize signs of an upcoming attack and then think him or herself out of it.
Source: Approved by an alliance of AAPB, BCIA and ISNR
Reported benefits of neurofeedback
* Improved memory, motivation and focus
* Greater emotional capacity and ability to love
* Increased intelligence and weight loss
* Reduced stress, anxiety and anger
* Heightened spirituality
* Eliminated addictions and antisocial behaviors
* Cured or greatly improved conditions, including high blood pressure, epilepsy, insomnia, stuttering, and, in some head-injury cases, loss of sight
* With time and research, proponents say neurofeedback may prove an answer to Parkinson's disease, bipolar disorder, autism, maybe even cancers
For more information
To learn more about the companies and associations mentioned or alluded to in this article, visit:
* Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback at www.aapb.org
* International Society for Neurofeedback & Research at www.isnr.org
* The EEG Institute at www.eeginstitute.com
* Brain State Technologies at www.brainstatetech.com *
* Brain Harmony Technology at www.brainharmonytech.com
* Two of the three listed Utah companies, Brain Map and Brain Gate, are not in business.
To find a practitioner registered with the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America, visit www.bcia.org.
