How Does Neurofeedback Brain Training Transfer to Real Life? A Dyslexia Example
One of the questions people often ask is how neurofeedback brainwave training transfers to real life. So we’ll take learning to read better as an example.
First of all, though, let’s think about weight-training. You go to the gym, lift weights, and develop your muscles and core stability. How does that transfer to real life? Doing bench presses isn’t exactly an activity that most people are called on to do on a regular basis. But, with your new muscles, you can now lift all the boxes in the garage to get to that ancient board game you stored such a long time ago. Or pull the washing machine out of its slot to fish out the bill that’s just dropped down behind it.
If you train your brain with neurofeedback, you would expect similarly to transfer the results to real life. You don’t drive a racing car by brainwaves alone in real life (well, not often) as you might do in a neurofeedback brain training session, but you would expect that exercising your brain in this way would help you to focus or relax better, for example – if that was the aim of the particular brain training you’d done.
Sometimes people who find reading difficult come for neurofeedback training. Maybe they’ve had a diagnosis of dyslexia, maybe they just know that reading is hard.
Just one of the things we will do at some point in the training is to get them to read and get feedback both at the same time. So some nice musical sounds will play every time their brain produces brainwaves more like those that a good reader would produce (that’s the feedback) and they have to listen out for those sounds while they’re reading. In other words, they get virtually instant feedback that their brain is producing “the right sort of activity for reading” throughout the whole of the reading task itself.
It’s good to then practise reading in between neurofeedback sessions. But I hope you can see that neurofeedback tells them when they’re doing the right thing right at the source of the activity – in their brain. A very direct and efficient process – which really helps the transfer of neurofeedback brain training to your real life.
Connect With Us