Living with Vampires by Jeremy Strong is a wonderful book published by Barrington Stoke. I discovered it when I was looking for something that would interest an 11-year-old who was struggling with reading and had come for neurofeedback brain training to help.

The point was to get an appealing book that a youngster could read during a neurofeedback session. I’d set up the training program so that nice sounds would play every time the child’s brain produced brainwaves that were expected to be helpful for reading. Their task was to keep the music going (by producing the brainwaves we wanted) and simultaneously read – if you like, they were able to use the music as a check that they really were activating their “reading brain”.

This book really got the youngster chuckling and turning the pages – reading with obvious understanding and filling me in on the story so far every few minutes.

This is what the story’s about.

Kevin’s parents are very unusual. And there’s a school disco coming up for parents and children. He really wants his mum and dad to be normal, just like the other parents, so that they won’t embarrass him at the disco. He’s especially concerned about impressing Miranda, who he has a massive crush on – even though she has big feet. How can he find a way to work on his parents and rescue the situation?

Living with Vampires has an interest age of 9-12 and comes in two versions, one in the Fiction for 9-12s series with a reading age of 8, and one in the 4U2READ series with a reading age of 7. 4U2READ books are simplified versions of some of the most popular books in other series and to give you some idea of the difference between the two, here are a couple of extracts for you to compare (hope I’ve not given away the plot too much!).

Kevin found just the right dish for them. Chicken stuffed with garlic butter. 4U2READ

Kevin searched the cookery books in the kitchen. It took a little while, but in the end he found the ideal dish. It was called Chicken Kiev. Chicken breast stuffed with garlic butter. Fiction for 9-12s

And here’s another.

The rest of the class began to laugh.

Mrs Fottle read on. “I think you have the most beautiful feet in the world.”

The class exploded. 4U2READ

The rest of the class began to giggle. Mrs Fottle read on and her eyebrows climbed higher and higher up her forehead. “I think you have the most beautiful feet in the world.”

Great splutters of laughter exploded around the class. Fiction for 9-12s

I found the books very funny and sympathetic to the problems experienced by kids of upper primary school age. The illustrations by Scoular Anderson are hilarious and the vampires turn out to be not too scary. But the story is entertaining and gripping and keeps you turning the pages until the very last line.

Two versions of Living with Vampires

The 4U2READ version (black cover) is slightly shorter at 55 vs 58 pages. It has a few more illustrations, which often have speech bubbles on them to help the reader make sense of what’s happening in the picture. The Fiction for 9-12s version (blue cover) has slightly smaller illustrations to make way for the larger amount of text, and no speech bubbles. Each version has 7 short chapters, is printed on cream-coloured paper (easier on the eyes than white paper), as are all Barrington Stoke books, and has been road-tested by children in the appropriate interest and reading age groups. The books look just like regular books and don’t have reading or interest age printed anywhere on the cover or in the book – so no chance of a child being embarrassed by being seen to read a book that has a lower reading age than their age in years.

Barrington Stoke publishes books of various reading (6, 6.5, 7, 8 ) and interest (9-16+, and also adults) ages. The stories are wonderful, fun, gripping (parents will definitely enjoy reading them too) and thoroughly road-tested by consultant children. Layout is clear and text size good.

My neurofeedback trainee read the book in a week – and in fact saved the last two chapters to read in our next neurofeedback session – they didn’t want the book to end! But there are plenty more from Barrington Stoke and I strongly recommend them. Good for your own kids, as presents for grandkids, and every school should have some!

Living with Vampires. Jeremy Strong, illustrated by Scoular Anderson. Published by Barrington Stoke. ISBN (4U2READ) 978-1-84299-796-3, publication year 2003. ISBN (Fiction for 9-12s) 1-902260-67-8, publication year 2000.

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.

Why? And how is the training helpful?

ADHD – and I include not-very-hyperactive ADD – often goes along with concentration problems. You have to pay attention at school, do maths homework, remember to drive to the post office before going to the supermarket, take an important document to a meeting. And somehow you don’t manage to do it. You feel sleepy, in a bit of a daze, even though you know the tasks are important and you want to do them. So what’s happening?

Well, if you look at the brainwaves produced by a neuro-typical brain – belonging to a person who has no problems with concentrating – you would usually see lots of nice busy reasonably-fast beta waves when they’re doing tasks like these. But if you look at the brain of someone who always finds it hard to concentrate, you would typically see lots of slow theta waves just at the point when they’re looking at the maths problem or setting off for the shops.

But theta waves are usually produced when you’re falling asleep! So you’re trying to concentrate and your brain goes sleepy!  

No wonder it’s a problem to pay attention. No wonder you look to the outside world as though you’re bored, with that sleepy look to your face!

So the aim of doing neurofeedback would be to train your brain to produce less theta activity and more beta activity. If we’re using the spaceship game as feedback – and adults enjoy this just as much as kids – we’d set it up so that the spaceship moves when you produce more beta and the screen goes fuzzy when you produce too much theta. Your aim is to keep the picture on the screen nice and sharp (keep theta down) and make the spaceship move as fast as you can (keep beta up). Your brain quickly figures out for itself what it needs to do to make these things happen. (“Hey, that spaceship moved. That’s good. What did I just do? Was it that? Oh, yes, look, it’s moving again. Must do more of that!”)

And so you get to learn what it feels like to concentrate. You get to practise concentrating and build up your “brain concentration muscles”. (OK, brains don’t have muscles, but it seems very similar to weight training when you’re doing it.) As we continue training we get you to do tasks that require concentration at the same time as you’re getting feedback, so that you can transfer your new skill to real life – being able to pilot a spaceship by brain power alone is good, but you do need to do more everyday things!

Of course, as I always say, this is a generalisation of what we see in the brainwaves of a brain whose person has ADHD, and an assessment gives a more detailed picture of your own unique brain and what it does when you give it a task. Do follow up the research on neurofeedback for ADHD – the International Society for Neurofeedback Research has a good bibliography.

They often feel a bit ambiguous about this label. After all, it carries the idea that something is “abnormal” or there’s a “difficulty” – with reading, writing, maths, hand-eye coordination. And of course, there is! But being labelled doesn’t make them feel particularly good about themselves.

On the other hand, though, it can give them a sense of relief – finally they have confirmation that they’re not lazy, stupid or crazy (by the way, one of my favourite books about ADHD), and also it means that there’s the beginning of a reason for why they’re experiencing the situations and behaviours they are. They’re not making them up. Their teacher, psychologist, whoever diagnosed them, has recognised their similarities with other people in the same boat. So it’s the beginning of power, the search for information, a word to put into Google, the idea that there’s some help out there.

Now when you come to do neurofeedback with me, I’m not so interested in your particular Dys. For sure, it gives me an indication of what you are finding difficult, but it doesn’t tell me how that is working out in your own particular brain. I want to know about your brain. That’s why the first thing we do is an assessment where I measure your brain activity while you’re just sitting and resting, to get a baseline. Then I measure it while you do some simple tasks related to the difficulties you’re having. That gives me much more specific information about your brain than a simple Dys. It gives me lots of clues about what sort of brain training will be likely to help you – not someone else in your school class with the same Dys. So I can design a programme that is yours.

Of course, and this is where I am VERY interested in the things that make up your Dys, I do want to know about the difficulties that are particularly getting in the way of you making the progress you would like, because we want the training to address those first if we can. And those are the things we’re going to keep track of to see how the training is progressing. But your programme will not be the same as your classmate’s, your sibling’s, your neighbour’s – it will be tailored to your own brain.

So in the end, the neurofeedback training will be aimed at helping you to get to grips with your own particular Dys. So I don’t diss the Dys – but I do want to get underneath it and behind it to know about you.