Biofeedback as brain training

Biofeed­back hard­ware devices mea­sure and graph­i­cal­ly dis­play var­i­ous phys­i­o­log­i­cal vari­ables such as skin con­duc­tiv­i­ty and heart rate vari­abil­i­ty, so that users can learn to self-adjust. It has been used for decades in med­i­cine. Recent­ly, this tech­nol­o­gy has emerged in rea­son­ably-priced appli­ca­tions for con­sumers who want to learn how to man­age stress better.

Neu­ro­feed­back is a sub­set of biofeed­back rely­ing specif­i­cal­ly on elec­tro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal mea­sures of brain activ­i­ty. Using Elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) biofeed­back to mea­sure brain waves gives the user feed­back on dif­fer­ent “mental states” like alertness.  Neu­ro­feed­back is still a tool most­ly use­ful in research and high­ly spe­cial­ized clin­i­cal con­texts, not for main­stream health­care and/or con­sumer appli­ca­tions, so we do not cov­er it in this guide.

Dr. Steen­barg­er, whose inter­view can be found at the end of the present chap­ter, rec­om­mends the use of relax­ation cou­pled with biofeed­back pro­grams to improve trader’s per­for­mance. These pro­grams pro­vide real-time visu­al feed­back on a “trader’s inter­nal per­for­mance”. You may be won­der­ing how this may help a trad­er improve his or her per­for­mance? It is because of the close rela­tion­ship between emo­tion and cog­ni­tion. Emo­tion strong­ly affects cog­ni­tion. Stress, as we men­tioned ear­li­er, can be very detri­men­tal to per­for­mance. Thus, in jobs that are very emo­tion­al like trad­ing, it is very impor­tant to learn how to self-reg­u­late emo­tion­al­ly in order to improve one’s cog­ni­tive per­for­mance Accord­ing to Dr. Steen­barg­er, biofeed­back pro­grams can tell the traders whether they are in opti­mal con­di­tions to learn and per­form or whether they are becom­ing too stressed.

Keep learn­ing by read­ing more arti­cles in the Resources sec­tion, and also please con­sid­er join­ing our free month­ly Brain Fit­ness eNewslet­ter”

This new online resource is based on the con­tent from the book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness (May 2009, $19.95), by Alvaro Fer­nan­dez and Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg.