Right about the time I was fully settling into my new meds and enjoying the sense of being even more focused and less impulsive, I got a call from my local doc, He wanted to talk with me about something new. I thought, “just what I need, something new!” I had just gotten everything working really well and he wants to talk me about something new? But since he was doing me a big favor prescribing my meds for an out of town doctor, I went in to talk with him.
He was happy the new meds were really helping me. Then he asked a piercing question. “Do you want to stay on the meds the rest of your life?” I said, “well, I would rather not but as long as they were helping me I have pretty well settled the issue that I would likely be taking the meds the rest of my life.” He asked, ”What if there was a way to heal the brain and get off some or all the meds?” Well that was no brainer (pun intended.) Of course I would prefer to be healed and be off all the meds if I could. He then began to share with me something new he had encountered first hand. His wife had been helped tremendously from long time issues with anxiety and depression. He said I needed to check out Brainstate Technologies.
The idea behind BrainState Technologies began about 9 years ago by a computer scientist named Lee Gerdes who was seeking a way to get well from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He had been assaulted in San Francisco by 4 teens with baseball bats. He was hit in the head 4 times and in the arm once. He had lost the use of the arm and experienced many symptoms from the brain trauma. Insomnia, anger outbursts, difficulty paying attention, anxiety, depression, etc.
He had been the chief scientist for a public software company during the Internet bubble. Highly functional but with great effort and will power. It took all his energy every day to do his job. But he was very difficult to be around for his employees. He could blow up at any time. Reminded me of me.
He tried every mainstream and alternative medicine modality out there with very little help. . He began to wonder if his computer and physics background could help him develop something that would help him. When the company he worked for was sold, he and 2 programmers began to work on what eventually became Brainstate Technologies.
After a few years work he hit upon a way to help himself. He fully recovered from PTSD and fully recovered the use of his left arm. All this from using a software program that optimized and balanced his brainwave patterns. After successfully trying it on other willing guinea pigs in his family and other friends, he set about to commercialize the technology. His goal was simply. To help people!
Basically, BST is a very advanced type of neurofeedback that is truly a breakthrough in my opinion. It reads brainwaves from various areas of the brain in real time, and then processes them with sophisticated software algorithms. It then plays those waves back to the brain through auditory signals, essentially mirroring to the brain what it looks like. It then begins to encourage (tweak) the brain towards a more optimal and balanced pattern. And it works.
Through trauma of various kinds, the brain can get "stuck" in certain patterns in its effort to "protect" the person from further hurt or trauma. Once stuck, the brain is very difficult to change using old technology. Standard biofeedback and neurofeedback can help but can take hundreds of sessions. Medicines can alter some functions and mask some symptoms but they usually cannot balance brainwave patterns. In a matter of just a few sessions, Brainstate training can dramatically move the patterns to a more normal and balanced pattern.
There still remains a lot to prove for todays medical standards but studies are now underway with some major Universities to do just that. Prove that optimizing brainwaves can alter things in the brain and body.
I see it as Star Trek like medicine. I said in my book that I thought we would see more breakthroughs in medicine coming out of physics rather than biochemistry. The problem is that mainstream medicine is still very focused on biochemistry. I am not saying that good can't or won't come out of biochemistry because it does and will. I just believe that we will see major breakthroughs from areas other than biochemistry. Brainstate is very promising in that regard. More in my next post.