EEG vs HEG Training?

[SwankBank]

I know a certain poster on this website has his own HEG headset company, which is awesome. 

I am wondering, if you wanted to get the cognitive benefits of EEG and/or HEG training, if you went to a EEG clinic like say http://www.biocybernaut.com/ or any comparable facility for the best EEG training or did a doityourself product like http://www.upgradedself.com/tech/neuroptimal-personal-trainer.html $5000-$15000; and for HEG Training you did http://www.upgradedself.com/tech/upgraded-focus-brain-trainer.html $1250.

What I want to know is:

1. Is going to a EEG clinic better than doing it yourself software bundle...I assume it is?
2. What is the difference between the HEG and EEG. What does one do that the other does not?
3. What are the benefits you receive from either? What does either do better than the other? For instance, it seems from what I have read is that EEG is better for raising IQ and improving creativity and HEG is good for focus and memory, but I am not sure if HEG is better than EEG training for that.
4. Should you do both and in what order would be best?

Thats about it,

THanks!

[Jonathan Toomim]

I'm the person you mentioned who has the HEG company.

1.    Yes, going to an EEG clinic is much better than doing it yourself. EEG is extremely complicated, and knowing what to train is very important. EEG clinics are typically guided by 19-electrode QEEG (quantitative EEG), where they compare your EEG readings at each electrode location to a database of other recordings to look for anomalous activity. DIY kits won't have that, and will more likely give you a one-size-fits-all style training protocol.

        On the other hand, going to an HEG clinic is not much better than doing it yourself. HEG is pretty simple, and even in a clinic is usually a one-size-fits-all type of training. The HEG DIY/home training kit is easy to use and just as powerful as the hardware professional therapists use.

2.     EEG measures oscillatory, synchronous components of brain activity patterns. It does not measure the amount of neural activity. HEG measures blood flow and energy consumption, and (semi-equivalently) the amount of neural activity. It does not measure activity patterns.

        EEG is (usually) messy and finicky, and generally requires a fair amount of work to get a good signal/noise ratio. It's also very sensitive to muscle artifact, such as from blinking your eyes or changing where you're looking. HEG is clean and simple, and pretty resistant to motion artifacts. For HEG, you just put the headband on and you're done.
       
        EEG can be done on any part of the brain, but due to heavy muscle artifacts from facial and eye muscles, doing EEG on the prefrontal cortex is tricky and often avoided. EEG on areas covered by hair requires wet electrodes, but since dry electrodes give poorer signal quality in all circumstances, most serious training uses wet electrodes anyway. HEG is mostly only done on the prefrontal cortex, due to hair attenuating the signal, but other (hair-covered) areas of the neocortex can be measured and trained with some effort, especially in people with light-colored hair.

    There are many more differences than that, but I don't have the will to write them all down.

3.    Take the IQ claims of EEG neurofeedback with a hefty chunk of rock salt. All of the studies I've seen on EEG NF that used IQ as an outcome measure used woefully inadequate control groups. There are also some data that indicate that HEG improves IQ scores, but they also don't come with good control groups. The IQ claims are mostly marketing hype, with a thin thread of science to back them up, as far as I know.

        The "improved focus" claim is an interesting one, epistemologically. There's actually more data and higher-quality data supporting the claim that EEG NF improves attention and focus than there is that HEG improves attention and focus. However, the data that does exist for HEG suggests that it works better (i.e. larger effect given the same amount of training time) than EEG.

        HEG seems to be excellent for attention/focus, working memory, emotional/behavioral/mood self-regulation, and other central executive functions.

4.     HEG and EEG seem to be complementary. I have no reason to suspect that one should be done before the other on scientific or biological grounds. I've heard from several users of HEG that they tried EEG first, spent a lot of money on it, then discovered HEG and found it to work much better, and wished they had gone straight to HEG and skipped the EEG. However, there are probably also other people who went through the opposite progression, but whom I don't hear from because they don't do HEG any longer.



By the way, I sell HEG systems retail for $995. Actually, $995 is the retail price I suggest to all of my distributors, and Upgraded Self/Bulletproof used to sell them for $995 (actually $1295 minus a $300 "discount", if I remember correctly, but I thought that was just a marketing gimmick).

Jonathan

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[Latitude]

Thanks for the great response, I would be interested in buying from you directly, but just looking on the description on Upgradedself, I don't see any mention of a user guide/training manual. Do you provide a guide to training every area of the brain with you device? And I have brown hair, and I would like to try and train all areas, so how with effort as you say would that be accomplished and is training all areas of the brain with HEG useful and safe?

[Rotem Segev]

Hi Jonathan,
thanks for the information. When you say "HEG seems to be excellent for working memory" what do you mean exactly? Training WM, alleviating stress induced WM deterioration or anything else?

Thanks

[Jonathan Toomim]

Rotem: My grandfather used Microcog as a pre/post measure for almost all of his clients. Microcog is a computerized IQ-style test battery which is very similar to the WAIS -- it has many different subtests with composite scores and subtest scores. It includes a few different memory tests, including a 5-minute delayed recall/recognition task, and a few different delayed matching–type tasks. As my memory serves, those subtests tended to improve by larger margins than the other components of Microcog (e.g. arithmetic). Two main caveats: (1) many of his patients (~40%?) were there for ADHD, and ADHD tends to severely reduce WM capability, so the improvement in WM performance may simply be due to reductions in ADHD symptoms; (2) no bloody control group. Aaaaarrrrrggghhhh.



Latitude/jyadgaroff: A few pages of basic instructions are provided with the unit; additional instruction is available via Skype and VNC screen sharing (showmypc.com).

I can't guarantee that attempts to train areas of the brain covered by hair will be successful for you. The recommended procedure for attempts thereat is to wet and part the hair at the site you wish to train, to minimize noise sources (such as bright light, especially fluorescents, and possibly your computer's AC adapter if you're on a laptop), and to test the signal strength with HEGDiag (a program that comes with the unit) and fiddle with things until you get the best signal possible.

I tend to de-emphasize the importance of localized training with nirHEG because the data we've collected show that people tend to produce widespread changes in activation even though measurement is done only at a single small site. For example, when training the signal at Fp2 (above the right eyebrow) while passively monitoring Fp1 (above the left eyebrow), changes at Fp1 average about 80% of the signal increase observed at Fp2.

Jonathan

Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training.

[Peter Meilahn]

Hi Jonathan, We have chatted before on Sigurd Othmer's Yahoo group. My hope and vision for HEG is that because it is simple it can be used repeatedly by clients. If I could afford multiple headsets I would let responsible families borrow them and in Minnesota the health plans cover video conferencing. For many issues like autism I see a need for daily training for the effect but because of the buy in. Over time, HEG may be a more one size fits all but because it is general it can create faster results from repeat use...

Do you consider selling on financing? I work with several families with more than one child with ASD that stopped EEG biofeedback or it is limited because of time. I do not thnk home training EEG training is as responsible because it is more nuanced while HEG can be as powerful....

Thoughts? Peter