Neurofeedback Therapy for Memory and Focus

Thanks to CuriosityStream for supporting my channel this morning. I found something from my teenage years that brought back some truly cringe-worthy memories of things that I did. And if you follow me on Instagram, you might've seen it in my stories. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has these memories. There's some awkward and embarrassing stuff that we've all done as kids that if we have the choice, we would probably rather forget. And as it turns out, there might be research that can help you make that happen, or at least remove that cringe-worthy association with the Mallory itself. This research focuses on a method called neurofeedback therapy. And while you probably won't be able to use it to forget that awkward moment at prom, any time soon, it is an active area of research for a lot of psychiatric conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD ADHD. And many other conditions in short, the goal is to help you train your own brand, to do anything from remove negative associations, with certain images or tasks to help you learn how to focus better. So at high level neurofeedback therapy uses brain signals to modulate your own brain activity. That's not the typical uses. EEG or FMRI, which are two methods of recording the electrical activity and signals of your brain. And previously, when we tried to use these methods, especially when it comes to SMRI, the problem that we often ran into was that we would take the activity that was going on in a certain region. Brain and average those signals to create our biofeedback marker or the signal that we're trying to help you learn how to control this is called a univariate approach. And the problem with is that you can't capture the complex things that are happening in a particular region of your brain. If you're taking the average of the entire space, In fact, in a lot of cases, if we look at the data that's coming out of your brain, when it's responding to the target image, which in the case of PTSD might be something that you are fearful of versus an off target image, which is something that you're not the patterns that we see in our brains are different. And the actual pattern itself matters, not just that average signal to perform neurofeedback therapy. You have to have a patient come in and collect on target and off target. Data from their brains. So if we're going with the example of PTSD, which is an active area of research, when it comes to neurofeedback therapy, for reasons that we'll get into in a second, you might have someone hooked up to an EKG or have them go through an FMRI, try and record the signals emanating from their brains. When they see something that they are. Fearful of, or that evokes that PTSD response as well as the signals that appear when they don't. And we need this data to build a class model, a machine learning model that can take all of that brain activity and learn to categorize brain activity into, on target States and off target States. And to be clear, you can actually have multiple States in this more than two, but for the purposes of this video, we'll focus on Tuesdays and on and off. Once the classifiers train, the patient comes back. And instead of being re-exposed to those negative samples, they are put in an MRI or poked up to an EEG and asked to modulate their own brain stage towards some target. And typically it goes something like this. Let's say you're the patient and the FMR. As you sit in the MRI, you'll [email protected] representative of your current brain state. Your goal is then to modulate your brain activity, such that that dot expands to hit the outer ring of a circle that you can see on scrutiny. Importantly, you're not. Given instructions on how to do this, but over time you learn how to modulate your own brain activity until you get to that target state consistently, as long as they HD, that would mean learning how to adjust my current brain activity, to focus my attention on the task at hand, which I could then use. Once I leave the study. If I feel my attention drifting during a task. On the other hand, for someone with PTSD that might mean training your brain to remove that negative association with. Whatever triggers your PTSD so that when you encounter it in the real world, you don't experience those PTSD symptoms anymore. And especially for PTSD, this is a really interesting method because currently a lot of PTSD treatment relies on exposure therapy, which requires you to be exposed to the thing that triggered your PTSD over and over again, until you learn to have a different response to it. And because that experience can be fairly traumatic, it causes a lot of people to drop out of therapy before they've completed their treatment. So, if we could minimize that actual exposure to the thing that triggers your PTSD or in the case of attentional disorders, figure out a way to make it easier for people to learn how to focus their attention. We can make the overall experience a lot less painful. And interestingly, although the research hasn't fully figured out what exactly is happening in your brain, when you do neurofeedback therapy, it seems like it might be something similar to what we see happen during exposure therapy, even though you aren't actually being exposed to the same stimulus. One of the most popular models for the system is deck Neff or decoding neural feedback, a popular machine learning system that essentially automates all of this for you. And so, as we see more studies on the impact of these kinds of therapy, this might be something that you end up using. One day, of course, neurofeedback therapy doesn't come without its drawbacks, namely that depending on the condition you're being treated for, it may change the memories in your mind. And our memories are already known to be relatively faulty. The thing that we remember is not always the same. The thing that happened, but intentionally changing memories has some ethical ramifications. Additionally, in the case of patients with PTSD, this method does still require us to show those patients images or stimulus that may be traumatic to them. Although there has been some current research that has looked at a way to essentially figure out those brain States for those on and off target stimuli. Without actually showing the stimulus itself. So if we use the PTSD example, that would be figuring out the brain state that is triggering of PTSD symptoms and the brain state that is not without actually showing images or stimuli that trigger the PTSD symptoms themselves. You can check out the Nebula plus version of this video for the extended deep dive into this paper. But essentially the researchers in this paper figured out a way to show people a wide variety of generally on offensive images that might be associated with certain types of triggers and use that as an indirect way of getting at the brain States instead of just. Directly showing some of the things that they're afraid of and all this method is really interesting. One of the things that the authors highlight is the fact that the amount of data that you would need to have a model that generalizes to a wide population, and also the image that, that you would need to do. So is. Often hard to come by in neuroscience research, in fact, and this could be a whole other video. So if you'd be interested in a video on medical data, privacy, let me know in the comments, the issue of data privacy in this kind of research is an interesting challenge. Not having enough data to make generalizable models is an ongoing problem in neuro and machine learning research. On top of the fact that medical data often comes in different formats, which can make them difficult to anonymize. And especially when we think about data like MRI data, where your actual whole head and face are being captured by the data, maintaining patient privacy is an important, but challenging step that we'll definitely have to go into this. If this ever gets translated into the clinic at a widespread level, I'll stop here for now. But if you're interested in a deeper dive into the research behind datasets and data privacy, you should check out the Nebula plus version of this video. If you're new to my channel, Nebula is a critical platform where you get to watch my videos ad free. And some of your fans, the recruiters, including myself, can create an experiment with awesome content without having to worry about demonetization or paying tribute to the YouTube algorithm. We're thrilled to be partnering with CuriosityStream a subscription streaming service with thousands of documentaries and nonfiction videos. Want to learn more about data? Check out the joy of data, a documentary hosted by mathematician Hannah Fry. Who explores how data is stored, shared, made sense of and what it reveals about us and our world. And we're CuriosityStream is all about big budget, nonfiction, documentaries, wearable, doing nebulous. So that education you creators have a place to try out content that might not work on YouTube. I'll Nebula. You'll find ad-free videos from some of your favorite creators from Tierra zoo to Marquez Brown Lee, to the coding train, as well as my Nebula plus content, which includes extended version to videos that you see on my channel. Including videos like this one, you'll also find Nebula originals like Tom Scott's game show money or questionable advice where Vanessa Hill from brain craft tries to help me order less takeout. Curiosity stream loves independent creators and wants to help score a platform. So if you click on the link in the description or use my promo code Jordan, you can get access to curiosity stream for 26% off their annual plan with Nebula included for free. For as long as you work, your actually stream member, that's less than $15 a year signing up for curiosity stream. And I realize a great way to directly support my channel while getting to watch the extended version of my videos. Free to sign up for curiosity stream in [email protected] slash Jordan or using the promo code org.

Thanks to CuriosityStream for supporting my channel this morning. I found something from my teenage years that brought back some truly cringe-worthy memories of things that I did. And if you follow me on Instagram, you might've seen it in my stories. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has these memories. There's some awkward and embarrassing stuff that we've all done as kids that if we have the choice, we would probably rather forget. And as it turns out, there might be research that can help you make that happen, or at least remove that cringe-worthy association with the Mallory itself. This research focuses on a method called neurofeedback therapy. And while you probably won't be able to use it to forget that awkward moment at prom, any time soon, it is an active area of research for a lot of psychiatric conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD ADHD. And many other conditions in short, the goal is to help you train your own brand, to do anything from remove negative associations, with certain images or tasks to help you learn how to focus better. So at high level neurofeedback therapy uses brain signals to modulate your own brain activity. That's not the typical uses. EEG or FMRI, which are two methods of recording the electrical activity and signals of your brain. And previously, when we tried to use these methods, especially when it comes to SMRI, the problem that we often ran into was that we would take the activity that was going on in a certain region. Brain and average those signals to create our biofeedback marker or the signal that we're trying to help you learn how to control this is called a univariate approach. And the problem with is that you can't capture the complex things that are happening in a particular region of your brain. If you're taking the average of the entire space, In fact, in a lot of cases, if we look at the data that's coming out of your brain, when it's responding to the target image, which in the case of PTSD might be something that you are fearful of versus an off target image, which is something that you're not the patterns that we see in our brains are different. And the actual pattern itself matters, not just that average signal to perform neurofeedback therapy. You have to have a patient come in and collect on target and off target. Data from their brains. So if we're going with the example of PTSD, which is an active area of research, when it comes to neurofeedback therapy, for reasons that we'll get into in a second, you might have someone hooked up to an EKG or have them go through an FMRI, try and record the signals emanating from their brains. When they see something that they are. Fearful of, or that evokes that PTSD response as well as the signals that appear when they don't. And we need this data to build a class model, a machine learning model that can take all of that brain activity and learn to categorize brain activity into, on target States and off target States. And to be clear, you can actually have multiple States in this more than two, but for the purposes of this video, we'll focus on Tuesdays and on and off. Once the classifiers train, the patient comes back. And instead of being re-exposed to those negative samples, they are put in an MRI or poked up to an EEG and asked to modulate their own brain stage towards some target. And typically it goes something like this. Let's say you're the patient and the FMR. As you sit in the MRI, you'll look@ascreenthatwillshowyouadotandthat.is representative of your current brain state. Your goal is then to modulate your brain activity, such that that dot expands to hit the outer ring of a circle that you can see on scrutiny. Importantly, you're not. Given instructions on how to do this, but over time you learn how to modulate your own brain activity until you get to that target state consistently, as long as they HD, that would mean learning how to adjust my current brain activity, to focus my attention on the task at hand, which I could then use. Once I leave the study. If I feel my attention drifting during a task. On the other hand, for someone with PTSD that might mean training your brain to remove that negative association with. Whatever triggers your PTSD so that when you encounter it in the real world, you don't experience those PTSD symptoms anymore. And especially for PTSD, this is a really interesting method because currently a lot of PTSD treatment relies on exposure therapy, which requires you to be exposed to the thing that triggered your PTSD over and over again, until you learn to have a different response to it. And because that experience can be fairly traumatic, it causes a lot of people to drop out of therapy before they've completed their treatment. So, if we could minimize that actual exposure to the thing that triggers your PTSD or in the case of attentional disorders, figure out a way to make it easier for people to learn how to focus their attention. We can make the overall experience a lot less painful. And interestingly, although the research hasn't fully figured out what exactly is happening in your brain, when you do neurofeedback therapy, it seems like it might be something similar to what we see happen during exposure therapy, even though you aren't actually being exposed to the same stimulus. One of the most popular models for the system is deck Neff or decoding neural feedback, a popular machine learning system that essentially automates all of this for you. And so, as we see more studies on the impact of these kinds of therapy, this might be something that you end up using. One day, of course, neurofeedback therapy doesn't come without its drawbacks, namely that depending on the condition you're being treated for, it may change the memories in your mind. And our memories are already known to be relatively faulty. The thing that we remember is not always the same. The thing that happened, but intentionally changing memories has some ethical ramifications. Additionally, in the case of patients with PTSD, this method does still require us to show those patients images or stimulus that may be traumatic to them. Although there has been some current research that has looked at a way to essentially figure out those brain States for those on and off target stimuli. Without actually showing the stimulus itself. So if we use the PTSD example, that would be figuring out the brain state that is triggering of PTSD symptoms and the brain state that is not without actually showing images or stimuli that trigger the PTSD symptoms themselves. You can check out the Nebula plus version of this video for the extended deep dive into this paper. But essentially the researchers in this paper figured out a way to show people a wide variety of generally on offensive images that might be associated with certain types of triggers and use that as an indirect way of getting at the brain States instead of just. Directly showing some of the things that they're afraid of and all this method is really interesting. One of the things that the authors highlight is the fact that the amount of data that you would need to have a model that generalizes to a wide population, and also the image that, that you would need to do. So is. Often hard to come by in neuroscience research, in fact, and this could be a whole other video. So if you'd be interested in a video on medical data, privacy, let me know in the comments, the issue of data privacy in this kind of research is an interesting challenge. Not having enough data to make generalizable models is an ongoing problem in neuro and machine learning research. On top of the fact that medical data often comes in different formats, which can make them difficult to anonymize. And especially when we think about data like MRI data, where your actual whole head and face are being captured by the data, maintaining patient privacy is an important, but challenging step that we'll definitely have to go into this. If this ever gets translated into the clinic at a widespread level, I'll stop here for now. But if you're interested in a deeper dive into the research behind datasets and data privacy, you should check out the Nebula plus version of this video. If you're new to my channel, Nebula is a critical platform where you get to watch my videos ad free. And some of your fans, the recruiters, including myself, can create an experiment with awesome content without having to worry about demonetization or paying tribute to the YouTube algorithm. We're thrilled to be partnering with CuriosityStream a subscription streaming service with thousands of documentaries and nonfiction videos. Want to learn more about data? Check out the joy of data, a documentary hosted by mathematician Hannah Fry. Who explores how data is stored, shared, made sense of and what it reveals about us and our world. And we're CuriosityStream is all about big budget, nonfiction, documentaries, wearable, doing nebulous. So that education you creators have a place to try out content that might not work on YouTube. I'll Nebula. You'll find ad-free videos from some of your favorite creators from Tierra zoo to Marquez Brown Lee, to the coding train, as well as my Nebula plus content, which includes extended version to videos that you see on my channel. Including videos like this one, you'll also find Nebula originals like Tom Scott's game show money or questionable advice where Vanessa Hill from brain craft tries to help me order less takeout. Curiosity stream loves independent creators and wants to help score a platform. So if you click on the link in the description or use my promo code Jordan, you can get access to curiosity stream for 26% off their annual plan with Nebula included for free. For as long as you work, your actually stream member, that's less than $15 a year signing up for curiosity stream. And I realize a great way to directly support my channel while getting to watch the extended version of my videos. Free to sign up for curiosity stream in nebula@curiositystream.com slash Jordan or using the promo code org.

Transcript for:Neurofeedback Therapy for Memory and Focus

Transcript for:
Neurofeedback Therapy for Memory and Focus