The training process starts by
teaching you to do something so fundamental that you will be astounded that you
don’t already know how—to pay attention to how you pay attention! The conscious
awareness of the way you pay attention is a fundamental skill that few people
have mastered or even tried to learn.
The second step is to direct it--to
develop a more controlled cycle between focusing and recharging. Recent Air
Force studies of the pilots in the B2 bomber, who are very carefully selected
peak performers, show that they are constantly cycling between concentrating on
cockpit tasks and taking brief recharging breaks, which we call microbreaks.
The Peak Achievement Training program teaches you how to focus and to recharge
separately, and then combines them into a cycle. The figure shows several
cycles in which Focus (yellow) and Alertness (orange) are interrupted by
microbreaks. There are vertical bars every five seconds.
The third step in training is to
learn to apply this cycle to enhance skills and experiences that are important
to you. You will be able to identify the cycles in many of your activities, to
pay attention to the cycle and understand how you do it, to video yourself and
discover the sequence of your brainwave patterns as you perform important
skills, and then to enhance your skills by refining the sequence.
When the Air Force designed the B-2
Bomber, they knew that it would be a highly complex airplane to fly, with many
different tasks to do, despite the many automated systems. They sponsored a
number of complex studies of the human factors involved in optimizing pilot
performance, many of them performed by Dr. Barry Sterman of UCLA and the
Sepulveda Veterans Administration Hospital. In a brilliant series of studies,
Dr. Sterman, who is a pioneer in EEG (brainwave) biofeedback research, measured
the brainwaves of pilots and others, while evaluating their performance in tasks
that simulate aspects of flying. He discovered that various parts of the
pilot’s brains were constantly cycling between a processing mode and an “idling”
or recharging mode, in which the brain conserved energy and refreshed its stores
of vital nutrients.
If you wish to understand his
fascinating findings and the fundamentals of Peak Achievement Trainingä,
we need to review a few fundamentals about brainwaves and the brain. I’ll try to
simplify this as much as I can, by making some broad generalizations. However,
if you are in a hurry or just not technically minded, you can skip ahead to the
section titled Fundamentals of Peak Achievementä:
A Summary.
Dr. Sterman broke down the complex
brainwave patterns he saw by analyzing how strong the output was at various
frequencies. The term frequency refers to the number of times the waveform goes
up and down (cycles) per second (called Hertz, or Hz.). You can take any
waveform, no matter how complex it looks, and break it down into the amount of
energy that it has at each frequency. This figure shows the filtered brainwave
pattern from the prefrontal part of the brain (middle of the forehead) with a
time scale of five divisions per second. You can see a large, almost regular
pattern near the end. This idling rhythm at 9-11 cycles per second, usually
called the alpha rhythm, occurs more frequently when someone is relaxing with
the eyes closed. It is much more prominent when you are recording from the back
of the head.
This figure shows the frequency
breakdown that the Peak Achievement Trainerä
performs on the raw brainwave. As the Spectrogram scrolls from the right (now)
to the left (past), each colored vertical bar shows the analysis of a short
period of the brainwave pattern. It separates out the amount of energy at each
frequency (on the vertical axis), and shows a color corresponding to its
intensity. As the scale at the bottom of the figure shows, more intense energy
produces more intense color. Generally, brainwave patterns will show the most
energy from 0 to 7 cycles and a high energy alpha brainwave stripe at 9-11
cycles.
Dr. Sterman divided the frequencies
into chunks, so that he could look at how much energy output he could detect
from 1-3 Hz., 3-5 Hz., 5-7 Hz., and so on, by every 2 Hz. He did not use the
traditional Greek letter analysis of brainwaves, which includes delta (0-4 Hz.),
theta (4-8 Hz.), alpha (8-13 Hz.) and beta (13-30 Hz.), because he thought it
was too inexact. The relationship between these Greek letters and various
states of consciousness, such as sleep, daydreaming or reverie, relaxation, and
focusing is now known to be very imprecise, and in some cases, misleading, so
I’ll only use them to designate these frequency ranges.
One of the major complications here
is that brainwaves and their frequencies correspond to different experiences as
you look in different locations on the scalp. For our purposes, the most
important distinction is between the frontal lobe and the “back” of the brain,
which includes central, parietal, temporal, and occipital locations. Very
roughly, you can think of the frontal lobe as the part of the cortex, the outer
layer of the brain, forward of the lines from the front of the ears to about an
inch in front of the very top of the head. The prefrontal lobe, which extends
behind your forehead and then folds to lie on top of the roof of your mouth, is
the part of the brain that is responsible for integrating various aspects of
your experience and making decisions about how you act on them. The back of the
brain is primarily involved in processing specific information, such as the
sensory inputs from your eyes, ears, and body. The two systems, specific and
non-specific, are each primarily connected to different parts of the thalamus,
an egg-shaped nucleus in the middle of the brain, which relays information to
the cortex.
The central part of the prefrontal
cortex is strongly influenced by a network of nerve fibers carrying messages
which help us to consciously focus on interesting and/or important experiences
that are useful for survival. These fibers contain the key neurotransmitter,
dopamine.
Recent studies of the brain by
researchers using powerful new technologies such as PET and SPECT scanning and
f-MRI have led to the discovery of the Executive Attention Network, the part of
the brain that is most involved in directing where we focus our attention. In
other words, it choreographs the dance of the brain, by turning on and off
various parts of the brain that are necessary to direct our attention to certain
aspects of our experience. According to a Scientific American Library book,
Images of Mind, by Dr. Michael Posner (a cognitive psychologist) and Dr.
Marcus Raichle (a PET scanner), the Executive Attention Network is located in
the cleft or fissure between the two hemispheres of the brain, right below the
midline of the scalp, an inch or two forward of the vertex, the very top of the
head. This part of the anterior cingulate cortex may actually be the central
part of the brain’s master delegator, somewhat like the executive assistant to
the Chief Executive Officer of a corporation, responsible for carrying out the
CEO’s orders by coordinating the resources of the corporation.
The Peak Achievement Trainer uses
brainwave Sensors located a little forward of this point—in the middle of the
forehead--to detect what is happening in the central prefrontal cortex and the
Executive Attention Network.
When the Executive Attention Network
encounters an experience that the brain judges to be unfamiliar, an experience
that can’t be easily categorized on the basis of prior experience, it turns on
the prefrontal cortex, along with many other regions of the cortex. As a
result, we become aware or conscious of this new information. The processing of
this new information is spread widely across the cortex at first, producing a
lot of high frequency messages from one part of the cortex to another.
However, continuing this high
frequency processing indefinitely is not a very efficient way to run the brain,
since it takes a tremendous amount of energy. Even with the energy conservation
measures it uses, the brain takes about 20% of the body’s blood flow and up to
65% of its metabolic energy. Taking any more energy than it absolutely needs
would be a real disadvantage to our survival.
The major energy conservation
measure that is implemented by the Executive Attention Network, in collaboration
with the thalamus, is to place parts of the brain that are not needed into “idle
mode”. As it sorts out the parts of the cortex that aren’t necessary for a
particular task, it sends them a message to slow down or turn off the energy
consuming, high frequency processing. With additional similar experiences, the
Executive Attention Network forms habitual ways of information processing that
save energy by idling more and more of the cortex via these messages. When it
is in idling mode, the brain performs a number of system maintenance tasks that
can improve subsequent memory and information processing. However, there are
virtually no EEG studies of the role of the midline prefrontal cortex in
learning and memory. Since the rich network of dopaminergic fibers is centered
there, it may behave very differently than other regions of the cortex.
These messages to the cortex that
put it in idling mode are rhythmic brainwaves—idling rhythms--that can
affect large portions of the cortex at the same time. In fact, they are a very
large portion of what we see in the visible EEG. Furthermore, since the
waveforms of many of these idling rhythms are irregular (not smooth sine waves),
they have overtones, which show up on the Peak Achievement Trainer as higher
frequency (beta and above) brainwave outputs.
The higher frequency brainwaves that
are produced when regions of the cortex are turned on are much harder to detect
with an EEG instrument for three reasons:
1.
There are several layers of tissue
that surround the brain, and then the scalp and the skin. Higher frequency
brainwaves find it much harder to go through these various layers.
2.
About 95% of the input to any
cortical cell comes from other cortical cells, either locally or via longer
fibers. Impulses travel in one direction and then loop back. Since the timing
and direction of these loops is random, the net effect is that most of the
activity is offset by other random activity, producing very little electrical
voltage on the surface of the scalp.
3.
The EEG is most sensitive to currents
that run in the direction of a straight line between the electrodes (ear and
forehead), roughly in the direction that the idling rhythms run, from the
thalamus in the center of the head outwards.
Therefore, the brainwaves that are
monitored by the Peak Achievement Trainer are primarily idling rhythms rather
than indications that important information processing is going on in the cortex
underneath the Sensor.
The Peak Achievement Trainer is
designed to detect the absence of the idling messages rather than the
high frequency activity. Although there is evidence that there are organized
brainwave rhythms in the beta range, and that they may represent messages from
one part of the cortex to another, the empirical finding is that when you focus
intensely, the brainwave Sensor near the Executive Attention Network almost
always shows less output voltage at all the frequencies from 1 to 37 Hz. This
decrease in output was originally labeled as Concentration in the older
software. In the new FocusedAlert protocols, we have chosen to create a
measurement of Focus that (more intuitively) increases as you concentrate more,
by applying the formula:
Focus = 100 – Concentration
The word “focus” can be confusing,
since it may be used in several different ways:
1.
Denoting the object of your
attention—that is, what you are paying attention to.
2.
Changing the clarity of an image—that
is, by turning a camera lens.
3.
The degree of single-pointedness of
attention—narrow vs. broad.
4.
The duration of paying attention to a
particular object.
It would
probably be clearest if I indicated the particular use of “focus” each time I
used it, but this would lead to many long and awkward sentences. Since most of
the uses of “focus” in this Manual will refer to the third meaning, I will adopt
the convention that when focus is used alone as a noun, it refers to the degree
of single-pointedness of attention--the narrower it is, the more focused.
Capitalizing “Focus” will refer to the particular measurement we defined
previously, unless it’s at the beginning of a sentence. The word
“concentration” in lower case will be synonymous with this meaning of focus. In
upper case, “Concentration” refers to the measurement in the older software. As
a verb, “focus” or “concentrate” used without further description will refer to
making your attention single-pointed.
The first definition will be
indicated by using “focus on”. The second definition will rarely be used here.
When it is, I will substitute “clarifying”. When the fourth definition is
needed, I will use “Focus Time” to refer to the duration, as formalized by our
measurement.
When Dr. Sterman examined the
brainwaves of pilots doing simulated landing tasks, he found that the idling
rhythms were suppressed in the parts of the brain that were being used at the
time. He was able to fine-tune his findings by looking at these brainwaves in
various control conditions, in which the pilots did only part of the task. To
make a long story very short, Sterman concluded that in the back of the brain
the processing of sensory inputs was associated with decreases in the idling
rhythms from 11-15 Hz., while more complex thinking decreased idling rhythms
from 8-12 Hz. The harder the task was, the more that these rhythms were
suppressed.
In fact, Dr. Sterman was able to
pick the best 6 pilots--those who were eventually selected as B2 bomber
instructors--by measuring how well they suppressed the idling rhythms in the
parietal lobe. This approach turned out to be more accurate, by itself, than
all the other measures that the Air Force used in making this selection.
Studies of pilots in the cockpit, as
they actually flew their planes, showed that there was a short burst of idling
rhythm between the individual tasks that they performed in the cockpit. The
better pilots needed a shorter rest period before starting to focus again. We
call this recharging period a microbreak.
In fact, there is evidence that this
kind of cycling between concentration and the microbreak is a basic way
in which the brain functions. For example, there are studies that show that
when we read, there is a brief idling rhythm in the visual cortex when we come
to the end of a line and move on to the next.
Dr. Sterman performed a study which showed that
these idling rhythms decrease right after a person is presented with a target to
respond to, and then increase again when they finish processing their response
to the stimulus. In the back of the brain, this idling rhythm was an 8-12 Hz.
(alpha) burst that increased as they became more familiar with the task, and it
became habituated. As he looked at sites that were further forward in the
brain, he saw that there was also an idling rhythm at 5 to 7 Hz.
There are also good, common sense
reasons to believe that the brain is set up to cycle between focusing and taking
a recharging microbreak. Even the best of us cannot concentrate forever. We
need our breaks. They are built in to our work and school day. The concept
that each of us has an “attention span” that increases as we mature from child
to adult, and then decreases in old age is a clear reflection of this well
accepted concept. People who fail to regularly take these necessary microbreaks
between tasks set themselves up for stress-related diseases because they
accumulate the tension and anxiety from the continuous effort in their minds,
brains, and bodies.
The most fundamental lesson of Peak Achievement
Training is that we all need to cycle continuously between focusing and taking a
recharging microbreak in order to consistently be at our best without overtaxing
our brains.
The prefrontal cortex is also
capable of alternating between focusing and idling. When things are familiar to
us, it can idle, and let the other parts of the brain carry out their habitual
ways of processing inputs, turning on and off in well established sequences.
When they are unfamiliar, the prefrontal cortex and the Executive Attention
Network get turned on. They have the role of bringing these new experiences
into conscious awareness and figuring out how to process them by activating
other centers of the brain. Dr. Sterman’s research indicated that the
brainwaves of the frontal lobe, including the sites near the Executive Attention
Network, also show cycles when the individual is continually involved in
detecting a series of targets. Right after a target is presented, the idling
rhythm is suppressed, only to return in about half a second. After an event, the
frontal cortex finishes its processing and goes into idle before the back of the
brain does. The prefrontal lobe idling rhythm is primarily in the mid-theta
range, between 5 to 7 Hz.
By using the multiple displays of
the previous Peak Achievement Trainer software to examine the brainwaves of my
students, I have been able to see their patterns as they focused and did a
number of other things. At first, I looked for the relationship between
concentration and the decrease in 5-7 Hz. rhythms at the midline site close to
the hairline. I found that this was the clearest indicator of concentration
that I had observed in my clinical experience. The Spectrogram display
permitted me to look at the voltage output at each frequency. From 2 to about
20 cycles, I saw clearly that as I and others focused, the voltage output
decreased across the board, at all frequencies. This was less clearly true
from 1 to 37 Hz. For example, the far left side and the right side of this
figure is focusing, while the right side is recharging.
Dr. Sterman had actually noticed the
same thing, from about 5 to 15 cycles, all the frequencies that he measured, at
virtually all the brainwave recording sites he tried. Technically, this is
called “event related desynchronization”. In the frontal lobe, this suppression
is followed by the return of the theta (5-7 Hz.) idling rhythm in about half a
second, particularly after we see a target, rather than an unimportant control
stimulus.
When people learn to suppress the
idling rhythms, their attention problems clear up. Several large studies, now
being submitted for publication, show that the suppression of theta and or alpha
(depending on age and recording site) is largely responsible for the success of
other brainwave training protocols in treating people with attention deficit
disorder. Most all of the brainwave training protocols for treating attention
deficit disorder have rewarded students for decreasing theta and/or alpha at
central or frontal sites. These decreases were much more consistently related
to successful treatment than the changes in higher frequencies that were also
evaluated. Using a protocol that teaches the student to enhance beta may
actually slow down training, because the feedback is less precise and more
confusing than that provided by the Peak Achievement Trainerä.
It takes about ten sessions for a typical student to understand that type of
brainwave biofeedback; almost everyone will understand this type of
neurofeedback during the first few minutes.
There is a common misperception that
increases in alpha rhythms denote peak performance. Actually, this comes from
studies of the back part of the brain, which actually show that as people master
a particular skill, alpha increases. However, this is actually a reflection of
the brain’s tendency for efficient operations, shutting off more and more
unnecessary processing as the skill becomes a habit.
It is clear that interesting or
important events also cause this decrease in the idling rhythm in the
prefrontal cortex and the Executive Attention Network. In Sterman’s study, the
targets produced a larger rapid decrease in the 5-7 Hz. idling rhythm than the
control stimuli that they didn’t need to respond to. In working with my
students, I have found that anytime I can entice them to become more interested
in what they are doing, they generally respond by decreasing their brainwave
output across the board from 1-37 Hz.
Becoming absorbed in a particular
experience is closely related to being interested in it. In fact, absorption
can be thought of as being a result of one-pointed focus on the experience—a
focus so intense that other inputs, ideas, or conversations with others or
yourself are ignored. In working with students, I find that it is this type of
single-pointed focus and interest that is most successful in inhibiting the
idling rhythms.
Measuring and Training Alertness
These FocusedAlert protocols also allow you to
measure and train what we believe is another dimension of attention: Arousal or
Alertness. We have chosen to use the word Alertness for this dimension. We
believe it is fundamentally independent from the single-pointed Focus
measurement. In particular, it responds to the state of higher
alertness/arousal in which intense effort marshals your resources to react--for
example, when the ball is coming right at you.
Although at this time we intend to keep the
precise formulas we use as trade secrets, we can say that we mathematically
eliminate the effects of Focus on the brainwave pattern, and then measure the
effects of the stimulation from the Reticular Activating System (RAS) on the
pacemaker cells in the reticular nucleus of the thalamus, which produce the EEG
idling rhythms we observe at the cortical level. The two measures are
mathematically independent, and we have seen instances where they function
independently: You can increase or decrease one without changing the other.
However, it is clearly true that most people will usually increase their
Alertness in order to enhance their Focus. There are many circumstances in
which it may be useful to train people to concentrate more calmly, minimizing
the increase in Alertness.
It appears that it is much more difficult to
sustain Alertness than Focus--the peaks last for a much shorter time. Alertness
may be related to the release of adrenaline, noradrenalin, and dopamine from
nerve terminals; when these are exhausted, restocking them may take time.
Trying to increase Alertness may also release adrenaline from the adrenal
medulla. Since this adrenaline has to travel through the blood stream, it may
produce an increase in the Alertness measure with a longer latency and slower
decrease, which will add to the effects of the RAS-mediated activation.
Since the neurotransmitters, neuromodulators,
and hormones necessary to support Alertness are in limited supply, one of the
major goals of training may be to teach people to conserve their Alertness by
minimizing its expenditure when it isn't needed.
Another way to think about this is that we want
to find the optimal point on the Yerkes-Dodson curve--the inverted-U shape curve
relating performance to arousal--for performing at the particular moment.
This basic truth was recognized many
years ago from experiments with animals. The highest point of the inverted U is
at the middle levels of arousal. They found that the location of the peak
varies depending upon how complex the task is. Simple tasks, such as assembly
line work, which can be accomplished with a succession of narrow foci of
attention, produce a higher optimum. More complex tasks, such as writing, which
require integrating a wider variety of information, are best performed at lower
levels of arousal.
This presumes that higher levels of
arousal (Alertness) are generally related to a narrower focus of attention.
Actually, this isn’t always true, as our experience with Peak Achievement
Training has shown us. Although it is sometimes difficult to do so, the two can
be controlled rather independently, so that, for example, you can learn to focus
more intensely at lower levels of Alertness and conserve mental energy. This
is the combination we need in order to successfully survive hours of lectures
and business meetings.
When you become too stimulated or
aroused, another problem develops—your attention becomes harder to control. It
shifts around, focusing on one thing and then another, but you can’t sustain its
focus on any one thing for very long. Often, emotional events receive the bulk
of your attention. We experience this as distraction, anxiety, or, in an
extreme, a panic reaction. When this happens, we may say that it is hard to
focus, but this problem is really quite different than the problem we have when
we don’t have enough energy to move from a wide, diffuse focus to a narrow one.
It is a problem caused by high energy, rather than low vigor or arousal. This
is the other reason why the Yerkes-Dodson curves decrease at high arousal or
Alertness.
Since you don’t want to be at either
extreme for optimal performance, but rather someplace in the middle, the
FocusedAlert protocols are designed to reinforce the optimum range between an
upper and a lower limit.
Attention as an Adjustable Flashlight Beam
One analogy is particularly useful
in understanding attention. Try thinking of it as being like an adjustable
beam flashlight, which you can tune between a wide, diffuse focus on many
different aspects of your experience at a particular moment, and a narrow,
single-pointed focus on one aspect of the experience at that moment. You can
focus this beam in a number of different directions, or in its widest mode, use
it to attend dimly to many things at once. When you focus more diffusely, as
you do during a microbreak, you are not conscious of any particular aspect of
the experience, but rather take in all of it at once.
You can also adjust the brightness
or intensity of the beam of this special flashlight. We generally do this by
turning the energy consumption control—the Alertness or arousal level, which
enhances our capacity to pay attention. During new, interesting, or demanding
experiences, the beam is on high intensity. This generally tends to make your
focus more narrow and absorbed, but it can also produce a brighter beam that is
somewhat wider. The Executive Attention Network has stopped idling and turned
on the higher frequency processing of the surrounding frontal lobe and other
areas of the brain in order to find an appropriate response.
In contrast, when you respond
habitually to an experience, the prefrontal cortex and the Executive Attention
Network is not involved, large portions of the cortex are idling, and very
little of your attention is used to form the response. The flashlight beam is
on a lower intensity. This response is not sensed to be as conscious as is your
reaction to a new or important experience.
At higher levels of arousal, you
start to lose control of the flashlight beam, as anxiety and possibly panic
cause it to shift quickly from one object of attention to another.
1.
The Peak Achievement Trainer
responds to single-pointed focus, interest, and/or absorption in any experience
by changing its visual displays and the sounds that it produces. It detects
when your prefrontal cortex and Executive Attention Network are not producing
idling rhythms.
2.
You will learn to use these signals
to enhance your ability to cycle between focusing and brief periods of
recharging or idling, called microbreaks. We all need to cycle continuously in
order to be at our best consistently without overtaxing our brains.
3.
By strengthening your ability to
concentrate, to recharge, and to easily and flexibly switch between them, Peak
Achievement Training will enhance your functioning, decrease your stress,
and improve your mental and physical well being.
4.
Many of your important activities
have built-in cycles of focusing and microbreaks; by understanding these cycles
and strengthening your abilities, you will learn to do them more effectively.
5.
Learning to control your Alertness
allows you to more consistently reach the optimal zone for a particular
activity. Alertness is used here to indicate the degree of arousal and the
amount of mental energy needed to sustain it. Enhancing your capacity to
maintain Alertness by practicing and learning how not to waste your mental
energy will enhance your reserves and decrease fatigue.
Types of Peak Achievement Training
Even without the Neureka! protocol,
there are twelve different and complementary types of training which are
possible using the Peak Achievement Trainerä:
1.
Strengthening the ability of the Brain's Executive Attention Network to
momentarily focus attention.
2.
Strengthening the ability of the midbrain to momentarily intensify
alertness/arousal.
3.
Strengthening the ability of the Executive Attention Network to sustain focused
attention.
4.
Strengthening the ability of the midbrain to sustain alertness/arousal.
5.
Simultaneously increasing Focus and Alertness to meet a heavy demand.
6.
Keeping Focus up while lowering Alertness/Arousal to decrease stress.
7.
Focusing attention on parts of the body that the coach wishes to work with.
8.
Train
the user to take brief, relaxing microbreaks which recharge the brain.
9.
Find
the best possible degree of alertness/arousal to perform particular activities
optimally.
10.
Perform arbitrary sequences of concentration, alertness, and microbreaks.
11.
Discover and enhance performance of the sequences that are optimal for
particular activities.
12.
Perform these sequences despite distractions such as self-talk and crowd noise.
