Brain Mapping / qEEG
What is brain mapping?
Brain mapping reveals how well our brain works. MRIs and CAT scans provide information about brain structures, but brain mapping reveals communication and connectivity within the brain, including our cerebral strengths and weaknesses. Brain mapping provides the most useful information for evaluating psychological processes, recording our brain activity at a lightning speed — every seven thousandths of a second — so that we can learn about how our brain shifts moment to moment in response to stimulation.
What are the benefits of brain mapping?
Brain mapping identifies the source of psychological issues, not just the symptoms. Depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, and other mental health problems may be caused by a number of sources, a variety of brain networks. Knowing the source of a problem allows targeted treatments, guides psychiatrists in the best medication choice, assists therapists in family counseling, and directs other therapies.
How comprehensive is brain mapping?
Brain mapping evaluates 1400 connections between and within corticolimbic networks, focusing on those networks and areas most responsible for our behavior. We identify healthy networks from unhealthy ones — those that are overactive, underactive, or unstable, sharing too little information with other regions of the brain. We compare brainwave activity and communication for 55 brain areas and 7 cortical networks. We determine whether our limbic system, an older and less evolved network, dominates our mental habits.
We examine brain areas vital to:
– Speed of Consciousness: We identify how often our brain receives sensory information from the environment and the efficiency in transferring this information to awareness.
– Achievement: We evaluate our brain’s ability to sustain attention, sequence tasks, and coordinate reason, decision making, and language.
– Social Intelligence: We evaluate how adept our brain performs in social situations, our proficiency in registering emotional and social cues of other individuals, our flexibility in adjusting to new social situations, and our resilience in responding to difficult and challenging emotions.
– Sense of Well-Being: We evaluate the integration of seven major brain networks, including the “default-mode network” which manages self-reflection and discerns changes in our emotional state.
How Does Brain Mapping Evaluate My Brain?
We evaluate the maturity of each brain area including our executive system in the frontal lobes involved in decision-making, impulse control, and judgment. We evaluate the presence of neuromarkers for attention, memory, planning, language ability, self-focus, spatial processing, and attachment. We analyze innovative as well as traditional EEG parameters with unsurpassed resolution and accuracy.
Corticolimbic Integration. We evaluate where our limbic system is integrated with the advanced neocortex and where it dominates specific brain areas and networks.
Brain Organization. We evaluate how well our brain transfers information across major cortical regions. We identify brain areas that are commonly “sleeping,” which are underactive and under contribute to conscious awareness, as well as those areas which are overactive, burdened with too great a role in our thinking and may result in a skewed focus or understanding.
Sensory Sampling Rate. We monitor the world through our senses and raise this information to conscious awareness many times a second. Most of us sample the sensory world 10 times a second. Some individuals draw information from their senses faster, which often places a great load on our brain to organize this increased information and result in stress, while others are slower, which can impact their ability to interact with others and understand experiences. Compatibility – between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, and even between friends and strangers – often requires similar sensory sampling rates.
Brain Mapping and Therapy
Our team of therapists create a treatment plan based the brain map, symptoms, and patient history.
Who is qualified to conduct Brain Mapping?
Normative EEG analysts are certified by the Society for the Advancement of Brain Analysis (SABA) or the American Neurotherapy Association (ANA). Extensive experience with patient populations is also required.
How much time is involved?
1 hour in a single office visit.