The Larger Context
Since epilepsy mostly results from cases of head injury, one may also ask: Does EEG training help other symptoms of head injury besides seizures, symptoms such as cognitive deficits, chronic pain, visual disturbances, extreme fatigue, mood swings, irritability, and sleep disturbances? The answer is that it does. Profound recoveries have been induced with EEG training in persons who have been stable for years after head injury, where further spontaneous recovery would not have been expected.

A third area where improvements have been observed with EEG training is in sleep disorders. Insomnia, sleep onset problems, bedwetting, night terrors, and even sleep apnea have responded to the training in clinical settings.

With these new findings, EEG training in the 12-19 Hz (or low beta) frequency range is experiencing a growth in clinical application, aided by new computerized instrumentation and a proliferation of centers where the training is offered. The alpha training remained (until recently) under a cloud of its unfulfilled early promise and indiscriminate popularization. In the past three years, alpha training has been shown to be very effective as part of a multi-faceted program for severe alcoholics, so it is experiencing a renaissance as well. Ironically, this is also in the context of remediation and rehabilitation of dysfunction.

What are the larger implications of these new findings? First of all, a connection suggests itself among the various conditions which ostensibly respond to this training. Firstly, attention deficit disorder is correlated with sleep problems such as bedwetting and night terrors. More than half of all seizures occur at night, suggesting an intimate connection of seizures with disordered sleep. There is a high correlation of attention deficit disorder with birth trauma, a kind of head injury. And many of the deficits resulting from head injury in the mature person look like attention deficit disorder. Also, depression is a common symptom resulting from head injury. Finally, other underarousal conditions, such as depression, also manifest in sleep disorders and cognitive deficits such as we see in ADHD. Perhaps a common neurological substrate or pathway underlies the attention problems, sleep problems, depression, and head injury deficits which respond to the training. If so, it must be very basic to be common to such a variety of observables.