An introduction to the innovative therapy that restores optimal functioning of the brain after physical or emotional trauma

• Provides an alternative to the more invasive therapies of electroshock and drugs

• Shows how this therapy helps ameliorate anxiety and depression as well as childhood developmental disorders

• Includes extraordinary case histories that reveal the powerful results achieved

According to the Centers for Disease Control, each year 260,000 people are hospitalized with traumatic brain injuries. The Brain Injury Association reports 1.5 million injuries, many of which go undiagnosed but which lead to all kinds of cognitive and emotional impairments. While neuroscience has learned an enormous amount about the connection between brain trauma and personality changes, the methods proposed for resolving these alterations are generally limited to drug therapy or surgeries.

This book explores a much less invasive but highly effective technique of restoring brain function: the Low Energy Neurofeedback System (LENS). Developed by Dr. Len Ochs in 1992, it has had extraordinary results using weak electromagnetic fields to stimulate brain-wave activity and restore brain flexibility and function. The treatment works across a broad spectrum of human activity, increasing the brain’s abilities to adapt to the imbalances caused by physical trauma or emotional disorders--both on the basic level and in the more subtle areas of cognitive, affective, and spiritual processes that make us truly human. While the treatment has had remarkable results with individuals who have experienced severe physical trauma to the head and brain, Stephen Larsen sees it also as an important alternative to chemical approaches for such chronic behavioral disorders as ADHD and monopolar and bipolar depression.

Stephen Larsen, Psychology Professor Emeritus at SUNY, chronicles the development of neurofeedback - an electronic feedback of brainwave frequencies that elicits amazing healing responses in people with post- concussion syndromes, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorders, ADHD and more. Larsen focuses largely on the methods developed by Len Ochs, PhD, an innovative explorer in these realms.
The earlier approach of EEG biofeedback entrained the brain rhythms for alpha or theta frequencies, producing relaxation and enhancing meditative states. Ochs discovered that by feeding back to the brain the frequencies that the individual was producing at the moment produced much more rapid and profoundly effective results.
People with brain injuries who suffered chronic headaches, confusional states, emotional lability and instability and people who had long-standing psychological problems that had resisted conventional and unconventional therapies could respond very rapidly to this treatment. The amazing thing is that the feedback stimuli required to produce these changes are very delicate and brief, yet extremely potent. Initially Ochs used stimulation with flashing lights, but he serendipitously discovered that radio frequencies could produce the same changes more gently.
Ochs wisely does not promote neurofeedback as a cure-all, and often recommends this in combination with supportive and explorative psychotherapy, acupuncture and other therapies to help people process the emotional materials that are released by the neurofeedback.
This is an exciting new field that promises to help many people who otherwise are beyond helping within conventional medical care. Larsen's style is both informative and engaging, detailing both the excitement of scientific explorations at the leading edge of treatments for difficult problems, and providing heartwarming stories of dramatic successes in a broad spectrum of people with serious disabilities.

I read this book before taking the training to become a LENS practitioner. The books offers hope for very difficult conditions that regular "talk therapy" can begin to approach. I have been practicing Neurofeedback for three years and wanted to understand and learn an approach where the client does not have to work so hard and where the results are similar or better.

I recommend this book and the LENS approach to all clinicians wanting to add a tremendous resource to their therapeutic "toolbox". For people who have persisting condititions that are difficult to treat, I encourage you to read the book and find a trained clinician.

I am a Family Physician in group practice for the past 25 years and have used traditional neurofeedback since 2003. Since 2006 I have used the LENS system, described quite well in Stephen Larsen' book. The LENS technique is effortless for the patients and much faster in time and number of sessions needed to train compared to traditional neurofeedback. We are not programming the patients, as the feedback given is their own EEG pattern, at a slightly different frequency. Homeopathy on the scalp? Perhaps. The signal sent to the brain is weak- yet the brain responds to the signal, and changes can be seen immediately. I liken it to a conductor giving the orchestra a tone to get in tune or a mirror being held up to the patient.

I am wary of new age treatments and their various claims, yet switched to the LENS technique based on recommendations from fellow neurofeedback practitioners, as no double blinded studies exist to prove its efficacy. Out of the 35 patients I have trained with sofar, 20 have had astonishing improvements in daily life functioning after minor to major head injuries, seizures, ADHD, Tinnitus, Aspergers syndrome, Retts syndrome, CFS, anxiety and depression. They generally report that they can resolve issues with much less worry and consternation and their sleep improves. Time will show if it is a placebo effect that will wear off. So far the effects have been lasting after an average training of 10-12 sessions. One of the 35 patients has had abject reactions to the treatment, and I have learned why -too much stimulation given by me - so yes, it requires patience and skill from the provider- LENS isn't a system that a lay person can purchase and hook themselves up to.

Training patients with LENS at the end of the day is a treat! I highly recommend this book.

Steven Crozier MD
Norway

LENS is a technique of using short duration, low intensity radio waves at the same frequency of the brain, or with a specific offset, applied through an external scalp electrode to break up stuck brain patterns. The brain adapts and assumes a more flexible or more functional pattern, and the patient gets better. This book is about the results of a specific neurotherapy technique. It's not neurofeedback, although the author seems to think this verbal slight of hand is OK. The author claims that LENS is neurofeedback because it takes a signal from the brain and "feeds that same signal back to the brain." Under this definition, we should now call homeopathy a type of biofeedback.

I am not in a position to definitively say what neurofeedback is or is not. Anyone, including the author, is entitled to define what neurofeedback is. All I can say is that his definition is, at the very least, at the periphery of what the self-regulation disciplines of bioefeedback and neurofeedback are about at their core. Neurofeedback provides feedback to the person so that they can change a behavior or response. The LENS technique makes no attempt whatsoever to include the person in their treatment. It is something that is done to them, not with them.

It is not a "how to" book by any measure. It is an "about" book, from start to finish. The writing is light and easy to read, with only minimal detail about the specifics of the concept, and almost nothing about the actual implementation of the concept. So you won't learn much, other than LENS is wonderful and can help with many intractable conditions.

I believe the book has been given an inappropriate title. In fact, the proper titles are alluded to many times in the text itself, as well as the fact that LENS is a third or fourth generation acronym for the process. Some of the previous names describe it accurately by including the phrase disentrainment technique. The author refers to this throughout the book, so it remains a mystery as to why the technique has now been renamed LENS. Maybe he wanted a sexier title. Maybe he wanted to honor his mentor with an acronym that mimics his first name (Len). Who knows. In any case, I found both the title and subtitle misleading. The process is not neurofeedback. It is a type of electronic homeopathy. Second, the subtitle says "technique' but the book completely ignores the how to of LENS. It is almost entirely about the effects of LENS as presented by anecdotes of individual case studies.

I think this title creates more confusion than clarity, as does the subtitle. But it may be that the author believes it most closely resembles neurofeedback, or that their most likely group to recruit for this specific technique are those who are interested or practice neurofeedback, because they can most readily recognize how or why it would be helpful. But they are philosophically very different in one very critical aspect. In LENS, it is the operator or clinician who is making the choices and going through a learning process. The patient is 100% passive to the process. In biofeedback and neurofeedback, the patient or trainee is actually trying to learn something, or more accurately, to surrender or direct themselves in a way that something their brain is already capable of can more readily or more appropriately happen. With LENS you just get better. The downside of this is that you also become more dependent on a clinician with his black box and proprietary software. If it doesn't work, or if you get worse, then it's back to the clinician for more treatment, which is fundamentally the opposite of learning to self regulate. Yes, it is true that LENS is a method for regulating the brain. To call it self-regulation, when the word `self' refers to the patient's brain, as opposed to the patient who participates in the process of self regulation, is misleading.

This is another "aren't I wonderful, please come to my clinic" book. That's fine, sales and marketing are legitimate business functions and these sorts of books seem to be very popular in alternative medicine circles. But my preference is for books that provide me with useful skills. This book is merely an interesting read about a powerful new technique that is not accessible to the lay person. Neurofeedback, on the other hand, is accessible to the lay person. There are books, training is available, and I can buy hardware, software, and instructional materials so I can do it myself. LENS is only available at special clinics.

Do I think the technique is good? Yes, clearly it is widely beneficial. But this extended sales brochure is neither informative to someone who wants to learn how it is done (that's another seminar / book); nor is it informative to the potential patient who wants to fully understand what is being done to him by the clinician. But it sounds like a very good process, and if I were willing to pay $200+ per hour, wanted to travel somewhere far away, and didn't know what to do with myself for 15 hours of treatment, I would seriously consider it. As of the book's publication in 2006, there were supposedly 200 practitioners worldwide.

The author openly states that those who criticize LENS (Len?) are jealous of his process because they can't figure out how low intensity doses of radio waves for an average of less than 6 seconds per treatment (1 - 5 sites on the scalp) can be so helpful. I hope they are wildly successful, but with the total treatment time so extraordinarily short, they could just as easily make it available to 3 or 4 clients per hour, for 10 minutes of evaluation and 6 to 30 seconds of treatment. I think it is a probably a revolutionary, albeit (author agrees) not new treatment. Approaches to healing that are homeopathic in style have been around for a long time.

The book is simply the author's way of promoting their work, without actually saying much about what they do. Magical proprietary software and hardware do that. LENS' entry onto the alternative therapy scene will be slow and limited, the same as most other alternative therapies that are rolled out in this fashion, available to a select bunch who shell out big bucks for the real training, as opposed to the introduction that you received by buying the book. I strongly believe that if someone goes to the trouble of writing a book, he should also go to the trouble of empowering people to the greatest extent possible. This author doesn't necessarily fail this test, because after all, you now know there is a wonderful new therapy out there, you are creating the demand that future credentialed practitioners need to support a full time practice. But it doesn't pass the empowerment test, either.

Is the author a good guy with good intentions? I'm sure he is. Is the book well written, given what it actually covers? Yes. But is the topic worthwhile, worth sitting down, buying this book, and reading through it? Depends on what your goals are.

Anyone who has been through the trials and tribulations of dealing with any condition or trauma that includes neurological disfunctions will find this book full of good advice and hope. It won't hurt to have a good up-to-date medical dictionary handy while reading. However, most of the text is written in narrative form so that even if you don't recognize all the terms, the ideas and suggestions aren't hard to follow. Dr. Larsen himself called me in response to an e-mail inquiry I sent to him about his program , and in subsequent conversations I have found the staff at the Stone Mountain Center extremely helpful and cordial.