It's all Adaptive Response Capacity to me
Sensing and responding efficiently offers us a path to brain health and wellness
The findings in this paper Brain Network Activation for Deductive and Analogical Thought are striking as they highlight my growing understanding of how light can influence brain activity and where neurofeedback supports the idea of enhancing CNS efficiency. I’ve posited that healthy brain functioning results from increasingly efficient discrimination between sensory stimuli, i.e., similarities and differences. The more finely our CNS can discriminate the less energy is required to enact a response. We are therefore always working to sense the similarities in the differences and the differences in the apparently similar. (Agazarian,1997) I carried this as an isomorphic principle in clinical psychology, body-centered psychotherapy, and most recently, developmental neurophysiology and neuromodulation.
Right frontal networks are more implicated in solving problems with indeterminate solutions and this suggests why this region is significantly dysregulated in those people who are diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD). These regions are shown to be less adaptively responsive, i.e., functionally efficient. We know from the literature on neurofeedback training for treating major depression and general anxiety disorder that it seeks to normalize right prefrontal activation.
It would then appear that one could standardize a neuromodulation-based treatment model by focusing on increasing adaptive response capacity (ARC) as operationally defined by decreased global voltage across all bands in the resting state EEG and the expansion of dominant frequency range and within-range variability.
References:
Agazarian, Y. (1997) Systems-Centered Therapy for Groups. Taylor Francis, London.
Shuang Hu, Shuang. (2021) Prefrontal cortex alterations in major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and their comorbidity during a verbal fluency task assessed by multi-channel near-infrared spectroscopy. Psychiatry Research, Volume 306, December 2021, 114229.