The Initial Appointment

The initial appointment is designed to put you in a position to make an informed decision about Neurofeedback, for you to meet us and for us to understand more about you and your interest in Neurofeedback. See our Initial Appointment page for full details on how to book and what to expect on the day.

History Assessment, Symptom Baseline, Neurofeedback Plan

When you decide to go ahead, we will ask you to complete a comprehensive assessment of medical history. This helps to form a complete picture of your background.

We will also ask you to review a list of more than 180 symptoms:

We will ask you to identify:

• Which symptoms you suffer?
• What are the are the priority symptoms?
• How severe are they?

We will process your symptom profile using our proprietary NeuroPlanning Tool.

Our NeuroPlanning Tool embodies more than 25 years of clinical expertise. It maps symptoms to Neurofeedback protocols. The tool incorporates new protocol information as it becomes available.

This will create your bespoke Neurofeedback Training Plan:

Priority symptoms and their severity measure progress and success. Initial symptom severity ratings become the baseline from which we measure progress:

Regular email reminders will ask you to update the symptom ratings. You can also make any comments. Your Practitioner receives this information. He/she uses it, together with your verbal feedback, to determine the next steps in your Plan.

Frequency & Sessions

Neurofeedback is a learning process. We all learn at different rates. The best training frequency is the highest we can cope with without over-training. Some people do 20 sessions in a week, others spread 20 sessions out over 20 weeks. Once a week is the minimum frequency you should consider. 20 sessions is the minimum number you should expect to achieve permanent results.

Sessions involve sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a TV screen. We attached sensors to your head using gel a bit like vaseline (we remove it afterwards), and provide feedback on your brain activity back to your nervous system, including your brain, via your senses of sight, hearing, and touch:

We use videos from our library of more than 1,000. The feedback is delivered through the size of the picture (sight), volume (hearing), and a vibrating soft toy (touch). There is nothing to consciously “do”, which is why small children or those with limited mental capacity can do it. We are providing information to the brain on the brain itself.

How does the brain change by being given information? Because that’s exactly how the brain is designed. It’s how the brain becomes the brain. For example, your auditory cortex is not designed to be an auditory cortex; it becomes an auditory cortex by trying to make sense of the information it receives from your ears. David Eagleman’s 2020 book Livewired explains this well.

We encourage you to train more than once a week if possible. More frequent training provides more rapid results which can increase motivation. Scheduling more than once a week also provides some redundancy in case you miss a session. So you have more chance to maintain the weekly minimum.

Most clients start with 20 sessions. The deeper the brain dis-regulation, the more likely you will benefit from more sessions.Each session consists of 30 minutes of Neurofeedback; we allow 45 minutes in the diary from end to end. Clients age 9 and over can usually tolerate double sessions.

Your Commitment to Training & Feedback

Assessment paperwork is important. We need it to understand client history, and to create your Neurofeedback Plan. Feedback is a critical part of the process. So all clients need to provide feedback regularly. The default method is via the on-line symptom-tracking tool.A training frequency of at least once a week is necessary for the cumulative effect to work.Many children are poor reporters. They struggle to describe how they are feeling. Their parents must identify externally observable measures to track progress.

Pricing

We offer a simple, transparent pricing structure. Please see our Pricing page for further details.

Duration

How many sessions will I need? This is the ‘how long is a piece of string’ question many clients have that is hard to answer. Because everyone’s brain is different, it is very hard to give accurate estimates, but there are some general guidelines:

• 20 sessions is the minimum number of sessions we expect would be required to achieve lasting change. There is nothing ‘magic’ about the number 20, but many studies were based on 20 sessions.
• The longer established the problem, the longer it is likely to take to resolve. Recent post-Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) symptoms we have relieved in a few sessions. Long-standing developmental delay or developmental trauma will often need several 20 session packages.
• We measure symptom progress via the on-line symptom-tracking tool. This provides a quantified assessment of symptom progress. If this is levelling off it can indicate that training effects are reaching their limit and it is time to stop or pause. If symptoms are still reducing in severity additional sessions will bring more benefits.