Got Boomer Brain? Here’s A Solution!

As we age the accumulated effects of the knocks and bumps of life begin to take their toll. “Senior moments”, lack of clarity, brain fog, as well as aches, pains and poor sleep patterns become increasingly present.

The ‘knocks and bumps’ phrase is literally true, as reported in a January 2009 study in the journal “Brain”. Researchers found that individuals in their study group aged between 50 and 60 who had been concussed even once or twice in early adulthood showed declines in attention and memory, as well as slowing in some types of movement, as compared with those who had not been concussed. So 30 years later those mental and physical problems began to emerge.

These effects are the result of changes in the neural networks of the brain. In the language of chaos math, the energy of the brain becomes trapped in patterns called negative attractors. These chaotic attractors represent an inefficient and inflexible pattern of energy usage for the brain. Getting "stuck" in this specific kind of brain behaviour is like being caught by an attractor.

A healthy brain should be able to smoothly transition from one electrical state to another and return to equilibrium, as circumstances dictate. The problem for most of us is that those accumulated knocks and bumps have left their imprint in the neural circuitry of the brain, leading to energetic “stuck-ness”.

Consequently we end up with sets of neural networks where smooth functioning is simply not happening, where turbulence occurs instead, and which may ultimately be felt as aches and pains in the body, problems with sleep and a host of other common disturbances.

Once the brain gets stuck in these networks it has a hard time breaking out of them.

The good news is that the brain has some truly incredible capabilities to fix itself once it becomes aware of these inefficiencies. How does it do it?

The brain is constantly scanning its environment, looking for patterns. This is fundamental to its survival and is an inbuilt wiring function. This mechanism is called the ‘orienting response’ and is going on 24 hours a day at an unconscious level.

So all you have to do to take care of the problem is simply let the brain know that it has a glitch and the magic of self-correction takes over!

The brain only needs to be alerted to an area of turbulent neural functioning, and it immediately goes about the process of rectifying it. Instantly! In this process of neural reorganization a person may find that quite suddenly various physical and emotional problems have simply disappeared!

Wonderful indeed, but how do we let the brain know it has a problem in a certain tiny network of neurons? We can take advantage of an amazing new technology emerging from the rapidly expanding field of brain research, called Neurofeedback.

During a Neurofeedback brain training session there are sensors attached to your head and ears which send the brain’s electrical activity to a sophisticated software analysis programme. Meantime you sit comfortably listening to music through ear buds. When the software detects turbulence in the signals coming from your brain it triggers a brief interrupt in the music, almost like a CD skipping. This is the feedback that is signaling to your brain that there is turbulence in the smooth functioning of its neural networks.

And that is literally all it takes to trigger the brain’s ‘go fix it’ reflex! It couldn’t be easier!

In order to enjoy the full possibilities of a healthy aging experience, it really is helpful to reset the frozen, poorly functioning wiring in the brain.

The benefits of improved mood, inner joy, calmness, increased creativity, aliveness, balance, relaxation and resilience all set the stage for making the aging phase of your life the best.