METANOIA ONE OF OUR OWN Dr Patton, ND, MBA
The optimization of Brain Functioning by Dr. Paul Swingle
Missives from Donald Boudreux
GEORGE P. SHULTZ The Penultimate Negotiator January 2011 ISSUE
Dr. Patton graduates from Royal Roads University.
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Editorial
The Optimization of Brain Functioning Missives from Donald Boudreaux On George Shultz
Award winning Dr. Patton
EDITORIAL This month's publication of Metanoia, features George P. Shultz on the cover. We are fortunate to have gained access to "Idea's and Action� by Shultz through James Tusty who was project leader for Free to Choose Press in publishing the book. In the past, Mr. Tusty has been a contributor to Metanoia, and as well was the producer of the highly acclaimed, award winning, documentary " The Singing Revolution". In addition Mr. Tusty was the connector to Professor Donald J. Boudreaux, who has kindly given us access to the many letters on economics he has submitted and published in numerous prominent U.S magazines. Also, Dr. Paul Swingle continues his series on exorcising the mind through the benefits of biofeedback. This time his efforts are aimed at the professional and the business man. Last but not least, our publisher, Dr. Allison Patton graduated with an MBA and was the recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Medal award.
Dr. Donald J. Boudreaux
Dr. George P. Shultz
Dr. Paul Swingle
Dr. Allison Patton
Unprecedented, Insider’s View Features fascinating Revelations Of How Forces Within The White House Competed For The Heart And Soul Of The Reagan Presidency
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THE OPTIMIZATION OF BRAIN FUNCTIONING Paul G. Swingle, Ph.D., FCPA, R. Psych.
There are many things we can do to enhance physical and mental performance. And all are important. These include proper exercise, good diet, nutritional supplements, disciplined work ethic, positive mental attitude, rehearsal, and good sleep hygiene. The present article focuses on an additional procedure that optimizes brain functioning – neurotherapy. Simply stated, neurotherapy changes brain functioning by modifying brainwave activity. Research over the last four decades or so has identified brainwave activity that is not only associated with conditions such as depression, attention deficiencies, addiction, sleep disturbances, emotional volatility, and the like, but also those brainwave states that are associated with peak or optimal performance. However, identifying brainwave patterns associated with specific symptoms and conditions was not the key breakthrough. The pivotal discovery was that of brain plasticity! As early as the 1940s researchers at McGill and Brown Universities demonstrated that brainwaves could be conditioned, That is, just like Pavlov did with conditioning a salivary response in dogs, these researchers were able to accomplish with brainwaves. Later, in the 1960’s researchers at Columbia and University of California showed that animals could learn to control autonomic (heart rate) and brainwave activity. Subsequently many additional researchers have shown that the brain can change. This has had huge implications and toppled our incorrect notions of how the brain functions. For example, when I went to school, medical and graduate schools taught that the brain had limited capacity for recovery. This is simply wrong! Sufferers of brain injuries were lead to believe that recovery after eighteen months would be limited at best. We now know that substantial recovery is possible long after the brain injury. Further, the discovery of the extent of the brain’s capacity for functional change has lead to the development of very efficient non-drug methods for treating depression, attention problems in children, age related cognitive declines, anxiety conditions, and, in fact, all conditions that are associated with brain activity.
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It’s All in Your Head! Stella limped into my office. She seemed to be in pain and clearly emotionally distressed and distraught. After she got settled and dried a few tears she blurted out “everyone thinks I am making this up – my doctor said it’s in my head!” I smiled and said “Of course it is, where else would it be? You are in pain and you are suffering emotionally. That all takes place in your head and that is where we are going to treat it.” A brainwave assessment, the standard initial mapping of brainwave activity that takes about six minutes, revealed that Stella had a common pattern found with clients with fibromyalgia. She had brainwave patterns associated with exposure to emotional trauma, poor stress tolerance and depression.
Optimal Performance Training What does Stella have to do with optimal performance training? All conditions are associated with the brain not functioning in an efficient or optimal manner. Basically then, all neurotherapy treatment of any disorder is focused on making brain functioning more efficient. The treatment of conditions as varied as depression, cancer, and age related cognitive declines are all premised on correcting brainwave anomalies followed by optimizing those brain functions that mitigate the condition under treatment. Hence, if you want to cut a few strokes off your golf score, or mitigate age related dementias or help fight cancer the same methodology applies. Correct what is wrong and then optimize those brainwave features associated with most advantageous brain performance. This reminds us that those “one-size-fits-all” franchises offering brain brightening or brain gym treatments are of limited value because they miss the specific areas of the brain that are problematic and compromising brain efficiency. Rather like having a client ride a stationary bicycle to treat a neck pain. Optimal performance training has emerged as an extremely useful and cost effective procedure for facilitating efficient functioning. It has application for athletes, CEOs, performers, artists, elite military forces, crises management, severely stressful occupations, in addition to facilitating recovery and survival. There are many examples of effective use of neurotherapy for optimal performance that have become known to the general public including Canadian Olympic gold medalists, the 2006
World Cup soccer champion team, Olympic medal archers, Broadway performers, Fortune 500 top management, and military elite Special Forces. Even the Vancouver Canucks are getting setup for optimal performance training.
How does it Work? Brainwave optimal performance training is not a standalone procedure. For golfers, the training includes training on swing, mental attitude and focus. For baseball, batting includes reaction time training, learning to incrementally commit, as well as mental attitude and focus. For CEO’s, learning methods for monitoring and self-regulation of performance is vital. For those struggling with cancer, working with their oncologists, nutritionists and learning self-regulation is essential. Cognitively declining elders must include activities that vitalize mental and physical functioning and avoid mind numbing activities. First step is to have a basic brainwave assessment. These procedures are very efficient and require only six minutes of recording time. This procedure is so efficient that in clinical settings it allows the therapist to tell the client why they have sought treatment! In the optimal performance situation, this procedure allows the therapist to identify areas of brain activity that may compromise efficient brain functioning. For example, many athletes and performers suffer from poor stress tolerance, a condition that is associated with a deficiency in brain functioning at the back of the brain. In such cases correcting that condition markedly improves performance that is further improved with optimization brainwave training. Once the brain inefficiencies identified in the brainwave assessment are corrected, the optimization training commences. This can include a variety of different brainwave functions at different brain locations. A fundamental procedure is to speed up the frequency of the Alpha brainwaves. Alpha brainwaves are between eight and twelve cycles per second. Alpha “slowing” refers to a condition where the strongest Alpha brainwaves are in the low frequency range. This condition is found in age related cognitive decline, drug induced cognitive “fogginess,” and developmental delays. Alpha frequency has been shown to correlate positively with IQ and immune functioning so that by increasing the speed of the Alpha peak frequency, IQ and immune functioning improve. Fine tuning of the brain involves having the client be mindful of brainwave status as reflected in such subjective states as mind “chatter” and perseveration of thought patterns. In the former, clients (CEO’s in particular) will decide on how much background cognitive activity they
like. In the latter they decide where they want to sit on the flexibleindomitable dimension .
How is it Done? There are three general classes of treatment in neurotherapy and in optimal performance training. The first, brainwave biofeedback or neurofeedback is the form most people are familiar with. It involves attaching some electrodes to the client’s ears and head and measuring specific brainwave activity. When the brain is doing what we want it to do, such as increase the strength (amplitude) of particular brainwave, then the client will hear a tone or see something move on the computer monitor. For children (and of course for adults if they wish) we set it up so that the child is playing a video game with her or his brain. When the brain is responding as we want, Pac Man gobbles up dots, or space ships fly through complicated mazes. This procedure allows the child to selfregulate brain activity. It is particularly effective for treating attention deficit disorders in children. The second class of treatment procedures are the braindrivers. Based on the procedure first reported in the 1940s, mentioned above, specific stimuli such as flashing lights or special sounds are presented to the client based on moment to moment brainwave measurement. For the child with an attention problem, for example, we might measure the strength of slow frequency brainwaves and when the strength exceeds a particular threshold we turn on the sound which, in turn, suppresses the slow frequency amplitude. This procedure is particularly effective for helping children become more efficient readers. It is also an effective treatment for those who cannot comply with the neurofeedback treatments such as severely demented elderly, clients in coma, and severely autistic children. The third class of treatments are those that clients self-administer in their home. These treatments include cranial stimulators, specific harmonics that we have pretested and know how they affect brain activity, relaxation exercises, etc. A principal purpose of these self-administered procedures is to maintain gains made in treatment and to stabilize the changes.
Do the Improvements Last? Some are relatively permanent others have to be maintained with booster sessions. For example, a client who has a deficiency in an area of the brain associated with stress tolerance will likely find that the improvement in brain functioning is stable. An elderly person who is
experiencing declines in cognitive functioning, on the other hand, will usually have to have three or four maintenance sessions per year after the initial brainwave slowing has been corrected to mitigate this age related decline. Children who have learning challenges are the most gratifying to neurotherapists because once their learning problems improve the developmental process kicks in and does the maintenance work for us. They get interested in learning and the brain just continues to improve. CEOs, athletes, and performers, on the other hand, need to have ongoing neurotherapy to sustain peak functioning. The best analogy is body building and fitness. If you want to keep fit, you might have a period of intensive fitness training followed by a maintenance schedule of perhaps three visits to the gym per week. If you want to be a professional fighter you had better work out several hours per day during your entire career. If you want to compete in body building contests, hours of muscle training per day is needed to maintain the muscle mass. John, CEO of a medium size Vancouver company, arrived for his monthly optimal performance session a few days early. He said he pushed up his appointment because he had an important meeting later that day and wanted to be “sharp as a tack.” I did a rapid mini assessment that takes less than three minutes. There was a mild disparity in the frontal cortex. I said to John, “have you been more irritable than your usual disagreeable self and are you having some mild lags in information retrieval recently?” After some kibitzing, John acknowledged the conditions I identified. I used braindriving to balance the frontal regions and then did a treatment designed to help quiet the brain. The later helps with efficient functioning in stressful situations and also improves many clients’ ability to be mindful of the more comprehensive implications of proposed courses of action.
Summary Although we tend to think of optimal performance training as being limited to athletes, performers and CEOs it is clear that the concept of optimal brain functioning is relevant to other circumstances as well. Any condition that is associated with brain inefficiency can be treated with neurotherapy. Optimal performance training can be thought of as the last phases of such treatment in which the brain becomes more efficient. The child with attention problems, for example, may be successfully treated by decreasing excessive slow frequency amplitude. The child’s learning can
be further enhanced with optimal performance training to speed up the Alpha brainwaves thus improving IQ. We have been expanding the concept of optimal performance to include the use of such procedures to optimize group wellbeing. Consider a couple whose marriage is in jeopardy because of brainwave conditions that are discordant. For some time now, we have assisted marriage and family counsellors by correcting brainwave features of family members that are related to interpersonal strife. This is simply an extension of the oft stated truism that all problems are family problems. A depressed parent, for example, seriously affects the children’s wellbeing. An emotionally volatile spouse also clearly compromises family harmony. Similarly, a couple where one spouse is passive and the second is excessively indomitable can experience marriage threatening explosive discord that can often be significantly improved by balancing the neurological predispositions. Further, in this context, two person neurotherapy sessions have been found to enhance couple harmony as well as efficiency. This intriguing procedure involves the training of two brains in concert to establish brainwave simultaneity. So, whether it is improving your golf game, hitting the high notes when singing Aida, improving your executive acumen, delaying the “Old Rocking Chair� getting you, winning gold for freestyle, enhancing strike force efficiency, helping to stay healthy, or sweetening marital harmony, precision optimal performance training may well be the treatment of choice.
Dr Swingle lecturing
MISSIVES FROM DONALD J BOUDREAUX Editor, Boston Globe
Dear Editor: John Hill asserts that "The free market has many virtues, but by its nature it must remain callous to human suffering caused by illness" (Letters, Oct. 18). Really? Take a walk down an aisle in a typical modern supermarket. You'll find analgesics, antihistamines, antiseptics, antifungal medicines, bandages, and nutritional supplements - all supplied by private, profitseeking companies. Keep walking and you come to the store's pharmacy, where you can buy yet other medicines - such as those that address serious illnesses like depression, hypertension, and high cholesterol created and produced by private, profit-seeking firms. It's no wonder that my GMU colleague Peter Leeson found that, in countries that became more capitalist since 1980, average life-expectancy at birth has risen from less than 63 years to 67.5 years (by 2005). In countries that became less capitalist since 1980, life-expectancy at birth fell from 59 to 57 years.* Thank goodness for "callous" capitalism. Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux Professor of Economics George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 Professor Marc Lamont Hill Department of English Columbia University New York, NY
Dear Prof Hill: I enjoyed your debate last week, on John Stossel's show, with the Cato 11
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Also available from Free To Choose Network The Power Of The Poor How one man’s ideas on property rights and the rule of law defeated Peru’s terrorists and unlocked a once secret economy.
The Ultimate Resource Free market incentives have enormously changed economies and loves over much of the world.
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Institute's Sallie James.* I cannot, though, accept the concept of exploitation that you offered there. You argue that Nike and other multinational corporations "exploit" workers in developing countries by not paying them more - by not paying their workers higher wages that, you are certain, these companies can "afford" to pay. So despite the fact that these corporations expand the employment options available to developing-country workers, these corporations are nevertheless guilty of exploitation because they do not expand these options even further. It seems to follow from your concept of exploitation that if, say, Nike pulls out of all developing countries - and thus shrinks the employment options available to poor workers there - it would no longer be guilty of exploiting those workers. Surely that can't be correct. I have a dear friend who, because she loves African art, routinely buys woven baskets, wall hangings, and sculptures made by artists in sub-Saharan Africa. My friend is a reasonably well-to-do American who certainly could afford to pay more for the artwork than she actually pays. Does my friend exploit artists in sub-Saharan Africa by paying only the asking prices of the pieces of art? Would she make these artists better off if she stopped buying their outputs? According to the logic of your argument, you must answer 'yes' to each of these questions. Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux
ON GEORGE PRATT SHULTZ By Hank Leis George Pratt Shultz, born in New York City, on December 13, 1920. earned his BA in Economics at Princeton University, his Ph.D. at MIT, where he later taught. He worked in the administration of President Eisenhower, President Nixon and perhaps his most important role as Secretary Of State for President Reagan. He was also president and director of Bechtel Group Inc. Mr. Shultz has written numerous books and has received many honorary degrees and awards, the most notable being the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour. For those interested in leadership Henry A. Kissinger says of Shultz, "Since leaving full time government service, he has no peer in relating the conceptual to the political...The principles of negotiation put forward by George Shultz in this work demonstrate these qualities. He emphases that negotiation is about persuasion, not technique; that it reflects ultimately moral components like reliability, steadfastness and credibility; and that it must relate power to morality." In his book “Ideas and Action” (The 10 Commandments of Negotiation) George Shultz discusses the negotiations he as Secretary of State, during the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan conducted with Mikhail Gorbachev and his counterparts in the Soviet Union. Mr. Shultz who served under a number of U.S. Presidents was a formidable negotiator, not because of being brash or aggressive, but because his arguments made sense to his opponents. Because Mr. Shultz operated at a strategic level and was so effective in achieving what many others had attempted but failed (weapons reduction by Soviet Union and the U.S.) I regard him as one of penultimate negotiators of our times. For those looking for an ideal, George P. Shultz serves as an example of a person who can get things done and remain humble while pursuing his objectives.
THE 10 COMMANDMENTS OF NEGOTIATION By George Shultz 1. BE IN CONTROL OF YOUR CONSTITUENCY 2. UNDERSTAND THE NEEDS OF THE OTHER SIDE 3. PERSONAL FACTORS 4. AN EDUCATIONAL PROCESS 5. AN ONGOING PROCESS 6. CREDIBILITY 7. TIMING 8. STRENGTH AND DIPLOMACY GO TOGETHER 9. TRUST IS THE COIN OF THE REALM 10. REALISTIC GOALS 15
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George Shultz, with President Nixon
George Shultz, with President Reagan
ONE OF OUR OWN It is with great pleasure that we announce Dr. Allison Patton as the recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Medal on October 27, 2010. Her thesis was on marketing strategies for a naturopathic medical spa and resort development on the mineral waters of Little Manitou Lake in Manitou Beach, Saskatchewan. The medal was first awarded in 1873 by the Earl of Dufferin and is one of the most prestigious awards that a student in a Canadian educational institution can receive. For more than 125 years the Governor General’s Academic Medals have recognized outstanding scholastic achievements of students in Canada. Among the members of this exclusive club of recipients are included such notables as Pierre Trudeau, Tommy Douglas, Kim Campbell, Adrienne Clarkson and Robert Stanfield. This achievement follows her being the recipient of the John LePlante Leadership Award. Indeed she has demonstrated her extraordinary skills in leadership as one of the founders and doctors of Mountainview Wellness Centre, a director of Salt Resorts Inc., a director and publisher of Metanoia Concepts Inc., and first and foremost a mother and wife, while all the time studying for her MBA in Executive Management at Royal Roads University. Mountainview Wellness Centre takes pride in congratulating Allison Lee Patton, ND, MBA for this exemplary achievement and wishes her the best in all her future endeavours.
Dr. Patton meets “Dragons’ Den’s” Brett Wilson.
Dr. Patton receives Governor Generals, Gold Medal Award.