If you could see your brain, could you control it better? Past research and contemporary clinical practice has made biofeedback commonplace. A recent advance in biofeedback monitoring, developed at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, has leaped over more traditional brain-wave conditioning work by giving patients an ongoing eyeful of the activity in a specific region of the brain.
Using real-time feedback from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, pain-control patients were able to view the action in that portion of the brain responsible for processing pain signals. The monitor presented the brain activity as a flame of increasing or decreasing strength.
Patients were able to learn very quickly how to control their pain by controlling the flame on the screen. Brain imagery technology may soon provide a method by which people will be able to develop direct control of very specific brain functions. A spin-off from this research may be the investigation of how brain control might be achieved by thought alone.
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