Practitioners who receive our quarterly Mindful Learners Newsletter have the opportunity to submit their questions for Mitchell and Angelika Sadar to answer. To join the mailing list, sign up here.
This month’s question, is a follow up to last quarter’s question: Can you tell us any more regarding symptoms associated with poor alpha blocking when eyes are open and training for this issue?
Response from Dr. Mitchell Sadar:
To be clear, poor alpha blocking refers to alpha activity that does not attenuate with eye opening or during a task, resulting in elevated activity when compared to the normative database. This suggests a failure to regulate arousal and can have a negative effect on attention and integrating visual, auditory, and somatosensory information, as a result individuals can feel overwhelmed in some situations. The individual may also feel spacey or foggy as the brain stays in this idling rhythm and they may need greater external stimulation to feel fully alert.
The basic training protocol for this is to inhibit or down train alpha in the back of the head (i.e., parietal or occipital regions). If it will not respond to this then one may try reinforcing it. The idea is to introduce flexibility into the person’s alpha activity.
