By Dan Pacheco 
Denver Post Staff Writer
January 11, 1995

"I couldn't focus through an entire business meeting," says the 40-year-old, who requested anonymity. After 30 minutes, he would inevitably space out and lose concentration. 

A few years ago, Jeff might have seen a psychiatrist. Instead, he plays video games. 

Sitting placidly before a personal computer, Jeff flies a simulated airplane without touching a keyboard or joystick. The only energy that keeps the plane from crashing comes through an electrode going from the top of his head to the computer. The electrode is known as a clinical grade electroencephalogram (EEG), the same spidery set of wires and electrodes hospitals use to find brain tumors. 

If Jeff's brain produces the correct level of beta waves, which are produced during intense concentration, the plane keeps flying. Theta waves, associated with daydreaming, send him careening into the stratosphere. 

The result should be a more relaxed, attentive Jeff, says his doctor - Daniel Hoffman of the Neurotherapy Clinic in south Denver. 

"In a conscious state, the neurons in the brain fire quickly. But in Attention Deficit Disorder (patients), their brain slows down when it should be most active. In other words, they're going into a daydreaming theta state instead of the intense beta state," he says. 

Hoffman's work is based on 20 years of research that has gone from being ridiculed by the medical community to being covered by half of all insurance companies. He charges less than some social workers - $100 an hour for 40 hour-long sessions. 

Today about 350 organizations provide neurotherapy in the United States. Their work is put under the scrutiny of insurance companies, academics and three professional associations. About a dozen neurofeedback providers practice in Colorado, Hoffman says. 

After the 20th session, Jeff says he can feel the progress. "You know when you're learning. I feel like I'm in a certain state of mind when it happens. I'm in my zone," he says. 

But he's not the only one to use those words. For the past two years, Colorado Springs therapist Richard Patton has been rocking the boat of conventional neurotherapy by making extraordinary claims. 

Reaching potential 

Using the same equipment as Hoffman, Patton says he can help teams of negotiators, engineers and athletes train their brains to achieve "peak performance." For a fee of $6,000 for 20 hour-long sessions, or $300 an hour, Patton says he can teach anyone how to throw like John Elway. 

"If you ask John Elway what it was like (to throw a football), he says "well you know, it just happened!' Something very specific happened," Patton says. By recreating that "something,' Elway can make another successful throw, according to Patton, whose therapy gives people the "ability to recognize and create at will that specific state of mind." 

Patton's work is so new that some neurofeedback researchers haven't even heard of it. In Patton's "neuroregulation sessions," a client's brain waves are fed into a PC and interpreted by a program called BrainLink created by his company, Advanced Neurotechnologies Inc. 

Depending on the desired mind state, Patton feeds the computer a "protocol," which is like the road map the subject follows to achieve enlightenment. The computer filters the client's brain waves through the protocol and tells her how close she is to the protocol through musical tones that rise as she gets closer. 

"It's not a state of bliss, although it can be pleasant. It's like beginning to become aware of your thoughts so that you can make changes in them," Patton says. 

Through his protocols, the therapist claims to have helped an 18-year-old become a two-time national Karate champion, a beginning kayaker brave expert waters, and a telecommunications manager perform under stress. 

"It's almost like I can feel a physical shift in my mind, just like you do when you shift a car. I can feel one thought, then the next thought, and it's at those points that I can hear the feedback," one client told the U.S. Information Agency, which was researching Patton's claims for the U.S. government. 

But don't expect to be able to learn anything from ANI about BrainLink without a price. Other neurotherapists have tried and were told to look elsewhere. 

Cloak and dagger 

Hoffman and Patton are members of the 3-year-old National Registry of Neurofeedback Providers. When Hoffman heard about one of Patton's client's who had overcome chronic fatigue using one of Patton's protocols, he saw a chance to help his own patient who had the same problem. 

He asked the patient's doctor what the protocol was. "She told me it was proprietary. It made me nauseous," Hoffman says. 

The protocols are so secret that clients have to sign a legally binding non-disclosure agreement before undergoing treatment. If they let out even a peep, "It's a horrible legal mess," Patton says. "The hounds of hell descend upon them ... I don't want to give anything away to any potential competitors." 

That's because Patton sees neurotherapy as a lucrative business that's only bound to grow. He says he already has been approached by several "huge" companies and defense contractors to make brain-wave products. Eventually, he thinks it will be possible for people to "type" into a computer without using their fingers. 

"Would you ask Bill Gates to give up his source code for (Microsoft) Windows? Can you imagine trying to talk to him into that 20 years ago? There's a whole industry here," Patton says. 

Experts in the field beg to differ. Hoffman says the registry may change its bylaws to make the ownership of protocols a cause for removal. And University of Tennessee professor Joel Lubar, president of the Academy of Certified Neurotherapists and the pioneer of using neurotherapy to treat ADD, says there aren't enough studies to prove that neurotherapy can improve performance. That makes ANI's rates, which are three-fold of most neurotherapists' fees, unjustified, he says. 

"My personal opinion is that nobody should be charging anything for improving normal performance at this stage. It's still too experimental ... Respectable scientists who see these claims will write detractors calling him a charlatan, and that impedes a possibly promising approach." 

Lubar says Patton's theory is plausible, if not yet demonstrated, and Lubar is doing his own research into the realm on college students. Hoffman is also hopeful. 

"I think there's little doubt that we're going to see an increase in peak performance due to neurofeedback in the future," Hoffman says. "I don't know if it's safe yet to say that a brain can become supernormal." 

The ability of the neuron to learn is already well-documented, Hoffman says. 

In one study, by hooking archers up to EEG machines, scientists showed that athletes' brains produced a burst of alpha waves when they released the arrow. When that "protocol" was taught to other archers, their bull's-eye scores went up, he says. 

Patton claims to have completed similar studies on golfers that isolated winning ratios of theta, alpha and beta waves. 

"I know what the ratios are for sinking putts. And if you don't make those ratios, you're not going to be sinking putts," he says. 

Daniel Landers, a psychology professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, says that's unreasonable. Landers published the brain patterns for putting golfers two years ago after years of research. His conclusion is that golf is too complex for neurotherapy. 

Never mind the controversy. Patton is preparing to apply neuroscience to other commercial uses in an entire line of brainy products. 

He points to studies done on rabbits, research that identified distinct brain-wave patterns when the animals sniffed different vegetables. The patterns were the same in every rabbit, which means human thoughts could have their own wave signatures. 

Sound like reading minds? 

Patton says that's the next frontier. 

"In humans, it's probably much more feasible to recognize the patterns of emotion. That lacks the specificity of a single thought - but it has many commercial applications," Patton says. 

Those applications are also trade secrets, and they're still a ways down the road, he says. In the meantime, Patton says he'll continue to provide his service. 

"Performance is not some end state where we arrive at and say, hey, here we are in Orange County," he says. "You don't just arrive anywhere. We can always perform better. There's always another goal, there's always another plateau to hit. There's always another mountain to conquer."