To keep up with the nutritional and waste removal demands of a higher metabolic rate, cerebral blood flow to the cortical area in use must increase proportionally.
[2] Developed by Jeffrey Carmen, a privately practicing psychologist in New York, passive infrared HEG is a marriage of the classic hemoencephalography principles employed by Toomim and a technique known as thermoscopy.
The heat detected by PIR is proportional to the amount of sugar being burned to maintain the increased metabolic rate necessary to fuel elevated neuronal activity.
[3] The first true instance of neurofeedback occurred in 1963, when University of Chicago professor Joseph Kamiya trained a volunteer to recognize and alter alpha brain wave activity.
This finding was applied to humans in 1971 when Sterman trained an epileptic to control her seizures through a combination of sensorimotor rhythm and EEG neurotherapy to the extent that she obtained a driver's license after only three months of treatment.
A clinician user of NIR HEG, Jeffrey Carmen, adapted Toomim's system for migraines in 2002 by integrating peripheral thermal biofeedback into the design.
Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) assessments may also be conducted pre and post treatment, depending on the patient's disorder.
The PFC is an ideal target for HEG due to both its location on the scalp (behind the forehead, where there is no hair to disrupt the scattering of the red and infrared light) and the susceptibility of its primary functions to learning.
All ASD sufferers exhibit impaired understanding and performance of social and communicative skills, impulsivity, difficulties with attention and some mode of obsessive behavior.
After only ten biweekly HEG training sessions, he rendered a completely normal QEEG reading and significantly improved scores on attentional measures.
[10] A large group of researchers headed up by Dr. Hershel Toomim and his wife Marjorie have repeatedly found that NIR HEG training can consciously enhance regional cerebral oxygenation to specific areas of the brain and result in increased performance on cognitive tasks.
Toomim, Mize, Kwong et al. found that after only ten 30-minute sessions of HEG brain exercise training, participants with various neurological disorders showed increases in attention and decreases in impulsivity to within normal levels.
[12] There is also work done by Luis Gaviria at Las Americas Hospital, where neurosurgery patients were given 20 minutes HEG sessions, as part of their rehabilitation process.