The thing they have in common: They’ve all turned to neurofeedback, a technique that promises to help athletes reprogram their brains so they can reach a zone of relaxed concentration during clutch situations.

This technique is bringing some science to the mental side of athletics, a field also known as sports psychology, which has often been derided by many players and trainers as hokum. In neurofeedback, athletes strap on electrodes that measure brainwaves. They then try to learn how to control spikes in those brainwaves, which may signify distractions going on inside their heads, such as obsessing about a past performance. Critics say it’s one thing to be able to manipulate a bunch of lines moving across a screen, but it’s another to remain perfectly calm as a fastball zooms toward you at 100 miles per hour or network cameras hover over your par putt.

As a veteran sports reporter who has seen many training fads come and go, I was curious to try it out. Wiring myself up to a neurofeedback machine, I spent two hours working my way through everything from complicated math computations to techniques for slowing my heart rate. It was far more grueling than I had envisioned. But it gave me some appreciation for what it feels to be more focused — and for how stress and pressure can hijack your brain.

In one exercise, the goal was to use the power of concentration to move two mice forward across a computer screen. Just when I was starting to have some success, I was interrupted by a phone call from my editor, who was calling to burden me with more work. For the next five minutes, I couldn’t even keep the mice from back-pedaling. (See this story for more details on my neurofeedback experience.)

Neurofeedback’s big claim to fame so far is its little-publicized connection to this year’s World Cup. In February, months before the tournament started, some of Italy’s best soccer players, including a handful who would later play in the Cup, began spending much of their practice time in a small room in Milan furnished with six luxury leather recliners facing a glass wall.
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Our reporter tries neurofeedback and learns from computer-animated mice that he has a “busy brain.”

On the other side of the glass Bruno De Michelis, head of the sports science lab for AC Milan, one of the country’s top professional teams, monitored a bank of six computer screens wired to a system made by Thought Technology Ltd., a Canadian company. The screens showing how each player’s brain responded to stressful situations. Some players, the data showed, were nervous about doing mental exercises in front of their teammates, while others either had trouble winding down after a match or winding up before one. In the following weeks, the players spent hours working on these issues through a series of exercises that resembled computer games, with the brain as the joystick.

Mr. De Michelis says a tremendous amount of energy in soccer games goes to waste because players lose concentration during key moments, like penalty kicks. “I call this useless suffering,” he says. “We can’t do magic here, but it can be of some help.”

Having the ability to tune out distractions during competition — known as having a “quiet mind” — is one of the holy grails of sports. Jocks believe that the capacity to have extreme concentration during stressful moments gives you a big edge, whether it’s a basketball player staying focused on the hoop while thousands of fans are waving their arms in the background, or a tennis player learning not to berate himself for a bad shot.

To help Tiger Woods learn to block out distractions during critical moments, his late father, Earl, used to jingle change in his pocket, drop golf bags and roll balls across his son’s line of vision. Golfer Se Ri Pak’s father used a different approach to make her mentally tougher. When she was a child, he took her to pit-bull fights and Korean cemeteries at night.

Until now, neurofeedback has mostly been confined to medical environments. Sufferers of attention deficit disorder, for example, have been found to have reduced activity in parts of the brain. Neurofeedback teaches them how to produce brainwave patterns that speed up those slow brainwaves. But brain-training has rarely been tried on healthy people, mainly because of doubts about its utility and its high cost, which can be as much as $200 an hour.

Over the last decade, university researchers and some of the companies that make neurofeedback devices have begun to dabble in the sports world, including helping Olympians like Austrian skier Hermann Maier.

Many of these same athletes have already had experience with a technique called biofeedback. Biofeedback differs from neurofeedback in that it focuses on controlling physiological responses to stress (like a fast heart rate and extreme muscle tension) as opposed to neurological responses. (To confuse matters, neurofeedback is sometimes referred to as EEG biofeedback.)

Proponents of neurofeedback say retraining your brain, as futuristic as it sounds, is now possible because scientists know precisely which brainwave frequencies correspond with optimal levels of focus. All a person has to do is learn how to achieve those same frequencies by practicing, they say.

But not all the kinks have been worked out yet, according to some people who have used the neurofeedback devices. Vietta Wilson, who has trained some Canadian track-and-field Olympians, says some of the devices she has tried pick up radio stations instead of brain waves. Another potential problem, according to some researchers: Some of the same devices track brainwaves in a particular part of the brain called the executive center — but altering brainwaves there can trigger depression in certain people. Several device manufacturers say neither of those problems has been an issue with their products.

In the last five years, neurofeedback has become the focus of studies in some top medical and psychology journals. In general, they bolster the case that it’s possible to retrain the brain.

Over the course of about 10 sessions, he worked on boosting his concentration by trying to propel a rocket forward with his mind. If his focus drifted and he either began daydreaming or listening to his inner critic, different-colored rockets associated with those brain states would creep forward and begin to overtake his rocket. The sessions also showed that Mr. Dell’Aquila wasn’t getting enough connectivity between the two hemispheres of his brain. So every night during the summer he listened to 30 minutes of specially engineered music. Mr. Dell’Aquila will play football for

Hammett had developed a case of carpal tunnel syndrome so severe he needed surgery. But being a former opiate abuser, he refused to use the medications that would be needed to control the resulting pain. Having already tried physical therapy, he set his mind on another alternative: neurofeedback.

In neurofeedback, people with mental or psychological conditions learn to regulate and reduce their symptoms — in Hammett’s case, pain — by monitoring their brain waves on a computer. The treatment is an increasingly popular cousin to biofeedback, in which people control physical stress by monitoring their heart rate or muscle tension.

Hammett learned to do both. Electrodes attached to his scalp transmitted electrical signals from his brain to a computer displaying a closed white flower. Other sensors were attached to muscles in both his hands and arms. As Hammett learned what it felt like to relax these muscles, and therefore reduce his pain, the flower began to open. Over time, he trained his brain to calm his central nervous system whenever the pain recurred.

Neurofeedback has been used for decades in private clinics, but few well-controlled research studies have been done — giving it an unscientific reputation. That’s beginning to change.

Researchers are now studying and refining the therapy — with promising results. Neurofeedback is being used to treat a growing number of conditions, including chronic pain, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, asthma, migraines, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, autism and a variant of autism called Asperger’s syndrome.

“We’ve done some definitive studies finally that show it works in important ways,” says Eran Zaidel, a professor of behavioral neuroscience and cognition at UCLA’s Brain Research Institute.

“It’s still considered an alternative approach to medicine, but some people won’t do conventional medicine at all,” he says. “Many, many people are very eager to use this method.”

Neurofeedback therapy emerged from work done in the 1960s by psychologist Barry Sterman, now professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Medicine. He wired electrodes to the heads of cats, then rewarded them whenever their brain waves reached a frequency that indicated a relaxed state. In subsequent experiments, Sterman found, cats that had learned to relax themselves this way had a higher resistance to the onset of seizures.

The medical applications seemed obvious: If people learned to relax in such a way, they too might be able to stave off seizures or anxiety attacks.

Perhaps the most researched and accepted application of neurofeedback is with patients who suffer from ADHD.

After a year, all the patients showed some improvement. But when the researchers discontinued treatment for a week and reevaluated the patients, only those who received neurofeedback retained those improvements.

The neurofeedback appeared to actually change the patients’ brain patterns, the research found, and neurological tests showed greater activity in the parts of the brain responsible for attention and behavioral control. The study was published in the December 2002 issue of the journal Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback.

Between drugs and neurofeedback, only the latter can potentially offer long-lasting change, says clinical psychologist Roger deBeus of Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va. “As the brain becomes more normal, patients don’t need as much or any medication,” he says.

Russ Ramsay, associate director of the Adult ADHD Treatment and Research Program at the

In addition to counseling, half the patients received neurofeedback, in which they learned to stabilize certain brain waves related to stress that comes with the initial phases of substance abuse recovery. After a year of treatment, 77% of the users who had received neurofeedback training remained abstinent, compared with 44% of the control patients, according to research published in 2005 in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

Some critics of neurofeedback have said it’s too imprecise. Electrodes placed on the scalp can detect brain waves toward the surface of the brain, they say, but might fail to measure waves at sub-cortical levels, such as those involved in attention and arousal regulation. Several advances in neurofeedback, however, promise more precise readings.

Monastra now uses a technique known as multi-channel neurofeedback. Instead of focusing on just one part of the brain, the technique gives readings from many brain regions.

“As we become more aware of the different subtypes of neurological problems, we use specific protocols to address those problems,” he says. “Chances are we’ll start to get even more robust results.”

Multi-channel neurofeedback surveys the brain’s surface to locate an abnormality, but another type of therapy actually looks into the core. The therapy — low-resolution electromagnetic tomography — can show clinicians signals from regions deep below the scalp.

In tests with obsessive-compulsive patients, Sherlin located increased neural activity in the cingulate gyrus, an area toward the brain’s core that’s involved in regulating attention and arousal.

Over-arousal in this area causes patients to ruminate on germs or other obsessions, he says. Teaching patients to regulate the brain waves from the gyrus could lead to improved treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to an analysis of the technique that Sherlin published in Neuroscience Letters in 2005.

“I see it as a complement to medicine or psychotherapy, not a challenge or alternative.”

But neurofeedback researchers expect acceptance of the therapy to grow.

For starters, the therapy is cost effective, they say. In the case of asthma, for example, if a biofeedback session costs about $150 — a typical rate in most clinics (neurofeedback costs about the same) — then the patient has acquired an unlimited therapeutic tool for the price of about four months of steroid medication, says Paul Lehrer, professor of psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.