How it works: The brain produces electrical signals in the form of waves that correspond to specific mental states (see “Which Brainwaves Do What" at the end of the article). Neurofeedback boosts your ability to produce particular brainwaves that have specific desired effects.The process is painless and noninvasive.

You don’t even have to be ill or in pain to reap advantages. Many healthy executives, musicians and athletes use neurofeedback to sharpen the mind, ease stage fright or just perform at their peak.

IS IT RIGHT FOR YOU?

To explore whether neurofeedback can help you, consult a neurotherapist - a specially trained psychologist, psychiatrist, naturopathic doctor, medical doctor, chiropractor or other health-care professional. Recommended: Choose one who is certified in neurofeedback by the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America (866-908-8713, www.bcia.org).

Melanie Lewis and her husband started to worry about their son when he was about three years old. His speech was delayed and he had trouble staying focused on anything for long. He lacked coordination, and he started having seizures. The family spent the next several years going from doctor to doctor, only to wind up with a handful of prescriptions and little hope.

"When he was eight-and-a-half he started having seizures of a different sort," Lewis says on the line from her home in Harrogate, England. "We saw pediatricians and neurologists who gave us a phenomenally gloomy prognosis and basically just racked up the dosage of his drugs. It was a time of fairly major disillusionment in the medical system."

This is coming from someone who’s a doctor herself and one who's married to a surgeon-turned-lawyer. Lewis says she and her husband have always taken a "proactive" approach to their son’s health, having tried everything from nutritional supplements to therapeutic horseback riding, along with Ritalin and anticonvulsant medication, to help him.

It wasn’t until they found Vancouver psychologist Paul Swingle, who specializes in neurotherapy, via the Internet and travelled here twice, that they obtained any relief for Martin, now 10.

I had never even heard of neurotherapy at all in this country," Lewis says. "I trolled his website, and it just made complete and utter sense to me."

To this day, it still hurts Arlene Martell to look at baby pictures of Adam. The round-faced, beaming youngster with plump cheeks and bright, hazel eyes reminds her of the way her son once was, before the nightmare of his later years. Martell began to lose Adam when he was two. The toddler would line his toys up and build things in perfect symmetry. He liked puzzles. Martell thought he was just smart for his age, not realizing Adam was exhibiting autistic tendencies.

He had his first seizure when he was four. Martell and her husband James returned from a night out to find Adam in bed drenched in sweat, his body contorted to the left. They took him to emergency where they were told Adam had had a seizure, a common experience among young children. But it happened again three months later. This time, Adam underwent an EEG (electroencephalography), a test that measured his brain’s electrical activity. Adam was diagnosed with Lennox Gastaut Syndrome, characterized by different types of seizures that attack frequently. He would have hundreds of ‘absent’ seizures a day, which Martell describes as someone turning a light switch off and on. Adam would suddenly look glazed over, as if in a daydream. They lasted 10 seconds to 20 minutes. Up to four times a week, Adam would suffer full-blown attacks called tonic clonic (grand mal) convulsive seizures. He would sometimes have up to 25 in a row, so quickly that his body would be unable to recuperate before the next one hit. Because he was having so many different seizures, the condition was difficult to treat. From age four to eight, Adam was given various medications – six different ones over a two-year period, and usually two types at one time.

In the nineteenth century, if you wanted to understand yourself better, you went to a phrenologist and had your head examined. Phrenologists argued that each human faculty corresponded to a particular “organ” of the brain and that the shape and size of these organs suggested their relative power. They massaged their subjects’ skulls, feeling for the bumps, and then massaged their egos, telling them about their characters. Queen Victoria believed in phrenology; so did Whitman and Dickens and Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. Ambrose Bierce did not. He called it “the science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists in locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.”

Today, if you want your head or, more likely, somebody else’s head examined, you go to a psychoneurophysiologist. I went to one not long ago. Desperate, determined, undeterred by cost or lack of insurance coverage, undismayed by the doubts of conventional physicians, undaunted by the practitioner’s Dickensian-sounding name, I switched off my cell phone at the threshold of Dr. Swingle’s office and carried my daughter across.

Cell phones interfere with the equipment. Unlike phrenologists, psychoneurophysiologists put faith in technology, so for contemporary patients the grip of bare fingers has given way to the tickle of electrodes – metal discs shaped like the suction cups on the ends of plastic darts. But we didn’t see those right away. I saw a wall of books and four or five computers. Maia saw three large swivel chairs. She dove for the biggest of these, the one behind Dr. Swingle’s desk, and began to spin. He regarded her calmly. I sat down in one of the other chairs and stared out the windows at the North Shore mountains. Coffee sloshed out of my cup onto the doctor’s rug. He didn’t flinch. Grey-bearded, grey-eyed, and bespectacled, his countenance wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a Victorian parlour.

He is an end-of-the-road practitioner. Doctors send him the patients who aren’t responding to conventional treatments – which makes for an interesting waiting room tableau – the autistic teen next to the performance optimizing CEO next to the guy with the closed head injury next to the empty chair vacated by the hyperactive kid. They await their turn with Paul Swingle, one of only three registered neurotherapists in the Lower Mainland. (His daughter, Mari, is one of the other two and works alongside him in their Melville Street clinic.)

The Swingles helps people train their brains to function smoothly. They do this with an electroencephalogram (EEG), first mapping the patient’s brain tosspot irregularities and then teaching that person to modulate their own brainwaves using various neurofeedback techniques. In the case of kids with attention deficit disorder (ADD) – a big chunk of the doctor’s clientele – Swingle has them play a computer game using only their minds. No joystick, just electrodes on the patient’s scalp. Every time the child gets his brain to pump out more concentration-enhancing beta waves, an on-screen basketball player sinks a jump shot. It’s the kind of self-regulation Swingle says can accomplish a lot.

“One child came to us as a non-reader and within six months had caught up to his Grade 3 peers,” says the former University of Ottawa prof who grew “tired of walking on ice” and came west in ’97 to fill the empty neuro niche.

The woman’s voice on psychologist Paul Swingle Ph.D.’s answering machine was slurred and slow, like a record played at the wrong speed. The patient, 35, whose speech had been affected following the removal of a brain tumor, struggled to make herself understood as she scheduled her next appointment. Three months and 12 sessions later, the voice on the machine was clear and vibrant, a result of integrating biofeedback into her treatment, says Swingle, who is a Coordinator of the Clinical Psychophysiology Clinic at McLean Hospital. He has saved a series of messages the woman left to illustrate her progress.

In treating this patient, Swingle used newer “neuronal” or brainwave biofeedback techniques. These techniques are now being practiced more widely, he says, thanks to technological advances that have improved the measurement and graphic display of brainwave frequencies.

Few people walk directly into a psychologist’s office and say that they need biofeedback, according to Philip Brotman, Ph.D., a Program Director of Biofeedback Training Associates, based in Manhattan. The vast majority are physician-referred, which underscores the importance of physician education and even marketing, he explains. Further complicating matters is the fact that there is no formal licencing board, which makes it harder to evaluate practitioners.