I received this question in my email:

Q: For my final research project I am researching brainwaves and neurofeedback. what I am trying to find out and understand specifically is how brainwaves can get "stuck" in a certain part of the brain... if you would be willing to help me understand this if you understand it yourself, or maybe give me a direction in which to look I would really appreciate it.

So what? Apart from a student research project, who cares? Why am I sharing this?

For me, how we think about and understand the world and our lives is all about metaphor. Whenever we try to understand something new, our brain is always making connections based on what that something or someone is “like”.

So when we attach a metaphor to something we want to understand, that metaphor drives our concepts about it, our expectations, our strategies — everything. If someone new reminds you physically of someone you heartily dislike, you tend to dislike things they say or do, read their motivations as if they were the other person, etc. When it comes to our brains, as your Brain Mentor, I want to caution you about accepting metaphors that limit your options.

And the idea of brainwaves getting “stuck” is one such misguided metaphor.

Let me tell you why…

Start with your own associations to being”stuck”. What is being “stuck” like?

For me, the idea of being stuck in one place brings up pictures like:

- a cave-explorer that gets stuck in a too-skinny passage or

- a rock-climber that gets stuck on a rock wall with no way up or down or

- a zipper that won’t go up or down or

- being trapped in a traffic jam with nowhere to go

I’m sure you have your own unpleasant images. I’m also sure your images, like mine, involve some kind of lack of motion, lack of alternatives. And likely some kind of emotional discomfort — anywhere from frustration to anger to panic to aggression.

So when we imagine that our brain can be literally “stuck”, that means we’re also imagining the feelings and thoughts associated with not being able to move, not having options, and the emotional states that accompany those. How helpful is that??

But here’s the thing…

Brainwaves don’t get “stuck”. At least not in the sense of being stuck in a certain part of the brain.

The idea of a brain wave as a “thing”, a touchable structure in the brain that can get stuck in a place, is just wrong from the get-go.

Brainwaves are not a thing that can be touched or held. They are not a structure, a “thing”.

Brainwaves are patterns of activity, activity that is always in movement, patterns that flow into new patterns or related patterns, or sometimes, flow into something similar to the last pattern. Think of the waves of an ocean or a river - always in motion, never exactly the same shape or size, never even exactly the same water drops, always responding to the environment (winds, rocks, sandbars, boats) around them.

So instead of thinking of a “touchable thing” that can get “stuck” in a certain place without moving, how do waves-in-motion get “stuck”?

Instead of thinking of “stuck” as a lack of activity, let`s remember that our brain is a collection of networks - collections of connections. The activity of any particular network of connections may have a tendency to get repeated or activated too easily or to “loop” too often. It’s not the waves per se, but the pattern of activity of the underlying portions of the brain networks that is triggered too easily or too often. The waves are just a reflection of that activity.

Think of a marble rolling along a table with grooves in it. (OK, or a bowling ball - I couldn’t find a good picture of a marble.) No matter where you start rolling the marble, it may have a tendency to get pulled into one of the grooves if its deep enough and wide enough that the marble encounters it. If one groove gets really big, the marble is more and more likely to encounter it and get pulled in. The brain’s activity is the same – it can be pulled toward this “attractor basin” (see more recent physics books on nonlinear systems) more and more easily. Think of anxiety – the more the person experiences anxiety — the “deeper” and “wider” their brain-groove gets — the more they may become anxious from a wider and wider variety of situations or they might become anxious more and more quickly in a “triggering” situation.

In our water example, this is the river that follows its banks. The river bed and the river banks create a “groove” that draws the water into that flow.

On the other hand, in turbulent water, there can emerge a repeating “looping”, which we call a whirlpool. In a whirlpool, it’s actually not the same water going around and around, it’s the same pattern pulling passing water in.

Chronic pain is an example of brain activity “looping”. We tend to think we “hurt” wherever we are aware of feeling the pain — that that specific place is the source of the pain. But it’s not really. If there is something wrong, that place is sending signals to the brain to relay sensations. But we actually have the activity that tells us “ouch!” directly in our brain.

Chronic pain means that, even though the original source of the pain may not be sending fresh signals anymore, the brain has learned the “habit” of the pattern of “pain” — the pattern of activity is repeating over and over even though the underlying physical sensory signal is no longer coming from the injured place. The brain network has learned a “habit” of communicating “hurting” that it has a hard time stopping. We can think of that like a whirlpool or “looping” of brain activity.

But here’s the power of changing our metaphor…

In every moment, our brain’s activity is in motion.

So our brain-activity is never “stuck” — never trapped somewhere. Like the water in the whirlpool, we have to feed it fresh activity to keep it going in that same pattern. Or like the bowling ball rolling toward the gutter, we have to let ourselves carry on in some learned habit. Both are brain-habits.

(When I was a teenager, I briefly — very briefly— belonged to a bowling league. Every one of my balls would veer off into the gutter at almost exactly the same place every time. Habit. My father told me that once I learned to make the mini-adjustment to put it where I wanted it, I’d be a champion! Different habit needed.)

And brain-habits can be changed. We can weaken old habits and learn new ones (just like my father told me about bowling.) We aren’t trapped on some rock wall with nowhere to go. We aren’t surrounded by traffic over which we have no control. We aren’t doomed to tolerate some thought-pattern forever. We can become aware of brain-habits and use strategies to shift the “flow” and break up the “whirlpools”.

How? Well, that’s another question for another day. :-)

In the meantime, notice what metaphors you use, their impact on your thinking, and what happens if you change your metaphor…

For more research on the idea of the “looping”, try Schwartz’ The Mind and the Brain, which talks about the “looping” of OCD brain-habits.