Biofeedback technique eases musicians’ anxiety

June 17, 2010 |  7:00 am

If you’ve ever sat down at the piano to play a Mozart sonata and couldn’t find middle C, you know the feeling of performance anxiety. The condition, often called stage fright, is anxiety that is so severe it can impede performance. As many as three-quarters of musicians have musical performance anxiety. Thus, for serious students, learning to master this condition may be as important as learning all the scales.

A new study shows that a specific biofeedback technique is highly effective in decreasing stage fright. Researchers studied 14 college-age musicians. The musicians’ tendency to have stage fright was estimated in a performance before an audience at the start of the study (with questionnaires and heart rate measurements). Half of the musicians repeated the performance four weeks later. The other half received training in biofeedback that was designed to teach them how to control their heart rate through thoughts and emotions. These students also performed again after four weeks.

The study showed a 71% decrease in performance anxiety in the biofeedback group compared with the control group. The biofeedback group had a 62% improvement in performance. The musicians in the biofeedback group also said they had an overall increased sense of calmness, slept better, were more relaxed and had less anger in their everyday lives.

Biofeedback helps coordinate the brain-heart-body processes, the authors wrote. This synchronicity defeats performance anxiety and gives musicians a feeling of “flow,” the authors said, which they defined as “when a person is functioning at peak capacity, including mind, body and energy.”

The study appears in the current [June 2010] issue of Biofeedback, published by the Assn. for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback.

And you get to play with all my gadgets as well – Breath training programs, Heart Math Biofeedback, alpha stimulation for pain management, Audio visual Entrainment Devices.

At the same time all of our acts, thoughts, and feelings are handled by the brain in its own code.

And the brain reads its own code by a kind of pattern recognition.

If we now allow the brain to witness its own behavior, it simply applies its pattern matching skills, realizes what the game is about, and is then capable of altering its own behavior.

In neurofeedback, we allow the brain to track its own behavior in our digital mirror. At the same time, we reward the brain if it happens to change in a favorable direction, in a sophisticated game of “warmer/colder.”  Since the brain is  a voracious learning engine, so it incorporates the new information and that becomes new learned behavior, or new functional capability.

Why is Neurofeedback useful for sports?

The skill of the game of golf is recognized to be largely a mental skill. Training a person to play better golf is largely a matter of developing and honing brain-based skills. What makes this all possible is that immediate feedback is always available on the person’s performance because in the motor act the brain’s capacities are on display, in a manner that all can judge. Skill learning is absolutely dependent on feedback—to the trainee and also to the coach. The brain’s trainability is a general property of the brain, one not restricted to motor function. The missing piece is feedback. If we can allow the brain to observe its own behavior, we can train it just as effectively as we can train motor competence. In neurofeedback, that is just what happens. We allow the brain to witness those aspects of its own behavior that relate to issues identified by the therapist. And this opens the door to shaping the brain’s behavior in all of those areas that matter to us in mental health, in education, in our relationships, and even in our deepest inner core of the self.

Neurofeedback and the brain.

Merleau-Ponty urged many years ago that the brain is best regarded not as an observer or witness to its world, but rather as an actor in it. It is especially attuned to its own impact on its surroundings. It is not simply or primarily a respondent. In the feedback screen, the brain recognizes its own agency with regard to the changing signal, and it can’t help but be intrigued. So the same process that works at the level of the person also happens at the level of the brain, in the brain’s own code. The brain’s code is reflected in the EEG. The EEG, in turn, is mapped into the feedback game. And the brain’s pattern recognition skills are such that it is still able—-even after so many levels of abstraction—to discern the correlation of the feedback information with its own internal activity. In this manner, we beguile the brain into altering its own state. Over time and by repetition, functionality is restored to brain networks, and new functional capacities open up.