How to use Opti Brain (mapping brain activity)

How we typically use Opti Brain is by starting with a resting measure. I like to know in general, what their thinking patterns are. I never quite know what they are thinking, so obviously they can be influenced. EEG is a very sensitive signal, so what they are thinking will influence that, but what I typically want to do is turn on Opti Brain and will go to the ‘Collect’ mode. What you’ll see on it, is the signals will start coming in, each of these different colors represents one of the different electrodes.

We’ll do some adjustments here and as those all get filled in, we know where everything is connected and that we are going to get good signals.

Some of the connections might go in and out a little bit, but when we map them, all of the distractions or the eye blinks and the disconnects will be taken out of the signal, so it will be all good signals. I’m just going to do a little 10-second connection here. I have different options and we’ll record and I’ll typically have the person just looking at the screen while we are recording and stop talking.

We’ll label this one ‘Resting Condition’ and I also have, on the app, if they were doing a putt for example, we could put in a quality rating of what the putt might be and we could also put in notes of what the outcome is.

We’ll go ahead and save this one, we come back to the middle, we go in, his trial is right there and there’s his maps. We can look at Aaron’s maps here; I kind of like to look at the left and the right are averaged together in numbers here.

He tends to be a little left-sided, so you’ll notice the left is higher there, the left is higher there, left is higher there and the left is higher there.

He’s got pretty good balance in terms of the color; the colors tell us the pattern in his brain and everybody is unique and different. Those are quite different right there, and what my guess is that when he gets on Synergy, some of these are going to become more alike.

I like the values as well, because they are going to tell us exactly how high and low the activity is in those different areas.

From here what I normally do is, go out and catch a baseline with him putting and collect several putts so we can go back and compare the brain maps.