“So there’s one thing I see right off the bat,” she said. “We’d expect to see more alpha when you close your eyes. But it actually looks pretty similar whether your eyes are open or closed. That tells me that you might not sleep well, you might have some anxiety, you might be overly sensitive—your brain talks to itself a lot. You can’t quiet yourself.” This was all accurate, if not news to me.
Kerson continued to scan through the test, selecting sections that weren’t compromised by my blinks, trying to gather enough clean data to match against the database. She ran the four good minutes through the program, which spat out an analysis of my brain waves that looked something like a heat map, with areas of relative over- and under-functioning indicated by patches of color. By most measures, my brain appeared a moderate, statistically insignificant green. “You’re neurotypical,” she said, sounding minorly disappointed.
Kerson nonetheless recommended vitamins to beef up my neural connections, since my amplitudes were a little lackluster. “Meditating would be good for you, but you’re going to need something else for meditation to work,” she told me, noting that I should consider some alpha training, which would involve putting on headphones to listen to sounds that would get my brain waves into the right frequency. I should also probably change out my contacts if I was blinking that much.
Kerson began folding up the electrode-studded cap, and I realized with a slight feeling of deflation that that was it. “It was nice to meet you,” she called out as I pulled out of her driveway. “And it was nice to meet your brain!”
* * *
A qEEG may not be anything like a personality test, but it still left me with the same unsatisfied feeling of being parsed and analyzed but still fundamentally unknown. My mind had been mapped, I had seen the shape of my brain waves, but I didn’t have any new or better understanding of my galloping, anxious brain, or what happens on those afternoons where I lose hours to online personality tests. Instead, I was just left with the vague sense that in some deep and essential way, I wasn’t performing as well as I could be.
I decided to seek out a second opinion from Gunkelman, whom several people had described to me as the go-to guy for interpreting EEGs. Gunkelman worked as an EEG tech in a hospital for decades, he told me. “In the early 1990s, I figured out that I had read 500,000 EEGs,” he said. “And then I stopped counting.” When he looked over my results, he grumbled about not having enough data to work with; for a proper brain map, he needed at least 10 minutes each with eyes open and closed, he said. But he nonetheless zipped through the EEG readout with the confidence of someone who’s done this more than half a million times before.
Like Kerson, Gunkelman zeroed in on my alpha. “When you close your eyes, you expect to see alpha in the back of the head, and we’re not really seeing that,” he said. That meant that my visual processing systems weren’t resting when my eyes were closed—the same inability to quiet down that Kerson had noticed. He also saw evidence of light drowsiness: “With an EEG, we can tell exactly how vigilant you are,” he said. He was right; I had been sleepy that day.