Cap and Map

Today my son had something called the, “cap and map” baseline for his upcoming neural feedback sessions.  He had electrodes put on his earlobes first for reference points.   Then he had a cap with electrodes in specific spots put on his head.   There was a rainbow ribbon cable coming out of the cap that Dr. Dan connected to a calibration machine.

He put the machine in my son’s lap and told him to help him as he went through each of the sensors, making sure each got down to 3.0 or lower in impedance.   He put a needle thing into each of the caps holes.   I say “needle thing” because it was a syringe, but it was a blunt one, only responsible for injecting conductive gel into the hole.   But he had to wiggle the blunt end of the syringe around on my son’s scalp a bit and that was somewhat uncomfortable.

But my son helped and he only flinched a few times.   Then he got to sit in the large, brown, reclining  chair and start the baseline test.   The test wasn’t too terribly exciting.  He first got to look at his brain waves, which was mostly a lot of small wiggly lines on the screen.   Then he had to sit still for ninety seconds with his eyes open.   Then ninety seconds with his eyes closed.   Dr. Dan only needed fifteen seconds of clean reading during this time, but you need longer when you have a wiggly child.

Next my son read for the next data reading.   Then there was a math sheet while more data was collected.   Then he had the eyes open and eyes closed readings again.   And then the cap came off and he was done.

Dr. Dan said he could see some of the things that had shown up in the evaluation he’d had from the baseline.   And that’s saying a lot because it was just little variations in squiggles on the screen to me.   He was trained by one of the pioneers in the field who told him you have to be able to understand the raw data.  

As we were getting ready to go Dr. Dan told my son he worked with chidden and adults for all sorts of things and he couldn’t promise, but one of his students had gotten better at Fortnite after working with him.   My son wanted to know how soon he could come back.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son found a “300 Funniest Fortnite Fails” video on YouTube that’s a compilation of Fortnite clips.   He and his father are in the living room as I write this, both laughing out loud as each clip goes past, saying things like, “woah,” “oh my gosh" and “that hurt”.

The Tiny Girl Sleepy Update:  My daughter was on the couch tonight, shortly before bed.   Apparently she was dozing off because when my husband came over to wake her to brush her teeth she said, “can we have just one more page?”   He asked her if she was dreaming and she said, “I was dreaming you were reading a beautiful book."