BCIA Continuing Education Posts

For many clients and families, MI needs to be threaded through the entire clinical encounter: assessment, feedback, treatment planning, and the ongoing work of therapy itself.

From diagnosing epilepsy to powering brain-computer interfaces, the EEG has shaped more than a century of neuroscience and clinical medicine. The central questions are what we are actually measuring and how we make sense of the signal.

Executive Summary Two patients can face the same pressure and walk away in very different shapes, and a recent study from Mainz, Germany, helps explain part of that difference at the level of the heart. Rösner and colleagues (2026) tracked how the autonomic nervous system responds to the same laboratory stressor when it is repeated over several weeks, and then asked whether more resilient people exhibit a healthier physiological pattern over time. Their answer was encouraging

Training programs teach, rightly, that the outer brain layer drives language, planning, and voluntary reports. That does not settle where felt experience begins.

For many children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the central struggle is not simply paying attention but regulating thought and behavior.

Clients should not chase every glucose peak, but rather turn patterns into safe, psychologically informed decisions. Behavioral health clinicians have a particular contribution to make. They can help clients receive sensor data as feedback rather than surveillance, especially when shame, perfectionism, disordered eating, or diabetes distress are already in the room.

Cortisol is rhythmic, context-dependent, and clinically meaningful only when interpreted in light of timing, symptoms, medications, comorbidities, and validated testing. Cortisol supports arousal, blood pressure regulation, glucose availability, immune balance, and survival itself. The risk emerges when secretion is excessive, deficient, poorly timed, pharmacologically altered, or uncoupled from normal feedback.

When the body experiences chronic low-grade inflammation, the effects extend far beyond localized tissues because inflammatory cytokines, meaning immune signaling proteins, instruct the brain and autonomic nervous system to shift their operational states. The result is widespread systemic distress that crosses traditional diagnostic boundaries.

Clearing amyloid from the brain does not produce a clinically meaningful benefit, a finding that directly challenges three decades of drug development guided by the amyloid cascade hypothesis.

The heart-brain axis and the gut-brain axis are not separate systems. They share the same nerve, immune mediators, and stress hormones. Their shared purpose is allostasis, meaning stability through change.

When you fall asleep, your brain shifts from a tightly controlled, one-way traffic pattern of blood and fluid flow into something more like a washing machine.

Adults with autism are approximately 2.6 times more likely to develop early-onset dementia than the general population, even after adjusting for known risk factors

The moment that tells you the most about a client's regulatory capacity is not the first spike of distress. It is the recovery window, when the brain actively reorganizes its networks.

When the person sitting across from you looks different from that sample, the diagnostic accuracy you learned about in training starts to drift.

Elite athletic performance is often explained not only by physical skill but also by how efficiently the brain controls movement. In precision sports such as shooting, even tiny variations in attention, motor control, or neural processing can determine whether a shot hits the center of the target or misses entirely.

HRV is exquisitely sensitive to how, when, and under what conditions you measure it. Get the protocol wrong, and you will be chasing noise rather than signal.

Today, neuroscientists view single BAs as participating in multiple networks depending on the task at hand.

Your confidence in a conclusion should update as new evidence arrives, and the size of that update depends on how informative the evidence is.

The central discovery is that M1 is not simply a mosaic of body-part territories. Woven among those effector-specific zones (the patches that control the hand, the foot, the mouth) lies a second system called the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN.