Tech­nol­ogy & Learn­ing mag­a­zine, widely read among school admin­is­tra­tors, has just pub­lished a good arti­cle Take a Deep Breath: Biofeed­back soft­ware is help­ing stu­dents calm down for bet­ter test per­for­mance.

Some quotes

- (School prin­ci­pal says) “It just goes to show that the emo­tional state can really affect a child’s per­for­mance on the test,” says Lagozzino, who prac­tices the same exer­cises him­self after an ini­tial bout of skep­ti­cism. “If they have tools to calm them­selves so they can focus on the task at hand, then it’s some­thing we should do for all students.”

- The train­ing exer­cise usu­ally lasts five to seven min­utes, and stu­dents can use it at a PC in the back of a class­room or in a lab. Alvaro Fer­nan­dez (yes, that is me!), man­ag­ing direc­tor of Sharp­Brains, a San Francisco-based reseller of the pro­gram, known as Freeze­Framer, which has been sold to 80 schools nation­wide, says the $300 price tag for a sen­sor (Note: and the soft­ware that comes with it) breaks new ground. Until just a few years ago, a biofeed­back ses­sion cost $100 an hour because of the required equip­ment, unavail­able out­side a doctor’s office. Now, “these sen­sors are less expen­sive to pro­duce,” he says. “The big inno­va­tion is there’s more solid sci­ence behind heart rate volatil­ity (sic, it should have said Heart rate Vari­abil­ity) as a key pre­dic­tor of stress lev­els, and the price is reasonable.”

- Lagozzino is look­ing to train more of his stu­dents. “When I first heard about this, I thought, okay, this is a lit­tle too far out there for me,” he says. “I didn’t think you could con­trol any of your own phys­i­ol­ogy and that it would have any impact on your think­ing. [But] it really does.”

Jeff and I had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences. First, biofeed­back pro­grams may sound a bit “out there”. But we tried it our­selves, saw how much it helped us iden­tify and man­age our emo­tions real-time, dis­cov­ered a lot of research on it over the last 20 years, and became advo­cates for it, as an exam­ple of a Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram.

You can learn more about how this tech­nol­ogy can help stu­dents, schools, and also adults in gen­eral and traders in particular.

Have a nice breath!

Alvaro

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