Rodger C Bailey, MS
Rebuilding the brain’s Executive Function
I work on the brain and nervous system side of physical therapy and strength and conditioning. I rebuild and refine the brain’s rhythm and timing circuits and precisely connect them to muscle groups so that athletes achieve the highest levels of performance. This shows up as improved speed, accuracy, coordination, reaction time, field of vision, mental stamina, mental sharpness, and focus & concentration.
I developed the approach I use based on my experience and education. A review of my history will connect the dots for how I developed this approach and some of the results I have achieved.
My Background
Electronics and Computers
When I gradated from high school in 1962, I joined the US Navy and was trained in electronics and worked on board ships maintaining electronic equipment for 4 years.
When I got out of the military, I was hired by IBM and started repairing card punch machines and card sorters. IBM was in a transition period between card tabulating machines and services and the bright new world of electronic computing. I rode that wave of change and ended my career at IBM as a Staff Programmer/Analyst in 1980.
My Degrees: During my time at IBM, I obtained degrees in Anthropology (BS, Fordham, 1972), Educational Counseling (MS, U of Bridgeport, 1977), and post grad studies in Linguistics (1977-1980).
While working in IBM, I was programming computers to operate manufacturing machinery without human intervention. In studying Educational Counseling, I learned psychotherapy techniques for humans, and in my Linguistics studies I learned how the human brain is a bio-computer and I learned linguistic psychotherapy techniques which were actually programming techniques for the human brain.
Linguistics
LAB Profile: When I left IBM in 1980, I started a career as a consultant with a linguistic profiling tool I created called the Language And Behavior Profile (LAB Profile). It is a way of determining a person’s thinking and behavior tendencies based on their unconscious word choices. From my frame of reference, this was a tool for understanding the person’s bio-computer architecture. It gives information about how the person operates in the world. After more than 30 years of use, there are many tens of thousands of folks around the world who have studied and are using the LAB Profile for self-discovery and as skills for psychotherapy, hiring, supervision, communications, sales, and marketing.
In one of my training exercises, I had mapped the patterns explained in the LAB Profile across our childhood developmental process (at which developmental step did a particular LAB Profile pattern evolve), so I was already interested in certain childhood problems.
Rhythm And Timing
Online Rhythm Test: The training I was developing & using was working for these children and I developed an objective measure of the person’s rhythm and timing circuits. This gave me a way of measuring success in the training process as well as an assessment tool prior to training. I made it Internet based, so I could use it anywhere.
One of the things I noticed was that those children who had an athletic tendency, became much better in their sport performance over the course of the program. It started with little things like a father coming to me with tears in his eyes, telling me that his son could finally hit a baseball or a teacher telling me that a child was able to run in a straight line for the first time or a mother telling me that her daughter was riding her bicycle for the first time.
Athletic Performance: This aspect grew as teachers told me how a particular boy had won a high school running competition and had beat out boys who were years older and a mother telling me about her son batting .500 on the varsity high school baseball team and another mother telling me her 15 y/o son was promoted to be the high school varsity ice hockey goalie because his skills had increased so dramatically (she told me he was catching the puck without turning his head to watch it come in).
The Zone: Children were telling me about how the ball was slowing down so it was easy to hit it. They were telling me about how they could easily steal passes, because the ball and the other players were slowing down. One high school basketball player told me that when he shoots, it’s so easy to make the basket because the basket looks so big. So, I started understanding that The Zone is a manifestation of very precise timing circuits.
Important Brain Structures
Signaling Nerves: It is important to understand how these timing circuits send signals to and receive signals from our body. Of course, these signals are passing through nerves which go out from our brain to muscle groups and sensors throughout our bodies. Some of these nerves are sending signals out with activation and deactivation information to our muscle groups. Other nerves are receiving sensory data from sensors throughout our bodies.
Timing Circuits: Our timing circuits are essentially a set of circuits which are humming in our brain. They are constantly keeping a set of (if we have precise timing circuits) frequencies going at a stable and steady rate.
Gating Circuits: But one important set of circuits are usually left out of the conversation about these kinds of circuits. The gating circuits are the controlling circuits which permits the signals to pass through (gate open) or stop the signals from passing through (gate closed). This is an important regulatory facility for our bodies. If a muscle activation gate is always open, that signal is always going to that muscle group and that muscle group never relaxes. If a sensory gate is always left open, the person receives that sensory data all the time and as strong as that signal can be.
Our timing circuits are the source of precision for opening and closing these gating circuits to give us coordination and to let us control our sensory diet. There are many physical problems related to these gating circuits open all the time or closed all the time.
Sensory Hypersensitivity: This is a condition where the gates are constantly open and the overload of the sensory data is affecting the emotional and physical state of the person. Our training program tends to get these gating circuits back under control so that the person can close the gates to moderate the sensory input (overload).
For instance, auditory hypersensitivity is a state where the person hears everything nearby. A person without that hypersensitivity is able to not hear certain things and hear others, but with hypersensitivity the auditory overload is painful because all auditory data comes in.
Brain-Side Training
Soccer Example: One 14 y/o defensive soccer (“futbol” down here in Uruguay) player described for me his evolution during his training. After a week of training, he told me that sometimes he could see those players coming into his zone as moving in slow motion. After the second week, he told me that he definitely saw them in slow motion and he had good luck taking the ball away from them. After the third week, he told me that they were moving so slow, he could reach in and take the ball without penalty every time. After the fourth week, he told that they don’t come into his zone anymore. When he was 16 he graduated to the semi-pro team in his club and when he was 17 he graduated to the pro team. A year after he joined his pro team, they were elevated to the first division. And that first year in the first division, they won a slot in the South American Cup competition. Nine years later his team is still in the first division.
MLB Baseball Example: A pro baseball player was entering the last year of his 9-year contract and was batting .200 after a month. He knew that his free agent contract would not be picked up if he ended the season at .200, so he asked for the training to improve his batting average. He trained too intensively and started getting light-headed and dizzy, so he backed way off the schedule to once per week and only one hour per session. His training was good enough and he ended the season with .254 and his contract was picked up by another team for $15+ million for 3 years.
Brain-Side Rehab
Construction Worker: This man had a construction site accident which threw him 30 ft to land on his head. He was saved by his hard-hat, but his TBI was severe enough that he received total disability from the state and a very large insurance settlement. He started with me after two years of physical therapy, but when he came to me he had very poor coordination, balance, and moderately poor speaking fluency. He needed someone to come to the sessions with him because he was afraid of falling when walking.
After the first week of his sessions, his language fluency returned. After a couple of weeks of sessions he was improved enough in his balance and coordination to use his in-line skates on the streets and sidewalks to travel to and from his sessions. After his third week, he was riding his Harley to and from the sessions. As he graduated from the program he told me he was ready to return to his hobby of bull riding.
Quadriplegic Lawyer: This young man was bothered by all the sounds around him. He could not sleep well at night because of the noises from other folks in nearby apartments or cars going in and out of the parking lot outside his apartment. Because of his quadriplegia, we could not provide our traditional training program which uses arm and leg rhythmic movement. So, we were able to organize head movement to achieve the same outcome. He completed the training with his gating circuits now fully and appropriately managed. He no longer has auditory hypersensitivity.
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