Equanimity: both your inclination toward being calm or anxious, as well as your sensitivity to calming and anxiety producing influences.
Focus: how quickly and completely you attend to the events around you.
Locality: the sense of boundary that you maintain between yourself and others, your sense of position in space, your moral boundaries.
Organization: your inclination to order, rank, quantify, and manage. The way you organize events around you.
Prosody: our ability to imbue speech with meaningful tonality and to extract meaning from the tonal quality of speech. Prosody is the tonality of emotion.
Recall: the strength to which memories play a role in your thinking, and the degree to which you recall memories of various sorts.
Recognition: visual, verbal, spatial, and conceptual. Are you good at identifying what things are made of? How facile are you at seeing a new whole when ideas are put together?
Temperament: when do you switch between diligence and frustration? What is the purpose and limitation of each? Does you ability in modulating your temperament improve with knowledge or practice?
Tempo: the natural pace of events that you find most comfortable and at which you naturally find yourself engaged.
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We equate many of these qualities with innate intelligence, and intelligence is seen as immutable. But intelligence is a slippery topic to which absolutes rarely apply. Neurofeedback techniques are facilitating changes in these areas, as I'll describe below.
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In this description of cognition I am distinguishing between improving one's performance through practice " such as requires the exercise, exploration, and rearrangement of your natural abilities " and directly enhancing or "evolving those abilities. The result may be the same, but the mechanisms are different.
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For example, I may learn to be better organized through a long period of practice in which I learn to compensate for areas of weakness. This process typically takes weeks or months. Alternatively, I may learn to modulate the electrical patterns of my brain in order to become a more organized person. For people responsive to neurofeedback this is a process that takes 10 to 20 sessions each lasting 30 minutes or less. The frequency of sessions can range between twice daily to weekly.
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