The Art of Artifacting
D. Corydon Hammond and Jay Gunkelman have published a book that will be important to the neurophysiological community, especially those who are diligently trying to help patients with learning disabilities, memory or behavioral disorders, through QEEG.
Many of these clinicians come out of the ranks of PhD programs and therefore have never had the opportunity to train with a clinical encephalographer. Since training in hard-nose EEG is very much learning the subtleties of the many kinds of artifact that can invade our recordings, untrained individuals, doing the best they can, run a great risk of including important artifact into their QEEG data. This problem is not minor; IT IS MAJOR.
The book that is described addresses itself very well indeed to this important problem and the authors have been successful in obtaining their goals. Societies like the International Society of Neurofeedback and Research (ISNR) should rejoice that such a book exists. Throughout the atlas all of the different artifacts are described with pictures.
The major part of the book is called Practicum in Artifacting. The reader looks at a tracing, describes what is viewed, and can then look back at the answers to see if they are correct. Thus, I want to state that the two authors have been successful in addressing themselves to the major problem in QEEG and have written an excellent book to deal with this problem. John R. Hughes, MD, PhD Director, Epilepsy Center University of Illinois Medical Center. Reprinted from Journal of neurotherapy vol 6(2) 2002
