Mabel Is Not in Trouble: What a Puppy Explains About Brain Training

Sep 15, 2026

Mabel, Larry’s Malshipoo puppy, sitting on a tray of her toys

Fall is in the air in Carter County, the school buses are running again, and everybody in this office is suddenly on a different schedule than they were a month ago.

Please note: we will be closed October 22nd and 23rd. Dr. Dennis will be at a BrainCore neurofeedback symposium on Hilton Head Island. Call or text if you need to be seen that week and we will get you in before we leave or right after we return.

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Phone: 423.542.3337 | Text: 423.380.0877

Mabel is not in trouble

Larry has a new puppy. Her name is Mabel, she is a Malshipoo, and she is somewhere in the middle of potty training. Which means Larry is somewhere in the middle of potty training.

If you have ever done this, you know how it goes. She had been getting it right at home. Then this past weekend Larry crated her up to drive out and see his daughter, and somewhere on that road she got it wrong, in the crate, nowhere near a door. And there is a second, right after a thing like that happens, where a person can genuinely wonder whether the puppy is doing it on purpose.

She is not. She is a puppy. She had the pattern at home. The road was new.

Nobody watching that would say Mabel is being difficult, or that she is not trying, or that she should have learned this by now. We give her the thing she actually needs, which is time and repetition and a reason to repeat it. Out the door, same door, same words, small reward when she gets it right. Again tomorrow. Again the day after.

And it works. Not because anybody lectured her about it. Because a nervous system was given the same experience enough times, with a reward attached, until holding the new pattern became easier than the old one.

I want to say something about that, because it is the same thing I spend my days explaining.

The question I get asked most

When somebody sits down and we go over their brain map, the question that comes next is almost always some version of the same one.

Why does this take thirty sessions?

It is a fair question and I never mind it. People have usually been sent home with things that were supposed to work quickly, and thirty of anything sounds like a lot when you are tired.

Here is the honest answer, and it is Mabel's answer.

A brain learns the way anything learns. Repetition, feedback, and a reward for getting closer. During a session, sensors read brainwave activity while a person watches a screen or listens to audio. When the brain produces a healthier pattern, the feedback rewards it. When it drifts, the feedback dims. Nothing is sent into the brain. The sensors only read.

Do that once and nothing much happens. Do it enough times, with the protocol built from that person's own map, and the brain gets better at finding the pattern on its own.

Now let me be careful with that number, because it is the part people hear wrong.

Thirty is not a countdown you wait out before anything is allowed to happen. Everyone responds differently. Some people notice changes well before then. Others take longer. How that goes depends on what the qEEG is showing and on the rest of what is going on with a person's health, which is the reason we map before we train instead of guessing.

What the number is really about is whether the training holds.

Think about adding a healthy habit. Walking after supper. Going to bed at the same time. Water before coffee. You might feel better in the first week of doing it. Feeling better in week one is not the same as the habit being set. It sets later, once you have done it enough times that it holds without you deciding every evening. Habits accumulate. So does this.

Larry said the truest thing anybody has said to me about this work, and he said it about a puppy. It takes a commitment in time and visits, just like anything, for the training to stick.

Four things that are true of any brain learning anything

If it helps to have a way of thinking about it, this is the one I use.

1. It has to be measured before it is trained. You cannot train toward a pattern you have not looked at. That is what the map is for. It measures and shows where patterns sit against normal ranges, and nothing more than that.
2. It has to be repeated. One session is a data point. A course of sessions is a habit.
3. It has to be rewarded. The brain is very good at chasing a reward. That is the entire mechanism, and it is why nobody has to try hard during a session.
4. It has to accumulate. Habits do not arrive. They pile up. This is the part nobody likes, including me.

Read that list again with a puppy in mind and it is the same list.

The part I would want said to me

Here is what I think the thirty-session question is usually underneath.

It is rarely about the sessions. It is about whether this person has failed at something again. They have tried things. Some of those things were supposed to be quick. When somebody asks me why it takes so long, a good part of what I hear is: am I going to be the one this does not work for.

I cannot promise anybody an outcome and I would not trust anyone who did. Neurofeedback is not right for every brain and sometimes the map tells us so, which is exactly why we look first.

What I can tell you is that slow is not the same as failing, and that a bad day is not a verdict.

Mabel is not in trouble. She had it at home. The road was new.

One practical note

We brought a Clean Connect headset into the office this month. It is paste-free, which means nobody leaves here needing to wash conductive gel out of their hair, and it goes on and comes off quicker than what we were using. If the mess was ever the reason you did not book a second one, that reason is gone.

Now I have a question for you

What is the thing you have been told to be patient about that you are tired of being patient about? Sleep, focus, mood, a kid's homework hour, your own afternoons.

Hit reply and tell me. I read them.

Yours In Health,
Dr. Dennis & Your BrainCore of Elizabethton Team