Editor’s note: Students in an advanced feature-writing class at Brown University were assigned to write a feature story about a street that conveys a sense of place. The project, now in its ninth year, presents aspects of city life from the perspective of college journalism students.

PROVIDENCE - Tim Slavin, 18, is a hard-working student at William E. Tolman High School in Pawtucket. He’s an accomplished athlete and enjoys talking with his friends about school and sports. With support from his parents, his doctors, and his friends in the Pawtucket community, Tim has come a long way since he was diagnosed with autism 15 years ago. Maturity has brought him to a crossroads in his journey, and he is about to take the wheel - literally.

Hands-on activities now seem to come naturally to this five-time Rhode Island Special Olympic gold medalist and he is proud to announce that he passed his driver’s test just after Easter. Behind the wheel of his newly acquired 1993 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which he paid for with his own summer earnings, Tim makes a confident turn onto Cedar Street.

He continues toward the NeuroDevelopment Center, in Federal Hill, where he has been working with psychologists since its opening in 2002. Tim knows the route well, but this is one of the first times he has driven it himself.

Arriving at the center, Tim is ready for a session of neurofeedback training, a treatment that uses advanced EEG feedback technology to map his brain and send back cues about how to make adjustments toward improved functioning.

The technology is complex, but Dr. Laurence Hirshberg, the center’s director, and a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Brown University, says the training itself is painless, noninvasive, and even fun. Now, after five years of treatment, Tim still looks forward to his sessions.

To provide neurofeedback, the center uses off-the-shelf PlayStation video games as well as other specially designed video and audio displays that show patients their brain activity in ways they can easily understand. Seven or eight partici-pants can train at a time in the center’s training rooms, veritable brain arcades offering more than 15 different games. On the sides of their scalps, patients wear electrode wires, which allow for a transfer of information between their brains and the video game screens.

They control the games with their brains instead of their hands and the feedback mechanism allows them to see their brain activity represented through the game.

THE SLAVINS are part of a growing community of Rhode Island families affected by autism, Asperger’s syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other neurological conditions, who have found solace and healing at the NeuroDevelopment Center. In the five years since its opening, the facility has grown to provide both traditional and innovative therapy options to roughly 500 people, 80 percent of them under 18.

Tim Slavin’s vulnerability to emotional over-arousal made him a good candidate for neurofeedback training when he started five years ago. At that time, neurofeedback was not covered by the Slavins’ Blue Cross insurance plan, but the family was desperate and willing to pay out of pocket if it meant their son could be calmed.

Debbie Slavin first recognized her son’s special needs when he was a baby. Tim had trouble focusing on people and his mother would often have to get down on the floor with him just to get his attention. His language skills developed slowly and for a young child he was noticeably uncomfortable in social situations.

As Tim got older, he experienced daily panic attacks. His heart would race and he was often unable to keep food down because of his nerves. He would worry about school, he would worry about the weather, he would even worry about worrying too much.

But Debbie Slavin wanted her son to be able to express himself to the world. And she wanted to foster a better understanding between him and her husband, John, and her older son, Sean.

The Slavins first started visiting Hirshberg in 1996, before the NeuroDevelopment Center opened. At that time, the doctor was working on his own, out of a small space in the basement of the Regency Plaza on Broadway downtown, providing evaluations, school consultations, individual and family therapy, and parent guidance.

Hirshberg is a soft-spoken and articulate man with silver eyeglasses, a graying beard, and the remarkable ability to make the intricacies of applied neuroscience comprehensible to his patients. He was recommended to Debbie Slavin by other parents as a sort of "guru" of neurological conditions.

Inspired to study neurosci-ence by a family member with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, Hirshberg has crafted a unique therapeutic protocol- a blend of personal experience, research, and open compassion for his patients and their families.

When the doctor began working directly with Tim, he would bring out toys for them to talk about and play with. But Tim, uncomfortable with all strangers, would only play alone, facing the wall in silence. At 7 years old, he still didn’t know what a friend was. The doctor told Mrs. Slavin that he wanted Tim to know the joys of shared experience. "I will be Tim’s first friend," she remembers him saying.

Using a mental tool he developed called the "bother scale," Hirshberg worked to help Tim recognize and describe his emotional ups and downs. It was simple: Numbers could express his emotional range. Some days Tim was a "two" and he was not very bothered; other days, he was an "eight" and he was very, very bothered. The technique helped Tim communicate and allowed Hirshberg to build trust with his patient.

Hirshberg put the Slavins through a traditional treatment of individual psychotherapy, parent guidance, family therapy, and play groups that continued for six years.

Tim started making friends at school and relating better with his family. But despite his years of medication, occupational therapy, yoga routines, breathing therapies, and counseling, his anxiety was still distressingly high. Hirshberg continued to search for a treatment that could permanently alleviate Tim’s tense energy.

According to Hirshberg, the neurofeedback training that Tim now undergoes is like a visual "bother scale." Using EEG technology, it shows Tim the momentary changes in his central nervous system arousal on a video game screen in front of him. As he plays, he is actually watching his momentary "bothered-ness" rise and fall.

Hirshberg got training in neurofeedback technology in 2000, when he took a four-day class on the technique at a neurological conference in California. No one was doing it locally.

Shortly after returning from the conference, he began using the new technique on his patients and almost immediately, he says, "we started to see that this crazy thing was actually very helpful."

Parents called Hirshberg delighted by their children’s emotional and social progress. "For the first time in his life, my son sat on the couch and snuggled next to me," one mother told him. "For the first time in his life, he held the door open for me when I walked in with a bag of groceries," another reported.

Months passed and demand for the treatment increased. In 2001, rather than starting a waitlist, Hirshberg hired another person to run sessions with him out of his Regency Plaza office. In 2002, he expanded his practice, hired several new part-time and full-time employees, and made the move to the West Exchange Center on Cedar Street where the NeuroDevelopment Center now stands.

By 2002, Tim Slavin was almost through with junior high, and his mother was starting to worry about how he would make the transition into senior high school and young adulthood. That’s when Hirshberg suggested neurofeedback to them.

Within two months of beginning the treatment, Tim was able to hold full conversations and comfortably look people in the eyes. Months earlier, he had had trouble responding to a simple "How are you?"

Other people noticed a difference too. Tim began extending his hand to friends and doctors, initiating conversations with a "How are you doing? Good to see you again." Debbie Slavin acknowledged that not everyone would react to neurofeedback as positively as her son did, but she started encouraging other parents to take an interest in the emerging feedback technology.

IN ANY AREA of life, people are better able to improve their performance if they have clear feedback on how they are doing, says Hirshberg. And numerous scientific studies have shown that the human brain has the capacity to repair itself through the guidance of this type of feedback. During the neurofeedback training, as Tim’s brain moves closer to or further away from improved function, his brain is forced to reorganize itself for improvement.

The video games at the center are adjusted for each patient’s needs. And as Tim plays, his brain is continuously reorganizing its pathways so that his individual goals are achieved over time. He sees and hears representations of the changes in his own brain activity, only a few thousandths of a second after those changes occur. He knows that the goal is to keep his brain activity at a steady pace.

When Tim achieves a state of calm and focus, he gets more speed for his vehicle. If he loses focus and his brain activity slows down, his vehicle loses speed. If he gets agitated or anxious and his activity is too fast, he loses directional control. "All I actually have to do is relax. It’s fun and it’s good for me," Tim says.

In the past five years, the center has grown to offer several weekly play groups and parent support groups, as well as a summer camp for children ages 9 to 16. Five psychologists are now on staff, as well as a social worker and two other counselors. And four technicians are monitoring neurofeedback for more than 100 children and adults.

Depending on the patient, training sessions can last anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour, two to four times a week.

As Tim matures, his training sessions are becoming less and less frequent, once or twice a month depending on his schedule. Still, he wouldn’t dream of leaving Hirshberg, the first friend he ever knew.

"Even though it’s all fine now and Dr. Hirshberg is much busier with new patients," Tim says, "it would make me feel really bad if I didn’t see him for a while because I’ve known him for many, many years."

As word travels through the local parent community, treatments at the NeuroDevelopment Center are more in demand. Scientific trials have given evidence to the success of neurofeedback and so what was once a solely experimental therapy is now gaining momentum.

Blue Cross has begun picking up some of the Slavins’ expenses. However, many experts in the fields of neuropsychology remain unaware of neurofeedback. When questioned about the technology, Dr. Eric Fombonne, a leading expert on autism who spoke recently at Brown University, had never heard of it.

It will be a slow process for this therapy to become accepted into the mainstream of traditional psychological practice, but according to Hirshberg’s patients and their families, it seems inevitable.

Joining the mainstream has been a slow process for Tim as well, and perhaps that’s what makes it all the more rewarding. Arriving at the center one day, Tim told Hirshberg that he had his car out front. Without missing a beat, the doctor grabbed his coat and scarf and left the office to go for a ride around the block with his friend.

He had never seen Tim as proud as he was rounding the corner that day. Such quiet moments of success, says the doctor, are the reason he loves his job.