It’s been a few months, and it’s been a total whirlwind here at EEG Info so let me try to remember all the way back to November for a moment. It seems like a year ago now, but that was about the time when all of us here at EEG Info held our breath as we put Cygnet out to you, our Neurofeedback community. We ordered 100 extra NeuroAmps, on top of our regular inventory, just to prepare for the rush that we hoped to get. We knew we had created something that fit our training model, that was easy to use, beautiful to look at, and functionally the most advanced design we have ever built. But what about you — the customer? Would you find it as intuitive, useful and appealing as we designed it to be? Would anyone actually appreciate all this hard work and huge amounts of money and energy and risk that went into the creation of this product? Read More »

The utility of EEG feedback or Neurofeedback in the resolution of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has already been established in research going back more than a decade. We now use it routinely with veterans in connection with our volunteer services (through Homecoming4veterans.org ). The world at large, however, remains to be convinced of the superiority of EEG feedback in the resolution of PTSD.

Establishing EEG feedback more generally as the treatment of choice for PTSD and other mental health issues is now an urgency, given the recent estimate by the Rand Corporation that some twenty percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are coming home with major mental health concerns and/or traumatic brain injury. Read More »

A new release of Cygnet, Neurofeedback / EEG Biofeedback software, is available for immediate download. The update will also be mailed out on a new disc to all Cygnet users very soon. This is the first full release of Cygnet; all previous versions were considered part of the Beta test. The full release comes on the heels of news from the manufacturer that they have received 510K clearance by the FDA for the NeuroAmp and Cygnet.

Read More »

In this newsletter we take a look at two recently published books that represent two ends of the spectrum of neurofeedback approaches. They reflect divisions within the field that have remained unreconciled over the decades. They also reflect their authors, who have taken very different approaches in their scientific research.

The Open Focus Brain

This book could be said to have had a forty-year gestation period. It is a collaborative effort of Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins, and one suspects that Robbins’ recent involvement likely played a catalyst role that finally got the book to happen. The bulk of the book could equally well have been written decades earlier, as Les Fehmi’s model for his kind of neurofeedback has been consistent throughout.

Fehmi’s approach revolves around alpha training, but the salient hypothesis is that the synchrony of our neuronal assemblies strongly influences our state. By enhancing neuronal synchrony in the alpha band, we move to a calmer state of reduced arousal level. Our Western lifestyles tend to move us toward higher arousal level, and toward what Fehmi calls narrow and focused attention. This is energetically and physiologically costly. Practicing movement toward alpha synchrony allows us to explore the space in which our attention is more diffuse. We are more immersed in the experience. The work still gets done, but at a lower level of effort and with much less drain on our resources. Read More »

A few weeks ago the Economist Magazine offered up the lament that comparison shopping is very difficult to do when it comes to medications because the underlying studies have not been done. It is difficult enough for pharmaceutical companies to get new drugs past their regulatory hurdles via Randomized Controlled Trials against a placebo control. Once that goal has been reached, drug companies feel free to peddle their new medications at will, perhaps allowing the implicit assumption to be propagated that newer is better.

Only a few weeks after the appearance of this article (Jan 12th issue, p. 68), this very issue was brought to the front pages with the published finding that two newer anti-cholesterol drugs, Vytorin and Zetia, may not hold an advantage over older drugs, such as Zocor, that have gone off patent. (Vytorin is a combination of Zetia and Zocor.) In the immediate task of reducing cholesterol levels, Vytorin did appear to offer an advantage. But this numerical advantage did not seem to yield a clinical payoff in terms of reduced plaque buildup in coronary and carotid arteries. Also the trendlines were worse for heart attacks, strokes, and the incidence of associated medical procedures such as angioplasties and bypass operations. This deterioration did not reach statistical significance, but one had expected better on the basis of the cholesterol numbers. On balance, there did not seem to be any selective clinical benefit from using the more expensive new drugs. One could even go so far as to say that the basic cholesterol hypothesis was being called into question. Read More »

Sometimes we who work with neurofeedback have the impression of living in a parallel universe. We live with a view of reality that is attaining increasing confirmation via formal studies while at the same time becoming much more clinically effective, yet it is a view that appears to be almost completely disconnected from mainstream thinking. This state of affairs is not unfamiliar to people who have studied Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” but it is still somewhat breathtaking to see how long the split between the old and new paradigms can persist in the real world. Read More »