In this final installment of the report on the AAPB Conference, I just wanted to catch people up on my impressions of what is happening to the technology. In the exhibit hall it became apparent that we are on the threshold of another generation of software from a number of vendors. I had spent the first day of our attendance at the conference being taught about the new version of Biograph software from Thought Technology. The new software promises to be a lot more versatile than the current generation. This flexibility is exciting to those of us who are thinking up things to do with neurofeedback, but of course it can also be intimidating and bewildering to the end user. The answer is that the new program is really a platform on which user-level programs are constructed. In Thought Tech lingo these are called scripts. I have been talking with Thought Tech people about a number of display options and specific discriminants for training that can be incorporated into a script.
The general thrust will be to incorporate more and more intelligence into the feedback calculation, involving a variety of decision-making that does not have to be under the immediate command of the therapist. We should not burden the practitioner with all of the particulars of a feedback design. Any features that can be automated should be handled in that way. This is particularly true for the inhibits, which can be EEG-responsive in a straight-forward algorithmic fashion. Here we can bring all kinds of sophistication to bear on the question of whether the EEG is moving toward or away from a state of optimal regulation. As new criteria are devised and accepted, they can simply be inserted as additional weighting functions or decision points, all of which function in background as far as the clinician is concerned. What remains for the clinician is to fine-tune choices with respect to the rewards. But as the overall training incorporates more and more measures, the relative impact of the rewards will of necessity decline. The training will therefore become much more manageable and less tippy for the clinician. (more…)