Endogenous Neuromodulation in the Infra-low Frequency Domain
The following was submitted as an Essay to the Science PINS Prize 2026 competition for developments in neuromodulation. The award is intended for young investigators, so the essay cannot qualify for the award. It was submitted merely to insert endogenous neuromodulation into the conversation among the reviewers in the competition.
Barry’s Leap
This year I was honored by the ISNR with the M.B. Sterman Career Achievement Award, which I accepted also on behalf of Sue Othmer. The award recognizes “thinking outside the box” as its first criterion. Barry received the award more than twenty years ago. Yet what distinguished Barry’s work is that he labored entirely […]
Can Endogenous Neuromodulation meet our society’s most critical needs?
Between January 2023 and December 2024, inpatient mental health claims increased by 80% in the US, while outpatient claims increased by 40%. This indexes a mental health crisis in our country of unprecedented scope. Here’s the context: Our national health status is worse than that of our peer countries, and it is declining in all […]
A Case of Chemical Injury and PTSD
by Carolyn McLuskie, MA, RCC and Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D.
When someone comes for neurofeedback with severe symptoms, we are not likely to be confronted with a single, narrowly definable issue. In cases of chemical injury that significantly compromise health and functionality going forward, the issue is inherently complex because it quite naturally evokes a trauma response as well. The dearth of available remedies makes […]
An Open Letter to Mark A. Reger, Department of Veterans Affairs
Dear Dr. Reger: I just read your article in JAMA with great interest. I would like to draw your attention to a recent publication on a controlled study of neuromodulation in application to treatment-resistant PTSD that was completed recently at the VA Pacific Islands Health Care System in Honolulu. It recruited 87 participants. This was […]
Enhancing the effectiveness of neurofeedback for dementia and cognitive impairments through corrective doses of ascorbic acid.
Neurofeedback has established itself as a safe and effective technique that can enhance brain function–through improving the efficiency of the neural networks in the brain. It has proven its effectiveness in disorders such as epilepsy, ADHD, head injuries, learning disabilities, autism, mood instabilities, sleep and chronic pain. In such cases we are dealing with a […]
A Revisionist View of Neurofeedback
One reason that formal research on neurofeedback by people in the academic community hasn’t generally matched what is being accomplished clinically is surely that researchers tended to take the operant conditioning model seriously. Plainly, the rigorous instantiation of a ‘purist’ operant conditioning design of the original SMR-beta protocols leads to a rather inefficient training procedure. […]
Research with Infra-Low Frequency Neurofeedback
ILF Neurofeedback Mechanisms and Neurophysiology Othmer, S., and Othmer, S.F. (2024) Endogenous Neuromodulation at Infra-Low Frequency: Method and Theory, DOI: 10.20944/preprints202310.1085.v2 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374784708_Endogenous_Neuromodulation_at_Infra-Low_Frequency_Method_and_Theory