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.
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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
For many early neurofeedback professionals, the impetus to enter this field came through a compelling personal experience either with their personal training, that of a family member, or that of a client. And thus it was with us as well. In fact, our first encounter with neurofeedback through our son Brian remains a standout success […]