One of the privileges of working in the early development of a field is that most of the pioneers are still around, and we get to know them all personally. We have lost Neil Miller, Chuck Stroebel, and Barbara Brown, and now Marjorie Toomim, but most of the people from the early days of the field are still with us.
I attended a lecture by Marjorie some years ago at a Biofeedback Society of California Conference in which she described some of her most difficult cases. At the end I asked her if she would rank these cases in her mind in the order of the clinical challenge that they represented to her, and whether she would be more or less likely to use biofeedback at the more difficult end of that distribution. She answered at once that the more severe the challenge, the more she would rely on her skills as a psychotherapist. In fact, when she did use biofeedback techniques, she would often use them simply as information for herself rather than as information for the patient. “I was never so humbled in my work as when my instrumentation told me that I was wrong.” Continue reading “In Memoriam: Marjorie Toomim”
This was the thirteenth Winter Brain Conference, the first in some time without its own special T-shirt. The crowd was somewhat smaller this year than in the past couple of years. This tends to happen when the location stays the same for too many years, although the Hilton was certainly a good host, and the local weather gods were favorably disposed as well. The exhibit area was noisy and boisterous again. The conference was significantly “privatized” this year, with more training seminars booked before and after the Conference. This took away some of the energy from the conference itself, but it was nevertheless another opportunity to mix it up with the other people who are thankfully pushing the boundaries of this field. In that regard, this conference remains unique for its accepting and inclusive ambience.
The QIKtest