by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

The June issue of The Atlantic Magazine features an article on brain hacking by Maria Konnikova. The article reviews various technology options that give some hope of sprucing up brain function. First of all there are the smart pills. Already the stimulants are finding use beyond their medical applications in boosting test performance among college students.

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by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

I n the previous newsletter it was established that the outliers in the distribution of reaction times could not be interpreted as the tail of the Gaussian distribution. They had to be treated as a distinct phenomenon. When it came to characterizing the distribution function that characterizes the outliers, the analysis suffered from insufficient data. After all, reaction time outliers are relatively rare, so even a database of over 1500 did not give us enough to work with.

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by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

A research group in the Netherlands has recently published two neurofeedback studies that failed to corroborate the claims for EEG-informed “Theta/beta” neurofeedback in application to ADHD. The first one of these of which I became aware had relied on parent and teacher ratings to establish progress (van Dongen-Boomsma et al., 2013). Such a study is easy to critique. After all, we have learned not to rely too much on parental observations on their ADHD children in our work. Is that really the best that can be done in the context of a carefully done study? Why not rely on some hard data from neuropsychological testing, for example? Well, it turns out that that was done also, and that was reported in the second paper (Vollebregt et al., 2013). Therein lay the answer that would be much more definitive. Alas, the outcomes were not favorable either. The experimental group did not distinguish itself from the control group in any meaningful way on any of the chosen tests. The tests had been selected with specific characteristics of ADHD in mind.

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