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.” (more…)

With the State of the Union speech coming up shortly, it’s not a bad time for us to do the same with regard to our discipline of neurofeedback. When people are asked about the prospects for society at large, they tend to assess it somewhat more negatively than society deserves, but when they are asked about their own prospects, they tend to assess them too positively. If only a fraction of everybody’s dreams were realized, what a growth rate there would be! We may be subject to the same bias. The world around us may have dim prospects, but our field is doing fine, thank you.

There is first of all a change in the attitudes with which our claims are being met. Neurofeedback is no longer being dismissed out of hand. The publication pipeline is filling up, and mainstream media are publishing articles about neurofeedback. The latest article in new Scientific American quarterly, Mind, did not even feel it necessary to issue a disclaimer: Neurofeedback is the coming thing for ADHD. (more…)

I had chosen this topic to end the year well before the recent tsunami brought home to us the disconnect between risks that we face–as societies, as a global community, as a species, and as individuals–and how we actually live our lives. This is a follow-up to the previous newsletter on Triage.

What got me started down this track was the December 5 issue of Parade Magazine, which featured an article by Michael Crichton that lampooned our tendency to overstate risk of future catastrophe and to over-react to it. First of all, this seemed strange coming from the person who has made a living by exaggerating risk: “The Andromeda Strain”, “Jurassic Park”, and “Prey.” But that’s science fiction, and this is real life. (more…)

The amount of true foreign aid (i.e., non-military development support) given by the United States is now down to about one tenth of one percent of our GNP (0.13% according to one account). At such levels there is a complete mismatch between resources and needs, so one might well use the idea of triage to answer the question about how such limited resources might be deployed. This was done at this year’s Copenhagen Consensus Conference by some esteemed economists. They deployed an imaginary budget of $50 Billion in the following way: $27 Billion for fighting AIDS; $13B for fighting malaria; and $12B for improving nutrition. Finally they proposed an initiative to reform international trade, which had no monetary impact. The astute will observe first of all that they over-committed their budget by 4%, but it would be frivolous to quibble, since nothing of magnitude is going to be available near term in any event. So it is far more important to contemplate that if $27B is the realistic cost of tackling AIDS with prospects of success, then what does the absence of such funds imply? The problem here is in our face more even than global warming, or the threat of international scourges by opportunistic diseases. This is here and now, with Asia, including India, China, and Russia at the threshold of a tipping point into runaway conditions. In Africa, of course, we are already at the point where AIDS is eating away at the core of societies that were at best functioning marginally before.

A couple of years ago, President Bush went to Africa to announce a five-year $15B plan to fight AIDS. Iraq got in the way. An economist would analyze this in terms of opportunity cost—in this case the opportunity to avoid future costs. The commitment to Iraq delayed a commitment to AIDS, under conditions where such delay has grave and near-term consequences. (more…)

The issue of the states’ authority to regulate medical usage of marijuana is currently before the Supreme Court, at a time when the chief architect for the reconstruction of a viable body of “states’ rights” is at home recuperating from surgery. What delicious ironies abound when those on the Court most strongly bent in favor of regulating individual behavior are also those who would carve out an appropriate domain for the exercise of discretion by individual states.

Joseph Russoniello, former US Attorney for Northern California and a Republican, recently took the rather aggrandizing position that even home-grown marijuana can be targeted by the Federal regulators through the interstate commerce clause. Growing marijuana is simply a substitute for buying it, and hence constitutes economic activity subject to regulation, he suggested. “It doesn’t have to have a direct impact on interstate commerce. To the extent that she is using this marijuana which she is growing herself she is not buying cannabis that is available in the drug market.” This argument would make even growing rutabagas in one’s garden part of interstate commerce, or doing neurofeedback in the privacy of one’s home. The mind races on: Home cooking deprives restaurants of business, and is therefore part of interstate commerce also. And the raising of children displaces the need for childcare workers, who are part of interstate commerce…. This kind of thinking needs to be nipped in the bud…. (more…)

Flying into Zurich one is immediately impressed with the orderliness of the country. Nothing appears to be out of place, even out in the fields, around the barns, and along the sides of the roads. I was reminded of Oslo, Norway, which comes close in this regard. I had a great reception in Switzerland, which must have the highest density of neurofeedback professionals outside of the Czech Republic, numbering more than in all of Germany even with a population one-tenth the size. Many practitioners there are oriented toward Val Brown’s NCP, and Pete Van Deusen is popular as well.

The fact that almost nothing is out of place in Switzerland gives the land a sense of stasis. The whole country still looks traditional, with new houses being built in the old style. Villages look like they always have, except for the asphalt and indoor plumbing. Roads remain narrow and curvy, in that full respect is paid to the buildings that were there first. But this is also the country with the highest median income, if one disregards capital havens such as Monaco and the Cayman Islands. The country is almost completely middle class. That is to say, there are no poor people. And it is too cold for street people. Obviously the well-to-do are here also, but they don’t show it off. (more…)