Today is Sunday; this must be Zurich.
Life has been just a little like that recently. A well-attended public lecture and advanced training course in Alexandria, Virginia; the NF Conference in Mexico; the BSC meeting in San Francisco, and now a public lecture, Introductory and Advanced training course in Switzerland, all in less than four weeks. Right now we are still pushing to make things happen. What happens when there is an actual demand for our appearances, when there is pull as well as push?

I still need to report on the BSC Conference, where Victoria Ibric and I conducted a panel on pain management. My talk tended toward the theoretical, where I made my usual case for the General Self-Regulation Model and for the conceptual reunification of peripheral and EEG biofeedback. Victoria summarized her extensive case histories on chronic pain and found that for those people who stayed for at least twenty sessions, there was substantial benefit found by more than 90% of patients. (more…)

Kurt and I just returned from an exhilarating conference in Mexico that inaugurated the new Mexican Society for Biofeedback and Neurofeedback with its first “International Congress of Neurofeedback in Mexico”, taking place at the resort hotel Hacienda San Miguel Regla, in the mountainous regions north of Mexico City.

The scheduling of the conference had been adjusted a number of times to suit the needs of the invited speakers, and ultimately most of the invitees were able to make it: Barry Sterman, Joel Lubar, Jay Gunkelman, Marvin Sams, Peter Smith, Tom Collura, Steven Baskin, and I. The conference organizers had received governmental support for the conference, and in fact the health minister of the State of Hidalgo was present for the opening session and even addressed the audience. (more…)

In the June 25 2004 issue of Science Magazine there is a review article titled “Neuronal Oscillations in Cortical Networks.” The principal significance of this paper is simply that it is appearing in Science. This article could be one of the significant building blocks on which a reconstruction of brain models in the bioelectrical domain can be built, one that is much more congenial to neurofeedback. The next step of the argument is that we have a technique that can intervene with these bio-electrical mechanisms.

The Efficacy Document put out by the ISNR and the AAPB assumes that this additional step in the line of argument can only be accomplished through suitably blinded and controlled studies. Otherwise we are stuck at the starting line. However, when I look at our “near neighbors” in the clinical world, some of these technologies do not seem to be similarly handicapped. For example, Scientific American published an article on virtual reality therapy in its August 2004 issue. The article highlighted the possibilities for managing fear of flying, phobias, and even chronic pain. No one appears to be holding their breath waiting for the definitive controlled studies. So the field of virtual reality is off and running. The question posed is simply whether the appointed task of moderating fear of flying, or fear of tarantulas, can be accomplished. There is no second-guessing afterwards about whether the virtual reality exercise actually had something to do with the recovery. (more…)

The current issue of the IEEE Spectrum, house organ for electrical engineers, revisits the state of the power grid one year after the blackout of August 14, 2003. This topic is of interest to us on many levels, and the present newsletter iterates the one I wrote last year on this topic.

First of all, the issue of grid stability has been getting the attention of system theorists working with nonlinear dynamical models. In simulations of ever greater complexity, it is found that cascading failures in which little blackouts become big ones seem to be a fact of life. But this instability is already evident when we have only three systems to coordinate as opposed to thousands. Sufficient complexity to make predictions nearly impossible in practice is already there at the level of three interacting systems. So we are into modeling complexity, in other words into chaos theory. (more…)

The pace of change is increasing in our field, rather than leveling off. How exciting, except of course for those who are connected with the Efficacy Document, who got left behind in the last century.

Now Chuck Davis is challenging us to change our thinking once again. What excited me about the Magnetic Stimulation capability in the previous ROSHI is that it involves the use of an EEG tracking capability. This allows us to stimulate the brain whenever a certain threshold in EEG amplitude is exceeded, irrespective of the frequency at which this occurs. This represents a kind of limit to which the standard inhibit strategy can be taken. It is like Reuters having a search routine that always finds its way automatically to what should be generating headlines at a particular moment. (more…)

Author: Tom Allen

Last week’s newsletter about the Efficacy Document was widely distributed to the neurofeedback community at large. It gave rise to a discussion on the Biofeedback list which is still continuing. Tom Allen responded with a longer piece that is reproduced below in slightly edited form. Some introductory material is presented first.
Where Do We Go From Here?

Steve Rothman wrote:
Siegfried,

You say in your note below:
“The efficacy document is a clear declaration of war against most of what we do
on a daily basis.”

To which I respond:
I think the above statement is over the top … (more…)