National Autism Awareness Month
A pril is National Autism Awareness month. So what is new in the field of autism research? A striking finding is the enormous genetic variability we discover upon looking for the genetic causation of the disorder. There are multiple contributing factors, so it is unsurprising that there are many clinical manifestations of the condition. So […]
The Lane James Band To Perform Veterans Benefit Concert
T he Lane James Band will be performing live in concert Friday, April 11 to raise money and awareness to benefit military veterans in need. The show will take place at Nectar in Freemont (412 N 36th, Seattle, WA 98103) from 6 – 8:30pm Purchase Tickets – $20 The Lane James Band is donating a […]
Brian’s Legacy eBook Now Available
by Siegfried Othmer, PhD W ith this newsletter, we are pleased to announce the release of our new book, “Brian’s Legacy”, the core of which is our son Brian’s journal, written during his college years. Through his journal we get to experience Brian’s evolving understanding of his own condition, his ongoing struggle to improve and […]
Interpretation of the Reaction Time Distribution II
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 […]
Recent Critical Studies of Neurofeedback in Application to ADHD
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). […]
School-based Brain Training Shown to Alleviate ADHD
A recent study shows that neurofeedback is effective in improving symptoms of ADHD, and outperforms cognitive training. Read Full Article on bostonglobe.com
Updating the Analysis of the Continuous Performance Test
by Siegfried Othmer, PhD For more than twenty years we have been using either the TOVA or the QIKtest with anyone who is able to take the test, in order to track progress in training. Both tests yield an incredible amount of information that is directly relevant to our project of training the brain toward […]
Structural Brain Change after Neurofeedback
Why sham feedback fails as a placebo by David A Kaiser, MFA, PhD In a recent study, truthful feedback is compared with false feedback using MRI and DTI analysis (Ghaziri et al., 2013). After 40 sessions of EEG training, both forms of feedback were found to increase gray matter volume in the brain, but veridical […]