by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

Travel Days 1 & 2

September 16 – 17 (Tuesday-Wednesday)

Thanks to frequent flyer miles that had piled up over the years, we were able to take this opportunity to fly in comfort to India via Virgin Atlantic Airways. The thought of sleeping in coach for all those hours on two successive overnight flights was unattractive. How standards change…. Years ago there had been all those fourteen- and fifteen-hour flights to Australia to get neurofeedback started there, and we thought nothing of it. The first leg of the trip was to London, with a flight that landed us there mid-day. We had slumbered in the nose of a 747, oblivious to the near-600mph speed and near 40,000 feet altitude. It occurred to me that the airframe might well have been built by the company that I had worked for back in the seventies, Northrop, during those years I was working there at the Corporate Research Center. As we were just in transit through London we were not even officially seen as visitors to England, in the same way that Edward Snowden was not officially in Russia as long as he hung out in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow.

by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

S ue and I have just returned from a sojourn to India, where we taught our training course at the Tibetan Medical Institute, Men-Tsee-Khang. Here briefly is the story of how this came about. We will be reporting on our journey in more detail in the following days in this newsletter. Stay tuned.

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by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

A t the time of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, King Louis the 16th wrote in his private journal: “Rien.” Nothing. Just a few years later, he was beheaded and himself came to nothing. One could make similar judgments about our field. No one in the suites at Pfizer is quaking in his boots at the contemplation of our ascendancy. We don’t yet count for very much. But biofeedback and neurofeedback are gradually marbling into the mainstream. The scientific foundations are being shored up; the techniques are being refined; the products are becoming ever more competent, as well as more attractive in their features; and the methods are becoming more people-friendly. Most importantly, the scope of what we can now accomplish with our methods is expanding to cover the entire realm of mental health. At the moment, the contrast between the actual prospects of self-regulation-based therapies, and the awareness prevailing in the rest of the world about their potential, could hardly be greater.

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by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

T he 2014 Clinical Summit was held July 10th, 11th, and 12th here in Los Angeles at the Woodland Hills Hilton, right next door to our office and training facility. It was our largest turnout yet, with 140 people in attendance. The location allowed us to utilize our office for all of the practicum sessions that were offered to attendees, for the purpose of evaluating the new programs. A number of distinguished guest speakers contributed expertise in specialized areas, and the feedback we have received so far has been glowing. We are so thankful to everyone who made the effort to be present this year, and grateful to once again be in the position to share the latest developments in the field with our network of committed neurofeedback practitioners.

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by Siegfried Othmer, PhD

The Historical Background
M any in the field are still relying on the traditional SMR/beta protocols that were our mainstay in the nineties. Of course, what was valid before remains valid, so the protocols are clearly useful for many applications. Indeed, the field experienced its “Cambrian explosion” of broad applicability to mental health in the early nineties, and all those forays into new clinical terrain were made with the traditional protocols.

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by John Putman and Siegfried Othmer, PhD

We have just reviewed all of the CPT data sets we have acquired over the last three years at the EEG Institute for which post-training data are available. The data were acquired with the QIKtest, but they were analyzed with T.O.V.A.® norms. The data cover a variety of diagnostic categories and ages. Every case represented here received infra-low frequency training with target frequency in the range of 0.1mHz to 10mHz. The results are broadly consistent with what we have observed over the years even with the higher-frequency training. Obscured in those comparisons is the fact that we are presently working successfully with a more challenged population than we did years ago.

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