We are pleased to announce that Brian’s Legacy is now available in paperback format.

Through our son Brian’s journal entries (written during his college years) we get to experience Brian’s evolving understanding of his own condition, his ongoing struggle to improve and manage his own health, and the gradual emergence of a more mature self. In my own contribution to the book, I provide some background on the challenges our family faced while raising a troubled child, and I provide my reflections on many of Brian’s journal entries. The book tells the story of our lives together, and also describes the path we traveled to the discovery of neurofeedback, which eventually became our life’s work.

Start reading today and get inspired!

About the Brian Othmer Foundation
The Brian Othmer Foundation was created in January 2002, in loving memory of Brian Othmer. Through research and exploration, the foundation continues to pursue the nonprofit objectives of research, education, and clinical services in neurofeedback. The Brian Othmer Foundation is a Nonprofit 501(c)3 Corporation.

Visit brianothmerfoundation.org for more information.

Siegfried Othmer, PhD

drothmer.com

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 what we are now calling autism isn’t just what Kanner observed originally, some 70 years ago. But how does such genetic variability arise in such short order? It has been said—correctly—that there is no such thing as a genetically mediated epidemic. The statement is correct in so far as standard Mendelian inheritance is concerned. And yet it is an epidemic that must be explained, and genes are involved.

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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 good portion of the proceeds to Homecoming for Veterans (HC4V.org). Homecoming for Veterans is a non-profit offering neurofeedback, at no cost, for veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) through a network of clinicians across the country who donate their time to this life-changing cause.

Come and enjoy the fun and order early as this will sell out. They fought for us so lets fight for them.

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 manage his own health, and the gradual emergence of a more mature self. In my own contribution to the book, I provide some background on the challenges our family faced while raising a troubled child, and I provide my reflections on many of Brian’s journal entries. The book tells the story of our lives together, and also describes the path we traveled to the discovery of neurofeedback, which eventually became our life’s work.

Start reading today and get inspired!

Available on Kindle
Available on iTunes

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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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