WHAT IS NEUROFEEDBACK?

When I caught the neurofeedback bug I was about to become a laboratory assistant in the pharmaceutical industry. I was just completing my degree in neurobiology and was looking through the most recent studies on migraine in preparation for my diploma thesis. I was particularly interested in the question as to how the brain manages to regulate and control its excitability and the extent to which excitation develops and spreads. One of the greatest challenges of the nervous system is to fine-tune stimulating and inhibiting impulses – we might think of this as stepping on the gas or putting on the brakes – so that we are able to do what we have to do in the best possible way. If this doesn’t go well, a number of very different of symptoms can result, migraine being just one example among many.

With all my neurobiological knowledge about the structure of the brain and the important role of neurotransmitters, my initial impulse was to look for the solution in chemical substances – i.e. active pharmacological ingredients that might be able to help the brain to better manage its excitation levels. However, in the course of my searches I came across the idea of neurofeedback and I was immediately electrified. It was claimed that patients could use devices to train themselves to better regulate their brains, and that by so doing they could learn to create a healthy balance in the excitability of their nervous system and thus prevent attacks of migraine or epilepsy. If that is possible, I thought, what else might the brain be able to learn to do with if it was supported by the right feedback signals? I couldn’t wait to find out more about this! From then on I was infected by enthusiasm for neurofeedback, and, as it turned out, it was quite a serious infection. Today I am still in the thrall of this kind of therapy – in fact my fascination grows from day to day.

That all happened a good 20 years ago, and the world was quite different then. Those were the early days of the internet, for example, and nobody could envisage how radically that was going to change our lives. In those days, the genome was viewed as an immutable template for all our bodily functions, whereas today we know that genes are not simply something that we possess, but that they can be switched on and off depending on the environmental conditions the organism has to contend with. Moreover, the fact that the brain has the capacity to develop was not so widely known. The dogma at that time was that adults cannot form new nerve cells and it was therefore thought that after a certain age it is impossible to make any decisive changes to the way the brain is organized. I’m sure you know the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact the brain can be modified well into old age. This capacity is known as neuroplasticity. We can see how pronounced it is if we look at stroke patients. The more they exercise the more likely it is that the tasks previously performed by the damaged areas of the brain will be taken over by other areas. Some experiments conducted by the American neurophysiologist Paul