Neuroptimal

[Dr LOREN PEDERSEN]

Hi All,

 

Does anyone have any information and/or experience with the Neuroptimal neurofeedback device? I had a patient mention it recently and the Neuroptimal claims to do neurotherapy in different way (Dynamical) from traditional neurofeedback. It supposedly doesn't need an EEG test, a qEEG, or even a diagnosis.

See: https://neuroptimal.com/

 

I appreciate your time. Thank you! 

 

Best,

Loren Pedersen

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[D Corydon Hammond]

I have had 14 different neurofeedback systems through the years, and NeuroOptimal was one of them.  I consider it a one-size-fits-all system in that the electrodes are only placed at C3 and C4 and it does the same thing.  I found it could produce results but more slowly than other systems, and with some patients it was too sedating.  My greatest objection to it has been that they are willing to sell it to anyone with the money to buy it, which I consider unethical, rather than only to licensed professionals.  I remember a schizophrenic woman talking with me about neurofeedback.  She lived a couple of hours away and I suggested a practitioner who was closer to her.  Later I learned that she talked with someone at NeuroOptimal and they convinced her that she could treat herself and sold her a system. 

 

D. Corydon Hammond

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[Kim Calder Stegemann]

Theoretically speaking, how are systems like NeurOptimal, LENS, or even the Direct NFB system similar or different?  

For proprietary reasons, it is difficult to know the "science" behind each approach, and all focus on the brain "resetting" itself without any volitional or intentional control/learning.  

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Regards, Kim

Kim Calder Stegemann, Ph.D., M.Sc., M.A., B.Ed.
Professor Emerita, TRU

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From: isnr_memb...@googlegroups.com <isnr_memb...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of D Corydon Hammond <d.c.h...@utah.edu>
Sent: December 12, 2020 8:39:34 AM
To: isnr_memb...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Neuroptimal

 

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[Dr LOREN PEDERSEN]

Many thanks to Siegfried Othmer, Claire Ruckert, Joseph Castellano, Taylor Williams Capozziello, D Corydon Hammond, Dan Corley, Steve Baskin, and Kim Calder Stegemann for your responses to my inquiry about Neuroptimal!

(and any others I may have missed).

 

Your comments and suggestions were very informative and helpful.

 

Best,

Loren Pedersen, PhD

On 12/12/2020 3:58 PM Siegfried Othmer <sieg...@eeginfo.com> wrote:

 

 

Steve—

 

There is actually one publication out there that deals overtly with a clinical condition. But Val discouraged the publication of more such papers. After a number of years one can apply other criteria, such as customer satisfaction—both practitioner and client. There is also cross-system comparison. 

 

In one case of a young girl with seizure disorder, the practitioners used both NeurOptimal and our system. Both clearly contributed to recovery, each in its own way, in the observation of the therapists. This kind of report—out of France in this case—gets my attention. 

 

Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D.

Chief Scientist, The EEG Institute

Los Angeles 

Alvarez, J., Meyer, F.L., Granoff, D.L., and Lundy, A. (2013) The effect of EEG biofeedback on reducing postcancer cognitive impairment. Integr Cancer Ther 12(6):475–487. 

On Dec 12, 2020, at 8:09 AM, St...@neinh.com wrote:

Show me the data. Anyone can theorize and hypothesize elegantly about anything. Science needs data that can be replicated. 

Steve Baskin

 

Steven M. Baskin, PhD

New England Institute for Neurology and Headache

30 Buxton Farm Rd.  Suite 230

Stamford, CT 06905

Greenwich Hospital of Yale New Haven Health

Greenwich, CT 06831

203-322-7639

203-914-1907 (fax)

 

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 12, 2020, at 7:47 AM, Siegfried Othmer < sieg...@eeginfo.com> wrote:

It is easy to critique NeurOptimal for many reasons. But there is method here, and we can try to understand it even if we don’t approve of one or another aspect of the operation. NeurOptimal operates on what the rest of the field refers to as inhibit-based training. It simply calls the brain’s attention to brief episodes of excursion into dysregulation. This is an exemplar of non-prescriptive training, in which the brain is totally unconstrained with respect to how it responds to the various prompts. Inhibit-training is a feature of most neurofeedback approaches going all the way back to Lubar, and it generally involves no explicit decision-making. It simply works in concert with whatever stimulus- or reinforcement-based training is being done. 

 

It follows that only the prescriptive aspect of the protocol calls for any clinical decision-making. If that is stripped out of the protocol then what is left is readily accessible to any health professional who doesn’t want to make a career out of NF but nevertheless wants to have access to the technology. By the same token, they don’t have to read the tea leaves on a QEEG. 

 

The term “dynamic” refers to the fact that the thresholds on the basis of which fouls are called on the brain are not static but rather track the ongoing brain dynamics. Our own approach has been similar in this respect for thirty years. 

 

As for training while the person may be distracted or even asleep, even this does not present a problem to the method. Cognition is not involved here. Awareness of the process by the trainee is not necessary to the proceedings. Training likely occurs even in Stage 1 sleep, as the brain remains attentive the the cues that are relevant to itself. 

 

The lack of published research is also deliberate. It follows from the fact that NeurOptimal qualifies for the wellness product exemption with the FDA. If the organization were to start making clinical claims the FDA would be on them like a pack of hounds on a fox. Of course clinical conditions rooted in brain dysregulation can be beneficially affected far and wide. Inhibit-based training is a competent aspect of our protocols. 

 

Now it is true that Val Brown keeps his cards close to the vest, and no one else really knows his algorithms. But that is also quite understandable, in that whatever the algorithms may be, they would be trivially replicable if made known. 

 

Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D.

Chief Scientist, The EEG Institute

Los Angeles

www.eeginfo.com

 

 

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[Dave Siever]

Hi Cory, I fully support your position on NO. I have witnessed the same thing from over 20 years ago with them.

 

 

Dave Siever

- dancing in the dendrites!

 

Mind Alive Inc.

Edmonton, AB, Canada

800-661-6463

 

This is the youngest day of the rest of your life.

Now go do the youngest thing possible! 

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[Sean Brock]

I'm curious if you all have an understanding of how NO works or what it is even trying to accomplish. Vague words like optimize or reset or balance are unhelpful. It seems like NO is a secretive about what is actually happening, but I would like to know your experiences.

Warm Regards,

Sean Brock, LPC, BCN

Neuro Colorado

720-232-0834
www.neurocolorado.com
se...@neurocolorado.com
1720 South Bellaire Street, Suite 710
Denver, Co 80222

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[D Corydon Hammond]

My recollection is that it is focused on reducing the variability in the EEG.

 

Cory

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[Siegfried Othmer]

How NeurOptimal works can be intimated on the basis of its history. Val Brown got started with fairly conventional NF that incorporated both reward-elements and a conventional inhibit design. He was aiming for a relatively ‘bullet-proof’ design, one that was least likely to evoke adverse responses, and in pursuit of that objective, all standard reinforcement-based elements were squeezed out of the protocol over the course of several years. He was left with an inhibit-only design that was broadly well-tolerated. As far as I can judge, Val has been refining that design ever since.   

The design principles include the key observation that the EEG is not well-described by the Gaussian distribution. It becomes power-law-distributed in the tail, and it is tail-behavior we are concerned with here. These are opposite extremes in the description of natural phenomena. No distribution found in nature cuts off faster than a Gaussian, and nothing in nature cuts off more gradually than a power-law distribution. It follows that something well-fitted with a power-law distribution ought not to be modeled with a Gaussian. 

The use of fixed thresholds is consistent with a Gaussian model; dynamic thresholding is consistent with a power-law model. By using the appropriate model for his inhibit design, Val sets himself apart from the rest of the field, i.e. Z-score training and other inhibit schemes.  When he last presented on the topic, Val described a version of dynamic thresholding that hinged only on the immediate context. That was more aggressive than the approaches to dynamic thresholding that we have been using for about 25 years, which take a longer-term perspective. A second point of departure Val has emphasized is his reliance on the Gabor transform rather than the Fourier transform for his analysis. This is essentially a short-term FFT with a Gaussian windowing function. 

By these means, Val has developed a non-prescriptive method, one in which the brain is totally unconstrained with respect to how it responds to the various prompts. The limited decision-space makes the method accessible to therapists who don’t want to specialize in NF but still want to take advantage of its unique capabilities. In our own worldview, our principal targets in NF are 1) cerebral excitability, and 2) arousal dysregulation, in which central arousal is intimately coupled to affect and autonomic dysregulation. Whereas therapists collectively have many ways to moderate arousal dysregulation, the same does not hold for cerebral excitability. Medical remedies aside, the taming of cerebral excitability is most appropriately achieved with NF. And inhibit-based training is the most innocuous, least troublesome means of encroaching on that objective.

Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D.

Chief Scientist, the EEG Institute

Los Angeles

www.eeginfo.com