Russell Barkley
Siegfried Othmer
I have argued before that we need to take on the critics of neurofeedback rather than allowing them to remain unchallenged after all these years. In that regard, it is illuminating to revisit what they were saying that served to discredit NF early on in the academic community. Here’s Russell Barkley on the core issue:
Mechanisms of EEG Biofeedback
What precisely are the children being taught to do in these studies? The children are rewarded for doing something to learn how to be more attentive. What behaviors are being rewarded? What cognitive strategies are they rehearsing to get the EEG to change? This is the critical part of training, not the EEG feedback itself.
The EEG feedback does not automatically reprogram a child’s brain activity. Instead, the child must consciously and volitionally use this information in some way to alter his/her cognitive or behavioral responses. Such alterations are then associated with changes in brainwave activity. It is very important for parents to understand that the changes in brain waves cause nothing. They are just a marker for the possible changes in behavior and cognitive activities taking place during the training. What are the children actually doing to achieve this change?
Russell A. Barkley, ADHD report volume 1, #3 June 1993.
The fact that people in our field granted consciousness a central rather than merely a supporting role in neurofeedback made it difficult to dismiss the argument. In fact, clinical neurofeedback got its impetus from Barry’s cat experiments. So let us reframe the question:
What precisely are the CATS being taught to do in these studies? The CATS are rewarded for doing something to learn how to be more attentive. What behaviors are being rewarded? What cognitive strategies are they rehearsing to get the EEG to change? This is the critical part of training, not the EEG feedback itself.
The EEG feedback does not automatically reprogram a CAT’s brain activity. Instead, the CAT must consciously and volitionally use this information in some way to alter its cognitive or behavioral responses. Such alterations are then associated with changes in brainwave activity. It is very important for people to understand that the changes in brain waves cause nothing. They are just a marker for the possible changes in behavior and cognitive activities taking place during the training. What are the CATS actually doing to achieve this change?
Now that neurofeedback is being done covertly, Barkley’s hypothesis--presented as ineluctable fact—lies moribund.
Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, The EEG Institute
Los Angeles
tse...@tmsemplepsychologist.ca
- applies to IQ, social skills, honesty, sobriety when driving , and many other attributes.
- presumably the ADHD patients who sought treatment because they wanted something, they did not have enough of.
- the ability to pay sustained attention . . . so they would probably use it, when they had it.
Terry Semple.
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John Mekrut
Thank you Siegfried, I'll add my thoughts.
Your re-framing using the cat studies is effective, and the implicit/explicit learning distinction provides the theoretical foundation that makes Barkley's 1993 critique not merely wrong but categorically misconceived.
Barkley's argument assumes that neurofeedback is a form of explicit, cognitively mediated learning — that the client must consciously decode the feedback signal, formulate a strategy, and volitionally execute some mental maneuver to produce brainwave change. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanism. Neurofeedback operates on implicit learning systems — through operant conditioning at conventional frequencies, and through mechanisms not yet fully understood at infra-low frequencies where the timescales involved render classical conditioning frameworks increasingly inadequate. Indeed, at the extreme low end of the frequency spectrum now being explored clinically, the process may be better understood as physiological re-calibration than learning in any conventional sense — conscious participation becoming not merely unnecessary but essentially a category error.
Barkley essentially demanded that neurofeedback justify itself as explicit learning when its entire power derives from the fact that it bypasses explicit learning altogether. That's not a weakness — it's the mechanism.
The covert neurofeedback work you reference makes this definitive. When clients show measurable clinical benefit without any awareness that neurofeedback is occurring, the conscious/volitional hypothesis doesn't just weaken — it collapses entirely. You cannot construct a volitional cognitive strategy around a signal you don't know exists.
There is a further irony worth noting. The gamified content delivery systems of many commercial neurofeedback systems — rockets to fly, cars to race, scores to beat — inadvertently imported Barkley's assumption into our own clinical practice. By framing the training as a performance task, we risk activating precisely the goal-directed, executive, high-beta cognitive processes that many of our protocols are designed to quiet. The client trying to make the rocket fly faster is doing something neurologically closer to what Barkley imagined than what we actually intend. In this sense, the field has partially validated this misconception through its own interface design choices.
A more clinically coherent approach — and one that more honestly reflects the implicit nature of the learning mechanism — is to engage the client's attention through immutable content they cannot influence, such as a film or documentary, while delivering feedback through peripheral variables like screen brightness, size, or volume. The client watches because they want to know what happens next, not because they are trying to win anything. The brain receives the conditioning signal in the background, below conscious awareness, and learns from it without interference from volitional effort. This is the environment in which implicit learning thrives. Notably, it is also closer in principle to what Barry's cats experienced — engagement without goal orientation, conditioning without conscious strategy.
It follows logically from this framework that goal-oriented effort during training may introduce interference rather than acceleration — activating the executive, high-beta cognitive processes that many protocols aim to quiet. While direct outcome research on this specific variable remains limited, the theoretical coherence of this concern deserves serious clinical attention, and it raises important questions about how we design the training environment and instruct our clients during sessions.
Barkley asked the right question — what precisely is being learned — but answered it through entirely the wrong theoretical lens. Thirty years later, the convergence of covert neurofeedback research, implicit learning science, animal studies, and the expanding clinical frontier of infra-low frequency training gives us a clear and deepening answer: the brain is being shaped through processes that operate entirely below the level of conscious participation — from the well-characterized operant conditioning of conventional neurofeedback to the physiological re-calibration occurring at infra-low frequencies so slow that the very concept of volitional influence becomes meaningless.
The cats knew that all along