ILF NF Mechanisms Paper Published

[Siegfried Othmer]

List members—

The long-awaited fMRI-based mechanisms study at the University of Zurich just became available this morning in the Journal Neuroimage—a 32-page magnum opus. The project was fiercely resisted at the outset, and getting it funded was a challenge. U. Zurich harbored a number of confirmed NF skeptics, who hopefully are having a conversion experience. This will make it easier to get clinical papers published in this area. 

Siegfried 

Disassembling Infra-Low-Frequency Neurofeedback: A neurophysiological investigation of its feedback components

Nuno M.P. de Matos ¹, Philipp Stämpfli ¹, Erich Seifritz ², Mike Brügger ¹

 

1  Magnetic Resonance Center of the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich and University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

 

2  Department of Adult Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychiatric University Clinic Zurich and University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121647

Citation: Nuno M.P. de Matos, Philipp Stämpfli, Erich Seifritz, Mike Brügger, Disassembling Infra-Low-Frequency Neurofeedback: A neurophysiological investigation of its feedback components, NeuroImage (2025), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121647

My words:

The paper documents robust changes in connectivity with the combination of ILF NF and the inhibit protocol, in the absence of significant change in the sham training cohort. The trial involved 30 minutes of training at 0.1 micro-Hertz in a non-clinical population, with pre- and post- fMRIs to document change. This was essentially a replication of Olga Dobrushina’s study published in 2020, but analyzed in a hypothesis-free manner, the most conservative. It utilized a more bullet-proof sham design, in which the researchers were blinded to the condition. Also, the comparison involved a within-subject design, whereas the early study was a between-subject design. This was also a larger study, involving 40 participants in each of three arms of the research, versus 51 in the earlier study.