Touching the third rail.
Siegfried Othmer
Touching the third rail.
Why are we not doing brain maps?
The reasons are historical, theoretical, tactical, and strategic. The historical reasons were the most fateful.
The history:
It is 1991. I am slated to present our data on the IQ study (the Marks/Othmer study) at the AAPB Meeting in Houston. Our son Brian had died in the early morning hours of March 6 in a nocturnal seizure. He was a few months short of graduation at the top of his class in computer science. It had been six years to the day after starting NF. I had my first and only encounter with depression. It was a whole-body experience. And yet I felt a compelling urgency to drag my depleted self to Houston to present the data. After all, these data furnished unequivocal evidence for the clinical effectiveness of NF in general, and of our protocol in particular. The implications for the educational system were huge.
The Biofeedback Society of California offered a second opportunity. They had set up a competition for a rather generous reward. Barry had secured the donation of a Lexicor mapper. The conditions of the competition were to submit a paper that formulated a biofeedback-related hypothesis and furnished relevant data bearing on the hypothesis. I submitted our paper, on the basis that our IQ study was a replication of Michael Tansey’s IQ study, published in 1990, with certain salient differences. We were training the left hemisphere with bipolar montage at C3-T3 and at 15-18 Hz, while Tansey trained referentially at Cz and at 14 Hz. The hypothesis was that our method offered advantages over the Tansey approach.
Tansey had found an average gain of 19 points in WISC-R score, whereas our training cohort yielded an average gain of 23 points. Populations were obviously not the same, but the comparison was nevertheless worthwhile. Individual subtest results were highly correlated between the two studies, with slight advantages across the board for our approach, with one exception.
What happened subsequently is largely unknown to me, but this is the picture I’ve pieced together. I suspect that ours was the only paper submitted that met the criteria, and that it was seen as something of a hot potato. The BSC at the time was totally concerned with traditional biofeedback. When it came to matters of neurofeedback, the leadership deferred to Barry. Eric Peper had done Alpha-band research with Tom Mulholland years before, but Alpha-band training had been deep-sixed at the AAPB, and Eric had moved on. Barry was the likely reviewer on the paper, with the possible participation of Eric Peper. In retrospect it is quite clear that our manuscript had no chance of being recognized by the BSC, which placed the organization in a bind.
Barry had high hopes that Christopher Mann, who had done his graduate work under Joel, would establish himself in academia with a focus on NF. Most likely, Barry recruited Christopher to submit his already published ADHD paper for the competition, even though the paper had nothing to do with NF. The paper got the award, and Chris Mann got the Lexicor unit for his troubles. The threat had been averted. I sent a letter objecting to what had just happened, but received no response. Nobody wanted their fingerprints on this.
That’s not the end of the story, however. My letter no doubt troubled a few consciences at the BSC, and some months later our manuscript appeared in the quarterly newsletter. Actually, it was only the first half of the manuscript. That led us to anticipate that the second half would appear in the subsequent issue, but that did not happen. It was only in the following year some time that the second half was finally printed. This indicates that the controversy surrounding our manuscript had been ongoing throughout.
When we went public with the results, and confronted the NF critics with our findings, both Russell Barkley and Larry Silver, MD (President of the Learning Disability Association) turned the story against us by way of ridicule. ‘There are some people out in California who think they can change IQ’ was effectively the message. Neither asked to see the actual study. Barkley told me that he wouldn’t trust anything that didn’t come out of a placebo-controlled study. I offered my usual objection: “If you were witnessing Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, you would not need a control group.” The issue was never about the science. Big PhRMA brooked no competition, and Barkley was their spear carrier. We learned that the critics could always turn our own evidence against us, just by virtue of their established positions as authorities on ADHD. This would not be the last time.
What might have happened if Barry had not tried to steer events, and a Lexicor system had been made available to us? We were in narrow focus on building our business, but if we had been given a Lexicor to use, we certainly would have exploited that opportunity to the fullest. What if the BSC had stood with us to defend an obviously meritorious study? With organizational support behind us, the discussions with Barkley and Silver might have gone very differently.
Just a few years later the pessimistic implications of “The Bell Curve,” by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, gained intellectual respectability. Resources were largely ineffectual when expended on behalf of the struggling masses stuck at the bottom of the Bell curve. Raising IQ scores and mental function generally, which we routine accomplish, could no longer be part of polite conversation in academic circles.
Christopher Mann came to interview for a position with us sometime later. He breezed in with a slight whiff of academic arrogance. He was not very respectful of Sue, and apparently wasn’t all that impressed with Lubar’s work in NF. ‘Why are you even here for an interview,’ I wondered.
Barry’s best-laid plans had been for naught, but the loss was not only ours.
Siegfried
John Anderson
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Ronald Swatzyna
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Subject: Re: Touching the third rail.