What is Neurofeedback? 

You're probably aware that if a monitor displays your heart rate, you rapidly can learn to change it.  That's the essense of biofeedback. When a monitor displays your brain activity - you can quickly learn to change that also.   That process is called neurofeedback.   

Neurofeedback began in the 1960's when a neuroscientist trained cats to change their brain activity.  Though the scientist was unaware, he changed the felines' brain activity and nearly eliminated seizure activity in the treated animals.  It's now clear that neurofeedback teaches the brain to change itself, and in turn helps attention, mood, behavior, cognition, and more.  Once these changes are practiced and learned, the effects tend to hold, at least for many problems.  As someone's brain learns to improve it's own regulation, it often reduces reliance on medications.  Sometimes, it allows medications that weren't working well to work better.

It's simple to do.

Neurofeedback uses a brain/computer interface.  It detects brain activity.  By using operant conditioning, you get rewarded when your brain makes more of certain types of brain activity.  Your brain might get a beep when it's doing the right thing. By changing the EEG, changes occur in brain timing, and can create a more activated, alert, and stable brain.  Or, a calmer brain.  Excessive fast or slow activity is associated with brain dysregulation, and a variety of clinical symptoms.  Training changes in that activity helps improve self-regulation. 

Where you train on the head can make a difference.  A few examples:

Depression is often shown in brain imaging studies as too little activation in the left frontal lobe (excessive slow EEG activity or lack of blood flow).  By training increased activation over that area, depressive symptoms can be reduced.  It can take many sessions for the brain to learn this new pattern. Once it does, you can stop training. 
Problems falling asleep can often be improved by training over the right hemisphere’s central motor strip.  This makes falling asleep much easier. Training that same person’s left hemisphere could have a very different effect - including making it harder to fall asleep.  But each individual is different, and training should be adjusted accordingly.        
Neurofeedback, psychotherapy, and medications work hand-in-hand.  Training is used with patients both on and off medications.  As the brain stabilizes and becomes better regulated, medications, psychotherapy and other modalities often become more effective. It’s not uncommon to see a reduced need for medications as brain regulation increases. 
 
Helping Brain Regulation
When you give the brain information about itself, it has an enormous capacity for change.  Neurofeedback makes the information available to the brain almost instantly, and asks it to make adjustments.  The brain can respond rapidly.  Changes in the EEG due to feedback tend to correlate with improved behavior, mood, affect regulation and attention.  Change in EEG behavior is a direct reflection of changes in neuronal firing.  EEG training is thought to improve activation, inhibition, and cortical stability, while impacting regulatory mechanisms down to the thalamocortical loop. The thalamus plays a role in generalized alertness and attention and has feedback loops to and from the brainstem to the cortex. 
 
State Flexibility
We’ve all seen someone go from being dejected and depressed (the other team just scored) to wild elation (your team just scored and took the lead) in seconds.  State flexibility is inherent in the brain.  A lack of state flexibility (being stuck in a particular state) causes problems.  For example, if someone gets angry, how long should it take to shift back to calm?  If it takes 4 hours, or if they’re still angry 4 days later, that’s being “stuck in state.”  We think of brain flexibility as allowing shift of states far more rapidly – perhaps in minutes.  A lack of brain flexibility can contribute to problems from impulsivity to attention to behavior.  Neurofeedback has been shown to increase state flexibility.   
 

Biofeedback is not new.
In the 1960’s, cats in a lab were able to change their EEGs with operant conditioning.  No one had a clue - particularly the chief scientist involved, that changing the EEG would improve brain regulation and inhibit seizures. This finding was accidental, yet it’s the research that launched this field.  Brain science during the 1990’s advanced the field of EEG Neurofeedback.  Information from MRI’s, PET scans, and other brain imaging techniques has helped target sites for training.