05 - Siegried Othmer - The Origins of Neurofeedback Part 1

Episode 05: The Origins of Neurofeedback with Dr. Siegfried Othmer (Part 1)

In this special two-part episode, we are honoured to be joined by the legendary Dr. Siegfried Othmer, a pioneer in the world of neurofeedback. Dr. Othmer has been at the forefront of developing EEG biofeedback technology since the 1980s, revolutionising how we approach brain health and therapy.

In Part 1, Dr. Othmer shares his deeply personal journey, discussing how his son’s severe behavioural challenges and violent episodes led him and his wife, Sue, to explore neurofeedback as a life-changing solution. From their son's first neurofeedback session in 1985 to the development of cutting-edge technologies that have helped millions worldwide, Dr. Othmer reveals the transformative power of brain training.

This episode dives into:

• The origins of neurofeedback and its early applications
• How brain plasticity has shaped the field
• The incredible advancements in EEG biofeedback over the past 30+ years
• Personal stories of breakthroughs in brain regulation

Join us as we explore the remarkable beginnings of a technique that’s changing lives around the globe.

Find out more information at our website

Edited with finesse by Mike at Making Digital Real

Transcript

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Welcome to the Brain Collective's podcast. I'm Maria and I'm Melanie. We're the founders of the Brain Collective in Harrogate. We've dedicated over 15 years to helping people re-regulate their own brains through neurofeedback, driven by our passion to help our families when traditional medical approaches fell short. We've trained with world-renowned experts and remain committed to staying at the forefront of this field. Hello and welcome to the fifth episode in our podcast series from the Brain Collective. I'm Maria and I'm Melanie. We've worked very hard in the world of brain health and performance for over 15 years, driven by a need to find great solutions to some very difficult problems with our own families. We're using neurofeedback, quantitative EEG, light and sound, and we strive to enable individuals to take control and live happier lives simply by influencing their very own brainwaves. We've gone above and beyond to source great guests for our show and we hope to inspire, to educate and to showcase cutting-edge technologies to solve some very tough challenges we have. So learn about all the things you can do to maximise your own brain. Today we are absolutely honoured to be joined by a very special guest, Dr Siegfried Othmer. We feel privileged to call Siegfried a mentor, a close colleague and a friend. Siegfried is a pioneer in the field of neurofeedback, a therapeutic approach that uses real-time monitoring of brainwave activity to help individuals regulate their own brains. Siegfried, welcome to the show. Well, happy to be here. I'm glad this all worked out. Well, you know, I was a physicist or am a physicist. I've spent decades in aerospace research and so forth and while I was there it was, you know, the frontier of a particular kind of science and it was very exciting. But I realised there were very few people who actually understood, first of all, who were reading the papers because this is military, you know, the military people just interested in the bottom line, you know, they're not interested in the lovely science. So I said there are actually very few people who are, you know, appreciating what I'm committing my life to and besides this was all related to the war machine. I said, you know, this is not what I was put on earth for. So and then what happened was our oldest, firstborn son developed behavioral difficulties and that just became riveting in our family. It just became, you know, he was mystifying and this happened, started happening quite early in his life. Already, you know, they were by two years old, there were some oddities and then it just got increasingly worse and then what really got everybody's attention is violent behavior. Says, well, you know, the world cannot ignore that and we couldn't ignore that and it was just out of the blue. He would start attacking somebody who was standing next to him, you know, we were tearing our hair and of course we got no help from the professions because they were equally mystified. There was just no understanding of this. Everything of this kind was a parenting problem. So here's this eight-year-old kid who was thrown out of school. He was expelled from school. When, you know, when does this happen in the universe? An eight-year-old expelled from school for poor behavior and of course the way they do that is they call you in and tell you all the bad stuff that your son has done and it's all your fault and would you please take him home and not show up again. We have nothing but a parenting model to go on. So in a state of exasperation, Sue, his father, my wife, was telling him, Brian, what, just what do we have to do? You cannot behave this way. Brian, sitting in the back of the car, comes back with, well mom, I guess I'm just an evil person. I'm just, I guess I'm just gonna go to prison when I grow up. Sue says, let's start this conversation over again. Brian says, well mom, I don't understand. If prison isn't for people like me, who is it for? So we realized that we had placed a terrible burden on Brian that he could not bear, right? He knew better than we did that he was not in control of his behavior and what gave us a clue was that he was so remorseful after these events. They were episodic and then he would be this nice kid. I said, wait a minute, what's, you know, what's going on here? Well, his being thrown out of school kind of triggered our pediatrician to suspect that there might be a neurological involvement. This was just too beyond the pale and he started putting him on anticonvulsants on the suspicion that there might be a seizure susceptibility involved. And sure enough, Brian started, you know, responding favorably to, it took a while, but on the third medication he started responding. And this was in the days when Tegretol was an experimental medication and you had to try everything that was already approved before you could go to the experimental one. So eventually he ended up on Tegretol and that really helped him. And so it controlled his violent episodes, but he was still no fun to live with. Life was still hell and it was particularly hell for his younger brother, Kurt, who was trying to stay alive. And so it was about nine years of this before we heard about neurofeedback, which was actually discovered right here, only a few miles from where we were living here in Los Angeles. And Sue had the conversation with a therapist. She was really intrigued because her background was actually neurobiology and she knew about violent behavior and brain surgery for violence and so forth. She knew that whole ghastly story from her academic work and now she was confronted with this in her own family. So anyway, a long conversation with the practitioner, sitting in Beverly Hills, only six miles away from her house, and says, well I'm coming. Well, Mrs. Osmer, would you like to know what it costs? Well, yes, but I'm coming. This did not mean that we were in the boat. It meant that we were going to try everything that was reasonable to try to get our son out of this bind. But sure enough, it did not take long before somebody else noticed. He says, wait a minute, Brian is easier. Are you guys doing anything? Aha, independent validation. Now, we had kind of held our tongue for several weeks. We were making observations, but you know, it might go away. Can we trust this? Do we trust our own, you know, is this wishful thinking on our part? But when we had this independent validation, it loosened the tongue. It got us talking to each other about what we were observing and of course we were observing the same thing. Yes, Brian was different. And that was just the beginning. He did a lot of training before he went off to college. There was no question of him going off to college before, right? We were thinking, you know, yikes, this guy's bigger than we are now and he's occasionally violent. So, you know, what's he gonna do? Keep hanging around at home? Or what are the options here? And he's off at college and had a great career. Now, he was a strange kid at college, you know, because he'd missed all those years of socialization because he was so out of it socially. But nevertheless, he had a good career in computer science. We ultimately lost him because he was still dietarily sensitive and so chances are he got some paprika or allspice or something in the cafeteria diet and that sent him off into a grand mal seizure in the middle of the night from which he did not recover. That's a very common experience. It's called sudden unexplained death due to epilepsy. And nobody talked about it, right? Because they don't know what to do about it. So it's in the literature but nobody talks about it. But it's actually quite commonplace or it was at the time. So that got us going. I said, you know, my wife's background is in neurobiology. She had left her career in neurobiology to take care of Brian. But now we were back. I said, okay, you know, I'm a physicist. I said, this is, we're talking about regulate, you know, the brain as a regulatory system. So we both took a look at this primitive instrumentation that was being used. I said, wait a minute, this is gonna change the world. And of course, so we decided to get into this. But then, of course, there was, again, nobody to talk to, right? So the essential discovery here is that we needed to shift our attention from brain, from child behavior to brain behavior, right? That you couldn't ignore this entire domain of brain behavior. It was the essential explanation for what was going on with Brian. And this was, you know, it left no doubt, right? Our experience with Brian over all those years left absolutely no doubt that the world needed to move forward by looking at the whole issue of brain behavior. And that it could be trained in the most trivial manner, right? I mean, this was primitive instrumentation. A very simple technique. And Sue was sitting in the office there waiting for Brian for, you know, to do his session. And she was seeing the people come and go and listening to their stories and said, wait a minute, this is lords. This is crutches going up on walls. You know, these are people who are head injured and they're starting to speak again. And people who are, you know, coming in and walkers and, you know, tossing away their walker. She's dealing with head injured people that were coming from Pakistan. So I said, okay, this needs some serious attention. So we got into the instrument development business and it took us three years. I got a sophomore writer involved. And that kind of kicked off the field. Of course, this is part of the whole field of biofeedback. And now it is, of course, blossoming. Finally, there is awareness, more generally, that this is what needs to happen. So that's a long introduction of why we're having this conversation. It's secret you are, and you know, I hate to say it, like you're the granddaddy of the inspiration behind what we do. And, you know, in the UK, it's new news. It's sort of new technology. It's new thinking. But, you know, you've been doing this since the 80s, haven't you? You started way back in the 80s? Yeah. So Brian got trained starting March 5th, 1985. And he lived another six years and died on the night of March 5th in 1991. So he had exactly six years. And over that time, of course, this thing really, really took off. And now, you know, we're in our third generation instrumentation design. And it's being used worldwide. There are probably close to 2 million people who have already benefited from the protocols that Sue taught to, you know, between, well, not just she herself, but everybody else who's doing the training of her protocols, teaches her protocols. Probably, you know, 20,000 clinicians have been trained in her methods. Sue had all this experience raising this child that helped her in her clinical work, right? So there was nothing that any parent could say that would knock Sue off her feet, right? She had seen it all. And she had the academic background. So it was really, she was just absolutely, it's as if she was put on this earth to do this work. And so it was a nice team that I was the scientist, the kibitzing on the side and contributing whatever I could. But the real motive force here was, of course, the clinical work, which Sue was was leading, and we lost her last year. But it's been kind of a, you know, it's a 37 year journey to mature this field. And now it has reached a level of maturity that allows it to flourish around the world. Why do you think it's going to now is the time it's beginning to sort of be recognized that it's a, it's an alternative way of dealing with these problems rather than the more traditional medical models that have dominated for the last decades? Well, okay, this is human nature. You know, it's, it's actually not at all surprising that a radically new departure takes decades to be accepted. This was true of pharmacology also, you know, this psychiatrist, you know, they were doing psychotherapy, they were in psychoanalysis and so forth. They're not interested in drugging the brain. The benefit of stimulants for hyperactivity was actually discovered way back in 1937. But Ritalin didn't become prominent in the application to ADHD until the 90s, right? It took, and the DSM diagnostics statistical manual of psychiatry, you know, that was a sort of a rogue operation in some meeting room of a few deviant psychiatrists, you know, in the 50s. And it was only the DSM-3 that actually started gaining some traction and so forth. So it took psychiatry a long time to buy into pharmacology. And now, of course, they're there, now they're absolutely hooked. And here we come along, and with this technique, which ought to, you know, fit beautifully into the field of psychiatry, but they don't, you know, they don't know how to deal with this, right? This is, it's not their comfort zone. Their comfort zone is now the man's. So we're coming along as an intrusive element into their, you know, they're living very comfortably. But what we also realized, you know, we were happy to have the meds, but we now realize that they're not solving the problem, right? They, it's not solving the problem of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and what have you. Mental health status is getting worse. Psychiatry is not the answer. So there's this huge domain of brain function that was not being handled. I've got to, I got to show you this. Here's a book, Are We Hardwired? Well, that book is, first of all, it's all about genetics. But that was written in 2000, right? And by that time, we'd been involved with neurofeedback already for 15 years. The hard wiring was no longer, you know, in our heads. The whole idea of brain plasticity was not accepted, you know, generally, universally accepted until the late 90s, right? Just a few years. So this book, you know, came a little late, but it wasn't until the late 90s that it became absolutely clear that we had to accommodate to the concept of brain plasticity. And before you had brain plasticity, where do you put neurofeedback? Well, it has to be a placebo or something, right? You have no place to put it. And in fact, a neurologist said, when he was confronted with neurofeedback, he says, there are 10 billion neurons up there. You expect them to change? You know, where do you start a conversation with a guy like that? And this was the late 90s. I mean, the brain, it's so obvious that, you know, the brain is alerting. We get here, you know, we don't start out very competent in infancy. So the brain has to learn it all, even locomotion. We're not like those relatives of ours who, you know, I get born with the ability to mobilize. So, you know, the brain gets there by learning. And of course, it involves brain plasticity. You look back on that now and you say, you know, how was it possible for science to be so stuck on this issue of brain plasticity? So that's what we've been confronted with. It's just not easy to get a committed profession to change direction. They're going to see anything new as a threat. It turns out that's true of academics also. You know, you think that scientists are interested in new stuff. No, no, no, no. That's a rare scientist. Most people, most scientists are in love with their belief system. I mean, it's part of them. It's who we are. We go through graduate school, get our PhD, MD, whatever. And we're in love with what we now know. That becomes part of us, right? And if somebody comes along with a new idea, particularly one that's radical, like nerve feedback, and they say, you know, that brings forth a lot of resistance. And so that's been the history. Sigrid, tell us about some of the work you're doing in the agencies, in schools as well, because you've cracked the nut there. You know, we're on the beginning of the journey in the UK, but you've moved a mountain over there. Yeah, yeah. So here we're now in, with our work is being done in the Los Angeles County Unified School District, the second largest in the country. And they just put out a report on their 29 kids they put through the program. And the results are just what you'd expect. They're wonderful. And so that's a door opener. And the LA County Department of Mental Health is on board. And we're in three states, the juvenile justice system of three states, Kentucky, Texas, and Alaska. Alaska came first, because of course, nobody pays attention. You know, Alaska can do its own thing. And nobody bothers them. We had that experience in Hawaii also. The psychiatrist in Hawaii didn't have any problem adopting neurofeedback. Because, you know, they're off by themselves. They're hours away. Hawaii, sorry, Alaska got started a few years ago with our neurofeedback in the juvenile justice system. And then they gave a talk and others paid attention. So that's how it's going to happen. So the thing is, in the private clinic work that we're doing, that doesn't propagate. Nobody pays attention to what clinicians do. I mean, you can't get that into the journals or most of the past history. You can now, but not over most of our history. You couldn't, clinicians weren't welcome. At the beginning, when we entered the field, clinicians weren't even welcome to present at the biofeedback meetings. You only heard from researchers. So it was really all locked up. So that doesn't propagate. It has to be in the institutions. And of course, for another reason, that is that the toughest cases end up under the care of the state. And, you know, we don't see them in private practice because somebody has to write a check and so forth. We see people who have their lives much more together. Still very challenging cases, but not quite at the criminal justice system and so forth. So they get to see the real challenges and that's where we need to be. And so it needs to be done with state support because these people don't come with a checkbook. So yeah, so that's the beginning. And of course, good research is now happening, good work going on in Russia. And again, Russia is basically Grand Central Station for biofeedback. They have no problem with biofeedback in the cultural sense. It's in contrast to the United States where, you know, psychiatry saw biofeedback sort of as a threat to the pharmacological empire and were not friendly. But that's not the case in Russia. So they picked up on our method. All the best research on this method was done in Russia. And only now are the other universities like University of Zurich and Turin. Turin has got a study going on PTSD. Zurich has a functional magnetic resonance study going. And so once that's published, it'll just close the book. It basically will answer the question, you know, does this stuff work? Because they're still having heartburn about this in academia. So that paper will kind of end that discussion. It'll be like the 90s and brain plasticity. Because it comes from the University of Zurich, they can't ignore it. One of the things I love about a lot of the work that you've done, I think, has definitely made us better clinicians. You know, it's looking very much at people as, you know, the individuals and very much based on the whole arousal model. I think that is just, it's so simplistic and yet so powerful to start to really understand physiological arousal and how we can influence that. Yeah. So that takes us then nicely to the issue of what sets this world, this technique apart from whatever else is out there in terms of brain training and stimulation techniques and so forth. So basically, the people who are therapeutically oriented in this world, once they're trained and go out there to do their work, they feel very responsible to be in charge of whatever it is that's being done, right? Now, in psychotherapy, you can't just sort of force the issue. You've got, it's interactive and you don't know where the journey's going. But still, the psychotherapist feels themselves very much in charge of managing the, you know, experience, what happens. So the mindset is, you know, the therapist feels responsible for everything that happens in that clinic, in that room, in that session, whatever. What has happened with this technique is that we're now confronting a very complex system. How does such a complex system really learn? It learns by trial and error. It learns by experience, right? So the brain learns by virtue of its lived experience. Everything is essentially additional input to the brain to refine its own abilities, its own competences. It turns out the best way to train this complex system within its own frame to give it the information that it needs. So the analogy I like to give here is to skill learning. The way the brain learns a motor skill is to see itself performing a skill, shooting baskets, shooting pool, playing the violin. You know, you refine the skill by the brain watches itself performing the skill. And now the brain's most important skill is taking care of itself, right? That's, that was the issue with Brian. So how do you, how do you get at that? Well, we can use our wisdom and say, well, I think the brain needs this, or I think the brain needs that and so forth. But the path that we took is that the brain needs information more than it needs instruction, right? We're not approaching this matter with a great deal of wisdom. The brain is still largely mysterious to us. You know, we can, you know, when we tell ourselves to raise our arm, we have no problem doing that, but we have a great deal of difficulty understanding just what happened there, right? There's something so missing out of the narrative. You know, yes, it's easy, easily done, but not easily explained even now. And so it turns out that it's far more productive to tell this complex system, to show this complex system what it is doing from moment to moment. For the brain, this is now an aha experience. It hadn't seen this kind of information before. And it allows the brain to improve its own skills. That's what happened to me in neuro feedback. Our entire family benefited, and it's what happened to Brian and Kurt and Sue. We all benefited early on. And it became very clear from my own training that what we thought we were doing, which is giving the brain, you know, putting the brain through a set of instructions, you know, forcing it to jump through hoops, that wasn't the important part. The important part for me was just watching the dance, the brain's dance. So the way to think about this is, I like to use the analogy of the battleship, or no, the aircraft carrier. You know, there, I don't know how many pilots there are in an aircraft carrier, but surely less than a hundred. You know, probably only a few dozen pilots on the aircraft carrier. But there are 4,000 people there. And the rest of those 4,000 people are taking care of the aircraft carrier. And the brain is in a similar situation. Most of what the brain does is take care of itself. This is a mystery to us, right? It's gradually being disclosed. But the fact of the matter is, we already succeeded in 1985. Before we had all the brain imagery, before the scientists started believing about brain plasticity, we were already there. And we were making stunning progress, right? Stopping migraines and, you know, aborting migraines and so forth, and aborting seizures and recoveries from head injuries, all that was already happening in the 80s. And so the brain in this technique was benefiting from a flow of information on its own activity that was actually, we weren't even paying attention to that, right? It was a matter of subtlety. We realized, wait a minute, regulation is a matter of great subtlety. So that's how the brain is actually getting so much out of that innocuous signal, that little signal that illustrates its journey from moment to moment. It's not meaningful to us because we don't understand the context, but it's eminently meaningful to the brain. But then the other part is, of course, is that there's a whole brain response, right? The brain doesn't, we think, the scientists think in terms of these parts, you know, what's the amygdala doing and anterior cingulate and whatever. It says, no, no, no. The brain, of course, is always having a whole brain experience. And so whenever we give it new information, it's the entire self, shall we say, the entire brain that responds.