06 - Siegfried Othmer - The Origins of Neurofeedback Part 2

In the second part of this fascinating two-part special, we continue our conversation with the legendary Dr. Siegfried Othmer, a pioneer in the field of neurofeedback and Chief Scientist at the EEG Institute.

Dr. Othmer shares his vision for the future of neurofeedback, emphasizing the critical need to address childhood trauma and the potential to unlock human potential through brain training. We delve into:

• The impact of early childhood trauma on brain development
• Why neurofeedback is essential for physiological resolution of trauma
• Groundbreaking results from neurofeedback in schools and juvenile justice systems
• The transformative benefits of training young brains for lifelong improvement
• How neurofeedback is evolving to be more accessible for everyone

This episode is packed with inspiring stories, research breakthroughs, and a hopeful outlook on how neurofeedback can shape a brighter future for individuals and society.

Listen now and discover how this revolutionary approach can benefit you and your loved ones.

Find out more information at our website

Edited with finesse by Mike at Making Digital Real

Transcript

Welcome to the Brain Collectives 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. Welcome back to part two of this two-part special with Siegfried Othmer. 

Siegfried, I know that you're particularly interested in child health, child mental health, which is a big deal for us in the UK as well. So although we see people from three to a hundred and three, we do see a lot of children who come through the practice. I know in the States there is, I was in the States up until yesterday and there's quite a lot of talk in the States about child mental health and the system falling short. 

Well yes, so child mental health is in a desperate state. The data are just piling up. In a sense we're seeing a crisis of our own civilization. 

This is the product of the way we're running our societies. We're no longer in a child-friendly society and this gets us to the core issue of our concern. Consider how our modern child racing compares to that of indigenous societies of old.

There it would just not happen that the child and the mother would be separated for any length of time, right? They would always be together. There would always be somebody within, if the child starts crying, somebody within reach within 10 seconds. The modern life really doesn't allow that for that to occur, right? And we have learned the importance of child abuse in terms of the devastating impact on mental health and then also physical health later on. 

But it's really much worse than that. It turns out that neglect of the child is equally devastating. It's an absolute requirement that infants grow up being unconditionally loved. 

They need to feel secure in order to grow up as healthy human beings. And now the circumstances of that are threatened, right? In the modern life in the United States we don't even have maternal leave as a standard so people rush back to work after a couple of weeks. I mean this is not good and we're seeing the devastating consequences of that. 

And so what has become clear to us, our technique has evolved over the last 30 years kind of in an effort to always deal better with the greatest political challenges coming in the door. And there was a pattern that emerged and that pattern was that the training which was done in the typical EEG frequencies, mid-band EEG frequencies for all these years and that's still conventionally the case, we migrated to lower frequencies. And that was particularly effective for the most heavily impacted people on the planet. 

And so we realized we were going after people who basically had a trauma background, right? Their background was early childhood trauma. Now they are a mystery to everybody else on the planet. Psychotherapy can't deal with that and pharmacology can't deal with it. 

So this is a huge and growing issue that nobody knows how to deal with. And the problem is this, early childhood trauma when a child is kind of pre-verbal and does not feel safe, right? Responds with with an altered trauma response. It responds to this as a threat and the trauma response adapts and it's kind of gets set for life, right? The trauma experience is always remembered. 

It's never forgotten by the physiology. You may, you know, the child may not be able to recall it but the brain doesn't forget it. And so these trauma events are physiologically encoded which means that they also need to be physiologically resolved, right? You can't talk people out of their traumas and I mean people try but it doesn't work. 

So what happens is the world divides between those people who have early childhood trauma and those who have had good enough parenting. The fact is that of course life is not perfect so all of us have had our little trauma experiences from, you know, we weren't perhaps wounded by it but they're there, right? And they left their mark. So there's this little T trauma and this big T trauma and there's a huge distinction and I don't want to diminish it. 

It's the big T trauma that absolutely requires, I feel strongly about this, requires what we have developed, our infralow frequency nerve feedback. I don't think you resolve it any other way but it turns out that everybody benefits from those same techniques because we've, you know, none of us have grown up unscathed. So we've all had our misadventures in our childhood whether we remember them or not and so it turns out most of humanity benefits from this kind of training and that now, you know, we've been focusing on deficits but the other thing to be said is that we're talking about getting the brain to better function. 

The entire technique is based on, you know, what does the brain do with this information? It just takes that information in order to function better. So the entire technique is actually an optimum functioning technique, right? Regardless of where you start, the aim is to get the brain to better function. So it's fundamentally an optimum functioning technique. 

So you say, well what about the rest of us, you know, who are not severely damaged in infancy, traumatized in infancy? Well it turns out that none of us really have any idea what our inherent potential is until we give the chance, the brain a chance to train. So when back in the early 90s we ran a study on ADHD kids and 15 kids, independent testing by a psychologist who had done this work for this kind of testing for 20 years, turns out they showed up with a 23-point IQ increase as an average across the board, all those 15 people. That was staggering, right? The world of course couldn't believe it because you've never heard of this, right? Because it was dismissed. 

The world could not believe it. That's not possible, right? So the fact of the matter is that all of us are in a situation where really we really don't know what our inherent limits are. Of what drove us in our work was the challenge of the most difficult clients on the planet, right, who are coming to see us. 

But what we ended up with is kind of an ethical mandate. If there is this huge gap between where we're living and what our potential is, is there not an ethical burden to make that available to everybody, you know, early in their childhood? And of course that means we focus on children because what we want to do is to put these brains on a better track, right, so that they avoid the nastiness that otherwise might occur. You know, you can't have complex Tourette's in children. 

You know, the complex Tourette's happens in adulthood later. It emerges. But it doesn't start that way. 

All these brain deficits start out simple. And so training the infant brain is actually quite straightforward, right, because the circuitry is still simple. You haven't got complex OCD behaviors. 

It's not possible, right? The brain hasn't had time to learn this behavior. So there's this enormous payoff to train the brain early in life. And now we have reason to do this both with the children who obviously need us, where we need the Department of Mental Health, and we need LA Unified School District, and so forth. 

But then it turns out that when kids get into school, all of them could benefit from an exercise in learning to learn, right, getting the brain ready for the whole educational experience. And unfortunately, to this day, we have an educational system that doesn't pay attention to the fact that there's a brain involved, right? It just it doesn't matter, except of course that we drug the brain on an ordinary fraction of kids, which ought not to be happening, because attention deficit disorder, you know, unfortunately was medicalized by psychiatry when it basically it should be looked at in an educational frame. You know, train the brain to attend, and we do wonderfully. 

So I might cite the example. We've got a study, you know, we were collecting all the data. So we got data on 15,000 people on this continuous performance test. 

And if you look at the six to ten year old age range at impulsivity, they come in and the median score, the kind of the person in the middle of the pack of the distribution, tests below six. Imagine that. This is what's running around in our school systems out here. 

The whole six to ten, of course, we're talking about people who come to see us clinically, but they're not that different from the people who are out there who don't find our way to our office. You know, they're not that different. They test below six. 

Now 20 sessions later, they test at age ten, right? In those 20 sessions, they move from age six to age ten. And when we look at the ten to 20 year olds, they come in and the median score, the middle of the pack, comes in scoring at an age of nine, mental age of nine, in terms of impulsivity. And after 20 sessions of training, the median score is age of 17, right? What teacher would not want that, right? Well, this is for the taking. 

You know, this is with 20 sessions of training with our method. And this would obviously transform the field of education. And, you know, impulsivity is the issue in the classroom, right? People, kids are not ready to learn. 

And the other issue in the classroom is the emotional problems that children come in with. And that's the trauma. We've got gazillion kids in chronic pain. 

Can you imagine that? I mean, when we were children, pain was not an issue. I mean, we got injured occasionally, right? Scraped our knee or something. But otherwise, pain was not a part of our universe, right? Now, chronic pain is commonplace in childhood. 

I mean, my God, what are we dealing with, right? Our children are suffering. And it's because of trauma. It's because of neglect. 

This needs to be dealt with at other levels besides, you know, we're the rescue remedy. But of course, the best remedy is not to have the problem in the first place. Secret, I think you've got some slides that you thought might be interesting for our listeners.

Yeah, so here, years ago, we asked children to draw a picture of their family when they came in for training. And so here's one example of a child drawing his family. And then on the right is a picture of himself after training. 

This is after some 20 sessions. Now, okay, so people might be tempted to think, okay, this kid just learned how to draw, that he benefited, he learned how to draw by virtue of the 20 sessions of training. But anyone, any professional involved in child development would see that very differently. 

They would say there are years of maturation between the first picture and the second, right? And all of that happened in 20 sessions. So here's another picture, another child, he did training to 40 sessions. So here's the picture at the outset. 

If you hear background noise, there are kids in the clinic here being trained. Okay, this is after 20 sessions. And this is after 40 sessions. 

And this was over a period of three months. And so what you see here, again, is years of progress in development. And so what's apparent here is that with this very simple technique, we saw a global benefit, right? This child didn't just benefit in terms of just paying attention better, maybe better behavior and all of that. 

No, there's global maturation, right? And so that's the kind of thing that's possible here. And I need to tell you, these data go back to the early 90s, right? So the kids who drew this are now in their 30s. And presumably, their lives are very different than they would have been if they hadn't had the neurofeedback. 

To illustrate just how much what the potential is here, when psychiatrists drug these children, they're in narrow focus, they're trying to deal with impulsivity and so forth. In fact, attention deficit disorder is narrowly defined as being the very things that are treated well with medication, right? Attention and impulsivity. If a child comes in with conduct disorder, oppositionality, so, oh, well, that's another thing, you know, that's a comorbidity and so forth. 

And you don't expect the stimulant medication to be helpful for those. But of course, that's most of what bothers people, parents, right? It's the behavioral issues and so forth that come in the door with the attentional deficits. So we need to look at children more globally, and give them access to this possibility of radically changing their life prospects with just a few sessions of neurofeedback.

Siegfried, with the work you're doing with in schools, how do you see the future of that? What are you hoping to achieve in that area? I said earlier, we have this bimodal distribution. They're the people who are quite clearly handicapped by an early start with early childhood trauma, right? But then there's everybody else. And then I reflect back on our early years, where we did such wonderful work with very simple tools.

And so I'm thinking that there now needs to be a bifurcation also in the instrumentation area. We can't have everybody lining up for 20 to 40 sessions of professional attention, right? The trained personnel are simply not available for that in the school system. So there needs to be another path, a more accessible path. 

And it's possible that this might go a variety of ways. But we think that, again, the most productive, in the sense of what I've just shown you here, path forward is with this kind of technique, in which we simply inform the brain of what it is doing, and allow itself to construct a better regulated self. But we can do that with simpler techniques than those that have evolved in our clinical practice to deal with the most difficult challenges on the planet. 

So I'm intrigued about developing sort of an entry level system that would not fly under the label of therapeutic neurofeedback, but would fly under the label of educational or optimal functioning neurofeedback, right? And you don't have to qualify by deficit. You don't have to be on the edge of being thrown out of school to qualify for the training. And so it doesn't have this aura about it. 

Well, you're among the kids who needs this. No, no, no. Everybody gets this. 

And what comes out of that, of course, is the child's appreciation of how much capacity they have to help themselves, right? The entire world of therapy is they're being done to. Brian suffered under this needing to take the medication. He dutifully took it, but he was hemmed in on all sides. 

Brian, you need to do this. Brian, you need to do that. Then he got into the neurofeedback and says, oh, here's what I can do for myself, right? And that was transformational to realize, to give him something that I can take this forward, right? I can understand my brain on this basis. 

It was uncanny what Brian was able to tell us. He would come in and say, Sue, I think I need some right frontal training here. I've got delta activity coming up. 

He had this exquisite awareness of his brain. I told him at the time, I said, Brian, the time will come when you're better regulated where you won't have that awareness, right? He was relating to the failure modes in his brain, right? And he became aware of what was going on where because he was in interaction with the neurofeedback. He was seeing the signal at every session. 

So he kind of knew what to expect when he felt a particular way, what he expected the AG to look like. So he knew himself incredibly well, right? But of course, it's because his brain was misbehaving. When our brain behaves, we don't know anything about it. 

So that's what we want to get to. We want to get to where you don't know what your brain is doing because it's doing fine. And so the potential is just huge and it gets our society out of the bind that it's in, right? Because we're talking about our next generation here and it is in trouble. 

It's in trouble in England. It's in trouble in the United States. And that shows really, you know, the cost of modern society, right? They don't have these problems with children in Africa. 

They're growing up much more naturalistically. And you remember seeing all these kids, you know, you don't have all these problems in Africa that we have, these early childhood traumas and so forth. So we've done it to ourselves and the trouble is we're living it and therefore, like a fish in water, you know, we're not aware of the water. 

So it needs to be brought to our attention. It's not naturally in our awareness what we're doing to ourselves, what we're doing to our children, what we're doing. Yeah, it's just no longer a child-friendly society. 

I do feel that we've got this magic, magic box of things that we can do now and but it's, it's, we spend our lives, Manly and myself and our team, trying to open people's eyes to the possibility of what they can actually achieve. And, you know, medication does have its limits. You know, all of us in this virtual room have arrived at this wonderful thing called neurofeedback because of our own children. 

We all share that purpose, that common purpose. It makes, and it's not a particularly easy field. You know, you dedicated your life to it secretly and so did Susan. 

And you continue to push all the boundaries. You're an author of many books. You, you know, you've instigated so many research papers on it as well.

It's about getting the message out that there is actually a really good strategy out there to deal with some of these really, really tough problems. And when they're not tough and you just want to do a bit better, you know, it's the limitless capacity of our brains. You know, we need to be focusing people out there, whether they're individuals or the agencies and organizations, that there are some really neat answers, some really neat ways forward with this.

Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully we're close to a phase transition where, you know, it just takes one, like what happened with brain plasticity, you know, just one happening, one publication can suddenly lead to this phase shift in the professions where they suddenly don't realize they're on the wrong side of the issue, right? And as soon as this becomes real, and as soon as, you know, the critical mass of professionals realize, wait a minute, we've been missing out. We should have been paying attention to this for the last 30 years. 

You know, as soon as that happens, everybody will want to clamber on board. And the critics will fall silent. The critics have been ruling the rules, right? They've been having a heyday. 

And then we're already starting to see the critics fall silent. And so we're, we can tell where the threshold of this phase transition where suddenly, this will be the thing that will be talked about. And then of course, everybody will, you know, will become, will suddenly have a gazillion experts. 

Because they suddenly realize, wait a minute, there's something here to be expert about. And, and then they will all anoint themselves as the new expert. And so, so that'll be the downside as far as I'm concerned, because say, wait a minute, you haven't done your homework. 

I mean, this is already happening. A lot of people, you know, making pronouncements about neurofeedback on the basis of very little knowledge, right? Because they realize, okay, this is a coming thing. So that's going to happen more. 

And I think we're close to that transition. And so it's going to be Katie bar the door. Once this, the power of this technique gets, you know, gets recognized at the, at the official, the right levels at the official levels. 

And that's, yeah. Can I just ask about the EEG Institute? Because obviously you head up the EEG Institute. And if, if people want to get in touch with you or debate or contribute or explore these techniques, especially you working with so many agencies in the U S and, you know, possibly there is an opportunity in the UK as well. 

How do they get in touch with you Siegfried? The website is EEGinfo.com and EEGInstitute.com. And I can be reached at Siegfried at EEGinfo.com. And, and even if you misspell my name, it'll, it'll get me, get to me. And I'm happy to engage with interested clinicians. And we have training courses, training courses now being conducted in about nine languages and in 15 countries. 

But we run our training programs now in the, in the United States. We have been all over the world, but now other people are taking care of other countries. So we, we've retired to just training in the United States. 

In fact, here in our, in our training facility here in Los Angeles, it's easier than taking everything on the road. And yes, our mission is to train new professionals to do this as quickly as we can. Get them out there doing, doing good work. 

Yeah, that's, that's now our primary focus. It's always a privilege to hear you speak, Siegfried. It's such a passion for you.

And it's just, listen to you for hours, an absolutely amazing work. Isn't it? You know, we're so fortunate. We're so fortunate to have arrived just at this point, right? Where the brain is uncovering this, this wonderful world of the brain. 

And to have it immediately, not just be an intellectual exercise of understanding it and so forth, which only a few people can do. You know, only, only the academics and so forth really understand it at the level where it needs to be understood. At the level of benefiting society, we're, we're all able to participate. 

Normal mortals can, can do this, right? We don't have to be brain scientists. We don't have to have a PhD in EEG phenomenology to do this. And this is, no, it has rattled down to something that's very accessible to a, to mental health professionals of all persuasions, you know, master's level and, and, and so forth. 

It can acquire the skill set and, and start doing wonderful, wonderful work. And I think one of the best beautiful things about it is it's very dynamic. It's a very active, it's a very dynamic process and changes happen really relatively quickly for someone.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. 

You, you, you, you don't leave the client and go have a cup of coffee when you're getting acquainted with a new client. Things happen rapidly. Yeah.

We feel completely privileged to know you, work with you, learn from you, ask you lots of different questions whenever we need to. It's just, it's just marvelous. What the listeners probably don't know is the fact that you've moved neurofeedback from being something that was on the fringes to be something that's a major contributor to thousands of people's lives. 

And that's a pretty big thing. We follow at your little coattails on that SeedFreed. Well, I'm glad I've had this chance to have this conversation. 

Wonderful. Yeah. Oh, brilliant SeedFreed. 

So this is today's podcast. Please do look SeedFreed Offmer Up is an inspiration. The work is amazing. 

It keeps going as well. If you're on our side of the technology, it changes all the time and is getting better and better. So if you want to reach out to us at the Brain Collective, just look us up on the web. 

It's the Brain Collective or send us a message through the website. It's on the front page. Really happy to help. 

And we're always happy to talk. SeedFreed, it's been marvellous. Good.

I'll see you in person soon. Yeah, bye bye. Take care.

It's been wonderful. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning into the Brain Collective podcast. 

If you're curious about how neurofeedback and neuromodulation can help you or your loved ones live a more balanced, fulfilling life.