I find this thread extremely interesting,
On Biofeedback:
I have been experimenting with brain hardware due to development of my own website, however having played with some biohardware, i've found the results to be a little bit disappointing for me so far. I haven't tried tagsync neurofeedback so far or advance brain entrainment, but the other things i've tried and read haven't been that beneficial or encouraging.
My interest is more with productivity rather than ascendency per say, but having a plenthora experiences with medications and drugs - I just don't have high hopes for it at the moment, which I did initially. In terms of inspiration and understanding, dropping a psychedelic once or twice in your life, radically changes your thoughts on your own perception. In terms of productivity I fail to see how this would generate more energy vs a can of redbull. I am still working on understanding it, there is a lot of material to cover.
Also reviewing literature there are a fews studies where they showed neurofeedback had essentially had no effects, even on ADD subjects, which neurofeedback is claimed to have the largest effect. Also this idea of alpha, beta and theta etc has also been questioned, and are based on some very old ideas of how the brain works. Its actually kind of now questionable whether the brain even works in this way, which would explain why binaural beats largely seem to fail to inccur much state change, when it should theoretically.
From the ideas I have been presented so far on various websites, I have good reason to sort of suspect current marketers/clinical centers veer towards pseudo-science. (I am not smart enough to conclude though).
I think a good barometer for me is - does the said treatment work better than a cup of coffee?
As for coherence training and biofeedback hardware/software etc. I find it "okay" to bridge the time gaps between supplements/medications, but they definetely don't seem to be on the same calibre, which is surprising given the effects manual meditation actually has without hardware support. Probably its just that nobody has nailed it in regards to creating a really useful effect yet, for everything there are literally hundreds of different protocols, with no seeming concensus on what works and what doesn't.
Also when we look at athletes or superb neurotypicals, we are more likely to be looking at the result of good genetic expression which confounds the result. To me optimising great genetics is a very different thing to fixing a dysfunctional one.
I think Tagsync may be a much more innovative protocol, I am really liking what I am reading (in terms of the technical breakdown), but only with tagsync.
First of all, because generalizing research you haven't even quoted or mentioned, its really just a blank statement with no scientific credence. To say that means that clinicians worldwide are less knowledgeable than you and you have looked at the existing research with an enlightened eye that no one else has and therefore found the truth that Biofeedback doesn't work. The point here is that if you are going to start insulting the work of Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Peak Performance Experts (Sports Psychologists which get paid extraneous amounts of money for improving athletic performance in Olympians, Professional Sports team, etc..by optimizing mindset through biofeedback/neurofeedback), then at least make some scientific arguments and we can take it from there. You also need to learn about the field to make an extensive analysis of the studies, not just read a bottom line and get at some conclusions.
Also, just last month a study on the use of NFB for ADHD was published. Here is an editorial on it. You can find details of his view on NFB in pubmed . The problem with NFB studies is there is so much heterogeneity in the treatment used, the blinding, the sham/control protocol, that its hardly scientific to take a meta-analysis for instance and bundle them all into the same group.
You say that for you a good barometer is does it work better than a cup of coffee? Well that's a pretty poor barometer to begin with. Coffee does little to improve significantly attention scores in IVA/TOVA tests so I wouldn't use it as a barometer. If you are talking about your subjective awakening that you get from the cAMP overload your brain gets well thats a different matter altogether. Its also interesting that you mentioned meditation in that same post as much of the research on one type of biofeedback stems directly from that. The optimal breathing range to obtain parasympathetic activation from Heart Rate Variability training was actually gotten to by looking at the breath pacing of monks achieving very very very deep meditative states. That's where a lot of that comes from. Dr Richard Gevirtz is one of the experts of the field so you may want to look into it and use it before you judge. Its easy to use, free for the most part and can get great results. In fact meditating without achieving that breathing pace, is not fully meditating at all.
One thing is for sure, NFB has been studied for decades. To look at the proper use of NFB for ADHD, you'd have to start by working at the work of Dr Joel Lubar. Then the clinical aspects extend with the work of Dr Thatcher in Z-Score normalized training. There are a whole host of other protocols in between and it gets pretty complicated from there so i'll leave it at that for now. Read my previous post on HRV, apply & reply.
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There is reseach that optimal brain patterns can be completely different for different individuals... I would not go in detail as it needs a knowledge in personality theory (Jung ) largely unrelated to this thread. Neverteless I want to make a quick point, there are two "Jungian functions" that correspond to what we would describe today as being creative and being insightful. Reading the posts in this thread, I see people experiencing (a huge at a times) increase of what Jung would call "internal intuition" or insight from their use of Tag-sync.
