An acquaintance of mine shocked me a few days ago by asking me if neurofeedback is related to a well-known cult. He wasn’t joking and was genuinely curious, which made me realize that many people have misconceptions about what neurofeedback really is, how it works, and who uses it. As someone who uses neurofeedback on an almost daily basis, it seems perfectly mainstream to me, but I realized that perhaps additional clarification would be useful.

Neurofeedback is the use of EEG devices and audio-visual rewards that come from sophisticated software programs for the purpose of changing electrical patterns in the brain, which in turn improves the quality of peoples’ lives. As with most things, the use of neurofeedback is part art, but it is a science-based tool at its core. It came out of a serendipitous combination of a UCLA neuroscientist’s work and NASA’s needs in the late 1960s, and there are hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles that address its benefits for many applications. It may not yet be a household word, but the popularity of neurofeedback spread with increasing speed once personal computers and their speed increased dramatically in the 1990s. It is now researched in several major universities both in the United States and abroad, and just within the past few years, more universities have been offering formal coursework in neurofeedback, making it possible to learn how to use it outside private sector training.

Neurofeedback is an interdisciplinary tool and not a field of endeavor in itself, which means that people from many walks of life use neurofeedback for themselves or perhaps to apply it in their professional lives. Because it deals with the brain, some of the more visible users are in the field of mental health, often clinical psychologists or, on more rare occasion, psychiatrists. A few neurologists and chiropractors use it in their practices, yet physicians as a whole generally are not avid users. Many others, such as educators and tutors, use it in their work, and there are also people like me, who focus almost exclusively on neurofeedback. Then, there are people who are not professionals at all but are using it for their own purposes, at home, and people who use neurofeedback to enhance their spiritual well-being. Despite this diversity of users, backgrounds, and purposes, I have never met a cultist using neurofeedback. So, as long as you find a skilled, ethical, and decent practitioner to teach you or train you, I think you’ll be just fine.