Recently during a consultation, someone asked me whether I use the latest and best technology on the market. The short answer to that is yes, my current equipment is only a few years old, and it has all the bells and whistles I need to provide good training. The longer answer to that question is a bit more complicated.

I’m not sure why a person would be inspired to ask a question about how fancy the technology is unless he was inspired by some of the marketing material for neurofeedback devices and advertising by practitioners who have been sold that same advertising line. Several manufacturing companies like to position themselves as the most technologically advanced, but a phrase like that distracts from the fact that the goal is to work with stable and reliable equipment that promotes good results. Companies with flashy products to market to us practitioners come and go, and often have products that disappoint. Most neurofeedback professionals know this and look to the stable, high-performance platforms for their work.

Neurofeedback relies on EEG devices to receive and amplify the very faint electrical signals that make it through the skull to be detected on the scalp. It’s important for those amplifiers to be accurate and fast. Almost all newer models tend to have both. But, it’s important to remember that amplifiers from the late 1990s and early 2000s also got good results for the people who used them back then.

When I was first learning about neurofeedback, I once studied briefly with a psychologist who was using an EEG device from the 1970s. He and his then-30-year-old device got truly remarkable results with the disabled population who worked with him. He probably didn’t intend to convey this to me, but one of the key lessons I learned from him was that the practitioner him or herself is truly important. Skills, attention, and care matter far more when doing neurofeedback than the fanciness of one’s gear. Even though I would never have wanted to use something that old, his dinosaur of a system worked.

So, no matter where in the world you reside, if you’re out shopping for a neurofeedback practitioner to do brain training with you, I encourage you to worry less about marketing language regarding cutting-edge technology (though cutting-edge is admittedly cool, and I love my system) and more about your sense of the practitioner’s skill and inclination to pay attention and listen to you as you do your training. If you trust yourself to choose the right person, then that person is going to be sensible and have effective tools to do their job.