• Question: What is neurofeedback?

    Asked by anon-252014 to Shenghong on 27 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Shenghong He

      Shenghong He answered on 27 Apr 2020:

      Sorry for the late reply. I have just got time to go through the questions 🙂 In my understand, neurofeedback is a real-time reply of the ongoing brain signal or a specific characteristic of the brain signal. We can use non-invasive neuro-signal such as EEG, or invasive deep brain signals such as local field potential (LFP, indicates the activities of one or several neuron populations), to present the feedback, which can be visual, auditory, or tactile. For example, in my own study, I designed a simple computer game, in which a basketball moves from left to right on the screen, meanwhile, we record the brain signals and calculate the power in a specific frequency band. If the power is higher than a threshold, it will make the basketball drop down. The idea is ask the subjects to try to avoid the ball from dropping and this will require them to suppress the specific brain activity. In one word, neurofeedback is a technique which can help us learn a ‘skill’ to voluntary control our brain activities.

Comments

  • Photo: Luke

    Luke commented on :

    I think Shenghong is more of an expert in this area than I am, but here is my understanding of it. Neurofeedback is when a person learns to control their own brain activity. Their brain activity is recorded and they get to see what it looks like and, with the help of a scientist, learn ways to control the patterns of activity. People who have suffered a stroke (when the blood supply to the brain is cut off) sometimes have speech and movement problems, which can really affect their daily lives. Some experiments have shown that neurofeedback is useful for improving these problems. Certain signals in the brain occur when a person, say, tries to speak, and neurofeedack can be used to change these signals to improve the outcome.