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Neurofeedback as a dance of agency

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Abstract

Many psychologists and other practitioners have started to use neurofeedback, a biofeedback system that is designed to help people adapt to their brain waves, usually either as a treatment for disorders like ADHD, depression, or as a form of enhancement to achieve ‘peak performance’. Although scientific approval of this therapy is lacking, commercial neurofeedback clinics are proliferating across Europe and the United States. In this article, ethnographic material gathered through interviews with practitioners and clients and observations during neurofeedback sessions provides the groundwork for a theoretical analysis of neurofeedback. This account demonstrates that although at first glance neurofeedback appears as a straightforward engagement between the two agents – practitioner and client – and a computer, it is in fact a complex entanglement of collaborating and competing actors. Human and non-human actors together perform a process in which it is unclear which actor is directing the ‘treatment’. While it remains unclear if and how the client is cured, restored or enhanced, this article demonstrates that through the process of neurofeedback, a new kind of self – one that is extended with all kind of entities that have emerged during the process – has clearly been brought into being.

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Notes

  1. The Society for Neuroscience and the DANA Alliance for Brain Initiatives, for example, organized brain awareness weeks, see http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=baw_home and http://www.dana.org/brainweek/, accessed 18 March 2013.

  2. To be precise, I attended one weekend course for novice practitioners, in which seven participants and two supervisors were present (United Kingdom), I visited three open houses of neurofeedback clinics, one meeting for psychologists using neurofeedback, and five demonstrations of neurofeedback to students and other persons interested (Netherlands). Furthermore, I made observations (1 day) during a neurofeedback experiment that was performed on five schoolchildren (United Kingdom). I extensively interviewed one researcher, six practitioners (who were sometimes also researchers) and four clients, what together resulted in about 150 pages of transcriptions. Most of the researchers/practitioners were also users, in the sense that they used neurofeedback to treat themselves (mainly for attention deficit disorder (ADD)) or in specific situations like before playing guitar, doing an exam or performing self-hypnoses.

  3. By stressing on the distinction between symmetry and equivalence, Pickering criticizes Latour, who, in Pickering's view, neglects or invalidates the differences between human and non-human ‘actants’ (Pickering, 1995; see also Collins and Yearley, 1992).

  4. By the term ‘performative’, Pickering usually means something like ‘agentic’, but he also uses it to refer to the capacity of a ‘dance of agency’ to bring something into being (Pickering, 1995, 2010). See also Barad (2003) and Callon (2007) for discussions about performativity and the shift from a representational to a performative idiom in the natural and social sciences.

  5. While a network, for example, appears more fixed and static (see also Kendall and Michael, 2001).

  6. The neurofeedback choreography can be compared with Charis Thompson's ‘ontological choreography’, with which she referred to the dynamic coordination of technical, scientific, kinship, gender, emotional, legal, political and financial aspects of reproductive technologies, a ‘coming together of things that are generally considered parts of different ontological orders (part of nature, part of self, part of society)’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 8). However, as will become clear in this article, aspects of neurofeedback are not that coordinated.

  7. Some ‘alternative’ therapists in the United States started using the technique as a treatment for all kinds of complaints in the 1980s and 1990s. There were also some scientific studies performed in this period.

  8. Roughly stated, delta has a frequency range from 1 Hz to 4 Hz and normally mainly occurs during sleep, theta (4–8 Hz) should characterize creativity, alpha (8–12 Hz) would refer to peacefulness, beta (13–21 Hz) to focusing. Low beta over the sensory motor cortex (SMR) (12–15 Hz) is thought to correspond with mental alertness, high beta (20–32 Hz) with hyper-alertness, and gamma (38–42 Hz) with cognitive processing. Too high amplitudes, however, are supposed to cause serious complaints: too large beta waves are sometimes connected to stress and anxiety, alpha and theta to ADD/ADHD and depression, and delta waves during waking hours can indicate brain injury (Demos, 2005).

  9. Instead of watching a movie, people can also play a game or listen to music when they lay back with their eyes closed. In these cases, positive feedback is given by a movement on the screen or a loudening of the volume. The feedback is often combined with beeps, which mean that your brain produces the right activity.

  10. This example is based on the practices as demonstrated during the neurofeedback course for beginners. More common, however, is to decide how (for example, SMR up, and theta down) and where (for example, on c4, right central) to train before the session starts. Other games, such as Pac-man, or a racing game, are also more used than the caterpillar game, and for adults watching a movie with a fluctuating screen is the most common. However, the caterpillar game is interesting because it illustrates a competition between people's brain waves.

  11. See also Dehue (2008), Rose (2007) and Roy (2008) for more examples and explanations of how people become more and more responsible for their own health and happiness.

  12. A comparable analysis was made by Simon Cohn who analysed how neuroscientists forged intimate and personal relationships with their volunteers to make ‘objective facts’ (Cohn, 2008).

  13. The instructions to sit up or lay back depend on the specific training. For alpha and theta sessions, clients should close their eyes and relax; for beta sessions, clients mostly should sit up and pay attention.

  14. The practitioner talks about an experiment in which he is involved. The same protocol is used during the neurofeedback course for novice practitioners.

  15. ‘Interesting, post-hoc analyses did not reveal any differences between the different neurofeedback approaches used such as theta/beta, SMR/theta and SCP neurofeedback nor a differential efficacy for the 3 domains’ (Arns et al, 2009).

  16. That is to say, if the expected changes are checked in the EEG. One supervisor of the neurofeedback course simply states: ‘Nobody wants a pre and post q[EEG] because it doesn’t do anything to give someone a paper and say ‘look! You have been fixed’ (P3). Clients however object this, for example, by stating: ‘If certain therapies or devices claim to change your EEG, then it has to change your EEG’ (C12).

  17. Tests or brain maps can be very helpful in convincing the client, or perhaps in stabilizing scientific facts concerning neurofeedback, but to stabilize the improvement of the self, more actors are needed.

  18. This ‘extended’ self can be compared with a ‘soft self’, introduced by the philosopher of mind Andy Clark as: ‘a rough-and-tumble, control-sharing coalition of processes – some neural, some bodily, some technological – and an ongoing drive to tell a story, to paint a picture in which “I” am the central player’ (Clark, 2003, p. 138; see also 2008).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Maarten Derksen, Trudy Dehue and Jess Cadwallader for their helpful comments on this article. Part of this research was made possible with an ENSN short visit grant.

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Brenninkmeijer, J. Neurofeedback as a dance of agency. BioSocieties 8, 144–163 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2013.2

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