• #Neurofeedback can zap your fears – without you even knowing | Aeon Essays
    https://aeon.co/essays/neurofeedback-can-zap-your-fears-without-you-even-knowing

    The problem with neurofeedback is in fact as old as #placebo itself. In double-blinded, placebo-controlled neurofeedback studies, neither the researcher nor the participant is aware of whether they are receiving a true intervention. When no one knows who is supposed to experience the clinical effect, the behavioural differences between placebo and neurofeedback intervention often disappear.

    Even more impressively (or disturbingly), it seems that the mind can change the brain by just thinking it might be undergoing an intervention . New studies showed that giving people ‘sham’ neurofeedback could have the same effect as the real thing. When people believed they were undergoing an intervention, they usually reported feeling that it had a noticeable effect. Sometimes, the brain activity in these individuals also began to show the brain being retrained as intended: not only would participants of sham-neurofeedback experiments report reduced chronic pain, for example, but their insulas (the region of the brain directly tied to the experience of pain) would show a reduction of activity.

    Since the early 2010s, neurofeedback has been fraught with this additional controversy. Researchers began to wonder whether all neurofeedback simply pertains to some deep, powerful capacity of the brain to change itself – and it needs no real technology to do it.

    The placebo studies raise the question of whether you can really disentangle the mind from the brain. The Hollywood blockbuster Inception (2010) plays with a similar idea: in the film, the hero (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) alters people’s thoughts by jumping into their minds as they dream.

    A new wave of research is focused on a brain imaging technique so similar that its advocates have called it ‘incepted neurofeedback’. These studies show it’s possible to implant thoughts into people’s brains without them being aware of it. In one case, researchers scanned participants to get a ‘baseline’ reading of their brain activity, and then subjected them to several days of neurofeedback training. When subjects saw black stripes on the screen, they were instructed to ‘somehow regulate [their] brain activity’ to make a grey circle in the centre of the screen get as large as possible. At the end, they got paid money depending on how successful they were. What they weren’t told is that the size of the circle was related to patterns of brain activation that corresponded to seeing the colour red.

    After doing this hundreds of times, people were asked what helped them get high scores. No one mentioned colours; some mentioned zebras, violent acts or performing in gymnastics tournaments. In subsequent tests, though, the participants were more likely to see the colour red when presented with an image than those who didn’t receive neurofeedback. Without even knowing it, the visual mark of ‘red’ had been implanted in their minds.

    #cerveau #mental

    • Using fMRI, researchers can create a map of an individual’s neural activity while thinking of a particular concept, such as ‘a spider’; by finding this brain pattern for people with phobias, researchers are then able to reduce the need for exposure during treatment.

      How? Armed with a trace of an individual’s pattern for ‘spider’, it’s now possible to give patients positive reinforcement when they manage to reduce activity in the areas of the brain that correspond to the experience of overwhelming fear of spiders. Crucially, we can do this without ever showing them any eight-legged nasties. Instead, using the cue of a circle or a pleasant tone, and the reward of watching it change shape or pitch, the person themselves finds alternative means of subduing neural activity in these regions. In this way, the brain begins to modify its own internal states, and the phobia will subside as if by magic.

      Not only is neurofeedback non-invasive; a number of high-profile research projects have also shown that it can be effective even when participants aren’t aware of the goal of the procedure. This new, unconscious reprogramming has far-reaching implications for research on human cognition, tapping into the crux of the mind-body connection, and opening up many new opportunities for novel clinical treatments. But it also has a potential dark side: the risk that neurofeedback could become a back-door for manipulating our brain states, without us even realising it.