Neurofeedback, also called EEG biofeedback, is a non-invasive and non-drug treatment, the general goal of which is to train the brain to regulate itself and develop healthier patterns of activity. Joining Timothy J. Hayes, Psy.D. on today’s show is neurofeedback expert Dr. Joel F. Lubar. Dr. Lubar has published more than 150 papers, numerous book chapters, as well as eight books in the areas of Neuroscience and Applied Psychophysiology. Today, he shares how he got into his work with neurofeedback and how the science has advanced over the years.
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Achieving Long-Term Symptom Relief Via Neurofeedback With Dr. Joel Lubar
Dr. Joel Lubar received his Bachelor of Science and PhD from the Division of Biological Sciences and Department of Biopsychology at the University of Chicago. Dr. Lubar was responsible for developing the use of EEG Biofeedback or Neurofeedback as a treatment modality for children, adolescents, and adults with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder.
This started with his controlled studies back in the 1970s. This application of neurofeedback has become widespread in clinics and schools throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and Japan. More than 1,500 healthcare organizations are using the EEG biofeedback protocols that Dr. Lubar has developed.
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Dr. Lubar, thank you so much for joining us here. It’s delightful to see you.
Thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to talk with you.
I was hoping you could start by telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it.
I graduated way back in 1961 from the University of Chicago as an undergraduate and in 1963, also from the University of Chicago in the Neuroscience area of Biological Psychology. I was doing a lot of different types of research, primarily basic research involving animals, until around 1970, ‘71. I decided I was going to try to do things for the human condition and advance work with people that would be helpful to them in clinical medical settings and so forth.
There was some early research that showed that it was possible to train people who had epileptic seizures to control the seizures, and sometimes, we do some significantly. I got interested in that work, and the fellow who started that was Dr. Barry Sterman at UCLA. We have a laboratory hospital in San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles.
He did a study on a single child in which he reduced the seizures significantly. That was very interesting. We have a laboratory with all the equipment to do that. We were like, “Let’s see if we can replicate this work.” We worked with a larger number. It was eight individuals, both adults, and children, that had significant severe seizures that were not controlled by medication or other techniques.
We were able to help them reduce the seizure activity using a technique at that time called EEG Biofeedback. In other words, what we did was we could record their EEG patterns, both when they were having seizures and before they were having seizures, look at the abnormalities, and set up a program so that when those abnormalities appear in the EEG, they could learn to block them.
This is called EEG Biofeedback or Neuro because it has to do with the brain neurofeedback. That was one of the early words that we did. At the same time, I noticed that as these individuals brought their seizures under better control, they also are able to attend, focus and concentrate better because that’s the same problem that they are having.
I decided to try with my students a program for training children that had what we call ADHD. At that time, they call it hyperkinetic disorder in childhood because they are often very active, running around all the time. We found that it was possible to control that as well. Our laboratory and my work were the first in the whole world to train ADHD using biofeedback or EEG neurofeedback.
That spread over since then. It’s one of the largest applications of neurofeedback all over the world. Other things became treatable as well, like anxiety, depression, addictive disorders, and many different kinds of learning disabilities. Over 150 disorders are treated routinely all over the world using these techniques. It’s important to point out, however, that it’s not a standalone time.
A perfect person’s brain rings up with the device, runs it through an amplifier, and serves as a display. As long as they can control the display, they are changing their EEG. You have to integrate this technique with other things, usually therapy and sometimes medication. In other words, it’s part of a whole program of techniques to help these patients.
How has it progressed over the years? How has the science advanced?
Science has advanced very nicely but not as fast as I like to see it advance. What I mean by that is the court of science, so to speak, the gold standard or what is called randomized controlled studies, usually where one group gets an active treatment, and the other group gets a placebo treatment, which will not hurt them in any way but it doesn’t apply the active ingredient. To see if they differ, there are many experimental designs. Many studies have been published in many of these areas I mentioned, depression, anxiety, addictive disorders, attention deficit, seizures, and so forth, that showed that it does make a difference but we need a lot more stuff in that time.
The reason we do is that at present, even though there are thousands of patients worldwide that have been treated and several thousand practitioners worldwide using this technique, it’s covered by third-party payers, insurance, and others like Medicare, Medicaid, and government agencies. It’s not as good as what we have now. To have that happen, it is going to be necessary to have more controlled studies to convince the scientific community, the medical community, and the insurance community that this is worth supporting. That is a long, tedious process. We have several professional organizations that are working very hard to see if this will happen.
You were talking about how you are training other clinicians to use these, develop protocols, etc. What are the catchphrases, words, labels, and certifications that a patient or their family should be looking for to find a qualified professional to help them with this?
Over 150 disorders are treated routinely all over the world using neurofeedback techniques. However, it’s important to point out that it’s not a standalone time.
There are two main certifying agencies. One is called the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance or BCIA, with a website, BCIA.org. They certify people who are health professionals that have learned how to use these techniques that have a basic scientific background in many fields of science and neuroscience that are part of this field. There was an examination that they had to pass and renew these certifications. That’s one level of certification. That is primarily for practitioners who are going through these clinical setting practices.
The other certifying agency is the Quantitative EEG Certification. I’m on the board of that one. This is to certify people who become very experts at being able to analyze EEG, understand what it means to set up protocols, and then also apply clinical settings. That is another extensive certification program. It’s a little bit more advanced for neuro physicians and neurologists, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other healthcare professionals that have tried getting and using that type of certification.
One thing I do recommend if people are looking for a practitioner, let’s say that you have a patient, have heard about neurofeedback, want to try it and are like, “How do I find a practitioner?” One way is to go through our professional organization, ISNR.org, International Society for Neurotherapy and Research. There is not only a very detailed discussion of what neurofeedback is, how it works, and all that with lots of illustrations but there is a portion of it where it says, “Find a practitioner.” It has lists of people who are certified in different parts of the country and in different countries to help them find the practitioner. The problem is we don’t have enough practitioners.
For example, I am in South Florida. A handful is probably less than five or so practitioners for the whole area of Miami all the way up to Boca Raton and Tampa Beach. There are only a handful of practitioners and quite a demand for treatment. We need to have more people trained and certified. We made it possible for patients to be able to obtain this type of training.
What kind of an investment is it for a professional who wants to acquire the equipment and get the training for this?
First of all, let’s say that somebody has a pretty good background in neuroscience and all that. To do this, they need to have an amplifier that they can connect up the individual’s EEG and record anywhere from 1 location on the head all the way up to 19 locations simultaneously. These amplifiers range anywhere from $5,000 up to $20,000, depending on how many channels they are and their quality. They needed a good amplifier. That’s one thing. Also, they need software programs for analyzing EEG, and there are a number of those out there.
It is a significant investment. For less than $20,000, a practitioner can get the appointment, the software, the analysis software, and they can do everything they need to do this, but the other part, which is much more important, is they have to have the training like, “How do I hook these electrons out? How do I look at EGG and know if it’s normal or abnormal? How do I read and analyze it? How do I use that information to set up training protocols?” That’s primarily what I do. I’m training people how to do all of that.
I have been in clinical practice. My wife, may she rest in peace. She passed away years ago but we have a practice, Southeastern Neurofeedback Institute going back to 1975. We saw several thousand patients and trained them together. I still do training but I do a lot of remote work. People will ask me if I can come online and work with their patients while they are working with the patient and guide them on how to do sessions. I’m still doing training with real patients in that sense.
I have set up a program here in the South Florida area nearby Coral Springs or Deerfield Beach. Patients are seen there for a variety of disorders, and the person who is trained to do this is very good and has had excellent results. He had been doing this for several years and has a very thriving practice. The demand is greater than the supply. We don’t have enough practitioners but we have a lot of people who need help.
What can you tell our audience about what a standard course of treatment is or what they should expect in terms of how many sessions over what period? This as a treatment should be integrated with therapy and some other things.
It’s very important because you can’t put a person on a device and have them change some physiological measure where there’s traditional biofeedback for people learning how to relax muscles, increase blood flow to their arms and legs, change their breathing, heart rate or things of that kind, as well as training the brainwaves themselves and other aspects of it. That’s part of the treatment.
The question is, “How do I integrate that information into my real-life situation? How do I make these transfers? Have we learned these while in stressful situations, whether it’s in family situations, home situations if you are an adult with children, if you are a child with a teacher, parents, work settings, and all of that?” The transfer is the most important thing.
That’s where we integrate the neurofeedback with the therapy if necessary and then with medications, in some cases. I have several trainees who consult these with psychiatrists, neurologists, and pediatricians. They use medications, and that’s fine. How they integrate the medical aspects of it within the neurofeedback is important. All work together.
What could someone expect in terms of a course of treatment? You can’t say all of these five sessions but what’s an average range for someone who goes for acute EEG neurofeedback training?
Very often, we get very good results in anywhere from 10 and 20 to 25 sessions, which is much better than it used to be. Before we had the more advanced techniques and equipment, we would take 40, 50 to 60 sessions because we were training on 2 or 3 locations. We are not only training 19 locations but we can train at the very top over 11,000 connections between these different locations.
Uses Of Neurological-Feedback: You have to integrate neurofeedback techniques with other things, usually therapy and sometimes medication. In other words, it’s part of a whole program of techniques to help these patients.
In other words, what we are training is whole neuro network-integrated connections inside the brain. Years ago, we could only train the cortex, the outer layer of the brain itself. Now, we can train more than a dozen areas in the cerebellum and areas deep inside the brain, right down in the brain, the hypothalamus. I can name the other structures but these are structures that are involved in regulation, endocrine function, emotional regulation, addictive behaviors, and all kinds of things. We expanded this enormously.
Here’s one of the advantages of EEG neurofeedback or biofeedback but neurofeedback is a better term. EEG changes very rapidly, and we can follow it up to 128 to 256 or even 500 times a second. We can look at changes almost on an instantaneous basis. That gives us a great deal of ability to work with these different connections that are continuously shifting and changing inside the brain. That’s one thing.
There’s another technique to which a number of our patients are referred to that, and that’s the imaging techniques such as the fMRI and MRI or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which gave you precise and detailed information about the structure of the brain. Is there anything abnormal inside the brain like cysts, tumors, calcification, damaged tracks in the brain, and connections? The MRI is very good at that.
It is even possible to do MRI in neurofeedback. There are some studies out there where they train people to change that measure, which is a blood flow measurement. It’s called the BOLD response, Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent response. You are measuring the change in oxygenation of the blood in different areas. The positive feature is that you can train activity in very tiny areas that MRI can see structures as small as 1 millimeter but the changes are slow. It takes at least ten seconds to see a change in blood flow. The feedback is very limited.
You can’t do it over and over again because you are putting a person in a large device with a strong magnetic field. There were sometimes some side effects from that but it is possible to record the brainwaves, the EEG, inside an MRI machine, so you can begin to combine these techniques together. There were other imaging techniques as well. There was the old CAT scan, Computerized Axial Tomography, which shows the structure.
There’s a thing called SPECT scan, Single-Photon Emission Computerized Tomography, which shows you whether the lab is perfusing different parts of the brain properly. Is there enough blood flow to different areas? There’s a PET scan, Positron Emission Tomography, which can look for abnormal uptake of radioactive tracers used to look for tumors and follow the course of their development inside their body. There are many wonderful imaging techniques, and those combined with what we can give you a broad idea of what’s going on with a particular operation. It’s very detailed.
Have people been using the QEEG neurofeedback in a clinical setting with people where they have them get activated emotionally, watch the brain response and then retrain that in what they might call a memory reconsolidation?
We do. Those are the bolts in the MRI, as well as in neurofeedback. They have them engage in an active task. There could be a visualization. Let’s say a patient has a chronic anxiety disorder. Look at the difference in their EEG on a moment-to-moment basis when they are experiencing very anxiety-provoking scenes, as opposed to when you take them through a relaxation procedure. We can see the differences.
Another good example is somebody who has learning disabilities. We can see how the EEG looks when they are trying to read, write or interpret something that they have read. If they have difficulty, we can see the difference between the performance and that situation compared with the baseline. The other thing that we have for all of these different techniques is a very large normative database. There are several normally databases that have anywhere between 500 and over 1,000 individuals of different ages.
We statistically can compare your EEG or my EEG to an age match database to see if what shows in the brain are outside of the normal range and which connections are outside of the normal range. We retrain using the database to normalize that as much as possible. We can even import this data directly into programs I drafted on the session by session basis and do all kinds of nice logistical analyses to show whether or not things are moving from abnormal to normal.
All of this advanced technology exists. I’m involved in one study that we are going to be presenting at our national meeting of the ISNR. It’s coming up at the end of July 2022, in which we took 120 children that have ADHD that turned the age of 6 to 11. We looked at thousands of thousands of connections in their brain to see which particular sets of connections are most abnormal, typically in that population. We picked out a number of them. As a result, we can set up protocols to train those specific connections. That gives us even more accurate ways of being able to normalize somebody. We are going to be doing more and more of that.
The more you do that, and the more you accumulate the data, the more refined you can make your protocols. That’s an exciting thought.
The more refined the protocols are going to be for individuals with different disorders or combinations of disorders. Very rarely, when you work with a patient, they say, “I have a terrible anxiety problem.” They may also be experiencing obsessive thoughts and depression. There are clusters of conditions that go together. We tried to work with a combination of them.
For example, in this particular study, we are working at two attention networks and an executive function network that has to do with the pinpoint accuracy of thought processing on salience and a network that is probably the default mode network, which is a good network that people are in under certain circumstances when you are into a very relaxed state, fantasize and visualize. That’s fine.
That’s not a good place to be when you are in the classroom or trying to understand something. Children with ADD often lapse into that default mode network. I have a great example of that. I remember years ago, there was a child in this classroom who had come in with a lossy look on his face. The teacher was lecturing. At the end of the lecture, the teacher looked at the little boy and said, “Do you have any idea what I have been talking about for the last hour?” The child said, “No, but I had a great trip for a robot.” This is what’s going to happen to get into the default mode network. You are fantasizing and imagining.
The demand is greater than the supply. We don’t have enough neurofeedback practitioners, but we have a lot of people who need help.
Artists, composers, and writers need this. Very often, to get the ideas and be able to use them as a springboard to action but then you have to be able to get out of it to get into the active processing network such as the salience network, executive function network, and the attention network. Otherwise, nothing gets done. We have all met people who said, “I have tons of good ideas but I never wrote them down. I never did anything with them.” They go from that portion of the process to the active process of doing something. That’s the next step. We try to help them with that.
It’s fascinating for me to hear you say that it can go in 20 or 30 sessions, and there can be significant retraining of the brain in that way.
Another important point is when you finished 20 or 30 sessions and you’re like, “I don’t feel anxious anymore. I don’t have this craving to abuse drugs, alcohol or whatever it is,” because we worked with a lot of addiction disorders. They are doing much better. You don’t say, “That’s fine. That’s all finished.” It doesn’t work that way. You face them out gradually and start with 2 or 3 sessions a week. There are some severe cases where you see them every day.
Over time, you reduce the frequency of sessions. Eventually, we get to a point where they may be seeing them once a month and then maybe after 3 months or 6 months. The message to them is always, “If you feel that a problem that you were working on is beginning to come back, we may need to do a few more sessions to get you back on track.”
You have to follow the patients. Look at it from another point of view. Let’s say there’s somebody who goes in for back surgery because they had an accident. Their back is very severely damaged. Let’s say there’s a dislocation of spinal discs and an impression of some of the neural fluids. The surgery is going and releasing all of that. What happens often is some scar tissue forms and comes back again.
You maybe have to have a surgeon, go into physical therapy, maybe occupational therapy or a long-term exercise program to maintain the flexibility in the vertebral column. If you do it right, maybe you have been under your control for many years. Neurofeedback is the same way of working with patients. They are long-term commitments.
We have talked about the cost of the amplifier and then the software. You are saying that we don’t have enough clinicians. How long does it take a clinician to get trained in this where they can be effective with patients?
Let’s assume that the clinicians already have a lot of therapeutic skills, whether occupational therapy, physical therapy, psychotherapy, social work or whatever it is and have already been practicing and using those techniques. It’s a matter of adding the neurofeedback QEEG component. If they work with us anywhere from 6 months to 1 year, progressively, they can begin to use these techniques with patients and do very well with them.
It does take some time. It depends on how much background they have already had. People have always asked me, “What should you tell students who are going through this field? What kind of background should they get?” This is what I always say, “The number of journal articles that are coming out in the neuroscience and this field is enormous.” There are sometimes as many as 20 to 50 new papers coming out every month in different journals all over the world.
I have stocks several feet high right here on my desk of papers coming out all the time. I tell the students, “If you take any of these papers, open them up and look through them, what you are going to see is a lot of complex mathematics that is very advanced.” Our field was becoming a branch of mathematical physics to some extent.
Let’s put it the other way around. Mathematical physics is often employed in trying to understand them. I’m telling these students, “Try to take as much math as you can tolerate or if you think with physics when you are in college. You are going to need that background to be able to read the literature on the field.” It’s becoming very technical and involved. I’m not trying to scare them at all. I say to them, “Apply what you can.”
The other nice thing is that if you go to YouTube, I bet that you all know over the years too, from time to time, that there are wonderful presentations on quantitative EEG, brain mapping, and network analysis. Some of those presentations are very easy to understand. They are bringing all those illustrations. Others are nothing but very complex, higher mathematical equations. There’s a series on trying to understand how the fMRI works. It’s about 75 lectures. By the time we get into the more advanced lectures, it’s all mathematics. It’s very complicated but you have to work to a certain level.
Fortunately, and this is the good news, our certification examinations are not having left-back at all. They are very practically oriented. How are you going to use this? What does this particular abnormal EEG pattern look like? What does a pattern that might be associated with anxiety look like? What does a pattern associated with depression look like? When you look at EEG patterns, how do you know what is generated by the brain and what it’s doing to the external noise, movement or artifacts so that you don’t misinterpret it? There is training involved. I do a lot of that myself with people.
There’s the training about how to get after you’ve done an assessment and compared it to the database, how you then develop a protocol for treatment that can help train the individual as you are calling it either biofeedback or neurofeedback. I have heard this explained by other people who do QEEG. One of the theories is that your brain wants to make sense of things and the input that you are experiencing to be smooth and consistent.
That part of what’s built into the software when you are giving a corrective treatment is that when a person is able to maintain a certain desired brainwave state, then the picture they are looking at is smooth, and the sound is consistent. If they deviate from that, then the software instantly reads that and decides to sputter the sound or the picture. The brain wants to make it smooth again. With that instant feedback, your brain is learning.
Uses Of Neurological-Feedback: The number of journal articles that are coming out in the neuroscience and this field is enormous. There are sometimes as many as 20 to 50 new papers coming out every month in different journals worldwide.
What we do is when a patient comes in, and they tell us, “In a thorough evaluation, why are they there?” That might involve psychological testing or what we call neuropsych testing if they are having problems in terms of education, learning or cognitive problems, and so forth. Once we have a clear, detailed history, the session may take a couple of hours, and there may be some testing involved.
We understand, “Who are you? What is your problem? How does it manifest itself?” We then do the quantitative EEG analysis. Let’s say the patient clearly identified that they have extreme obsessive thoughts about things associated with extreme anxiety. As a result of that, we look at their brain EEG pattern. We go to those networks and pull those networks up. We then know which connections are in those networks.
We can look at the patient’s brain and say, “How many of those connections for those networks are outside of the normal range?” We can see them right away on the map and on the connector that’s called where we can see all the different connecting lines and have them broadly from the norm or the values. Once we distinguish that, then we can set up a protocol.
We are going to take these particular frequencies of EEG and bands of EEG. We use theta, beta, alpha, gamma, and so forth. Which frequencies are we going to train? Which connections and areas are we going to train and normalize? It’s true that when we set up the actual EEG neurofeedback itself from the patient’s point of view, they don’t have to look at the complicated EEG. They get a simple display. I’m going to give you an example of many displays.
I have about 30 of them but I have a simple one. You see a little river. Every time they produce the right pattern, the fish jumps, and you get a little tone. You can pick the time on the water. It could be a bell, a gong or a pleasant little sound of some kind. What makes the fish jump is if they can produce the normal pattern for all the connections in that network that are outside of the normal range for a certain period, let’s say 0.75 a second or 0.5 a second, then the fish would jump. They are producing the normal EEG for that period.
This is very discreet feedback. It only occurs when you are introducing the wrong right pattern. For children, sometimes people are abused in movies of various kinds. The child was watching a movie. As long as it’s producing the right pattern, the movie continues. When they are not producing the pattern, either the movie can pixelate, fall apart, change the color to black and white or fade out. Things can happen to it so that it’s no longer visible, and they have to reconstitute it again.
There are a lot of detailed techniques involved in doing this properly. What you are trying to do is tell them that you are producing the right EEG pattern that isn’t a normal pattern for somebody that has an experience that you are having. Let’s say a patient is severely depressed and had a traumatic brain injury. A lot of people who have had traumatic brain injuries got strokes. When you are producing the normal pattern, everything on the screen works the way it should.
When it deviates from that, it immediately tells you that you are falling out of the normal range. As you learn to produce this more and more consistently, we can graph this and show it to you over sessions. “Are you also experiencing improvement?” We hope that there is a great correspondence. When the pattern is the normal pattern, is there more of a time than the abnormal pattern when the patient says, “Yes, I’m not feeling as depressed as I did before. I can control my anxiety working in social situations or school,” if it’s a child or whatever it is? “I have control over the things that I’m concerned about much more.”
This is very interesting. Let’s say that we are doing this particular session. I’m going to say the session is 40 minutes long. It consists of several sub-pieces like a period of feedback and then the rest period. We always tell them, “You are going to get a certain score at the end of each of these rounds. In each round, we would like you to beat the previous score, meaning that you are showing learning during the session.”
Let’s say that the patient is doing very well on five rounds. In round one, they get a certain score. Let’s say twenty rewards a minute. In the next round, they get 22 rewards a minute, the next round, 24 rewards a minute, and then in the next round, only 15. We say, “We pause the session for a minute and see if we can figure out why it went down.” The patient says, “I’m trying to control my anxiety and suddenly, I have all these thoughts flooded in my mind, and I couldn’t concentrate. I started worrying about something.”
That’s where you begin to get the insight, “How can we deal with that?” That’s where the therapy comes in. There come some times when you have to say, “Maybe we need a couple of sessions per week. Deal with those problems and see how we can help you resolve them.” The integration of the therapy with the feedback is getting those jobs. It is important. When we were working with seizures, that may be one example, we could do the feedback by itself and try to normalize the abnormal patterns in your EEG that would set off the seizures. There wasn’t as much therapy involved but sometimes there is necessary.
If you take a breath and think about it, what is an aspect of this that I haven’t even asked you about that you would want us to know about, either an aspect of the work you do or something that you hope that people reading this might be able to do to help you spread the word about it?
What we need to do is to get more emphasis on the results that we are getting and try to get this information to people that support this more. For a lot of patients, neurofeedback is only available to those that can afford to pay for it, and that’s unfortunate. It needs to be available to everybody. The only way we are going to do that is to get insurance and third-party payers to cover.
We are working very hard to get the insurance companies to recognize what we are doing, not just say the term they like to use, “This is experimental. Why should we pay for something experimental?” Prove them it’s for real. That’s where the research comes through. It’s happening but slow. We are doing everything we can to purchase among all of our professional organizations like AAPB, Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback.
All of these organizations have subcommittees that are working directly with the insurance companies, sitting down and saying, “Here’s some published research.” We think that this warrants coverage because that’s the only thing that’s going to be available to everybody. We want it to be available to everybody. Look at it this way. People in my age group depend on Medicare for a lot of coverage of our medical expenses. Older people do have a lot of cognitive problems. Some have strokes and brain injuries. Medicare is important for those people to be able to get coverage. Now, it’s not very good. Our next goal is to get better coverage for this.
For many patients, neurofeedback is only available to those who can afford to pay for it, and that’s unfortunate. It needs to be available to everybody.
The other thing is we need more research in this country because if you pick up any of the journals that have neuroscience papers, papers on EEG, Quantitative EEG, and neurofeedback, the majority of them were being published in other entrants. It’s not like there’s no research here. I have a paper on one of these techniques, and all the authors were from church. There was the next paper in a major journal. We have papers from Spain, different South American countries, and all over.
Part of the reason is that in some of these countries, their governments support this counter research. Whereas here, we have the National Institutes of Health, NIH, and National Science Foundation. There are grants available but sometimes it takes 3 to 5 years to get a grant to study. It’s a very tedious process. Most clinicians don’t have the time to write grants, so it has to be done through universities. I have always had grant support in my laboratory. We spend a lot of time writing grants and getting contracts. It’s an evolving process but the field is growing. It’s running very rapidly, and more people are hearing about it. That’s good.
I thank you so much for sharing the time with us. It’s delightful to finally meet you face-to-face and learn more about the work you have been doing for a lot of years. I’m anxious to keep learning and following your work and the developments. Hopefully, one day soon, it’s going to be fully reimbursed through insurance and Medicare.
That’s one of the goals.
Thank you so much for taking the time to be with me. It’s delightful to talk to you.
Thank you very much.
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Dr. Lubar has published more than 150 papers, numerous book chapters, as well as 8 books in the areas of Neuroscience and Applied Psychobiology. One of these books was the (QEEG) Databases for Neurotherapy, published in 2003. He has been a Regional Editor for the Journal of Physiology & Behavior and an Associate Editor for Biofeedback and Self-Regulation.
He has held the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester and then Associate Professor and Full Professor at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Lubar also had a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA in Neuroscience. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Tennessee. He was the past President of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback and the International Society for Neurofeedback & Research.
He’s also been President of the Academy of Certified Neurotherapist, which has offered specialty certifications in EEG Biofeedback as a part of the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America. Dr. Lubar was listed in 2019 by Stanford University in the top 2% of the World’s Scientists based on research, publications, and impact on their field.
Important Links
- Dr. Joel Lubar
- BCIA.org
- Quantitative EEG Certification
- ISNR.org
- Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback
- National Institutes of Health
- National Science Foundation
- (QEEG) Databases for Neurotherapy
About Dr. Joel Lubar
Dr. Joel Lubar received his B.S. and Ph.D. from the Division of the Biological Sciences and Department of Biopsychology at the University of Chicago. He has published more than 150 papers, numerous book chapters, as well as eight books in the areas of Neuroscience and Applied Psychophysiology. One of these books was on QEEG databases for Neurotherapy published in 2003. He has been a Regional Editor for the Journal Physiology and Behavior, an Associate Editor for Biofeedback and Self Regulation.
He has held the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester, then Associate Professor, and Full Professor at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Lubar also had postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA in neuroscience. He is now professor Emeritus of the University of Tennessee. Dr. Lubar was the past president of AABP(Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback) and was the president of ISNR(International society for Neurofeedback and Research.
He has been the president of the Academy of Certified Neurotherapists which has offered specialty certifications in EEG Biofeedback as part of the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America (BCIA). He has also been the past president of the EEG Division of the AAPB. He has served on the BCIA Board of Directors, and as a member of the executive board of the AAPB. He was previously an officer on the board of the Biofeedback Research Society.
Since 1979 he had been co-director of the Southeastern Biofeedback Institute, in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is currently president of the Southeastern Neurofeedback Institute in Pompano Beach, Florida. Dr. Lubar has presented his research at many workshops in Europe, South America, Canada, Israel, Australia and to many State and National meetings of Biofeedback Organizations. He was an invited keynote speaker at the Third International Conference in Biobehavioral Self Regulation and Health, held in Tokyo, Japan, October, 1993.
Dr. Lubar was responsible for developing the use of EEG Biofeedback (Neurofeedback) as a treatment modality for children, adolescents, and adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, starting with his controlled studies in mid-1970. This application of Neurofeedback has become widespread in clinics and schools throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, Japan, China, Europe and Mexico. Currently, more than 1500 health care organizations are using the EEG biofeedback protocols that Dr. Lubar has developed. Dr. Lubar is currently developing databases for the assessment of individuals with multiple addiction disorders, seizure disorders, and many clinical entities.
In a 1992 publication, in Pediatric Neurology, he and his colleagues showed, for the first time, that children with the inattentive form of ADD (without hyperactivity), differ significantly in terms of quantitative EEG patterns, from matched control non-ADD children. Dr. Lubar’s laboratory at the University of Tennessee was the first to develop and publish methodology and results of LORETA neurofeedback in 2004. Dr. Lubar was listed 2019 by Stanford University in the top 2% of world scientists based on research and publications and impact on the field.
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