Member- Aug 21, 2014
- 5,055
- Tinnitus Since
- 1999
- Cause of Tinnitus
- karma
Background: A year or two ago, at a point that I was really grappling with T badly, I did ~8-10 neurofeedback sessions. I didn't stick with it longer than that, because I didn't have a high degree of confidence in the practitioners. They were nice and meant well, but I didn't have the sense that they were giving me, as an adult tinnitus patient, a radically different treatment program than they might perform on a high school student with attention problems. So, while there are some reasons I think that it makes sense to believe neurofeedback might be able to help with tinnitus, I did not think the considerable money I invested was fair test of that.
I must point out at this point that I have a layman's view of neurology; my background is in computer science. That said, the reasons that I think neurofeedback is an interesting approach are:
* there have been a few studies of which investigated this, and appeared to have a positive result:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23700271
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21592701
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19163873
* there's a much larger body of information to suggest that biofeedback and neurofeedback can cause the physical structure of the brain to change
I've got the fulltext of one of these someplace; I will get the other rest at some point soon. The last summary appears to me to suggest that attentional processes increase or decrease electrical output in the auditory cortex; this is in line with my own observation that my tinnitus will occasionally seem to disappear -- until I "look" for it. That's the basic "don't think of an elephant" problem.
So, there's some interesting data, but there's an apparent lack of neurofeedback practitioners who have this specific issue as an interest. I've seen some other people online who have attempted neurofeedback -- one or two who thought it helped -- but I've never heard of a clinic where an MD audiologist works with a team of EEG technicians to exclusively treat tinnitus patients. Without someone doing that, it's very hard to be certain if it can be effective, and it's also very hard as a patient to have a high degree of confidence that forking over a few thousand dollars and investing ~100 hours of time into it.
One word of caution at this point: I've seen some anecdotes to the effect that neurofeedback, done improperly, can cause problems and maybe even seizures. On the one hand that's pretty alarming; on the other hand, anything that's totally safe seems unlikely to be doing enough to be helpful.
Neurofeedback depends on real-time analysis of the output of multiple electrodes placed on the head. It is now possible to do this using consumer technology - http://emotiv.com/ being the best example. For about $800 you can get a headset with a dozen electrodes, and software that provides the data from them. They also have some software available that lets you interact with the device in various ways. I'm not necessarily optimistic that their canned solutions will be sufficient to really implement one of the tinnitus protocols that have been attempted in the literature -- but if there's one angle to this problem that I feel remotely qualified to dig into, it's the software side.
So, there's a lot of people with tinnitus out there, there's a bit of research that this approach might be reasonable, but I've never seen an account of someone attempting to really hack on the problem themselves. This seems like a kind of interesting angle to attack this problem from, and if nothing else maybe focusing on it would distract me from all the noise
Has anyone thought about this? Are there by chance any EEG technicians or other software people out there who would be in thinking about this?
I must point out at this point that I have a layman's view of neurology; my background is in computer science. That said, the reasons that I think neurofeedback is an interesting approach are:
* there have been a few studies of which investigated this, and appeared to have a positive result:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23700271
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21592701
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19163873
* there's a much larger body of information to suggest that biofeedback and neurofeedback can cause the physical structure of the brain to change
I've got the fulltext of one of these someplace; I will get the other rest at some point soon. The last summary appears to me to suggest that attentional processes increase or decrease electrical output in the auditory cortex; this is in line with my own observation that my tinnitus will occasionally seem to disappear -- until I "look" for it. That's the basic "don't think of an elephant" problem.
So, there's some interesting data, but there's an apparent lack of neurofeedback practitioners who have this specific issue as an interest. I've seen some other people online who have attempted neurofeedback -- one or two who thought it helped -- but I've never heard of a clinic where an MD audiologist works with a team of EEG technicians to exclusively treat tinnitus patients. Without someone doing that, it's very hard to be certain if it can be effective, and it's also very hard as a patient to have a high degree of confidence that forking over a few thousand dollars and investing ~100 hours of time into it.
One word of caution at this point: I've seen some anecdotes to the effect that neurofeedback, done improperly, can cause problems and maybe even seizures. On the one hand that's pretty alarming; on the other hand, anything that's totally safe seems unlikely to be doing enough to be helpful.
Neurofeedback depends on real-time analysis of the output of multiple electrodes placed on the head. It is now possible to do this using consumer technology - http://emotiv.com/ being the best example. For about $800 you can get a headset with a dozen electrodes, and software that provides the data from them. They also have some software available that lets you interact with the device in various ways. I'm not necessarily optimistic that their canned solutions will be sufficient to really implement one of the tinnitus protocols that have been attempted in the literature -- but if there's one angle to this problem that I feel remotely qualified to dig into, it's the software side.
So, there's a lot of people with tinnitus out there, there's a bit of research that this approach might be reasonable, but I've never seen an account of someone attempting to really hack on the problem themselves. This seems like a kind of interesting angle to attack this problem from, and if nothing else maybe focusing on it would distract me from all the noise
Has anyone thought about this? Are there by chance any EEG technicians or other software people out there who would be in thinking about this?
