2ème journée nationale du neurofeedback

The 2nd french conference on neurofeedback took place on the 25th of january 2017 at ESPCI, Paris. As explained in my post about the 1st edition of this conference, the revival of french neurofeedack research is still quite recent. The NeXT section of the AFPBN is doing a great job at structuring the field. Their goal is to establish and spread good practice advices, dispense training and promote research. This event was free and open to everyone so part of the audience was made of Neuroptimal practitioners, non scientists and curious people. People from the industry and startups (Mensia, Urgo, …) were also present. While the conference was of scientific and technical matters and all the speakers were careful of expressing the current limitations of neurofeedback research, the questions from the audience were inevitably practical and about neurofeedback applications: if doctors could prescribe neurofeedback, for what conditions neurofeedback could be used… Some questions were also pretty disconcerting. Though I knew it from my readings, it was interesting to see by my own eyes that the social context of neurofeedback is indeed complex, and that there is a big gap between neurofeedback practice and research. It also showed that some people are really waiting for the therapeutic options that neurofeedback has to offer. Overall, this event gave a very representative view of the neurofeedback landscape in France. The program can be found here. Just after Tomas Ros’ great intervention, I gave a talk about unimodal and bimodal EEG/fMRI neurofeedback. Here are my slides (the title is in french but the slides are in english):

My feeling was that though the question about the choice of the modality (EEG, fMRI, EEG+fMRI, NIRS, MEG, … ?) raised interests in a few researchers, it does not seem to be a primary concern yet for the french NF community. For the time being, most of the french research teams are working with EEG. The last talk of the day was given by François Vialatte who once again shared his very original and inspiring vision. In his talk he proposed to shift the traditional NF approach which targets global conditions (ie the neurological or neuropsychological condition of the subject) to a more dimensional approach which would instead target functional dimensions (which can be common to different conditions) such as attention-related markers. He gave a review of the vast number of EEG markers that have been shown to relate to functional dimensions. This could greatly increase the number of EEG-NF protocols and strenghten the outcomes of NF studies.