*Warning, post of the future.* I have waited a long time for the third edition of the real-time fMRI conference to be announced. The second edition took place in february 2015 in Texas and I was so disappointed not to be able to attend it. At that time, we were waiting for the MR-compatible EEG device and so I did not have any results to present yet. Rtfin2017 will eventually take place this year from the 29th of november to the 1st of december in Nara, Japan (good thing that I started learning japanese a few months ago). fMRI-neurofeedback is a very specific research field and this is the main conference specializing in it. Moreover this conference is open to other modalities such as EEG, NIRS and MEG, so it is a good place for the different neurofeedback communities to gather. I’m looking forward to be there !
On the 9th of march, 2013 I participated to “Ma thèse en 180 secondes”. This contest is inspired by the “3 minutes thesis” concept coming from Australia and consists in presenting your PhD topic in 3 minutes in a clear and precise way to a lay audience. It has become pretty popular among french PhD students. We were 12 participants in Rennes, and 38 in the region Bretagne-Loire. It was a great but tough experience as it required to take a step back from our every day research and put ourselves in the place of someone with knowledge of their own. During the training it was interesting to see how people don’t necessarily retain from your speech what your want them to. The time of preparation for those 3 minutes of speech was way way over 3 minutes ! For my presentation, I refered to the character Hannibal Lecter and to the movie scene in which he cuts a piece of brain of his victim and feeds it to him. I chose this scene because precisely, this is not what neurofeedback is and because Hannibal might be a good pick for a neurofeedback therapy. At the end of my speech, I invite him to a neurofeedback experience.
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.
I had the chance to attend OHBM 2016 conference at Geneva Palexpo. It was impressive to participate to such a big event and see the huge variety of research topics around neuroimaging. There was an educational course on the fundamental principles for clinical applications of real-time fMRI. Though real-time fMRI is an emerging and pretty small field of research, it is growing fast and seems to raise a lot of enthusiasm among researchers. I think my favorite keynote was Tim Behren’s on “Storing, using and updating knowledge for behavioural control”. It is amazing to see how with fMRI and clever experimental design you can actually tackle fundamental questions about the neuronal codes and mechanisms. I also really enjoyed David Poeppel’s keynote on how the neurobiology of language has evolved over the last twenty years. I presented the preliminary results of my first EEG-fMRI-NF study during the poster session. Here is my poster.
The 1st french conference on neurofeedback took place on january 19, 2016 at the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moëlle épinière (ICM), Paris. Though the first demonstrastion of classical conditioning of the human EEG dates back to the 1930s and is attributed to french neurophysiologists Gustave Durup and Alfred Fessard, french researchers have been wary of neurofeedback technology and concept for a very long time. Indeed neurofeedback suffered for a long time from the reputation of a pseudoscience because the studies were not well designed and because even without enough scientific proof of its efficacy and understanding of its mechanisms, the technology started to spread among practitioners. However during the last 15 years, neurofeedback research has started to become more rigorous, partly thanks to the emergence of fMRI-neurofeedback. It is only very recently that neurofeedback has started to regain interest from the french research community. This event organized by the NExT (Neurofeedback Evaluation & Training) section of the French Association of Biological Psychiatry and Neuropsychopharmacology (AFPBN) is an important step for the french neurofeedback community. The program can be found here. This article presents a summary of this day. During the poster session, I presented the Hemisfer project (Hybrid Eeg-MrI and Simultaneous neuro-feedback for brain Rehabilitation) on which I am working. You can find the poster here.
*Warning, post of the future.* I have waited a long time for the third edition of the real-time fMRI conference to be announced. The second edition took place in february 2015 in Texas and I was so disappointed not to be able to attend it. At that time, we were waiting for the MR-compatible EEG device and so I did not have any results to present yet. Rtfin2017 will eventually take place this year from the 29th of november to the 1st of december in Nara, Japan (good thing that I started learning japanese a few months ago). fMRI-neurofeedback is a very specific research field and this is the main conference specializing in it. Moreover this conference is open to other modalities such as EEG, NIRS and MEG, so it is a good place for the different neurofeedback communities to gather. I’m looking forward to be there !
On the 9th of march, 2013 I participated to “Ma thèse en 180 secondes”. This contest is inspired by the “3 minutes thesis” concept coming from Australia and consists in presenting your PhD topic in 3 minutes in a clear and precise way to a lay audience. It has become pretty popular among french PhD students. We were 12 participants in Rennes, and 38 in the region Bretagne-Loire. It was a great but tough experience as it required to take a step back from our every day research and put ourselves in the place of someone with knowledge of their own. During the training it was interesting to see how people don’t necessarily retain from your speech what your want them to. The time of preparation for those 3 minutes of speech was way way over 3 minutes ! For my presentation, I refered to the character Hannibal Lecter and to the movie scene in which he cuts a piece of brain of his victim and feeds it to him. I chose this scene because precisely, this is not what neurofeedback is and because Hannibal might be a good pick for a neurofeedback therapy. At the end of my speech, I invite him to a neurofeedback experience.
