OStatic

by cloudy on Nov. 12, 2008

Great! Let me get a button made with 'Open Source for Big Brother!'

by Doug Merritt on Nov. 12, 2008

"While not everyone believes in bio- and neurofeedback..."

False. Both have been firmly established for decades and are quite mainstream, not fringe. Indeed it would be fringe to claim otherwise.

You may be getting confused with the topic of polygraph tests,

which indeed are not at all reliable as lie detectors, which is why

they are typically not admissable in court, and although they are

used in the private sector, should not be.

by Doug Merritt on Nov. 17, 2008

Hi again Lisa,

You're raising a different question there, whether bio-/neuro-feedback is efficacious for treating some particular thing such as ADHD, and that has to be taken a topic at a time. Feedback systems may or may not be useful for some particular application area someone decides to try to apply them to.

I'd love it if I could use biofeedback to lose weight, for instance, but I have a feeling no one has pulled that off.

The part that is long proven is the basic stuff that the words "biofeedback" and "neurofeedback" *mean*. If you're given feedback about something like heart rate, then you can learn to control your heart rate to some extent. Same thing with basic EEG such as alpha versus beta waves. Fairly inexpensive devices to allow learning alpha wave production from neurofeedback have been on the consumer market for decades; there's nothing controversial about those basics.

Non-feedback EEG of course has many critically important medical uses, and is even getting incorporated into computer gaming, so any project like open EEG that open sources the topic is potentially a boon to us all as individuals.

Polygraph on the other hand is a monitoring system, not a feedback system. An operator monitors physiological signs looking for patterns of stress. They are reasonably reliable at doing that, but the problem is that the correlation between patterns of stress and lying is completely unreliable.

In fact, polygraphs work best as lie detectors when they are used with (in all seriousness) naive, under-educated, preferably unintelligent subjects who are overawed by the machine, process, and operator, and who believe that it is an infallible lie detector. A good fraction of such subjects will just give up and confess without need for the polygraph, and many of the rest will be so afraid that their physiological stress responses may be amplified when they lie, making the process work more like that authorities wished it always did.

The short version is that polygraphs are useful as a tool for intimidation by authorities (police, FBI, employers, etc), which is why they are loathe to give it up, even though they are aware that it is not a reliable lie detector.

You can imagine that that practice strikes me as immoral and corrupt in multiple ways, and so I'm not happy when people lump polygraph and EEG/biofeedback together -- technically they are related subjects, but the differences are sharply important in the real world.