Neurofeedback: A Review of BrainCore Therapy

Let me say up front that we hold no financial stake in BrainCore Therapy. That matters for a review like this, and it also makes the review easier to write, because almost nothing about what BrainCore does is new. The company offers neurofeedback to adults and children, sometimes for a diagnosed psychological problem and sometimes for people who just want to tune up how their brain performs. Neurofeedback itself has been in clinical use for more than forty years, and thousands of practitioners worldwide fold it into their work. So a fair assessment of BrainCore ends up being an assessment of the whole method rather than of one company's secret sauce.

If you have landed here while deciding whether to send a family member, a friend, or yourself to a BrainCore provider, the reassuring part is the track record behind the technique. These protocols have been tried and retried in private practices for four decades. Dr. James Hardt of the Biocybernaut Institute, for instance, was among the earliest researchers to study neurofeedback, working with Dr. Joe Kamiya at the University of Chicago back in the 1960s. In those first experiments Kamiya attached electrodes to the scalps of graduate students and asked them to push their Alpha brainwaves up or down. That was neurofeedback in its infancy, decades before anyone wrote a word about BrainCore.

The original work used a single electrode on top of the head. Equipment has multiplied since: companies such as BrainMaster, Thought Technologies, Vilistus, IBVA, and the Mind Mirror all build gear in this space now, among others.

What BrainCore sells rests on a straightforward picture of the brain. Billions of nerve cells coordinate by passing electrical signals from region to region, and those signals can be picked up at the surface through Electroencephalography, or EEG. Put electrodes on the scalp and you get a readout, whether the brain underneath is functioning at a high level, within a normal range, or showing something off. Place several electrodes and you can watch how activity differs from one part of the head to another.

Once software has processed that activity, the reading can be routed into something a person actually sees or hears, a video or an image that shifts as the brain shifts. Alertness tends to ride on faster waves (Beta), while a relaxed state tends to ride on slower, medium-speed waves (Alpha and Theta). As someone learns to make themselves more alert or more settled, those Beta and Alpha readings move with them. The software might then brighten an image when Beta rises and dim it when Beta falls, or run any number of similar arrangements.

That loop is the whole idea. Interior states line up with electrical activity in the brain, and when you make those small electrical changes visible and immediate, a person can learn to steer their own brainwave patterns more deliberately. Everything BrainCore does sits on top of that one mechanism. Reviewed against the common protocols, their approach looks like a fairly standard application of what the field already does, used by practitioners for people dealing with ADHD, anxiety, depression, traumatic brain injury, and other conditions, as a medical professional sees fit.

On the question of controversy, neurofeedback on its own is not an especially contentious thing. Some people do question whether it holds up as a medical treatment for psychological problems, arguing the evidence is still thin, and that is a reasonable position. The studies indexed through the National Institutes of Health database are enough, in my reading, to justify more research rather than to close the book.

The FDA has not reviewed BrainCore's particular methods, which means the company cannot claim its systems diagnose, treat, or prevent any disease. Absence of that clearance is not proof the systems do nothing; it mostly reflects what clearance costs. Getting FDA sign-off runs into the millions of dollars per condition, and each disease state has to be submitted separately. Neurofeedback for depression, for ADHD, for anxiety: each would be its own application. Because of that, BrainCore can only present its work as part of a healthy lifestyle or as a supplement within a physician's plan. A doctor retains discretion to prescribe it off-label, but the company is barred from advertising it as a treatment.

Betsy DeVos is also part of the story, having drawn her own controversy into the orbit of BrainCore neurofeedback, which is worth noting in any honest accounting of the brand.