A U.S. scientist experimented on Indigenous kids to cure them of trauma. One critic calls it ‘bonkers’

Hardt says it’s laughable to suggest that neurofeedback can accomplish anything in just a few minutes, as Rogel suggests.

He said he did make modifications to the protocol for the sake of the children, limiting the training to just a couple of hours a day. Some study participants confirmed that duration while others told CBC they were in the chambers for much longer.

Furthermore, Hardt said that while Biocybernaut administers neurofeedback without a practitioner in the room, his staff are carefully monitoring participants by video. 

Robert Thibault, an independent research scientist who has been studying neurofeedback for years, says the most reliable research has concluded any benefits from neurofeedback are due to placebo effects.

In research he published while at McGill University in Montreal and the University of Bristol in the U.K., he reviewed thousands of neurofeedback studies, finding that only 11 of them met the gold standard of research: double-blind placebo-controlled trials.

In those studies, some participants were watching their brainwaves in real time while others were watching a recording of the brainwaves of someone else — essentially fake brainwaves. Thibault said in all but one of those studies, the people watching fake brainwaves improved at the same rate as those watching their own brainwaves in real time.

“People might be getting better from neurofeedback, but that improvement isn’t because they’re watching their own brain activity,” said Thibault.

He said the improvement is instead likely attributable to the “whole healing environment,” which includes a caring clinician and an intensive focus on trying to improve.