**3. A very brief history of neurofeedback**

Neurofeedback originated as EEG biofeedback and developed nearly at the same time as EEG, itself, beginning in the 1930s with Hans Berger and his colleagues toying around with this new machine to watch how their brainwaves changed with different perturbations [60, 65, 66, 77, 78]. However, neurofeedback as a therapy did not start until the 1960s after Barry Sterman discovered that neurofeedback training could protect cats against jet fuel-induced seizures [67]. Around the same time, another scientist, Joe Kamiya, was also conducting neurofeedback using alpha (α) training, which he found was able to reduce anxiety [77, 78]. After publishing an article about his experience with α training, public awareness and interest was piqued, so more people decided to try it out. Some people who tried α training had a spiritual experience, which is great for them, but, unfortunately, it did not bode well for the reputation of the emerging field of neurofeedback since the spiritual effects were seen as contrary to true medical treatment or therapy [66, 77, 78].

Although the remainder of the history of neurofeedback is quite interesting and provides a good background for why the field is so divergent today (primarily due to in-fighting between pioneering researchers), it is not within the scope of this article to present. Therefore, the reader is directed to many other resources where they might find a history of the field [65, 66, 77, 78]. The main points here are that neurofeedback began as EEG biofeedback, which developed out of pure curiosity about how one might be able to control their brainwaves through visual feedback of their activities, and the original methods that were developed were α training and SMR/beta (β) training.
