Thursday | May 22, 2025 | 3:00pm PST

  TITLE: Self-Regulatory Competence: Our foundational skill. 

Our healthcare crisis is rooted in a mental health crisis, which in turn is traceable largely to early development. Our children grow up under conditions of ‘civilizational stress’ that fundamentally reorients neural development. Resulting self-regulatory deficits precipitate a cascade into progressive dysregulation that eventuates in chronic medical disease. Restoring self-regulatory competence by way of endogenous neuromodulation is proving to be a potent countermeasure. This is best done by recapitulating the developmental hierarchy, which also sets the stage for a move from a remediation model to a prevention model in early childhood. Prevention is function-focused rather than deficit-focused. Hence it should be universally available, by analogy to vaccines. Accordingly, as there is no specific therapeutic objective, this early intervention should qualify for the wellness designation of the FDA.

About Siegfried

Dr. Siegfried Othmer is a physicist who has been engaged with clinical neuroscience for 40 years, along with his wife, the late Sue Othmer. They co-developed a non-prescriptive approach to neurofeedback, endogenous neuromodulation, which involves neither stimulation nor discrete reinforcements. This approach has been implemented in three generations of instrumentation design, NeuroCybernetics, EEGer, and Cygnet. It has been taught to some 20,000 professionals over the course of 35 years. Othmer is currently Chief Scientist at the EEG Institute in Woodland Hills, California, United States. He has written and lectured extensively on neurofeedback, and is the author of two books.