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Brain Flexibility, Resilience, and Choice as Goals for Neurofeedback

February 4, 2026 Comments Off on Brain Flexibility, Resilience, and Choice as Goals for Neurofeedback

This week at BioSource.com, expert neurotherapist John Anderson expounds on what is and is not a goal of neurofeedback:

1. Neurofeedback isn’t about changing personality — it’s about enhancing skills.
Anderson explains that parents often worry that neurofeedback might alter who their child is. Instead, the focus is on training three core capacities: flexibility, resilience, and choice — skills that support learning and adaptive functioning without eliminating existing strengths or personality traits.

2. Flexibility — the ability to shift between mental states with control.
This means moving smoothly between focused attention, relaxed alertness, and other states depending on the task. Anderson highlights that successful performance (e.g., in learning, music) involves this ability to adaptively shift network states.

3. Resilience — the capacity to maintain or return to a desired state after disruption.
Neurofeedback appears to help strengthen sustained attention and the ability to stay engaged or refocus, drawing on research about attention systems and training effects.

4. Choice — selecting one’s desired mental state.
Here choice refers to being able to consciously enter a calm, attentive, or otherwise preferred state. In clinical contexts like addiction recovery, improved ability to choose sobriety-supportive states is discussed as an example.

5. Real-time feedback accelerates skill learning.
Because neurofeedback offers immediate information about brain activity, trainees can learn to regulate their own states more rapidly — similar to how biofeedback trains heart rate variability or muscle tension.

6. Flexible, resilient, choice-driven regulation supports life goals.
Whether improving attention, emotional regulation, performance, or recovery outcomes, these trained capacities are broadly beneficial and apply across contexts.

Brigid Turner was raised in Arcata, California and then attended Utah State on a full ride scholarship to play NCAA Division 1 soccer where she was the leading scorer and Female Athlete of the Year. She played 1 year of semi-professional women's soccer for Arizona Heatwave before earning her Juris Doctorate at University of Oregon School of Law. She practiced law as a D.V. and child sex abuse prosecutor for 12 years before going into personal injury law, but ultimately found her passion in the neurobiology of trauma and the brain. She recently graduated with a masters in Applied Psychophysiology from Saybrook University. She lives in Bend, Oregon with her two young sons.