A former colleague of mine left academia to set up a practice doing neurofeedback (as she called this kind of thing where they are detecting some kind of brainwave pattern from the scalp, as opposed to the kind where they are using heartrate etc. - it may be that neurofeedback is the thing to google.) She was pretty open about it being something that's not terribly well supported by research at this point, but she was optimistic that it has real potential beyond placebo: I'm not in a position to judge. In her practice it sounded as though there was software that would translate different patterns into different behaviour of something on a screen. E.g., if you wanted to encourage some particular pattern of brainwaves, then when that pattern was detected an icon on the screen would move; when it wasn't, the icon would stay still. Thus what you try to do is move the icon, and in the process of learning to do this you learn to alter the brainwaves to the desired pattern. It's apparently clear, and unsurprising, that people can learn to do this with practice. The $64K question is whether that learning actually helps with ADHD or whatever. It seems biologically plausible that it conceivably could, but if I were planning to use it, I'd certainly be looking into the research and interviewing the practitioner carefully.
