Behavior: No Deus ex Machina

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Limited Acceptance. One problem was that "electronic yoga" was upstaged by other marketable versions of yoga — Transcendental Meditation, for example — that do not require relatively expensive machines. Another has been the sheer quackery of some promoters who were quick to jump on the biofeedback bandwagon, and the limitations of the equipment for home use. According to Brain Researcher Robert Ornstein, "Commercial machines are not good enough to get alpha feedback, and certainly wouldn't help a person much. They might be fun."

With the faddish phase of biofeedback over, serious researchers are continuing to inch ahead, recording small but solid gains and winning limited acceptance from the medical establishment. In Ornstein's words, biofeedback still "needs a lot of work." Says Thomas Mulholland, former president of the Bio-Feedback Research Society and head of the Psychophysiology Laboratory at the Bedford, Mass., Veterans Administration Hospital: "It is one technique, and not the kind that will lead to a great theoretical breakthrough. I would say biofeedback will have arrived when it is unobtrusive again and taken for granted as one method in the stream."