Dear Peter,
Ni hau! Thanks for contacting me. I am personally interested in this technology, and would welcome any further information you can provide me.
With regard to the application of biofeedback in golf, this is a matter that is somewhat ahead of the crowd, but is still a useful and promising application for commercialization.
First, the golf market is a notoriously tough nut to crack. Golf technology is rendered acceptable to the generally unadventurous, mostly male golfing public through the established golf media (Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, and the Golf Channel). This is the typical route for introducing new training aids, like the Medicus or the Kalasky swing trainers or new designs in equipment technology. These new products require a very capital-intensive marketing campaign -- something like $40,000 for a one-half hour infomercial broadcast on the Golf Channel, and an up-front investment in producing the program of about $100,000 to $200,000 or thereabouts. The golf retail chains, major sports equipment chains, and the on-course pro shops basically will not touch a new product without this sort of major marketing effort, and will not retain the product without fairly quick and dramatic bottom-line results. The closest technology to biofeedback is the Q-Link pendant that claims to protect the wearer from stress-inducing, ambient electromagnetic radiation. This product is backed by some manufacturer-sponsored university research and a major marketing campaign. It sells normally for $129.00, I believe. The word-of-mouth that the marketing campaign has been trying to engender is only now beginning to grow, after about three to four years. All of this is to say that market penetration of new technology in the golf industry is a pretty specialized and difficult assignment.
Second, biofeedback technology is doubtlessly regarded as "fringe" science, not because of any intrinsic character of the science, but because its methods and workings are not at all familiar and its usefulness to golfers not self-evident. The NASA imprimatur would certainly help, but there are still systemic problems in introducing new technologies into golf. Course pros as a group are trained by the PGA to be very careful in use of their marketing space, partly to maximize sales, but also to perpetuate the "traditions" of the game in a conservative fashion. Golf shops sell clubs and shoes and shirts and balls and little else. Of all the hundreds of putting aids and swing aids available, practically none of them find space in the usual golf retail stores or the pro shops. A quick glance around any airport PGA Tour shop shows you that only a very select group of books and tapes makes it onto the shelves for teaching golf (about 15 titles out of a possible 200 at any one time), and nothing in the way of teaching aids (out of a possible 200 or so to choose from). This state of affairs bespeaks the golf industry's general refusal to embrace teaching-related merchadising. With just a few exceptions, PGA teaching pros maintain the pretense that teaching golf is a matter of explaining body positions and movements, mostly by example, that is not helped much by technology apart from using videotaping of the student. So, even if the technology is not only clearly normal and its usefulness immediately apparent, the PGA course pros are still not likely to embrace it on a wide scale. This leaves the proponent of the technology attempting to explain it directly to the golfing public. That means infomercials and direct sales. A recent attempt to capitalize upon the draw of Tiger Woods of younger, edgier people into the staid world of golf was FringeGolf.com. This project ran for two years touting a less traditional attitude to golf and it flopped. Biofeedback technology is only now coming into its own for learning and developmental disabilities, so it is surely a far piece further down the road before it becomes acceptable in the conservative leisure world of golfers.
Third, as I understand biofeedback technology, it is a matter of regularly scheduled sessions to train familiarity and the ability to induce target brain states (e.g., alpha waves). Very, very few golfers undertake a "project" of golf skills development of this span and depth. More normally, the golfer will take one or two full-swing lessons and then just read the magazines and try a tip every now and then. PGA course pros almost never take lessons themselves. More serious amateur golfers usually restrict their spending to a local, trusted golf instructor. Serious semi-pro golfers have sponsor money to help them be free to play, but they don't have money for sustained learning programs. Major pro tour players have plenty of money, little time, and a great distrust of anything related to golf instruction that does not come packaged with ten or more seals of approval from other golfers they already respect. The typical pro reaction to new technology, e.g., belly putter, is to sit back and wait and see how it works for other, braver (or more desperate) souls. Something unfamiliar like a regime of biofeedback training, with uncertain usefulness and methodology and a serious investment of time, would not look very attractive to many golfers at any skill level.
Fourth, putting instruction is the rump of golf instruction. For every one knowledgable putting instructor on earth, there are at least 5,000 full-swing instructors. (There are 25,000 PGA instructors in the US and nearly ALL of these know practically nothing about putting beyond the trite fare perpetually served and reserved by the golf magazines.) And there really are not more than a few instructors truly competent in teaching both the full swing and putting. Almost all instructors are only competent to teach the full swing, and mostly fake it when asked (rarely) for a putting lesson. To the extent you may view biofeedback as especially suitable to teaching putting, this extra difficulty in the current market is worth noting.
All that said, I personally believe there is a commercial FUTURE for biofeedback / neurofeeback technology in teaching golf and enhancing golf, especially putting. There is a growing group of golf instructors who approach golf from a wider scientific perspective than the dominant engineering / robotics perspective. Indeed, your NASA references are clearly intended to cloak biofeedback with the aura of engineering science. Dave Pelz has done the same in his books, and on his videotape about putt reading he even features video footage of the Space Shuttle blasting off into the wild blue yonder. So, as a result of repeating his former NASA connection for about 30 years, Pelz has firmly associated NASA science with golf in the popular golfing mind. While biofeedback is more about neurophysiology than engineering -- how the athlete's brain and body actually work in perceiving the athletic situation and managing the psychological issues and generating and executing the athletic performance -- the NASA affilitation with your technology will doubtless help with golf media and golf popular acceptance, at least gaining a willingness to listen.
Unfortunately, this part of the golf-instruction scene is somewhat divided into the old-line "academic science" group and those without the imprimatur of universities. The academics are shackled by hidebound scientific methodologies such as the shop-worn procedure of comparing condition A to condition B (versus control) with a priori criteria. As a result of academic culture and funding patterns and career advancement, academic research is almost unfailingly anemic, abstruse, and not understandable by golfers. It doesn't help that the work is designed in a cookie-cutter way and stays confined to the same tired old themes (mental practice, interventions for stress-inoculation, visualization, and the like). Nor does it help that academics aren't all that knowledgable about how golf is played and what are its important or salient performance cues. A ton of academic golf science is unadulterated drivel that the golfing public is blissfully unaware of and wouldn't understand how to apply even if forced to attend a symposium. Tragically, the golf media want to stand in the glow of "science" for marketing purposes, and so buy into the popular, ill-formed notions of what passes for "respectable science" in their readership's set of attitudes and beliefs. In that scheme of things, NASA / engineering "sells" but biofeedback is "vodoo science."
Those who appreciate the role of brain-wave management in athletic performance and are willing to pursue the matter publicly are not suited to the academic realm. Academia views biofeedback as a relic from the ESP / TM / hallucinagens 1960s. It will be another 10-20 years before biofeedback is considered mainstream for purposes of academic pursuit and career advancement. The example that comes to mind is Dr Debbie Crews at Arizona State University. Debbie studies brain-activation patterns in putting with EEG and recently with fMRI, and also works with ADHD Native Americans. She has done some experimentation with biofeedback, but has published very little on this as applied to teaching or learning golf. From her published works thus far, it is apparent to me that she is following a conservative, bottom-up empirical investigative model in designing her research, as if she is studying brain science rather than golf, with golf being only the excuse to study the brain. This is a result of the hampering effect of academic culture which demands a lab-rat style of experiment design for the sake of scientific legitimacy in the funding and career advancement realm, and is exactly backwards of what is useful to the golfing public. She publishes papers in the World Scientific Congress on Golf that might be read by a total public readership of perhaps 500, mostly other academics, and none of what she publishes constitutes a science basis for specific techniques or approaches to golf performance. There is simply a giant gulf between what her empirical studies suggest about optimal brain states for putting and how that translates into what the golfer should do to play the game better. Who cares what her brain studies show if she can't connect it to what a golfer should do? This is where science is failing golf.
Popular acceptance and hence wide application of new technology in golf comes usually from either golf media endorsement, pro player endorsement, or top national teacher endorsement. With respect to top teachers, there are lists of the top 100 teachers according to Golf Magazine, and the top 50 teachers according to Golf Digest, and there are also top teachers in each state (about 400 total nationally). There are teachers of the year for each PGA regional section and national PGA teacher of the year. There are invited teachers who present sessions at the PGA's National Coaching and Teaching Convention. The PGA has a national instructional director (Rick Martino) and a national practice facility and a manual. The LPGA has a director of instruction trained in educational psychology. Of all the national golf instructors, only about 20 or so have operations with sufficient scope and stature to command much popular following with endorsements (e.g., David Leadbetter, Jim McLean, Jim Flick, Rick Smith, and a handful more). Your product would probably be suitable for application in the context of the regular clientele of an established golf school, as this would permit the time for guided usage necessary to derive its performance benefit. Depending upon your pricing, golf schools that feature cutting-edge technology are not averse to trying a new technology. The Nicklaus-Flick Schools and the Leadbetter Academies and the Mclean Golf Schools certainly consider themselves technologically sophisticated, and so are a promising tact for you.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is gaining a foothold in golf instruction, and is a specialized form of hypnosis. NLP is a chief rival to biofeedback in mind management for sports performance. Similarly, aural-beat and light-wave pulse brain entrainment is an interesting and related technology with golf applications. People involved with bringing these mind-body techniques to bear on golf would seem naturally interested in your biofeedback application. There are companies out there making compact disc products for golf hypnosis and golf relaxation brain-entrainment music or sound. A former neurologist (dyslexia specialist) from Baylor Medical School teaches golf psych on a hypnosis CD (Fran Pirrozolo) and the head golf psych of the David Leadbetter Golf Academy (Dr Robert Winters) has a CD for putting hypnosis called the "Putting Genius." Dr Nick Rosa in Tennessee teaches NLP for golf, and there are many others also. Maggie Connor of Ultimate Journey in Boulder Colorado is a master hypnotist and a national mogul ski champ who was featured on NBC during the Salt Lake City Olympics for her work with US skiiers. She has a golf hypnosis CD (
http://www.ujpro.com). Pual Overman in Wilmington NC has a CD of brain-entrainment music for golf. David Grant Geier in Strongsville OH has a golf school that teaches "transformational" and "integral" golf psychology and skills development, and his approach incorporates a wide range of meditative techniques. I'm sure he would be interested. Locally, I work with a neurofeedback specialist who is principally engaged in therapeutic applications for learning and behavior disabilities, but she is also keenly interested in applying her methods to golf. She is part of a nationwide network of neurofeedback practitioners who would doubtlessly be very interested in your golf applications.
The trouble that I see in applying neurofeedback to golf is in defining what brain states are truly optimal for the different tasks involved in golf, and in understanding the "natural ecology" of how these brain states come about in the golfing context. I am somewhat sceptical that simply training a facility to recognize and promote alpha waves is sufficiently sophisticated to be all that useful in the long run. The skills are attention skills, emotional management skills, perceptual skills, movement skills, and cognitive skills. The unfolding and meshing of these skills in an optimal pattern is very little understood generally by golf teachers (practically none at all, really), and I start from the position that anyone designing an application for biofeedback to golf knows LESS than an experienced golf instructor about what sorts of neurophysiological processes are really key to successful routines and skill executions. I also have a "naturalistic" approach to golf instruction such that any teaching aid that injects foreign imagery or thought patterns or behaviors into the golf experience is viewed as probably flawed and sub-optimal in the sense that the approach detracts from performance in some non-minor way. For example, I don't like stroke tracks to "train" or "groove" a stroke movement because of the visual pollution the practice brings to the green and the divorcing of aiming to a target and stroking that the isolated track practice promotes. The general fault with golf hypnosis is that it is far too general and emotion-related when it could be much more individualized and keyed to specific relevant visual, cognitive and kinesthetic cues in the performance process. Thus, the use of these approaches in NLP, brain-entrainment, and neurofeedback are currently all stuck at a very general level of application. As such, they are somewhat useful to novice or bad golfers, in that slowing down the brain enhances attention and promotes emotional tranquillity and smooth consistency, which is all to the good. However, these mind-body approaches probably won't really find their highest usefulness until designed in a top-down fashion to support and enhance very specific brain processes. Perhaps your approach differs from that of others, but the NASA connection suggests otherwise.
The current best use of neurofeedback is likely to be in stress management, rather than in enhancement of perceptual, cognitive, or movement skills. This is not at all a small thing in golf. At all levels of golf, from novice to local veterans to pros on Tour, stress management is a HUGE problem. The appeal of the Q-Link pendant, which includes quite a respectable number of pros, is its word-of-mouth reputation for helping keep the golfer calm under pressure. Whether this perception is real or placebo is another matter. Neurofeedback obviously has direct application to attaining mental calm and focus, and this alone ought to open doors for you and get the attention of key gatekeepers in the golf industry.
I suppose you are aware of the National Academy Press book by Dr Robert Bjork on enhancing human performance. He conducted a study of various approaches to improving human performance on behalf of the US Army. As I recall, his conclusion about biofeedback technology was "yet to be proven." So long as this general impression retains popular currency, and so long as the golf industry remains unadventurous and dominated by the PGA merchandising model of golf instruction, you will likely find only a limited present market for your application and broadening that market will be a daunting, expensive task. That being the case, I would recommend taking this tranquil opportunity in the slow progression of golf science to develop partnership-style research endeavors that involve creative and forward-looking members of the golf community in assisting your application to mature to its full potential and to pave the way for its mainstream acceptance. I see this as about a 5 year project, if handled astutely.
Personally, I am keen to help you in this time. Whatever role you may see for me in assisting you, do not hesitate to call on me. This area of golf mind-body enhancement is where I concentrate the great bulk of my time and effort, and I am determined to be a leader right on the cutting edge for the next thirty or so years. I can guide you in the development and tailoring of your application to golf in various ways, and also point you to the key gatekeepers in the industry for science, new technology, and popular acceptance. Since you are less than an hour from my house, I will be glad to visit in your office to explore this subject in greater depth at any time suitable to you.
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Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
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