An effective treatment to completely alleviate chronic
tinnitus symptoms has not yet been discovered. However, recent developments suggest that
neurofeedback (NFB), a method already popular in the treatment of other psychological and
neurological disorders, may provide a suitable alternative. NFB is a non-invasive method generally based on electrophysiological recordings and visualizing of certain aspects of brain activity as positive or negative feedback that enables patients to voluntarily control their brain activity and thus triggers them to unlearn typical neural activity patterns related to
tinnitus. The purpose of this review is to summarize and discuss previous findings of
neurofeedback treatment studies in the field of chronic
tinnitus. In doing so, also an overview about the underlying theories of
tinnitus emergence is presented and results of resting-state EEG and MEG studies summarized and critically discussed. To date,
neurofeedback as well as electrophysiological
tinnitus studies lack general guidelines that are crucial to produce more comparable and consistent results. Even though
neurofeedback has already shown promising results for chronic
tinnitus treatment, further research is needed in order to develop more sophisticated protocols that are able to tackle the individual needs of
tinnitus patients more specifically.