Biofeedback is a new method for individual behavior therapy, which uses the control of electronic instrumentation and is scientifically proven. Biofeedback may be defined as the technique of using equipment (usually electronic) to reveal to human beings some of their internal physiological events, normal or abnormal, in the form of visual and auditory signals in order to teach them to manipulate these otherwise involuntary or unfelt events by manipulating and displaying signals. One can bring bodily processes under conscious control. Biofeedback enables a person to gain absolute control over mind and body. This means, that if we put all of our attention and control to a particular bodily condition, a particular organ or the brain-field, we can voluntarily affect that condition, organ or field. Even in the field of athletics, biofeedback plays a very important role, because people discovered that proper training methods and the appropriate instrumentation can remove mental blocks preventing one from achieving higher performance. Biofeedback trainers have worked with ice figure skaters, marksmen, hockey players, gymnasts, runners at all levels, often at the elite olympic level. Biofeedback is the most direct method to change the biofield (both brain and body-field) and thereby improve physiological and psychic conditions permanently (psycho-neuro-cybernetics).

In the last few years we have just begun to discover the unlimited possibilities of the mind.
Jean Houston 

The coined term biofeedback (feedback of biological processes) is a shorthand term for external psychophysiological feedback, physiological feedback, and sometimes augmented proprioception. The basic idea is to provide individuals with increased information about what is going on inside their bodies, including their brains. The field that deals most directly with information processing and feedback is called "cybernetics", founded by Norbert Wiener. A basic principle of cybernetics is that one cannot control a variable unless information about the variable is available to the controller. The information provided is called feedback

The term biofeedback developed out of several scientific discoveries, that revealed without a doubt, that humans, as well as animals, have the ability for self-control of bodily and mental processes, especially the autonomic nervous system, where in the past one thought that the ANS functioned automatically beyond conscious awareness, hence beyond voluntary control. First efforts in this field go back to at least the year of 1926. The term was finally adopted at a meeting of scientists in Santa Monica, California, in the year 1969, combining many different research fields under one common thought: biological reactions can be voluntarily influenced by feedback. The conscious control of inner bodily processes, for a long time the secret of eastern philosophies, was first practised in clinical trials and later in clinical settings treating patients.

From early on biofeedback instruments in the form of lie detectors were used in legal courts, especially in the United States.