Still 'Profiteering From Anxiety'

Late last year, the excellent Neurobonkers blog covered a case of 'Profiteering from anxiety'. It seems one Nader Amir has applied for a patent on the psychological technique of 'Attentional Retraining', a method designed to treat anxiety and other emotional problems by conditioning the mind to unconsciously pay more attention to positive things and ignore unpleasant stuff. For just $139.99, you can have a crack at modifying your unconscious with the help of Amir's Cognitive Retraining Technologies. It's a clever idea... but hardly a new one. As Neurobonkers said, research on these kinds of methods had been going on for years before Amir came on the scene. In a comment, Prof. Colin MacLeod (who's been researching this stuff for over 20 years) argued that "I do not believe that a US patent granted to Prof Amir for the attentional bias modification approach would withstand challenge." Well, in an interesting turn ...