This is why you can't get the kid to come from the TV to dinner because it's stepping down that and the theta is going to surge. It's going to feel like you're wrenching stimulus away from the brain. So you teach a teenager or a 45year-old that that is happening. This is why you're frustrated. Don't want to get up and do your work cuz cuz you're high stimulus. You have to go to a lower activation state and then decide. You know that's hard. [Music] I'm excited to share my conversation with today's guest, Dr. Andrew Hill. Introduced to me by AJ Wilder, our guest on episode 24, who's explored the benefits of Dr. Hill's work as an aerobatic pilot. Dr. Andrew Hill is a cognitive neuroscientist, Peak Performance Coach, and founder of Peak Brain Institute, where brain mapping and neuro feedback replace guesswork with data. His own early struggles with attention and anxiety sparked a lifelong curiosity. What happens when we can actually see what the brain's doing and train it to do better? Dr. Dr. Hill walks us through how this approach reshapes everything from focus and sleep to stress and mood. We also dive into the limits of diagnostic labels, the science of plasticity, and how everyday tools like real-time feedback and habit shifts can unlock meaningful change. This is a conversation about science, awareness, and adaptation to take greater control of your mind's potential. Let's start the show. Dr. Hill, thank you so much for coming on. I'm excited to talk. Hey, thanks for having me. Nice to be here. Um, so there's a lot of different directions I want to go here, but um, you run Peak Brain and that's going to be the anchor uh, behind where we're going. Um, and for the benefit of the audience, you have a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. So I want to go in a lot of different directions because I think there's an undercurrent in your field of study as it relates to many if not all the high performers that have come on to scales of success and what I'm most interested in sort of breaking down which is the science of recreating resilience. um in your work um I want to start with one specific thing which you had highlighted um why we should all get QEG brain mapping as it relates to agency. So I wanted to start at how do you define agency? So when it comes to the brain um there's lots of things that are hard to see. You know, if you break your arm, it's pretty obvious, but if you have a cramped up threat sensitivity or something, it's hard to spot from the outside. And because of that, we tend to carry this idea that psychiatric or suffering or other cognitive things are happening to us. We have diagnostic labels. We have disease processes. And a lot of things in the brain are not actually disease process. they are phenotypes or dysregulations, you know, variance on human versions or a normal resource that's stuck in a certain mode. And that's a very different mindset than I have a giant, you know, set of labels that in this this scary thing happening to me. So, a lot of what I do is help people look at the actual uh uh brain and and instead of worrying about the diagnostic label or you know what what what the assumptions are about what's happening, let's just look at brain function and performance in in attention and other things like that. And so, it's sort of like looking at your lipid panel and going, "Oo, I better back off in the Ben & Jerry's." you like you see your triglycerides off the chart, you're going to, you know, lay off the sugar if you're smart. And the data gave you agency, gave you the ability to take control, gave you perspective, actionable perspective, actionable insight. You know, change is happening. Shift happens all the time. And if you know what you're working with, then you know why it could be important to do something. So if I show you that your alpha waves are all spreading out in speed and say, you know, this often means difficulty with word finding and tip of the tongue and verbal fluency and internal speed of thought. Are you having, you know, oh, you are? Oh, okay. Well, might be because your delta here is excessive. I don't think you're getting good deep sleep. Stop eating before bed. Get up early seven days a week. Go for a walk when you first get up. And those are circadian tricks that you are able to decide are important because you know how your brain works. It's not a rule the doctor says don't eat before bed. We know we don't shouldn't eat before bed. If I show you what it's doing and then explain, hey uh the normal circadian rhythm as the uh end of the day happens the natural melatonin gets released completely shuts off pancreatic insulin. The falling insulin makes us snacky, which is an evolutionary trick because you eat the food if you have it. Don't let the other guy eat the food. Eat the food yourself. But problem is we have fridges and like you know 24/7 grocery stores now. So you want to resist that. And having any blood sugar after you fall asleep suppresses growth hormone release once you're asleep basically. So great way to rob yourself of deep sleep of dreamless restorative sleep is to eat before bed. So, you know, go to bed full and wake up fat and tired. Go to bed empty and wake up, you know, full of energy and raring to go. But it's a circadian reason. And knowing the reason, knowing how it impacts your life, your choices, your brain, gives you a different path you can start to decide to navigate. So, I'm I want to go into sleep because I think that that is a really critical component to all of this. But starting with you talk about um I mean all of this is being measured. You can never manage in my opinion what you cannot measure. What is measured is managed right and yeah it I'm I I feel really fortunate that we're in a a state of the world in in time where there is a democratization of information. Um everybody from the Peteras to the Ander Huberman's just as examples. you with your you've got a YouTube channel uh that's highly informative any lay person can get really up to speed foundationally on what's going on coupling that with I've started to experiment a little bit with concierge medicine and biomarkers increasing increasingly taking biomarkers which has um if I can just pause there for a second I I have found it to be remarkably beneficial in you know we're playing a whack-a-ole with our body you you know, does if I stop doing this or I stop doing that, what effect does it work? Cuz I does it have on my overall well-being is it and what root this was rooted for me was sleep. Sleep started to go south and it was exacerbated when I had a child two and a half years ago and I just realized that that was such a critical component to my overall day. If I didn't have good sleep, I couldn't function as well during the day and it was a downward cycle. if I could turn it, it became an upward compounding benefit cycle. And so, um, I I I say all of this because it, uh, relative to the democratization of information, uh, having access to being measured is this idea of agency for me has has a lot to do with the removal of victimhood, right? It's it's the idea of being able to take action to improve those neural pathways uh that neuroplasticity that allows you to interpret your external stimuli in a better way. So, I'm laying all this groundwork for you obviously to shoot holes in if you think that there's any any flaws in my line of thinking, but how do you see the chicken and the egg relationship between neural development in improving certain uh interpretations of your external stimuli and sleep because I think they seem to be sort of a yin and yang. Oh, yeah. It's hugely foundational. I I kind of consider three legs of a stool um in in a lot of human experience and human performance day-to-day as sleep, stress, and attention. And each of those things, two of those overlap as you go down below the stool, you'll find they share resources. So, executive function or attention and sleep have a very strong component. There's a brain wave we make a lot of to keep us asleep at night called sensory motor rhythm or low beta waves. And you've seen this brain wave if you've seen a cat on a window sill watching birds. That laser-like focus and liquid body. It's a very inhibited body, but stabilized attention. And that state is used for sitting still, staying asleep. It's also used to not be impulsive if you're a human. So, or to suppress seizures. If your brain is prone to seizures, you pump that that beta brain wave up a little bit and it suppresses the seizure phenomena. So this this inhibitory beta, this beta wave that's used to kind of gently steer everything happening in the brain ends up showing up across a lot of different areas of brain performance and sleep. Um, we call it sleep spindles. That's what the that's what this low beta frequency is. It's called sleep spindles when you're asleep. So a a car goes by and blar the horn. You don't need to wake up if you're used to that. So your brain goes, "Nope." And it bursts this frequency and keeps you asleep. So the dog barking, your wife kicking you doesn't wake you up every two seconds. Um, and we use this thing to inhibit to inhibit waking up, to inhibit getting distracted, to inhibit being fidgety. And beta waves, we kind of pump the gas in a system and it stabilizes, it stills, and it focuses. That is hard to maintain if you don't have good sleep. So as the quality of sleep, especially deep sleep, in terms of measuring, managing, you know, a lot of us have wearables and things these days, even the smart beds out there now. Um the the measurement of sleep is a little bit fraught with guesswork in the devices. It's kind of like a lipid panel again, you know, where a lot of the estimates up until the past 10 years were estimates were algorithms about how this works. Here's the total panel. Everything else is, you know, an estimate off of one fraction. It's kind of how sleep tracking works as well where they can get movement and total sleep and then deep sleep is a pretty reliable thing to get off those infrared wearables with the green light things. So, you can get deep sleep and what you can't get is REM off those devices and it's magical, you know, unicorn numbers pulled out of thin air as far as I can tell. Also, here's the thing. REM is not really amendable to lifestyle change. It's kind of like blood pH. You can't really muck with it. it it holds itself stable and if you get thrown off too much all hell breaks loose and you die. It's that it's that specific. So if REM is off by the time REM has gotten disregulated you've been hallucinating for a few months you know you're really distorted like you got a lot bigger problems than do I have enough REM? So what you can control and you can measure is deep slow wave sleep, deep sleep, restorative sleep, the release of growth hormone, you know, learning, memory, repair, all that deep dreamless state that is slowwave sleep or deep sleep on the trackers and it's relatively uh valid number and it responds to lifestyle interventions. So if you fast before bed, let your blood sugar drop, you'll get more of it. If you work out between 3 and 7 PM and burn off the cortisol, uh, when the cortisol is nice and low already, so you feel it, it burns off and moves. Heart's really big and powerful in that afternoon time, so you move a lot of resources. You get a good workout, you feel nice afterwards, gently depleted. That's the postcortisol burnoff state. It's great for sleep. It's good for circadian support. So the agency thing is you learn how the sleep works. You start dialing in sleep phenomena and your sleep tracker will show you that you're getting more deep as a function of the total hours. And then as you get really really good at it, you'll find that you can screw around with your sleep and your brain still prioritizes those two hours of deep in the first half of the night. If you get four hours or five hours, you get the two. And if you get seven hours, you get the two. And the brain, you know, is is healthy enough to insist on that amount of deep sleep for rest and repair. Um, so that's a that's a measurable thing, but you don't have to invest, you know, hundreds in a wearable or thousands in a smart bed. There's good research showing that after a couple of weeks of tracking the quality of your sleep every morning, how do I feel? How much did I sleep? What was the quality? After a couple of weeks of that, humans are as accurate as sleep labs and but more accurate than wearables. Um, the the the pinnacle of a wearable is called an acttography. It's a it's a watch. It's very very sensitive to movement and it's more sensitive than the wearables we have in the consumer space. But they load you up in a sleep lab with EEG and acttography and the acttography is generally better at staging the sleep than the EEG is actually. So it's the it's the gold standards that movement and humans are as good or better than acttography it looks like. So you don't need a device, but you do need to get in the habit of measuring, evaluating, seeing what has affected it the day before, and then you can play around with stuff, and you'll feel more rested. So two questions. One is what what percentage of your overall sleep is the sweet spot for deep sleep? And then the second is there's a hundred variables that contribute to quality sleep, but what do you think are among the larger ones we can focus on during the waking hours? Yeah. So, in terms of amount of deep, it depends a little bit on age. So, if you are younger, you're going to need both a lot more hours and a lot greater percentages deep. So, if you're like a 9year-old, 10year-old, 12y old, you should probably be getting nine or 10 hours of sleep a night and like three hours of deep, you know, more, three and a half, uh, a lot more, ideally. And you'll go through spurts, too. Little kids as they go through huge growth spurts have these like unusual shifts in the sleeping pattern, which is normal. Um but for someone who's finished most their development who gets an you know a nominal eight hours probably more like seven seven and a half a night like most of us um getting those two hours of deep as for an adult who's post development post 25 years old two hours of deep should be the target regardless of how much sleep you get because there's a lot of normal variability. You might be a six hour sleep you know a night person and that's normal for you. You might be an eight hour only and that's normal for you. Both those people when they feel good are getting north of two hours probably. So is that I mean I'm roughing it here but a a third for a younger person and then for develop maybe a quarter to a third. Yeah. If your sleep's average but people have a lot of different sleep styles, a lot of different sleep habits. So there's a lot we can get away with. Humans are pretty resilient. Um the important pieces about sleep are giving your brain circadian when you're awake so it knows what time it is. If your brain knows what time it is, it can put up with slightly iffy sleep habits, sleep hours, sleep schedules. But if it doesn't know what time it is, then the brain starts to to move all of the body process. It slides past the earth's clock, and you end up with the circadian rhythm making you awake with cortisol in the middle of the night. You end up burning out, you know, 11:00 a.m. because that's when your body thinks you should be sleeping. the human circadian rhythm is longer than the earth's photo period, longer than the 24-hour cycle. So, generally, so you end up sliding slowly past the earth unless you get these resets. And the brain's very good at picking up resets. The strongest one from the outside world, the strongest exogenous cue for sleep or for circadian is when you eat. When you eat it, uh really eat in the time zone you want to live in is my number one hack for sleep. It's not when you sleep. It's not how you p wind down. It's not about evening light, which has almost no impact as far as I care I can tell. It's when you eat is the number one thing to pay attention to. And it's also the number one thing that people tend to screw up. Like it's really common to not do that one well. And so if you just pull back two hours for somebody who's insulin sensitive or maybe three or four hours if you're a little bit insulin resistant, just have a fasting window. The literature shows in um uh intermittent fasting the version called ETRF early timerestricted feeding where you put the fasting hour at the end of the day has superior health benefit than regular TRF regular intermittent fasting where you're like 168. So allow your blood sugar to drop at the end of the day. Go to bed hungry and you'll wake up taller, stronger, repaired, lean, you know, go to bed full of food and you wake up fat and tired having not slept that great. suppressed your deep sleep and kind of, you know, feeling loy. So, it's counterintuitive, but you can play with that first rule. I I think we can go we could talk for hours about this because I think it's um there's so many variables, but I want to transition a little bit to um peak brain, what you're doing, how is this being measured? Um and and what just maybe lay the groundwork for those who are unfamiliar. what does it look like for a patient of yours to be a part of this program and how are those metrics being measured? Yeah, so we do some assessments and we do some interventions and the assessments um collectively we call it a brain map and it's really two pieces. Uh one is a quantitative EEG and you'll often see those terms brain map and QEG equated. What that is is a measurement of your brain at rest. So you put a cap on the head, squirt it full of gel about 24 locations are picked up and the brain uh you measure across minutes 10 10 minutes or so eyes closed 10 minutes eyes open and the patterns you pick up are not the momentary events of thought or running the physiology. It's the standing patterns the the the features that are traits. So these are things that are always there. So I measured your brain and did a a resting set of maps. You take that recording and compare it to an average database of people your age and on a mathematical bell curve, look at how unusual you are in a bunch of heat maps and say, "Okay, you're weird. Great. People are weird. Don't worry about it." The goal is not to make you average. The goal is to use this and see what sticks out. See if it makes sense. So, you'll see patterns in the brain of little resting features. lots of beta brain waves, low amounts of alpha, the speeds are unusual and those have meaning often, not always. They aren't perfectly precise because, you know, to diagnosis because people are weird. So instead, you say, "Oh, look, this part of your brain's unusual in this way. It often means X or Y and the person starts laughing or their wife does in the next room because it's it's a thing." And you sort of paint out the blind corners by learning how your brain works. It's not here's your diagnosis. It's hey, here's your brain. Does this make sense? Oh, it does. Is it important? Oh, it is. Well, then you can change it is sort of that the the cascade real quick. So, how is all this being measured? You have nodes that the patient has. Yeah. Put a cap on your head. Little Lycra swim cap type thing with holes in it. And each hole has a has a silver or tin electrode, little round disc of metal. We squirt gel in all the little holes and it picks up your scalp electricity and a grid throughout your whole head and also your ear clips or earlobes. and you sit there for 10 minutes and just get the sort of everything at once and the same thing eyes open the brain's in kind of a different mode eyes open and eyes closed because the visual tissue wakes up and a bunch of things happen that look very different. So the baselines are kind of two flavors of the how the brain can baseline eyes closed and eyes open. And uh the map the the QEG is the same for you today, tomorrow, a month, six months, a year, five years. It'll change a little bit. It'll flex a little bit dayto day if you don't do something to your brain. If you do things to your brain, it'll change. get a concussion, get COVID, uh stop sleeping, go on night shift, develop a drug habit, like it it'll it'll shift, meditate for six months. Well, I was just going to ask that. Can you give us like an example as a baseline? Somebody who's suffered from ADHD for 45 years and a Tibetan monk who's been meditating for Yeah, they'll have different brains dramatically. Uh ADHD, someone sits down, puts a cap on. Oh, we also do an attention test before the QEG. So, we have the person do the world's most boring 20 minute computerized go no go style. Click when one stimulus pops up and don't click when something else pops up. So, activation versus inhibition. ADD versus ADHD essentially. Um, so we measure that against the population as well and say your performance, look at this, you're inattentive a little bit, you're impulsive or it's auditory or it's visual or it's fatigue. And that's the performance piece. And it's a layer below the diagnosis of ADHD. It's all the individual resources of performance that kind of uh you can measure like stamina, reaction time, auditory performance, visual separately than just activation versus inhibition. So we did that piece of it with performance, the cap on the head, sits still for 10 minutes or so, eyes closed, eyes open. And on that map, if someone had ADHD or something that looked like ADHD, because there's other things that can mimic it, you'll have um there's two areas of the brain between the top of the head and the ear on both sides kind of the middle. Uh the pre-entral gyus or gyri for both of them. And the one on the left is a stabilizer of executive function. Starts action. It stays on task even if you're bored. It follows through. It alerts you to things as they're changing. The one on the right supervises. It sort of reads the map and says, "Hey, we're going to slow down up ahead to that right-hand turn." Helps like adjust what's happening moment to moment. And these pre-entral gyri are the most posterior part of the frontal lobe. And because of that, they're situated right over the mid strip. And so they touch all of the body descending information and receive all of the sensory information up from the body. And then they send it out into the frontal loes. So they are the mind body overlap. And the one on the left activates like the driver in the car. The one on the right supervises like the passenger in the car. They use beta waves to do their job. The one on the right uses that SMR, that sensory motor brain wave I mentioned earlier. So good robust SMR tone on the right hand side. You know if you're paying attention, you can sit still. You aren't going squirrel because you can resist information and stick to pattern, stick to plan. The one on the left makes a faster beta to do its job, 15 to 18 hertz roughly. And that stabilizes the mode you're in, keeps you on task, keeps you locked in, keeps you vigilant, keeps you focused, keeps you aware. It also turns off all those things and keeps you asleep at night. So the left side, if the beta's weak and the performance is inattentive, I'd be like, "Oh, look this left side. Lots of alpha kind of drifty tissue. Not a lot of beta." Oh, in your performance, you were kind of spacing out. This is inattentive. Um, it often means a sleep maintenance issue. Not staying asleep. Well, is that also happening? Oh. Oh, it is. Like maybe threequarters of the time person's like, "Yeah." And then the right hand side, oh, lots of theta, not as much beta, lots of theta brain waves, which is like taking your foot off the brakes when theta happens. So, a surge of release essentially. On the right hand side, lots of theta means impulsivity. And you can measure how well someone can stop themselves when that stimulus pops up, which is inhibition. So you can measure the performance and the brain, and say, "Wow, look at this. You're a couple standard deviations off the mean for performance and for brain on that right-hand tissue." This usually means like an ADHD type of thing. Does that make sense? Is that important? Okay, cool. So you kind of walk through there's maybe 20 or 30 phenotypes or patterns that show up in the brain maps in in the raw EEG that mean certain things. Stress, sleep, attention. There's about 10 or so regulatory features in the brain you can spot. They're not subtle, but they're also not um easy to understand. They're kind of like gross human things. So one would be attention. Those two sides I mentioned. We also have a lot of anxiety based flavored things. the anterior and posterior singulate for holding stuff in your mind or for evaluating the outside world. You've got a big sensory and social tissue chunk behind the right ear for mapping everything in some speed of processing stuff with the alpha speed you can see. So you get these like gross resources sensory, social speed, attention, stress and sleep. You can see brain fog. You can see um other things sometimes motivation and mood sometimes but they're not as reliable as you get up to higher level human things. So you go over someone's brain with them like a fitness coach sitting down at Equinox going ah distribution of body fat, strength, performance. Hey, what's um what's what's really important to you here? And based on that, I build a plan to make a change, which is where some of the magic actually comes in. People think the magic is looking at their brain and it's fun, but the change is where it's really gets fun. So So talk to us about how the change happens. What what's the process at pe brain? So there's this thing called neuro feedback that we do which is BOF feedback on the brain. And unlike bodybased forms of BOF feedback, this one's mostly involuntary. So I I described those two pre-entral gyus areas, the left and right gyri. And if you wanted to train your executive function and your sleep quality together, you would probably want to train the left one for 15 minutes and then the right one for 15 minutes in a classic workout. And so we would have you put ear clips on and stick a wire on those regions. and then set the computer up to measure the beta you're making on your own moment to moment and also maybe measure the alpha on the left and the theta on the right that you're making on your own moment to moment and your brain's making these brain waves and whenever they briefly flex in the right direction so the beta comes up briefly and the alpha goes down the left a computer again goes yay good job brain good job brain with some audio some visual the brain's like whoa hey I kind of like stuff there's some stuff and then the brain moves in the wrong direction a Couple seconds later, the beta goes back down and the game slows down or stops and the brain says, "Um, where where's my stuff? I don't like no stuff." And then it happens to flex in the right direction and the applause continues. The brain starts to notice, hey, wait a minute. I'm making beta stuff starts happening and it starts making little bursts of beta waves. And the trick here is that we adjust and move the goalpost. So, as it starts to move, we also move. So, we have we we keep a threshold adjusting. And so we're waiting essentially for the brain to always move in one direction. If it's really strong, you make it harder. If it's tired at the end of a session, it's fairly easy. But we're still catching the movement of those little beta waves, you know, flexing briefly in that tissue. And I say the brain is doing this because it's mostly involuntary. You can't feel your brain waves. Brain has no sensory nerve endings. So two three sessions in typically the the brain is starting to react the very first session but typically about three sessions in the brain goes oh oh you wanted beta here's some beta and you get three or four hours of like increased tone of that tissue and you you know stand up and you're like whoa huh I might be more clear focused I might be calm wait is this real this might not be real I might be a it's that quick. Yeah. A few sessions in and then it wears off and you're like, "Wait a minute. Was that was I was I really feeling something? I don't know. Hey guys, I might have felt something." Okay, try it again. The next day, do it again. A little stronger. And you're like, "Well, wait a minute. No, no, no. I think I actually think I'm feeling something." I had a guy yesterday who trained for the first time. I think he's in uh Romania or Croatia somewhere. He's been struggling such a hard time for years with strong anxiety. He's tried lots of stuff. He's a sophisticated consumer of health and and and medicine and he happens to be an early responder. So we did a session, a guided session yesterday with him and he left a note in his private chat saying, "Okay, too soon to tell, but I might have felt something." We're like, "Yeah, I'm great, great, great." And then this morning he made a note in his sleep survey saying, "Okay, um, yeah, that was different. I slept different." And then he did another session this morning and two hours later came on his channel and said, "Okay, I I mean, I didn't want to think it was possible, but I'm definitely feeling something." That's not the average person. Usually it's three, four or five sessions and you're like, "Hey, wait." Okay. Yeah, maybe. And then your sleep is a little different or your focus is a little different and it's not that dramatic and it wears off. And so you sort of iterate. try to stretch the different resources and go, "Okay, your goals might be met by bringing up those beta waves." You know, making those resources stronger, executive function, sleep. Cool. Let's do a bunch of sessions. Exercise in that tissue. Watch how you feel over the next day. And after a few sessions, you start to notice after effects starting to build up and linger and then wear off and you're like, "Oh, I had a really productive day. I'm clean my house." I was a good listener. My wife, I was just listening. I wasn't solving. It was great. You know, like so you got these phenomena happening or parents call me and say about three weeks in I asked my kid to take the trash out. I asked him one time he got up and did it. What is going on? You know, so like you you see a shift in resources a few weeks in. And you start to lean into them. You know, the first time you get in shape when you haven't met in a long time, 3, four weeks in, you're going for a walk and you're like, "Oo, my butt's nice. My balance is nice. I feel pretty good." And that happens with your attention, your stress response, your speed of processing. So verbal fluency starts to get better and you feel it. So you're like, "Wait a minute. Hey, I like this brain training stuff and that gives the the client, you know, really an it's a personal training metaphor where you're sort of iterating and trying stuff, seeing how it lands, adjusting, and then we go back and map the brain again and measure the executive function again toward the end of a two-month period, which is like how many sessions are going on in that two-month period?" 25 to 35. Okay. So, three to four times a week for about half an hour. Um, and that is right on the edge of where things start to stick, start to become more permanent. Usually, it's more like 40, 50 sessions. You can trust that whatever you've gotten done is your new baseline because your brain is now practicing attention stress. Even if you fall off the training. Yeah. Yeah. Generally most people get permanent if you will long lasting changes for uh you know for a long time after doing three or four months of neuro feedback which is like 30 or 40 sessions. That's the classic amount. I mean there's literature showing with ADHD kids you follow up 6 months 12 months 5 years and 10 years with stable effects and the seizure literature all of the metadata studies stop at a year and all and and they show stable effects up to a year. That's when they stop looking. So, I mean, it's it's a pretty robust effect. Um, it's not permanent right away, though. So, you have this opportunity to go, "Oh, I didn't like that." And let it wear off. Or it's not permanent right away. So, you're still suffering with your stress, your anxiety, your OCD, your drinking while you're working through it. But because you're working through it and starting to feel different, it is this sort of self-perpetuating thing. You know, you feel the effects of you putting the effort in. You're like, "Okay, no, I want to do this." like teenagers, you know, parents like, "Oh, my my s my 14-year-old won't do this." Four or five sessions in like what is going on? He asked to do it. Yeah, it feels pretty good. Feels kind of calming. What What is that attributable to? Is it is it just that the neural pathways have started to create or there are newer newer neural pathways? There's new ones and every cell has probably moved around. I mean, plasticity is fairly robust in brains just in general. Uh we have a lot more than we think we do. You know, even if you're 70 years old, you're still making six or 700 new neurons a day. New neurons, not plasticity, not moving around existing ones. And existing neurons can move pretty much forever. Make new processes, make new friends, make new connections. So if I sent you to a piano lesson, you don't play piano. In one single day, you know, trying to play piano for half an hour, the hand area on that motor strip would move all its little cells around trying to optimize one day, one session. and neuro feedback. One session of neuro feedback creates a measurable plasticity effect over 24 hours. You have this enhanced plasticity. So if you add things like meditation and sleep hacking and you're doing some psychotherapy with your therapist and you're working out in the gym, the neuro feedback starts to lubricate all those things. So I get calls from physical therapists saying, "What are you doing like with my client? She walked in without a cane today. I've been working with her for 10 years. Who are you?" Oh, okay. Great. Glad her balance is better. about her brain injuries shifting. So, you get this in the brain. Can we um can we stop on that for a second because I I am curious what how does this translate to physicality improvement? I mean because because we're talking more uh attention, emotion, uh focus, executive control, but how does that apply to, you know, somebody who might be partially paralyzed in a part of their body? Is is there any correlation here? Uh partial paralysis is hard because you probably lost the tissue and it's hard to, you know, rebuild. But I have had clients, lots of clients with brain injuries who have some spasticity or a leg that won't relax and you train the area and after a couple of sessions the the hand relaxes, the leg stops trying to get up and move on its own. So you can get effects there, but generally once there's significant tissue damage, it's a lot harder to make change. So um we have reliable changes in things like attention, anxiety and that when I say anxiety I mean PTSD, OCD, social anxiety, sensory anxiety, hypervigilance, rumination, all flavors um are fairly tractable and you can see them in the brain maps and this is the answer to your question. The reason that it's kind of the same why we get body effects is because your brain is your body. Your attention is part is the way your body is operating. Like think about how your bicep can flex. Your attention is doing something kind of like a resource management where it has abilities to move and it can kind of like tire out and it has certain regulatory ways it tends to operate in best and and you have, you know, 20, 30, 40 of these cortical areas that have big jobs, big stable jobs. And if you learn how they work, you can start to stretch them and move them lots of ways, but neuro feedback's pretty quick. It it seems like it would be involuntary how you start to stretch that, right? Yeah. The training process I mentioned the neuro feedback is mostly involuntary shaping. Yeah. Yeah. Because what I find so fascinating about this too is that um you know I read a study recently about the um have you ever seen that that magic trick where they uh put a mirror uh against somebody's arm and then they put a plastic hand in front of you and then you hit it with the hammer and you feel the pain. And so I'm really interested in how this impacts perception because it seems to me that, you know, how we perceive the world is how we approach everything, right? And so two people can see the same environment and have entirely different reactions to it. And I'm going to to places like PTSD, for example, how does this how does this work Sure. cooperate with um how we perceive the world and how let's say you know is is there an artistry here is there something you know I I don't want to say it's like lucid dreaming but is there a way to say I want to get better in this particular area sure and sort of focus on that yeah and and those areas are all over the place they're in they're in suffering areas or goal or high performance areas there's lots of things you can do so let's break down those two you know two of those examples you just gave PTSD type phenomena We've got a circuit in the back midline of the brain, the posterior singulate, whose job it is to orient your attention to the outside world. Watch the road. Heads up. Heads up. Careful. And if it learns the world is not safe. If there's tigers, you live in a jungle and there's tigers. You miss the tiger one time and the brain's like, let's allocate some resources because the cost of missing that twice, I'm not going to miss it twice. Let me allocate. And the problem is we get stuck in that mode. And then when the posterior singulates high in beta, often low in alpha, you'll get a lot of rumination, threat sensitivity, easily activated, panic attack. So it can be PTSD, might just be you you ruminate and you're a worrier. Or maybe on a brain map your posterior single, it's super hot, but you're an actual lifeguard and it's trained. Or you're a mom with 17 kids and you're fine with all the chaos. It's just strong. I can't tell if it's good or bad. But if I look at your posterior singulate and say, "Wow, this is really strong. This tends to be this evaluator and scanner." And when it gets like this, we often have a lot of difficulty putting down worries and not being threatens, not ruminating. Is that something you're dealing with? And the person most of the time says, "Yeah, I I have a PTSD diagnosis." And we would say, "Oh, okay. That kind of sucks. Sorry, dealing with that. That's so frustrating." But look it, it's right there. In just that moment, before we do anything before we've thought about interventions, that moment of like, oh, that real thing that sucks for you that people can't see. Oh, yeah. Right there. There's this incredible relief because people suddenly they're just as in pain. The suffering hasn't changed. But what's really hard to do is be as overwhelmed, as ashamed, as frustrated by it because you're like, "There's the thing. Okay. All right." And suddenly it's shifting. It's not happening to you. A doctor didn't give you a label. It's a it's a process. You're posterior singulate. Of course, it's strong. You were in a car crash and the brain learned the world isn't especially predictable. Wow, that sucks. Okay, what is what would what would you know success feel like? Relaxing that. Is that in the Oh, that's in the way. So then you'd train that down. In six or eight weeks, you'd pull the teeth of most of the classic acute PTSD. Or the other example, someone comes in and says, "I'm shut down. I can't find my creative spark. Can't feel my juice. Feeling kind of wooden and dull and burnt out in my 50s. I don't have any joy. I love my wife, I think, but haven't felt it in a while. You know, I do when I get home is drink alcohol and watch TV. I don't do anything like like you know I want to do. Where's where's my joy? And then you take people like that and after working out sleep and stress and attention basics then you do something called alphatheta neuro feedback which brings you to the moment of the edge of sleep before you fall asleep. That moment when you have the world's best idea you solve world hunger. You plot your book. You've you know solved that problem and then you fall asleep so it's gone. But you hold you there for 20 minutes at a time. And so ideas start to bubble up and the monkey mind drops away and awareness and insight and this powerful resilience starts to creep in. And that technique brings up creativity reliably. It takes the alcoholic who can't fall asleep without a drink and it re-educates the GABA in the brain. The person can decide to fall asleep with no alcohol again. It gives you that deep soothing soft nonlinear awareness. Um, and it's a it's a fairly for some people fairly spiritual and ecstatic state as well. Like a lot of deep insight. It's kind of a gentle way to release trauma for some people as well. Some like developmental trauma. Um, it's the core of Dave Asper's 40 years of Zen program. It's an alphatheta. That's what he's doing mostly is this alphatheta plus a mindfulness kind of instruction around it. Um, alphatheta is really powerful and it's been used for decades, you know, since before the field of nerf feedback really existed. It's been used for um alcohol recidivism and relapse. It's been used for creativity, for trauma. It's a really powerful set. So, somebody who wanted to get into that end of things, you'd want to lean into that technique. When you say alpha theta, well, first of all, can you just define the different the waves and what they mean? Sure. So, alphatheta is a category of nerve feedback named after two waves, alpha and theta. Alpha is a neutral. It's the car running in the driveway between the gears. And theta is a release. It's like turning the tissue off or letting it move into its automatic mode briefly so it can things can happen like the moment you have a sudden memory. Aha. That's a burst of theta. Little little release. It opens a floodgate and the thing pops up into your mind. Oh. Oh yeah. There's that thing. That's a theta burst. But so is like squirrel squirrel squirrel. I can't sit still. And you know you don't want tonic high levels of it. You want to turn it on and turn it off. Open the floodgate. turn off the floodgate of information of ideas and alphatheta neuro feedback. You close your eyes, you sit back and both the alpha waves in the visual tissue back here is what you're what you're measuring. They rise with the theta waves as you relax. And then there's that moment when you start to turn off your mind. You start to fall asleep a little bit. And at that stage, the relaxing alpha actually goes down. It goes down into like a more low mode and your mind gets clear again. the theta takes off and you're basically on the edge of a dissociative state but still aware and it's that hypnogogic access moment that you can get to when falling asleep in prayer in some aspects of meditation. It's that access consciousness that like you're receiving your mind instead of having your mind kind of experience and it's really interesting for people to to have that uh that experience and it can really be powerful. I mean Dave's program is kind of like a shamanic you know sweat lodge using alphatheta as the core technique and you get the experience you come back with that like wow I can feel that way I can have emotions oh my god I love my wife so you have this like you know progressive but you can also take somebody and work through you know months of it and take the the actor who's no longer funny because they're so stressed and burnt out the person whose immune system is trashed because of infections and bring up the tea cells uh you can do you know flow people that are shut down creatively. The same technique alphatheta was used in a micro surgery and 20 30 years ago robotic micro surgery was starting to show up and that was it was still fairly complex back then where like you had to like put your hands in gloves and do the surgery basically um one single session of neuro feedback in a in a group of I think 12 surgeons improved their micro surgery techniques one session for some reason probably wasn't a durable change but you can measure things like this in the literature fairly quickly when you do the technique and terms of measuring change. I mentioned I do like a two-month program initially. I usually do two rounds of that to get people through what they need, but the first one makes enough change for us to measure. So, we go back and do another brain map and a performance test 25 to 35 sessions in toward the end of a two-month period. And in things like ADHD on the performance and on the brain, those areas I mentioned, um, we see about a standard deviation of change across people most of the time in in one two-month chunk of time and another one does it again. So if you get two standard deviations of change on a bell curve and you're super super ADHD, guess what? You can hide it. You can sit quietly in class and listen and you can still be the fastest guy on the pitch or the video game. uh competition because you still have the ability to turn on high theta and be super receptive but you can also pump the brakes and be like I should sit in history class and listen or my my wife regulation what's that regulation it's it's regulation it gives you control over those tissues exactly so ADHD is not a disease process it's a phenotype you're stuck in that mode of high theta maybe high alpha and if you can learn literally learn teach the brain to take more of a range in control it's kind of like taking a circuit that's a bit cramped and isn't working properly and giving it a range of motion. Well, you're it's it seems like you're breaking the default network that we've either learned through conditioning or has been embedded in our own DNA, but there's a a breaking of uh in the conditioning world, you're talking about not having a drink before you go to bed because you've always had that. There there is a breaking of that. Uh sure. You're you're directly changing the brain. I mean, you're you're taking the traits that exist, the tendencies that exist, and you're tuning them. So, you can tune them a lot more than you might expect. Yeah. I I want to talk about a couple of other things before we do. So, you you mentioned alpha and theta. What about uh beta and gamma? So, delta is the slowest one. Uh delta is down to about between, you know, like two hertz, two cycles per second. Delta is the heartbeat of the brain. Delta runs the background, keeps things moving, your heart and lungs, your immune system, your growth, your repair, your deep sleep. Uh, you don't think in delta, you live in delta. Is that the only brain wave you might see in somebody who's brain dead? Oh, good question. Um, you will see a lot of reduced beta waves and a lot of low amplitude brain waves in general. And you might see delta if the brain stem is still intact and pretty healthy and the cortex is somewhat intact. You might still see delta big slow delta. Yeah. Um but when someone's deeply asleep and in that deepest of sleeps, you're going to see delta being strongest right then. But you're also going to see other brain waves still happening. So you're not only in delta, so to speak. In fact, delta is a really cool frequency. When when you're deeply asleep, it surges hugely and it's a two hertz wave. It's twice per second. And it literally creates a mechanical fluid wave in the brain like a like an agitation cycle of a washing machine. And the CSF the the fluid all gets pushed around in a two herz wave and it pulls out all the toxins, metabolic byproducts and drains them out into the spine essentially for flushing. Um but like a washing machine, you know, you hear the agitation cycle kick up. The brain does that during delta sleep. So you have these little surges at night and then when you're awake it hangs out in the background and keeps the body moving, the lungs moving, the heart, the immune system, etc. happening. So you'll see a little bit of it when you're awake. But if someone has a major concussion, if they have major apnea and they're not sleeping, if they've been exposed to mold or lime or had a lot of COVID, you'll see huge amounts of persistent delta or concussion, you know, tissue damage. you'll see a persistent blob of delta where the crush happened because the brain isn't sure what to do. So, it defaults back into the the background frequencies. Or if you shear the brain away from a a surrounding part of brain, it runs super fast and really fast beta because there's nothing coming into it to slow it down. No inhibitory inter neurons. So, delta slow and then you have theta 4 to 7, which is like taking your foot off the brake and letting things happen. Um, you have alpha between 8 and 12, and that's two things. 8 to 10 is slow alpha, which is like the idling, and 10 to 12 is the starting to ramp up before you kick it into gear. Then you have beta from 12 or 13 all the way up to 40 roughly. And that's where your mind lives mostly, the experiences, the thoughts, the sensations, focus, but also sleep is a beta phenomena largely a big monkey mind or uh heavy in ADD, higher in the beta waves. They can be, but usually they're much much higher in theta. They're disinhibited, so things kind of bounce around and run really quickly, but the beta is normal or typical. Okay. Sometimes you'll see low amounts of beta and average amounts of theta. that also produces impulsivity. So, it's either high theta and average beta or average uh theta and low amounts of beta. It's the ratio between them. The ratio of activation tone versus inhibition tone is how well you can control the tissue essentially. Yeah. And that can get in the way. I mean, you can have an ADHD like thing because you're super tired and you're impulsive because the the beta is too weak to like pump the brakes or you can have it because your theta is just high all the time because you're built that way. That's called ADHD. But and then gamma waves. Gamma is above 38 all the way up to several hundred. And gamma is one of these things in the health and wellness world that you should be suspicious of. You should put gamma in the same category as the word quantum. If you hear it in a in a health context, chances are the person's full of it. And chances are they don't really understand what they're talking about at best. You know, at best it's it's stupidity. At worst they're evil. Um, gamma is really hard to measure in a in a proumer, even a professional context. Gamma is really, really tough. And we know that gamma is also an emergent property of organizing the brain at long distances instantly. Gamma does not seem to be like the generation, you know, of one little spit bit of tissue. Instead, gamma emerges from the whole network to talk to other parts of the brain instantaneously faster than the neural transmission could get there. And we know that the relationship of gamma, which is let's call it 40 hertz, which is the gamma we that we have some measurement of, and theta four hertz, they nest. They they ring together. 10 cycles of theta for one cycle of gamma. And when they're nested, we call that consciousness. You give somebody uh anesthesia and they become unconscious, you break the the time relationships of theta and gamma because you change the timing of the microtubules in the in the neurons. So then you lose consciousness. So you can measure the phase relationship of gamma and theta on the forehead in surgery and tell if someone's conscious or not. There's a device called the bisspectral index that does this that used to be all the rage for 20 years in this country. It's gotten a little bit out of favor, but it's a single forehead with a number on a screen. Anesthesiologist watches it and tells if you're conscious or not. Really really reduce the amount of awake during surgery experiences. So what what is the definition of consciousness in that regard? Awareness. Just awareness. Momentary awareness. Yeah. Yeah. Low C, little C consciousness, not overarching identity or conscious. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So, what about flow? And I and I'll sort of give a little bit of uh groundwork from where I'm coming from, but I had we we met through AJ Wilder, who was a guest on this show, who's an aerobatic trick pilot. I mean, I that's doing him a huge disservice by describing it, but it is he is in uh an extraordinary strap small equipment to himself. Yeah. Yeah. Uh I had another guest who was an explosive ordinance disposal technician. disabled roadside bombs. But there was one common thread among both of them, which was when faced with life or death, their heart rates were not at 180, they were at 120. Their focus was supreme. Yep. It was almost as though um the way they were describing it is, you know, there's really nothing else going on and everything's a little bit slow motion. So there's a there is a a moment of zen that they are achieving. And I keep going back to that because that to me is maybe the closest um representation of of a flow state in in some respects. And I keep thinking, you know, is there a way to achieve some level uh approaching that level of uh uh comfort in certain circumstances without having to endure life and death circumstances? I'm I'm dumping a lot on you, but I think it relates to flow. So, I'm just curious your your perspective on this. I mean, for those that type of flow is an intensity driven flow. And I would say that, you know, you don't have to be an ultramarathon or diving off a cliff to experience it. You might experience it playing a video game because it's super intense and you're like feeling it. You just know when that guy's going to move. You know the pattern. You're you're you're in the zone. Doesn't take a lot of conscious thought to direct and push it. It feels somewhat effortless, but it's also a little bit creative. It has an awareness without a strong focus. All of these people that are in those intense experiences, what they're doing is shutting off theta. The mind is now apprehending the world very powerfully. It's locking into the world very very powerfully. So those flow states are actually not dissolved attention states. Those are actually fairly those are absorbed attention states. Attention can be uh an awareness state, watching things flow by, a single point awareness where you're absorbed, where you're concentrated. And those ones you mentioned, those flow states are much more of an absorbed state. Stock broker who's crushing it, the video game guy who's in a competition. The guy's h hurtling down a mountain side on a mountain bike trying to keep himself from, you know, dying as he tries to beat everyone else behind him. That's a high activation state. very fast brain waves, very fast beta, large amounts of beta, shutting off theta, and it actually feels very slow inside because, you know, think about it. If you're driving a a 12cylinder Ferrari down the highway versus a, you know, four cylinder, you know, Honda, your foot's in a different place on the floor. Like, you're you're sat back in that Ferrari and you're and you're powerful, but you're chill doing it. you're blown by all the other cars versus like you know right now ladder state is not flow. Yes, the former one is to bring up the power and to answer your question how to get there. It's a mix of executive function and creativity work. So those those beta wave areas, the presenter gyri and the alpha theta, the awareness, the visualization, the creativity because as you do more and more of those creativity protocols, you get more reliable access to shift into that mode where you kind of reach and pull out of that nonlinear state or allow the wellspring to start bubbling up ideas, then turn it off, go back to, you know, doing your taxes, whatever. So you have this ability to shift in and out. I would argue that's more important than can you get absorbed. Can you find the thing to put you in that state? Well, can you get there when you need to? When you're having a rough day or your partner was a jerk, you didn't sleep that well, you didn't have your coffee. Can you still go to work and be a leader in that mode? Because that's, you know, like where's the where's the the utility of it? Not just can we get access to states, but can you get reliable control like you said, regulatory control uh over what you're doing? Well, and I'm curious if you have a take on this, but I'm glad that you mentioned this uh comparison between the Ferrari and the Honda to me because a lot of this actually seems to contribute to willpower. And hear me out here for a second, which is that, you know, in order to do certain actions, you mentioned a teenager who didn't want to take out the trash who now is willing to do so because there that to me is less resistance in taking an action. And when there's less resistance, you don't use as much willpower to achieve that outcome. Yeah. I think it was activation energy. What's that? I think it was activation energy in ADHD. ADHD is a high theta state and the brain really really wants stimulus and when the stimulus is high that brain is sort of operating in its sweet spot. Like somebody who has severe ADHD is going to be a horrible accountant and an amazing crisis worker. You know, I put them in the the case where the patterns are changing all the time and they have to be on and it's intense and it's, you know, life or death or super fun. And that's when you get the highest performance out of somebody's ADHD because the environment can direct the executive function when you're required to direct it yourself from inside with low activation. This is why you can't get the kid to come from the TV to dinner because it's stepping down that and the is going to surge. It's going to feel like you're wrenching stimulus away from the brain. So you teach a teenager or a 45year-old that that is happening. This is why you're frustrated and don't want to get up and do your work because because you're high stimulus, you have to go to a lower activation state and then decide, you know, that's hard. But if you give the brain the ability, oh, I should do the trash, you know, mom says do the trash and the theta just on the ask from the mom, the theta goes down, the person anchors to the thought and goes, oh, that's interesting. Not it's going to take me away from the absorption I have right now. Right? Well, the taking away to me is the resistance, right? The resistance to do something. And I think that um I suffer from small tasks that I just don't want to do. Um but and though I can't I haven't gone through your program, but the closest thing I can sort of liken it to is meditation for weeks and months and months where I don't find it myself resisting doing some of those smaller things that took a lot of energy for me to do before. but maybe less so. And meditation brings up the beta on that left side. It helps you learn to initiate, sustain, follow through tasks. What has all of this? You have such a wealth of information on the brain. How has this influenced you on yourself as as a patient of your own? Yeah. Well, I mean the reason I'm doing neuro feedback now and the reason I probably have a PhD in neuroscience was because I would hang out after hours in a neuro feedback center I worked at 25 years ago. Um it was an autism center that did mostly neurodedevelopmental and autistic spectrum work with some you know pretty impaired people. Um, and I had done a lot of very acute work in psychiatric hospitals, in residential facilities with autism and other developmental things, working with really, really deep suffering across human experiences. And I got this job working in an autism center that was outpatient doing neuro feedback. I was kind of curious about what this stuff was. So, I ended up getting a job there. And within about three or four weeks, my mind was blown because I was seeing changes. And I had I had a decade of experience working with people like this. And as far as I knew, you couldn't really make change. Could manage suffering. I mean, I I ran a group home for folks that had no language. Um, I think everyone in the group home was both blind and deaf and developmentally disabled. And like I learned four different versions of tactile sign for that house. And I spent a year teaching a guy to use a fork. That was our big accomplishment was, you know, behavioral training so we can go out to the restaurant and not make a mess. But he didn't care. And I'm sure when I left that house, they didn't reinforce the the use of the fork and he probably stopped. And it was like, you know, very small change. And I had like a decade of working with huge suffering and almost no change. And I was good at it. So I was good at going in and soothing suffering and calming down people that were violent and, you know, help people understand how how what they're dealing with. This is before my my my neuro degree. But I was super ADHD, like the worst you've ever seen. take the most hyperactive 10-year-old and multiply it, you know, and that's me. And it was and I was, you know, in the 70s and 80s before it was kind of a thing. So, it wasn't medicated and it wasn't, you know, labeled. I was just this wild man. And I got through college and then this is after college that I'm doing this job and I started seeing people change. I'm like, this this doesn't make sense. This is amazing. I'm I'm I'm intrigued. So, I I um paid the the fee to have my own brain data analyzed by the service we used. It was 400 bucks back then. And my uh boss gave me some, you know, some orientation around things that might be interesting to work on. And I would just hang out after hours and just do random things to my brain, which I don't recommend, by the way. It's good to have some like bit more guidance than that. But I managed to do about 18 sessions in a row of ADHD types of things. And I remember like a month and a half after I started, I was like, whoa, okay, it's kind of quiet in my head and things are I can f wow, I slept great last night. And then from then on, essentially kind of built up to the point where I finally noticed it and a bunch of other weird things happen like I trained down some of some the the selector, the anterior singulate. Uh, mine had tons of theta, front midline theta, which happens in all kinds of things that are like tick things like OCD or songs in your head or nailbiting. I bit my nails from the time I was like six months old up until my mid20s. And I trained down the theta and six weeks later noticed that I had fingernails and had to go buy clippers because I was getting in the way of typing. Like, what the heck? I When did I stop doing what? Yeah. after years of never being able to stop and you know growing up being you know told not to um it changed my brain and just kind of shifted and the ADHD change the executive function change was so significant that I sort of felt like I could finally go back and and do grad school and I could decide what to do and so at the time in the field of neuro feedback there was these three schools of thought about how this stuff worked that did not agree with each other at all and this is back before the internet and the uset at uh you know forums and things and really really vitriolic scientists yelling at each other in these little tiny forums you know really aggressive and yet all the schools of thought were getting better effects than most traditional psychiatry and this really struck me as a blind men and elephant situation. So I went back to grad school and studied how neuro feedback worked and did a placebo control double blind study looking at how the brain was in real time reacting to the neuro feedback to figure out well it proved that it worked but be to figure out how it actually worked because it was all theoretical up until that point and so I demonstrated the brain actually knows when you're plotting certain brain waves look at that there it is in a blinded uh placebo controlled context and that was I mean I did one of the first double blind studies in neuro feedback and I did the research in 2010 I think so. So the field is still pretty new. I mean we discovered it in the mid60s on cats. It was used in humans throughout the 70s and 80s and it probably started to really get big in the 2000s like when I was applying to grad school in the 90s. I had to be careful using the word neuro feedback or bio feedback or the eyes started to roll you know. Yeah. Um, and nowadays, you know, well, when I was in when I was at UCLA, I had this experience where my first couple years I was that weird guy doing bio feedback and then the next couple years all the like the senior scientists at UCLA's psychology department like, "Hey, your research is pretty cool. Can you use my instrument when doing your research?" That's I learned, you know, so like these really really highend cognitive neuroscientists were like getting into my geekery, which is pretty awesome. And there's been a sea change. We we know that it works a little bit now, even if it's somewhat, you know, mysterious still to most people. What What are some of the biggest changes you've seen in yourself? And I know we're coming up on time, so we'll bring this into a close. I mean, I've for for myself, I I had a huge change in executive function. Um, I see changes in people. I mean, all the time. I do at least 20 brain map reviews every week with people and at least half of those are brand new and half of them are repeats. And I reliably see I mean a couple months in reliably see huge changes in OCD, PTSD, ADHD, sleep issues, seizures, migraines, bedwedding, sensory, you know, just so many things. So it ends up being more for me it's not about the change anymore. It's about the perspective. It's about well hey saw you're suffering but it's just your brain. Don't worry about it. It's just in your head. It's also in your head. Like you can figure it out, right? The brain's not as mysterious as we think it is. that you can see your ADHD, you can see your anxiety in your brain maps, you can see your disregulated sleep. It's jumping out. There it is. Okay, it's yours. What do you want to do with it? So, that's that's the real soap box is don't just let the suffering happen to you. Figure out more deeply what's going on because there's always things you can do. Shift happens. Back to agency. That's right. Shift happens. Get some agency. Get yours. Um what do you think is the one thing that is uh misrepresented or misunderstood about this field? ah um the the literature is a bit weak the research literature and if you read there's over a thousand papers 1,200 1500 pages papers out there on neuro feedback and if you read them all you'll be confused because about half to twothirds are like this stuff's amazing it eliminates ADHD it drops seizures it makes people not want to drink and the other half are like meh and so then you'll find a couple people that are like ADHD experts getting on a soap box saying this stuff doesn't work, but they're not neuro feedback people. And they've made a big big mistake when they say that the neuro feedback in the literature is not the neuro feedback that's done in the clinics. It's iterative. It's personal training. You do a little bit, check it out, you shift, and the place you end up for somebody could be really, really different than where you started because you're adjusting as you go. And you don't do that in the literature. Also, all the studies are short courses, small groups, small numbers of people. So, like if you're already believing it and you read the literature, you're like, "Oh my god, why is no one else doing this? Why are we all doing this?" But if you're skeptical and you read the literature, you're like, "See, I told you." Yeah. So, but I'll tell you, give me 10 skeptics who completely don't believe that brain mapping is a thing and nerf doesn't work. 10 skeptics, I will map their brains. I will cold read with no history stress, sleep, attention, moods, whatever else is going on. And I will be right like 90% of the time or better for all of my guesses. So, I challenge any deep skeptic out there to reach out and, you know, we'll we'll we'll we'll tell you about yourself without you telling me. Well, we could I I could talk to you for hours. Hopefully, uh maybe someday we can have you back because this has been hyper illuminating. Uh I love the work that you're doing. any um last thoughts or things you think I might have missed? No, no, I think we we covered a lot of lot of good stuff. Yeah, my my message is about taking control and, you know, learning yourself. So, thanks for giving me the opportunity to, you know, stand on that soap box a little bit. Well, really grateful to have you on. Thanks for coming. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks. Thanks for listening. For a detailed list of episodes and show notes, visit scalesofuccesspodcast.com. 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