Brain Fitness, Biofeedback & Nootropics - Andrew Hill, Ph.D. | The FitMind Podcast

You know, birds and squirrels, look for fermented berry juice and get drunk. I'm sure when we were monkeys and trees, we were doing the same thing. I mean like, oh, that fruit over there, when it ferments, I see pretty pictures, you know, I'm sure we were looking for stuff and altering our chemistry because we co-evolved. Dr. Andrew Hill. It's great to be with you. Thanks. For having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Well, so I thought, could you just give us some background on kind of how you got into brain training and what brought you to this point? Sure. So, so I do a lot of these days, I do biohacking across a bunch of things, including a neurofeedback or brain training is my primary, uh, sort of tool set, but I've been working in mental health and human services for a long time since, uh, the early eighties, actually the late eighties. Um, and, uh, throughout that whole time, I worked in group homes and acute care centers for people with psychiatric crises and, uh, dual diagnosis, sort of inpatient centers for drug and alcohol, as well as like the metric stuff and developmental, you know, residential homes for people with severe and developmental issues and across all these range of health and human services. I saw a lot of people not really getting any better, you know, so a lot of holding patterns, especially in, in, uh, higher functioning, so to speak mental health care, uh, where you would think people who've, you know, Ben functional and are now not less. So you'd think we'd have tools to help them get back to the stability or productivity or safety, um, that, uh, they had had recently, but generally, uh, it was hard to find that sort of thing. And I saw a lot of people who were in crisis and holding patterns where they're being sort of managed, but not helped all that much. And I also saw a lot of, you know, more acute sort of longer term developmental processes, you know, autism and other things where we just didn't have many tools to help. And this is my perspective after, you know, 20 years or something in the field. And then I got exposed to neurofeedback and saw symptoms, shift, and autism and seizures drop away of many kids and ADHD. Things just get resolved and kids and adults. And I was sort of like this, doesn't totally track with my experience of how we work with the brain. That's kind of exciting and what's going on here. And, you know, this was back in, again, we're talking the nineties now some point, and at that point there was still in the, the field of neurofeedback is still fairly young and niche-y, um, I mean, here we are in 2020 and the field is, uh, the way it's practice. Now, a lot of the field is derived around a particular technology called SMR training. And SMR is a frequency in the brain, uh, about 12 to 15 cycles per second, 12 to 15 Hertz in humans, adult humans, and SMR is a bunch of things that it does in mammals. Uh, largely it helps the brain with things like inhibitory. So, uh, humans use it to stay asleep. So it's called sleep spindles. If you're deeply asleep and a car goes by your house and honks the horn, you generally don't Rouse. You kind of might start to wake up and then your brain suppresses the rousing phenomenon because you aren't threatened. And the suppression, the maintenance of your sleep is a function that uses SMR and SMR is also used in things like keeping the brain away from seizure states, you know, keeping it sort of stable as opposed to chaotic and dysregulated and, um, the field was on, but might as well. Uh, this is a decent story to go into the field was started again about 53 years ago. And I think '67, uh, Dr. Barry Sterman at UCLA was approached by NASA who's. Um, astronauts were getting sick, breathing in the methyl hydrazine, vapors from the rocket fuel and things. And so Sterman was doing a safety toxicity study essentially on rocket fuel. And he discovered that of all the users in cats as his test subject, this is the sixties, our animal research was a little different back then. Uh, and, um, we discovered that he discovered that some of the cats he was trying to sort of, you know, figure out how toxic this, this, this rocket fuel was some of the cats wouldn't wouldn't have the same symptoms as other cats. Most of them had dizziness and, and, and, uh, crying and drooling and seizures and, you know, all kinds of crazy symptoms and exposed, uh, exposure to the, to the rocket fuel vapors correlated with increased symptoms as a function of time, you know, dosing time kind of curve stuff. But some of the cats had these super powerful brains that refuse to have seizures and needed two and a half times the exposure before they show these sort of seizure events in the brain. And he figured out he'd done a conditioning experiment in the cats six months prior to train up cat's SMR to see if it was a trainable thing, if you could actually use operant conditioning. So you measure the cats at some are a little tiny scalpel electrode and put a chicken broth a little will not drop her in their mouth and squirt a chicken broth into their mouth, whatever the SMR searched. And you've seen SMR, if you've ever met a cat or owned a cat, uh, that phenomenon lying on a window sill and watching intently out the window with the bodies liquid totally inhibited, but the mind is very still and like, sort of on that state's SMR and humans use it for the cognitive thing. Sometimes we don't use the way predators do. They have to relax deeply before jumping into action. So it's deeply inhibited physically while mentally focused and that state of being still in your body and not so still the kind of pointed in your mind, that's the opposite of ADHD in humans. So if you train up, if you exercise the SMR in humans, you produce this big shift in function and you reduce inhibitory problems. So we often get, uh, effective, uh, elimination of ADHD. In a few months, you get reductions in seizures. The literature is about 50%, um, in the, in the metadata studies that came out, show that the average person about a 50% reduction and some people have complete control of seizures. Um, I've never seen somebody only get 50% reduction. It's always a pretty strong effect, but then you can go after almost like cosmetic fitness for your brain. And so I say, Ooh, I'd like, abs in my brain, I want to be a better listener or more creative, or have flow state access, or, you know, dial away that old trauma I have or whatever it is. So I got this, this awakening, so to speak working in these centers with acute people, autism and severe ADHD and seizures and things, you know, developmental stuff mostly, and was seeing change on in, in a realm of symptoms that I didn't think were changeable based on how we dealt with the brain. And so this was, uh, in around 2000 or so, and I had to sort of, you know, Tiffany and what what's going on here. There's all this technology being used and sort of a really weird niche-y area of the field. Some are scientists, some are psychologists, some are crazy engineers, and there's this thing called biofeedback on the brain or a feedback. Ooh, cool. And so I didn't know about it. It was, it wasn't very mainstream and there's some reasons for that, why it wasn't mainstream in the seventies and eighties, but, uh, it got a little more, a little more mainstream. And as I was getting deeper into the field, I sort of figured out that all of the ideas about what this stuff is, were kind of not reconcilable. You know, everyone had like, oh, it works this way. And they were getting results, but not getting, uh, sort of an under underpinning that you could theoretically test or exploit or use for the next person reliably. And so I call this a blind men and elephant situation. You know, we all have a piece of something or describing it, but not really seeing the 10,000 foot view picture. So I went back to school, went to UCLA and got a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, studying, uh, EEG, how the brain processes, attention, lateralize attention, and how you can push the brain around with your feedback and trying to figure it out. Some of the mechanism actually happening at the moment of the brain binding to being dragged around by the straining process, which is not actually about squirting chicken broth in your mouth. If you're a human, um, humans like stimuli. So all you have to do is watch something on a screen and listen to things. And, uh, you stick a wire like the SMR humans make us a more on the central motor strip, which runs ear to ear. And if you're sitting very still and relaxed, your mind is kind of, you're balanced, it's an SMR state. So you can measure a part of the brain, the right, which is involved with supervisory attention, knowing if you're paying attention or not, and measure how much SMR it's making and also measure theta brainwaves, Thetas receptive state creative, noticing things start bubbling up patterns, jumping out, but it's not a very linear state. So high theta and low SMRs kind of ADHD effectively. It's not exactly quite that simple, but it's sort of that phenomena it's dis-inhibited. So if you measure the feta and SMR under the right-hand side of that supervisor, and you applaud the brain, you make the car drive faster, or the spaceship steer better, or the Pac-Man eat more dots. Whenever the brain happens to drop its data and raise its SMR, those little bursts of applause of increased stimuli, tell the brain, oh, good job. Good job. Oh yeah, good job there. And the brain picks up the trend and goes, I'm getting awarded. I'm getting cool stimuli. When stuff happens, you know, stuff happens when I drop my feta. Nice. And my, my SMR is going up more. Stuff's happening. You can't control it because you can't control your brainwaves. You sit there and watch a game stopping and starting. But the next day, your brain's like I was getting stuffed. Whenever data dropped and suddenly your fatal will share it. And you who I feel really nice to focus them briefly, then it goes away. It's like working out, you know, week or two into your first gym adventure. You're going for a walk and coffee. You're like, Ooh, my balance. I feel a little different and it's not that dramatic, but it comes and goes. And you know, maybe your sleep's better one night after your workout or something. So that's what happens when you work on your brain, but it kind of is no pun intended top down. So you really do sort of get everything shifted in your life, all your, your capacities, get it worked out. And as you work on different circuits and different, uh, physiology, you get different effects. So you can kind of be a little bit like it's kinda like walking into Equinox and going. I want to have I'm thinking, all right, it's different process a little bit for each person, but it's kind of the same process broadly. And we'll tweak it for you and identify the weak spots. And for you, maybe it's better sleep as the big blocker for this other guides, the 19 pizzas a day heats. Um, you know, if somebody else has never having actually lifted anything with their, with their whole body. Um, so, you know, you can dial in the sort of personal training aspect and you can do it for the brain resources. You can identify like executive function, stress, response, sleep, speed of processing, stuff like that. So long-winded answer. But when I discovered we had some agency over all this stuff and I sought making change in a place that I didn't think we were all that good at making change in human brains, I got very excited and had to sort of double down on the, you know, beating this drum that you should be doing neurofeedback and taking control of your brain, kind of, kind of stuffs. Wonderful. Well, and so when you mentioned neurofeedback, I think probably a lot of the listeners haven't been to a brain gym before I think of this device. It's a consumer electroencephalograph that measure that this is the only neurofeedback I've done, where it was giving me direct feedback on my meditation progress. So walk us through what this actually looks like and what kind of equipment is involved. Sure. So I do two things. Um, one is called brain mapping or quantitative EEG QEG and this is an assessment tool that looks at one person's brain in relation to kind of population averages. It doesn't use it diagnostically. We aren't, we don't care that you aren't average. In fact, people are generally not average, but we care about is if the ways that you're very unusual, if those things jump out as stuff that is often a bottleneck we'll test that idea. Oh, Hey, this shows up when you're like, if you have a high failure beta ratio in kids, that's 94% accurate roughly for spotting ADHD, as long as it's not a lot of sleep deprivation, making the data look strange, know that one single measurement top of the head measuring feta to beta it's high, that ratio is high executive function problems exist. So to gather the sort of assessment data, you just do a resting EEG, put a cap on your head, squirt full of gel, sit still for maybe 15, 20 minutes. And in that timeframe, you're gonna do an eyes closed recording and an eyes open recording because the brain has two very different baseline states. When you're awake, eyes closed and eyes open is a dramatically different, uh, mode in some ways, um, at least in the EEG, it is because it's such an expensive thing to run vision. So big gross shifts in what your brain is doing at rest can give me some idea about how it's operating. So in the case of vision, if I looked at drug eyes closed recording and saw the back of the head, which is your visuals, the system wasn't going idle, wasn't making alpha waves. When your eyes were closed, I would go, oh, Hey, for some people, when they're staying lit up in a beta frequency and the alpha isn't coming up, that means they're not letting go of the visual system with their eyes closed. That often means kind of a hypervigilance state. We are scanning or preparing to scan your brains. Like staying lit up just in case. Do you have some like, hyper-vigilance, do you have to scan everything? Oh, you do? Okay. Well, this is probably related. Oh, you done? Oh, okay. Maybe your neck is tight. Maybe you're just active. Maybe you're a firefighter or a first responder. Maybe it's a skill, not a problem, you know, but I find the unusual thing go, Hey, is this Matt does this matter? Just relevant, like, like a code. She was with an athlete, not like a doctor does with the patient, you know, because it's not about here's what's right or wrong. It's about, here's a feature that's statistically unusual. Do you care about this or is it so, um, the opposite, uh, pattern might show up as well. You open your eyes and look at the back of the head. If you don't see beta waves, if you just stay stuck in the alpha, you know, stuck in the neutral frequencies, that is generally inattention. We call that add. So, you know, I make predictions about states. We also measure your performance. I do executive function testing. So measure, sustain, focus, short-term focus, auditory and visual attention inhibition versus activation tease apart a bunch of things in extremely boring, 25 minute tests. I apologize in advanced anyone who takes, who does the attention testing, it's just a computerized test, but it is so tedious. We kind of unload your attention and make you respond in the time course where you can't use automatic resources. So it's only like 20 minutes long, but it's a long 20 minutes or something, you know? Um, so the tension test is, is a, is a population level average. And so, and from there we develop a picture together, oh, this is what might be going on. Here's some goals what you want to work on, just like you would go over your fitness data with your high end trainer. And from there, we do the feedback which we do three times a week for half an hour. I don't bother to put the full head cap on. We go discreetly after specific locations and circuits and try to exercise. And then we observe the next day. So we use little devices like this. This is a little mini EEG amplifier. So I have these people's homes as well as in, uh, um, my offices. And you just put some air clips on and plugged them into the box. And you put one wire on the part of the ha had maybe two that you want to exercise. You want to measure the brainwaves from. And again, eight executive function work, maybe as a wire on this side for ADHD, for being more alert on, maybe it's the vigilance side. If you have some, uh, OCD then on your, your brain map, what I'll see is the front midline of your brain is stuck in beta, which the anterior cingulate and that's a switching system. I might go, oh, Hey, some people that have a lot of beta there, their switching system gets a bit wound up and they tend to per separate, it's stuck on things. You bite your nails, good songs in your head, OCD, maybe your CEO, maybe it works for you fine, but we all stuck sometimes. Oh, you are okay. And then you can measure a, put a wire here whenever it kind of unclenched that resource briefly on its own because the brain's always changing. So we're not doing things active the brain or pushing you around. We are zapping your brain. We're sort of measuring the variability, like the beta waves, the alpha waves, things changing and amplitude and speed. And when your brain happens to move on its own for half a second in the righ direction, the game you're watching runs better. The pack mandates more Dodge, the spaceship flies faster, you know. So what are sorry So for those unfamiliar, what are those brainwaves? You mentioned a couple of times, the gamma, the beta alpha. Brainwaves are bursting little rhythms within the brain. The brain has a cortex or the bark, the top surface of the brain, which is mostly what we think about. We think about the brain. The brain matters this top layer. It's all these little cell Scion, gyrus, so grooves and, and Hills and valleys and things. And that's mostly for surface area. It's a pretty huge amount of surface area squished in like a little like a rag wadded up it's squished in from massive surface area. But that's, that's largely the computational tissue use for input output on your senses and to think it, so you're doing kind of your experience as a human that bark, the top cortex and the circuits. There's a couple of billion, little circuits in that net cortex, uh, that are comprised of 30,000, roughly neurons in a little column that are countable CPU. And they pump out different firing rates as a unit 30,000 neurons, but probably a hundred thousand support cells, all computationally, chunking out the same information firing or not firing. And then they all talk to other little CPU's and make really complicated networks that can come offline and online moment to moment. So you're looking at the sort of activity of this little neighborhood of friends, hanging out, talking in different circuits and making calls between each other and doing all dances together. And that's the age now, the speed or the amount of firing coming off of each of these cells are groups of cells called micro columns is what you're measuring on the scalp and the outside. You're measuring bursts electricity at first of signaling from these little columns now alpha waves are what we often hear about sort of pop in popular terms. Alpha is a calm state. Uh, alpha is a relaxed state. I mentioned earlier, you close your eyes. And the visual cortex goes into alpha and rests in alpha, but we make all brain waves all the time. So it's not like you're making alpha when you're resting and making Delta when you're sleeping when you are, but you're making all those waves, you know, in different circuits all the time. So if you go in order of speed, you actually would start down at zero burst or close to zero as Delta waves. And Delta waves happened between about zero and up to about four, maybe three and a half times per second, or Hertz or cycles. So Delta is like, you know, three to four Hertz, maybe two, three, couple of times per second, big Delta waves. And then you have fade out, which is four to seven little waves per second. And then alpha is like seven to 13. And then beta is like 13 to 40 and above 40 or in gamma. And you can't really measure gamma from outside the head. So a lot of consumer devices that use the word gamma, they're kind of misleading you. Um, you kind of need to be inside the skull to measure gamma. It's a little tiny wave. Again was like 40 Hertz and above. So the same of energy, like 10 microvolts and a Delta wave is one big giant Delta wave. That's 10 microvolts of juice. The same gamble will be little, tiny, little waves, you know, 40 Hertz of them. And that little burst when, when Tricity is produced in the brain and the soft tissue, and it goes through layers of scalp, skull, MiniMed, GS, or wrapping layers. And every time, the way it was past those layers, they get dampened, they get attenuated. So when you measure stuff from outside the head, you can't measure anything above about a 40 Hertz because it's just being attenuated out. It's gone. So don't believe that we're gamma gamma in EEG is, it is kind of a misleading term of the word. Quantum is in health circles. Like, have you heard the word, you hear the word quantum runaway in a health context. It just doesn't mean what people, you know, it's all marketing and nonsense, and it's looking for gullibility, you know, from the sound good. Um, the word detox isn't far behind in health circles, you don't accelerate your body's detox ability. Did you can't and there's very little, you can do, um, to, you know, accelerate sort of processes of detoxification. You can alkalize your body either is no. So, you know, the only thing you can do for alkalizing alkalizing, your body is die. Yeah. Your body is so good at holding the alkalinity, the pH at us, but a rigid level. If you go off by 0.2 0.3, pH you die. Boom, dead. Sorry. There you go. So the only thing you're, you're, you're making alkaline by drinking that water is your toilet water. It's passing, right for you and making your toilet alkaline. You're supplementing your toilet by drinking alkaline water, you know, and, and anything I have size max is a grind obviously, but anything that, that world of wait a minute, what are you talking about? Can you please define that term? And if they can't like, you know, I want to hear what your quantum health tech, I'm sorry. Anyways, stepping down off the Rand. Um, the waves are, we think the alpha, because that's the first Greek letter of the alphabet might be the first brainwave. That was the first one we discovered. Cause it was so obvious. You close your eyes and big, giant alpha waves show up everywhere and Alfa Hunsberger discovered EEG. And I think the 1930s or before, before that, actually I forget the actual date, but he found that in the rabbit cortex, little giant bursting, slow bunny rabbit rate waves, alpha waves. So alpha was the first way discovered. And then beta above. It was another variant will faster wave. And then only later on, we discovered there was things slower than it. So alpha beta Delta, and then gamma. So it's out of order, unfortunately, in terms of the Greek alphabet, um, for all you Greek efficient, I was out there who were burning, wondering why Delta waves are the slowest and gamble waves were fast, but it kind of jumps around between. That's why it's just the order of discovery. I know somebody was, is now happy to know that. Um, some, some, some EEG got EEG. You got, there was like, oh, I get it now. So you're welcome. But, uh, we don't know what all these things do. And there's many brainwaves with any tree Quincy for different functional things. Like I mentioned, the alpha waves show up when you were a visual systems idle, but you also make another form of alpha on the motor cortex called new, which is involved with neuro neurons activating and echoing what you're seeing. So if I see you in ice cream cone my mirror neurons from my hand, moving and looking at an ice cream cone might go off because I'm empathizing with Alex really good. And my, my, my brain will echo it. If I'm not autistic, you'll make a little new waves, motor imagery. I imagine that like that, oh, that must be a really good time to grab that ice cream cone. I'm imagine the motor imagery you'll echo it. Actually what I'm seeing in my own, my own control systems. So you can look at lots of different brain, but we don't really understand them. And we ended up giving kind of a phenomenological thing where it's like, oh, here's what's average. Here's, what's an outlier. And there's some understanding of the different brainwaves. But until we get specific, I mean, we know about seizures. We know about other types of problems, but the general 10,000 foot view of the brain is still fairly mysterious. So we're not only doing medicines. I mean, if we are, it's kind of functional medicine, what your functional medicine doc looks at, ranges and patterns and tries to find the thing that'll make a difference, but your functional medicine doc, isn't looking for the absolute one discreet bit of medical information. They're trying to find that sense of where the bottlenecks are in your metabolism or what's suboptimal, and that will affect your experience. So they're trying to look at the root of the system, not sort of the, you know, the, the plus or minus of a disease, essentially. So neuroscientists work the same way when it comes to the brain, because you don't really understand it, but we can measure it and make some guesses. And then when it comes to neurofeedback, we can apply leverage to make change and see what happens. And you have the opportunity to go, well, it's like fitness. Did that work? How do you feel today? Oh, you're on camera with your arms. Let's take some weight off the machine next time. Oh, you felt great. Oh, it's too easy. Let's crank it up. How'd that feel? And you can be very iterative in your feedback and you can get subtle changes because that half an hour of the brain being applauded for certain brainwaves, doesn't praise, a huge change. You got about a day of subtle surge and then dropping of the brain's activity from one or two sessions. And so, as you evaluate, what different workouts do you learn your own brain better and better. And then you can dial access to the states and reliable, um, uh, robust, if you will, uh, uh, flexibility and stamina in those states just by going after things. Oh yeah, it feels like this. And then you can go back to the brain mapping, any attention testing. Uh, we do it every 20 sessions if people near the office. So my clients have brain mapping gear. Cause actually this is a brain mapping. Amplify will tiny thing. And if you put a cap on their head, plug this into the Bluetooth amp, squirt their, their cap full of gel. And we do remote brain maps now all over the world and you can see the change. So you're feeling different. Ah, I think I'm feeling better. My kid performing better in school seizures are dropping, whatever it is. And then you look at your brain map and you've made a couple of standard deviations of change against the population in a few months generally. So it's a huge change subjectively. And then you can go back to the data and evaluate tension testing, brain mapping, and see that there's been a big shift in things that don't shift in sort of conventional wisdom. Uh, and then it's becomes a process of like, well, what's next? You know, you want people coming off and like, oh, I go to ADHD. Okay, great. You know, and, or some trauma not to minimize it, but like, I'm kind of happy when people come in with some trauma, because it's like, this is a lovely thing to work on. You know, it's like a chiropractor, oh, another back injury. I'm sorry to see that. But they know they can help. Uh, you know, when people come in with ADHD, migraines, seizures, trauma, OCD, uh, all kinds of things, sleep issues. I get sort of like, great. Let's find this thing in their brain and give them some control over it. And then the relationship as we go over the brain mapping, isn't a sorry, sir. Here's what's wrong with you. It's so here's the thing. Do you want to work on this? Is this Courtney? Oh, it is cool. I'm sorry, experiencing this, you know, brain fog or impulsivity or seizure thing, but like cool. This one's showing up here. Let's go to that. Let's see. I feel, and then people end up becoming the, the, the agent, the agent of their change, you know, which is often not how we experience our brain health ecology. We often kind of give ourselves over to other people to help us figure out what we're feeling or thinking or give us medication to change our states. And this is instead like, okay, let's dial in help. You understand the levers that you might want to pull to change your own states. And so, you know, I'm not sure what the metaphor is, but you know, those gym guys that like get all small and can't put their arms down because it's so oh, easy to build upper body mass for men. Right. And they're like, oh, this is great. I do have people who get incredibly well, you know, creative and focused and calm, uh, because they need neurofeedback well beyond, you know, fixing any problems. I sort of joked that if you walk into an Equinox or they're high end gym, you know, all the gorgeous staff has their apps hanging out. But if you walk in a peak brain, everyone's a good listener and calm and kind, you know, it's a different kind of skill set, but it's still hanging out. You know? So, uh, and I have like 20 something and 30 something, you know, staff a lot of the time. So they're like these really low key meditator vibes just because when the opposite is downtime, they're training their executive function, their SMR, their alpha, and, and generally all my staff is well-regulated because they're sleeping great handling stress really well, showing off any old ADHD stuff or anxiety stuff that they came into college with or whatever. So, uh, it's nice to be able to offer tools like that essentially. It's why do mean you work with executives, you're giving agency I'm to understand what's happening inside their brains and helping them get tools and engage with practices to modify their behavior. That's all I'm doing. Just the, the behavior that they're modifying happens to be the involuntary when directly at the brain to shape the behavior of the brain into engaging in voluntary behavior, to shape the brain by doing voluntary stuff. That's the only real difference there. But, you know, ultimately it's, you know, meditation, mindfulness directed attention. A lot of the things that your app does is directed attention and most forms of directed attention will activate a particular circuit and then enhance plasticity in that circuit so that you get directed change. So getting focused attention, you get singular changes. If you're doing Metta, you're getting like HRV changes, you know, loving kindness stuff. If you're doing, um, the pasta in a present time awareness, you're getting a shift of awareness in the brains with self-centered. I singled up here to the underside, the dorsolateral, the, uh, the dorsal chunk of the people, the cortex activates, the more insight meditation or present time awareness, the less you become self-centered in your ins as you're meditating. And you got sort of like a self last perspective, which is what I hear comes with, uh, decades of meditation in the, in the, in the antique literature. Uh, you know, one says you get selfless by not trying to reel up. That felt would be alike, but that's what we see the brain. We see the shift going from the switching system to the one that involves value without self-involved yet the underside of the frontal lobes. Take a big enough dose of psychedelics. And you might know what that feels like pretty quickly, but. There's some temporal lobe stuff. Actually, we have some, we have some spots and temporal lobe theorizes, the gods spot. And then if you staff with electricity or TMS, and I visit him or take certain drugs, you create like a serotonin storm briefly. And the temporal lobe in a part that makes you feel, you know, one with everything and bliss and, you know, uh, understand the deeper meanings of the world radically. Um, but I don't know if, I don't know if I think there's actually something to that, you know, like once the machine are using to perceive as altered a little hard to trust, but we're what we judged, you know? So, I mean, I'm excited because it tells about the machinery of the system the same way. I think it's interesting about brain injuries, right. Actually engage in altered states, myself, plenty. I mean, I think all humans do to some extent, um, I have a lot of doing like ecstatic shamanic, you know, practices and things, and have pursued some of that. But humans have been altering their brains since before you were human, you know, birds and squirrels looked for fermented Berry juice and get drunk. I'm sure when we were monkeys and trees, we were doing the same thing. And you're like, oh, that fruit over there. When it ferments, I see pretty pictures, you know, I'm sure we were looking for stuff and altering our chemistry because we co-evolved, you know, the, the, in, in the brain, the, uh, the two big cannabinoid systems and brain and body involved in immune and involved with pain and bliss and anatomy receptors, we didn't even know when it was cannabis binds this thing in the brain. It's a, it's a cannabinoid receptor. And we discovered it years later, the molecule we actually build and that fits that, that receptor. So, um, we co-evolved, you know, the world co-evolved. So we have all with plants and we have with animals and we share a lot of the same chemistry. And, uh, you know, I think it's important to take control of this stuff essentially. Are you familiar with Terence McKenna's stone date theory of evolution. That, that, that, that being stone was the, was the impetus to, to. Well, yeah, his hypothesis was that we were taking ingesting psilocybin mushrooms as our brains evolved. This is part of the mind expansion that allowed us to develop these higher faculties, which is a little bit unsubstantiated, but an interesting a hypothesis. The problem with that is it assumes that it's going to push the brain in a particular direction in one person that will actually have any impact, right. And the experts and most genetic studies we know about, there's not much inheritance. There is some epigenetics, you know, your grandparents are in a concentration camp or something, or have extreme trauma. You have different cortisol because epigenetics, you know, your, your parents, your pre your, your gram, your grandmother's eggs get changed. So your mother's cortisol brain gets changed. So then she produces you and you have different cortisol. It cascades that way throughout development, but they're not massive effects for shifting huge giant resources. And there are some studies that show certain brain, uh, genetics flew through the, the humanoid population in some absurdly short time, like 20 or 30 or 40,000 years. Like, no, I couldn't have changed all ones. And it looks like brain density and size changed all at once and some blink of an eye. So something happened and all the different hominids, like us all came out in a very, very short jumping time. And we don't know why, but the brain density thing, um, you know, I think, I think there's other more plausible outcomes, raise it here, then more plausible things. Cause it wasn't one group of humans who found the cool mushrooms and at one cave, you know, it was all of the place humans were, were growing and evolving, humanoids growing and evolving. And I really think it was, I mean, I think there's easier things to point at to hang evolution on like cooking carbohydrates and meat with fire. So we freed up more of their nutrients and our brains could actually run on higher amounts of energy. Right? More REM sleep, maybe from the fire. Interesting. Maybe yeah. Or at least able to control sleep a little differently. So we were, we were changing our regulation, you know, and once you start changing your environment, it just goes crazy. If they wants to changed the past a hundred years, you know, once you start taking control, it's a little ridiculous of how rapidly this stuff evolves. Ray Kurzweil, singularity is all about is that we're accelerating so rapidly. The exponent as the tool of progress is happening so rapidly that any second now we'll be able to go in and micromanage our physiology with technology a hundred percent of the time. And I, I, you know, I'm, I'm a gerontologist. I, I respect people like Aubrey de grey and in Ray Kurzweil who suggests that the, the anti senescence, you know, movement of getting rid of the aging stuff, you know, it's interesting, but I, I think there's lots of things that individuals can do that aren't about auntie senescence or not aging. There are about living a nice, beautiful trajectory throughout your whole life, even improving it, the biohacking instead of having a drop, which we all, we all have some sort of drop after eight 30, usually called sarcopenia. Um, so we're living an exciting time because at the inflection points are all accelerating. But, uh, just to get a little aside, I wouldn't worry about living forever, but I would worry about controlling things, the diseases of aging, because we now know most of the factors we can use to modify the risks and the progression of things like Parkinson's Alzheimer's diabetes and cancer. Like those are the, the, the chronic diseases in a modern society. There's developed the population. Pyramid goes from a lot of young people and only few old people. And as it developed regularize the population pyramid and, and, uh, we're here basically, even when you've been there a little bit where the few younger people were still like this, we have a bump in the middle of our population pyramid called the pig and the Python. And that's the boomers. The, the, you know, you see, you see a giant snake swallow, a big meal. It goes down the snake for years, you know, or hours or days. Anyways, while the boomers are pigging, the Python, they distorted American society by changing everything the twice as big as the previous or next generation. And all those in the U S were built, then pretty much, um, it's massive Explorer, explosion of suburbia and everything else. And then there's an echo boom falling along about 20 years later in that Python. But the we're we're doing this. And as you do this, as you become more regular column, the causes of death change, you know, in societies, we have a lot of young people, the causes of death are include infectious things and illness and injuries. But in our societies, modern societies that have regularize the causes of death are chronic things pretty much, you know, so now it's, now it's a diseases of aging, diabetes, cancer, dementia is and Parkinsonian things. And we know how to take control on a lot of that stuff now, including backing up dementias to metabolic interventions, including getting some cancers with cancers. Now we have vaccines for obviously. Um, so I think we're about to take even more control of the machinery, but, um, I really doubled down a place where I can give you specific access to your brain, because it's always nice to be, to get immediate benefit to these technological advancements. You know, so while it might be happy to, I don't know, get an injection in 20 years to make my skin look young, or, you know, I don't know. Maybe I have some hair. I may be cool. I've never had hair really, who knows, but not since I was like 20, um, that'll happen. You know, you know, the scientists, the scientists, you know, they'll spend more effort and balding medication than they will in almost anything else it's like, can imagine the amount of money spent on Viagra versus like some orphan disease. You know, this is what will happen. It's, you know, so I'm sure that we'll figure out baldness. Actually, I think we did recently, there was a study a few years ago, showing that we now know why gray hair happened and the sirtuin genes, you know, w we know why sometimes it was very tribal versus gray hair. It's a strange phenomenon. It's a genetic thing. It's not the oxidative stress thing, essentially, but it looks like the mechanism that causes the hair to go gray is related to the one that causes the hair to fall out, or at least to suppress production. So, um, you know, 5, 10, 20 years from now, all the old men who are wealthy will have giant flowing golf, golden locks, you know, that'll be, that'll be the status symbol instead of the weird, like backwards transplants and things like our president would be flowing locks of natural grown hair, because I have the money for it. You know? So I'd be a little bit ranty. No, no, I love. It. So I wanted to bring this back, cause I wanted to ask you about, you were mentioning, you know, gamma, any device that's claiming and can help you with gamma waves is kind of a knockoff, but I know that this is something that with the right equipment, certain neuroscientists can study. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with, um, the work of Dr. Judson brewer or Richie Davidson over at university of Wisconsin. Yeah. And cliff Saron is the same, same group and cliff. And those guys showed some gamma up to about 400 Hertz. I think at least 200. I saw cliff do a talk on the Samantha project. Um, UCLA a few years ago, he was showing gamma. Gamma is not one thing. It's many, many things, right? It seems to be from about 40 to maybe as high as like 400 Hertz. And the big takeaway message there, I think, and this is my perspective is that increased meditation over years causes increased gamma coupling throughout the brain. And interestingly enough, you see the opposite phenomena in progressive schizophrenia. You see decreased gamma coupling and some of the same regions. So gamma or 40 Hertz. Initially people think that frequency for gamma is involved with something about attention, awareness consciousness. Um, if you will, and there's a, basically you can measure gamma through the skull. If these were called active electrodes, we are boosting the S basically put an amplifier at every location it's really expensive to do. And so you need to spend usually 60, 80 grand and hardware to do. That's why I'm saying consumer devices don't do it because there's two there's knock-offs there's low, low end vaporware usually, but you can measure it with the right technology, even if you not are opening the skull up. And one of the ways this has been used because, uh, theta waves, I mentioned are four Hertz, but four cycles per second, and gamma waves are about 40. At least the classic gamma. Well, that's a nice math and turns out the brain knows that too. They nest in and frequency. So you get a gamma theta nesting, 40 to four Hertz coupling, cross frequency coupling. They echo together four Hertz, 40 hits, forty a hundred forty four Hertz, and then it reacts again, they, they phase synchronize again and again and again, when you're conscious and when you're not conscious throughout a phase. So you can break the phase coupling of theta and gamma waves, four and 40 Hertz, and you go unconscious. So you can measure that in surgery. Uh, I think, uh, AstraZeneca, one of the big companies has the bio spectral index, a device in surgery, and then measure the coupling in the forehead. And the anesthesiologist can tell the depth of consciousness on a meter, on a single number based on, you know, if there's this coupling or not. And it turns out now this is going to look crazy. It looks like some of what anesthetics do anesthesia does is it changes the, not just the coupling, but it looks like it changes some of the way microtubules work deep inside neurons. Here's where it gets very crazy. I'm gonna break my own rules and use the word quantum. Uh, but it looks like the diameter of microtubules is roughly about what it would take for water molecules, to quantum tunnel from one place to the next, without making the journey in between. So there's some people out there in the edge of neuroscience and quantum physics, we're suggesting the consciousness is the quantum state embedded, you know, calculated by microtubials deepen neurons. And that is using to sort of project out to the real world, brain, you Tony and physics brain, the theta gamma coupling. So you can get gamma experiences, a lot of what the biohackers talk about in the sort of consumer devices, a couple out there and use a technique called tag sync, feta, alpha gamma sync. And they're not measuring GAM. I know they aren't, but you can do a lot of the pushing on gamma if you push on feta because of the coupling. So if you train alpha and feta in relationship to each other, you cause, um, a flow state, you can cause crossover states that moment when you fall asleep at night and you remember like that cool thing you have to do, or you solve world hunger, maybe, I don't know. Um, then you fall asleep and you're like, wait, I had the best idea last night, that moment of nonlinear thought where stuff's bubbling up as a crossover and a hypnagogic access point. And it's very similar to the access point, moving into creativity, voluntary creativity. So you can train the feta alpha relationships to be more flexible. Then you can reach for that state internally and go into a flow state or have creativity do some work done at, uh, one of the big performance colleges in London a couple of years ago, a paper came out showing that the group I'm a music college because the group that did neurofeedback versus the cryptic, didn't get a whole grade level, grade level above, uh, improvement with a little bit of neurofeedback. And it was not a function of like anxiety, your performance, you know, fear or anything that controlled for that. It was creativity, improvisational ability use a calendar. Those were the things that rated higher. Um, so if you aren't creative enough, you can do alpha theta neurofeedback and build it up. I actually get calls all the time from, I have a lot of CEO types, high powered, hard charging, you know, performance people, usually men, and they often are pretty shut down emotionally and don't meditate. You know, it's hard to get some of those guys, I'm sure, you know, some of the executives, their emotional IQ is exactly where you might want it to be, or their willingness to deal with the internal environment. Isn't necessarily all that healthy always, or these, all that accessible while at practice, let's say we're skillful. Um, well some of these people will do alpha theta, um, because while there is a peak performance thing generally, and I'll get calls from their spouses. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much, whatever you did do it again. And next time it could be the best conversation we ever had. Like they weren't defensive at all. They were wow. You know, it's great. So, you know, piano's calling me having been super amazing emotive on their musicianship actress, call me, you know, winning their improv, you know, competitions and, uh, spouses call me when they're jerk of a or their, their rigid, let's say, and overly productive and a bit burnt out CEO type of spouse will, uh, suddenly kind of like roll back some of that callous and be a little more fluid with their directions. So again, the point is you have control over this stuff. So, you know, shift happens, get yours. Are there other promising areas that would combine the spatial accuracy of say FMRI with the temporal accuracy of EEG, that kind of the next level. Cause I know EEG has been around for a while and it seems like in some sense, it's kind of like modern day, uh, like modern day for Knology like you're kind of looking at a brain region and you're saying like, okay, this is correlated with certain states. Like what's the next level for us? Great question. So EEG electricity has a timing precision of about a millisecond. You can measure electricity very rapidly, but it spreads out throughout the brain. So you can't really measure where it's coming from with great precision in a typical single electrode in the head measure compared to something else, not nearby. Half of the signals coming from right underneath it being generated right there. And half the signal is coming from everywhere else. Some together averaging out mixing, but the things that are not from right underneath it are not the same time relationship. So this is stuff that's lagged and stuff. It's instantaneous coming together, essentially. So this is the unmixing problem. And if you've actually take the egg and you can unmixed the scalp signals, a full head, EEG and asleep, you know, traditional EEG, old squeegees, 19 scalp channel plus ears. And you can unmixed the signals and project where they're coming from and the brain. This is analogous to like putting a bunch of microphones up at your party, make a map of where they were doing a recording. And then later on making a map of who was speaking and where they were based on, unmixing the different position on the microphones, oh, he's in this direction, that microphone, that's one of the arguments over there. So you're doing source analysis. It's called an inverse solution. You're unmixing the scalp signals and with 19 channels on the head, you know, it's still pretty blobby, but your source of betas, a few centimeters and FSRI has a voxel spatial precision about a square, about a cubic millimeter almost is what, uh, what FMRI will do in terms of spatial precision. The timing precision and FMRI is very, very poor because it relies on the, on the bold response with blood oxygen level dependent response. I E your brain calls for resources. They show up about a second later. So the way you work in FMRI studies is you block the same event or stimulus or task into several hundred chunks. So you can get the blood level going up and staying up and go, okay, there it is comparative to other state, but it's a slow thing. So if there's transient events are sort of coming offline and coming online briefly, you miss them. So what you can do is you can increase the density of the EEG. And when you go from 19 to 32, which is the next step up, generally, you get some pretty good precision spatial precision. And when you hit 70 electrodes, the spatial precision of the solution of the EG solution is equivalent to the precision of MRI. So you get the cheap technology, relatively a full head to dense array, you know, cause these things aren't cheap, but you're talking 70, 80 grand, not a million bucks of helium and $2 million of hardware. That's what an MRI costs, because if the helium that costs it's one of the big costs is the healing to put in those things or other gases, because we don't have any, you know, that we're running out of helium. You can't don't, don't get your kid healing and balloons. Cause we have very, very little left in the world. Um, all the MRI machines needed the cost of it cost so much money, a hundred million dollars maybe, you know, to like fill up your machine. It's ridiculous. Well, I'm exaggerating, but it's a really expensive stuff. Your lab will, you know, if you're an MRI guys that have a lab, half your cost is the machine half the cost of your helium and you have, you know, broke grad students basically at that point. Um, anyways, so, uh, where were we at the answer? The last question, I think all sidetracked. Okay. So you were describing how 70, uh, electrodes gives you the same spatial accuracy as an FMRI essentially. Yeah, so. So that is sort of the answer is that at 70 electrodes you've reached the spatial precision. You're asked them toting against it, essentially aren't quite there, but any more electrodes don't really add more spatial precision. And now you have millisecond time and precision, and you've got almost a voxel know that seems cubic millimeter of spatial precision with EEG. So this means that the average person, you know, doing deep brain analysis and deep brain research actually accessible because you don't need to spend millions of dollars to buy an MRI machine and fill it up with a rare gases. You can just buy yourself. I mean, even a 19 channel cap, I mean this device here, this is a 19 channel headset. Um, this cost about five grand and then a full head cap with a, I have a bunch over there. I won't want to put one out, but there's like 300 bucks. So for, you know, five, six grand, you can do a somewhat coarse source analysis, deepen your brain and figure out where brain waves are coming from. And the tool that's used to unmixed the scalp signals is open source and free. It's called Loreta L O R E T A. And the, some of the variants are called ELORETA and SLORETA that had make different assumptions in their math. But the, the, the, the most recent ones were quite good. And I do believe, um, there's some papers out by Pasqual Marques, uh, Roberto, Roberto Pasqual, Pasqual Marques, who is the adventure of Loretta. And he shows side by side SMRI and write a solution that looked very, very compelling. I've seen him present these at our meetings and things very compelling. So I don't think if I was an MRI person, unless I cared specifically about metabolic metabolically, I wouldn't be using MRI. And if I was caring about blood flow, I might use a different technology completely called, uh, agg, um, and hemoencephalography, or even NIRS near infrared spectroscopy. These are sort of ways of looking at metabolism by using infrared sensors and building up a picture of those. And so the cost is dramatically reduced compared to MRI and MRI for folks that may not know is a giant magnet. And then you bounce radio waves through the magnet and the interference pattern as it hits tissue, is what you're picking up. So like kind of like, you know, the MRI machine is the stage for the camera man to take a picture of you and the, and the camera is the radio waves bouncing off of you. And then to pick up different tissues and make them show up differently or see what's active and SMRI, which is metabolic. You want to tag the tissues that are active with in the case of MRI functional versus just the tissue you want to tag it with usually radioactive tracers. So oxygen, glucose, dopamine, something with a slight radioactive trays that you can then take a picture of it. It sticks out against the background tissue. So MRI is expensive, MRIs, a bit invasive with radioactivity. Um, it's a research tool because we don't cause brain just so different. And there are, as far as I know, not database of thousands and thousands of thousands of MRI norms. So while you can do a SPECT scan and IRS or spectroscopy, this is what the amen centers do. They do infrared blood flow and infrared, they use, um, uh, of the MRI magnet through a blood flow analysis, essentially a metabolic analysis. But, but then you're just, I slept with a picture of activation levels. You don't, you actually aren't left. That is a graded or interpreted perspective. And you have you're in trouble, hold into your scientist or your clinician to interpret it. And in brain mapping the EEG stuff, you get the analysis compared to people your age. So while you don't get a valid label, it means X attention. You do get a valid bit of data, oh, it's beta or it's alpha speed or something. And those things are kinda like looking at your, you know, your 23 me genes. We don't understand them perfectly, but you can learn. You can dig in, you can try things. You know, if you have a weird anxiety thing and to do a methylation analysis on your genes, maybe you'll discover you want to try, uh hydroxocobalamin or something, you know, because of your data points you found, it's not a big deal to try different B vitamin variants. You can dig in, you can try things and you'll probably improve your cognition. If you have a problem like anxiety or something, because of the MTHFR, you'll do well by getting the right variant of B12, not just any B12. And that's what we're talking about with this functional medicine stuff is for functional biohacking, is that it's not really our job. You have the scientist, the doctor, the provider. I don't think it should be our job to decide what to do and to make meaning, even of like, what's your fade away me and what's your office be. But if we can help you navigate interpreting data, and then you can go in and pick snapshots of it throughout your life, then you'll use it the same way you might use your change in your CRP scores or your, you know, for us men, your, your, your, your, uh, prostate androgens, or, you know, your testosterone. You can use those, those levels that they change. I mean, I can look at your brain. You're, you're, you're young enough, you'd alpha be healthy, I would assume. But if you were 10 years older and I saw you alpha wave running slower than they should for your age, I would know that chances are extremely good. You're having delayed recall for words and naming issues. When you're tired, people often their forties and fifties are scared of getting dementia. And that's the first symptom that shows up for a speed of processing issue is a delayed access to words. It's not your memory, it's your speed. And it's changeable really quickly changeable, but I can predict that look at your brain again, your alpha is running slow. Oh, alpha usually means speed of processing. You having word finding issues. I am great. Let's work on that. That's an easy one. So again, I'm trying to reframe all these back to the idea that you have agency, no matter what it is, even if it's not discreetly perfectly understood, you know, it's fitness, you can try and see how it feels and then build it. If it's the right thing, it feels good after the gym that day to again, be able to sore maybe back off or adjust. And so you're good. Neurofeedback person is doing this iterative thing. Um, and, and I find that, you know, back to the source analysis question, do the source analysis and the brain again is only interesting from a research perspective, you know, no psychiatrist or neurologist. I know that works clinically would use an FMR. I, for your clinical decision, you know, you, you have them ride on their brains in general, not one person's brain, but you might do QEG to learn only about one person's brain, not about brains in general. So it's completely different framing to do a population level, uh, sort of, you know, source analysis, if you will. Right? Yeah. If MRI is comparing a baseline to some other say, yeah. Yeah, but then didn't want 10 people. So you can see that under this one condition, the same 10 brains operate, oh, attention must work this way because it's operating this way, this blood flow, but your name's in questions about the 10 people ever MRI, it's always averaging huge numbers of data together. So G has literally you compared to a few thousand people to see how you're neat and interesting and quirky and wonderful and weird. So. Well, one of the things I love about your work, and this is also my passion at fit mind is thinking about what is the mind capable of? Like, what are, what's the full potential of the human mind? So what do you, what do you foresee, like, what's your vision for kind of the future where people could take this? I know, just in terms of my own research and kind of experience with different meditative techniques, you know, I have, I have, you know, I'm fairly certain at this point that there are people that can take those meditation techniques and train their minds, that they're in a state of just constant bliss, essentially. Um, and I'm curious if, you know, is there some equivalent of that where someone could use neurofeedback or in the future, you think, you know, a lot of people will be doing this to really get their mind to optimal states. Um, I, I do think that a lot of people be using a bunch of techniques in the future more and more and more, I think, you know, using neurofeedback will be, you know, in the forties and fifties, people didn't go to the gym, you know, in the forties, at least, but now it's a giant marketplace, everyone's fitness, everyone's doing kettlebells and, you know, they're, they're CrossFits and whatever else. And everyone's really quite, I mean, the average, you know, dad bod now versus the seventies, quite different, right. For a guy who's like in his thirties and is thinking about this kind of stuff. And we know about heart disease, we know about the fat, isn't bad for us now. And it was all carbs fault, you know, essentially in terms of oxidative stress and, and location. Um, but I don't think people will end up being blissed out all the time and we'll end up achieving state permanent. And I don't think we should, the human brains are meant to range across a whole bunch of states, hours, days, and minutes, and flexible access to states is what we should be going for. Not turning on stakes, the high performers. You know, it's not about pushing you up and up and up and up into like the best possible format. It's about smoothing out all the variability so that you perform adequately or at your good level, no matter how you're feeling, but it doesn't mean your states will shift. It just means you'll get stuck in your states. So I work, a lot of people get stuck in like a perseverative state. Mike gets very hyper-focused, but that's not necessarily useful or flexible. It happened for a reason. Um, but it's not always serving you. So let me give you an example specifically. Uh, there's a part of the brain, the back middle called the posterior cingulate, whose job it is to evaluate the environment around you. And if you learn the world is not safe or predictable, the poster is singular. It's totally clenched and is threat sensitive and you ruminate and worry. It's kind of can be PTSD if it goes too far, but when it's not PTSD, we all use the, the posterior cingulate. You're a ballgame looking at your phone, somebody else heads up and you actually look up and catch the ball. That's the posterior cingulate, oh, Gotta reorient. Oh, cool. Co caught, caught this ball, kept yourself safe. Are you driving a car? And you're fishing around on the floor of your car. Not that you would do this, but if you did that sense of a watch the road, that's the poster, a singular, we all need one. So I view this kind of like somebody with a spasm low back, you know, humans low back tends to get a bit messed up because we're not especially well engineer to be upright the way we are, you know, just kind of a weak spot and the world can push in our lower back. The erector muscles get really tight spasm up to protect the spine. But then later on they're hyperactivity, they're very strong muscles, but not well regulated. So I wouldn't want any of my resources tonically activated because they'll cause problems the same way as like a lower Back would. But if my posterior cingulate is too chill to be relaxed too much, now you're tranquilized. You're not threat sensitive. You're like, look at the tiger. Hate pretty kitty instead of running away, you know, so you want a healthy range of these resources. And to some extent, I think the biggest thing that will happen is we'll understand the resources, you'll know that all have ADHD. And we go in and tweak that resource. So I'll have a seizure or I have OCD or PTSD or something. And it will be just like, you know, dropping 3% of body fat at Equinox or something, it'll be just that mechanical. And the stigma will get, will drop away to anxiety, attention, stress, sleep, aging, trauma, all this stuff has just individual circuits. To some extent, getting a little bit tweaked or worn out or pinched or cramp is sort of metaphors. But I think we're, we will understand that we don't need, like, I don't think we need Adderall for 99.9% of the people or any stimulants for 99.9%. It would take a train out the problem, you know, and the same is true for anxiety meds or sleep meds. There are no sleep meds, but nothing that actually causes sleep, but you can do a lot rapidly by training up the SMR response, the sleep spindle thing. So that's what I think we'll get access to is a, just like we can, we can, we can carve off some body fat with our home gym or no intermittent fasting and work with a coach to dial in some control over insulin. If it's out of range while we can get some control over our threat sensitivity or our distractability, if that's gotten out a range because of fatigue or our genetics or our trauma and experience, it should be just as, you know, accessible as like I'd rather not be this upset all the time, or I'd rather not carry around all the trauma, you know, response or not be able to feel safe with your relationships or get rid of this stupid seizure. You know, for most of us, the brain is phenomenally more changeable than we think it is. It's always changing and we're just starting to get a handle on how we can push around specifically. I think that's going to get much more nuanced in the near future. Nice. We'll do you have a couple of minutes for some rapid fire questions here at the end? Sure. Okay. So. Coolest travel experience you've had coolest. Huh? How about most strange? I was taught by an ape when I was visiting the island of Gibraltar was a 14 year old. I was mauled by a barbary and I have scars on my, on my arm from a four, four foot tall grizzled old ape. That beat me up a little bit. Jesus. Um, okay. Uh, favorite brain food. Favorite brain food, probably eggs. Okay. Okay. What about, what are your thoughts? I love I crush eggs. I've actually gotten that answer on here before, so that's perfect food. And you've also you're involved with a nootropics company, right? Yeah. I helped, I helped a true brain when they pivoted from a triathlete supplement into the, into the true rain. Um, they created a whole range of initial nootropic products and I helped Chris Thompson design and test the effects of all the first round of products. Um, it's since developed a little more, I actually just got Chris to send me all the new products, the, the, some food bars and ketones, but I wasn't really involved with that piece of it. Just all the initial, you know, helping the company running for the first few years. I do think nootropics are useful, but I like you, I like there was a gap filler later on after you gotten rid of, I mean, my, my first rule biohacking is fix the stuff you do every day, you know, and I think nootropics are a second strategy on top of that. And for some of us that gap fill things we can't fix with lifestyle interventions. And they're also really useful for anti-aging pro brain health, you know, brain injury stuff. So I liked some nootropics is lifelong strategies in day in, day out and a few others as like, okay, you gotta be on for the fourth time that day or something, you know, well maybe some Prasad, Tampa, verbal fluency or, you know, whatever else. But I don't, I don't do many in tropics myself anymore because I like to change the whole system, make a permanent change versus just making a transient change. And the nootropics that I encourage people to take. Like my mom, um, are things that help her age better. Like she calls me I'm out of prostate again, or receive a Coleen because we know that that's a good thing for her. She loves how it feels. We have some Alzheimer's Parkinson's our family. So she's like, you know, she basically keto or paleo and your diet, and she does basic good nootropics to keep herself from aging and slowing down. And, you know, in her seventies basically. Um, and my mom does call me about twice a year and say, you know, how many trips again? Where can I get them again? Because you know, the it's all like a, uh, a true brain. The neutral company I helped create is a bit of a big player was only about three or four players that do you know, consumer-based the tropics. And then all the old Sylvan, tropics was still a little fly by night. So the websites will vanish and the source of the go away and [inaudible] , which is one of the original ones it's hard to get sometimes. So I got a call from my mom, like, I'm her drug dealer? Why did I get trafficked to him? Now I have to find something. So it's kind of funny. My, my, my little Hobbit mom was working on her brain and gonna stay super sharp until, you know, she's, she's quite old. I'm sure. So this is the mom who, uh, three months ago, just to get your viewers a sense of who she is or your listeners. Um, she was in the jungles of Vietnam and Laos, I think. And she got sick. And so she ended up nursing herself back to health, eating Python and bison jerky for a couple of weeks in the middle of the forest, without any electricity or anything, some random forest out there. And then she hiked back into some part of Asia and she ended up getting into Japan just before all the, all the borders closed last year, she was on all the islands down in an Arctic visiting different breeds of penguins. Oh my God. No. She's yeah. And she's, she's in her seventies, so she's, she's a good, biohacker my, I aspire to be half the biohacker my mom. Yeah. That's your, uh, your family vacation sound really eventful. And she goes, oh my God. I was a kid. I was my grandparents. Yeah. But my mom traipse around the world by herself or with a friend. Um, and does his crazy, when she whitewater raft, she, you know, she doesn't do the things tourists do. She does the thing like crazy hardcore athletes does. And she's like five feet tall and 70 years old, 70 something years old, you know, like it's kind of funny. Supermom. That's awesome. She really is. Really is great. So then the tropics might be working. I don't know, I have to hear this cause, cause it really is just her. She's just that, that awesome. But then triplets aren't, aren't hurting and they're probably helping her stay healthy longterm. And that's, I mean, I'm a big fan of some nootropics. I think people with some memory issues and, or some myelination issues should look into CDB Coleen, I'm a big fan of CDP Coleen or Citicoline because it helps the brain remyelinate it helps the brain use Coleen differently. So after taking it for a few weeks and months, you'll create phosphatidylcholine differently within yourselves. So [inaudible], and a little bit of CDP Coleen here and there you'll use Coleen from the eggs very, very differently, uh, after several weeks and months of that. So I'm a big fan for a few nootropics, but I would almost drop back to supplement strategy and say, well, you know, vitamin C vitamin D three and some B vitamins are generally, you know, a great strategy. Um, I think in these post pandemic world, I really do think people should be prophylactically dosing, high amounts of vitamin C and D typically is 5,000. I use, I think in these pandemic times we should be doing 10,000. I use a dad, even young people and, you know, having a few grams of a sorbic acid every day, just to keep our systemizing high. And then if you get sick with respiratory thing, add some zinc, but, um, it does look like vitamin D status and a sorbic acid. And I feel the things that are in the body will impact how sick you get. If you've got COVID. I saw a study showing from the aging stuff, the APLU for variant that causes rapid more rapid oxidation in Alzheimer's and atherosclerosis is, um, uh, causes much faster damage under COVID as well. So there are some appear to be some things that make you protect it against, uh, those inflammatory, you know, states. But I think all of us, again, just like we have opportunities to stay healthy every day, do small little things that will have huge impacts bumping up your vitamin D status is pretty innocuous and seems to do a lot. I mean, up here, your, your onboard vitamin C is pretty cheap and won't hurt you and it might do a lot. So I'm a big fan of these sorts of things as lifestyle dimension about what we're talking about, this becomes important, but I think all of us should do lots of things we can do every day, like get up early, like don't eat before bed meditate, you know, uh, using this awesome app that I I've heard of a thing or two about, for instance, you know? Um, so there's all kinds of things that we can pursue. Uh, I think we all should essentially. Nice. Okay. I got two more for you. Um, favorite technology that you're excited about. Favorite technology? Um, I'm S I don't know, I'm not, there's, there's no technology really that I'm waiting for. That's really real. I I'm in the process of taking technologies that haven't been combined in different ways and making new consumer tools, and I'm going to start pushing the envelope a little bit in brain technologies and toys, but I I'm a little bit annoyed that there's a couple of things we haven't solved yet, uh, in technology. And I don't think that, I mean, I, I, I don't think we're going to be like, like getting to other planets effectively. I really, really wish Elon Musk would stop talking about the brain. I don't think he anything he says makes sense. The Neuralink stuff. No, it's nonsense. He can't add up. Saying it's nonsense. He's rehashing all the same old problems. People have been doing NBCI brain condition for years and have yet to hear anything new that solves any of the classic problems. So I, what I would wish he would focus on, give us a one G drive, Excel, something rocket ship that can put out one G accelleration constantly with a radio, without a nuclear reactor or something. Not that high tech, one G drive. It's all I want. One G drive would get us to the proximate, alpha centauri cluster with deceleration time in about seven years. Cause the one G drive can actually get close to the speed of light. No, Scifi, you know, it's four light years away or something. So it's just a year acceleration, get some fraction of Lightspeed and then you go for three years and you saw it for three years and you were there. Now. I won't tell you much time to pass on earth. It's very strange, but that's not Saifai with a one G drive. We could get to other planets, you know, relatively quickly. So he's all about let's save the earth and go to Mars. We don't want to go to Mars. Mars is at the core that rotates it's blast radiation all the time. We're never going to be able to live on Mars. And, you know, for thousands of years it just is not viable. So we got to shoot for, okay, out of this solar system. Systems, I need to go other solar systems if we want to go to the planets, because the ones we have, aren't that good to live on. So how far away frustrated by it by folks in the wrong stuff, Mr. Musk, you know. So how far away are we from that? You think. We would be there in a year or somebody starting to do it. Okay. But right now, no one's working on it. No. One's working on as far as I know. I mean, I think NASA probably isn't working on it. Um, couple years ago they tested the, uh, the weird, we're not sure quite how they work drives the ken-a drive or m drives these things have been produced. Um, those are not producing very much thrust, you know, but maybe they'll figure out how to predict one gravity thrust that others probably not, but, you know, we could do anything. Is massless anything where we're generating a field instead of an objective, if you will propel it, we potentially, you can do forever. And we could run a nuclear reactor and figure out some way to charge a field and, you know, collect small amounts of plasma and heat it up or something. There's, there's ways to do it when G is not that much of a technical hurdle, you know, at all. Uh, and I think that if we, if we cared about, you know, modern tech like that, the other one is desalination. I don't, I don't think that we're, we're spending enough effort on D on getting clean water. You know, like, I, I really do think we're gonna want to have detect a lodge, a technologically solve our way out of global warming and a societal breakdown through resources, nothing available air and water and food, but mostly, and water is the issue. And I believe that we should be focusing strongly on carbon capture with machinery and technology and the salination with machinery and technology so that everybody gets clean water and clean air. And that would stabilize the Globe's rapidly shifting political. I really do think most what's happening is going to be like locally and globally. And geopolitics is mostly going to be destroyed. Like the big head that we're coming to is going to be about resource competition in the next 10, 20, 30 years. And having we saw before all this current nonsense with the pandemic past five, 10 years, but a lot of emphasis on the refugee stuff as other regions of the world, quote, unquote destabilize. Well without water air in 10, 20 years, half the world is going to be starving. Nomads, you know, mad max wandering, looking for water. So I really do think we should be focusing on fundamental problems in the planet of like carbon sequestering is a power plant. I think in Iceland, it's at the top of the geothermal vent and they use the heat, the thermal event to generate electricity. And then they grab carbon out of the air and sequestering the base salt rock that the, that the, uh, power plant top-ups. So it's a carbon negative power plant. Yeah. It's still stores more carbon than releases. Now we can do stuff like that. Wind power water. You know, I think we're really missing the boat. And I think that we're not gonna have time to do it in 10 or 20 years when every S every nation is, you know, I mean, you're probably not old enough, but when I was a kid, you couldn't buy bottled water. Why would you buy bottled water? Why don't we just buy water? And then Pepsi and Coke got into it in the eighties. Now, you know, you got to buy water. So I'm, I'm concerned about that kind of stuff on the planet. I'm also concerned that we should be getting off the planet. And, you know, there's a couple of things that people aren't solving. They should solve people who say they don't have the, uh, the Tony starks of this world need to be like solving the real big problems. Yeah. Well, listeners feature Elon Musk's you got your challenge. Dr. Hill wants a one G drive and he wants DS desalination. Desalination and carbon sequestration, all the technology. I think they're all within reach. I just think that, and here's the thing. Anyone who solves that, or this gets a disruptive leg up on that is going to be richer than anyone's ever been in the world. So, you know, do do well by doing good enlightened self-interest. Okay. So on that, um, similar vein, this is my last kind of quick, uh, quick fire question. You got 15 seconds in a commercial that goes out to the whole world. What's your message. Oh, I don't need 15 seconds. The messages shift happens. Get yours. Your brain is changing. It's not, if it is changing all the time every day, just decide how learn about it and take control. Nice. I love it. I love it. Well, thanks for coming on the fit mind podcast. Um, finally, I guess, is there anywhere that people could connect with you or learn more about your work? Yeah. Thanks, Liam. So, um, uh, thanks for having me. First of all, people want to track me down on socials. My company is usually peak brain LA. It's all over all the, all the socials or people are in Institute. And then I'm Andrew Hill PhD on the socials. Although I got to got to acknowledge my Instagram is almost entirely pictures of baked goods, lots of breads. So you can look at Instagram and you've got a big brain. LA is one, you can look at the brain memes and quotes and things like that. Um, and then I have a podcast which has been a hiatus for a while, a video podcast called headfirst with Dr. Hill, which is for biohackers. And of course I'm on a bunch of podcasts, podcasts like this one, I'll probably relaunch mine. I'm trying to figure out the best format to do it in. So it folks find the head first with Dr. Hill podcast. And if you have guest suggestions, please give them to me because I'm going to start probably figure out a way to crank out a lot more content in a lot of different ways. Um, now that you know, we sort of need to do more virtual stuff. Uh, it's time to double down on that. I think a little bit myself. So please folks, let me know your brain questions, your, your, your favorite guests, who I should talk to and come ask them your brain questions, and also really give everyone who's a listener of your show, Liam, half-price on the brain maps, so they can come to any peak brain office and get instead of 500 bucks, it's two 50 for the brain. And we also offer free repeats, which is very strange. So it's a sort of, open-ended, biohacker, you know, the light's special basically to learn and learn and learn forever about your brain. Um, we have offices in St. Louis LA and Southern California, Costa Mesa. Um, but half of my clients train their brains at home so we can do work with you guys. So I would say track us down and let us know what you want to do to your brain, and we will help you get things moving. Awesome. Well, this has been really fun. Thanks Dr. Hill. Oh, my pleasure, Leanne. Thanks so much for having me.