Brain Matters: How to Unlock Your Neuropotential With Neurofeedback - Dr. Andrew Hill

the big trick in neurofeedback is that we're moving the goal posts so over the 30 minute run of the north feedback session your brain's going to go through several normal to itself typical endogenous if you will changes it's going to run to Theta and beta and changes in speed and fatigue and stuff just happening if we only pick out the 70 times that your brain had little 10 second runs of theta dropping and the beta climbing and just applauded those of all the billions of things your brain is doing your brain's going to notice hey wait a minute why is my Theta going down being applauded okay and it's going to start chasing the information flow as we ask it to have to do even more to get the same gameplay I mean we move the goal post adaptively and then 10 minutes and 50 minutes in your brain's a little tired and you're actually not able to make the same you aren't fluctuating as well in that direction anymore so we make it easier we move the goal posts the thresholds next to where you are so when you fluctuate again in the right direction the Applause resumes so we're giving a directed signal of movement and so we have these two or three different brain waves you might be training in a session might be training down some slow brain waves turning down some very fast brain waves and turning up some in the middle so you simply measure the amount you're making boom boom boom and put a threshold just above or just a below where somebody is Collective insights as a Voyage Through topics and Technologies revolutionizing human well-being groundbreaking approaches for a better world and a better life await you welcome to Collective insights this is James martinberger CEO and co-founder of qualia I appreciate your support of our podcasts Collective insights and I encourage you to try the formula that launched our company qualia mind qualiamine promotes life-changing enhancements to your focus energy and overall mental Wellness this podcast interviews world-renowned experts on crucial aspects of mental Wellness such as sleep exercise and mindset training but if you also want to add the life-changing brain nourishment into your diet try qualiamine at neurohacker.com you can use code James for an extra 15 off that's quality of mind with code James neurohacker.com and I and hope you enjoy today's episode welcome to today's podcast episode I'm Lauren Alexander and I'm absolutely thrilled to introduce our hosts and today's discussion even though we may not have crossed paths before I have been working tirelessly behind the scenes working on each and every episode of collective insights we have covered neurofeedback with Dr Andrew Hill a few times on Collective insights but we've never really had the time to dig in deep to the mechanisms and science behind it so today we aim to deliver a really comprehensive exploration of how brain waves work and to our advantage and sometimes to our disadvantage and perhaps killing some myths and sacred cows about brainwave beliefs that are floating out there you know I'm you know I'm here and it was really because of the episode on neurofeedback that we did now nearly seven years ago with Dr Andrew Hill that led me to explore neurofeedback for myself and as of this morning I have done over 70 neurophy back sessions and it has literally changed my life and I think that you're going to really enjoy this episode so buckle in if you haven't met him before Dr Gray Kelly is going to be our host today he is director of product development at neuro hacker Collective he's a naturopathic physician and author of the book shapeshift and as I mentioned before Dr Andrew Hill is here with us he is the founder of peak brain Institute and a top Peak Performance coach in the country he holds a PhD in cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA's Department of psychology and continues to spearhead cognitive research using EEG qeeg and Erp methodologies he has been practicing neural feedback since 2003. Andrew welcome back to the show and Greg go ahead and kick things off sure we've got a lot to cover and one of the things we really wanted to dig in deep here was about the different brain waves that our brains making all the the time mixing together to perform in different ways so can we start just maybe a quick background on what brain waves are sure so um thanks for having me back guys nice to see you both uh brain waves are oscillations little rhythms the brain is making um the cortex more specifically the brain has a bark a layer that's got wrinkles gyri and soul side bumps and grooves and the the parts of the cortex that are sort of oriented perpendicular to the scalp to the skull you're actually getting the ability to read the brain through that part of the scalp so we have something called micro columns also occasionally called mini columns one is electricity one is size and it's something like 30 000 neurons in a column a little like block party in the city one building and that whole block parties jam into the same little rhythm and then firing if you will at the same rate the same you know dance pattern and you might have 30 000 neurons and a couple hundred thousand glial cells that support cells all kind of making up this little one machinery and we have billions of these things these are all the CPUs and they're six layered block buildings and they have some uh clotheslines going to the local buildings next door send them back messages and they have some long distance communication with pigeons to further ways to further buildings away and they all influence each other's uh local neighborhood sound and Intercity communication called micro columns many columns and how fast they're bouncing is a brain wave so the brain waves were named things off the Greek alphabet and the first one alpha isn't the slowest brain wave it's just the first one we measured basically it's a very easy brainwave to see and we measured it before we had like modern electricity even we used it was a scientist was bouncing light off of reflections of an exposed cortex and saw a ripple in the uh of a of a flame candle on a wall with an interference pattern realize it was a brain wave being evoked uh so the really subtle phenomena that we've known about for years but we've never really deeply understood we still don't but Alpha is about a 10 Hertz a 10 cycle per second wave and it's sort of like the idling mode the rest mode the bass the background and it really represents the index frequency the basic speed of your brain the speed at which you idle and it gets faster as you get older as you myelinate the brain as you produce more cells it gets faster and faster and faster and your speed of processing climbs and then as you get quite older you start to lose cell density lose myelination and you speed up processing dips that's when word finding issue starts showing up that's the Alpha Speed dipping for instance or maybe you got covet or a head injury or haven't been sleeping for four or five days or six weeks and then you have brain fog same phenomena Alpha's draggy so you can sort of feel this uh you can feel your Alpha Speed if you're having handoff or information flow issues essentially um so Alpha was the first brain way we thought about it was the first one that we kind of get into in the field of neurofeedback or biofeedback back in the 50s and 60s it's not necessarily the most exciting one to exercise it's just really obvious to sort of measure and starting at sort of the the slowest brain waves if you will we want to talk about Delta and Delta happens up to about twice per second two Hertz and it's the heartbeat of the brains the background of your metabolism the sort of brain stem phenomena of keeping your heart and lungs moving and all the involuntary cell metabolism stuff and bursts of it dominate in slow wave sleep that's a Delta Sleep phenomena it's very non-conscious background processes of the brain uh you don't think in it you kind of live in it basically and you'll see that the brain will produce General amounts of it it'll fill your Delta bucket at night it'll kind of recede in the background during the day for most of us but if you're sleep deprived starts to climb up in speed and get rushy and push around you see there are high amounts of it because your brain's sleeping when you're awake works very fast because your brain's rushing around trying to heal you or sleepy when you're awake so you can still get hints of this Delta Reserve not being well managed even though it is still fluctuating and doing the basic things Delta slow as you go up in Faster speeds you get to Theta and then Alpha so in between the alpha neutral and the Delta rest in repair mode you have the Theta and Theta is the release it lets things happen it takes the brakes off the cortex these these billions of little micro columns are organized and modulars modular neighborhoods that do specific things sometimes all of the time primary cortex doing something and sometimes it creates temporary networks Association cortices frontal lobe parietal lobe and makes meaning of other people's information mostly other neighborhoods so as these circuits are all bouncing around the Deltas and active resting mode in the tissue or the whole system Theta lubricates it releases of a little block party to happen or a normal behavior of a circuit to turn on or happen automatically so you need Theta because Theta is four to seven Hertz basically roughly at around six and a half Hertz a burst of that is the moment of insight the AHA the the sudden memory of the thing you didn't think you you actually knew that's that's six and a half Hertz you need that but if you make large amounts of four to seven Theta broadly throughout the head then your modules are kind of automatic and stimulus driven and you have poor inhibitory tone and we call that ADHD you know squirrel is a high Theta State we can't inhibit you see all the patterns the novelty the stimulus the outside world will drive you and put you in a mode but in the absence of that ability to load up your modules and make them you know engage in their automatic way then it's harder to control yourself to inhibit to direct the machine and decide how that information is is rising off of that part of the brain so Delta Theta Alpha and then you went to Beta And beta is a pretty wide range it goes from about 12 Hertz all the way up to about uh close to 40. and 40s where something called gamma starts and beta is pretty great it's the the modular activation the gas pedals the gears the voluntary and you think in it you perceive in it you have emotions in it that's most of you that you're aware of is a thing happening in beta and the default mode network runs in beta and specific sensory tissue uses beta and language tissue kicks off in beta so mostly you're aware of just that surface and just that you know faster brain wave set to some extent in terms of the mental cognitive higher human cell stuff it's up there but there's a special frequency within beta and it's in the lowest range uh it's in 12 to 15 Hertz and it's called the sensory motor Rhythm and it's what a lot of the field of neurofeedback is uh centered around or was discovered to sort of you know that's the big lifter you can kind of think of that beta wave that sensory motor wave as the relaxation mode or the idle mode or the rest mode uh just like Alpha but in the motor range and the movement and the control and the thought range so SMR beta low beta when it occurs on the strip of tissue that goes from ear to ear we have the sensory tissue and the motor tissue there just in front of and just behind the Central Division you have a sending information rising up for your body registering just behind the Central sulcus and you have descending motor control and voluntary control going down and just in front of the Central sulcus and this little bit of tissue when you're relaxed when you're sitting still when you have self-control and you're not distracted you're making lots of SMR lots of sensory motor Rhythm the strong inhibitory tone and those of you who are wondering the abstract what this might feel like well you've probably seen it if you have a cat who lies on a windowsill and becomes very still watches the bird that laser-like focus and physical inhibition that motoric Stillness that's a high SMR state that's literally the opposite of ADHD like literally SMR and Theta in an inverse relationship is a thing you can screen kids for and go oh impulsivity okay classic nice you're one of those um so Delta Theta into the betas and then you're up to gamma so gamma is kind of I for those uh classic literature people it's it's uh it's a snark it's you know it's a bujum you're you're darting at Shadows if you're concerned about Gamma in a biohacker context it's kind of like the word Quantum you got to be really careful in a biohacker context if someone's using the word Quantum most of the time they have no idea what they're talking about some of the time they're dishonest uh it's a real it's a big problem you know unless you're getting nuclear medicine you probably shouldn't be using that word with regards to your health honestly it's just not valid sorry I'm I'm very I'm very opinionated that's what the podcast is for apparently but um functionally gamma is a thing it exists we know about it we've measured it clefairin uh uh be Allen Watts did a bunch of work at the samatha project showing you at Gamma coherence changes captivity changes and long-term meditators that are amazing you see gamma changes in schizophrenia that are quite altered you see it in aging that are altered but it's really really hard to measure gamma waves 40 Hertz waves there's something called the one over F rule the amplitude of our frequency rule in all living systems actually all systems that are Dynamic and stable that oscillate like weather or your body you know oscillations happen and if they're big oscillations they have a lot of energy and they're slow delta waves big Delta wave if you have 10 Micro volts at Delta you got one or two of them but when you go up to gamma 40 Hertz waves you get tons of little tiny gamma waves the same energy to produce one let's say Delta wave and that means as you go up in speed you go down in the size of the wave down on amplitude the problem with that in EEG is waves as they travel from the brain through the layers of the meninges the tissue the skull the scalp they attenuate each of those things as a filter and it drops the amplitude of the waves and it drops some of the fast waves so much that you cannot measure gamma through the noise floor of EEG without getting under the skull or without using hundreds of thousands of dollars of very expensive Amplified equipment I've done some of that work you can do it but if you haven't spent 100 Grand on your EEG rig you probably aren't really measuring gamma and most of the literature for the first 50 years in gamma has been retracted because most of the of the researchers discovered they were picking up isocodes the movement of eyes the vibration is in that muscle range that intends to bleed into frontal electrodes so gamma's a bit of a thing with that it's been it's interesting but you need very specialized equipment that's either designed to sort of just measure that or it's very expensive brought Amplified equipment at the scalp so it's hard to do with passive consumer or prosumer or even decent lab grade gear reliably but one of my mentors in the space a guy named Jack Johnstone who passed on a couple years ago helped um a company develop an algorithm for measuring Consciousness using the ratio of gamma to Theta so gamma's about 40 theta's about four turns out these suckers Nest they ring together they synchronize and the angle though the phase the synchrony between this ringing is how conscious you are if you break that timing you create unconsciousness so all the major anesthetic drugs that that Knock You Out do so by changing we think by changing the something the microtubules that change how some of the ions work in your neurons but the functional effect is you change the phase angle the the coupling of of gamma and Theta you get Consciousness change and you can kind of measure there's a the bi-spectral index the best it's a commercial product is a Amplified single electrode you wear on your forehead in many hospitals in the US now during surgery so the anesthesiologist can look at a numerical scale of how conscious you are and use that to get to gauge uh uh Consciousness and this is why gamma's so sexy because it has this Consciousness thing in a valid way not in a way that gets you drummed out of your your grad program by using the word consciousness so people get excited about it but it's really hard to measure and it's really noisy and it's really hard to get in a modern you know even modern technology you're just not really generally doing stuff with it and yeah people who train it with neurofeedback or train there's a whole category of uh biohackeracy use neurofeedback a lot of them have gotten into something called the tag sync uh Theta Alpha Gamma synchrony training and they're reporting amazing subjective effects slow States and transformation but I'm fairly certain that what they're doing is simply manipulating Theta and Alpha and there's a category in a feedback called Alpha Theta where you do creativity Flow State relaxation work immune work substance uh craving work it's fairly powerful uh protocol of neural feedback and I believe you're getting gamma effect you're feeling Consciousness changes but you can do it by manipulating your Theta and meditation creates data changes that are measurable so I would say it's it's you know uh you're you're at risk of elaborating in the space without actually using the tools that are right there to go after that are a little more understandable and then you can worry about things below gamma but that's that's the landscape from about zero to about 40 gamma goes from 40 up to about maybe a thousand actually but we can't really measure it um Cliff sarin and Beyond watch did some work again with the samatha project I think they showed uh changes in gamma phenomena at 200 at 400 Hertz really really fast brain waves but that again it's a very hard phenomena to get access to without uh being under the skull so right should bring away the primer well I and um one of the things I just want to make sure we point out to the audience a benefit of qeeg is it's basically taking the EEG right the electrical activity of the brain but then mathematically slicing and dicing it so that you'll understand like okay there's this proportion of alpha in this part of the brain and you know it's got this amount of Delta and then when you talk about something like the alpha Theta training you're actually saying okay well you know when we look at your resting state or eye is open what we're seeing is you know this this brain wave looks like a weak muscle it's not doing its fair share let's teach the brain how to strengthen that and do more of that is that something along those lines correct it is it is the only subtle inflection I might uh want to add here is that while the performance testing we do alongside the brain map is graded it's good or bad and here's some deficits here's some performance brain maps are really not showing what's weak or strong just what's weird people are weird so we start off okay how unusual are you for the average person your age on a bell curve and some heat Maps Okay wow your Alpha is really unusual oh your fate is doing that wow your bait is interesting and I don't know what that means for you I just know what now it's plausible it's often true what could be true what is visibly potentially showing up but it's not you it isn't the subtlety of you it isn't the experience broadly but it might represent the stuff that shows up most reliably the stuff you can usually spot are the regulatory features that all brains engage in all the time the executive function the features of uh impulsivity or inattention you can see things like speed or processing which is again that Alpha Speed and that will represent experiences of like word finding issues and delayed recall that's a laggy Alpha Speed for instance um you can see almost all the flavors of anxiety in a brain map as far as I can tell not so much developmental things that are slow moving and that are gradual but all almost all of the flavors of acute or low-key anxiety perseveration rumination sensory and social irritability strong trauma response stuff um are things that show up as signatures and specific tissues that are cramped up with your anterior sting that's cramped up well you're either a high-powered CEO you got a little bit of OCD maybe both you know let's talk about your anterior cingulate oh your superpowers steel trap mine huh does that get stuck so it does okay you want to work on that all right and stretch that out it's it's a relationship with your physiology it's not so much about which label we get to so you know you see stress response things executive function things speed of processing brain fog sensory and social when it's really unusual those are the big features and from there I mean we should probably asked Lauren who's gone through it quite deeply um I do not remember a few months ago when I went over your brain map the first time because we've done a lot of mapping you know part of our our job at Peak is to teach you to become your own expert so you dove into that a little bit but um what did we find what was your experience the first time perhaps of looking at your data if I could put you in the spot for a second yeah yeah I mean I think one of the really meaningful things for me is I entered and was curious about uh the training just as like a biohack I didn't come to the table if like I want to address anxiety I want to address depression I want to address I really was like I'm a biohacker this is the next cool thing and I really had no idea until having some of the um you know brain waves speed up and catch up that I was really carrying this like 50 pound bag of anxiety around I didn't I I and so when that bag was taken off that's when I really had my eyes open so in the maps when you went over things with me and saw oh you know there's a cluster over here does this ring true to you or not I was like huh yeah kind of but the whole experience to me and the training of it has really um kind of opened my eyes to how you know a year ago I was such an anxious person but I wouldn't have labeled myself as a and so it's been really amazing and it's kind of crazy that such a simple thing of training of exercising your brain in a targeted way exercising and I'd love to talk about or ask about you know you have these sessions you know and they're very specific like CZ A1 and this is the frequency that we're going to inhibit this is the frequency we're going to reward and what does that really mean like what you know I I know uh I'd love you to unpack some of that so that we could really understand all together what's going on during a neurofeedback session sure um there's a couple different ways you can do neurofeedback uh a pretty classic way the way that we do it is using passive reinforcement learning operant conditioning I'll unpack those terms um but we often measure three different brain waves three different sets of frequencies at one location or maybe more than one we occasionally do like lots of wires but usually one or two wires in the head measuring your brain at specific places you might want to exercise broadly executive function stuff's pretty straightforward the left side of the brain kind of on that sensory motor cortex its job to some extent is to keep the spotlight bright and stable and clear and on things even if they're boring keeps you awake you're waking on and and it also helps keep you asleep at night which is kind of cool so it says mode maintainer the right hand side helps with pumping the brakes and not going squirrel you know with that SMR Theta ratio thing the supervisor of your attention are you appropriately paying attention or are you allowed to react to the new stimuli that's that's the right hand side more for most of us and both of these tissues do their job do their super supervisory control thing with beta of some sort and they both kind of become more automatic with thetas and Alphas the slower brain waves so pretty classic way to train your brain might be to do 50 minutes of one and 50 minutes of another and we're going to want to bring up some beta on the left side for a few minutes while bringing down some Theta maybe and then 15 minutes move the wire bring up some bait in the right hand side and bring down some Theta and when I say bring up or bring down we're literally just exercising by watching what the brain is already doing and then providing contingent feedback we're only applauding some of the stuff the brain is doing so if you stick some wires there and put some ear Clips on and measure the amount of beta moment to moment you're making and your Theta whenever your brain happens to make briefly a little more of that SMR beta and a little bit less of the Theta the computer sees that and goes oh good job brain and a game starts to run on the screen your Pac-Man needs some dots your puzzle pieces fill in what's your favorite uh game horses the horse's picture the picture gallery yeah we have this game we use called formation where you can load in beautiful pictures and art and it's like a picture grid that unveils and shows you more and more so for every uh one second or so that your brain for half that time has spent with your Theta going down or staying down and your beta going up or staying up the computer goes beep and shows you a little bit more of a of a picture it's unveiling it as an Applause dream good job good job good job good job and then you're then your brain moves the wrong direction The Game Stops for a second and the Brain goes oh wait wait where's my information where's the uh where's the Applause why am I not getting uh stuff happening I kind of like stuff stuff's cool no stuff isn't isn't so cool where's my stuff and then it happens to move the right direction and the Applause resumes and the Brain notices it the mind doesn't actually notice it that well usually three or four sessions in when did you notice it because you're a biohacker people are subtle I I based on you know I've asked a lot of people what was normal but I think I'm like a super responder because after my third session I felt completely different and it's built and it's over time I mean I've done a lot um because you know it's like once you get a taste of this you want more so three sessions four sessions five sessions that's actually pretty typical to feel something I think you did get a I remember you got a pretty strong specific response sometimes the things we start with are the things you really need and you've got a really good response right away I think you know that was you um but the the the mind doesn't actually notice the process happening right away the brain does uh they gave me a PhD at UCLA for demonstrating that learning Loop of neurofeedback I think I did the first double-blind placebo-controlled study on neurofeedback and I did it looking at that game that formation game how the brain reacted when the reward popped up the audio beep and the picture reveal I I grabbed that event an ongoing EEG and then you snip out those eegs you average it together and you lose all the endogenous background information you're left with the learning event called an evoke potential and you can look and see how that evolves in response to the brain wave you're applauding so I demonstrated that that learning loops the brain starts to go oh beta waves cool beta waves within about five or ten minutes for everyone the very first time you do neurofeedback the brain's going whoa whoa hey why am I reacting to beta beta's cool and the mind has no idea typically and then a few sessions and you're like hey wait a minute huh I might be feeling a little different it's interesting or maybe more in your case but uh it's this passive involuntary operant conditioning the big trick of neurofeedback is well are you getting the effects you're looking for or not this is changing your brain briefly gently it's not permanent right away but you're pushing on your brain we want to make sure we're moving the right direction and not just how we assume you are built from some assessments or from some labels you've been given so we work really carefully to move from sort of a scientific modeling here's some ideas about you what's important let's understand you yay brains into more of a let's be careful let's listen to what she's saying are we moving towards your goals is there is this are there shifts are there is a new suffering we can try to support other new Transformations she's looking for and we learn your experience day-to-day by asking you sleep stress attention stuff and as that starts to fluctuate we're we're sprinkling in a little workouts trying to elicit effects that are in the direction you want to go in and then doubling down when you say oh wow hey wait I like that one okay let's give her two more of those I think that's a good one for her great you know and the coaches stay on top of you and help you know celebrate the wins and commiserate when things are stressful and that means you have to worry about how to do neurofeedback you can just worry about oh am I noticing anything from this stuff or should I be a squeaky wheel and ask for more should ask for more um but it comes very much like personal training where you get to validate the workout be annoyed at your coach if you're too fatigued ask for a harder workout and start to learn how the system uh responds over time that's then that's the neurofeedback of the intervention itself and then of course we map the brain again and we get to go back and be scientists and say hmm is it plausible you're feeling different in this way and teach you more the field of neurofeedback was discovered because uh somebody was manipulating SMR and you got an anti-seizure or seizure protection effect from it months later in in animals back in the 60s Dr barristerman UCLA was testing methyl hydrazine rocket fuel on cats for danger levels basically and some of the cats refused to have any instability events in the brain oh wait a minute these cats were used six months before and since cats make so much SMR he just squirted chicken broth into their mouth whenever they made a little bit more and shaped it okay cool you can operantly condition beautifully uh beautiful these cats became super cats seizure resistant and his lab manager was epileptic and uncontrolled in all of her meds having tons of seizures so they built her an auditory reward to SMR and her seizures dropped away and she went off all of her meds it was the start of the field but here's another thing SMR is also called sleep spindles it's the thing that keeps you asleep and causes memory consolidation to kick off so when a dog barks three houses away and you know that dog you don't wake up in a threat you just suppress the wakeful Rouse moment and the Sleep spindle kicks in and you have this you know deepening of your sleep and then that kicks off a 9 Hertz spindle in the hippocampus which causes that memory consolidation stuff to start to move short-term memory to long-term memory throughout the cortex so it's this motoric inhibition that allows that deep rest that deep staging of architecture and it's unusual to get deep sleep improvements with Alpha Theta training because that actually Alpha Theta to some extent brings you into the hypnagogic mode between awake and asleep and it brings up the Theta the the non-linear or the inside I mentioned earlier while dropping the the aware Idol the alpha so that you're actually more of a Theta dominant State more creative more shifting it's that state people know because they have good ideas before they fall asleep or remember that thing before they fall asleep that's that's a Theta that's a hypnogic access State a non-linear State it's a bit of a flow State access for many of us well Alpha Theta neurofeedback brings you right to the edge of that and holds you there just to hold you there so you end up getting that deep relaxation but you also many of us get insight with Alpha Theta stuff bubbles up we start to feel our feelings and know how we feel them I get calls from the spouses of high-level CEOs whatever you just did do that again he brought me flowers we had the best therapy session oh my gosh and and people say things like oh my gosh I was so elegant under that uh eloquent in that fight I wasn't mean to my wife oh my goodness and artists and creatives get back in the zone and can find their flow again so Alpha Theta is pretty amazing and it it was used in the 60s and 70s a lot in something called the peniston protocol for alcohol for substance use disorders specifically with alcohol a lot and it seems to um reverse the literature reverse the one-year relapse rate with alcohol from 75 across all interventions to 25 when neurofeedback is added um similar kinds of impact Alpha Theta use for violent offenders in Canada Doug Quark did a bunch of work on this same kind of thing the one-year reincarceration rate for violent offenders dropped from 75 down to 25 in a study when your feedback was added so it gives you that in between state that emotional access state it can irrigate some release from some stuff you aren't aware of it can do gentle sideways careful work and Trauma for some of us and uh you apparently got a healing response from it you know I I've seen it Jack up T cells to 15 like really take CD4 plus cells and bring them way way up and this is a known effect of alpha training in general Alpha Speed training back there brings up T cells Dr uh Gary Schumer in Orange County did some work on that um but Alpha Theta the next door neighbor of alpha training seems to also release such a deep healing a deep relaxation response that there's a surge of growth and healing and I think her deep sleep was a secondary effect it was the consequence of that incredible release of growth hormone and T cells and relaxation your brain's like oh we're gonna do three hours of deep sleep tonight to do some cleanup and restock the shelves because oh my God yes but we didn't provoke the Deep Sleep necessarily if you had a chronic generalized anxiety disorder and I trained your beta we would produce less anxiety and better sleep maintenance and that's about sleep architecture specifically now you're training the actual Sleep System but you can go after either way and great oh she's getting great sleep cool wasn't a primary goal glad that's happening that suggests we're on track for her brain because you train the brain and it flexes you go to the gym for your abs and your shoulder hurts the next day because the seat height was set wrong or something so in neurofeedback you train whatever your attachment trauma your creativity your Flow State your laser-like focus your seizures and you get a little Flex over the next 24 hours on sleep stress attention on speed and by noticing those things you index the protocol the exercises you're doing and that's what our coaches are doing for you Lauren they're saying hey haven't seen a sleep survey in three days how you doing just gonna do some planning for you is because they want to see if you're noticing those fluctuating things we can use to index the path you're on and help you know create a bit more of a tight coupling to where you want to go so that's how you change your brain this I'm not sure if this would be an appropriate analogy for qeg and neurofeedback but sometimes I'll hear a descriptor like top down brain bottom up right like the top down is like the predictive brain right what's filtering out a lot of experience and saying okay well I know this person is going to insult me so whatever they said I'm going to feel insulted where you know that bottom up is more like the raw sensory input and the raw you know like um emotional thing and that it would sound like to me a lot of what you know this Alpha Theta training does it's it's allowing more of that raw to like bubble up and now cause that top down brain to say oh my prediction might have been incorrect let me update that I think you're right I think um especially in things that there's a syndrome called Alexa thymia which is inability to talk about how you feel I mean some people believe all men have this but I I don't um so uh you can reliably get access to how to putting your emotions into words using Alpha Theta for most people it works counter to that phenomena essentially um I think it's exactly what you're doing uh Dr Kelly is is is educating the more frontal the more top-down about the more visceral the more back in fact Alpha Theta neurofeedback is done on the back of the head hey Pro tip in the brain front of the brain inside self back of the brain outside world so the Deep Awareness stuff you're doing is actually on tissue that's used to integrating the outside world into the self it's not on the highest level cognitive stuff in the most decision and thinking stuff and the holding stuff and the attention stuff it's in the making meaning of things that as they come in that's the place you're doing Flow State work so yeah and one of the things you mentioned earlier was the default mode Network which I just think of as the mean at work um but I would you know that obviously has a lot to do with the stories about our past rumination sometimes they'll say time traveling right going into the future to be anxious about it the past to be worried or depressed about it so I would imagine a lot of this neurofeedback training must be making some fairly dramatic changes in the default mode Network and maybe you know the attention Network you've mentioned executive function but there's an executive control Network and I would think these are all just like you could almost see these connections and you can see you can see the networks the rich clubs the rich hubs you can see the salience network the executive Network and the dmn default mode Network all kind of show up like the front midline and back midline are big clusters of tissue called the cingulates and the anterior cingulates which is what you're thinking about or planning for future in the back midline posterior cingulate does watch the road heads up and evaluates the possibility of things having gone wrong in the past so the outside world in history so yeah if you post your singular it's lit up to you know a couple standard deviations above average and beta waves I'm going to think you're either a lifeguard or there's some threat you know activated sensitivity and you're ruminating all the time maybe both maybe neither maybe it was weird good job be weird but let's talk about the fact that hey this posterior cingulate this often cramps Up When The World Isn't especially safe or predictable are you kind of like threat sensitive and activated kind of visceral you are do you care you care all right we don't know if it's true who cares what we call it but if that matters to you you want to stretch that see how it feels okay cool you know so you can you can take pretty severe threat sensitivity trauma response PTSD type phenomena and you're not doing anything invalid but your frame this is physiology is mechanistic and saying wow the suffering that really is is is is important that really matters but it's just your brain so a people have a sense of agency with things like neurofeedback but B understanding how it works means you can be frustrated and it hurts but you have a much harder time being ashamed about it or being overwhelmed about it when you have that sense of like oh wow my back midline is doing this lifeguard thing oh okay huh great now you know so you can see the dmn uh interesting that posterior thing but behind the right ear is the tempo parietal Junction I call it the princess and the p uh it Maps the world into the self so if someone's voice is irritating or they're chewing too loud and destroying your concentration or uh you find everyone's face is too loud and their voice is too annoying and all that stuff that's the back midline of the back right behind the ear um but of course they're not separate like the the cingulates are sort of at the intersection of the networks involved with the South the racetrack of the internal reverie and awareness that's the true dmn and the executive area the left stabilizer Focus the right inhibitor of distractibility those will be directly tied into the cingulates and being over having those different networks those Rich clubs and hubs locked up together start to predict some of the phenomena you see um and I have a very different perspective on the brain after doing the physiological stuff that I used to after working deeply in Psychology for many many years for instance there's a the default mode Network in the front the anterior cingulate and that back right the tpj the temporal Junction there will co-activate co-lock up when you are obsessively focused on things in the environment that are irritating and so you see this in something called misophonia when a spouse about to kill their husband because he's chewing too loud that that actually happens it's like an OCD tick rage from small sounds you know mouth sounds especially because they're weird um so you see this like obsessive type of thing but that same co-activation right tpj in front midline you see locked up in claustrophobia and in agoraphobia you would think they would be somehow like opposite no they're about the mind being obsessed about the environment being uncomfortable oh okay and they have an outside world map to the self kind of relationship safety oh so I I help somebody with agoraphobia a couple years ago two summers ago she did a remote program and after doing eight weeks or something with us went on a road trip to a wedding and came back from it with pictures and success stories and posted them into her Facebook group for agoraphobia and I got 12 people the next week who had agoraphobia who came who got maps and nine of them had this pattern and I went oh oh agoraphobia looks like other tick disorders holy cow it looks like claustrophobia it looks like misophonia it looks like Tourette's huh and then you know he talks about their dmn and their intercingulate and the tpj and you start to decompose this from the big scary label hey here's how you might well on this anterior single it also means that you don't mind like a steel trap and the right tpj also means that you get all the feels and you got all the empathy and you're a little raw but it's kind of a super power huh okay and it's not about this monolithic application of label or identity at that point it's more about okay here's how it works and am I able to do something about that and stretch that tissue so you know it's my soapbox well and I think the and I just want to illustrate this point I I think I often tell Lauren I think of feedback as The Breakfast of Champions right and creating good feedback loops should be our goal in as many areas of Our Lives as possible and um like one I would say example from my way distant past back in I think it was 1990 I decided to study Thai language and one of the first things we did was learn colors so in English that NG sound that you'd have at the end of a syllable like ring or Wing like we've got that right we heard that sound in that location at the end of a syllable in infancy our brain you know wired to hear and say that appropriately but Thai Vietnamese they have that sound at the beginning of a syllable we we simply do not right so the word for blue in Thai starts with that NG sound and I can remember my professors you know you know holding up something blue having me say that shaking his head over and over again right because my brain just couldn't tell what it's not what he was saying and what I was saying how those were different right and there was no feedback loop to correct it my brain didn't have that sound feedback loop and what I really needed was someone to create that almost what neurofeedback like ding ding ding you said it right this time like more of that right so you also need to hear the difference yeah right the ages nine ten roughly the laterality Left Right division finishes off and at that point the brain prunes out the possibility of hearing new speech sounds because if you hear something that's kind of like a phoneme you already know it's probably the guy from The Village next door probably not a new language so this is the basis of both our accents that if we learn languages after age 10 or 11 or 12 but also the inability to hear speech sounds that aren't fully you know nuanced in our native tongues unfortunately so well and he gets to finish off my analogy I didn't need to be told I was doing it wrong I knew I was doing it wrong I needed help doing it right and to me when you know I think of what you offer with neurofeedback it's teaching the brain how to do things right that before it was just stuck it didn't it didn't hadn't figured out that on its own the chances are that it would figure out on its own are fairly low you know where if it could have it probably would have and it's why you know you see so many miraculous things with the brain in such a wide context of limitations and like you said some limitations you know maybe a superpower in another area so let's keep that but let's you know like help you overcome the limitation and you can measure things you can't feel so you can train involuntary aspects I mean you know you can do things with neurofeedback you can do meditation but that's only the voluntary stuff you have a really hard time accessing tissue you can't literally feel with meditation but you can go right after it measure it in real time with neurofeedback so it gives you like an end run around on the voluntary and the mental but you also do get the benefit of the imposed feedback loop of talking to your coaches day to day about how you're feeling and monitoring your sleep and you know Drucker what is measured is managed here and if you start recording your sleep and recording your uh energy level in your mood and your stress because you've told us those are your goals and we're having you let us know if they iterate well you're going to be really aware of what your mood is doing day to day your sleep habits are doing if you're actually taking oh my gosh I got to tell Peak brain coaches that I have my aura ring shaming me again oh wow that might mean you don't eat before bed tomorrow because you have the reflective coaching piece of it and it means that you you know start to notice and shape and uh uh as an aside the one of the best ways to track your sleep in the literature among the most accurate is tracking your sleep is rating it subjectively and if you do that routinely over time you become as good a Raider as the best combination of EEG and ectography and everything else you actually approach perfect if you just start doing it eventually and it actually gets better than most of our biohacker sleep trackers we have access to you can get there pretty well so the point is observe record make notes be mindful don't let momentum push your brain your circadian rhythm your sleep habits your food your stress response around start looking at those systems and thinking about how they they move and starting to steer them so we try to sneak that in while we're training your EEG we try to like teach about circadian stuff and you know the best way to do keto if that's your jam or whatever other biohack you're you're layering in we try to give you a little bit of best practices so that you have this longer term feedback process built in to steer changes for yourself so well Lauren you've been you know listening attentively are there any things that may have come up that you have questions on or think our audience May benefit from some clarification I think we covered the brainwave piece really well but one thing at least that I really appreciate about neurofeedback on a on my you know understanding of it is about how it's about pattern recognition and then how the brain is just this pattern recognition engine in and of itself and we're using a modality about pattern recognition to kind of nudge it in the right direction but that it is very self-directed so maybe you could help better synthesize like my understanding of the pattern yeah you're talking about associative learning things happen things get Associated all kinds of things in the brain the body and the body notices the ones that are rewarding that are reinforcing so while nervey back functionally is a bit different sitting in a chair watching a game stop and start it's kind of no different than a baby flopping around who manages to do a baby push-up and goes oh my gosh I can see 12 feet all this information the world is so much bigger holy cow I love it the body the brain remembers oh okay more information in that state let's do baby push-ups tomorrow and later on because it's cool but the baby wasn't thinking left arm right arm got to do a push-up it was just like reach for the mode reach for the activation and there was a reinforcer a rewarding State about more information yummy stuff interesting stuff so in the case of neurofeedback the rewarding stimulus is just something at all you know billions of things happening so all we're doing is watching one little piece of the brain going good job good job good job good job again and again and the Brain starts to go oh okay the big trick in neurofeedback is that we're moving the goal posts so over the 30 minute run of the north feedback session your brain's going to go through several normal to itself typical endogenous if you will changes it's going to run to Theta and beta and changes in speed and fatigue and stuff just happening if we only pick out the 70 times that your brain had little 10 second runs of theta dropping and the beta climbing and just applauded those of all the billions of things your brain is doing your brain's going to notice hey wait a minute why is my Theta going down being applauded okay and it's going to start chasing the information flow as we ask it to have to do even more to get the same gameplay I mean we move the goal post adaptively and then 10 minutes and 50 minutes in your brain's a little tired and you're actually not able to make the same you aren't fluctuating as as well in that direction anymore so we make it easier we move the goal post the thresholds next to where you are so when you fluctuate again in the right direction the Applause resumes so we're giving a directed signal of movement and so we have these two or three different brain waves you might be training in a session it might be training down some slow brain waves turning down some very fast brain waves and training up some in the middle so you simply measure the amount you're making boom boom boom and put a threshold just above or just a below where somebody is and then when they move across that or stay on the right side of that the game runs and every so often you adjust the thresholds next to where they are so that their General Tendencies of the brain moving in that direction is what the brain hears about and we see how you feel so yeah operant conditioning in involuntary instrumental conditioning specifically but it's just low-key operant conditioning with passive feedback yeah awesome well thank you it has uh been a really awesome episode for our listeners it's been an amazing journey for me and your team is incredible how how can um you know if anyone's listening how what would be the best way to learn more interact with the peak brain Institute yeah so we have offices uh popping up uh both in the US and a couple now overseas but most of our clients work remotely so you guys can come to one of the US offices where we have a special for the folks who are neuro hacker Affiliated um where we have like an unlimited annual brain mapping membership and it's usually 500 bucks but it's half price for the nordhacker folks it's a biohacker special to come in and do like maps and maps and maps and maps with all your nootropics and schedule those Maps people do and we love it so you know get in there and learn your brain um but we also do everything fully virtually and remotely and we send out equipment so you know our socials are mostly Peak brain in LA but it's Peak brain Institute as the main website so come check us out tell us you heard us here and tell us what your brain goals are it will help you figure out yourself perhaps a bit more and give you some control over making changes well thank you so much Andrew today I've learned a tremendous amount and I'm like honestly super excited to do more work with you myself so thank you of course Dr Kelly my pleasure we'll we'll get you back in and uh we'll peek more at your EEG foreign [Music] this podcast is for informational purposes only the podcast is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment you should not use the information on the podcast for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease or prescribing any medication or other treatment always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified Health provider before taking any medication or nutritional herbal or homeopathic supplement and with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition never disregard 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