Brain Wellness - episode 100: Geeking out on the neuroscience of brain mapping with Andrew Hill

[Music] welcome to brain Wellness the podcast I'm your host Mandy MP each episode will bring you a new topic or interview related to brain health and wellness as part of my mission to help you on the path to a healthier happier brain so let's get started hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Brain Wellness the podcast my guest today is Dr Andrew Hill Dr Hill is the founder of peak brain Institute and a leading neuro feedback practitioner and biohacking coach for clients worldwide at Peak brain Dr Hill provides individualized training programs to help you optimize your brain across goals of stress sleep attention brain fog creativity and athletic performance super excited to have you here today with me Dr Hill thanks for being here of course thanks for having me Mandy yeah so my first question for Everyone is always just tell me a little bit about your story what what got you to where you are right now how'd you get to be the neuro feedback gurer that you are yeah so um I've been doing neuro feedback in one form or another for about 25 years years and before that I worked for about a decade in acute uh Human Service work so I uh managed group homes for people with multiple disabilities so they had no language often no vision um often you know cognitive deficits as well so really acute uh developmental difficulties and after doing that for a few years I ended up going into acute impatient psychiatric work working with crisis uh both in uh adult as well as a geriatric population and then a kid population so I had all this really rich but kind of deep suffering experience across different areas of human stuff and I was working in a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts one of the more uh at the time uh aggressive locations to work and I got injured and couldn't keep the job that I had effectively and the hospital uh closed down soon after that so I was sort of like well I don't can't really go to the jobs I was doing before in Psych hospitals and okay what should I do and I went and got a job in high-tech and worked in doing uh Tech development Tech engineering uh Tech evangelism for a few years and uh to give you some sense of when this was this was right before the year 2000 uh big Tech correction the bubble correction so I was you know in in Hightech right when that was happening I was like well maybe I want to get back to work working with people because you know the tech boom is slowing down so I went and got a job working in an Autism Center that used Nur feedback I heard about this stuff called Nur feedback I was kind of excited to check it out and I ended up working in this Center seeing uh mostly kids with autism ADHD anxiety seizures you know childhood sort of Developmental category stuff and um what I saw blew my mind because people were getting changes in an order of weeks and you you'd see somebody come in really disregulated lots of seizures crazy ADHD ticks something and within a few weeks you'd seeing changes in behavior and after a couple of months you're seeing measured change in assessment data and I had been working with people who we were doing our best just to like keep them safe sometimes impatient or working in group homes I spent a year one year teaching a guy to use a fork that was our big accomplishment was he went you know from not using a fork to using a fork and it was just reinforcement learning it just really tedious and then I'm seeing extremely disregulated kids in like 6 weeks 8 weeks ratchet down their disregulation like really dramatically to the point where parents are call uh teachers are calling home and thanking parents for whatever they did and it really shocked me it sort of flew in the face of what I thought was uh possible for helping brains and at the time this was uh again you know long time ago the field was still pretty young it's not that old now but you know EEG is only 100 years old this year and neuro feedback was discovered in the mid sort of 1960s in this uh clinical form and you know half its life uh uh basically 25 years ago the three or four schools of thought in the field were still all arguing about how it worked and what to do and there were open questions about what was happening and what the mechanisms were and my way is the right way no my way is the right way and a lot of that vitriolic uh fighting in a little tiny nichy area of psychology essentially you know crabs in a bucket climbing over each other and and really aggressive fighting you know this is before the internet the modern internet this is back when we had use net stuff you know so to give you a sense of how long ago it was and all of these greats in our field were leaving these long diet tribes around technical stuff and you know disparaging other tool sets and what really struck me as somebody knew in the field learning all this stuff was that no matter what tool set was in use the effects they were getting were better than what I had seen across a decade of working with acute cases without fail and I was like this is really really weird like they're all arguing about this and yet it seems to work a lot better than all the stuff that I've seen what's going on you know and in some ways it was even worse because the ideas that each of these three schools of thought had were not reconcilable they had different ideas about how the brain works how Learning Works and yet they were all getting good results so this is a blind men and elephant situation right we have a a piece of something we're describing without some good perspectives so um I ended up going back to grad school to figure out well how is it working how does the brain know when you are rewarding brain waves yeah you know we we have the technical setup we stick wires the head we measure the brain in real time when that changes we applaud that back to the brain but how does the brain know how does the brain figure out where's that informational Loop happening um you know we were doing very systematic sort of recipe book stuff in the field 20 years ago and we didn't really understand necessarily H H why we would do some things um do this that works and there's still some of that c amount of clinical lore uh persists in the field but a lot more now we can go oh this phenomen in the brain okay we should do this to address that and it's a much more straightforward perspective but at the time I was doing my grad work it was an open question really on if it worked you know in the mainstream people were a little skeptical um there's a lot more research now but the research still lags the clinical practice mostly because we don't do uh neuro feedback the way the research is done it's a very individualized process like personal training and most of the research doesn't do that it just takes these like two groups does one thing for each group and then does short amounts of ner feedback so it's kind of a weak comparison um but you can still find good impacts on many things in spite of that in the literature so I was going back to grad school without a huge amount of literature um and and very little on like mechanism or what's happening you know the the initial research on neuro feedback the discovery if you will happened in UC at UCLA in the mid-60s by mistake cats were being exposed to Rocket Fuel to examine how dangerous Rocket Fuel was and a certain subset of those cats refused used to have seizures all the rest of the cats were having really bad effects from Rocket Fuel exposure but eight of the 32 cats were like nope we're not having seizures other cats are having seizures 40 minutes in the other cats were like two and a half hours in looking a little bit unsteady but not having the seizure events yet and the person who did this experiment Dr Barry Sturman was like have I discovered a special cat no he turns out another experiment had had done six months prior he put a an eye dropper taped into their cheek and and squirted chicken broth into their mouth whenever they made a brain wave the cats make a lot of if you've seen a cat lying on a wind still watching Birds that's still body and Laser like focus is a is a mode that uh animals go into it's called sensory motor Rhythm and predators do a lot of it because it's a combination of being deeply physically relaxed or inhibited and cognitively you know intentionally very very focused um that state that high smmr state is the opposite of ADH D like literally the opposite of ADHD where you have trouble maintaining the inhibitory tone and instead other brain waves take over but Sturman picked SMR because cats make these huge surges of SMR sensory motor Rhythm and trained it up okay great you can condition it wonderful go back and the subject pull cats and six months later these cats were seizure resistant huh so he trained his lab manager who was having uncontrolled seizures on major meds de tegral meol d and she was still having tens of seizures every single month and they built her an auditory feedback machine and over a year she was used she used it went off all of her meds and was then seizure free for a year that was the start of the neur feedback field but it was it's all phenomenological you know this for autism that for seizure this for ADHD that for trauma and then we got into brain mapping or qeg where you can to see the phenomena in your brain that might relate to Reg atory features that we often give labels to you know but like ADHD is not your brain it's that's a particular behavioral set of characteristics that probably have two or three big physiology resources that might be cramped up in particular ways but one diagnosis might have four or five or 10 or 20 or you know infinite number of things you might see in a brain so brain mapping is not a diagnostic process it's looking at your brain saying hey look look at all the weirdness cool cool let's figure out what's plausible how much of this might track things you understand and the stuff we can see somewhat reliably ends it being the stuff the field of neur feedback can relatively uh with some good confidence change it's these features of attention stress and sleep seizure migraine sensory processing speed of processing uh and sensory social sensory speed tension stress and sleep and then the stability stuff migraines and seizures that's the loow hanging fruit for neur feedback there are other things it can do Cravings creativity flow States immune system but the landscape of ner feedback we think about the cortical resources of the brain the Big Rich hubs the default mode Network the salience network brain laterality language areas visual you know all the coral stuff and that's not that Mysteria I mean it's a little bit it's it's weird it's your brain it's hidden but it's not nearly as mysterious as people think so brain mapping becomes this process of sitting down with somebody and saying hey look look at your brain here's something that's plausible people go yes yes that's that's that's me so you're usually not telling somebody new something new about themselves when it comes to brain mapping you're usually helping somebody figure out oh the stuff that I care about is showing up like that oh okay and you crystallize your perspective on it because you get a sense of how weird or how quirky or how it might operate so this gives people agency and then that's also given the neur a feedback landscape these other tools to start doing very tailored work towards someone's particular goals even if they don't fit a diagnostic bucket or sort of an intervention recipe book you end up working with a person uh at a very individualized level to explore resources shape resources you know pursue it so long with the answer but I I have this personal training perspective on neuro feedback because I went into first the research perspective on how is it working um and then uh from there brought it out into you know more of a sort of startup landscape with both you know High performers as well as addiction as well as you know traditional Nery back goals of you know childhood stuff as well so yeah yeah that's that's where I am I love that so as I mentioned before we started hitting record I did have another conversation about neuro feedback a few weeks ago and I was hoping we'd get into it even deeper and you have not disappointed so far so I I love all all the detail on it so all of those different theories of why it was working did you come up with a good explanation for why it does oh yeah yeah sure um I demonstrated how the brain knows that the stuff on the screen or the audio is uh itself essentially so the experiment I did one of my experiments from my grad work was looking at well let me back up let me explain how n back works yeah yeah technically how we set it up what's actually happening and then I'll back up and tell people what the other half half is how you know how what I discovered in the brain okay so neuro feedback is essentially something called operant conditioning it's just exercise in the brain waves but the behavior you're conditioning is involuntary so that's where it gets kind of weird because you can't really feel your brain waves so conditioning them is this process where your brain is learning but the mind's like really this is stupid until it starts to kick in two three sessions in usually for Nerf Fe back you feel it you know not right away typically what's happening give you a classic example um there's a circuit on the right hand side of the brain that supervises our attention uh it's involved heavily with aspects of executive function with sleep of of behavior and uses that lowf frequency beta that sensory motor Rhythm 12 to 15 Hertz to sit still relax uh resist waking up at night um not go squirrel you know so pump the brakes appropriately supervise turn here turn here no no no come on you know they kind of like pulling back gently this right side circuit and it uses beta waves low beta waves to do its job often in some people anyways theta waves which is a release brain wave or a lubrication takes the brakes off the circuit Theta might be really high there in some people and the beta might be relatively low and that produces a lot of disinhibition people that are more driven by the outside world that react that are Hunters not gatherers that have this sort of mode they choose really based on what is demanded by the outside world so they're really good at high stimulus high intensity high conflict less good at doing their taxes and that is a low supervisory state but it's a very high uh performance State under high intensity so you know again aspects of that sound like ADHD basically so you often want to train this sensory motor Rhythm this SMR frequency up because it will make your brain more able to sleep able to sit still it'll reduce seizures it'll reduce a bunch of stuff it also causes a huge plasticity surge in the brain for about 24 hours so we love to train SMR so you stick a wire there put some ear Clips on and typically set the computer up to measure your brain as you make that brain wave the amount of those beta waves moment to moment and maybe the amount of the theta waves as well moment to moment on your own whenever your brain briefly shifts in the right direction computer sees that and apply your brain by making stuff on a screen some audio little gameplay start to happen the brain's like hey I like stuff stuff's cool hey there some stuff and then it moves in the wrong direction the beta dips the Theta climbs and the game slows down or stops the brain says oh I don't like no stuff where's my stuff and then it happens to move in the right direction the Applause continues and it goes h ah and then there's this process in the training where we move the goalpost we adjust every few seconds next to where the brain is so we only catching the movement in the proper direction to applaud my big question was well how do we know like how does the brain know that those beeps are you know contingent on the actual brain waves is there a training process or and there was some question 25 years ago is it the attention you're being paid by your therapist is it you know what is it going on here I mean there was open questions on those uset server people are arguing about doesn't matter where you put the wires doesn't matter which frequencies you train or is it just exercise pure so those are the big questions I wanted to answer what is happening in the actual informational Loop does it matter left versus right hemisphere does it matter low beta waves versus high beta waves as the reward so 12 to 15 or 15 to 18 which is a more higher frequency beta the left the corresponding circuit in that pre-central area it uses faster beta 15 Herz and above for stabilizing vigilance and also stabilizing the depth of sleep it's the it's the most maintainer essentially so these two big circuits C3 C4 in nfy Black parland see left side right side Central strip are big maintainers of sleep and executive they're of and trained they're very you know conserved across a lot of complaints and goals so I targeted those in an experiment where we put training wires on those locations and put a 64 Channel cap on top of that and then set people up to get rewarded on changes in beta or low beta on the left beta on the right or sham meaning they were getting rewards that were not contingent to their brain in real time so we stored some EG and then derived training rewards off of stored files that were not theirs and had no time locking no relationship to their brain um and then uh we trained five days in a row and we watch what evolved in the brain over that time oh in the last bit of uh for the Neuroscience Geeks in the audience um we took the reward event the beep that happened when the brain's just spent half a second doing the right thing and we embedded it in the ongoing 64 Channel EEG record as a series of events and over that half an hour oh and I also um we trained with nobody in the room we set people up and left just kept N Signal quality from another room uh so we had a sham condition we had left side beta left side SMR and right side smrs four conditions four different groups and watch what happened with the EEG it turns out within five minutes if the if you're not doing sham training within five minutes the brain starts to burst in the frequency you're rewarding under the location you're rewarding the brain's like going ah every beep that happens causes a desynchronization a surge in the beta if you're rewarding SMR after a few minutes of that whenever the brain hears a beep that has a pla of the SMR has just made it makes another little surge of it or desn an amplitude event that causes a f difference so you can see the brain going whenever you applaud the brain wave and that little surge of activity does not happen everywhere it happens under the electrode and it doesn't happen that much on the opposite side doesn't happen at all if you're applauding things that are not contingent to the person you still see an auditory event you still see the beep happen in a slow frequency auditory event but you don't see the desynchronization called an event related spectral perturbation uh you don't see that if the person's getting a sham reward the beep causes an auditory event but there's no beta uh surge that happens afterwards so I demonstrated side you know side of the brain matters sham matters it shows up instantly within a few minutes and this is important because one of my big questions clinically before I to grad school is why do we have to spend 10 or 20 sessions just getting to some good movements for some people for some people they sit down the first session like oh my gosh angels are singing the world is bright oh my gosh I feel amazing that's rare one person out of maybe 50 has that experience though and maybe one person out of 50 is like I never felt it but a month in their sleep is great or they're not drinking alcohol or whatever seizures are down but there's no subjective experience and most people are in a mid place where two sessions in three sessions in four sessions in they're like hey wait a minute huh I might be feeling something okay and then it wears off and ah I was imagining that and then they do it again oh no wait a minute there's that nura feedback thing and at that point you can change protocols each time and get a different subjective effect and that's the real core of Nur feedback practice is this personal training well how'd that feel we getting goal congruent movement did you notice anything oh you did great do it again oh you didn't oh it was a little bit too wired after that it was back off so we we we we know we get subjective effects but one of my questions is why is it 5 to 10 sessions in for really getting that movement is it really taking the brain this long is there you know why is is there a dose effect what's happening and no it just turns out you need to build up enough of an effect for the mind to participate because it's just not a very big effect initially the brain notices the brain starts to learn within five minutes and you can see it on a screen you can tell if neuro feedback is happening so the loop of information flowing from the person's brain out into the filters to the game and back to the brain I demonstrated that it exists and that it's different based on if you do beta training or low beta training or no training you can see the distinctions and then I even did in five days in your feedback some lateralized attention testing the the the lab that I got my PhD was a laterality lab Left Right Hemisphere and my mentor Dr iron zidel um he was a grad student for uh Joe Bogan Roger Sperry who did all the initial split brain subjects uh surgeries on people for EP Epsy and a lot of that was looking at hemispheric uh function as well so Dr zel's lab was focused around testing attention and each hemisphere separately using tcop you you flash information very quickly on the screen and you flash it to either left hemisphere well left visual field right visual field while fixing the middle and based on which hand you respond with you can actually constrain the ask of information into one Hemisphere or the other or force it to use both hemispheres based on which Mouse hand you're using and which visual field you're sending information into so you can suddenly test attention go no go style attention orienting to spatial stuff and attention in one hemisphere at a time and so showing that there's two separable attention systems that converge late to create our experience of attention really inform my perspective on how things like ADHD work certainly but I did a lot of testing with all of these like 75 85 95 year olds but brain subjects that were all the initial people I went back through them all and did all this testing and learned how their brains work and it was very very cool I learned a lot about laterality but you can see the laterality in the neuro feedback as well you have this perspective of taking Left Right hemispheric control and then we're starting to figure out that things like ADHD and and just general executive function it does have a very strongly lateralized left as the the vigilance maintainer and the uh stabilizer of that resource and right as the supervisor and steer and inhibitory tone and gently pumping the brakes so that perspective you know I went into grad school having had you know more than a decade of experience I I knew about brains and I knew I was I was experienced neur feedback but my perspective on the brain that I learned in this environment with Dr zidel changed how I did near a feedback because it created this this deep perspective on Left Right hemisphere coordination um the field of neura feedback had been working with what What's called the arousal model you know activation of anxiety and stress and sleep and fatigue um and so that plus my experience with developing brains plus the laterality stuff means that I've created a system of doing nuro feedback that's a little tiny bit different than most of my colleagues yeah we don't have a lot of colleagues in the field it's a small field only about you know 5,000 people in the US or so do this uh and about 15,000 you know worldwide but I have this this neuroscience perspective first not a psychology perspective so I'm not looking at the DSM or the diagnostic you know labels I'm not trying to find your di diagnosis in a brain map I'm teaching you how your brain works you know what you're feeling what your goals are somebody teach you how your brain works you're like that that over there can we change that okay if we see that yes not hard to change data with neuro feedback really actually pretty easy it's hard to know what to do to get an effect it's hard to understand a brain but once you know what you're working on you can put your thumb on that resource and you can gently move it how'd that feel it's mysterious but not blind so you have this opportunity to get in there and try things and N feedback is transient too initially eventually it's not 40 sessions 50 sessions and it starts to really become permanent early on people are kind of weird and you know the goal is not to say why isn't your brain average the goal is to say look do we see things in your performance test and your brain Maps you care about this okay now let's see if we're right now let's see from the ballpark of what understanding you and so then you teach somebody about their brain let them pick goals they get excited even before you start nerve feedback there's this lovely thing that happens where you teach them about their rumination or perseveration or seizure disorder or whatever it is and you show them in physiology and in data pictures of what's going on that they always they already know deeply and it's suddenly a lot harder to feel overwhelmed or ashamed or guilty about our brain thing I mean you got a broken arm people are sympathetic you know but if you're extra sensitive to rejection and it rules your life people aren't that sympathetic and you know that's a that could be a trauma response or a feature of ADHD or you know could be really be in the way and a real feature and if you have social and sensory tissue that's turned up to 11 wow look at that you're you're you're a a fairly uh sensitive person maybe you're empathetic and emotional maybe you're flooding but you can start to look at your brain as part of your body the same you look at other resources you know hop on your Fitness your your body fat scale look at your blood lipids look at your deep sleep on a Tracker maybe look at your Alpha Speed maybe look at your Theta beta ratios maybe look at you know uh instability events uh learn your brain take control of it that's my big uh big soapbox here with this stuff at this point so yeah super fascinating so we talked you talked a little bit about how you can't diagnose things but you can see patterns are there any other things that qeg can or can't do sure um the most valid thing the thing that Rose to diagnostic validity at one point but then dropped away a little bit um is ADHD uh Dr Vince manaster did some research in the 80s showing that um the ratio of theta to Beta tracks ADHD blindly sorts thousands of people from uh you know pre-diagnosed but but blind on that into a bucket of ADHD with 94% accuracy an inattentive ADHD um has a high alpha signature which is a neutral frequency 81% of the time really powerful like that's better than most uh discriminants we have in um you know General markers like blood ranges and things that's a better predictive however as grad students kept repeating that research every year it got weaker and weaker and doing a lot of discussions at conferences we all kind of decided Well what we're seeing here is sleep issues creeping into the Adolescent population over a decade washing out the sensitivity of this effect because High Theta high alpha when you're awake yeah it's ADHD it's also lack of sleep regulation perhaps as a cause so those two things look like each other concussion can look the same for some people so physiology phenotypes and tissues in the brain do not track the diet diagnostic label buckets they don't fit perfectly and people are weird so what is a problem for one person is not a problem for somebody else and the goal is not to say because you're average there's something wrong and brain mapping is used as an average reference you have to use a some measurement and age related populations are pretty stable so you can think of this like it's a measurement you know but it doesn't matter if the yard stick or meter stick it's just a comparison so you have some reference about what's sticking out and then can really learn brain mapping when you start to remap and do repetitive Maps so I teach people to understand their own brain Maps that's the first thing we do but then someone you know I tell somebody ahead of time oh you have to come in without CA caffeine and they groan oh really yeah to get a clean brain map you have to have been off caffeine from at least four o'clock the day before and for things like Aderall Etc it's like 48 hours to get a clean EEG oh my gosh no I'm not sure I can come in without coffee oh well we have really good coffee in the office we'll make you some but why don't you do two brain Maps why don't you schedule two let's do a caffeinated one as well or the person's like I can't stop smoking weed doc can you do 24 hours because that'll clear your EEG it's enough if you're a daily user 24 hours is plenty to clear the EEG not if you're an occasional user but if you're chronic if you use it for pain or for you know excessive Recreation you don't want to stop 24 hours get you enough visibility but let's do a stone map let's do one or a m map with your Aderall or a map with your whatever it is your pre-workout I don't care um if there's stuff in your lifestyle you rely on you prescribe to you let's do an acute map or contrast map because I can teach you about brain mapping faster with a contrast condition on the screen you know how Aderall feels or cannabis feels and when I show you that your Aderall wakes you up and makes you a little more crisp and focused but also makes you make more errors because it's it's addressing your sleep not your ADHD you know that already and when you point oh yeah or I've had like teenagers you know say my my mom really wants me to stop smoking weed but it's the only thing that helps my anxiety and the mom's like is there any way we can demonstrate that weed isn't good I was like well we can look at their brain and see what it's doing and you discover that okay it looks like your kid is self-medicating appropriately with with cannabis actually because there's really strong trauma stuff that's being brought down really well you know so this anxiety and migraine you know the 17-year-old is using it for you know I think we need to take a harm reduction approach here Mom not necessarily you know think of it as a as an abuse Paradigm necessarily because your kid said some things ahead of time and seem to be born out with this data so it's just agency again I'm not pro or anti any of these things any medication or any intervention but you can use the maps to dial in your meds when you change meds it shows up um the chair of my dissertation committee Dr uh Andy luer uh he's the sort of placebo researcher on all the placebo research and he also did a study on something called cordance he also manages the stard D um uh depression studies for all the big drug companies looking at all the big you know uh Frontline medications for depression and that's sort of why he's also the placebo guy um but he did a study showing uh an EEG measure in the brain called cordance which is a ratio of absolute to relative power in the frontal Load 7 to 10 days after you start an SSRI your brain has changed and it you often haven't felt the felt it by that point the brain changes well in advance of your experience and you might not feel it for three to five more weeks but it predicts if the anti-depressant is going to work or not so from a clinical management perspective you got somebody in crisis who needs medication management you can change the meds wait a week look at the EG and get a good sense about what direction the person's brain is being encouraged to shift in uh so there all kinds of like predictive there's phenotypes in the brain that predict if certain medications are going to work on you as well I can look at your brain and tell you if you're ADHD let's say I can look at your brain and tell you which medications to ask your psychiatrist about because your brain is one that doesn't generally work well with stimulants but might work well with this or that or the other um you can tell that from brain mapping often or aging or or injuries you know if you're aging your Alpha Waves slow down and I'm having word finding issues is that just you know my alpha waves or is there a concussion what's going on ah it's just your Alpha wave slowing down your sleep is disregulated prove your sleep meditate it'll speed back up versus something more Ma you can you can see that distinction or God forbid somebody gets covid or concussion you can see postco brain and I really clearly for most people if it's symptomatic you can even if not symptomatic you often can and same thing with concussions half of all concussions or brain injuries are silent and for 5 to eight years have no symptoms and then some of those produce uh brain fog slow processing even seizures later because there's a delay sometimes for brain injuries but um 3 to six months after somebody gets covid two to six months you can see the neuroinflammatory signatures and they look just like concussions for most people covid chemo mold lime apnea uh all kind of look the same and you don't really care what it is you don't really care if it's an old concussion or covid last year or you don't care too too much as long as the person is not reintroducing causes like it's going to be hard to get over brain fog if you're sleeping underneath a moldy AC unit and that's why but if you had a concussion if you you know had an injury or an illness and you're you've been knocked over by it systems are regulatory you can change it's just got to shape that that change a little bit so anyways you can get the a the agency is more important than the neuro feedback in some ways the qeg can be more powerful and I've had like I've had a couple parents bring their kids in saying oh my kids going to college soon they can't organize their way out of a paper bag and the kids's like super ADHD or something and we do a brain map we do a performance test and I sit down and say look here's your brain here's some strengths here's some weaknesses this is hard to control this is awesome that's powerful heyy you might want to think about controlling it this way just orienting them to the resources and they leave and I'm like that was a great candidate for nerfy back I'm sure I'll see them and I don't see them again okay four years later five years later I got a call hey Dr Hill just wanted to thank you that thing you said to my son my daughter it's all they needed to hear they suddenly started to apply themselves went to college developed some structure got into it they needed to hear that they were they were you know smart and Powerful in spite of this and just be given a little perspective on how to maybe move through it and some couple of hacks couple strategies and they ran with that and they're graduating top of their class now they're they're super excited they're getting their first job they're in med school now so I hear that sometimes even without the neura feedback so I I hear that a lot with nura feedback too like oh our kid with you know has just graduated thank you thank you but um there's a lot can do with just knowing yourself so that's my big takeaway my big my big message for everyone in this landscape of weird neuro feedback stuff is start with a brain map start with a qeg yeah make sure you get someone to sit down with you and go over it and explain what's what's there it won't be mysterious it should make sense to you and it should then tell you what you should do to your sleep your meditation practice maybe some nutrition maybe some exercise it gives you all these you know places you could instantly start make change so brain mapping qeg come get one yeah so there's there's different technology out there there are different companies that do the qeg if you if one person say were to go to multiple different places is the qeg going to look the same or might it look different for the most part for the most part this's about three or four backend commercial database products that contain thousands of cases of clean data as well as tools to process the data and output the comparison person s um but a qeg is just a quantitative processing of an EEG and the EEG is the same EEG you would do with a sleep lab or an Epilepsy Center it's just seated upright for 20 minutes not lying down and no no flashing in your eyes but you can you can take the EEG gathered by any qeg provider you can reprocess it with the tool set that a particular provider uses and it's interpretable across providers um there's really about two different ways of looking at qeg and the commercial tools um and there's a lot of similarity across the the big tools in the field so I could take any database output and look at it and go okay seeing some of this maybe some of that um it's also really important to look at Raw data you know uh people don't always do this but you should look at your raw data and know where the blinks and the coughs the movement teeth grinding because EEG is noisy and you're going to be looking at some noise in your flat Maps so it's good to look at your raw data look at performance as well you must always look at an attention test or something like it otherwise you're just getting data without the framing you need and then the and then the EEG itself within the EEG the qeg you get you could take that to any other provider and they could sit down with it but every single person you do that to will say hey can I have the raw data because they'll want to both look at the raw squiggles and they'll want to reprocess it make make their decisions about where the filter cut offs are which uh Montage or spatial visualization of data you want to use so yes but this functional medicine doctor might use this range for you know B12 and this functional medicine person might care about this hormone so you'll get different things in the reports the high level reports that providers prepare for you that are not convergent that do a little bit of high level judgment that do some deriv things that are special features of certain databases I don't love that actually I I teach people to read the basic it's called neurog guide one of the big tools in the field maybe half or two-thirds of the field uses that as their qeg database and and tool set and I use neurog guide to process data and I process um you know couple hundred pages of data for every map and I pull out about a dozen pages and teach people to look at a couple different montages couple different aspects power speed connectivity um and then I walk them through all of the features they have because we all have quirky outliers we're all kind of weird so it's not a question of if you're weird it's how and also it doesn't matter so I'm not saying oh my gosh you are an average on this spell curve no it's like oh hey look this part of the brain's unusual in this way with this brain wave sometimes that can mean this oh that Ring's true cool we're probably seeing something real does it matter oh you don't you don't mind that great awesome go you how about this thing or oh you maybe really do matter okay well then I'm sorry you experienced that bit of suffering that's frustrating and look it we see it it it's a completely different way of working with it I'm I'm not in charge of the definition I'm not saying you have ADHD yeah I'm saying oh look the left side of your brain is not making as much ba as the average kid your age and you kind of spaced out during the performance test dude um this this this bait on the left hand side helps us stay crisp and CLE clear and bright and keep the spotlight on the road when things are boring is that hard for you oh it is is that annoying oh it is yeah I bet it is you know you could meditate and make this beta come up and it would actually make your spotlights brighter or you get some n feedback and train the beta make some change so I get to the place of oh here's the ADHD yeah but I'm not telling them that that's that perspective because people know how they feel so I'm also not a doctor have a PhD but it's a neuroscience so I really want to be a scientist when I'm educating you and then a coach when I'm helping you design intervention so my my joke is doctors are great but they have to be right you go to doctors for answers come to scientists for questions help you dig through data look at things come up with ideas and then once we have some perspective we move into coaching role where we iterate through interventions and we just are on your team as you move through making transformation and then go back to science they do more assessments and more you know Hy hypothesis generation and exploration so that's really how we're different in the Nur feedback landscape almost everyone are are therapists y um and we're we're closer like your high-end gym your Equinox or your or your soul cycle you know and we have that Soul cycle model we send equipment home coaches and screens cheer you on and have you do brain mapping and Nerf you back from your living room so we really make it much closer to a personal training uh experience hopefully for people where they own they own the transformation they drive it they decide what to go after so yeah yeah I that's our big Soap Box I love it I love it um I could probably sit here and ask you questions all day long um but I think for sake of time time frame do you have any upcoming events or anything you want to share with listeners um if they want to connect or or get to know more about all of this yeah sure so of course we're all over the socials come check us out at Peak brain La usually um also I'm on YouTube I do a live stream every Monday where I do Nur feedback on myself and talk about what I'm doing the protocol what it's trying to do in the brain and then I launch into some biohacking topic where we talk about how to hack sleep or how to hack IQ or how to hack anxiety so if you want to come hang out and ask me realtime questions come see me on YouTube it's YouTube do Hill um and yeah ner feedback is this thing that I don't think we should be it shouldn't be mysterious the same way that you know these days we all track our our sleep and look at our lipids and you know our parents didn't do that you our grandparents didn't think about you know blood sugar right we're we're all dialing everything in and we're younger you know I'm in my mid-50s don't I look young you know I'm I'm joking but like like my parents are also relatively young in their 70s but like their parents in their 70s my parents you know we're progressively getting younger as we learn to take care of ourselves in this country and this in this culture this's this Concept in gerontology I'll leave us with which is the compression of morbidity you want to take your illness and your aging and your infirmity and compress it right into the very last moments of your life so you slide into death with a good-look sports car running at the peak of its you know function right up until the moment it all breaks down and falls apart and neuro feedback just like exercise or watching your blood sugar these are all things you can do to flatten trajectories so you you don't end up having 30 years of Aging you end up having you know three years of Aging right at the end of your of your functional range so take control people yeah yeah and I think we're in National biohacking month too I think uh so perfect time for this conversation um you go great stuff I second I could totally ask you questions all day long u but this is absolutely fascinating I would definitely recommend people go watch you U like I said I was checking out on LinkedIn beforehand you've got a lot of lot of cool stuff out there that we just I think we just T touched the tip of the iceberg with it all today so thank you so much for being here they are they are I saw a sign one time that said brains are cool I wish everyone had one but you have proof that everyone has one I I I've never not looked at her brain and not found something I've never not I've never done an EEG although I'll tell you I use that joke I put a cap it and go oh we found brain waves good for you and people laugh most of the time I did that with imaging so anytime I was ordering CTS and MRIs in the hospital and they'd ask if I found anything well yeah I found a brain so you can tell your spells you're good you're good exactly so so a thanks so much for having me on the show really apprciate you so much awesome great thanks for tuning in to this episode of Brain Wellness the podcast if you enjoyed this episode I encourage you to subscribe like and share this with others to help me continue on with my mission to help people live healthier happier lives go to www. brainwell solutions.com to see what I'm up to and get links to all the social medias there see you next time