Dr. Andrew Hill - Brain - Hacking increase your potential: Dr. Andrew Hill shows you how - WR #eps69

[Music] welcome to inspiration radio gross principles for Humanity and progress join us when we share information wisdom and ideas how to create an extraordinary future for us all the future is open we together decide what will be in it two beliefs you forever need to eliminate get it out of your head you can't teach an old dog new tricks or if you're growing older you need to accept that your body is not yeah like a young person everything is going down I just turned 72 and my fitness level is increasing and I'm building new synopses in my brain because these two sentences are not right we know better today you can learn whenever you want it depends on you if your brain builds new synopsis and if you have the right mindset and train also the brain and your body you can stay fit longer than ever thought today I talk with Dr Andrew Hill he has a PHD in cognitive neuroscience and he is the founder CEO of peak brain Institute so I think it's a must to listen it and listen the full hour because there are a lot of information you can use to get to a personal peak in quality of life in the way you think the way you really live there's so much more what we know today modern science modern technology you can get rid of a lot of problems patterns trauma um even health issues and you can tune yourself I use here an example okay maybe in the past I didn't use my car right and I know I could fix a car but we know also we can tune cars and if you see the body like this and we can do it through wire the brain and Dr Andrew Hill knows how to help and how to tune so listen carefully you can visit the Institute uh via website and be then just on zoom and learn and train or you go to one of their centers but first listen ideally get some aass and start changeing your life there is so much easier Ways to Live have a totally different potential what we all have good morning Andrew from Switzerland good morning to La which La it's morning good morning thanks for having me nice to be here today o' your time so you go up early and comes directly the qu first question um is it important to go up early for the brain or is this just I think it is I I I think it is I'm I'm not a big opponent of this idea that we have chronotypes I think the chronotype uh myth the idea that we have Larks and owls you know and people that are better at staying up late or getting up early I don't really believe that um in all my experience I think that humans do really well when they in train strongly to the outside world when the brain knows what time of day it is whether or not you're up at night or you're up super early if the brain doesn't know what time of day it is then your circadian rhythm starts to slide past the Earth's circadian rhythm or the the photo period so the strongest cues for circadian and tratment are when you eat Morning Light and morning activity so the morning has a very strong uh flavor a strong entrainer for what time of day it is and most of the cues that we hear strongly from the outside world are in the morning so if you get up super early and train well with the sun I my my experience is both personally and working with people is that the amount of sleep you need to get goes down and the quality goes up so the time to sleep in is the start of the night folks not the end of the night so go to bed early no shame so so when when I have this this ring here or I'm always complaining um oh last night you was an hour later than your middle of your Rhythm so that's not and uh when I'm in Sweden and there is not really a sunset so would you say then I don't need less so much sleep well in if you're going to be in someplace where the Sun is up you know 10 20 30 hours you know most of the day um I think then the timing of your food becomes Rel relatively critical because the brain is not going to get a lot of evening light or Morning Light difference so it's not going to really understand this the the morning reset so fasting before bed becomes the critical aspect of circadian management because as melatonin gets released which should happen later in the day it suppresses release of insulin from the pancreas completely so you have this falling insulin signal as melatonin goes up and that creates this desire to snack because if you have insulin to release oh maybe you know this food around evolutionarily better store it but in this modern world where we have tons of access to calories all the time yeah that falling insulin signal creates snacky Behavior at the end of the day day and that actually pushes Circa Rhythm back by several hours so if you go to bed with some high blood sugar essentially or or anything above low blood sugar then it suppresses your growth hormone release and for those people that are north of about 35 or 40 you only get one small pulse of growth hormone after you fall asleep you know middle of the night unless you have high blood sugar or any blood sugar and then it suppresses the release of growth hormon so eat before bed wake up tired hungry but go to bed a little bit hungry and wake up full of energy and you know feeling lean so it's kind of paradoxical but fasting before bed is among the I believe it's the strongest exogenous cue the strongest cue from the outside world about circadian information and food timing is a stronger CU than light than sleep than anything else so the number one thing you should do for managing your circadian rhythm is eat in the time zone you want to live in and you can use this for travel too you can pick a time zone that's a few hours away and a few days before start changing meal timing to approximate that of the time zone and you will have very little time zone adjustment across multiple hours that way it's a nice little trick as well but here comes the question what is in the culture and everything and when you said just fasting before sleep so what is the definition then for fasting how many hours yeah it depends a little bit on how healthy your your ability to clear insulin clear blood sugar um but I would say if you're not metabolically you know dramatically off uh then two hours is probably be fine maybe three if you're a child two if you're somebody who's insulin resistant and overweight and craves carbs all the time maybe six you might need to actually have a Tim restricted feeding window that allows a really big drop of insulin at the end of the day so that you can start actually having a bit of a you know insulin reset because cortisol insulin melatonin these things all sort of cycle in a circadian way not just in response to what we eat so you have to kind of think about both as you manage the the body and brain and how is it the culture like in Europe there is Spain and I experience the restaurants they open early about 10:00 in the evening then full and the kids are alive there so they have a totally different Rhythm and not looking yeah but at 10:00 in Madrid or something in the summer it's still light at 10:00 at night you know there still the sun's just gone down really right so I I think in that instance the food timing is sort of you know people don't eat at 10: p.m. and go right to bed in Spain they probably and they also don't have a you know American style food dinner which is lots of calories in 20 minutes highly processed and then crawl into bed which is the Western they take more time it's more celebate yeah two three hours of dinner having relaxing time have a good hour afterwards sitting and talking maybe go for a walk this is the the the benefit of the French Paradox in spite of all the high fat and smoking apparently because they walk everywhere it seems to offset a lot of the risk so I think that the sort of Iberian cultures that stay up very late that have late evenings that have late dinners they have an adjustment you know they're not eating four meals in the last 1 to 10 p.m. they're having you know sort of a circadian appropriate if you will uh lifestyle but uh humans are pretty adaptable this is why I don't believe in Lars versus owls or chronotypes because you put any human pretty much in any environment give them a little bit of circadian support and they can shift night shift day shift working late getting up early so I do feel that people that complain that they must you know stay up late it's because they're not well in trained and the human brain and body can exceed the 24-hour photo period pretty easily we we have a hard time uh if our Circa rhythm is short but we tend to be sloppy tends to be longer than the day because a negative entrainment shortening something is a way to create entrainment or oscillation so if our own circum rhythm is slightly longer than 24 hours but the sunlight and the food and the activity signal comes in shorter than 24 hours it's a very strong entrainment to yank us back into that cycling so this is why we can't catch up on sleep by sleeping in but we can catch up on sleep by going to bed early oh it's the negative entrainment that resets the Circadian rhythm so yeah and deep steep face but is interesting in that's in the last sentence you mentioned the brain can adjust but when we talk about food at least I grow up with food uh has just to do with the body so eating fasting is just about the body and not the connection of the brain but you are not the Sleep Institute you're from the peak brain Institute so right what is the connection then between the food or like you said the the rism and the brain yeah I mean there's a lot of sort of neuro uh gut coupling um and you know the the largest nerves in the body the he the most heavy bundle is the 10th cranial nerve the Vagas nerve that runs from the the brain to the heart to the gut about 10% of it most of it runs up it runs from the gut to the heart to the brain and of course the heart is integrating moment to moment to decide if you need to run away or digest food or relax and that Heart tone the thing that our ring picks up overnight the HRV that's the momentto moment integration of the ascending information from the gut and the descending information from the brain so the heart kind of balance that place between sympathetic activation and parasympathetic relaxation and the gut's heavily involved in that if you're uh stressed if you your body decides your brain decides you need to run away you stop digesting and if you are are digesting then you have less mental energy for you know activating your your mind so the uh the the the gut tends to have a very strong indic uh support on sorry my camera is acting up so the the gut tend have a very strong regulation support with regards to the brain and also you have uh co-actors the gut is producing huge amount of neurotransmitters um most of your serotonergic system is actually in the gut not the brain about 95% of your serotonergic are in the gut and the gut's a learning nervous system so it reacts to food it reacts to when you eat um the number one predictor of when you get hungry is when you ate past couple of days the body learns very quickly oh it's time for for dinner and you know this if you have children or animals they they know 20 minutes before it's time for dinner what time it is they're looking at you crying you know so uh their circadium is very very strong with regards to food but the brain can pretty pretty much adapt as much as it needs to so humans can successfully eat every hour humans can successfully eat once every two days so it's it's about the the the integration of the cues more than anything else so my biggest Takeaway on that is to avoid eating late essentially and uh you'll not get in the way also there's some good advice around not eating first thing in the morning you know when you first get up cortisol has Spike to raise your blood sugar and your heart rate your HRV um to wake you up and you have for about an hour hour or two You've Got High cortisol and somewhat high blood sugar relative to your Baseline and so in that first hour after you get up you probably shouldn't eat shouldn't have coffee because you have a very large amount of cortisol and blood sugar sort of occupying information flow if you shove more cortisol and blood sugar right into your system first thing you may become sort of resistant to the signaling so the cup of coffee is not going to have the same impact right when you wake up as it might 90 minutes after you get up so I'm a big fan of a of a morning routine of a minimum viable practice find the thing to do that doesn't feel like a burden but feels like self-care and build in a 20- minute routine of things that you don't skip you know you hit the can you brush your teeth maybe you go for your five Sun citations or your walk to that coffee shop in the corner that your wife loves the coffee from or something and you create a little practice that involves um movement low-key movement movement you can talk over I don't want you doing your CrossFit first thing in the morning or your 50 mile bike ride first thing in the morning I'd rather you do your yoga you're walking you're stretching and then your body's woken up it's burned off the cortisol burned off the blood sugar that woke you up and now when you receive more energy more cortisol the body will hear it very differently and so it'll create more appropriate if you will timing cues for the the brain and body well very interesting at least I guess different than most people live a little bit sometimes yeah yeah I mean I'm I'm I'm as guilty I wake up in the morning with too much blood in my caffeine stream you know I Stumble to the coffee machine and feed my cats while I'm making coffee they know exactly what time of day it is then too I I'm convinced my cats think my the the coffee grinder means they get fed too because those two things tend to co-occur so you know your own brain may not know that getting up does doesn't just mean shoving food and coffee into your mouth first things so if you teach yourself to have a little bit of an energy flux to drop that cortisol to drop the energy before you start taking more in you may notice that you actually react to food and stimulants and things differently so reflected for sure um you would say the brain can make decision or adapt and you talk yeah nearly infinitely it's very adaptable that 90% of whatever information goes to the brain what about the idea of a free will if the brain just so easy low-key questions on this discussion today I see okay uh Free Will um I'm I'm I have a hard time even conceptualizing Consciousness so I'm not sure I think Free Will exists in the moment just like being conscious being aware exists in the moment but I'm not sure that we have all that much free will because we are creatures of habit learning structure socialized constructivist constructivism you know our meaning is made by the relationships we have with each other with our world and our motivated behaviors you know reducing the drives for thirst and hunger Etc are big pieces but the context we put the world in is dramatically different I think you know culturally and spiritually person to person so ofil question of free will or is it about awareness or possibilities to live it free will is confusing from the point of view of the brain because if you look at what the brain is doing in response to the outside world you can actually measure the brain reacting to the outside world before the Mind knows about it yes this is a liit ex experiment yeah there's so many experiments showing the brain has picked up information and has related to you before before you're aware of it this happens Everywhere You subtle things and so I think that the conscious mind is not necessarily always in the decision seat it's a bit late in the process and so we tend to this is I think the basis of things like intuition and other sort of non-cognitive awareness maybe spirituality it's this this knowing that Creeps in but free will you know would require the concept of will would require the ability to make choice and cause things to happen from Choice the physics of the the the intersection of Neuroscience and physics is very very squirly in terms of what's happening at the level of the neuron inside the neuron we have um microtubules these little railway tracks that carry information carry you know packets up and down the the neuron and there's some evidence that the microtubules operate at a spatial scale scale a small enough scale that there may be Quantum effects happening inside the microtubules they're so small you know water May tunnel down them the same way that entangled molecules can be non-local essentially and if you look at some of the work of current physicists looking at this particular topic they're a little bit convinced that um there's not going to be any way mathematically to go from possibility to discreet information that so collapse of the quantum possibility the foam into discret information there's a lot of very very smart physicists saying that we're not going to be able to to computationally arrive at a reduction from Quantum possibility into discrete events and if that's the case then what our Consciousness is is simply an awareness of the collapse of the possibility into the reality it's knowing it's that that time course that moment that that that micr as Things become real that might be what Consciousness is simply our awareness of that thing happening as it's happening sort of the you know watching the the marbles fall down the hill and I think our awareness of that hopping into you know reality becoming reality I think we've conflated that with an idea that we're that we have a separate Consciousness a separate awareness from reality so I'm a little bit convinced that forget free will the Consciousness is a bit of an illusion so that we do things like keep eating having sex and avoiding pain and you know it's really about the survival of the you know the the genetics not so much about the individual so I don't know that I really believe too too much in Consciousness uh let alone free will because I see cases where Consciousness is easily abolished anesthesia brain injuries someone has a you know a concussion and loses memory and their identity is dramatically shifted so I don't I don't know how I feel about this idea of uh a free well well you may have to get back to me on that one sorry yeah no it's it's interesting um at least it's a topic um I'm dealing with um yeah quite intensively at the moment and this is also the question where's where's our memory or whatever or when we say the uh in the quantum world theory is that the Observer decides the outcome yeah the O the orchestrated reality where things collapse yeah so what you say then is oh no the Observer just had a different awareness that he could see the difference yeah that's my that's my guess is that what Consciousness the the perspective we have of being aware is simply observing reality coming into existence in sequential moments and that awareness of the thing actually happening of reality becoming real we sort of believe we're somehow involved with yeah because we're seeing things change at a you know ultra fine time scale so I think that we uh you know believe that we have control over it when most of what we experience probably not that conscious not that cognitive it's more subog nitive it's you know deep learning and Trauma and perspective and then there's language you know the language you know how you think the waran yes some body language and so all of this is impacting what you see and if you're prior if your perspective impacts how you what you believe then Free Will is sort of constrained by all of those things and not a separate thing it's only in response to what you believe what you see what you feel the stimulus in response and I don't know that there's an awful lot of choice involved with that I think that the illusion of consciousness useful but I don't think it necessarily exists yeah t Lama said um oh yes I experience fear and the question what do you how do you handle it he says I focus I focus on intention so it sounds like I make a free decision tan said oh yes I can have the feeling of Rage but I can control it and no I'm not one of these super guys but I remember when I was younger and driving on the motorway and someone cut me I reacted directly was pissed off or or whatever whatever make alarm lights today maybe I I feel little bit the trigger but most of the times I feel a kind of free space how do I want to respond not just react so what would you call this free will or well I think you've learned I think you've learned that uh it feels better not just that but something happened before you reacted to change what you thought about it so maybe when you were in your 20s you thought oh that and now you're thinking oh that person's unskillful or something so your perspective on the ACT that happened the moment was not one that required a threat level of response when you're in your 20s and something cut you off and you're angry it's it's a it's a threat threat response you know you're you're in you're in a crisis level response briefly at least your brain is deciding maybe you better react strongly but you also have a lot more you know inhibitory tone you're less reactive 20 30 40 years later than you were in your 20s so I think that the the conceptual landscape has change but also the hair trigger you know the the ability to pump the gas and braks is more finally grain as we get out of our 20s so my hunch is you've transcended a little bit and you you know don't view the person who's cutting you off as a threat the same way and therefore it doesn't elicit doesn't require the same reaction um but I would say that's somewhat informed by how you've changed more than how that person or that driver has interacted with you and so you your perspective on people cutting you off is no longer uh a survival level you know experience my guess certainly in my database are more possibilities than just one and it needs time to figure out which one is it you've also been cut off a thousand times since you were in your 20s so you've had this experience of non crisis level consequence for stressful events which might recontextualize this is sort of the basis of therapy is you re experience the stress or but in a container that is safe and you know whenever we have memor or experiences it's sort of like unremember something examining and re-remembering it so if you move through stressful events but move through them again and again mentally or in a you know practical environment like driving then you'll get sort of re-educated the context will get uh fixed and it ceases to be this you know singular solo event I would say what is a consequence out of this to say I can't choose to be happy I just didn't experience enough happiness yet maybe yeah um again happiness is another one of these very complicated topics like free will uh and I and I I I don't know if I I have a concept a clear a clear concept of Happiness there's the reduction of suffering with contentment and things like that and then there's absorption States I would say which involve joy and love and you know feeling for other people but I again I I I think happiness is a construct that we you know we sort of apply to a bunch of other more basic features around feeling safe feeling Joy feeling love feeling um fed feeling you know I I I almost think of Happiness as or or contentment as the inverse of stress stress is sort of feeling like you don't have the resources to meet the current demands you feel overe extended and I would argue that happiness while not complete with this requires that aspect of feeling like you are in the moment enough and you have enough and you're being met appropriately and all your needs are met and there's you know I think that's an aspect of happiness you know necessary but not sufficient for it perhaps um and just like when you were driving your car you know the the secondary reaction you know that is you know Buddhist the second Dart you know holding holding a a coal in your hand so you can throw it to somebody else you know it's the it's the attachment to the to the secondary response you have no choice over whether or not you stub your toe but you do have a choice whether not you hop around yelling at your chair afterwards so I think as you evolve as you develop as you grow you have figured out uh how to have the context that is beyond simply the momentary reaction so Transcendence Evolution where where's for you then the difference maybe it's a kind of free will question um I grow up maybe at home when there was stress or whatever and and my dad had only one tool it was a hammer so every problem was treated with a hammer so I grew up with this so is it doesn't matter if it's stress in the relationship is this a car or someone cutting me off or I had only the idea of using the hammer when I had kind of emotional stress now growing older I I've somehow collected or got as a birthday present different tools so now I have a lot of tools is this maybe just oh I don't know which tool to use now so or is it um no I really decide which tool to use it's a great question um my hunch is it's both uh that you have additional tools and therefore I mean if you only have the one reaction if your dad is always yelling and you're out in the world and somebody creates conflict given your skills given what you've been taught what you modeled you're going to yell you're going to create you know anger but I think we also you know we have ridiculously Rich lives even those of us that are suffering in you know crises a lot of the time it's not all that all the time and so in our teen years we develop a separation of identity this is why we get rebellious at 13 14 15 and start you know wearing leather jackets and smoking if it was the 60s and doing you know these days it's random music or something I don't know but it's that's an identity development aspect as you pull away from the little tribe you grew up in and you develop a secondary identity it's evolutionarily beneficial so you can go mix your genes with a different group of people essentially um but my hunch is there's secondary development that comes you know I I I taught college for a long time at UCLA and there's an awful lot of difference between an 18 and 19 year old freshman and a 23y old senior I mean dramatic sometimes like children versus real adults sometimes uh and a lot of variability on the you average 18-year-old comes Ino or is this just culture or whatever it's cultural and and you'll see differences among across different cultures you get three 18-year-olds coming into the university and one person has been taken really good care of has all the resources and doesn't necessarily have a lot of internal ability to structure time to meet commitments because things have been taken care of for the this is the first time they're having to like bring an assignment in or remember things write things down and other folks they come in at 19 or 20 and they've been working full-time for 10 years they got a kid they were responsible for their grandmother that's a very different student who who's engaged with a fully adult life in their late teens versus somebody who's maybe starting the adult life and I mean this is the if you get if you get the the the big five uh the ocean model or canoe model for personality the theory is that we have these resources these these these aspects of ourselves that are somewhat built in and they do change throughout the life course but they really change based on the demands that we have to meet the responsib abilities the job the family the life and beyond that our tendency to have a certain amount of openness conscientiousness extraversion uh agreeableness or neuroticism these things are somewhat built in and they react to the demands responsibilities the role of life you put yourself in so I think that is actually again it's not so much about free will it's like if you got a kid you got to take care of and they're crying you react to it and you do it so yeah is there is there in there a a big difference with the modern world and if you go a few thousand years back uh Alexander the Great he was with 21 uh not in University he didn't have a nice life but he was already conquering and and what you say countries big army and whatever they needed to think um and they had all expected to different lifespan so there um these native uh people that with 13 boys go whatever for tests and then they're already adults um so this is really so what dictates the brain or this life of responsibility creates a brain or a model yeah um there's developmental stuff there's developmental stages that we have to get through but the last big ones are are really in the mid teen years this is probably why culturally a lot of people a lot of cultures have adulthood you know rituals of adulthood starting at 13 or so is because that's really when the brain has turned into the adult brain from the ages 8 to 10 roughly 9 to 9 to 11 for for for boys 8 to 10 for girls the brain finishes its child to adult development in terms of Left Right hemisphere separating language locking down on one side and a bunch of other phenomena really become more of the adult pattern as you hit that that stage of age I think this is why we have 13 years as the sort of you know age of spiritual adulthood or in some ways the next stage of life in many cultures um and then up until mid 20s the brain is developing more and more self-control so in a western if you will you know these college students you mentioned they're finishing college with a finally with with a brain that's finished cooking as they le as they reach their their mid 20s but I I do think that we have the ability to be fully formed adults largely you know in our late teens early 20s and as you say you know some historically over the past thousands of years very common to be an adult and to do adult things and and and you know big challenges when you are uh younger than maybe modern adulthood is um but you know I read an article yesterday some 13-year-old just graduated from MIT with the PHD I mean it still happen that you have these overachievers and if you look at the literature on productivity and expertise what you find is that if you look across different aspects of human uh Excellence be it music and science or math or politics or writing or art is that you get this um time window that happens and people become good at things after they do them a certain amount of time it's not about the age of the individual it's about the career age the amount of time you have idea I'm sorry is this a 10,000 hours idea you need to do something it is although Gladwell would hate that because everyone misunderstands his ideas um but no it just takes time to there there's a generativity and a productivity aspect you can't get the good art out until you've gotten the bad art out of the way also there's the Practical techniques if you practice your art you get better at your art so certain careers require longer to master and certain careers and and abilities benefit from things you have more strongly when you're young so if you're a States person or a writer you tend to be older when you reach the peak of your career because it takes 30 years of being a States person to become the best writer and politician or something but if are somebody who's building sculpture then you're probably 30 when you hit your Peak because it requires a lot of physicality it's a physical thing and maybe you're not a different uh you haven't developed the expertise in the the fine subtle things but you have the mechanical at that point so you can look at career age instead of chronological age as a predictor for the maximal output the highest quality output and this is true across you know Mozart and sculptors and uh Churchill this this very very classic uh curve that shows up but it's a career AG curve not a chronological so my guess is Alexander the Great started conquering at age 12 and this is why he was you know conquered half the World by his uh late teens or something he started early and you'll find that you'll find you know in our I would say our American Western culture childhood is extended and Adolescence is prolonged and but there is a same I just read from Buffett or Buffett said also so what people do between 13 and 1820 if they have a focus already uh they maybe have the whole life and are good at it because especially some programming and in America there is an insurance company to hire a new sales person they ask what did you do at 12 so when did you start to earn the first money is there something in programming maybe it's it's I think certainly we can become good at anything yes early much earlier than we do now I mean apprenticeships historically the past you 10,000 years was how things were taught and you started apprenticing as you're blacksmith or a leather worker or a habash you started apprenticing you know at that same young teenage because that was when you were moving into the into your career and I think we can still do that these days you know often we we do but culturally I think that's very bound you know uh one place to the next and it's probably a little unusual even here in the US for people for you know to be hiring salespeople asking them you know what they did in their uh in their pre-ol days but um I I think it is a cultural aspect and and we are you know both underutilizing humans but but also giving ourselves we're sort of like in this Renaissance of we have freedom we have time the the the medicine the food access the money we are a richer people worldwide even given all the nonsense that's happening and all the starvation and War that's happening as a human species we are the richest the most educated the healthiest that we've ever been and I think that's just going to continue and we're sort of now in this maybe last vestages of you know the previous couple thousand years of stratified society and inequality and you know War so I'm hoping that all of this Evolution ends up where we are able to have more freedom more ability to grow slowly if we need to to develop our careers uh young if we want to but right now we still take people at age you know eight or so put them in a school system and then mov them through 10 or 20 years of school and even in the US that's starting to get a little bit of a push back you know when I was young in the in the 70s and 80s there were trade schools that were a very viable thing to do you might go become a mechanic or a plumber or electrician and those still exist but the idea of non bachelor's level schools you know non College Programs being as good or maybe better that's just starting to come back up I think culturally here in the US as a viable thing because College Des herbs insanely expensive and they've gone up so much and also I mean talking about Buffett I don't Buffett's really old and while he may have had an awful lot of ideas that are valid 20 years ago um I'm not that impressed with Buffett talking about the young people because their ability to afford a house to get a job that covers more than basic needs it has never been worse in the past 100 years in this country so young people are in a very different environmental and economic environment than than Buffett was or anyone else was who's born after uh or born before the 1980s basically so I think the economic environment is less good for almost everyone who's young now probably didn't spend in a long time uh and I think that'll change as we you know develop more technology and more uh again more freedoms it's it's a freedom it's a it's a largess it's a it's a luxury that we can enter college at age 17 and exit at age 22 you know and spent a bunch of years learning stuff and getting developed and it's incredibly wonderful and we may turn that into our you know medical degree or our poetry or whatever but it's also a different place in terms of Freedom different and it comes to the brain what do we learn how we program the brain because we school system and you can see it in Europe yeah is education for jobs which not existing anymore yeah and uh then yeah you end up in in poverty know it's just for it's still for kind of factory conveyor belt or whatever old thinking even at a high level even the top edge of Education like a PhD or something in the US a PhD is they're usually five year programs the average length of finishing completion for PhD student is eight and a half years in the US but you go to Europe and get a PhD and it's a specific job you have for two to three years it's a contract it's one project it's paid to do one set of research and you go in with with having already uh usually developed a Masters or some some you know data skills so it's a very narrow prescribed uh with an endpoint but in the US you end up spending years in getting your education and then years not finishing generally uh it's a cultural difference so I have a lot of clients a lot of friends in in Europe are like oh I'm thinking of getting a PhD in the US and I'm like why would you do that it's incredibly expensive and it takes so much time and the systems are not set up to move you through the program so you have to be completely self-driven but if you go get a PhD job in Europe okay two and a half years later you have your PhD and you've been paid for that for that work generally so I think it's a much better model and I think that you know for education anyways just like our you know our undergraduate lack of maybe skill bearing uh education is starting to be questioned I have a hunch that well we're already seeing in the US we're seeing different ways of funding grad students and different ways of of trying to make it more uh equal you know I I went to grad school and my advisor didn't have a lot of funding so I spent my whole time you know teaching and doing other jobs a couple friends whose advisers were heavily funded and they finished in three and a half years never doing a job and you know just working in the lab so that piece of it the higher education piece of it is being sort of refactored I think but times are changing uh really and information's success right and get more information so the modern Technologies so what changing in the brain or maybe before another question in my book better the whole world against me than my soul I mentioned a discussion with a German Professor who we call him a kind of brain Pope or whatever in Germany um and I asked him where's where's the memory uh and he said it's in the brain right and uh maybe it might be we're not sure might be but he said it quite sure because and you mentioned also damages in brain and then then they don't remember but that really is not convincing me because if um my computer I take something out I can't access the cloud anymore um so but not true in the brain Carl Ashley one of the first brain scientists looking at memory taught mice and rats to run mazes and then progressively remove more and more of their C to try to abolish the memory looking for where memory is couldn't find it was able to remove you know many many parts of the brain and never abolish memory now we sort of know it's not well understood but we know that the hipocampal structures that both retrieve memory and store memory they're storing it in a distributed way there's several different ways we know that memory occurs we we're getting hints of it we don't know overarching but we know that the pattern of where receptors used to be so the neurons will create receptors and pull them back and make them more sensitive make them less sensitive but the pattern of the holes in the membranes of where receptors used to be is one of the memory encodings so is the weight between different neurons How likely they are to fire if one fires the other one gets the firing but it looks like the information might not be stored discreetly so it's kind of like you had a song that you wanted to remember instead of remembering the particular series of notes you might remember the mathematical arrangement of that song the algorithm of that song but that math might be stored through the unique confirmation connection of several different neurons as a pattern and that pattern might actually not be in one place but be sort of resonant through multiple cells so this is called holographic memory the idea that we can store patterns that are evocative of the information we wish to learn and but the the patterns aren't stored in a particular place they're stored as this recurrent echo of information in a sort of fractal holographic um algorithm that is stored and again we don't know it's not in a particular place but it appears to be essentially distributed uh redundant storage all throughout the cortex so thoroughly redundant that if you lose aspects of you lose physical tissue you don't lose individual memories you might lose resources language or production but you don't you generally lose memory if you lose part of your brain it's kind of cool it's also if you have this organ transplant or especially also with the heart that the person says oh no I feel different I have memories I can't really absolutely there's some evidence that we store memories in nonbrain tissue there's it it's kind of crazy but there's this case study after case study of heart transplants waking up and dying the phone number of their heart transplant donor or craving cigarettes when they don't smoke cigarettes or tearing up when they hear the sound of a kid's voice and not knowing why realizing it's the kid of the heart of the heart donor so the heart heart might be special I'm not sure if we've seen this hint of transferred memories in other organ transplants the heart's really special it has neurons that are somewhat similar to the brain neurons but they regulate differently if you you probably seen an EKG that sort of classic wave form and an EKG is the same every time it's a coherent wave and based on shape changes in that wave you can kind of tell what's happening in the heart the timing is off or there's a Skip Beat or whatever but the brain is not coherent like that very similar neurons but they're chaotic and they're they're oscillatory they're they're quite a lot going on if you look at a brain wave look at EG and you see a heartbeat type form a coherent High amplitude waveform that's a seizure and if you look at the heart and you see the chotic oscillation the way you would see in the brain that's a heart attack so you have this regulatory domain stability the heart wants to remain coherent the brain wants to remain chaotic and if they flip into the other regulation mode that's where illness is so I do believe the heart because it's similar neurons likely has the ability to store information I mean we know that the heart will develop um responses to our stress level to our gut to our brain so it seems like a very small leap we don't know scientifically how this works but a very small leap to suggest the heart itself may be repository of information certainly poets would agree but I'm not sure that neuroscientists have any real good answers yet so no I can only speculate I studied law is totally different but uh when I look at my radio there are different stations and they have different frequencies if I am on one frequency I can't hear the other one it's there still in the air so when you have an organ transplant or the donor maybe wasn't a totally different frequency um and so the different frequencies coming together and then now is a question what I'm listening to yeah yeah it's interesting i i i there's something there we don't yet know but uh it's nice that there's still things we don't know like we had the topic before you need to train over with 10,000 hours or what kind of concept I met once Bert Goldman um he was uh yeah kind of I would call her also spiritual trainer and everything and he took from and I see in the in the Science World do heavy one universe is a meta or the parallel universe and so he believed there a parallel and you have a doubleganger and you can be in this universe this one and this one so he decided to be a photographer rock singer painter and somehow immediately he was good because he was so good in tuning in so where did this ability or possibility came from I mean we we carry around so many limiting beliefs we could do almost anything if we thought we could MH literally I mean the ability of the human brain and body to perform in ways we don't expect is there you know so there is maybe good enough finally come to Peak brain Institute topic um so what is it really about um Can can read about okay it's about healing is this just more about healing or tuning um okay we can learn more but this a a huge variety of possibilities there it is it's nearly infinite what you can you can do with your brain the way that I approach this sort of functionally is um I think about the resources that might scaffold your goals or I think about the suffering that's there that you might want to get rid of and there's a handful of things in the brain about six or eight things that you can consider regulatory these are features that are sort of meant to change and they rise to the level of Challenge and demand that you give them largely and they're meant to to be resilient but they also kind of cramp up and disregulated and that's where we get a lot of the human suffering and these are to Rattle them off these are things like attention all the anxiety flavored things sleep uh speed of processing stability so seizure and migraine resistance and sensory work and social processing these are all somewhat regulatory so your sleep your executive function your stress are not fixed things there's a handful of resources in the cortex that you can see you can actually measure them and look at them but you can change them so if you meditate or do neura feedback or change your B vitamins from methylation or a thousand other things you can literally change how these resources work because they're meant to adjust lifelong so those are things that I think that we often don't understand individually and we don't think they can change so we tend to as humans have this suffering where we think we have a diagnosis or we think we have a challenge or a problem and it's happening to us it is how things are but that's not usually true you know if you have severe PTSD or anxiety or ADHD or something well you can look at your brain and you can see these features jumping out as actual structural and and functional resour sources and once you know how they work you can change them so the brain is not as mysterious as people often think when they have depression anxiety seizures migraines you know lack of fulfillment lack of Joy creativity these are things you can learn how they work just like you learn how your you know your your blood species work if you do a blood panel and you see your Tri list rides are extremely high back off on the ice cream maybe same thing with your brain if you look your brain the Alpha Speed is dragging down really slow and you're having word finding issues and delayed recall and tip of the tongue kind of phenomena well okay that's it it's right there it's the Alpha Speed let's look and see is it your Delta maybe your sleep isn't great is it your beta maybe anxiety is slowing down your processing so you can actually tease apart the functional limits in executive function stress and sleep especially and then you can exercise these resources once you know what you're going after and create really quick change and things like ADHD or anxiety we usually work with folks for uh three or four months and in that time frame they make on a bell curve multiple standard deviations of change permanent change in big features of executive functions sleep anxiety so the brain is dramatically more changeable than we realize and many of us don't know how to apply the pressure and Ste year for those changes but once you do whether or not it's watching the aura ring and changing Behavior to get better sleep or going after and sticking wires on your head and training the brain directly and everything in between the brain's incredibly malleable and the resources are not that fixed only about a third or less of your experience is genetic in the brain most of it's actually learning and can be changed so you know shift happens get get yours get some get some change if you want it yeah if you said ordering or whatever and what my understanding is was it we had for a long time also a different idea about the brain because we had not the computers the possibilities to measure so just recently we can get the information and see the possibilities yeah I mean we didn't look at cholesterol 100 years ago we didn't look at bone density 20 years ago uh Sleep Quality is a thing we're just now starting to figure out but we have the access we're able to sample our blood panels our Sleep Quality our brain waves and again once you know how these things work it puts you in the driver's seat because you can then decide to take control over it yeah so in the end it's like uh it's in the driver's seat not just for brain is it just for the whole quality of life being solving problems so it's not not only fixing the car it's just really also tuning into the optimum if if you like so everything is possible not just possible but once you see it once you see your suffering your anxiety your ADHD your sleep issues once you see it in data in a brain map uh in some performance testing it hasn't changed your suffering the next moment but it's much harder to be overwhelmed or ashamed or feel guilty about your anxiety when you're looking at it in data and saying oh here's an adaptation of your brain oh okay yeah I feel that well it's not really your fault you aren't mad at your shoulder on a broken on an x-ray it's real you're frustrated the Pain's there but you don't feel guilty about your broken shoulder yeah we do you can't maybe not get rid of the pain but you can get rid of the suffering so yeah your perception about it but when it comes to the brain we don't know what's going on we think it's our fault we think it's happening to us we don't understand how it's working we may have a diagnostic label applied to us and I think that can obscure really quite powerfully the potential of of taking control because it's now top down applied from the outside instead of knowing how these individual resources might work for you so I know thyself is incredibly important and the brain is knowable much more than we think often so and um is there is some kind of age limit like we I grew up with what you don't learn when you're young you never can learn then if you're old or whatever or is this no there's no age limit is a short answer when I was um in college or actually before between undergrad and grad school uh I took about a decade off and in that decade is when we discovered that we don't stop making neurons I mean you you right now sir are making in the neighborhood of 700 neurons a day so you're still making them lifelong and those neurons can Resort and reconnect nearly infinitely so you're never going to not have enough brain t issue it's not really an issue you you can never stop learning the brain has an infinite capacity as far as we're concerned to reorganize so it's never really a limit of the resources it might be of how you're using them or how they're tuned you know if you can't concentrate or can't sleep or can't remain calm it may be hard to function in the in the way you wish but the brain is largely uh Unlimited in terms of its ability and I think we're starting to figure that out I mean you know my grandparents and great-grandparents were much older than my parents are at the same age physically emotionally stage of life my mom who 75 is you know traes around the world traveling you know cataloging random animals you stomping through jungles having fun and her grandmother was frail at 75 and mostly sat at home and didn't have that same kind of like conquer the world I'm still young kind of perspective and some of that's because of the medicine and the health and the perspective and some of it's because you know we we have a different perspective on being uh in our 60s and 70s and 80s now than we had 100 years ago you know so yeah that is very interesting like we this is cut off I learned not to be stressed when I got older I got stressed because I couldn't do things and that's also interesting and I'm realizing also shifting at least with the mindset when I was very little and couldn't really walk I okay I kept on trying because I maybe I had the belief one day I can walk like the Dos but then I was so programmed over decades from now on the doctor says yeah you're getting old you need to live a bit and everything so when I got problems and my leg not working right I and had not at the beginning the idea it will be better hopefully I can keep it a while like that hopefully it's not getting worse yeah because of what a doctor said because of this perspective of yeah and then I shifted and now I'm getting older and oh I'm getting fitter again so what if I go in the studio in The Institute and will train what what you think what we we said also we are not really living our potential what do you see is possible so far you can see or now I want to prepare I just last week I turned 72 so happy birthday have 28 years 100 so how could I be like if we go in the Blue Zone in Netflix there is a 100 old uh South American Cowboy every day on the horse I never was at fit like he is with 100 so okay can say he trained longer but um so what is possible yeah so the blue zones are interesting there's something there but it's a little bit of a confirmation bias too so we should be cautious reading too too much in the blue zones unless we see the same behavior also supporting Health in individuals that are not in those areas because there's a lot of uh noisy data so to speak um but we do know nowadays that there are ways to remain relatively healthy and or to get healthier you know uh there's this idea of compression of morbidity you don't want to age and die for 30 years you want to squeeze all your illness and death into last 10 seconds of life and and you know slide into that parking space and fall over dead last minute if you can um living powerfully up until that moment um compression of morbidity moving illness into the later part of life and we're doing that now you know we we we age slower in our 60s and 70s now than we did did 100 years ago but there are things you can do to take fairly aggressive control and to not just flatten the trajectory but to improve the trajectory one of the biggest things is meditation lifelong meditation will Sid step the age related cognitive thinning the cortical thinning rather that you experience starting in your 30s you get a little loss of Cortex every year and it starts to accelerate our 60s with a few a few percentage uh of the weight of our cortex unless you meditate and doesn't seem to take much 20 minutes a day probably will sidestep the meditation and if you do it lifelong the amount your cortex is still thick the amount you you you Sid step cortical thinning is correlated with your lifelong meditation hours what is meditation for you does it have a headset and relaxing music or is it no meditation is just anchoring it's executive function it's anchoring the focus to to quote uh John kavat Zin U medit or mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way on purpose to the present moment and I would add with curiosity or a sense of Investigation instead of a sense of judgment but it's anchoring it's paying attention in a particular way that's all meditation is and then noticing when you've gotten distracted and going back to the same anchor the same Focus again and again and again that's the rep of meditation of the exercise people often think meditation is being relaxed no you don't don't be strong at the gym you be weak later on you're strong because you worked out the resource and meditation is frustrating it's distracting it's annoying you sit there and focus again and again and again and again and again but if you keep doing it you develop a lot more cognitive and cortical power and then the moments when you're not on the cushion you have more of an inhibitory tone a spaciousness less of a reactivity because you have better executive function you're less reactive you're likely to yell at the guy who cut you off because you have that moment of inhibitory tone the moment to decide perhaps so maybe there's your free will you we create space in our in decision action higher level of resilience you do have higher level of resilience with meditation as well yeah you you you develop less you there's a positivity bias that Creeps in so we stop viewing things as negative or threatening this also happens with aging called gerot transcend whether or not you meditate or not as you get your 60s and 70s you start developing spiritual experiences and a view on life as Transcendent of your suffering it's a very common phenomena we don't know why it happens it's not just spiritual it's not because you're reaching a later part of your life it's seems to be this this shift that happens where we uh care about things differently so yeah to Pig Institute so yeah um what is the reason I which why should it Go who is your client or your wished dream client yeah so we only work with folks that have brains that's our our one client type is those that have a brain an awful lot of our clients have difficulty with executive function sleep stress um in the the sort of lwh hanging fruit for neuro feedback which is the primary Technique we use things like ADHD anxiety seizure migraine PTSD these are exceptionally tractable phenomena you can change these things really really quickly so if you gave me you know uh a NeverEnding stream of anxious gifted people with ADHD I'd be extremely happy because within about three months they would all not have ADHD in the classroom and the boardroom only on the sport pitch or when they decided to be in that high stimul environment so you can reliably change almost every aspect of anxiety and attention usually sleep you can drop seizures back the literature says by 50% but I've never seen a result as poor as 50% it's always much more dramatic in terms of reduction of seizure um you can do creativity work reliable work on creativity access Consciousness flow States if you're shut down you can't feel your emotions you can't talk about things you can't be creative reliably in a handful of neuro feedback sessions you can fry open that that door and you know the moment when you're falling asleep and you have that burst of insight or remember that thing you should do or solve world hunger and then you fall asleep and it's gone that's the hypnogogic access state where the monkey mind's dropped away and the receptive attention and awareness has come up and you can train your brain to get reliable access to that in a handful of neura feedback sessions so that you can decide to go into that nonlinear access Place simply by putting yourself in a state and for people that are either working through trauma or trying to become more creative or more in touch with your emotions this kind of uh creativity work is really powerful and it the same work I'm not exactly sure why but the same work we do for creativity we also do for alcohol so those folks that have been drinking for 20 years and are shaky and can't fall asleep are nervous even in the absence of alcohol the brain gets sort of damaged by the constant glutamatergic uh the Gaba is released by alcohol and glutamin has to come up to match the Gaba but in the absence of alcohol you're left with a the shaky brain the brain can't bring down the glutamate again but in six 10 weeks of neuro feedback you take somebody who's been a lifelong Craver of alcohol and disregulated and they're not craving and fall asleep at well they can be calm if they wish in just a handful of weeks so this is the promise of neuro feedback if your brain is not doing what you want especially in anxiety attention sleep you can see it on a qeg a brain map where you put a cap in the head squirt it full of gel and just grab some resting data and if you see things in a brain map you can then exercise the brain waves using B feedback and make iterative and Progressive change a lot of change in just a few months so we usually eliminate ADHD and really knock anxiety back to typical levels or pull the teeth of PTSD completely or OCD completely in couple months and these are often folks have been working with these challenges for decades with no real success and you get in there and exercise some brain waves and you see people soar when their resources are not in their way anymore so I I worked in traditional mental health for many years and doing neuro feedback still even a dozen 20 20 years plus into doing neur feedback it still feels like cheating a little bit because people just start changing so quickly within a handful of sessions three or four sessions you feel neuro feedback so session what I understood also when you said you put something on your head yeah it's important to come to an Institute you need to go there physically you can't do it bya Zoom so the best is we actually do it remotely yeah we have physical offices there's two in Europe well we have we have Stockholm and and and London also got a handful in the US about four or five in the US but most of our clients certainly in the US never visit our offices um in Europe and the UK people visit the office for the for the assessment the brain mapping but then they grab equipment and go home I have a little device here's an example of an EEG a little micro EEG amplifier and you just put some a couple ear Clips on and couple wires on your head and measure the brain in real times the training process the N feedback process doesn't requ ire a whole big rig of wires you can just do with a couple wires at a time you measure the brain in real time for instance there's a circuit on the right hand side of the brain that knows if you're paying attention or not you know it's it's involved with executive function and it uses beta waves to do its job and it goes into more automatic modes using theta waves and so if you have tons of theta there then you don't fall asleep really well and you're also very distractable or impulsive you know squirrel ADHD type Domin it's this right hand side so you simply stick a wire there plus some ear clips and you measure the beta moment to moment measure the Theta as it changes moment to moment whenever the brain briefly moves in the right direction for half a second you applaud the brain with auditory visual feedback and the Brain says oh stuff I like stuff and then it moves in the wrong direction the beta goes down Theta comes up and the game slows down or stops the brain says hey I don't like no stuff and then it happens to move in the right direction the Applause continues the brain starts to notice this and the big trick is we move the goalposts every few seconds we adjust the computer next to where the brain is so the Applause only occurs for that one little circuit flexing itself in the right direction and you can't feel your brain waves so this is mostly involuntary you're watching a Pac-Man stop and start or cars move and you're like really this is doing something really but two sessions in three sessions in your brain's like oh you want some more beta here and you're like oh wait a minute I think I'm feeling something I feel kind of focused that's kind of weird and then it wears off and let must have imagined it but the next time it's stronger and then it stops wearing off as you repeat it so you have this opportunity kind of like a personal training environment to stretch a resource feel it grade it then iterate and we um move people through three or four workouts a week send equipment home we have live coaches on seven days a week so doesn't really matter if you're in Austria Germany Sweden the UK the US got to get some equipment and then the coaches can work with you virtually teaching you to run the workout gear it's kind of like being in a high-end gym and having some goals but not knowing how the machine is set up and somebody sees your confusion runs over and helps you set the machine up so it's kind of this is our model like like the soul cycle model for brain where we send equipment home and there's little coaches in a window cheering you on and helping you you know get things done so yeah thank you but anyway um it still can make sense to come to the Institute because I'm planning now in around a months I will be in London um yeah we grab a copy of your uh your brain data show your brain but it sounds very interesting um and at least for most people will be the solution it's just doing it from home it's incredible mhm yeah and and take some time too you know neuro feedback takes 30 40 50 60 100 sessions sometimes to get people where they want to go so it's not a lot of time you work out for half an hour three or four times a week but you got to build up you know 30 40 sessions so it takes a few months to really create the change you're looking for yeah but it's nothing compared what you can achieve if and you're actually creating change you're not just being paliative or medicating a system you're creating changes strong changes in anxiety or ADHD for instance that are I think hard to ignore yeah still fast really fast it is yeah it's compared to most things again I've been in this field for more than 20 years and I forget sometimes how how rapid it is compared to um you medication route sometimes or Psychotherapy which can take a lot longer and and there's things we can do that you cannot do with meds or therapy yeah world and for a while or even if you say cons in entrepreneurs and it's partly so hard to change them because they're always distracted Here Comes something else and Y and three four months a big change know that is incredible and if you get the brain out of the way all the cognitive coaching takes off if you get you know people's Psychotherapy their coaching their sport their language their relationships become amazing because the brain is no longer in the way yeah so therapists love sending people to us because we help the the brain regulate and then the therapy works or the coaching works or whatever else so very interesting so people who are really interested in in this changing the life fast with this getting all whatever um stupid stuff wrong programming uh or even traumas like I understood out of the way where to go website yeah Peak brain Institute or Peak brain. cuk if you're in the UK and uh check us out I think most of our socials are Peak bra in LA because that was our first um office yeah come check us out if you're in one of the countries we're at you can come get a local brain map if you're not in one of those countries we still do work in Canada and Australia Dubai but people generally get their own sort of hardware and software so it tends to be a little more of a uh an investment because we have to get your own you know systems but no uh you can work with Peak Bryant Institute wherever you happen to be so come check us out um on online and ask me your brain questions I would love to uh see the kinds of things you're struggling with so come come tell us your brain stuff yeah I wrote a book with the title The Best Is Yet To Come so The Best is Yet to create indeed change your brain and then live the best life you ever left thank you wonderful Andrew for the time um I wish you a wonderful day and California La and thank you for sharing and uh at least uh I will meet your Peak Institute in London and maybe we connect later and share my experience with you and wonderful whoever is listening or watching really give it a try you only can win well thank you sir for the kind words I look forward to talking to you again in the future thank you V [Music]