Dr Andrew Hill Founder of Peak Brain Institute

welcome to neuronoodles neurofeedback neuropsychology podcast featuring Tech Legend Jay gunkelman he is the man who has read well over a half a million brain scans our goals provide information and promote options for better Mental Health the neuronoodle podcast is supported by listeners and businesses just like you like our gold supporter the seventh annual Super Brain Summit AT Bradley University and our silver supporter mind media join us at the 7th annual Super Brain Summit AT Bradley University Center for a collaborative brain research it's featuring speaker Dr Mary Frances O'Connor she's the author of The Grieving brain the surprising science of how we learn from our love and loss if you want to get more information regarding registration contact Gwen hoarter she's at g-h-o-w-a-r-t-e-r at bradley.edu or call her at 309-677-3900 if you want more information regarding programming you can contact Dr Laurie Russell Chapin herself at 309-677-3186 or email lar bradley.edu mindmedia.com get the latest EEG and neurofeedback technology from mymedia.com there's semi-dry sensor cap is a Wonder to see and they're EEG amplifiers have been trusted in the field for decades their neurofeedback in qeeg courses will get you up to speed in no time visit mindmedia.com now not Dr J what's that not Dr J it's not doctor today oh that's true I forgot oh come on if Dr J can play basketball and be called a doctor it's true a gazillion brain scans no but I have to be correcting that um you can see the problem if there was a misunderstanding about it yeah I have to do the same thing with regards to clinical stuff folks often want me to use diagnostic language or they want to understand that and I'm sort of it I mean it's part of our our the way we educate the way we frame what we do our value proposition for our clients is providing education and agency not diagnostic expertise so I joke that when our clients find us you know we teach them to become experts instead of having to be the right expert the next person who has the answer we can transfer some of that to them so they can you know go forward with it I've always had the luxury of working along with the neurologist or electroencephalographers typically and that that's been very freeing obviously um you can call something what it is and not have to kind of work around um and a diagnostic call with the credential as a cosign so right it worked really well for me um so I guess though to what extent did you I mean you've been doing EEG and clinically EG is a clinical field how long have you been involved with EEG well I had my first laboratory in 1972. so almost as long as I've been alive you've been picking up brain signals yeah professionally but I I played around with eg amps and stuff in the at the University at the North Dakota State University in Fargo go bison you know um but um uh the the state hospital in Jamestown basically uh gave us space and uh funding and we built our own amps I mean 1972 what neurofeedback amp could you buy yeah yeah how big was it the the origin had a zero cross detector which couldn't see anything but the dominant frequency it was a terrible app you know it was you know it had enough space inside the case to carry lunch but it was it was um but but you couldn't really do really AEG with it and the state hospital had a big old brass model six which wasn't like current current uh but it was still quite functional uh so we you know we had uh some uh interesting um uh times three years I ran that lab and then came out to California and then I uh after one year of making equipment and finding that you could go broke making equipment for people fast yeah yeah I I decided that the service end of the field always has need for service so um I looked I got a job in the busiest EEG lab in the world in San Francisco and over a hundred a day a minimum day was 100 eegs wow and they came in from over 400 hospitals across the U.S off of satellites into phone systems and yeah so 500 000 eegs later uh as a that's calculated only 100 a day and there were days we topped 200 but sure you know just 100 A Day Makes for an easy calculation so uh um so I I had that as a background um a BS degree from North Dakota State University where they know a lot about bs you know so well first um but you know just basically the depth of the visual uh exposure to the waveforms and and the training with John Hughes and the Gibbs and uh Charlie Yeager and Dr Shearer and yeah they're very very high level EEG interpretation and um and I you know density of exposure yeah I remember uh an email uh chat lists online which I was uh I had to kind of step away from those because uh I I I I wouldn't let go of the some some conversations that didn't make sense so yeah I know there's some vitriolnosis at that point I just you know that wasn't me so I just had to just quit doing that I remember somebody with an email something about a salamander oh that was probably me yeah yeah I was very vocal on those early lists uh and uh uh interchange with me and asked about grad schools where you could do a neurofeedback uh program uh without getting kicked out of the University you know and I suggested Aaron zydel at UCLA uh brain lateralization lab so um I remember you back before you were the you that you are now you know that's right 30 25 30 years or something a while ago I forget exactly yeah I well you have a a sharp a guy on the email list you you were also one to try to drill down and you know ask the you know kind of show me the data sort of uh approach to uh to some of the uh posts so well I mean back then there was I I really described that that time in the field of neurofeedback as a bunch of blind men and elephants you know everyone's describing something and and proclaiming truth about Mars is the way and being in direct option yours can't work this is how to do neurofeedback this is how it works people arguing back then about does sight on the head matter does frequency matter this is why my part of my dissertation work was to to compare sites and frequencies active in sham to just like put a stake in that question once and for all Yes it matters here it is it's proven but um and Aaron zeitel's brain lateralization lab is the perfect spot to have done it wasn't yeah where you know dicotic listening tests and things that were available for for analysis that you know normal Labs don't think like that you know so yeah it also dovetailed I mean I was trained to do neurofeedback before grad school by Dr Larry hershberg in Providence yeah um right right great in the field uh recently retired but Larry had a big long history focused on developmental uh trajectory stuff autism and other types of Developmental stuff with kids primarily and I was um Dr hershberg was trained in this sort of arousal model of neurofeedback that sort of I think came out of my perspective sort of from the optimers initially and some of that EEG uh yeah it was called neuroscybernetics right the arousal model and when I took the arousal model which was heavily relevant to Spectrum development and kids and ADHD and things when I took that and then I went into a laterali lab and I got my head around unintended laterality and left and right and I started to think about how we use you know bait in the left and SMR on the right and frequency specific hemisphere differences and some of the the clinical lore the rules the paint brushes we've been taught to use started to coalesce so yeah yeah I I really um you know I sat through I also had the luxury of sitting through um I'm going to say it's a luxury that I did it twice but I took two I took the course twice with Arnie shy Bell on neuroanatomy um because I didn't pass the first time uh it was really hard you know medical student level neuroanatomy and I went through it and almost you know got it and didn't quite get it and did it again and really it sunk in but the mix of that like old school arousal model the laterality model that Dr zidel helped really instill I mean I um a lot of the tools that I used in my research on brains in General on neurofeedback I use something called the land the lateralized attention Network task which is a lateralized version of Dr posner's Mike posner's attention Network task so you're it's a flanker task you're trying to predict the direction of an arrow you know say it's up or down or left or right and there's some flankers some distractors nearby try to predict something or or judge something with distractors that are incongruent to it or in Conflict to it creates an executive conflict which is a prefrontal kind of thing and Dr zeidel took posner's uh and ant which was a horizontal line of arrows flipped it vertically made it in both hemispheres and then made it a tactistoscope so a very rapid presentation and you can constrain the response Hand by visual field and now you can actually test attention systems in each hemisphere separately so I started to think about the brain very differently once I got the ability to dig in and test modular resources and you know this was dovetailing with you know I was working of course a little bit in that lab with Dr Jack Johnstone dear friend of both of ours who passed on a few years ago also a great EEG yeah but my business partner yeah um and so Jack was teaching me a lot about this sort of endo phenotype perspective on brains and EG and you know that was obviously our that was you and me and uh Jack and joy right that first paper I think yeah uh 2005 endophenotype clinical characterization of characterization clinical databases yeah I was talking about uh uh failure modes in the brain that were common but we hadn't put together that they were uh probably Endo phenotypic until 2005. uh but for about four or five years before that I had done the reverse look at the 500 000 or what I could recall of them you know uh I I don't have the artificial intelligence I just have this little skin version you know so um but having looked at that these were the common patterns that I saw and having uh hung out in clinical settings what were the treatments that matched up with them because if you had the same Endo phenotype you got the same treatment approach not the DSM didn't make any frequent sense you know obviously it's it's not not valid anyway so uh we didn't really Drive ourselves for treatment decisions based on the DSM we use the EEG to guide us and uh and cutting across the DSM if you have the same EEG pattern you've got the same treatment basically so uh that that's what we published um in the the 2005 uh with the Insight that it was likely and the phenotypic there were two of the 11 patterns that were known uh genetic correlates um since then obviously the others have been filled in so uh it wasn't a bad guess you know it absolutely wasn't and I mean I I struggle with Endo phenotypes the phenotypes in general as a as a thing that I work with every single day and this is sort of getting to something I started to ask a minute ago um 50 plus years working with the EG I assume most of that almost all of that is with the lens with the perspective of clinical uh pathology atypicality problems being presented um when I look at Endo phenotypes you know patterns that exist in the EEG across people I find there are phenotypes that exist that aren't the clinical ones necessarily in fact a phenotype um the proportionality of the phenotypes the expression is whether you're normal or clinical you know each phenotype there is the phenotypes exist in normal people and clinical people the same phenotypes is just more severely expressed and that that it's an easy uh uh you reduce the proportionality of the mahalanobus distance of the three-dimensional data scatter and multivariate Analysis so if you have less Divergence you're normal if you have more Divergence within that pattern you're you're clinical and that that's an easy one to show but that sort of opens the door for us here right because we all have brains that are weird good job be weird like all of us are rather atypical and when you show someone their atypicality their endophenotypes they're anterior cingulate being extra hot could be preservative and intrusive and obsessive or it could be that they're a highly effective CEO who's highly organized and loves their mind when the back midline could be a trauma response or it could be a very effective lifeguard who's heavily skilled at it and doesn't seem to be threatened or or activated by their threat response stuff so that I that I struggle with day to day because I work with clients with acute clinical classic stuff and I work with clients that are the highest performers squeezing the juice out of life and everything in between and I find the same patterns in a person that walks in with no problems yeah as well as somebody who's got severe dysregulation and it's not a question of here's a thing that's wrong with you it's here's the thing that's different in you would you like to work on it doesn't make sense to is it valid because try and interpret phenotypes yes the electricity pattern the thing we can measure the statistical thing that's hard to you know measure a clean away in some ways still sticks up those things don't always mean mean interesting things a deviation could be abnormal could be could be a compensatory mechanism and it could be a unique outlier state that the person has as a special skill yeah and uh Gerard fittermore in in South Africa's uh a brilliant guy I've known him for a long long time I won't embarrass him the number uh uh but uh he he works with um what you would consider extreme athletes um who runs those things that we run over two mountain ranges for six days or you know those crazy races uh who Rose across the freaking Atlantic in a boat by themselves uh the these are his clients yeah and don't you know that they have a singular that's just crazy a lot of them if they didn't how the hell would they stay on task for those Dr Hill I'm going to put a link to our uh I'll put a link right here to the last show that we we did with you but a couple years ago what has gone on with you since then I see that you're opening up new locations I see you have a moniker the Magic Man and oh what some podcaster that was her that was her experience her her judgment after working through it I mean a lot of people have this experience um of getting agency of understanding themselves a lot more after digging into looking at themselves and that's that's what people find magical and this is also my sort of frustration with the field of neurofeedback it's all rather magical and none of it's any really more mysterious than anything else there is no magic box in neurofeedback there is no best particular approach there's understanding of the science and Physiology and gentle shaping and moving it but nobody has like the magic like there's no mystery tradition here you have to be initiated into to really start digging in and only the right particular church will get it to you it's not how this stuff exists so we've been expanding Peak brain Institute which is really focused on a mix of classic neurofeedback and and Peak Performance stuff we have four offices now in the us and we're opening up as well uh in Europe so in the US we have New York City which just expanded St Louis uh LA and Orange County California each have offices and then we're in La we're in London now too so uh how do you keep how do you keep control of all of that well I I have a perspective on brain training that is not a therapist I mean a lot of my colleagues who my mentors people have taught me they're they're mostly therapists and they tend to have a roster of clients of patients that are 20 clients 30 clients and they see them for a mix of therapy and neurofeedback typically and almost everyone I know in the field has a population of interest because they started off doing autism or eating disorders or anxiety or trauma and then discovered neurofeedback as a lovely tool set or they started to specialize because of the change they could help Shepherd in a particular area they really found it fulfilling um I uh don't do that piece of it I don't narrowly Niche down and I also don't work in the role of a therapist for you so without being a therapist without working to have to create the complete transference container that safety container where you're sort of allowing a therapist to create some you know some agency and re-examine things and provide a a mixed perspective that is the therapeutic process to sort of unlearn and relearn things that's a pretty vulnerable place to be and it takes a lot of management clinical boundaries and there is this transference this this relationship you develop with the person and their agency and geek brain instead operates like a bunch of personal trainers and coaches we're here to thrust agency back up on you and teach you how your brain works so you know we see about 10 times as many clients I think as the average uh neurofeedback solo practitioner and we do that because I teach people to read their brain Maps we don't write these long exhaustive here's a bunch of labels here's things that could be true about you diagnostic level reports we instead say oh cool data uh CPT brain Maps let's dig in let's look at some stuff let's teach you the neurocognitive exercise of putting physiology behavior and contrast and seeing what's outlined about your resources teach you how this stuff works and okay there's your brain what do you want to do and so we can take the the stuff that is clinical when it exists executive function stuff anxiety features sleep postcode brain fog seizures migraines whatever and you can work on those things from a resource perspective if I talk to you about your interior cingulate and its tendency perhaps to perseverate being plausible based on your Maps you're like oh my God yes actually somebody gave me an OCD diagnosis oh wow I'm sorry you deal with that it's so annoying here's the physiology probably would you like to work on that so you know I don't have to deny other people's diagnostic language but I'm not really I don't really care if you're a high-powered CEO who's mostly good at hyper focusing but can't turn it off and be nice to your partner when you get home or if you're like somebody who's compulsively hand washing or somebody who just has a song stuck in your head if you tend to perseverate and the anterior cingulate is stuck for you well that's true for you you know you know how you feel so you can now learn the physiology take control of it and that that thrusting of agency that educational that piercing that mystery a little bit by showing someone their brain map I think really helps to offload in some ways some of the burden of doing neurofeedback traditionally I mean a lot of therapists struggle to continue to maintain a perspective on how their clients brains are changing clients aren't super uh compliant with sleep surveys and personal inventories and things day to day and you've spent a lot of time catching up on that sort of a bug of neurofeedback and we made it a feature we teach you to do neurofeedback if you're a client I mean about 80 of our clients work from home with equipment and we just teach you to do it we have Live support staff and live coaches to jump on and help you and teach you and suggest new things but um the big benefit even before folks do neurofeedback with us especially if you're near an office is that we provide the sort of membership model for brain mapping so people pay one time and they come throughout the year and learn to use mapping and attention testing is a tool so I'm in California with offices in New York you know cannabis is legal in those States and I can't tell you the number of maps I've seen pre and post cannabis or Adderall or caffeine or biohackers you know looking at their different nootropic Stacks examining how their cognitive stuff works or folks that have gotten covid and have post covet examining the degree of brain fog or the post-concussion stuff that got reactivated by their new ski trip when you can see this stuff and you can see it shift in numbers and you can relate it to how you're feeling you can start shifting your relationship with aspects of suffering in places where you aren't performing you can be as annoyed and as frustrated as you want to be looking at a broken shoulder on an X-ray you're probably not going to be ashamed or overwhelmed quite the same way I went and you're like oh my God that thing it's so annoying yeah don't tolerate it oh empathy frustrating but it's just your brain in this case you can see it you can change it and I tell people that look if you see stuff on a qeg qgs are hard to interpret a little bit people are weird but if you see something that is valid for you right because you can almost always change something in a data set or it only matters to you if it's valid if it really matters to you but you know if you see it you have agency so that's that's sort of our soapbox and that with the network of physical offices we also do remote programs is creating a different relationship I think with the field of neurofeedback because a lot of our clients are not just doing oh I gotta fix something but they're learning to understand themselves and moving through even years sometimes of mapping progressively trying different life interventions doing some neurofeed back and you know transforming across a long time hopefully so artificial intelligence is that coming into play the chat EPT Jay and I have been going back and forth over the last couple weeks Jay's a big proponent of AI oh yeah it's gonna I mean we've we've just discovered fire we don't I don't think we quite know yet what it can do uh all we know is it can burn things we don't we don't know you had to cook gourmet meals like we're worth that level oh my God someone got burned yeah but Peking duck like there's a whole other end of the use of the technology we have to get to as it elaborates um of course the big constraint here is that these especially natural language model uh or deep deep language model systems are um only really really good when they are constrained very very narrowly in the questions and are trained on a very narrow data set so to get them to do the skilled stuff we do is going to take a minute because the amount of judgments you have to capture and then train the system on and my data sets you have to provide for the subsequent training or are a little bit you know there's some stuff that has to happen first but um I've got a database of 5 000 clients more I I forget when I put the new charting system in that I last used but it's it captures um pink brain Peak brain the current entities around for seven and a half years like I have six years of decision making captured every protocol all the surveys every every tension test every brain map in this massive data set now if I can figure out how to constrain chat gpt45 whatever Auto GPT um I can sort of say look here's the questions we want to ask here's the ways we've answered in the past I think going back to the old school machine learning of training models model fitting that's going to come together with the amazing natural language stuff and the inferential reasoning and the genetic learning where you can tell it to learn to do stuff and give it very imprecise and have it do Federated gpts where it sends other gpts out to do stuff amazing but we're gonna need the other piece of it which is the old school machine learning model fitting the learning and intelligence against the domain expertise we already have you can't take domain expertise and put it in these models that's the big issue do you think that you're five look chat GPT is open source okay could there be an open source I I know there's a few people that are doing it but all the scans that you do you take the identifiers off and you put it in one place and everybody has access to it do you think we can be organized to figure out where somebody doesn't I know everybody wants to make a profit everybody wants to be proprietary but 500 000 is bigger than five thousand right yeah no I I mean sure although I I bet Jay would agree you don't need 500 000 to approach normal variability you need about 10 to 100 000 depending what you're looking at so um sure absolutely and we're doing that basic science question thing you're asking that's asking about science about how brains work that's useful but I think the exciting thing is the next step and that's the intelligent agent that is a model of you that interacts with interventions it probably would need somewhere around 500 000. do you think to approach you don't need it as one group you need it randomized into two groups so that you can validate what you find in one group independently on us on the second group yeah uh that without that validation step you you could be up a box canyon then and not be aware of it uh so the uh the one of the difficulties in Neuroscience is replicability yeah and uh we we've got to provide that um and uh you're right about a hundred maybe two hundred thousand something such as that may be sufficient to generally characterize uh the the broad distribution but categorization within that as clinical categorization epilepsy uh bipolar uh you know the the the clinical observations which are some of which are quite valid uh and and and the epilepsy spectrum is I think uh a concept that needs to be included because uh autism and ATD and you know the the high percentage of epileptic form content that you see in these clinical groups so uh the the a few hundred thousand can characterize as the normal distribution fairly well but um the the clinical clusters are going to have to be identified that's that's some hand-holding of the algorithm uh some management basically but once you've got that done once you've got that done one time you have to you have to run that on your independent sample and and validate it basically yeah join us at the seventh annual Super Brain Summit AT Bradley University Center for collaborative brain research it's featuring speaker Dr Mary Frances O'Connor she's the author of The Grieving brain the surprising science of how we learn from our love and loss if you want to get more information regarding registration contact Gwen hoarter she's at g-h-o-w-a-r-t-e-r at bradley.edu or call her at 309-677-3900 if you want more information regarding programming you can contact Dr Laurie Russell Chapin herself at 309-677-3186 or email Lar bradley.edu one of the ideas I have around that and part of where I'm getting my ten thousand to a hundred thousand number from is I think we can take the the data model conceptual model of qig and make it at a dimension of time into it so if we had Wellness trackers for the brain where some people tracking their sleep their stress their seizures their migraines their mood how angry their mother-in-law made them whatever the drinking their exercise and we have a longitudinal set of variability per person with some snapshots against their normal variability within one person now qbeg has a different metric I believe that amount of intra individual variability captured with context will take that number of 200 000 and cut it down to I think the power analysis will show that it's like 20 000 now in terms of wild side because you're getting you're getting the seizure incidence that happens every so often across six weeks you're getting the recurrent migraine patterns and there's going to be a lot more contextual data I think we will be able to reduce the need to keep qeg's clean I want them to walk in sit down do a brain map walk out and okay they reported to having caffeine before and they smoke weed last night oh and they have um some sort of like you know this and bass Spectrum some sort of anxiety stuff they're reporting okay great so now with this atypical characterization now we can have a sort of regression mean through a set of normal typical data or or um uh examine the variance around human populations but with the context of how people themselves vary which is a thing we actually have to sort of control out in qeg come in the morning no caffeine not super you know there's a bunch of constraints to get valid EEG data now and I think we're going to be able to to eliminate those at some point and have fatigued and stressed and medicated EEG and be able to look right through that and make judgments I think that's coming how do we get more more data if you have five thousand we need a hundred thousand whatever the number is you think it's possible to get everybody together and say all right we'll make our we'll spend 600 bucks like Stanford make our own yeah AI sure and well sure I'm sure someone's already doing it um yeah again the thing that I'm much more interested at Stanford actually separated from Stanford to a private entity that was funded um and they're doing an AI scrubbing trying to replace Psychiatry with uh you know biomarkers and uh the uh Stanford gave him 37 000 eegs that were already cleaned up and digitized and the problem was that these are all epilepsy cases and encephalopathy cases because that's what you use the EG for clinically so that the data's not sufficient to characterize like that this is what I'm saying we need to think about brains as normal variability and and we need to all be examining our brains just like we look at our lipid panels you know it's just a part of your physiology that you manage it's not so much about pathology as my take on it but you're right well blood pressure I mean I just got back from my physical it's like you know here's here's the Baseline how do you compare over the years people have to get in that frame of mind pardon the pun that you know above your neck you have to keep an eye on what's going on there as well yeah you can't feel it ironically so you know well insurance doesn't pay that's quick I don't even let them test me anymore really the people that are on steroids and stuff so oh yeah right right you know the show me a norm that I'm appropriate you know so yeah wouldn't you find it useful like if you had a data point that was distorted by your experience your suffering some medication Etc you would understand how that data point being distorted what it meant like it would provide Agency for you as somebody who's educated can interpret subtle data why do we all have that capability there's a reason that I've lasted over 30 years and they have an average life expectancy of less than 10. for no pituitary you know and what's the reason it's difficult to stay alive with no pituitary I'll tell you that I didn't hear both anterior and posterior pituitary oh yeah the whole thing was gone wow so your brain yeah yeah my poor timing very important I get a new doctor and they they they have a clean clipboard nothing on it and and Mr good you know the joke on the last name what are you here for well renew my meds well what are you on I start to list my meds and they about five meds down the list they say well what do you have and this is not what I have it's what I don't have I don't have a pituitary and the clipboard and the draw drop at about the same time they're linked together somehow some reflex I don't know what it is uh but what do we do for you I'll renew my meds and and you might want to find the specialist who might know what to do for me uh but that they don't really exist you know neuroendocrinologists that are able to do better than what I've been doing don't exist so um that doing what they do you have a half a chance of living 10 years you know so well I can't imagine it's a large practice space for those doctors to operate in in this particular complaint so well I I take my medications essentially all PRN and these are not meds that are prescribed PRM uh steroids and stuff yeah but you know they uh I was complying perfectly with the prescriptions and they couldn't get normal blood levels and I I tell them well let me take them the way I want and I give you normal blood levels they said well there's no way for you to tell your uh cortisol level you have hydrocortisone you know steroids that you're eating I said well yes there is you know I've damaged myself over the years I cut these fingers off and had them sewn back on I've got a risk that's had six surgeries got bad knees broken back twice I busted up ribs I I'm a total freaking mess when I feel pain in all of those I'm not on enough steroids inflammatory stuff yeah and if I can't feel any of them now I have earned the right to feel some pain so if I can't feel any of them I'm on too much steroid and I I don't have a normal life I used to fly internationally or I was sitting at home on the computer for three four weeks at a time so I didn't have a normal lifestyle and here you are you're pituitary if you change the level of Life stress shifts the levels around the cortisol level will shift based on what is what's needed as an anti-inflammatory for yourself and to control your immune system and blood sugar and circadian and yeah and and with no uh no you could slam it with doses a couple times a day uh standard doses didn't match up with a non-standard life so as soon as I started taking him PRM I gave them normal blood levels and then they couldn't you know understand the basically said okay take it however you want but you know don't don't don't tell anybody you know it I've made it 30 years uh and way past any estimate that they would have given well we're super glad you've been continuing to share your your Janus with it with us all so I'm I'm still having too much fun to pass that's all that's great the devil doesn't want you so doc so Dr Hill I I hear you got uh some new podcast episodes coming up what you got cooking yeah we have some new podcast episodes I had a podcast called head first with Dr Hill that's available all the podcast places apple and and YouTube Etc and uh it's you put a link in the in the corner great um and head first we sort of went fallow during the pandemic we you know reduced our uh we changed our office a lot you know pre-pandemic we were sort of this really vibrant seven day a week 12 hour day gym with a couple locations and now we are more locations but they're smaller and 80 of our clients work from home so it's got this very different kind of uh phenomena attached to it in terms of how clients work with us um but as we're starting to do more with meditation groups and client Outreach and stitching together this worldwide network of of both gyms and clients we're relaunching podcasts and things like that so um head first Dr Hill will be I think the new episodes will start rolling out next month we have a couple big guests I think Wim Hof is one of our first guests coming out uh as uh as a as a show we're producing right now and I think it'll be a weekly podcast uh uh okay pushed to all the podcast places so folks Please Subscribe you can check me out at Andrew Hill PhD you can check out Peak brain at Peak brainla and I think my YouTube is just Dr Hill d-r-h-i-l-l so come check us out what what are people wanting to to consume nowadays what do they want to know yeah um I find the stuff that people want to know is always very you know personal and it tends to constellate around the same types of phenomena I mean this is sort of getting back to the idea that if we understand ourselves we can take more control I mean Jay it has a strategy with managing his cortisol that works for him because he understands it adequately and he manages better than most people better than doctors do in this instance and I find people when they understand that they're alpha waves are running slow and that's why they have word finding issues it's probably not aging at 55 all your Alpha speeds are all over the place and your Delta's you're not sleeping great and you're having speed of processing so they they often go oh okay wait a minute that's happening so when we start to distill things down to how some individual person's brain works not just like the phenotypes cohere and the data sets from our scientific clinical perspective but the experiences start to cohere for individuals they start understanding how their their sleep management or lack thereof is impacting them or they're eating before bed it's impacting them or they're working night shift throws them off or they're you know ski vacations they keep getting concussed on I find people start to really become laser focused on stuff that they sort of already know but becomes this you know how do I change that how do I make change can I can I go after that I also find people are often a little bit scared until they realize that brain mapping is this tool they're often I don't want to know I can't you know but you can change it oh I can change it okay I want to know so people generally want to know whatever it is they suffer from the most sleep stress or attention are often big foundational things that they're curious about oh my I'm different I'm unique in this way can you help me take control of it is often how people lead their uh investigations so your model is is a bit unique uh in that you've got uh coaching and General Health and Wellness orientation and kind of an Eclectic set of tools uh Hyperbaric and you know various uh uh diet and you know lots of approaches and this is not um a medical office this is a general health and wellness and coaching right and uh it's it's not a clinical model uh but it's it's a model that essentially uh uh uh coaches and focuses uh the person in in a direction that may be helpful for them yeah we thrust agency upon you and teach you what you might want to do and give you best practices and then check back with you we don't you know give you the answer necessarily and it's probably a good idea to have a affiliated medical uh uh associate that can end up handling uh the the findings that will obviously come up right where you see a dramatic clinical abnormality in the EEG which you can't call because it's not your uh you don't have that bib on the hat you know so right right um having a doc uh on at your beck and call uh to to handle cases like that and is is quite useful yeah we generally find we have to navigate non-you know coaching type things for a lot of people and that may mean we're working with someone's neurologist and providing data or work with some therapist helping them look at an attention test and um even though we're not MediCal and we don't have that clinical perspective that psychological necessarily you know uh legal and medical oversight we do refer out to those sorts of things if we see things that are unusual or we think you know I I can't tell you the number of people that I send out to gather neck image in like a nuka practice because they've had a car accident you know if there's musculoskeletal things I can't diagnose them for you but I can say oh hey I think you may be experiencing something that a provider in this landscape really needs to take a check and look at and hear somebody and we have those relationships in all of our physical offices you know we have a few doctors a few you know specialists in each area but yeah it is something we we manage and one of the ways I've been able to get away from having to manage that is because people often find neurofeedback it's a niche so they often find it late in their experience of addressing their goals so by the time I've gotten somebody with a severe trauma history or a lot of seizures or major autism they have a deeply skilled relationship with this clinical stuff and they know how they know how their meds work and they have their team and they have you know they're kind of over their talk therapy or not or whatever and it's just like you managing your own medication PRN people come in and I'm okay to work with you if you have a clinical diagnosis but I'm not the clinician for you so sometimes it's a little bit of like the hey there's a there's a severity here I think that you should probably see your doctor for of this flavor but it's very similar to what I've been doing and you know I work with uh patients that have epilepsy and I'm not a neurologist so I can't treat epilepsy but I can train somebody who has epilepsy how to operate their brain optimally and work with the neurologists or epileptologists who's managing their case because I never work you know behind the scenes without their knowledge right um and and at that point the doctors managing the that they're treating the seizures I'm just teaching to optimize brain function and when the seizures go away and you know we've got good experience that that's what's going to happen the meds will be pulled because the doctor doesn't want you on meds if you're not having seizures absolutely uh and and you end up with seizure-free medication for you and we just published another uh case like that in neuroregulation uh the the the the the the patient uh just graduated with honors from Baylor and she wanted to be able to do lectures about intractable epilepsy and neurofeedback and uh and life outcomes and as a motivational speaker and she wanted her case to actually be published so great uh Rusty Turner myself Sue Wilson uh the the the the treatment team uh basically ended up um getting it written up in great detail uh medication seizure free for like seven years and now she had a division one tennis scholarship uh four years Dean's List um and now she's graduated and and uh has this publication that just came out last month um as as uh basically the validation of her clinical case story basically the link to the show will be right here yeah and and it it's is uh Isabella is the the patient's name and uh her her case was astounding um actually they had a little bit of neurofeedback in the US before her family moved to Barcelona uh where uh as a young pre-teen she started to have intractable seizures and um the the EG done in the United States actually showed the seizure activity uh in the temporal lobe um the the neurologists and neurosurgeon in Barcelona will have to remove her right temporal uh to control the infraction level epilepsy they chose to do neurofeedback and quit meds and they were told that that would kill their daughter uh and obviously she's bloomed uh really quite well this one thing to be seizure-free med-free for seven years that's another thing to have graduated with honors the tennis scholarship so it's amazing she she she didn't just Escape epilepsy she blooms in a in a major way an oppressive young lady that's wonderful of course I've seen some similar things across the decade or more 22 years I've been doing neurofeedback but um in terms of medication management that I find the same thing that happens antidepressants anti-seizure meds you sort of bring the floor up to meet the person and then the meds take care of themselves with the doctor and the client great I find I have to be a little bit more pointed with my advice with psychostimulants and people that use cannabis because almost always somewhere around three to five weeks in the tolerance to stimulants and the tolerance to cannabis gets abolished out of nowhere and the person's like getting three four five times the subjective impact suddenly from those drugs and it can get in the way and cause problems behaviorally or you know psychologically like oh my God I can't get off the couch I'm too stoned or my kid is super irritable won't sleep or eat right now oh maybe that Adderall is you know they need a different dose now essentially so I sort of warn parents of kids that are taking stimulants and I warn people that are you know chronic Stoners Like well you know look a couple weeks in you're probably going to start getting potentiated effects as you uh get more sensitive so that's something you may have to manage maybe make an appointment with your doctor and you know ask for uh uh refill that's got extra amount of half the dose or come up with the strategy for that drug maybe because in my experience you're probably very sensitive to these medications in a few weeks when your Consciousness becomes clearer the effects of these things are notable uh when you're all clouded it's hard to spot these things you know and as you as you clear people's uh Consciousness it's astounding uh how sensitive they can be to stuff that they were they're just absolutely uh were oblivious to previously yeah yeah I'm gonna try to you know that if you if you look at the literature SMR training for instance uh you can look at a visual event related potential and look at the size of the potential that you're revoking and get an idea of how much recruitment the visual stimuli is getting if you do SMR the size of the visual stimulus jumps up you've removed some somatosensory interference and and so as you control the the inner level of noise you can see signals that you couldn't see before you can feel effects that were just part of the background Cloud before but now you they're obvious and that's a plasticity effect too right there's the Emmy there's the motor of Oak potential work that shows that one session of smrr creates a much lower threshold of activation to create the hand jumping when you give the brain a little magnetic pulse a certain threshold to activate that but after a single session the threshold way reduced so it's not just clearing information it's making the system more sensitive more plastic more changeable I think in general so Dr Hill Jay is it true I've heard that the Stoners out there the boozers out there once they've done neurofeedback some people have lost the taste for their drug of their of their choice is that true it is true not just alcohol and weed people often depending what you're doing to the brain people can lose the taste for cravings for sugar as well what the hell is happening why as you clear the brain you don't need substances um uh we we basically did a research project on 30 addicted individuals uh of a wide variety of different substances but we found that there were two primary drive mechanisms towards addiction over arousal which had three EG patterns fast Alpha which is over arousal low voltage fast which is over arousal and beta spindles which are over arousal if you had over arousal Alpha Theta was part of your future as a therapeutic intervention uh and the alpha Theta people when when you get rid of the drive towards the uh towards the substance and you're exposed to the substance is quite often something that you have a a bad reaction to there's no there's no more reason you've taken away the drive in psychology read the books you get rid of the drive you're supposed to get rid of the behavior associated with Drive aren't you you know Well if you really get rid of the drive that's what happens the other third of the addicted population has anterior cingulate drive not an overarousal they had an obsessive compulsive drive and if you if you don't fix that you end up with the uh symptom substitution if they're clean and sober they're going to find something else to be locked onto um but you know they uh you you can end up getting rid of the drive and at that point the behavior associated with the addiction goes away yeah the old rap Park uh example where when rat Park is Fun the rats play in the park going rat Park is empty they just you know do cocaine all day instead yes and to their detriment yeah yeah they'll do drugs until they die and and if you give them an enriched environment they they have a life as opposed to just do the drugs and that's that's true for like the mechanisms over arousal impulsivity obsessiveness but I honestly think it's a lot simpler than that the most addictive stuff is driven by learning neurofeedback changes learning so you can shape the direction you go in and change your stuck patterns of reinforcement yeah foundationally the the neuroplasticity principles what allows you to get out of the the Drive mechanism that you're being driven towards something with you you're after all who's in control do we have strings coming up is there a master Puppeteer up there you know dangling us uh controlling our Behavior Uh no we you know we're we're we're self we're autonomic um and uh we get to name ourselves we're self-regulating and sometimes well even when we're not aware of what we're doing we're still doing it ourselves right right even when involuntary it's still self yeah yeah it's it's good to see you Andrew and oh you as well Jay of course yeah it's good to see uh um a referral to Aaron's lab turnout so uh obviously yes successful well thank you it was an amazing experience working with Dr zeidel uh working with Dr uh Johnstone uh Jack uh going formal defeated me for a second Dr zeidel and John Stone and other folks and I got just a huge Rich uh you know just as a as an Assad you mentioned when I first reached out that I had I was like how do I get a degree in this without you know getting laughed out of the interview process essentially and I found when I was interviewing for grad school people were like rolling their eyes when the word biofeedback was brought up but about two three years into grad school all these really really senior scientists at different departments in New Zealand like oh you're you're the neurofeedback guy oh I have a cool test Suite you might want to use in your research so I think there's been a sea change yeah of legitimacy as the tech space evolves and I think that's giving not just scientists and clinicians more agency to learn and do but individuals it becomes much more approachable over time to a large extent I think that's also been leveraged by International Neuroscience uh not having the pejorative associated with neurofeedback but basically using their feedback as a as a manipulant we brought in scientists from Salzburg University Salzburg blemishes lab and that their exposure to the concept of neurofeedback suddenly put neurofeedback into their experiments so you get people doing PhD dissertation work with neurofeedback as the tool that they're using so the number of labs in Europe went from tubing on basically being almost the only one to suddenly having Salzburg and um there's a Spanish Society there's an Italian Society there's a society for Applied Neuroscience for Europe um uh England's got its own little group as well I mean that it's flourished internationally and don't even start to talk about it in in Asia I mean uh goodness gracious the Koreans have done fabulous work a complete database dry headset they're doing AI scrubbing of the data to predict mild cognitive impairment and dementia they've got a whole bunch of other uh discriminant features uh being built at this point with AI so um yeah internationally it's just exploded and it's not like you you have a pejorative against neurofeedback internationally at all and there's still a little hangover in the US that I still have to apologize for the early hippie reputation that was me you know so our whole field was dismissed as a bunch of hippies and that you know that yeah well you've redeemed yourself I think my apologies you know you've come a long way so yeah oh it needs a few more podcasts out there get the word going grip drip drip Dr Andrew Hill J gunkelman thank you for coming on the neural noodle podcast my pleasure guys take care of those brains oh yeah bye-bye the neuroniddle podcast is supported by listeners and businesses just like you like our gold supporter the seventh annual Super Brain Summit AT Bradley University and our silver supporter mind media join us at the 7th annual Super Brain Summit AT Bradley University Center for a collaborative brain research it's featuring speaker Dr Mary Frances O'Connor she's the author of The Grieving brain the surprising science of how we learn from our love and loss if you want to get more information regarding registration contact Glenn for arter she's at g-h-o-w-a-r-t-e-r at bradley.edu or call her at 309-677-3900 if you want more information regarding programming you can contact Dr Laurie Russell Chapin herself at 309-677-3186 or email lar bradley.edu mindmedia.com get the latest EEG and neurofeedback technology from mymedia.com there's semi dry sensor cap is a Wonder to see in their EEG amplifiers have been trusted in the field for decades their neurofeedback in qeeg courses will get you up to speed in no time visit mymedia.com now