Dr. Andrew Hill: How To Increase Your Brain Power | The Tyler Wagner Show #1074

all right everyone welcome back to another episode today I got Andrew Hill with us so welcome to the show man hey thanks for having me I really appreciate it of course grateful to have you on uh so yeah if you can uh start us off just a little bit more about you and what you do sure so I'm uh a neuroscientist that works in a functional area basically um somewhere between a doctor and a coach and how we work with human resources and the tools that I use are ones mostly of Neuroscience so some folks call this biofeedback some call it biohacking uh it's used in a therapy environment as well as for Peak Performance so um I got my PhD at UCLA studying cognitive Neuroscience which is the sort of intersection of mind and brain and uh since then I've been opening companies that do what's called neurofeedback or biofeedback on the brain and we work with folks to map their brains find performance bottlenecks and then usually change their brains over a few months so I'm a professional mad scientist basically that is awesome okay so I have to ask you this um my uh and this is kind of a different start it's not what I was expecting to ask first but my uncle I think he does he might maybe use some of your tools or something different but he has actually done something like you described on me and my brother before where okay we put this thing on her head and then he had to use this gel and like uh like little kind of Q-tip thing in each sure and it took forever to get the levels or something right yeah yeah it was right then he asked his questions or and he asked us some questions and then in other times we had to just like close our eyes open her eyes regardless and then he gave us a full report on our brain so yeah you did a brain map or a quantitative EEG so a cap on the head squirt full of gel yeah I can get one set up in about 10 minutes but no offense you're on call uh they had all of our offices come on in we'll we'll put a cap on your head squirt it full of gel and then have you sit still for 10 minutes size closed 10 minutes eyes open and get some resting bass lines uh we're measuring averages of things moment to moment stuff that doesn't change day to day basically so it's not like the content of your thought but but it's more like looking at your height you can sort of measure it and get a sense of it as it's relatively stable and We compare all that but plus we also do an attention test an executive function assessment alongside that and the performance in the brain are compared to a database of people your age and we see how weird you are we look for outliers and performance you know impulsivity distractibility Etc as well as outliers in your brain and then try to model the ones that are unusual in your brain to see if they matter for stuff you're finding in your performance or goals you might have for feeling different or changing how your brain works so got it um so yeah I uh I just wanted to ask that so but before we dive more into this I'm always curious like what was so when you were younger and not like uh too young let's say middle school high school did you have any idea that you would be doing anything like this or was your thought of your adulthood completely uh different it's a good question I guess in high school I mean I I my undergrad uh I went to UMass Amherst on the east coast and I started off in engineering electrical engineering because I was I was kind of geeky couldn't hack the math so I left that pretty quickly but uh probably not I mean I I didn't have any real human services or people experience before college but then in college um and and afterwards I started working with um humans in really acute environments you know inpatient uh acute psychiatric facilities and uh group homes with folks that had multiple disabilities including no language and issues with movement and communication um just really extreme I kept finding myself working with really extreme uh humans under developmental or psychiatric conditions I was good at it I was really good at walking into an environment and like settling things down and they're really aggressive psych units and things um without getting people hurt without having to do you know Hands-On intervention so after about a decade of working in all kinds of Human Services uh mostly inpatient psych and residential with autism and things um I got injured I blew up my back working in the psych hospital and couldn't keep doing the work I've been doing so after a year or two of uh not doing exactly the same thing and doing some case management work I went into high tech and uh got excited about high tech did some sales engineering and some you know got into Tech a little deeper than I got into it before and missed the Human Services thing a little bit and uh for some context the this was right around 2000 1999. and the tech bubble was bursting and the Northeast was you know Tech sector was falling over so I left the tech area and went back to Human Services and got a got a job working for an Autism Center that did neurofeedback and was like wait a minute this is pretty interesting what are we doing to these people why are there why are they getting changes I didn't know we could change and was seeing autism and ADHD and seizures and migraines and concussions and Trauma and stuff be impacted and I had tons of experience with all these populations and didn't think much we could do was doing more than holding patterns and being palliative and helping some suffering but not making much actual change and then I saw neurofeedback and was like oh we're making lots of Rapid change in a few months for people all over the place and it was striking enough that it motivated me to go back and get a grad a PhD in a neuroscience studying this stuff basically I studied uh neurofeedback and intention and I think I may have done the first double-blind placebo-controlled study on neurofeedback as my dissertation which is kind of fun but a bit of a long-winded answer but I kind of got here because I started working with humans you know and then as an interviewer we always like longer answers yes the opposite is what we don't want it yeah you got it I'll I'm good at that um got you got you okay so um just I'm curious on this what are some of the I guess most there's two parts of this so first is like on a surprising not necessarily like uh the impact that it's had although I do want to ask that next but for now I'm just curious like out of all the work you've done and the people you've worked with with neurofeedback and all this what are some of the most surprising things that you've like discovered by by doing it yeah um there's there's phenomena neurofeedback is a phenomenological Space versus discrete Diagnostic and intervention space a little bit it's closer to personal training and how it's used than medicine okay you have goals you have assessment data people are weird and you iterate to get them the effects you're looking for and you have to be very person-centric um this is why the research literature is has lagged by decades because you different things for everyone so it's hard to test um but uh you come across things over you know working with thousands of people both clinical lore that create certain effects objectively or stuff that you discover because you work with so many brains and you see some so many difficulties one of the first things that um I discovered I've seen a lot of these things honestly but the one of the first ones I saw one of my colleagues uh in Southern California who since retired a guy named Dr Gary Schumer did a study in the late 80s that he didn't publish until ten years ago or something in 2000 14 I think um and he was doing neurofeedback Alpha training on hiv-positive population in the late 80s when there was no retrovirals and it was a death sentence to have HIV basically and he did a a an active study where it was neurofeedback a relaxation tool called cranial electrostem which is used sometimes or the combination of both basically and he found that the group that had neurofeedback or neurofeedback and electrostem had a really massive surge of T cells and it was a really robust effect a time when there was no treatments essentially and he published it really late you know uh in in the field so to speak but I was working with somebody right when he published it who was immunocompromised and just finished doing 25 30 sessions with me for alcohol for over activation he couldn't fall asleep without a drink he'd been drinking for 25 years a bottle and a half of wine every single day on the beach while he wrote for a magazine he would go home and be like activated was the alcohol wore off more wine Ativan and Ambien get like two and a half hours sleep and be wandering around West Hollywood being disoriented with all those things in his system never regulated for a while and when I met him he was this you know giant man who looked like an Oompa Loompa bright orange skin and liver failure and so in this disoriented bright orange man's wandering around town he gets thrown in jail and so he went to a medical detox uh voluntarily and did 45 days and they drove him from the medical detox to my office for a brain map and his brain looked like alcoholics brains look most of the time when there's chronic use binge using it doesn't do this but chronic use does even low amounts we developed this like activated tone in the brain where the beta waves climb an amount and the connectivity patterns get all locked up and you get to like an hyper arousal and you can't sit still and you can't stop moving and you're nervous and you can't turn your mind off and fall asleep what you're seeing is the the Gaba versus glutamate balance in the brain is very tightly controlled and if you throw alcohol in you release tons of Gaba the glutamate Rises to balance it withdraw the alcohol and you can't rapidly learn to make more Gaba so you get this like hyper arousal crisis that's why you can't detox somebody rapidly without giving them sedatives or you cause a cardiovascular crisis for the same reasons uh but you see decades later sometimes that old alcoholics are burnt out and can't fall asleep from this phenomena so we successfully regulated this guy's sleep I walked into the office 10 weeks in and he was asleep on the couch I said my assistant uh oh is he here for a visit no no he discovered he could fall asleep at will and wanted to be asleep when he walked in to prove it all right you know we re-regulated that that acute phenomena that you walked in for but he was a lot of the work we were doing after his severe over activation was addressed was around creativity because he was an actor and we were doing a lot of creativity work and then my colleague published this paper showing this manipulation you do in the brain that creates a T Cell Surge and it was like the next door neighbor to the thing I was doing for creativity for him there's a technique called Alpha Theta which is uh hypnogic non-linear access flow training basically and it brings to the edge of sleep and holds you there so you the monkey mind drops away and insight starts to Bubble Up and creativity bubbles up and stress drops away I was doing a lot of this Alpha Theta for creativity and flow purposes for this guy Dr Schumer published a paper showing Alpha training in the same spot brings up T cells so this guy had really bad T cells when he first walked in like quite poor quite risky and he showed him the paper and he ran out and got his blood tested and had T cells are above average you know it's not that's not a permanent effect many things he didn't most things would be doing if you would become permanent you change the brain it's now changing and it's practicing the new modes but this is probably something to do with like the deep relaxation response that allows the system to create healing events like T cells and growth hormone and stuff like that so this is more of an acute effect that we were getting I think but folks can read the paper that Dr schimmer wrote and my colleagues have also seen similar things where you can replicate a T-cell burst with Alpha training which is kind of a cool phenomena I've been using that a lot the past three years yeah somebody gets covered it's burnt out foggy if they're right after it I do T Cell boosting protocols and they seem to clear it faster and if they're left with Long Cove and I then work on it like it's a concussion basically and work on that successfully usually too but um yeah no wow that's so interesting um so I'm curious on because as we were talking about that um and I I don't have a chronic issue I mean I like alcohol I don't drink it every day but the mental part you were saying I can definitely relate to that where my I have in a lot of ways it's weird like when I'll go out um how do I put this like my only desire of drinking alcohol it's not even an anxiety thing it's actually to just calm my brain down yeah so Gaba yeah I'm wondering if it's a similar uh thing because now I have found out just to be clear because when I was younger I actually would use alcohol from time to time to help myself go to sleep but the sleep is so shitty that it's not even worth doing because what would happen is yes it will put you to sleep but then you wake up three hours later and then you're up with acetyl aldehyde it's all metabolized and you're yeah yeah exactly yeah so one thing I use that's how helped is um this CBD like under the tongue and I use like a high high dose of it and it just completely knocks me out but then when I wake up in the morning I'm a little foggy for a couple hours so that's the downside of that okay so I'm just curious the reason I'm talking about this are there any uh and obviously you know the brain mapping and everything and changing the brain but have you come across like Solutions like uh to just calm the brain down in sure yeah I mean with regards to neurofeedback we reliably make massive change over a few months for everyone yeah I mean and the things that most reliably change the things that all brains do the Sleep stress and attention stuff so sleep is a very it's usually a big problem but but it's not usually a big deal to change once we see what's going on um outside of the landscape and neurofeedback we often coach people on other life hacks and things to try that can impact them like and the classic stuff don't eat before bed for three hours people know that but they don't often don't know why and the why can help a lot when coaching the why of it is you need to have low blood sugar and no insulin to release growth hormone at night otherwise no growth hormone for you and if you're north of 30 that's the only pulse you have of growth hormone the only opportunity you have to get it is right then so letting your insulin drop all the way letting your blood sugar drop all the way uh going to bed hungry basically a little bit Yeah a lousy wake up full of energy and having shredded some body fat and gotten some energy flux and deep sleep and growth hormone but if you fill your body with energy and go to sleep with a full stomach suppressed growth hormone Plus melatonin as it's released as you get tired melatonin suppresses pancreatic insulin release completely completely so you don't want to throw blood sugar into your system at the end of the day as you get tired because it's gonna be a much higher level of blood sugar than it would be for the same amount of carbs or sugar earlier in the day so yeah upper sack this is making uh so I have a doctor down here that I do um like the you know vitamin IVs and all that stuff and uh I do some peptides and one of them I believe it's called igf-1 and what it does is you it's a stomach injection before you go to bed at night and then it releases I guess more human growth hormone while you sleep it's interesting as you said that it makes sense now because all my other medications are in the morning that is the only one that is at night and that is yeah it's trying to do um uh growth hormones a pulsatile thing especially once you're north of like 24 or something you get a pulse basically that happens a couple hours into sleep and the older you get and the more inflamed you get and the more tired the more burnt out you got the smaller the pulse is so if you're like 30 or 40 and you're really burnt out not sleeping great you've got a little tiny trickle pulse and if you eat food before bed you should press that completely so it ages you much much faster um but uh yeah good circadian stuff what are uh and actually the why is important because as you were saying that I was thinking about that too like I've heard that before don't eat three hours before bed but like honestly I think I do that every now but now that I know like scientifically or however you want to word it that these are the reasons why it's actually sticking with me a little bit more right now like it just makes sense now more I guess I appreciate that I also encourage you to treat these things as experiments and things that might work for you and to play with and see what happens instead of rules because they don't feel rigid that way um you know don't eat before bed three hours great if you're if you are eating before bed and you change that it'll probably make a difference but maybe you don't have that dramatic issue or your metabolism is pretty good otherwise and you aren't you know you're you're not getting hit by it as much the other sort of circadian hacking rules might uh be more meaningful the next one is to get up seven days a week at the same time fairly early no later than an hour after the sun comes up because the light cue that circadian resetting is not really visible anymore in the air after an hour of sunlight so you got to be enough in that first hour or before early is fine much at least get up in the middle of the middle of the night is fine but you want that first natural light to be something you're aware of you know the corner of your eye a little bit the third Rule and people again don't often know this they're the why of this one uh when you first get up you don't want to go from the bed to the desk or the couch or the breakfast table you don't want to go into a mode where you're taking energy in right away you don't want to go into a mode where you're exerting high stress and work and output right away you want to do an intermediate exercise activity thing to burn off a little bit of fuel one of the things that wakes you up is cortisol surges before you wake up and it squeezes your liver and feeds you breakfast basically and so you wake up with blood sugar and cortisol having surged they're pretty high so if you hit the gym super hard and kettlebells or iron you know you're going to jack up blood sugar and cortisol even higher and receptors have been pretty fit uh fed with those things recently so you can create insulin resistance and blood sugar resistance and cortisol resistance by working out too aggressively first thing in the morning it doesn't probably cause a huge issue like depression like from cortisol resistance but it probably weakens circadian entrainment it gets confused it's confusing uh to the brain so in order don't eat before bed get up early and go for a walk or do five sun salutations or something that's exertive enough to break a sweat but not that you couldn't talk over if you had to basically that's that's the level is that the uh a guy another friend of mine down here his name's benazadi he runs this thing called sure do you know him yeah I know who he is yeah oh awesome okay I heard of him he's a good friend of mine he lives like 20 minutes away oh nice so yeah he runs this thing called keto camp and one of the things that he talks about which is not I don't even think it's relevant to the keto thing but regardless he talks about the you shouldn't have coffee the first thing in the morning you should wait an hour and I think the one of the reasons for that is this cortisol yeah yeah yeah you'll notice um if you have a cup of coffee when you first wake up versus having a cup of coffee at like 2 p.m it's a very different experience in terms of how awake you get from it you know coffee in the afternoon makes you really awake because you have very low cortisol receptor occupation recently so you feel it strongly but you know you might get cortisol activation first thing in the morning from but your heart's gonna pound a little bit you aren't going to feel more awake because you because you've got tons of cortisol anyways cranking through your system so so yeah the rule of thumb would be to wait an hour and then because your personal drops so we did a mental thing like do why do people think is it like people just think they need it right away but indeed yeah basically okay and it's addiction you know it's a mildly addictive it's not a big deal it's not you know harmful in fact it's quite health healthy mostly coffee is but it's mostly habit addiction learning uh people don't usually wake up when caffeine withdrawal it takes about 18 hours so you know they have time um mostly habit mostly culturalize my guess but I'm not 100 sure and coffee is the number you know two traded substance ever known to man or something so you know after wine right the the things we we drink to alter our state so the most heavily sought after stuff no actually that's interesting right so those two things one brings wine is number one and coffee number two for human trading across history yeah basically they're a complete opposite that's funny um or at least the way that I think it makes you feel is awesome sure that's right um gotcha so then with your uh Institute and stuff the next question I was going to ask you is what are like one and maybe you can't actually use names because I'm sure some of it's private but what are some of the most like impactful things that you've seen like somebody like a transformational um sure well I mean this thing where I help alcoholics who haven't slept for decades reliably get into sleep quickly or women who are menopausal and progesterone fall into the floor and they can't stay asleep that tends to respond or post covet brain fog tends to respond I mean I've seen you know if I start giving you some more extreme cases it sounds unbelievable and it kind of is but people are variable and the effects that happen uh when you train the brain are also quite variable sometimes magical I mean I've seen people with no language develop language spontaneously after a few sessions or release their language it's rare it doesn't usually happen that way um but but it's really common for a kid who's screaming and and stimming and has no language and having seizures to six weeks in have a dramatic Improvement in sensory integration or you take the worst ADHD kid in the planet can sit still and is moving and Scattered and can't do his homework and is getting in trouble all the time and on an attention test those kids will show two to three standard deviations off the mean you know really bottleneck resources everywhere and the Brain Maps match that so you see like the physiology and the performance pointing at the attention really clearly it's really easy to see like ADHD for instance um if you train their brain three times a week for about three months you'll usually create two to three standard deviations of change on a bell curve so you can take folks that are below average and bring them to typical or above average permanently in three to four months usually in like 40 to 50 sessions of neurofeedback so it's a very large mover and you feel it like two three sessions and you're like hey wait a minute huh this is interesting I'm feeling something hey coaches I'm feeling this great do it again and it builds up a little bit more the next time you have this like window of effect where you can evaluate what's happening and grade it because you get flexes you get changes in sleep stress and attention when you train the brain so you're kind of trying to get the right training in this is not like oh yeah go do incline presses this is like um here's our brain with some goals and this might work this should work I think we're in the neighborhood see how he feels and then we get very subtle elicited effects after a few sessions and you're like hey wait my sleep was better last night really okay let's try it twice more if we're on track we'll know and if we're not you know well not too and so we can iterate we don't have to be right yeah it's not us being doctors we're being coaches we're helping you uh drive towards goals yeah Moore is like just throwing everything at the board and then just being like hey that I mean obviously with some direction well tailored it's stuff that's tailored to you tailored to your brain your goals and we build the starting place but then it's iterative because yeah two brains look the same same goals likely the same protocols that might work don't work the same on two people so you have to like adjust frequencies and sites and it's kind of like two guys that have weak lower backs and one loves to do you know squats for it another one can't has to do like some you know some other machine to feel good and metaphors breaking down but the mapping is uh one of the good side with the upsides of brain mapping or qeg is its stable map after map unless you do something to the brain so you see the same patterns they're hard to interpret but they're the same for you one after the you know one map after the next until you start pushing on the regions of your brain and exercising it a few times a week if you're feeling things based on that adjust the workout push it some more go back and map the brain again and so you see the changes you've created the client gets to see their brain uh brain map their performance scores and their subjective experience all converging towards high performance over a few months usually so it's nice to demystify and give you control over like you don't need yet another expert another doctor to tell you what's true you can learn to read your data learn to control your brain so that's our soapbox is to make you the expert essentially in thrust agency back upon you and not become your you know therapist per se for sure for sure so what is the actual I think this would actually be helpful is um because I mean you talked about in some regard but um I'd love to hear it just yeah clearly like what is the pro so say if somebody comes into your office they have blank and blank issue what is the exact protocol or process it's customized but I just mean like sure the whole Logistics yeah yeah yeah so there's there's two aspects mostly what we do one is brain mapping which is the assessment the other is brain training which is the neurofeedback and the Brain Training can happen on electricity EEG training classic neurofeedback or blood flow training called heg where you train the brain using infrared cameras which is pretty fun um so there's the intervention piece and the assessment piece and both of these can be done without coming into our offices actually most of our clients work from home and we send them gear and coaches teach you live stuff I mean you know we could send you a cap and you could put in your head and coaches will make a little more gel in that hole nope next one over as you sit there cool okay you know and then you could smoke some weed and map again and see what it does your caffeine or Adderall or whatever you know so we we do all kinds of maps help people explore their brains because we're their gym where they're we're not their doctor we're their lab they're mechanic their gym their Spa where everything except their doctor basically in this in this role um I I call it functional Neuroscience basically that's sort of our role is to be the the operational aspects of it but map the brain initially put a cap in the head do a really boring attention test for 20 minutes as well work with me a few days later to go over all your data and I'll teach you to read it I'll teach you dig into your attention test your brain Maps hypothesize about interesting features and usually that coalesces the two or three or eight things you really care about in terms of uh sleep stress attention speed of processing rain fog that kind of stuff tends to show up pretty reliably um so that's usually the first chunk is looking at your brain learning use these tools to develop a little bit of refined perspective on what's Happening and then you would sort of prioritize your goals for me oh I want to work on my sleep maintenance that's really important yeah I don't care that I'm a little distractible that's fine you know I'm I'm a bass player it's fine or whatever you know like you know you can choose your goals not just fixing you it's chasing goals yeah and then we would build a plan that is about three times a week and the technique would look like training individual locations on your head so we don't use a cap for the training usually we have you put ear Clips on and then you find one or two locations on your head with individual like we help you find little cheat robes and guides and we have live coaches who can help you place wires as well and jump on and support you but the idea would be that you're going to measure a couple parts of the brain in real time as you uh as it varies as your brain makes different brain waves so let me give you an example uh that because it's getting a little abstract um would you like an example in the attention or in the stress landscape um let's do oh I mean both um hold on let me think real quick what because I'm thinking selfishly now sure it's okay I'm sure there's at least half the population of the popular listeners who have at least one of those you know let's do um let's do attention because I don't feel stressed really okay let's do attention although better sleep is always good so whatever well the the aspects of the brain that manage attention are also the ones that manage sleep to some extent believe it or not oh perfect okay yeah so if you've seen a cat lying in a windowsill watching birds that let's still body and laser-like focus that's a certain brain wave that mammals make humans make it too it's called SMR sensory motor Rhythm and it's when your body's still and your mind is clear and focused it's literally the opposite of ADHD literally the comcat in the window cell has tons of it the kid who can't sit still looking around everywhere can't make SMR he's reacting to things instead of choice driven dude that's so great am I literally and the cat dude the cats are always like you know like it's this black cat her name's Bonnie and she will just sit and look out the window and watch birds and stuff for hours won't move nothing Stillness is SMR and humans use it for to sit still and to avoid being impulsive and we also use it to stay asleep and we use it in in mammal brains to suppress seizures so SMR is inhibitory tone pumping the brakes a little bit on things internally failure of SMR means your squirrel but you also might have seizures or can't stay asleep so SMR is the classic sort of flavor of neurofeedback that was discovered as impactful in organisms about 50 60 years ago now um at UCLA there was a scientist Dr Barry Sturman is still here in Los Angeles uh in 1965 or six or something and he was doing research for NASA on cats measuring how dangerous Rocket Fuel was this methyl hydrazine stuff that astronauts were breathing in and feeling nauseated so he was examining the toxicity curve on animals back in the 60s you know more animal research and he found that of the 32 cats he was working with uh three quarters of them 24 of them had a perfect dose-dependent curve where minutes in the chamber airtight chamber with a little Beaker of Rocket Fuel inside of it they would develop symptoms you know neurological symptoms drooling stumbling uh uh making sounds seizure coma death perfect dose dependent curve but a to the cat and to give you some context um these 24 cats were showing instability events seizure events in the brain at about 40 minutes in other eight cats two and a half hours in we're just barely starting to show anything what's what's up super cats come on yeah he remembered later on he'd use this eight these special cats that were not showing the same behavior same response to the chemical no seizures basically in another experiment six months ago sequence prior where he stuck a chicken a milk a little eye dropper in their mouth and taped it in there and was squirting chicken broth into their mouth whenever they made SMR he trained it up he's used to operant conditioning he was like let's see what happens if we reinforce it oh look at that it's bigger cool put him back in the cage two behavioral experiments with grad students you know six months later these cats had seizure resistant brains and his lab assistant was a medication uncontrolled epileptic having tens of seizures a month on major drugs mavarol Tech retall Dilantin and so they built an auditory training machine that beeped whenever she made SMR and trained her brain off and on she went off all meds over the next year and remained seizure free for a year and a half or something uh and that's the effect the the average impact on seizures is 50 reduction in the literature I've never seen a result that is as bad as 50 reduction in seizures it's always like really really nice so towards like what tends to happen magically some of the deep really scary stuff can actually be impacted um so people stick wires their head they measure the brain wave so in case of SMR there's a circuit on the right hand side uh that's involved with knowing if you're paying attention basically it's the supervisor of your attention and it doesn't make SMR which is a low beta brain wave very well when we can't control our focus when we're reactive squirrel and you know ADHD like and also when we have trouble with sleep architecture the SMR is kind of wonky there so you stick a wire there plus the mirror clips and measure the SMR and measure Theta brain waves as well which is like a lubrication frequency it's probably a little high right there it's taking over for the SMR you measure it moment to moment whenever your brain happens to make a bit more of the beta a bit less of the Theta for half a second the computer goes oh good job brain and so it's applauding by making stuff on a screen move auditoring visual stuff happens car moves spaceship flies beeps happen whatever and your brain's like ooh stuff I like stuff that stuff's cool and a few seconds later it moves in the wrong direction and the game slows down or stops the brain's like hey where's my stuff I was watching stuff a few seconds later happens to move in the right direction the Applause resumes so the brain's hearing like good job brain good job brain good job brain nope good job good job good job nope again and again and the big trick is we're moving the goal posts we're shaping the activity so your brain's getting applauded for little runs little Trends it's engaging in over half an hour that might be bringing the beta SMR up a little higher for 10-15 seconds and the Theta might drop 10 15 seconds as you sit there and concentrate or feel in the zone or think you know think really you know differently in focus for a second you'll your brain will get Applause for that and it goes huh okay after two or three sessions of that the brain reaches for whatever is producing The increased input so your second third fourth session you're like hey wait a minute I feel a little different this is interesting and then it wears off a couple hours later and for training up SMR you might feel calm a little bit and not much else or you might have a visit from the windshield wiper Ferry who comes and like squeegees your world you're like whoa It's so clear and so quiet and calm and why I can focus on everything so there's different effects different things and you can train Alpha up and drop anxiety acutely and you can you know for you as you train SMR you might notice something two three sessions in you might notice some sense of internal Clarity or calmness you might not but then you'd make a note saying guys I slept really well last night that was weird I had dreams half the night too I never have dreams as your sleep shifts hard under the caress of good SMR tone it can now go to sleep and stay asleep differently at least briefly you say I got a sleep effect we're like uh oh SMR you have sleep needs yeah why don't we do this twice more this week let's watch what happens let's see if it builds up in the right direction for you and otherwise we'll tweak it so we're trying to elicit an effect that's reasonable based on your goals doing simple things that are subtle and and transient it'll wear off if it's the wrong effect maybe we pick a frequency that's not good for you it's fat too fast for you and you would feel really focused after the session and you wouldn't like it and you wouldn't fall asleep that night very well and you wouldn't feel very focused later on that day either it'd be like to be too much you'd overdo it tell us oh guys I felt kind of like on edge and on and I kind of wired I didn't like it and I couldn't fall asleep oh oh yeah that beta thing we tried oh that's too fast so try half a Hertz slower 14 and a half not 15. so we changed it we changed your plan try this version and then try it and you're like I don't know I didn't notice any difference I'm still wired oh okay yeah oh 14's nice oh I was so calm and I was focused that was weird and so you get to evaluate you know it's mysterious but not blind where you get to test what's happening and go huh nah oh wait wait I like that one and we tease apart the effects and then build them over time and then map your brain every other month again basically and watch those changes in the resting brain that you've built up permanently by then got it okay so I have two two more uh big questions for you sure one is um okay and I'll get to we'll save my favorite one for last it's about uh taking like mushrooms and stuff I'm just curious if you've tested these with because you said smoking marijuana and stuff so I'm curious about that we'll leave that as a cliffhanger sure before that and if you don't want to discuss exact pricing you don't have to I'm just I'm just curious about this I would imagine just based on so far that this is more of a luxury thing but at the same time I think every person should do this so my question for you is where are we at in the market for this like yeah is it something that everybody could afford or is it more something that yeah is a yeah so just it's somewhere between those two I mean also in the field of neurofeedback in the US at least and and there's more in the US than that than everywhere else in the world combined but in the US there's some something like ten thousand practice centers roughly who are clinicians and almost most all of them charged like therapists and therapy rates and therapy access is really quite poor these days where you're paying 250 300 bucks a session and it's hard to get a therapist and neurofeedback has to be done two or three times a week three times a week is standard so you might do 40 sessions in three months and here in La if you if you ask a therapist or any any office for near feedback besides us hey what would cost for two three brain maps in 40 sessions they quote you like 15 or 20 grand basically um our price on a three-month program is 5K these days okay yeah you know and that and that's a couple bright and clean remokes and your gear do remote mapping have coaches work with you live lend you equipment and do an arc of three months of neurofeedback so you're dropping below that 100 bucks a session rate uh uh uh basically at our at our uh pricing packages but we're disruptively priced we're basically half or less of everyone else because everyone else is a therapist and so they got 20 clients maybe the technician and they're doing neurofeedback potentially on top of therapy and even the ones that don't do therapy with you still treat it like therapy in terms of the relationship it's treatment doing it to you you aren't informed about it they think they know what's right so I find that the pricing is not always the the problem in a therapy model because there's there's this need for therapists there's room for that you know the respects the coach in the gym the therapist the coach in the field helping them with the voluntary stuff you know the nuanced habit stuff and some of the stuff we work on our feedback is best done in a therapeutic context trauma and you know other stuff that's very nuanced you want the brain and the mind dealt with at the same time and so a therapist can do both pretty amazing but that means that a therapist is charging you know a lot of money and we have we have an office in New York City for instance where the prices are the highest of any City we are in and neurofeedback is pushing 350 400 bucks a session sometimes with a psychiatrist or a therapist yeah um I think that's a bit unnecessary I also think just to you know I have this reputation that's developing of being a curmudgeon in the biohacking world and here I go again I don't think it's necessary to charge somebody 25 or 50k for five days of alpha Theta neurofeedback which is what the peak performer programs are out there in the biohacker world they're five-day extremely expensive programs that are a bunch of loving kindness research and practice with two a day Alpha Theta neurofeedback programs Alpha synchrony and other things that are accessible without buying the giant package of you know biohacker luxury so there are the only luxury versions out there like that like those programs I'm mentioned you know these one one week long programs that I won't I won't name uh just to avoid getting somebody mad at me uh but um you know it happens anyways I don't need to like beg for it yeah so right but well you know if you want to work with good tools learn it move through a few months we'll charge you five or six grand you know for a few months and and it's you're right the level now where it's not accessible to everyone but it's not Out Of Reach anymore yeah yeah it's close you got needs you got seizures you got crazy ADHD you got some addiction you got some brain fog the needs are expensive how expensive is your undealt with PTSD or undealt with you know drinking issue those are pretty expensive so yeah yeah we try to keep it as cheap as we can but it's still a chunk of a chunk of resources we recognize that yeah um what is the time commitment like on a weekly so you said three sessions a week like what's the time yeah about half an hour of training time which means you're maybe sitting down for 45 minutes or so yeah throw a couple of your Clips on if I gave you a complicated protocol in the peak brain way you might do three 12-minute segments of something where you gotta like throw some ear Clips on set the software put a wire on I have a product I love I call left right and Center which is left side the brain right side of the brain middle of the brain it works on strong Focus strong self-control and then deep ability to relax all at once you can kind of dial in that sweet spot and that's three that's three 12 minute protocols so you're putting your Clips on and one y or 12 foot managed move the wire double check your protocol move the wire double check the protocol dude I just thought of this I just don't want to forget one of my clients is Stephen Cutler do you know oh sure yeah yeah okay dude so yeah I was on Rihanna's uh podcast stuff oh yeah guys yeah yeah yeah yeah he's he's um well actually I don't uh we might be working with Ryan soon too could we do books and stuff so regardless I was gonna say you guys should connect if you're not already I just thought about it so you're already yeah just tangentially thus far but uh Rihanna of course is here in LA and I know him you know so yeah that's awesome yeah I was just thinking because I uh zero to dangerous I've taken that course nice no it's just it's really I I have a lot of clients who who either go have done that program or go to that program after they work with us so we have a nice little overlap of those folks that's exactly what I was thinking I was like you guys would totally work well together yeah yeah I'm a big fan of those guys very cool so um I'll actually say this live while it's recording I am going to become a client of yours so I'm excited for that my the reason I asked the time commitment is because I have a lot of travel coming up so I'm thinking like when I get back from all of it February 1st is when I will actually be back in base and I think I could commit to that but uh I am in and then what I'd love to do if you're open to it is I'll do the three month thing and then I'll have you back on again sure talk about it yeah we can even do a shorter I mean you can create impact you can see and feel on data instructively in a six week so we can do a six week intensive with you or something push hard okay it's all travel gear it's a laptop bag and a shaving kit size kit so it doesn't it's not burden some gear to carry around or anything but I'll have my uh marketing folks reach out and and send you up but yeah um for next year yeah yeah but but uh but no the burden's pretty easy for training and we have a live um slack channel for every client set up seven days a week 12 hours a day so after the initial instruction and hand holding and teaching all the basics when you do run into trouble to photograph your head or ask for some help and someone jumps in and like troubleshoots or double checks your placement so we're trying to teach you to become your own like neurofeedback level Tech essentially and you have to do some skills in it after a few after a few weeks usually yeah yeah I'm excited too because my that Uncle it's actually one of those scenarios where it was actually my dad's uh well he's still a lot he's my dad's best friend from college and uh so he was like an honorary uncle right not my godfather too so the way I'm also I mean I want to improve myself but also it'll bring me closer to him because we'll have something more to talk about now so I'm excited great well if you are traveling feel free to stop by New York City St Louis LA or Orange County we have offices in those places okay nothing in the the South part of the Eastern Seaboard side would be good I think chances are pretty even we'll end up in somewhere in in Florida uh soon because we have some Partners here in Florida that okay uh they're high level like like uh athlete Trainers for bodies they want us to go in and do brain work with them it sounds like so okay so all right so this is the I want to ask this now about like the um like different substances right and then different things that it does so one of the things too that I just thought of uh as well my doctor down here as well he does a lot of ketamine therapy for people and it seemed like very good results for um like depression and other things I I actually and honestly I tried it a couple times not necessarily with a uh how like a goal in mind just more Curious of what it would be like and it is a wild ride for anybody that has not like when you take ketamine in an IV you go very far away yeah well it's intentional dissociation to some extent they're trying to get done you know so you could have a I kind of you're probably too young for the reference but I think of ketamine and a couple other things like shaking up the Etch-a-Sketch oh no no I don't know after sketches are you old enough yeah I'm 31 so I don't I think yeah yeah it was a retro re-release when you used it or something yeah probably uh it had a USB port for downloading the stuff I'm kidding um but uh as well as things like things like tea as well as you know strong as well strong uh experiences they seem to act like a plasticity resetter and so I think that's to some extent what's happening in ketamine we do know some specific chemical Pathways that it's acting on but the the the IV ketamine is uh does dissociative and it creates transformations in some people but there's also now licensed in the US for use the inhaler of one half of the ketamine molecule called s ketamine and it's not psychoactively altering doesn't knock you out doesn't sedate you but it causes the same lift rapid like within minutes of major depression and stuff like that as an acute treatment so you can get it prescribed now as an inhaler um it doesn't have the uh what elements it doesn't have the trippy or whatever elements to it just uh yeah it doesn't sedate you the same way it's unassociative interesting to me because I got to be honest it's weird like a lot of people I think like it I actually gotta say I don't think I like like I would not describe ketamine as pleasurable some people think it's like the best feeling or like to me well it's probably about how your brain starts off more than anything else you know drug drugs of abuse or drugs of choice are often based on where we start but um you know I I I appreciate what you're saying that you might want to be interested in the the non-psychoactive but still supporting cognition or mood but here's the thing I would generally want to look at your brain and then just change it yeah yeah like like we can worry about Gap filling and spot filling and adding nootropics and adding certain things after you see what can't be done quickly generally and I I would guess that anxiety motivation learning mood Deep Sleep Quality absorbing information feeling resilient under stress would be low-hanging fruit in a few months under a feedback so that's awesome if the ketamine was a specific thing you were using and I couldn't try to get at that goal I'd be like all right how are we using it let's you know interleave them or something and people do that with things like micro dosing they interleave them often and they're doing that kind of stuff micro dosing doesn't really show up in the brain maps by the way weird okay yeah most things um caffeine massively impacts the brain map you have to be off of coffee or caffeine otherwise you can't get a clean brain map it's night and day difference so is cannabis so is Adderall dramatic dramatic dramatic dramatic yeah that's the thing too like Adderall CBD too hate Adderall like my desire with and I know once I become your client we'll talk more but my true desire is you actually described it a little bit it's like a mixture of like I my brain is already so like all the time like so I would love to just be able to like and then like you know what I mean kind of like um uh sorry no worries no worries there we go that's the thing when you live at the uh Four Seasons you can't turn that thing off so it is what it is um but uh what I want to say is like to have this ability to sleep and also be alert and focused when I want to but to have a mind that is like silent you know and I just my mind's just always talking to me we we can give you more control over that General there's lots of ways to do it nerve feedback certainly is a way meditations are really a powerful way to develop inhibitory tone you know to help more control over your internal environment we have uh free mindfulness groups and Monday nights on online and if you do work with us uh as a brain training client we'll give you a mindfulness coach as well who'll work with you with a few visits to develop a practice to give you some accountability uh awesome most of our heavy liftings neurofeedback but I do a lot of biohacking coaching for our clients we have mindfulness teachers and so all of our coaches tend to have the peak brain way they drunk the Kool-Aid they know all the things that I say about sleep and stress and attention and supplements and things like that so I'm drinking the Kool-Aid I've already drank we have the technology Colonel Austin we can we can rebuild you so uh before Before I Let You Go I'm just curious is there anything notable and I'm sure there is but I guess in the short time we have left of like have you had sessions with people where they did take like uh not a micro dose but maybe a higher dose or a heroic a macroduce yeah yeah like what happens to the brain is there anything you could share on it just says yeah I haven't not seen extreme dosing of psychoactives like psilocybin I haven't seen that actually in real time and I would and I have seen people after doing experiences like that shamanic level stuff sweat lodges Burning Man tons of psychedelics yeah 99 times out of 100 the brain on the far side of the experience looks identical to the Brain before the experience wow I have seen one person who did uh psychedelic MDMA and psilocybin assisted psychotherapy um in a in a two-week intensive and changed his brain as if he had done a year of intensive work and a bunch of modalities it was really amazing so it can work but mostly it's a state distorted not a trait changer gotcha interesting I would not have guessed that that's very interesting now on the flip side of that when you exercise their brain with neurofeedback when you train it you abolish tolerance for stimulants and for cannabis reduce tolerance for alcohols to some extent as well so if you're using that stuff a little out of control using too much Adderall use too much weed and start training the brain suddenly you ramp back on your use because the same amount is too much so you start rocking back same with alcohol too yeah it's not quite as profound and effective reducing tolerance but more importantly with alcohol because you know weed and those sorts of things aren't especially addictive psychologically there's a little bit you know there's some tolerance but they're not habit forming per se there's no real true addiction but alcohol is dramatically addictive physiologically and psychologically and everything else more importantly the alcohol is you can train down the inability to turn off your sleet to drop your mind and fall asleep the inability to settle down when you're feeling uncomfortable inside and can't tolerate how you feel the the cravings for alcohol can be directly addressed with neurofeedback so for alcohol it's not just the tolerance it's the fact that we're rebuilding all the damage that gabaergic you know lack that creates glutamatergic tone and that we're working on the acute stuff the impulsivity the anxiety the body pain the can't fall asleep the Cravings all those things creep back up all the reasons you use alcohol are right in your face when you aren't using it plus you have to draw and irritability and stuff like that so for alcohol it's a complex picture but great tool but cannabis people half the people who do neurofeedback or heavy weed smokers quit without him what I'm being asked to just quit a few weeks you know like I feel great let me smoke the weed they stop teenagers stop smoking weed half the time it's pretty amazing yeah but the rest of them who don't stop smoking weed are using a fraction of it for a while for six months to a year before they build the challenge back up tiny amounts maybe you could speak to this and sorry if you have to I know we only had an hour a lot it's okay no worries but now as I'm sure you get this all the time I'm very curious yeah sure so for some reason okay when I was younger I would smoke weed like every day and I and it was the best thing ever like yeah it would actually give me that feeling that I was like I could do anything with like I would be in this just Mellow Mood I could communicate like everything was like a perfect flow now I don't smoke weed I promise my weed maybe three times a year now because every time I smoke it now I get extreme anxiety everything in my life comes to the Forefront I think about everything that's going on and it's hell so I'm just curious is there any reason you could think why that you're throwing disinhibition into your brain and a young man's brain is fast and juicy and hot and powerful and an older man a a matured brain yeah yeah stressed and a little bit unrested and that's what you're feeling when you drop away the the inhibition you're feeling you know you're more sensitive to that you're probably a tiny bit just regulated in stress and sleep and the weed exacerbates it versus releasing natural power and creativity and silliness and whatever else you know yeah okay gotcha yeah I was just curious because it's literally opposite dude it'll probably change again that would be great it'll probably change back but we probably will in another decade of especially if you're low use and pro-healthy at some point your dopamine system and your liver both will conspire to make weed like it used to be that's awesome I can hear a few back throwing the mix we'll accelerate that that process dramatically so you might get like young man's experience you know like ooh I'm high again and not too stoned you know I really yeah we'll see we'll see and more yeah and we can look at your brain on weed and figure out where it's making you anxious which circuits are being cranked up if you want yeah you know dude that that's worth the price of admission in itself I'm just saying fun experiments we can do this is the point we're not your dog we're not here to tell you what to do we're here to help you demystify this sucker and take control of it and gradually uh become your own expert become your own neuroscientist essentially yeah that's our that's our goal thank you man I I want to leave it to you now if there's anything we didn't cover please share and then uh where can people stay in touch like socials website you know anything you bet so yeah um please do check our socials out uh Peak brunelles most of our socials because our first office was LA but we're all over the place and as you folks may have heard you don't need to be near our offices to work with us uh one important thing is we're giving all the podcast listeners a discount on either a full brain training program or the brain mapping membership if you're near the offices I mentioned the cost of the program's about five or six k for the three-month program but we also have a uh if you're near the office of New York St Louis LA and Orange County it's a once a year fee for unlimited brain maps to use as a tool and that is normally a 500 Club membership but it's cut in half when you're referred in like from podcasts like this one so folks are in LA or in New York and they have that luxury 250 and you can map your brain a bunch of times learn about it see what weed does see what Adderall does and uh have a tool to track your own personal transformation so we try to make this very useful in terms of understanding yourself um but yeah check us out uh Peak brunella and socials and the main website is Peak brain Institute which depending on this podcast uh drops might be I have a new one coming out in a couple of weeks so uh we'll we'll be dropping brand new websites lots of educational content lots of research articles we're working on summarizing so uh Peak brain Institute for the for the web presence perfect dude thank you again I really enjoyed this it was uh it was awesome I loved it my pleasure thanks for having me appreciate it