👉 Subscribe and follow so you don't miss the next one: https://bit.ly/3Uq5tQR ▶️ Watch my latest video here: https://bit.ly/3NVSeVF #neuroscience #brain Dr. Hill is one of the top peak performance coaches in the country. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA’s Department of Psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognition. Research methodology includes EEG, QEEG, and ERP. He has been practicing neurofeedback since 2003. In addition to founding Peak Brain Institute, Dr. Hill is the host of the Head First Podcast with Dr. Hill and lectures at UCLA, teaching courses in psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology. Have questions? Send Dr. Hill a message via our contact page, or check out his many podcast and media appearances. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with all the resources you need to become a successful author. You can learn more about Authors Unite here: https://authorsunite.com/ Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on my future videos. Follow Dr. Andrew on: https://peakbraininstitute.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewhillucla/ https://twitter.com/andrewhillphd?lang=en https://www.instagram.com/andrewhillphd/?hl=en Follow and Connect with me on Social Media https://www.facebook.com/officialtylerwagner https://www.facebook.com/authorsunite1 https://www.instagram.com/tylerbwagner/ https://twitter.com/mrwagner37 #biohacking #optimization #elevate
Episode Summary
This conversation originally aired on Tyler Wagner. You can watch the original conversation. What follows is drawn from my side of that discussion, written up and expanded for the page.
What does a neuroscientist actually do with your brain?
I work in a functional space, somewhere between a doctor and a coach. The tools I use come out of neuroscience. Some people call this biofeedback, some call it biohacking. It gets used in therapy settings and for peak performance.
I did my PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCLA, the intersection of mind and brain. Since then I have run companies that do neurofeedback on the brain. We map your brain, find the performance bottlenecks, and then usually change those patterns over a few months. I sometimes describe the role as a professional mad scientist. The more accurate version is functional neuroscience. We are your lab, your gym, your mechanic for the brain. We are not your doctor.
What happens during a brain map?
If you have ever had a cap squirted full of gel placed on your head, you have done a QEEG, or quantitative EEG. I can get one set up in about ten minutes. You sit still for ten minutes with eyes closed, ten minutes with eyes open, and we collect resting baselines.
We measure averages of brain activity moment to moment, the stuff that stays relatively stable day to day. This is not the content of your thoughts. Think of it more like measuring your height. It holds steady, and you can compare it.
Alongside the map, we run an attention test and an executive function assessment. We compare your brain and your performance against a database of people your age. We look for outliers, things like impulsivity and distractibility in your performance, and unusual features in your brain. Then we model the unusual features to see whether they matter for your goals.
The map is stable. One map looks like the next until you do something to the brain, train it or put a substance into it. That stability is one of the strengths of QEEG. It gives you a fixed reference point you can return to and watch change.
How does neurofeedback change the brain?
Neurofeedback is operant conditioning for brain activity. You put ear clips on and place one or two sensors on your scalp. We measure specific brain waves in real time. When your brain produces a bit more of the target rhythm for half a second, the computer applauds. Something on the screen moves, a sound plays, a spaceship flies. A few seconds later the activity drifts the wrong way and the feedback slows or stops. Your brain notices the missing reward and reaches back toward whatever produced it.
The trick is that we keep moving the goalposts. We shape the activity so your brain gets rewarded for slightly better runs over half an hour. After two or three sessions you start to feel something, a little more clarity or calm, and it wears off a few hours later. That window is where we evaluate. If the effect is right, we build on it. If it is wrong, the effect fades and we adjust the frequency or the site.
This is the part people miss. We do not have to be right on the first try. We hypothesize, we test, you report back, and we iterate. Two brains never look the same, and the same protocol works differently on two people. So we adjust half a hertz at a time, change sites, and watch your data, your performance, and your subjective experience converge toward better function over a few months.
This work depends on neuroplasticity. You are exercising circuits, and they adapt.
Why is SMR the circuit behind both focus and sleep?
Watch a cat in a windowsill. Still body, laser focus on the birds. That state runs on a brain wave called SMR, sensorimotor rhythm, a low beta rhythm produced over the sensorimotor strip. Mammals make it. Humans make it too.
SMR is inhibitory tone, the brakes on the system. We use it to sit still, to resist impulse, to stay asleep, and in mammal brains it suppresses seizures. The kid who cannot sit still, who reacts to everything instead of choosing where to attend, does not make SMR well. The circuit on the right side that supervises your attention is the same one that struggles to hold sleep architecture together.
The history here is real and worth knowing. In the mid-1960s at UCLA, Dr. Barry Sturman ran toxicity studies for NASA, exposing cats to rocket fuel. Most of the cats developed seizures around forty minutes in. A small group held out for over two hours. He realized those cats had been in an earlier experiment where he had reinforced SMR with chicken broth using operant conditioning. He had accidentally built seizure-resistant brains. His own lab assistant, an epileptic having tens of seizures a month on multiple medications, trained up her SMR, came off all her drugs, and stayed seizure free.
The literature on SMR training for seizures shows around a fifty percent reduction on average, and I have never seen a result as weak as fifty percent in practice. If you want the deeper mechanics, I wrote about this in SMR Neurofeedback: Train Sleep, Focus, and Self-Control.
For ADHD, the picture is just as clear. The worst ADHD kids show two to three standard deviations off the mean on attention testing, and the brain maps match. Train the brain three times a week for three to four months, around forty to fifty sessions, and you typically create two to three standard deviations of change. You can move someone from below average to typical or above, and it holds. More on that in Does Neurofeedback Work for ADHD?
What happens to the brain after decades of drinking?
The GABA versus glutamate balance in the brain is tightly controlled. GABA is your primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. Glutamate is excitatory. Throw alcohol in and you release a flood of GABA. Glutamate climbs to rebalance. Withdraw the alcohol and your brain cannot rapidly learn to make more GABA, so glutamate is now running high and unopposed. That is the hyperarousal crisis of withdrawal, and it is why you cannot detox someone fast without sedatives. You would risk a cardiovascular event.
Chronic use, even at low amounts, builds an activated tone. Beta waves climb, connectivity patterns lock up, and you land in hyperarousal. You cannot sit still, cannot quiet your mind, cannot fall asleep.
I worked with a man who had been drinking a bottle and a half of wine a day for twenty-five years. He came in after a medical detox with a brain that looked like a classic chronic alcohol pattern. We regulated his sleep. Ten weeks in I walked into the office and found him asleep on the couch. He had discovered he could fall asleep at will and wanted to prove it.
Withdrawal is a glutamate rebound. Neurofeedback rebuilds the inhibitory tone the drinking eroded, and it addresses the acute drivers directly, the impulsivity, the body pain, the inability to settle, the cravings. For alcohol the whole picture is complex because the dependence is both physiological and psychological. The tool works on all of it. If anxiety is part of your pattern, the same logic applies to the circuits in Biohacking Anxiety.
Can alpha training really boost T cells?
Dr. Gary Schumer ran a study in the late 1980s on an HIV-positive population, back when the diagnosis was a death sentence. He found that alpha neurofeedback, alone or combined with cranial electrostimulation, produced a large surge of T cells.
I had a client doing alpha-theta training for creativity, a technique that brings you to the edge of sleep and holds you in a hypnagogic state where the monkey mind drops away and insight surfaces. His T cells were poor when he arrived. After the training they came back above average. This is an acute effect, tied to the deep relaxation response that lets the body run healing processes like T cell production and growth hormone release. It is not permanent the way a trained circuit is. I have used T cell boosting protocols for the past few years with people coming off COVID who are foggy and burnt out, and they seem to clear faster. For the relaxation circuitry behind this, see Decoding Alpha Waves.
How do you fix sleep without a pill?
Sleep is usually a big problem and rarely a big deal to change once we see what is happening. Outside of neurofeedback, the circadian basics carry most of the weight, and the reasons behind them matter more than the rules.
Do not eat for about three hours before bed. Growth hormone releases in a pulse a couple of hours into sleep, and once you are north of about thirty that nighttime pulse is your main opportunity to get it. You need low blood sugar and low insulin to release it. Melatonin, which rises as you get tired, suppresses pancreatic insulin release, so food late in the day spikes your blood sugar higher than the same carbs would earlier. Eat before bed and you suppress growth hormone and age faster. Go to bed a little hungry and you wake up with energy, having burned some fat and gotten deep sleep.
Get up at the same time seven days a week, no later than an hour after sunrise. The light cue that resets your circadian clock fades from the sky after about an hour of sunlight, so you want that first natural light in the corner of your eye.
When you first wake, do not go straight to the desk, the couch, or breakfast. Cortisol surges before you wake and squeezes your liver to feed you blood sugar, so you start the day with both already high. Slam a heavy workout on top of that and you can build cortisol, insulin, and blood sugar resistance and weaken your circadian entrainment. Instead, do something exertive enough to break a sweat but light enough that you could still talk, a walk or five sun salutations.
On coffee, wait an hour after waking. First thing in the morning your cortisol is already high, so caffeine does little to wake you up further, it just pounds your heart. By mid-afternoon your cortisol receptors are freer, which is why the same coffee feels much stronger then. Coffee in the morning is mostly habit. Treat all of this as experiments to run on yourself rather than rules to obey. More structure is in Biohacking Sleep and Biohacking Your Morning.
Why does cannabis feel different as you age?
A young brain is fast, juicy, and powerful. Throw disinhibition into it and you get flow, creativity, silliness. A matured brain that is a little stressed and underrested responds differently. When cannabis drops away your inhibitory tone, you become more sensitive to whatever dysregulation is already there. The anxiety, the racing through everything in your life, that is the underlying stress and sleep debt surfacing, not the weed creating something new.
It tends to shift again over time. With low use and a healthy lifestyle, your dopamine system and your liver eventually conspire to make cannabis feel closer to how it used to. Neurofeedback accelerates that. When you train the brain, you reduce tolerance for stimulants and cannabis, and to a lesser degree alcohol. About half the heavy cannabis users I see quit within a few weeks without being asked. The rest use a fraction of what they used to for six months to a year.
We can also map your brain while you are using cannabis and see exactly which circuits are getting cranked up and driving the anxiety. Caffeine, Adderall, and cannabis all change the map dramatically, which is why you have to be clean for a baseline. Micro-dosing, oddly, barely shows up in the map at all.
What do psychedelics actually do to brain function?
Ketamine works as an intentional dissociation, and it acts something like a plasticity reset, shaking up the Etch-a-Sketch. The IV version sedates and sends you far away. There is now a licensed inhaler of half the molecule, esketamine, that lifts major depression within minutes without the dissociative trip and without sedating you.
On the stronger psychedelics, here is what I have actually seen. After heroic experiences, sweat lodges, Burning Man, large doses of psilocybin, ninety-nine times out of a hundred the brain on the far side looks identical to the brain before. These are state changers, not trait changers. I have seen one exception, a man who did MDMA and psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in a two-week intensive and changed his brain as if he had done a year of intensive work. It can happen. It usually does not.
My bias is to look at your brain and change it directly rather than reach for substances first. Anxiety, motivation, learning, mood, deep sleep quality, and resilience under stress tend to be low-hanging fruit over a few months of training. If something like ketamine is serving a specific goal we cannot otherwise reach, we work it in.
What does it cost and how much time does it take?
In the US there are roughly ten thousand neurofeedback practice centers, and most charge like therapists, two hundred fifty to three hundred dollars a session. Since the work needs to happen three times a week, often forty sessions across three months, a full program quoted by a therapy office in Los Angeles runs fifteen to twenty thousand dollars, and in New York it can hit three hundred fifty to four hundred a session.
Our three-month program runs about five to six thousand, including remote mapping, equipment we lend you, and live coaching. That puts you below a hundred dollars a session. I have a reputation as a curmudgeon in the biohacking world, and here it is again. I do not think it makes sense to charge someone twenty-five or fifty thousand for five days of alpha-theta neurofeedback, which is what some of the luxury peak-performer packages cost.
Time commitment is about half an hour of training three times a week, so you are sitting down for forty-five minutes or so. The gear travels in a laptop bag and a shaving kit. Most clients work from home. We send equipment, teach you live, and run a support channel so someone can check your sensor placement when you get stuck. The goal is to teach you to become your own technician, and eventually your own neuroscientist.
Mindfulness is part of the work too. Meditation builds inhibitory tone and gives you more control over your internal environment, which is the same target much of the neurofeedback aims at. I run free mindfulness groups, and brain-training clients get a mindfulness coach.
The bottom line
Your brain runs on patterns you can measure and patterns you can train. Map it first so you know what you are working with. Fix the foundations, sleep timing, morning light, the gap between eating and bed. Then train the specific circuits behind your goals, three sessions a week for a few months, and watch the data, your performance, and how you feel move together. The aim is not to make you dependent on another expert. The aim is to hand you the tools and the knowledge to read your own brain and steer it. If you want a starting point on optimizing cognitive resources, read Biohacking Intelligence.