Enhance Focus, Reduce Anxiety & Improve Cognition Using Neurofeedback Dr. Andrew Hill

hello everyone and welcome back to the boost your biology podcast today's special guest is one of the top peak performance coaches in the us he holds a phd in cognitive neuroscience from ucla's department of psychology and contributes to do research on attention and cognition he's been practicing neurofeedback since 2003 and is an absolute wealth of knowledge in this space dr andrew hill welcome to the show thank you very much for having me lucas really appreciate it awesome so andrew maybe let my listeners know a little bit about your journey like how did you become so fascinated with the human brain oh wow so i've always wanted one of those guys who sort of takes things apart and has to understand you know the reasons behind things the shapes behind things and why they're working and uh when i was growing up my my brother experienced a brain injury actually ended up having a pretty significant change in consciousness for a month or two he was in a coma and then it took him some time to uh sort of relearn skills things like some language aspects some other things and i was i don't know eighth grade which in the us i think is around 13 years old or something when that happened and it was very sort of illustrating wait a minute the small little injury it was a very small part of his brain that was sort of damaged creates a massive shift in how the system acts how it acts later how can change its performance and then seeing how he behaved differently with a small relatively minor brain injury how it was difficult for him for a few years afterwards um really thinking about the brain and then i ended up working in health and human services throughout college and soon after like a couple years after and worked with really severely impaired people that had no language were multiply disabled with developmental disabilities cerebral palsy and other movement disorders you know i learned several different versions of tactile sign with this population because everyone had their own like 30 or 40 signs they knew and that was it and then i ended up getting a little frustrated working in those really acute you know developmentally disabled environments which were residential and just sort of caretaking roles and moved into acute crisis work in psychiatric work where you know again we weren't making a lot of change but at least people were moving through some transformations sometimes and did that work for a few years and got kind of burnt out like you do working with mental health and worked with pretty much every aspect you know geriatric stuff dual diagnosis with alcohol latency age with children and really saw a lot of different types of how we deal with mental health how we deal with inpatient outpatient crises and wellness and things like that and was getting a little nonplussed but still trying to think about what to do next and i got injured i was head of sort of restraints or hands-on interventions at a really acute psych hospital and got significantly injured and couldn't do hands-on work anymore so for a few months i ended up acting as a case manager but then the hospital closed and i had a pretty significant back injury so i couldn't just go laterally to a new kind of mid-tier case manager job and was like okay hey i've heard about this stuff called neurofeedback i've wanted to get into it for a while let me find a place doing it oh hey there's a place right here you know half an hour away that does neural feedback and they do mostly autism and adhd work and i have lots of experience with you know developmental population let me go talk to them walked out with a job started working with neurofeedback in providence rhode island at a place called the neurodevelopment center which is still there really amazing focus on developing brains with that sort of wide swath of everything that fits under the autism label as well as adhd and other things that are sort of undefined developmental challenges and i started working at this place having a pretty good experience with this population across different aspects of it and i started seeing people change i was seeing adhd symptoms go away i was seeing sensory issues drop away in autism i'm seeing seizures go away in a lot of the time in the matter of weeks and months and was like wait a minute this does not track with what i understand to be true about how the brain works how suffering works how we can work with suffering what's going on and this isn't medication there was no like gotta get it right or we can't help and then even with med there wasn't this like intervention landscape where you tolerated stuff there was a landscape of agency being created for these people and so that's what really caught my attention and after a couple years of doing that work and seeing these kinds of transformations 60 70 80 of the time and some of the most acutely suffering people that i'd met i was really hooked and this was 20 you know years ago or something and my experience at the time was that the field had two or three or four different fields no one knew how nervous worked everything was really vitriolic everyone's in conflict and fighting and everyone was sure they knew how it worked and hating everyone else in the small little field who like disagreed with their particular methodology and yet everyone in the field was getting better results in most things than traditional amounts of health was dramatically better in adhd and seizures and autism no matter which different style of neurofeedback that invested in that was sort of that was it struck me as what i call a blind men and elephant situation you know we all have a piece of the puzzle we're like oh i have a snake i have a leaf elephant and that got me a little bit curious and so i went back to grad school at ucla and got a phd studying neurofeedback studying how attention works in each hemisphere of the brain separately how you create the attentional systems and then merge them at the last moment to create the experience of attention and how you control it so lateralized attention hemispheric stuff i worked with a guy named dr iran zeidel who died last year or year before last the pandemic has left my time since really blurry and uh dr zeidel was one of the grad students who did a lot of the work with doctors sperry and i think bogan who did the split brain research on the initial epilepsy subjects back in the 60s and 70s and things so that's the sort of scientific or academic lineage i come out of testing the individual hemispheres of the brain and we worked with some of the last split brain subjects from this initial experiments as they hit their 70s and 80s and things we would travel around the us and do brain maps on them and measure their eeg and measure their attention and dr zeidel developed the style of testing the attention in each hemisphere on people with split brains with a corpus callosum severed so you couldn't transfer information between the cortices and then they took that system of assessing attention and moved into normally intact brains like you and i probably are and uh was able to demonstrate you can test attention or you can measure the the independent attention systems in each hemisphere so i came back into neurofeedback with this new perspective on the lateralization the shared left and right you know resource management of the brain and as i got that perspective i realized a lot of how i'd been trained to do neurofeedback had taken some of those brain deep laterality things into account so that combined with doing some work on my phd dissertation was looking at how the brain responds to the process of neurofeedback what's happening in the real time so the way neurofeedback works is most of it is different styles most of it is passive involuntary operant conditioning so i measure your brain moment to moment lucas measure some beta waves over the right hand side which is involved with knowing if you're paying attention let's say so measure some beta waves which is a little bit of an activation measure some theta which is a disinhibition of that tissue or it doesn't want to do its job properly and you measure those things moment to moment and whenever the brain happens to move a little bit in the right direction you applaud it by making a stimulus happen and when the brain moves in the wrong direction you withhold the stimulus the brain's like hey i like stuff where'd the way that stuff go and then it happens to move the right direction and you applaud it again it's like oh hey wait wow cool i dropped my theta stuff's happening interesting the mind has no idea why the car is moving or the pacman stopped whatever because the mind can't feel your brain wave to a large extent but the brain's like oh hey oh hey oh hey whenever the theta gets applauded and so later on that day or the next day the brain reaches for low theta states and the mind's like oh i feel focused if you ask your kid to take the trash out the next day when they have a theta dipping they get up and take the trash out we get frantic calls my kid got up and cooked for themselves or like did the laundry it was weird so organization happens as you learn to suppress this this right-sided theta and i studied in my phd program essentially the beep or the car moving or whatever the stimulus is that's applauding the event what's happening at the moment the brain's getting applauded and i found well a we did one of the first double-blind placebo-controlled research studies ever for neurofeedback which it's been really hard to do you can't blind the eeg if you move you see the signals move you cough you see it move but the developer of the software eager called howard lightstone howard developed a really elegant way of doing blinding where you take storage segments of eeg they're not the persons you stitch them together you scale them up you blend them with the person's eeg for displaying the screen so the clinician and the person are seeing eg and if they move or cough the artifact gets carried through to the training screen stops the training but all the training parameters how much alpha bait etc have no contingency so they're not you know rewarding anything we did a double blind study and showed that the brain right after you go beep or move the thing in the frequency you're responding to the brain desynchronizes suddenly has a burst of that frequency right afterwards so we were showing the brain binding to the event the learning process happening in a double blind placebo-controlled way i did that research in 2010 and published it in 2012. and that was the first double-blind placebo-controlled research that exists really young kind of nitchy mad sciencey field essentially you know only was that uh 10 years ago essentially we had some of the first real good research but people often ask why the research is flaky for neurofeedback and it is and there's a bunch of reasons for that the blinding of it is just a recent thing we've solved but how do you do personal training in a big research study how do you test something that's different for everyone it's individualized iterative you know so that's a big piece of it and these days someone has to spend about 5 million u.s to do a high-level fda level study that's gold standard and no one owns neurofeedback and the drug companies have been actively advocating against neurofeedback not supporting it for 50 years so it remains a bit of a black art and people have to get into it and we decided to take this role at big brain of being trainers about the tech about the how to use mapping how to push your brain around because personal trainers educate you and guide you through your path and you make the meaning and you find the results doctors have to have the right answer and so we took this out of the medical place and put it more in the all right it's your brain let's figure out how to iterate through workouts and see what you like and refine that that perspective so no it's incredible stuff andrew and i wasn't aware that you were the very first to help publish that that paper that double blind placebo my dissertation work which you can find i mean publish is a strong uh statement because it's just the dissertation registration you know but yeah those count so if you google my name and ucla or phd you can find the publication and we did a bunch of things including dr zeidel's lateralized attention network tasks look at hemispheric attention we train people's brains five days in a row and we put on top of the training wires a full 64 hip channel cap and we measured the evoked potentials the the little blips that show up in the brain in response to all the information flow and then tore it all apart looking for where things were changing in each group we trained the left hemisphere right hemisphere betas versus faster betas and then sham versus real and kind of teased out oh wait look at that that's how the brain knows something's happening that's how it's recognizing the loop of information one thing that um strikes me andrew is like what's the link between like neurofeedback and building self-awareness as the individual because i realize as a biohacker or just somebody trying to optimize health like having a really high level of self-awareness is going to be highly beneficial so like what's the link there between self-awareness and neurofeedback i would say there's probably two pieces where there's a lot of good inflection there one is in the brain mapping the qeg i can show your brain at rest and i don't know what it means for you necessarily but i know what it means in general for most people and it's plausible and i can measure your attention and tell you what that does mean on a performance test those two bits of information operate very much like a lipid panel or you know expanded blood panel as you learn your own physiology it works for you i mean take this out of the brain for a minute if i gave you the keto guru rules they might work for you but if i gave you a acetone media for your breath and taught you how to hack your generated ketones the second day and played with macronutrient you know numbers you might discover you could have 100 grams of carbs a day and remain in ketosis so the qeg can help you unpack things about your brain you can go i have lots of resting alpha i might be a little inattentive oh yeah that tracks and then meditate more to reduce that or maybe you want to go through brain mapping the qeg and examine your brain under clean caffeine cannabis adderall modafinil piracetam or different racetams it gives you this immediate you can see all the brainwave shift speeds and the amplitudes and you can compare that to the attention test you've done alongside that and get a valid read of here's my performance shift in this nootropic here's my physiology change which we think might mean x oh yeah that tracks like what if your alpha speed the resting idle of your brain is alpha waves it's about 10 hertz about 10 seconds per second if that's normally 10 hertz and you get 10 20 years old and it slows down a little bit that feels like you're driving your car with the emergency brake on and people who are above 30 or 35 will have word finding issues and tip of the tongue and short-term memory problems and they're often concerned that it's memory but it's not it's speed of processing to load time in and out of the memory so look at your brain your alpha waves at rest and go lucas your alpha waves are running a standard deviation on the bell curve slower than most guys your age and you're like yeah i'm having word finding issues okay and then you can do a bunch of maps and go wow perhaps tim gives me verbal fluency and oh well your alpha is sped up by a full heart on piracetam nice well now you know so that's the first answer is you can demystify the stuff that people like you and i tend to do just self-experimentation and reading and research we're very intellectual for a while and then we jump off the deep end and try stuff you know good and bad i'm sure you and i actually know i won't disclose our dirty laundry so to speak but i know both you and i both had amazing interesting experiences and have run afoul of self-experimentation pitfalls here and there side effects we didn't like and weird things that happened so this can be a buffer to that just on the pure data side and then the other piece of it is neurofeedback one of the big benefits for people is a technique in neurofeedback called alpha theta and alpha theta is flow state it's generative access it's wellsprings of consciousness it's non-linear awareness it's insight and it's the moment of falling asleep at night when you solve world hunger or have the best book idea or the best podcast idea you know oh my god i gotta do this and you fall asleep and you're like wait i was last night oh wait a minute that was a really good idea that's a flow state a generative access state when you move out of linear modes and alpha theta neurofeedback can reliably train that state to be right there to open the door and reach for it pull it into your mind so it gives you some things it gives you the ability to put your emotions into words really easily so if you're alexa thymic if you can't describe what you're feeling it cracks open that barrier so suddenly you can describe anything you want deeply it also has the capacity of taking chronically burnt out shaky over-activated alcoholics who can't fall asleep can't calm down without a drink and it re-educates the gabaergic tone in a few weeks so the person can just fall asleep it will remain calm not be uncomfortable with their internal environment so that you know gab and glutamate are the two primary inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters all the rest do different things a very sophisticated audience you guys all know this but glutamate and gaba have to be somewhat balanced then if you have too much glutamate you develop seizures too much gaba you pass out think about alcohol you drink alcohol you pass out if you're drinking alcohol all the time and you withdraw it you have seizures that's the that's the glutamate gaba thing so you can train someone with alpha theta and they get the internal downshift into a calm okay low-key settled state but they also get the physiological state of reduced shaky activation turning the mind off better sleep regulation so that's alpha theta you also get t cell boosts oddly enough cd4 plus cells go way way up way up dr gary schumer did a study in the 80s on hiv positive men before there were any treatments and did three groups cranial electrostem neurofeedback alpha training and both both groups that had neurofeedback had massive cd4 plus cell increases over a few weeks it was really quite dramatic and i've seen that in my clients as well i've seen t cell massive t-cell improvements sometimes from alpha theta and alpha theta is the basis behind things like 40 years of zen and james hart's biocybernaut program and those are one-week programs to drop you into what i consider an ordeal style of neurofeedback a shamanic event style of door feedback doing a sweat lodge version of it yep you can get something out of it but it doesn't make iterative change it might just break you free your shapes if you're stuck i'd rather use those tools like alpha theta systematically progressively build a foundation and resource other stuff do some flow state work creativity work on top of that but along with an answer this is how we get into the nerve feedback process yeah no that's really really amazing that's part of that andrew i'm curious to know you mentioned autism adhd and also desired flow state what are some of the other applications for neurofeedback two other ones that are pretty big that are pretty sort of low hanging fruit and obvious i mean the field of neurofeedback developed because we discovered by mistake that it reduces seizures dramatically dr barry sturman in the late 60s was doing an experiment with rocket fuel and found that of the 32 cats he was using a quarter of them refused to have seizures when exposed to rocket fuel this is the 60s you know animal research and he realized later on that those same super cats who had super stable brains had done a previous experiment six months before to see if you could make a brain wave rise by rewarding it with chicken broth whenever it showed up and cats make a lot of this brain wave if you've seen cat and window cell the liquid body and laser-like focus that's a brainwave state called sensory motor rhythm humans use it to sit still stay asleep suppress impulsivity suppressed seizures it's an inhibitory tone it's also called sleep spindles it's used for learning consolidation it's used for lots of stuff the lack of it in humans we call adhd so literally the calm cat in the window cell and the adhd who can sit still literally opposite regulatory styles in the brain so smr can be trained up you can go after it so seizures if you will and that sort of brain thing is a big use of it historically i will say that you know aside from the peak performance stuff and the attention stuff two big areas become a lot of our so goal space for clients as they elect them and go after them one of them is different flavors of anxiety and the other is brain fog especially these days with cobia brain fog and stuff so anxiety is an interesting phenomenon i'll talk about first just because anxiety is not really disease it's natural circuits that are cramped up so anxiety is closer to a spasm muscle for most people even when severe even when it's ptsd or ocd or something it's not a disease process really for most people it's like having like an example in the brain mappings again an example how the brain mapping gives you insight and helps you understand yourself let's say you're a little obsessive you can't stop thinking about stuff your song's in your head you bite your nails but you're also kind of high-powered and a bit of a ceo well looking at your brain map you're going to see the front midline of your brain the anterior cingulate is making lots of beta waves probably it selects what you're thinking about this part of the brain and if it gets strong we hyper select which can be ocd if it's in your way if your thoughts are having you or it can be a ceo if you're highly useful or skillful at using this little resource same thing the back midline posterior cingulate that's the oh watch the road part of the brain i'll catch the frisbee hey lucas heads up orient you know uh alert and orient that's the posterior cingulate well if your brain learns the world is not especially safe or predictable it cramps up and your brain is now evaluating for danger all the time but that's metaphorically a lot like the lower back spasming up in a car accident so you can walk away 10 years later kind of sore didn't quite regulate properly you know you can stretch it out you can get it back in shape just like your posterior cingulate if you're experiencing ptsd or threat sensitivity or rumination or something you can work it out you can stretch it out or you got the right tpj for social and sensory loading you see in autism as well as like quirky people that have social anxiety the right temporal parietal areas like ah the world's so loud that my wife's chewing is so annoying you know or you can see sleep issues as the brain makes lots of delta because you aren't sleeping or i mentioned alpha waves earlier having word finding issues and then the big one we see a lot of is brain fog these days because you get covid and 50 of people roughly a month and a half later their brain looks like it's had a concussion and they feel like that it's about 50 the the initial research in the lancet that came out about a year into the pandemic showed that about 50 of people with covid symptomatic code but have actually neurological symptoms that are significant six months later so i find that i have in some ways the luxury of a long client base and thousands of people i've worked with so before the pandemic we had seen more than 5000 people and for neurofeedback and brain mapping and i have multiple maps on people i see them for years sometimes because it's a relationship they have with their brain um and not because they have to train their brain figures just because we are a resource and now people come back having new complaints and we look at their brain and we're like oh i'm like yeah i covered and you see it it looks just like a concussion or and it usually this might be interesting to folks covet doesn't create necessarily brand new inflammation it seems to in the brain it seems to latch onto old seeds of inflammation and make them flare up so i don't all i often don't see a new like like concussive spot or a global metabolic dip what i usually see is the old stuff that used to be a little bit of scar tissue or inflammation getting huge and blowing up and that and their alpha slows down the delta goes up metabolism falls over but it looks like a concussion client who's got another concussion or something or an apnea person who got exposed to mold or mold who got lyme it's like a double metabolic hit kind of signature in the brain it's not really specific you know it's like wow you got hit by something what was it oh you had covet oh yeah that's probably what this is so again it's a phenomenon i'm seeing that i would go i don't know why this is here but there's something here and they would go oh yeah i know it's you know i got you know hit by a surfboard oh i had covert oh i slept in a moldy tent i've been feeling like crap the past two weeks oh okay so when people are suffering especially with these mysterious things like long covid seeing your brain seeing that it's right there gives you a freedom gives you some agency or showing someone that has ptsd or anxiety or you know a quirky brain and can't process social information the same way or has tinnitus or something else you show them on their brain and people start changing their relationship if i showed you a separated shoulder on an x-ray you might be frustrated at it but you're not going to feel ashamed or be angry at it probably but we're often that way about our brains so if i show you your ptsd your ocd your adhd your sleep issues your irritability your sluggish brain waves because you're dragging all right and you're like there it is and here's the model next it's not impacting you it's not your fault it's just your brain and that gives you a place to apply pressure and make change so we like to joke we don't sell neurofeedback we sell agency we have big tools for doing things with neurofeedback so people often do but the brain mapping alone gives you this little snapshot of yourself that you can kind of dig into over time and i think it really changes our relationship with a lot of things we consider mental health and psychiatric in most flavors of anxiety attention stuff sleep stuff stress you know general things human suffer with the vast majority of it you can take out of that pathological diagnostic dsm world and put it into the world of hey which resources are bottlenecked we want to work those out see if we can get them to feel different great so you know it really flips the script a little bit on the regular mental health thing which is why we do it this way it's incredible yeah i mean i'm i'm just gobsmacked i wasn't aware of all this that you're mentioning there andrew and as part of that like you mentioned the anxiety the different regions of the brain that you're able to sort of identify patterns particular frequencies what about like as far as like mood and and like oh mood because i'd imagine you'd see a lot of post covert great question mood is something you can't predict from a brain map but if someone's got a low mood you might see it in a brain map it's not a reliable enough thing to show up so richie davidson one of the great meditation researchers found early on like 20 30 years ago now now the research is kind of a weak finding and since then even richie davidson would not necessarily say it's true but all the initial research on people that were depressed and on meditators by him showed an asymmetry where the left frontal lobe the front corner was more activated and the right frontal corner was less activated so this is the approach system and this is the avoid system or the i hate things system or like get off my lawn kids system so sometimes you see an asymmetry where the left front is making too much alpha or neutral and not enough beta or the right front is making too much beta gas pedal or not enough neutral alpha asymmetry shifts and the right function starts to drive the bus and it finds things kind of irritating and negative and wants to take things that negativity perspective the negativity bias i mean we're evolutionarily benefited biased to attach to the negative if you miss sexy things and yummy things and attractive things there's more of those tomorrow but if you miss tigers and danger you might miss it once better not miss it twice because that's it game over so we have a negativity bias we attach the stuff the right frontal lobe will lean in and go ah things suck really easily and we can sometimes see that in the brain maps and also the alpha speed slows down the speed of processing drags down in depression a lot of the time but having a low processing speed doesn't create depression it just creates a low processing speed so depression is an experience we're having it's a high level human thing it's broadly cortical it's like music it's like thoughts it's like memories they're not in one place they're everywhere so depression as i was saying is more of a human experience and less of a specific resource in the brain where anxiety you'll have individual little modules for selecting your focus the front a valve in the world in the back drinking in the world and mapping into the mind sensory primary cortex in the auditory the visual association cortex for putting things together we have individual resources you can see but when you use them all together for your human experience your thoughts your high level you know mood and things those are often things you don't see on an eeg you're seeing high level features so while i'm able to guess there's something going on i wouldn't note this depression per se where i can usually tell if someone's ruminating perseverating has social or sensory issues has slowed processing isn't getting good sleep has attention difficulty those are sort of easy things to see on a map and the good news about brain mapping is if you see it you can change it you know if you use something like a spect or other sophisticated analysis you may get some insight about your brain but then what you have to then go find ways to intervene which are functional medicine when someone does a spec then they go see you and go oh i have this exposure low metabolism what can i do to boost my blood flow and you come up with a bunch of strategies and try stuff with eeg analysis the qeg if you find things that are real you can then go exercise the eeg so you get an immediate actionable thing to do or you can exercise the blood flow we also do heg or hemoencephalography we exercise the vasculature that works pretty well for uh covered brain fog by the way so i'm curious to know like as far as some of the exercises i know like many many years back i actually volunteered myself as part of a university student was looking at neurofeedback and i remember one of the games that i had to play was like i think i had to keep like a ball at a certain like what is that h-e-e-g or something it might be it might be hegg or maybe it was scp slow cortisol potential it depends if it's voluntary it's unlikely to be oscillatory ongoing eeg because you can't control it but if you're trying to control something you can sort of control the big output of frontal lobe you can concentrate and blood flow will surge mri uses this it's called the bold the blood oxygen level dependent response but it's happening all the time and you can kind of use passive sensors we use one called pir hdg passive infrared hemo encephalography just an in-front camera you strap on and point inward and it's kind of like you're sitting on the beach figuring out how active the ocean is by watching a spot on the shore it's very indirect metabolic outflow it's happening all the time but you can like lean in and concentrate and two seconds later there's a big surge a higher surge than usual so you can learn semi-voluntarily and there's some old technology navy's blood flow i think what you were doing is called slow cortical potential training and that means you're training below one hertz because the general dc shift or the activation of the brain which all the other energy rides on top of can be somewhat voluntarily controlled and it tends to change slowly up and down over about half an hour but you can sort of learn to control it if you're doing a thing where you're trying to keep a ball up and down and those wires on your head like i.e voluntary control over electricity it must have been something like scp most eg is passive and your brain gets applauded for little you know of the billions of things it's doing a couple of those things are getting applauded you can't really control that but if you're trying to control like the broad things the broad blood flow the broad electrical activation there's some voluntary control there so that's my guess interesting what about andrew i'd love to hear about like some incredible like success stories that you've had with maybe some clients you want to share maybe you know obviously respect for their privacy but maybe just share some some pretty crazy transformations every so often people ask me this question and i'm always hesitant to start talking about stuff i see because it sounds ridiculous i mean most people have ridiculous transformations that are life-changing and if you have some big major things in the way what happens is outside of the scope of what is expected in other aspects of mental health i mean just adhd stuff you measure someone's attention on an attention test when they start and they're on a bell curve off the mean by a couple of standard deviations you know hundreds of middle of a bell curve when it's age matched and these folks come in at 60s and 70s and 30s and 20s and missing scores for aspects of attention when they start and they do 40 to 50 neurofeedback sessions and they're above average 115 120 125 permanently in three months eighty percent ninety percent of people with adhd i mean it's just it's insane the kind of effects we see or someone's coming in having seizures uh we had a growth years ago major developmental issues some genetic disorder where her body didn't fold proteins properly and she was having lots of drop seizures was having seizures several times a minute basically hundreds of times an hour and she was about 11 years old very very small physically because of this genetic disorder her parents hadn't slept in 11 years or whatever because the girl having constant seizures meant that throughout the night they were always afraid they were always trying to get her to be safe so this is a girl with a lot of difficulties and we trained her brain in about three weeks she was down to having one seizure every two hours from having dozens an hour now this is a very extreme case but just that small change was a huge success for her and the girl had no language but at the end of that process she wasn't feeling tired all the time because of constantly having seizures her parents could sleep at night so they weren't tired all the time and the girls started making better eye contact and having a bit better cognition it's a very small win cognitively but a huge win in terms of the big suffering you know same thing someone comes in who's got some major ptsd you know like you read about can't fall asleep wakes up screaming sweating you train the average person with intrusive ptsd or ocd or something really extreme for three four five weeks and you've pulled the teeth of most of the symptoms not completely and the brain still cramps up that way over time you may need to do some more work but the average person with ptsd will have a dramatic dialing down to minimum of their symptoms in a couple of months the average person not the outliers and almost everyone with adhd and at least half of people with seizures have these sweeping kind of changes so this is why i'm saying it's a little like a hesitant to talk about the successes because we usually see successes and if you're someone who's extremely high performance you have neural problems and you feel pretty good and you train your brain you still level up your attention you still level up your handling of stress you still get better deep sleep what will happen a lot of the time for many people is the amount of hours will compress and the depth will improve so you go from sleep in eight hours yeah okay sleep to six and three quarters of amazing sleep that's cool you know stuff like that or your circadian rhythm which never quite locks in starts to lock in but neurofeedback boosts bdnf and other forms of plasticity acutely for 24 hours after every session so when you do things like neurofeedback other stuff you're doing starts to really synergize and people that do things like neurofeedback are often interested in making change and doing other things so it has a rather magical reputation in fields of like physical therapy and speech and language therapy and epileptology because those people see their clients go and find a neurofeedback person and suddenly start making changes so or alcohol doug quirk did a lot of work initially uh peniston and agner and penicillin i think did some work on alcohol initially and showed that alpha theta used for alcohol reverses the one year relapse rate in alcohol it goes from three quarters down to one quarter and that's across people so this is a huge impact it's kind of like exercise okay what are you going to do with it that's not a one size fits all thing it must be tailored it must be focused on your goals there's different ways to do it so it's not trivial but it's also not rocket surgery so to speak you know yeah yeah as far as the um like the frequency of sessions and like the duration of each session i'd imagine obviously needs to be carefully tailored to the individual so maybe you want to sort of outline you know let's say a typical three month program what might that look like yeah we like to train the brain have people train the brain about three times a week for about half an hour but what you do in that session might be quite very different what frequencies that you're training where in the head you're training how many channels if you're doing eeg or heg or combination so we tend to build complicated customized individual programs for every person and their goals just like your coach would in the nice high-end gym you know it's always tailored to you but we start off with something called the brain map of the qeg where people will put a cap on their head and squirt it full of gel and sit still for about 10 minutes eyes closed and open also do a really boring attention test and you'll hate me just a little bit after it as we bore you to tears and find out how well you can stay focused when things are not that exciting and those three things are compared to a database people your age not to see why you're not average but to find the interesting shapes of your performance and make some models about where there's stuff you might want to change then we go after the neurofeedback and we teach you how to do it a lot of our clients work remotely we have many offices now in the us and some partners overseas but most of our clients never see offices we send brain mapping gear out we send our feedback training gear out all the coaches work privately with you on a private chat so we have this 24 hour seven day week while it's on 24 hours seven day a week slack channel system setups you have your own private system for getting help with your coaches and taking photographs to your head and asking for more protocols and we also use that same slack channel to bug you to fill out your sleep surveys and stuff like that but it's very iterative where we you try something it's mostly involuntary your brain goes oh hey wait i noticed something later on you feel a little bit different later on they can know about your sleep stress your attention and then the coaches come to me and say hey andrew i noticed lucas had some really great sleep after his new left side protocol and that's set up for a repeat but then there's nothing after that what should we do oh yeah lucas wants to do some creativity works why don't you ask him if he wants to move to alpha theta so do a one channel on a two channel or see if you want some more work on that deep sleep and if he's experiencing the pain right now maybe give him a right sided alpha protocol okay thanks and then write out like a two week plan from that and come to your channel and say hey talk to dr hill knows your sleep was good we put a repeat of that in put some right-sided protocols in keeps doing pain work but after that is the creativity stuff here's some new locations on the head here's a cheat sheet and the staff will work to really help you learn the specifics of the thing you're trying to get done and then we'll stand by to help you troubleshoot when you're sticking wires in your head and then your experience is all about not stumbling through setting it up or doing it but more like do i notice anything and if you don't great but you probably will um it's pretty subtle and you're really kind of like a athlete going oh hey wait yeah i know something feels pretty good like this workout or maybe metaphorically you call your trainer and say dude i just dropped eggs all over the floor at the supermarket what are you doing my arms are noodles oh okay we'll take some weight off the curl bar next time you know it's that kind of thing but here you might notice yourself feeling kind of wired or kind of tired or your sleep is interrupted and not better that night or you're a little irritable or something and then it wears off because it's a transient push and unless you repeat it it doesn't last as you repeat it 5 6 10 15 times then it starts to last because now the brain is practicing stuff it does every day in a new way so it tends to stick at least the sleep stress attention things tend to stick pretty reliably after a few months because you're using them all the time so that's sort of the the landscape as you move through a few months of iterative training people can usually make about a couple of standard deviations of change in that kind of time frame across executive function or stress or whatever else features we're working on we map the brain every other month so typically in a three month program folks get 40 to 50 sessions of training in and there's three brain maps and we see a couple of standard deviations nice linear change in their executive function and their brain maps will have features of stress and sleep and other stuff to kind of drop away and more importantly the person's reporting subjective stuff all along that we're helping sort of marco polo into shape oh your sleep did that try this okay great that's working for you now now try this and we're just always trying to gently push the way your trainer does and listen to what your needs are and maybe giving your workouts that day based on what's happening but then at the end of the process you know a few months in you're kind of different and people that have simple if you will goals for neurofeedback things like adhd some anxiety some sleep stuff three to four months you know 40 to 50 sessions permanent change for most people you got brain injuries you got some autism you got an active disease process like you know parkinson's or schizophrenia or something you want to train longer maybe ongoing for like schizophrenia or parkinson's for autism people usually do about six months because they move slower and there's more to do and for my peak performers i have clients who've been training straight for years who have hundreds of sessions building up and they work through some anxiety and some drinking and some coke use and some being a jerk to their wife and they're six months in and they're feeling amazing and they're like what else you got doc and i'm like oh okay let's start you meditating and doing some keto cycling and some fasting and go to some flow state in our feedback protocols and we keep chipping away and they keep having these like discontinuous every so often they get next level stuff showing up as we keep working the resources out keep trying fun things so once your relationship with your brain starts to change there's sort of no upper limit for what you can do i mean i don't know what the metaphor is but you know those gym guys who get all swole because of how easy it is sometimes for guys to get swole that sort of happens with some of our brain clients where they've been training for years and the most relaxed good listener and you know super well-adjusted people with massive immune systems and creativity i mean i'm joking a little bit but if you walk into any peak brain office in the u.s while the full-time long-term staff are they're in their late 20s 30s they might as well be 95 year old monks they're super good listeners they're really calm they're really kind and it's the same phenomena as walking into the high-end gym and seeing all the staff's abs hanging out you know so it's hard to say what the process could be because it's so individualized but people usually do three to six months level up a bunch work some things out change their relationship with their brain and then we might see them in the future for mapping or for an additional challenge they have with a concussion or some covet or something or maybe they want to hit some more goals so you know clients work with us off and on for years perhaps but the thing that usually brings them in initially is pretty much addressed typically within about three to six months so 40 to 100 sessions roughly yeah i've got two more two more big questions the first one is um for you andrew that's um personal experimentation yourself like what's the most wild thing you've seen personally or maybe it's a sleep experiment or maybe it's like a creativity thing like yeah i'd love to hear about what you've done with your own brain yeah for me the neurofeedback stuff is really where it's at while i enjoy nootropics while i really enjoy fasting and other kinds of experimentation the reason i'm doing this is because i was 28 years old you know injured couldn't work in a psych hospital anymore trying to find you know the next thing and i was the most adhd person on the planet like i've never met a problem child who's 10 years old who is worse than i was in my 20s just like i made robin williams look calm you know during his coke years it was really bad how hyperactive had disinhibited how running a million miles an hour i was even into my 20s and then i got this job at the neurofeedback center was seeing all this stuff happen and would hang out after hours training my brain after a few weeks so i paid my own brain map we used to send them out to get processed elsewhere and i paid for my own processing fee and got my brain map and i wouldn't recommend doing this necessarily but i started poking at stuff i saw on the maps and trying lots of stuff and only about half of it actually had any guidance from my boss at the time but i had probably two stories things that happened to me one is i did about 18 sessions of neurofeedback and went from the most impulsive person on the planet to basically having no adhd in about a month and a half and it was really really really subjectively just you know life-changing in some ways now i could go back to grad school now i could think about a phd versus an md because i know i could actually sustain my attention where i had been 10 years between undergrad and grad school because i knew i could not get through grad school with my adhd so i eliminated it was like oh oh wait a minute okay something's here and i was thinking about to do and i was playing around you know for a few more months and i trained down some theta brain waves on the front midline of my head in one session i in retrospect did uh too long a session i pushed too hard but the next day i'm waking up and feeling like i'd run a marathon my legs were heavy i was super tired i was like had a physiological response you know and didn't think much of it was fine the next day thought okay some over training that was kind of weird much what happened there and about a month later i looked down and realized my fingernails were getting in the way of my keyboard and i had to go by nail clippers and i've been obsessively biting my nails since like age three or something and i stopped biting my nails with one session of direct feedback stopped cold so thoroughly that i didn't notice that i had stopped it just became something that was partitioned out of my behavior suddenly and i've seen that kind of thing happen with other people you know obsessions and stuff or little ticks so i had those two experiences while working as a senior tech with mostly autism was like oh okay well this is ridiculous there's something here but no one knew it no one knew how to really navigate it no one really deeply understood this mysterious thing we're doing and while i went back to grad school to find that out i didn't understand deeply how it works but i did develop this perspective of trying to identify and steer phenomena from a regulatory perspective and that's successful instead of trying necessarily to deeply understand discreetly every single thing we see which is not really possible that's the problem that doctors often run into having to be right having to get the right diagnosis the right medication and if you get it wrong can cause harm and your coach in the gym is less likely to cause harm getting the imperfect chest press angle or whatever and even your personal trainer in the ot or pt space the medical rehab space even that person has an iterative approach uh test and see try and see be gentle be very client focused meet them where they are move them to where they want to be so when i opened peak brain we really took that approach pretty hard and we went into the personal trainer for brain stuff and that is how the the process tends to work we work over a few months clients work out some goals and we have some fun with uh sharpening some transformation incredible incredible yeah as far as like i know we discussed offline before that you you guys have expanded into you know numerous locations do you want to let my listeners know maybe if they want to get their brain mapped like what does the process look like sure so you can come into any of the offices we have and get your brain mapped we have several in the u.s plus some partner offices overseas all your listeners get a half price sort of club fee or brain mapping fee and all the us offices which drops it from 500 to 250 actually fyi and we also have remote brain mapping for clients not near an office although it's a little more expensive than that because we're sending out brain mapping gear and in the us we have offices in los angeles and orange county california st louis new york city and we can do remote mapping any place in the u.s and we have a remote training systems anywhere you ask for rentals it's a pretty low problematic way to get your brain mapped no matter where you are we also have partners in london hong kong copenhagen and a few other places probably a few others opening up down near you if i had to guess and um in any of those places you can go and get your brain mapped and work with our brain mapping people and me to do the analysis and get some gear and work with us that way so if you're not near one of our offices or in in one of the countries we have a partner we can also get you your own brain mapping amp we'll teach you to use it they're a little expensive i mean but these days the cost of tech has come down so much that we can give people their whole entire sell them a whole package of pretty sophisticated brain analysis brain mapping brain training here and then send it anywhere in the world i have clients in puerto rico and dubai in ireland i mean every single country i can think of i have clients in who have their own gear and we also have many many clients in places like the uk and the us where we just send out rental systems so if you're near one of our offices then you're in luck and you can get a nice discount map and have this sort of open and ended ability to map and see what's going on and if you're not near an office but in one of the countries we have rental systems you can grab some gear with a rental do a few maps over the weekend do the same exploration with our coaches and if you're in a different country we can still work with you but you may have to buy some gear instead of rent it so awesome yeah make sure to leave those all the relevant links in there in the show notes and finally andrew i'd love to sort of ask you what do you think the future holds for the whole neurofeedback space like what direction are you hoping to see head into yeah i think a couple couple things one of the difficulties of doing neurofeedback is the round trip the difficulty of any coaching with sophisticated technology or sophisticated techniques where things are variable is watching what happens as it lands and steering it be that adjustabling someone's carbs or their sleep schedule or their whatever we track a lot of information with you about what's happening how you're moving towards your goals what you're noticing day-to-day so one thing we're doing this year is releasing an app which is a quantified self dashboard you'll be able to use as this like real omnibus place to track everything that you may want to watch how the variables interact so how your sleep and stress and meditation and diet are affecting your speed of processing and whatever else so we're developing this dashboard that should let us move the field of neurofeedback a little bit out of this recipe book slash science iterative but it takes a bit of a black art gift in some ways to walk through brain data and brain things it takes years of training you can't just grab a brain map and start training stuff you see you have to understand how the brain works and even that isn't uh iron clad because people are weird you know it's the process is very iterative what i'd like to do is to move the need for the skilled clinician out of the picture by first replicating those kinds of skilled decisions with lots of our coaches and other people's coaches in this kind of app interface and then start mining the app for predictive stuff and eventually the apps can become our sort of health avatars and we'll be able to do tests on them and say oh if i threw this nootropic at myself what would it do oh my model says i don't like braziltan i probably shouldn't take it you know and you can do testing things or your model can say hey look based on the amount of sleep you're getting if you keep doing this for a week you're going to be in trouble and so that's where i think we're going is this predictive reflective thing where we can almost have intelligent agents that are predictive health avatars i think that's probably where we're going in the mental health in the in the health space in general yeah that's amazing it's amazing i know at the start you said it was like giving people the agency and empowering the consumer the customer which is an incredible mission and i really really respect what you're doing andrew and i'm looking forward to staying in touch and i'll have to organize myself at brain map i mean i'm as i said before i'm heading to europe you see you mentioned got a place in copenhagen so maybe i'll stop by there but yeah we'll get you in copenhagen or london or we have a partner who's coming back she'll be in sydney soon i know you're not super near to there you can pop over to wellington if you want to see new zealand i don't know lesson you're there but you guys are in a bubble right in the quarantine it's one ocean is one bubble right you allow cross travel i think yeah so but no you're more than welcome or if you want to grab your own amp we'll send you one down under and you can do you can do mapping from there for your clients or something so awesome awesome well andrew thank you so much for coming on the show man it's been an absolute pleasure and i'm yeah really excited to dive into this space more so myself and i may have to get back on for another podcast in the future as well happy to lucas thanks so much for having me it's been a blast talking to you today awesome