Have you ever heard of a brain coach? Join Alex and Dr. Andrew Hill, UCLA PhD trained functional neuroscientist and founder of Peak Brain, to explore how he utilizes neurofeedback to help clients meet their brain performance goals. Dr. Andrew Hill is the founder of Peak Brain Institute and a leading neurofeedback practitioner and biohacking coach for clients worldwide. He has lectured on psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology at UCLA’s Department of Psychology where he received a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience. At Peak Brain, Dr. Hill provides individualized training programs to help you optimize your brain across goals of stress, sleep, attention, brain fog, creativity, and athletic performance. He is the host of the Head First podcast and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance. Click here to visit the Peak Brain website: https://peakbraininstitute.com/about-pbi/ Stay updated on New Events and Videos by subscribing and following us on: Instagram: https://instagram.com/alexkatehakis Facebook: https://facebook.com/CenterForHealthySex Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexKatehakis For more information or resources visit http://centerforhealthysex.com or reach out to one of our kind and compassionate intake counselors for a confidential consultation at (310) 843-9902 or via the contact form below: https://centerforhealthysex.com/about/contact-us/
Episode Summary
This article is drawn from a conversation I had on the Center For Healthy Sex podcast with Alex Katehakis. You can watch the original conversation. What follows is my own account of how neurofeedback works, what brain mapping shows, and how I use both with clients at Peak Brain Institute.
What is cognitive neuroscience, and why did I move into neurofeedback?
Cognitive neuroscience studies how the brain produces performance. You overlap physiology with behavior, attention, sleep, stress, and you learn how a process works by watching the two move together.
I came to this field from the other end. I spent years in health and human services, including inpatient crisis work, geriatric dual diagnosis, and group homes for people with multiple disabilities. I led restraint teams in a psychiatric hospital and got injured doing that work. When I came back into mental health a few years later, I landed at an autism center that trained the brain with neurofeedback.
What I saw there changed my plan. Kids with ADHD were getting it regulated in a few months. People with severe sensory issues or no language were shifting their resources in weeks. That ran against everything I had watched in acute inpatient psych, where the average approved stay dropped from eleven days to two over the two years I worked there. SSRIs can take three weeks to start working. Two days of stabilization sends someone back into the same dysregulated environment, and the revolving door turns again. That model reduces symptoms. It does not build long-term change. Neurofeedback was producing change that held, so I went back to grad school to understand the mechanism.
How does neurofeedback actually work?
Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback aimed at the central nervous system. Most people hear biofeedback and think hand warming, breath pacing, relaxation work. Those train the peripheral nervous system, the parts you can feel. The brain is different. It has no sensory nerve endings. You cannot feel your own brain, which is a mercy, because it is acidic, hot, and moving.
Your brain is also bad at monitoring itself. There is no central manager checking on the modules. Information flow depends on keeping processing separated. Endocrine signaling releases molecules into circulation, where they act slowly at a distance. Neurotransmitters release into the synapse, a sealed gap between two neurons, where you are controlling concentration in a tiny gradient. The architecture keeps the parts apart on purpose.
Neurofeedback borrows a bit of that gap. We pick up something varying inside the brain, the amount of a brainwave, the speed of a wave, or local blood flow, and we reflect it back through a game or display. The brain notices its own output and starts adjusting.
The classic example founds the modern field. In the 1960s at UCLA, Dr. Barry Sturman was working with cats and found he could operantly condition a brainwave called SMR, or sensorimotor rhythm. You have seen the pure version of SMR in a cat on a windowsill watching birds: body held still, focus quiet. That is the opposite of ADHD, which runs as high theta relative to SMR over the sensorimotor strip.
Put a sensor over the right or left central cortex and you can measure the beta waves moment to moment, along with the theta and alpha activity that interferes with control. When the brain moves briefly in the trained direction, the game advances and applauds. When it moves the wrong way, the game stalls. The operant trick is moving the threshold every few seconds so the brain keeps getting rewarded for movement it makes in a chosen direction. Within about ten minutes the brain has picked up the loop and started to mirror it. The mind takes a few sessions to feel anything. This is mostly passive. It works in someone who is asleep. Dr. Margaret Ayers became known for training people in comas. Cats are terrible at following instructions, and the conditioning worked on them anyway. I cover SMR in more depth in SMR Neurofeedback: Train Sleep, Focus, and Self-Control.
Does watching your own brain change it?
Some parameters give you a little voluntary control. With blood flow, if you concentrate or think happy thoughts you get a surge of blood about two seconds later. Strap an infrared sensor on your forehead and you can watch the vascular tone rise in real time. For most EEG training the loop runs the other way. The training is involuntary. Your brain adjusts toward what the display reflects, and you cannot make it not work in the chair.
The numbers are strong. Train those left and right central circuits and we typically see about two standard deviations of change in ADHD features over roughly three months. That moves severe ADHD to the other side of the bell curve. It is replicable, and clients feel it, so the process stops being mysterious. For the research picture, see Does Neurofeedback Work for ADHD? and Is Neurofeedback Legitimate?.
How do you choose the right kind of neurofeedback?
Systems split into two broad approaches. A semi-standardized system like BrainPaint uses questionnaires to pick from a set of protocols. Bill Scott at UCLA helped develop it, and inpatient addiction centers picked it up because menu-driven training works well for cravings, alcohol withdrawal, and seizure activity, along with the executive function, sleep, stress, and anxiety problems that feed dysregulated relationships with substances. It is effective, but it does not start from your actual physiology.
The other approach, where most of the field works, starts with quantitative EEG (QEEG). I think the assessment itself drives much of the change. When I show you your brain and name patterns you already live with, something shifts. If your anterior cingulate is running in high gear, you may get stuck, looping, obsessive. If your posterior cingulate and back midline are stuck on watch-the-road threat scanning, you ruminate and run threat-sensitive. Seeing it gives you a target. You can place a sensor over that back midline, measure the beta moment to moment, and train up the alpha tone that lets the circuit put its fist down. You feel the circuit stretch. It wears off in a few hours, you tell your coach, you train again, and it builds.
The real shift starts before any training. Once you treat your suffering as physiology with a label, it stops being something happening to you. A therapist holds a container and works with transference. My role is different. I am a coach and a scientist. My job is to teach you what your brain is doing and hand agency back to you. You become your own expert. I describe this whole model across the biohacking work, including Biohacking Anxiety and Biohacking OCD.
The muscle metaphor holds. Most of what people suffer from, anxiety, executive function problems, sleep dysregulation, looks closer to a resource that has spasmed or gotten stuck in one regulation mode than to a progressive disease. Stretch it, and it loosens. Train it repeatedly, and the looser pattern holds.
How is EEG neurofeedback different from other biofeedback?
Biofeedback is the umbrella. EEG neurofeedback trains the brain. EMG trains muscle tone. Heart rate variability training works on the vagus nerve and the beat-to-beat variability that reflects sympathetic and parasympathetic balance. At Peak Brain we integrate these toward your goals rather than around a diagnosis. A program might combine HEG or HRV biofeedback, EEG neurofeedback, mindfulness, a sleep tracker, or a ketone meter for working on insulin resistance and sleep strategy. You watch the downstream effects show up on later brain maps.
What does peak performance mean if you are already regulated?
People are weird, and weird is fine. I am not measuring you against a population average to make you average. The map is a yardstick that shows where you stand and what jumps out.
On executive function we use continuous performance tests, which are valid go/no-go measures. Compared to others your age, they show where you are impulsive, where you are inattentive, where auditory and visual stamina diverge. The value comes from reading the physiology under the label. A teacher says a fourteen-year-old is "really ADHD." The map shows executive function fine for the first fifteen minutes and burning out in the last five. That is a stamina issue. The brain shows low beta and draggy alpha rather than the high theta of classic ADHD. The kid is anxious, has sleep maintenance problems, and is brittle and reactive rather than hyperactive. You cannot always tell those apart in a stressed teenager by watching behavior.
Alpha speed carries another set of clues. If your individual alpha frequency runs slow for your age and you are over thirty or thirty-five, you likely get word-finding trouble, delayed recall, and tip-of-the-tongue moments. People assume that is aging-related memory loss. It usually is not. Age-related memory decline hits episodic memory, your first-person experiences, well before semantic and word information, which you keep until you are far into a dementia process. Word finding and delayed recall come from a timing problem. You reach to load information into working memory and the handoff mismatches, so you grind your gears. In a kid the opposite happens. The alpha runs so fast that finding words is easy but absorbing new information is hard. You read a book and notice ten minutes in that your mind wandered off for eight of them, because there was nothing stable to synchronize the information flow. I unpack the alpha mechanics in Decoding Alpha Waves and the aging picture in The Critical Aging Window.
Seeing these patterns is not always a cue to start neurofeedback. Sometimes it is a cue for agency. If you just had COVID and I see Delta everywhere, that maps onto how uncomfortable you feel, and the move might be sleep work, oxidative stress strategies, or a metabolic intervention, then a remap in a few months to track it the way you track a lipid panel. For brain fog specifically, see Biohacking Brain Fog.
How does mindfulness fit with neurofeedback?
Jon Kabat-Zinn defined mindfulness as paying attention in a particular way, in the present, on purpose. People often assume it is relaxation. It is an act of executive function. You do not arrive at the gym strong. You arrive weak, you train, and later you are strong. You sit to meditate and your mind wanders, your knee hurts, your stomach rumbles. That is the rep. Most forms of mindfulness use an anchor that recruits the prefrontal cortex to hold attention on a single point as the present moves by.
Executive systems sit in the foundation along with sleep and stress, the three things that scaffold higher human functioning. There is no mood thermostat in the brain, but there are measures for sleep quality and executive maintenance. Train those and the larger system tends to resolve.
Mindfulness adds the voluntary piece that neurofeedback lacks. Neurofeedback is the coach in the gym building the resource. Mindfulness is the coach in the field, the one who notices you are dropping your shoulder when you try to execute. Every Peak Brain client gets mindfulness training if they want it, and we run weekly groups online and in person. We also build healthy habits in afterward, because fixing a sleep problem can translate into better sexual function months later once cortisol drops. More on the training side in Biohacking Meditation and Mindfulness: Don't Just Do Something, Sit There.
Can brain training help with sexual function?
Sexual identity, expression, and pleasure are complex and individual. A sexual complaint usually arrives wrapped in something else. Performance complaints often read as anxiety. Some are parasomnias, like the men who cannot fall asleep because a middle-of-the-night erection wakes them, almost like a tic. Performance pressure behaves like any other flavor of anxiety.
A large group I see is women in their late thirties and forties working hard to get pregnant, where cortisol gets in the way. A fertility doctor will tell them that addressing the anxiety or sleep problem would do as much as the hormones, and they find us that way. I work the sexual piece inside the larger goal map. For an anxious client the target is the flavor of anxiety, the perseveration, the social anxiety, or the attachment and trauma history, and you can train down amygdala reactivity. Other cases are quirkier: nighttime arousal phenomena, or post-SSRI depersonalization with anhedonia and low sexual tone. Not all of these are fully tractable with neurofeedback. What you can move well is anxiety, sleep quality, and plasticity. Improving those narrows the field, so the remaining work with a fertility doctor or another specialist gets more specific, because you are no longer fighting to drive cortisol down once deep sleep regulates. For the underlying circuitry, see Biohacking Fight or Flight and Where Is Love in the Brain?.
Where can you do this?
We have physical offices in West LA (Culver City), Costa Mesa in Orange County, St. Louis, and Manhattan, with concierge technicians in London and Stockholm and a few other cities coming online. About 80 percent of our clients never see an office. We ship equipment and amplifiers, run brain mapping virtually, and staff live coaches seven days a week to teach you neurofeedback, troubleshoot your setup, and help you get the wires on. If you want to see how remote training runs, read Remote Neurofeedback: How It Works and What to Expect.
The model is personal training for the brain. You map your physiology, work a goal like ADHD, post-COVID fog, seizures, migraine, or creativity over three to six months, and then keep the agency going through continued habit work. The website is peakbraininstitute.com. Map your brain, see where you stand, and pick the one pattern worth training first.