How I Changed My Brain In 6 Weeks (Using Neuroscience)

I spent six weeks training my brain with neuro feedback, a system that claims it can literally retrain your brain waves. So, the changes that I saw caught me completely off guard and they stuck around. I'm Dr. Thomas Smith. I'm a clinical psychologist. I spent decades exploring ways to optimize social and psychological health for myself and for my clients. So, this is going to be the first in a series of videos where I test out something promising and then I share my experience with you because I feel like we can always grow and there's always more to learn. A couple of years ago, a family member reached out and told me about their experience with neuro feedback. They raved about how helpful it was. They were feeling less stressed, calmer, more focused. She'd been working with Dr. Andrew Hill, a UCLA trained cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in functional brain health and performance optimization. Dr. Hill runs Peak Brain Institute, which as well as having remote training, also has multiple physical locations around the US and Europe, one of which happens to be 15 minutes away from me in New York City. If you've read my book, you will know I love being a guinea pig. I love trying out different treatments and things that I think may help. So, I agreed to have my brain mapped and to have the neuroscientist, Dr. Andrew Hill, look at it. And I agreed to a six-w week trial of neuro feedback with testing at the end to see if there's any changes. And of course, being me, I took a pretty exhausting battery of tests of my own so that I'd be able to track any progress over time. Just to be clear, they didn't pay me to go there or talk about this, but they did give me a pretty hefty discount for being a psychologist. I really had no idea what neuro feedback was, but being interested, I did go look into the research on it a little bit. So what I discovered is that neuro feedback is a way of attempting to nudge the brain waves we have in a way that allows us to get some beneficial results. I discovered there's actually some evidence showing this can be a helpful intervention. They have studies showing benefits for attention and focus, for mood, for stress, for cognitive performance, and for sports performance. You might have even seen maybe on Netflix some of the footage of athletes doing some neuro feedback. My initial reaction when I went and dug around the research was that it's a promising intervention, but it's kind of early days as far as establishing it. More importantly, I couldn't see evidence that it was harmful or that there were really great risks to trying it. One thing that I think was really interesting was the idea that you could get a look at your own brain and then tweak your own brain. So the first step in this was getting up really early in the morning and then going in for a Q EG. So a quantitative EEG. This is basically where they're trying to get a look at my brain. They're trying to understand all the different areas of my brain and how my brain waves are functioning. They put in this cap which is quite fetching looking, but then they have to take this big thing of gel in order to get the best read possible on the electrical signals coming off the skull. When I had this cap on hooked up to the computer and the reader, I had to do a few minutes of staring at a wall with my eyes open and then a few minutes with my eyes closed. when it was just reading my resting brain waves. There's a range of waves that we have as humans and they're picking up on all of these and they're looking across the brain. And what they're doing with this information once it's done with computers, they are adding all these brainwave data together and then they compare it to a sample of people in your same age range. I think that the base of samples is in the hundreds of thousands. And what they're looking at is how is your brain different to the average brain? Like I try to introspect and understand myself, but if I can have objective data of like this is what we're seeing, then that's really useful. You know, I want to know how much of it's in my mind, how much it's in my brain. >> A few days later, I hopped on a video call with Dr. Andrew Hill. Nice to meet you. >> Yeah, good to meet you as well. And we went over my results to look at what he was seeing, what I wanted to work on, and then to set up what the protocol would be for the 6 weeks of neuro feedback. And as a side note, I honestly was a little bit anxious because like I haven't seen my brain before, and I'm like, what if my brain is super weird? Like what if things are like really off? before the call he sent me these images of my brain which I had no idea how to understand and some data. >> So we have two things to look at today. >> Okay. >> Uh one is your performance test and then we'll have a brain map and let's >> it was fascinating to have this call with him to look at my brain in such detail go over the images. >> I want to walk through the unusualness of you and people are weird like really weird generally. So, we're doing a population comparison thing, but good job. Be weird. The point is not why aren't you average. >> Yeah. >> It's to try to figure out if some of the quirks or features or trait patterns you have are interesting, meaningful things you want to exploit or change or work on. >> What I thought was honestly pretty interesting is he would look at the data, he would point things out in my brain and he would make guesses about what he thought my experience was and 80% of the time it was true. I probably am seeing the phenomena of you feeling fatigued and closing your eyes. I mean, that's that very much lines up with this. >> So, he could see from looking at my brain that I was experiencing stress. He said he could tell from looking that I wasn't able to concentrate and focus for a long time without feeling exhausted, which is very true. He also saw my tendency to go into my brain and think a lot. And these are things that I have dealt with long term, doing pretty well at. So, it was interesting that he was still seeing that in my brain data. Based on this and also asking me kind of what I wanted to work on, he set up a protocol for what we'd work on for the next 6 weeks. One thing that was kind of interesting is I went into this thinking, "Oh yeah, I'm going to do my ongoing work on anxiety and self-confidence and calming my nervous system." But when I was talking to him about what really got most in the way for me, I realized it was brain fog. I realized that I really did struggle at that time in my life to work more than maybe three or four hours a day. I would just get really mentally exhausted, kind of come to accept it. I've been trying to find ways to work on it, but it was just my day-to-day life. So, we figured out the protocol, what targets we were trying to work on, and we agreed that I would do 6 weeks of neuro feedback in office three times a week. You can do about 20 sessions, >> um maybe 22 or something and three times a week and we'll grab another set of data with Monica after that. Not like it's not a full clinical course if you will or a full suite, >> but it's definitely enough to stick some changes for you and it's definitely enough to experience and to see changes in the data. >> So, I was really excited to get going. A couple of days later, I had my first session booked. Luckily, it wasn't the fancy cap with all the gel. Instead, it was a a much lighter um electrodes being they do my ears, but then they would maybe just do a couple of electrodes on my brain. So, it was far less intensive. The the way it works is they figured out they're going to target some particular part of the brain that day. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to take the brain waves that are a little bit different than normal. They're trying to nudge them into the normal range and then we're going to see if that has uh subjective benefit. So, the way they do that is kind of fun. You have the electrodes on, you look up at a screen and you get to pick a series of different games. You can pick the ones you want. You're not forcing anything to happen. They're not telling you what to do. You're basically looking at the screen. You want this game to work. And then when your brain waves naturally move a little bit closer to where they're supposed to be, you get rewarded. There'll be like a noise, like a ding, a noise, and then something good will happen in the game. I tried doing this race car game, and every time that your brain waves in those areas happen to go where they wanted them to be, the car would pick up speed and start going. And then when it very naturally moved out of that range back to where you normally hang out, the car would slow down. It was rewarding. Like the system is literally rewarding your brain waves for being in the right place. The idea is you do this consistently enough and after a while your brain waves kind of want to go to the area they've been rewarded. And this is why it works over time. So I tried a series of games. The race car one was too stressful. There's a Pac-Man one I thought was, you know, again, a little stressful. What I found that I liked was sort of like a jigsaw puzzle one. You would start off with an empty screen and every time your brain waves would go into the right spot. One piece of the picture would show up. Over time, you would start to get a sense of maybe what the image was. That maybe doesn't sound quite as exciting as like a race car game, but it actually was rewarding. Like we know from research that completing a puzzle like that, it's rewarding inherently for people. So, you would see a picture start to form over time. I decided I liked that and that is what I stuck with for the whole time. I picked a lot of art pictures and nature pictures and animal pictures. Each session was maybe 30 to 45 minutes long and I didn't know each time which part of the brain we were going to work on because it was designed to be adaptive meaning they are getting feedback from me every morning after a session every night. So they were able to track how I was feeling and my feedback on how I felt after each session. So they would take that into account. They'd also look at the data that they collected of my brain waves in the session and they would adjust the protocol each time. I really liked the people at Peakbrain. I went so much that I really got to know them and they were also a positive calming presence as I was doing this training. I would look forward to it. And maybe 3 weeks in, I started to notice things. I didn't necessarily expect much out of this. I was quite skeptical going in. Maybe two or 3 weeks in, I noticed that sometimes I would go into a session a bit stressed out or kind of in a bad mood or kind of fighting off, ruminating about something. But then over the course of the session, I would calm down. I'd start to just feel a little bit better and I'd come out of the session feeling like I was in a different state. A few times, I don't know which particular areas they were working on, but a few times I'd actually feel like pretty happy, like it was like doing something to boost my mood. Maybe after about 4 weeks, I started to notice a pretty big shift. Like all of a sudden I found myself having a lot more mental energy. My ability to focus shot up. Instead of being groggy, I would wake up full of energy. I would sort of jump out of bed enthusiastic, motivated, ready to do things. That translated to kind of the biggest shift of all, which was I was able to work a lot more than I had before. I wasn't getting kind of burned out at three or four hours. I felt like I had sort of this endless amount of like mental energy. I could basically work as much as I wanted to. I kind of had to stop myself from working too much. My mood was like subtly better. If something happened, it wouldn't rock me as much. I was just like I was kind of more stable. It wouldn't it wouldn't impact me. One tangible way that you can see this is if you've been to the channel like in the past, you've been watching for a while or maybe if you just go look at it now, you can see I tried to do this channel a couple of other times. Honestly, it was just too much work. It was too hard to do. But if you go back and see how those videos used to look and how they are now, you'll notice there's a pretty big difference in the channel. And that is because I suddenly had access to like five hours more mental energy every day. So yeah, kind of this channel being the way it is now owes some debt to neuro feedback, which was part of why I wanted to do a video on it to start this series. So I got to the end of the six weeks and I had the call with Dr. Hill. He asked me how it was going and I told him, "I feel like I'm 30 again. Like, what have you done to me?" And he was like, "Do you mean in a good way or?" I'm like, "Yeah, in a good way." I was explaining like my I feel like I have a 30-year-old brain now. He told me the changes that he had seen in my brain scan and how it lined up with what I was experiencing. And then I showed him the results of my testing. I retested myself. And what I found was there were some areas where there was no change. I had very little change in things like my self-esteem or like my sleep quality. But I did have in my test solid improvements in mood and stress and serious changes in motivation, vitality, and cognitive engagement. I was very encouraged. I asked him, "Can I give you money and get like six more weeks of this?" So I did. that actually went a little bit differently and I'll get into that in a minute. But if you've watched this far into the video already, you might be interested in another way of training your brain. Today's sponsor, Brilliant. 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To learn for free on Brilliant, go to brilliant.org/domasman. Scan the QR code on screen or tap the link in the description. Brilliant is also giving our viewers 20% off an annual premium subscription which unlocks unlimited daily access to everything on Brilliant. Back to the other brain training neuro feedback. Let's dive into what happened in the second round of training. So I'm back for another 6 weeks. I've graduated so I'm doing two areas with my brain at the same time. It's harder but I like it. Feels good. When it came to results, what I found with six more weeks was that I did have some improvement, but it wasn't this big leap like it was doing it the first time in my testing. I ran the test again. I definitely had a bump up, but it wasn't dramatic. It showed me like the real dramatic results came in that 4 to 6 week period. So, one of the things I really want to note here that was surprising for me was that the benefit that I had after 4 to 6 weeks and after 12 weeks, those benefits have stuck around for me. I really had those positive impacts last 6 months after doing this, a year after doing this. It was maybe only a year and a half after starting that I've started to notice the benefits kind of taper off a little bit. So, guess what my plan is? I'm going to go do it again. I'm going to go do another 6 weeks. I'm going to do my tests. I'm going to see what does it do for me this time. I may even adapt my goals a little bit to target some of my new outcomes I care about. So, I really want to try to work on my sleep and maybe I want to do a little more nervous system regulation. So, I do want to note what I'm describing to you is my personal experience with this. It is not a randomized control trial study proving how this works. I could not control everything else in my life. I couldn't test against some twin that I have to see what happened to them with not doing it. What I got to see was what happened when I tried it. It very well could have been that I would have made these changes. Anyway, there could have been other things going on in my life that led to these changes. The people that I've spoken to who've done this cuz I've recommended it to friends, some of them have tried it out and what I've found is one person had this great response like I did. Another person had a moderate but very good response um especially around feeling calm and stable. And then a third person had not much of a response. If you're interested in neuro feedback like maybe look a little more into it. It does cost money. It takes dedication. It's a lot of time investment. If you want to work on nudging your brain waves in healthy directions, but you feel like you're maybe not ready for the investment of neuro feedback, well, we know from research there's evidence that meditation, yoga, exercise, and maybe even listening to music can also influence those brain waves. So, I've been doing experiments like this on myself adult life. I intend to do more videos on it to show you in this series. I also have a newsletter where I get into the insights that I pull out of research and out of my own experience and other things that I think might be useful and helpful. So check that out in the link below as well. So neuro feedback trained my brain waves. But training is only half the game. The other half is recovery. So, watch this video next to learn the four pathways that help you mentally recharge.