How to Get Your Brain Back to Optimal Cognition with Dr. Andrew Hill

adhd folks make lots of theta so they can move they can see the solution or the elegant thing or jump over the linear into the insightful of the creative and they're very good at that not so good at sort of sinking into the sweet spot where the arousal level the creativity level the focus level the activation level are all dialed in perfectly and you have control over a present set of resources because that requires internal maintenance in some way you have to sort of keep yourself in a zone in a mode that's hard to do what does it take to do the impossible what does it take to level up your game like never before what does it take for individuals organizations for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting nothing is ever the same again breakthroughs our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance access the minds of maverick scientists groundbreaking innovators and world leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best perform your best and accomplish your boldest goals i'm your host rhian doris and together with best-selling author stephen kotler i present to you flow research collective radio [Music] dr andrew hill welcome to flow research collective radio it's absolutely great to have you here at long last oh thanks for thanks for having me nice to see you again yeah yeah you too yeah we first met in i think it was 2018 here in la you were incredibly generous and kind setting me up with uh brain training and your feedback at your offices in peak brain in la and uh we've been meaning to do this for for a while so i'm really glad we're getting the chance to drop in here so i wanted to start andrew with your your phd which you did in cognitive neuroscience in in ucla and i wanted to just ask you what the core focus of your phd was on and how it led you to to where you are present day and what you're currently working on sure um so when you think about a phd of course the old joke is that you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing the more practical way of thinking about a phd is you end up developing sort of domain expertise in a certain population of interest or complaint or ask area of science or question and you develop some tool sets methodology to explore that question and those two things will frame a lot of how you think about you know science and the stuff you're doing and for me the area of cog neuro so cognitive neuroscience is the overlap of mind and brain essentially and for me the area of cognitor i was interested in was how the mind produces the aspects of attention and i ended up working in a lab at ucla with a professor named dr iran zeidel who died last year dr zeidel was one of the last great scientist who did the split brain research with uh uh sperry and bogan years ago i think iran was a grad student at cal tech um and was not doing psychology and they were like go work for this guy roger sperry oh okay he's like a physics grad student or something and ended up becoming a laterality researcher and becoming famous for doing lots of intra-hemispheric stuff dr zeidel did can you give a quick breakdown for people on on sperry's work and that that research it's very famous in neuroscience but yeah yeah so years ago i i'm i'm really bad at numbers so i'm guessing it was the late 50s early 60s when this happened but it could be later there was a bunch of neuroscientific research done looking at how to work on intractable seizures essentially and these two neurosurgeons were um finding they could arrest medication intractable seizures by cutting the corpus callosum this fiber bundle that connects the two cortices the top parts of the brain uh left to right kind of like a little if you held your hands like this the corpus callosum or the biggest commissure or bundle that crosses laterally is it's like a nike swoosh if you cut the brain this way you see a little nike swoosh in the middle big white matter tract and it's a giant highway of of connecting different hemispheric collaterality pieces and when a seizure happens one of the ways is a little bit of the brain better the cortex will create a little coherent spike a little delta or discharge spike and when it's strong when it's too organized when it looks like a heartbeat basically it's too you know specific then it can recruit neighbors into doing the same thing and that can bounce back and forth across those white matter tracks of the wiring left to right and the intensity builds up as it goes back and forth and the whole system destabilizes and that's called a seizure in this case a grand mall or tonic clonic seizure these scientists found that if you cut that corpus callosum initially they were doing complete called comacerotomies or complete severing of the left and right uh fiber bundles other the corsets away from each other by cutting the fiber bundle completely then the seizure couldn't build up and you you eliminated dramatic seizure issues in most people and oddly enough there was very little evidence you'd cut the largest information highway in the brain it was very subtle in terms of effect the person after recovering from the surgery didn't seem to have much noticed effect and then they started discovering some strange things where if you did specific things where you presented information to essentially one hemisphere at a time you could discover that the hemispheres were actually in some ways independent attention systems so the classic example of this is you put your hand under a table so you couldn't see it and so we put objects in your hands if an object was in your uh for most people your right hand you could name it but if in your left hand you couldn't name it but you might be able to point to uh something on the screen like it does this you could use it you could understand what it was but you couldn't find the word for it because language production often lives in the left hemisphere and so this leads to weird things that have been captured and i'm sure oliver sacks put a book on it or you know other popular psych but there's the alien hand or foreign hand syndrome again because language is largely left hemisphere especially for men in the front for production in the back for reception of language that's really because the way the visual fields and hemispheres work you get sort of sorting of information to one hemisphere and if you were holding a book let's say with your right hand trying to read it your right hand might put the book down because they'll oh sorry the way around your left hand but put the book down because you're right hemisphere couldn't read no interested holding a book or extreme cases have been reported to folks like you know one hand buttons up the pajamas other hand unbuttons the pajamas because they disagree about what we're doing right now so little creepy things like that but dr zeidel was a grad student watching all this research happen and then he ended up working with other researchers later in italy and other places in israel in in the 80s and 90s and 2000s a lot of the research that was still being done on seizure found that you could do partial resections of that big tract and still get the dramatic reduction of seizure especially if you took the fibers that were going to the areas and just resected the anterior part of the middle or the back and so dr zadel's research was all about probing the hemispheres of the brain by flashing things very quickly into one visual field or the other on the screen and then having folks respond with a mouse with one hand or the other and by doing that you can route the informational ask on the task on the screen through one hemisphere or the other you can demand so he developed a system of how the brain works by using split brain subjects and then took that research testing how information works in each hemisphere into non-split brain subjects and found the same kind of information flow and and attention management so that was the lab that i worked in at ucla dr zeidel's uh hemispheric laterality uh cognitive neuroscience lab and we tested how attention works in the hemispheres and i went in there with some neurofeedback or brain training experience so often as what happens in grad school is your mentor has certain skills and interests your grad student comes in you kind of mesh those things so i ended up doing a lot of work around the laterality or left right hemisphere impacts and effects of things like neurofeedback and how to get attention to change by manipulating attention in different hemispheres separately and i end up doing some cool research with the navy a little bit looking at attention systems in the brain in real time you know high demand situations and uh my dissertation work what they gave me a phd for the thing that i learned more and more about until i knew the tiniest details was essentially neurofeedback i studied i created one of the first double-blind placebo-controlled studies of neurofeedback where i ran 40 people through five days in a row of neurofeedback with a full head 64-channel cap on top of the neurofeedback wires and had a double-blind sham kind of condition built in for a quarter of them and looked at how the brain reacted to being rewarded for making different brain waves the passive biofeedback loop which i can break down further if you want but i was trying to figure out how the brain was noticing neurofeedback what was actually happening in the learning experience of the brain and watched across five days how the brains reacting to neurofeedback changed based on if it was sham if it was left hemisphere training of low i called smr if it was left hemisphere fast beta if it was right hemisphere training of beta so i examined the hemispheric specificity the frequency specificity and some of the attention effects on attention testing as it changed in a single five day course of neurofeedback which is just enough neurofeedback to start things moving not enough to really make much change but people start feeling it about three or four sessions in so i wanted to capture that little what's happening how is the brain binding to the information so that's what i did my uh my phd on thank you for that breakdown fantastic and thanks for bringing us up to speed i actually just want to start by getting your simple or generic breakdown of what biofeedback is what neurofeedback is uh well not when i mention neurofeedback around people who are not that familiar with it they often struggle to understand sort of how it actually happens as well so i would love also a breakdown and maybe an example of what it actually looks like to do neurofeedback training as well i'll say ryan it took me six months of being a neurofeedback technician before i could conceptualize what was happening it's it's a little mysterious once you get it it's not that hard but it's it's a little mysterious with all the technology hooked up so um i my guess is in about five minutes your listeners will understand more than i did five and a half months in so that's a i could you know save some pain for you guys biofeedback is a form of modifying the body essentially by taking things that are not normally appreciable like your heartbeat your body temperature and making them under your voluntary awareness so you can then learn to like change them and this is something like hrv biofeedback like the heart math devices or old school stuff like hand warming to drop headaches is biofeedback you can look at your activation level and stress level and some breath work and change that as a way of doing some biofeedback but generally when we say the word biofeedback what we mean is peripheral nervous system control things that are outside the skeletal system you know the controlling your heart maybe your skin your parasympathetic to sympathetic activation is biofeedback in the body neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback that has some unique properties by definition it's just stuff that's on the central nervous system so stuff inside the bone you know the skull in the spine that's the cns and because it's the cns you're not really aware of it the same way you are in the peripheral body so neurofeedback is measuring the brain usually and training it to change but the process of change becomes involuntary operant conditioning or involuntary shaping so this is how it actually works and i'll give you a concrete example let's say you wanted better executive function you wanted to control your distractibility better which we all you know many of us want to do some of us have adhd some of us don't but many of us could benefit from some resource building in the distractibility way there's a brain wave called smr sensory motor rhythm which is a low beta brain wave and if any of you have seen a cat lying on a windowsill watching a bird you've seen smr it's this liquid still body and laser-like focus that cat seeing a prey animal outside maybe it's the tail is twitching but the body is just still mostly because you can leap onto an animal you can you can leap into action from relaxation much much better than from tension so that mixed state of still body and focused mind is a high smr state and mammals most animals make smr as a way to inhibit if you will or stop things from happening if you have poor smr tone your brain tends to make seizures and neurofeedback was discovered by mistake in the late 60s by dr barry sturman because he trained up smr in cats because it was so obvious and of the you know 32 cats or something he was training a certain group of them had these magic sorry let me back up this is a worthwhile story to tell so dr barry sturman was at ucla in the in the 50s and 60s and uh he's still an emeritus faculty he's still occasionally doing lectures but he was exposing cats to rocket fuel vapors on requests of nasa to figure out how dangerous this stuff was this methyl hydrazine because the astronauts were not enjoying breathing in vapors when they were exposed to it so there was a research study and in the 60s we had much more lacks animal research so this is the part of the story it's hard but dr sturman found that minutes exposed to the vapor would create increased symptoms where they would had vocalizations they would pant they would drool become unsteady in their gait and ataxic have seizure then coma then death it was a perfect dose dependent curve where minutes equaled symptoms more more and more symptoms for 24 of the 32 cats he had in his little subject pool eight of them super cats refused to have seizures while the other cats were falling over and having major problems at about 40 50 minutes in the other cats were showing mild instability events in the brain two and a half hours exposed couldn't figure out why one group of cats seemed very different than the others and then he remembered that these cats have been used in a prior experiment six months before to see if you could get them to raise this brainwave the cats make a lot of whenever he squirted chicken broth into their mouth to applaud it happening he could they raised it great back in the subject pool well this brainwave makes your brain resistant to being destabilized it turns out and later on he stumbled across this by mistake and then his lab manager was in medication uncontrolled epileptic they built her an auditory feedback and she beeped whenever her smr went up and over the next few months they trained her smr up and she was on huge meds and having lots of seizures and they eventually went off all her meds remained seizure-free for a year so this was the start of the field of neurofeedback clinically so to speak in the late 60s and we still train this smr frequency and now we often train it for things like adhd as well as seizures but um the cat in the windowsill still body and laser-like focus is the opposite of adhd literally high high smr low theta is anti-adhd state when it reverses high theta means like air in the brake lines and low smr support inhibitory tone you're moving a lot distractible your brain's like swirl you know it's very outside world reactive and it's not focused on the goal so literally that calm cat is the opposite of an adhd state if you stick a wire in the part of the brain which is involved with monitoring if you're paying attention and measure smr and measure theta which is a release state in some ways as they change moment to moment as your smr happens to go up and the smr sorry the theta happens to go down you just applaud the brain and say yeah good job brain and make a little game on the screen move so your pacman eats some more dots or your puzzle pieces start to fill in or your spaceship starts to fly better and a couple seconds later your brain moves in the wrong direction for the workout your smr goes down your theta goes back up and the software slows down the pac-man stalls the beeps go away and the brain's like hey i was watching stuff i don't like no stuff where's the stuff and then a couple seconds later happens to move in the right direction and the software resumes good job brain good job brain nope good job good job good job nope again and again and the big trick here is every few seconds we move the goal posts so over half an hour sitting there your brain gets little bursts of applause for runs or trends it engages in of reducing its theta and raising its smr and the mind can't feel its brain waves that's why it's so mysterious and no one knows how it works if you know as they do it because the mind can't tell that the computer game was happening only when a certain you know if you always moved your arm and the game always moved you'd know what it was doing but it's moving whenever your theta moves it moves or something or beta moves it moves so your brain however likes the information and has no idea it's not a real thing in the world like a musical instrument or a car you're trying to drive and you're changing the rules so it's trying to adapt a little bit as you go in that half an hour session and usually after about three sessions or four sessions later on that day or the next day your brain reaches for the state and says hey wait i want information what low theta hi hi smr and the person goes oh i feel calm and if you ask your kid to take the trash out when that happens they get up and do it and i get frantic calls my kid took the trash out i asked once it was weird or whatever you know like you get to get weird subtle effects showing up and the process of getting the change in neurofeedback becomes one like personal training where you sort of look at your brain on an assessment pick some goals start gently working the resources out in this involuntary exercise way but then you report the next day or later that day how was your sleep how's your stress how's your attention how's your drinking how's your trauma and you get effects so it's mysterious but not a blind process for you and after you know as you try different things you feel different things you know beta on this side produces more self-control beta on this side produces more alertness so if you come in and say oh i was super charged up and i could focus all night but i couldn't fall asleep i might do some you know different beta wave for you and say how was that oh it was great i could focus and i could fall asleep okay great that's your workout there let's do that a few times and then it builds up and becomes more stable as you experience it again so it's involuntary exercise on brain waves using operant conditioning or shaping like skinner's pigeons you know i promise this is not pavlov's dog i will not make you drool but we take things that already exist you know brain waves we shape them a little bit like pavlov did with his pigeons yeah when i first did neurofeedback with you andrew that was one of the things i was so struck by is how it feels passive because it's happening the responses that are neurological are happening sort of outside conscious awareness as you said there's not a perfect map between your brain wave state and your subjective experience yeah and and we're measuring one little two little three little things you're doing out of a billion things moment to moment so while we can pick up some things like i probably had you look at your theta wave number like here's your microvolts here's the amount of theta okay concentrate when you concentrate you suck shut down theta in your in your brain so you can see it happen if you focus you can see theta drop usually but most brain waves are subtle and myriad and billions of things happening and you as the as the person you're kind of like the conductor of the symphony where you might notice the out of tune guy in the corner but you're kind of trying to you're more of the audience actually the conductor's the brain you're like the audience who's just kind of taking in the giant composition and doesn't really notice that second chair oboe has a flat read or whatever the term would be you know like it's very we're not very good at feeling our brain there's no sensor nerve endings in our brain there's very little accurate perception of our brain a lot of it's the brain deciding sort of symbolically and you know metaphorically what it's experiencing and making meaning of it so uh it's very in imprecise and indirect against the real world so i want to ask you about adhd one of the questions we get most frequently is about the relationship between adhd and flow and you mentioned attention earlier on being one of the core focuses of your phd and i know adhd is a big focus within that for you um and interestingly when i did the brain map with you guys as well what was mentioned was that i had a camera house phrase but either a disposition or a certain sort of orientation toward a kind of adhd that results in difficulty channeling attention but higher attention once it is sort of challenged or engaged and so i'm curious there's a few questions in there but first off you know if you can just talk about about adhd and attention and then um whether there are different sort of strains of adhd so to speak or different ways that it manifests sure um there there's a lot there let me impact a little bit uh yeah adhd has many things the classic adhd brain is one that that has difficulty directing it's it's powerful resources you know you can think of this as a hunter versus a gatherer the hunter is really good under high stress circumstances but don't put them weed in the garden they're not gonna you know they're gonna be bored or don't have that person doing your taxes you know don't have your mma fighter doing your taxes they're going to be bored and not not enjoy it so there's a certain amount of playing to our strengths and humans are built in many different ways and adhd is sort of a natural variant we need hunters as well as the new gatherers but problematic adhd in a modern sense is people getting stuck too far in one mode or the other and not be able to change out of it to some extent when it's diagnosable or classic problematic adhd the person usually has a hard time directing how their brain is responding to demands of the environment or rather they only just respond to the environment they don't self-direct their attention so if things are intense they're on and if things are boring they're chill but they can't necessarily be focused if things are boring so that's sort of one of the difficulties is voluntary selection over the mode suppressing theta bringing up beta so you can focus on the boring teacher talking because you should is something most people can do but in the hunter mind or the adhd classic distractible pattern matching novelty seeking mind that's high stimulus seeking it's going to not engage with the relatively low value information because it's it's a brain that's biased towards better switching in some ways and better dynamic task management i have a little bit of a different perspective on flow i think perhaps than than some of the the folks in your corner of the literature but i really i mean sometimes informed by you but by by you and and uh other folks but i sort of viewed as two things one is the ability to enter that highly focused effortless you know what what i think the the conventional flow state is i also think of as the non-linear access state the hypnogic state i forget if you've done any alpha theta neurofeedback with us but that sort of non-linear you know the moment you fall asleep are about to and the ideas pop into your head or the solution or the important thing pop that's a an access moment and i believe that is the doorway into a true flow state where you're sort of being ridden by your your higher and lower impulses at the same time you get out of your own way and just act that's a one that's one type of flow and it can be done almost dissociatively and it can be done lying you know with your eyes closed it can be done when you're in the middle of your sport then there's the other type where you're highly focused or highly present highly engaged i think that's more the the executive flow and the high performer flow and the sports person flow i think there's almost a divergent convergent kind of difference there on a uh you know the hypnagogic sort of flow tends to be very tightly coupled with spikes and creativity um and the kind of aha insights and then yeah i definitely agree on that adhd is some gifts in some of those areas and some deficits if you will or some difficulties accessing others because they'll be very able to access the switch from linear to non-linear to be creative to be abstract to see outside the box or to think of the the the fluid application of an old idea you know the fluid intelligence thing we take something you learn and apply it a novel way that's an adhd skill that comes from things like theta um from having the ability to almost put things together no one else would or have your mind move skip from one idea associatively to the other that's a wonderful thing for theta in fact we use theta for this like bubbling up memory experience around six and a half hertz in the brain is receptive memory or the stuff bubbling up so if you you know you can break that open that's why you get this access to old stuff sometimes doing alpha theta neurofeedback because you kind of crack yourself open a little bit for memory but um adhd folks make lots of theta so they can move they can see the solution or the elegant thing or jump over the linear into the insightful the creative and they're very good at that not so good at sort of sinking into the sweet spot where the arousal level the creativity level the focus level the activation level are all dialed in perfectly and you have control over a present set of resources because that requires internal maintenance in some way you have to sort of keep yourself in a zone in a mode that's hard to do that is not a skill set of the adhd person who's in some ways there to be responding to the highest stimulus and highest dynamic level of threat when it's classic adhd so there's some gifts in that but it's going to be like a powerful sports car with lousy shocks and brakes you know in the adhd person so i think if you can teach them to meditate you can blunt the distractibility impulsivity and give that particular gifted difficult brain all the gifts or you can do things like neurofeedback and train out the the stuckness of the adhd in a few months we can create multiple standard deviations of change in a few months usually on attention tests but without robbing you of any of your adhdness when you go to play your video game or hit the sports field or look at the abstract stock trading patterns you'll still have the ability to do the high stimulus non-linear thing but you can also sit and focus in a classroom or a boardroom or to your boring partner drone on about their you know boring day not that your partners are boring but you know uh the idea is that selection over our attention is a big issue in adhd classic you know in the way adhd but it does give us the gift i mean there's certain over-representation of people with a sort of adhd brain in art in the arts and creative things we may get similar over representation in mental illness as well you know genius and mental illness both come higher and people that have those kinds of brains um and uh so yes that that that flow implication if you will it's both a benefit and it has some difficulty with management you know so i want to ask you andrew in a moment about uh functional neuroscience which you mentioned before we before we jumped on but before we switch gears there a little bit what is your general recommendation to someone who's listening to this who's hearing you talk about neurofeedback who wants to do it or benefit from it what does the protocol look like you know i think a lot of people have heard of things like 40 years of zen or different neurofeedback um mechanisms and and feel free to by the way touch on peak brain specifically and what you guys do but i'm curious how someone takes this knowledge about your feedback and you know does it and gets benefits from it sure what do those steps look like yeah so of course you came into the office a couple years ago here and there until we pushed your brain around and had some you know a little hands-on experience um of course that was in the before times uh where the world's a bit different um we then and now do an awful lot of work with remote neurofeedback so how you do it in terms of you know where and how you execute for us has become a little bit irrelevant because we tend to work with clients virtually and with remote gear and we send open out but the general process i think in a best case best practices way is to think of neurofeedback like sophisticated personal training where you might want to do your dexa scan your strength assessment your bone density assessment and then work with your personal trainer who's got an ortho perspective to help you rebuild your skeleton very very targeted work and neurofeedback's the same way you look at your brain at rest uh what's called a brain map or a quantitative eeg and we then look at your performance of your attention skills again those things are compared to a database of people your age essentially so you can see where there's some bottlenecks in performance and maybe you have some classic theta or some you know other likely things to work on and the process of neurofeedback is usually training your brain for about half an hour about three four times a week and we like to recommend about 40 to 50 sessions minimum for a permanent change and when i say change i alluded to it but you can usually make a couple of standard deviations against the average population on executive function testing so if you're really distractible and you have adhd on a bell curve you're a couple of standard deviations off the mean and you do 40 or 50 sessions in your feedback and now you're above average above the mean likely permanently and there's no upper limit so we move out of a fix into a fitness and optimization so yes you can do things to help you with you know an injury or some concussions or postcoded brain or whatever or if you aren't creative enough you can crack yourself wide open or you can do some old you know trauma work or remediate your adhd that's kind of out in the way or whatever so it takes the things that used to be mysterious and used to be diagnosable and used to be in some ways the realm of a therapist and your doctor your your counselor and it gives you the agency over it so you can look at your brain and go oh i am distractible yeah that's something i want to work on and then as i was saying earlier you gradually iterate with your uh with your neurofeedback and peak brain works completely virtually these days as well as in our offices we have several in the us and you can come to our offices i think we're going to give all your listeners a nice discount so a half price on the brain map fee and once you know what you want to work on you can then get this iterative process going and we generally do about three to four months with clients and will make very large changes and put a floor under somebody for resources of like stress sleep attention uh pretty broadly so i would say there's lots of different technologies out there in the neurofeedback space and they're starting to get kind of fractured and divergent and i would encourage folks to always use a form of neurofeedback that is tailored to you that looks at your brain and helps you identify iterative you know targeted approaches a lot of the one-size-fits-all systems are either somewhat weak if they do work or they're poorly suited to you and actually cause trouble i tend to work with folks every week that come to see me because they've rented a one-size-fits-all system and exacerbated a brain injury or ptsd or some something because they weren't they weren't like everyone else when they started and it you know got worse so you can get some benefit from some from from some general approaches but i'd rather everyone start by doing tailored work if they can and do a brain map or a quantitative eeg to guide the process um so yes you can come see peak brains in you know different places in the us we can send you out gear we have some overseas offices but there's you know five or ten thousand practitioners in the us that beauty's work um my guess is you can find a local person to work with you and if you can't geekbrain will certainly you know send you out some gear and get you some brain training if you guys need so super and that's peakbraininstitute.com that's the best place to go for people who are interested in working with you guys directly or it is yep yep okay la.com is a shorter uh that was our first domain the peak brain institute's our main website and we have offices in la orange county new york city st louis some partners in london uh you can get brain maps done with uh a few other places in the world as well and even if you aren't near one of our offices most of our clients actually do brain mapping in the comfort of their own kitchen and that and then we ask with it because you know let's do two maps let's map it on caffeine or cannabis or adderall and you can learn today i did a map uh uh i'll i'll spoil he's gonna publish on his blog soon a guy named quantified bob who you might know okay bob troy i and we just did a caffeine map he's doing a big write-up on pre and post caffeine so maybe you want to see if your acetam or your methylene blue or your sleep deprivation from burning man has any impact and then you can just do empirical research so we like to offer that that biohackers special where you can just keep learning about your brain over time without the ongoing cost nice love that that's great thanks for that breakdown so you mentioned post covert brain before we dive into functional neuroscience what what have you been seeing with respect to post-cover brain with respect to long-haul covert and some of the some of the issues that people are are surfacing and then some of the solutions that you know you've seen whether neurofeedback or or just more broadly so so we now have two years plus of postcoded brains and unfortunately i see it a lot and it looks an awful lot like brains that used to come in with complaints about mold lime and concussion it looks the same it's a it's a non-specific often non-specific kind of inflammatory neuroinflammatory strain sometimes it's more specific on the sides of the brain or the back of the brain but that's usually because it tends to interact with old scar tissue i think that's what's happening so if you have a little bit of old like low-key wear and tear um that isn't causing you trouble from an old concussion or something that you've mostly recovered from and you get a neuroinflammatory state it anchors itself to the old scar tissue i think it tends to get really stuck so a lot of people come to see me there's a window just like concussions don't show up right away often in the brain they kind of bloom covet seems to do the same thing where you seem to get brain-based you know brain fog slow processing irritability you can't think clearly you're kind of burnt out it's just like a post-concussion state for many people but it's often three even as much as six months after you get covered is when it shows up and it seems to show up regardless of the severity of the covet it's it seems to be about underlying other inflammatory stuff other you know concussions you've had maybe if you have the conditions that seem to cause more exacerbated covet you know insulin resistance things like that seem to cause more likelihood of long covet as well but it's not that simple either because i get lots of young healthy people with mild or no symptoms in covid they still get long coveted three months later there was a one of the earliest articles on long covid and neuro stuff came out i think in the lancet about maybe nine ten months into the pandemic in the fall i think was in the fall and it it was in the spring anyways um the lancet and they showed that about 50 of people develop some sort of neuro symptom from long covid about six months after they get infected and that really does match what i'm saying i think it's almost a roll of the dice if you get covered even asymptomatically i think the chances are about half that you develop kind of like a wear and tear phenomena later on where you're just kind of burnt out and something you can't think as clearly and you're kind of moody and you have no stamina and you're kind of irritable and it feels like sleep dap and it feels like a concussion and it feels like chronic stress but it also responds just like those things just like concussions do and chronic stress responds very well to the same kinds of interventions so i've done lots of work just with neurofeedback and had great success just like a concussion tends to get resolved and you know several months in our feedback i've generally brought more things to bear when there's been post covet stuff for clients i've done other coaching so a lot you know most of what i do the heaviest lifter i have is neurofeedback but even before the pandemic i was getting more into the sense of you know biohacking or functional neuroscience what you can do outside of the scope of specific target interventions what you can do is modifiable behaviors what can you do with small lifestyle things what can you do with minimal viable practices that will give you that bio feedback that regulatory loop where you're watching things change doing things and then having them change some more and then doing some things you're steering the process of transformation or recovery or healing or optimization so you know we all we call it biohacking of course because we're because we're kind of geeky in that way we know what that means but you know our grandmothers and our moms my mom calls me every couple of years and says i'm out of prostitute send more you know and i give her some prostatement and she's been on it for years loves it you know but she was interested in prostam and cdp choline 15 years ago because we have alzheimer's in the family and she has a neuroscientist son so she's like hey what's this true brain stuff and i'm like oh yeah let me build your custom stack mode you know so she got into it that way and she's a rare grandma who uses nootropics i i think and you know i think i mapped her brain at one point as well and she had fun with that but i want folks to think about you know we know what we need to do for health and for wellness in many ways we often don't know why we know we should get good sleep probably shouldn't eat lots of sugar probably shouldn't carry lots of stress but why so i've been working on this coaching system in some ways i call functional neuroscience where i help people break down the aspects of sleep hacking or metabolic hacking around partitioning you know nutrients into time macros calories as a way of you know bumping up ketones essentially um circadian rhythm timing not just sleep hacking but the circadian rhythm aspects of it when to exercise to maximize insensitive insulin sensitivity and cortisol sensitivity and moving glycogen in and out and then the neurofeedback becomes a piece of that and often a big piece of it for our clients but there's a lot of things you can do with just an aura ring or just a loop strap or just a biostrap and a good log and a sense of what you want to do or a body fat scale or a biosense ketone meter or something and you a lot and what what the modern set of tools accessible neuroscience tools in some ways is letting us do is become our own neuroscientists like i can map your brain teach you about your brain now you have the agency it's not about me being your expert you know what your brain looks like you can map it again and we could do a lipid panel and realize that our sugar habit last month was causing some trouble and change it or whatever else we felt like you know we kind of have that agency and if you are chronically stressed or have long coveted or burnt out you might love that to know that doing a round of hyperbaric medicine and dropping carbs and jack and protein up to cause a massive anti-inflammatory effect and moving your high intensity workout to the afternoon to avoid cortisol resistance and do some low intensity exercise in a fasted state to create some circadian signals not about fat loss these things will all support steering the system we are carrying around so call it fitness call wellness call it whatever but because i'm a neuroscientist a lot of the coaching i do on the body is to support high brain performance and sleep regulation stress regulation attention regulation there's an awful lot you can do within the body to create the conditions for change in the brain and and for improved performance and decreased suffering in the brain so i've been teaching folks a lot about this aspect of it and we tend to do that coaching alongside our neurofeedback but i'll have a uh series of articles out later on this year maybe even an ebook on the basics of functional neuroscience for folks that want to get into this sort of biohacking in the body for for brain performance reasons that's a super breakdown thanks for that andrew what what are some of the if you did i don't know distill it down to three to five sort of functional neuroscience habits or behavior changes what are what's your hit list generally i'm outside of the neurofeedback sure do on top of it um the number one thing tends to be sleep packing and circadian aspects of that not just the sleep aspects but the circadian aspects and the biggest thing and i i i'm a bit of an iconic class in the biohacker world i don't care about light or blue black or glasses i don't think they're that uh impactful or meaningful for most people what i really care about is when you eat that's the number one exogenous or outside world cue for circadian it's a stronger cue than light but dramatically when you eat is more impactful than when you sleep for what time of day your brain thinks it is so controlling the times of food is a big deal for me and i like to give people a set of basic rules to play with in order importance and see how they unfold in terms of better sleep compressed sleep deeper sleep more energy more regulation more resilience faster speed of processing and they the rules are sort of like uh in order of importance fast before bed so adults like you and i would need about two three hours children can do it in two if you're really insulin resistant you might need four maybe longer but give yourself a window of no calories at the end of the day a pretty chunky window what that will let happen is your insulin will drop low and in the absence of insulin you'll be able to release growth hormone once you fall asleep if you have higher insulin you'll kind of just have this counter regulatory cortisol spike it'll suppress growth hormone so basically if you go to bed full you'll wake up tired and hungry and fat but if you go to bed hungry you wake up full of energy and lean so it's a little counterintuitive but the idea is to sort of lean into that cortisol spot the cortisol dropping instead of rising as you fall asleep and we also shouldn't eat before bed because melatonin shuts off the pancreas release of insulin so if you're if you're shoving food in your mouth in the day you're doing so in a very difficult insulin state where the cells can't handle so you're basically creating a high blood sugar state anyways if you eat before bed for most people so first rule fast before bed second rule get up early i don't care when you go to bed if you do care about light the light you should care about is the light that happens one hour within one hour of sunrise that's the only light that really matters for circadian rhythm entrainment there's a set of nuclei and cop on top of the optic chiasm or the optic nerve crossing called the suprachiasmatic nucleus that watches the color of light in the sky essentially in the air and it only notices color in the first hour of the day for a morning signal so go to bed early or so i go to bed uh fasted get up early and get some low intensity exercises in first thing in the morning cortisol wakes you up it squeezes your liver feeds you breakfast you should be wide awake and be able to you know run around and hunt things at first thing in the morning that's the idea so go ahead and do it do some sun salutations do a walk something before you eat um that ability to move and to uh it only takes about 15 minutes of like a full body exercise like a vinyasa flow or a sun salutation or 30 minutes of low-key things like walking to actually contribute to an autophagy state to trigger intracellular autophagy and exhaust resources but if you woke up in the morning and you reach for the weight you slam a hardcore workout or something you're calling for you're going to bonk you're going to drop all your blood sugar and you're going to call for more cortisol but your body's used to having high blood sugar and high cortisol first thing in the morning if you call for more all you're doing is creating resistance for blood sugar and cortisol so you're kind of working against the fitness stuff in some ways so go to bed early so i go to bed uh fasted get up early low intensity exercise before you eat in the morning even 15 minutes and then move your high intensity exercise like your kettlebells your resistance bands your weight lifting your hard core steady state hit whatever move that to the afternoon when your cardiac output is at its highest and resting cortisol is at its lowest so the spike you create through intense exercise does something instead of just cranking up your sympathetic tone love that and it's a fantastic breakdown it's a nice reminder as well that you know the don't eat before bed means three plus hours it's not just you know an hour or so um which is easy to slip on so i love that breakdown i want to close with a question we ask everyone on flow research collective radio it's a question about a question we call the research genie question the question is if you could click your fingers and instantly have all of the research done the randomized controlled trials whatever it is to answer any question that you've been pondering in your academic life or your personal life what would that question be wow i have so many questions that i would want to answer um and in the area of neurofeedback and the eeg tools that i use there's just so much basic low-hanging fruit that can be you know picked up and published so it's not just a genie there's like a whole bunch of genie grad students just getting their phds doing this but um probably something in the neighborhood of uh consciousness honestly because i have this i'm suspicious of consciousness honestly the more i get into neuroscience and the more i get into buddhism which kind of converge the less i believe in consciousness and the more i believe in sort of a moment-to-moment illusion of self as the evolutionary you know uh imperative to keep us doing things that start with f um so you know feeding and things like that and fighting and other stuff that starts with driven behaviors the illusion of self the attachment to the things we care about and and you know our in-group out group stuff and resource management that there's some evolutionary benefit for that but i'm i've seen consciousness interrupted so many times and so interestingly that i'd be interested to know uh if we could really do some of that deep research that would be hard to do on humans i'm fairly convinced there is no self beyond the manifestation moment to moment of the meat suit and i and i would love to find that answer essentially i think it will change i think if we had a deep sense of consciousness from a scientific perspective it would advance us even further out of the dark ages so to speak you know a couple of years ago we killed each other for our beliefs because of a different you know random saint or god we believed in or something and i have a hunch that if we could sort out some of the consciousness stuff it would sort of create that that buddhist promise of you know moving beyond suffering because he would be on attachment and reactive selves so that's uh not a scientific reason for it but i think that that'd be the reason i would want uh genie to invest their time in because it's a lot of work i love that there's an amazing book which you may have read by robert wright called why buddhism is true that that talks about the convergence between neuroscience and uh and buddhism and he talks a lot about the illusory nature of self from both perspectives it's very frustrating i i want to you know i want to be a spiritual guy but i can't be because i believe in science i want to be a scientific guy but the harder i get the science the the less i believe and some of the deepest underpinnings there so it all kind of breaks down uh it's all it does turtles all the way down you know yeah exactly that's it well um dr andrew hill thank you so much this was incredible by the way i appreciate it amazing pleasure amazing information for everyone beautifully articulated and really practical and actionable as well so thank you so much my pleasure if what you've heard on flow research collective radio has been helpful please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on apple podcast spotify or wherever you are listening to this reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to 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