I've Scanned 1,000s of Brains — This Is What the Healthiest Ones Have in Common

We are comprised of, you know, many regulatory resources and if you understand how they interact and how they work, then you can steer them. You can take control of your life, improve your sleep, improve your executive function, reduce your anxiety, improve your social function. And these are things that are hard to manage unless you understand them. You know, it's not as useful, often I believe, if someone just hands you down a diagnosis. Sometimes it can feel like something's happening to us. Our anxiety or ADHD or sleep issue is happening to us. And it is, but it's also resources. And if you know how those work, it's a lot harder to be overwhelmed or shamed about what's going on and it creates this urgency, this agency to take control. And that is fun. It is fun to train your brain or do some intervention and feel different in a way you wanted to. Dr. Andrew, welcome to Dr. to the show. Thanks, same. Nice to see you again. How you doing today? I'm doing good. Yeah, you were on a show many years ago. I think it was even something like six, seven years ago. And yeah, now you've come out with or you're coming out with a new book called the Gifted and Tortured. So, yeah, my channel is a lot about the longevity and health span and the brain is obviously a huge component to that. And your book specifically talks about, you know, these I guess you can call them different uh types of brains out there. And your background in neurofeedback also is just, you know, on a daily basis involved in looking at people's brains and you know, helping people to optimize their brain function. So, I'm yeah, happy to discuss with you. We'll first start with some of the research that you've been doing in the book and then later we'll also talk about my brain scans that that I happened to do. I think it I did the scan first time in 2018 and the second time in 2022 or 2023, something like that. So you have you have you're the most you're the person who knows the most about my brain I guess in the world. So um Yeah. >> that responsibility seriously. I'll I'll your secret is safe with me until today when we might tell people a little bit about what makes you tick. Yeah. Yeah. So um yeah, let's start with um the book. You can maybe give a brief introduction to it and what's it about? Sure. So the book's titled Gifted and Tortured and it's really about these patterns in our brains, these resource patterns that we all carry around. And I do this this assessment technique called brain mapping or quantitative EEG where you measure someone's attention performance, measure someone's brain at rest, and then look at how unusual they are against the average population. And out of that you can see how we each have sort of resources that are tuned in certain ways. And I've been doing brain mapping for about 25 years and sort of emerging out of that is this concept of phenotypes or patterns of resources tuned a certain way or set a certain way. It's almost like phenotypes of hair color or height or things like that, but they're not quite as stable. Um the brain's more changeable largely, especially things that are meant to change like attention and anxiety and sleep. So in talking to people for 25 years or so about their brains, the same areas kept coming up whenever there was a performance difficulty or unusually high performance, the same dozen or so areas kept emerging. And so I started to teach people really more about how brains in general work and their brain specifically might work using these metaphors, these phenotypes as little characters in our brain. So out of that um of course I've been involved with that wellness and longevity and health optimization landscape for a long time. I taught gerontology for uh over a decade at UCLA. So, my perspective on trajectories of change and long-term uh wellness and optimization sort of came up at the same time. And now, what I really do with this this data is I teach people to think about these resources more as something that they can manage and modify. So, the book is sort of capturing those dozen uh phenotypes, those dozen resources in our brain that often get in the way. And then it talks about how they might produce both a giftedness when they're when operating well and a tortured, you know, dysregulation when they're not, and sometimes at the same time. And then it gives you um sort of that uh you know, strategic uh modifiable behavior or biohacking sort of perspective on how you can go after making change depending on how these resources are operating for you. Mhm. Got you. Yeah, so you're actually looking at these and you mentioned phenotypes, but yeah, people I guess do they do uh recognize different uh yeah, phenotypes or archetypes as well of uh behavior or personality. And um you know, the brain is I guess the ultimate organ for behavior that uh you know, directs your behavior or controls your behavior or influences your behavior. So, um yeah, you could I guess you could see that as well in the brain mapping and the these uh neural uh pathways. Yeah, you can see traits more than more than states. And also, it's important to uh underscore the idea that brain mapping or QEEG is not a diagnostically precise process. It's not looking for the the DSM label or the set of particular criteria that fit a diagnostic label. Instead, it's finding resources that cross those diagnostic boundaries. So, it does give somebody the ability to both understand themselves, perhaps, but also not be too attached to the particular diagnosis of ADHD or anxiety or whatever it is. Instead, think about the resource level, and now it's about optimization. Now it's about you know, iterating through change, remeasuring, taking control. And so, understanding yourself, I think, brings a lot of agency and you know, digging into these uh individual patterns, I think, can give people some perspective. That was my hope anyways with this book, to give people perspective on how to take specific control over flavors of anxiety or executive function or sensory or social things. So. Mhm. Yeah, I guess then we can get into some of those uh phenotypes. You you say there are 12 of them, if I >> Yeah, there's there's more, um but the 12 core ones are a mix of very large uh hubs in the brain in the cortex that lots of um resources run through. So, if you think about, you know, high-level human stuff like, I don't know, motivation and love and joy, those are really, really mixes of different resources in the brain. There's not a thermostat for mood, there's not a thermostat for for motivation. But there are resources whose job it is to do more basic things. Of course, we have, you know, primary tissue for hearing or seeing and mapping those sensory things in, but we also have a lot of tissue whose job is to sort of act like um regulatory systems. So, if you drop below the level of those higher-level behaviors, you end up in some basic resources around attention, stress, and sleep as foundational, kind of like three legs of the stool. And then you end up with resources involving um how we interact with the world, sensory, language, social, things like that. So, um I often uh again see these same patterns across people jumping out again and again. Um if If imagine a plus sign on top of the head, the the front and back axis of the plus sign that runs down the middle of the head covers the cingulate cortex, which is involved with stabilization of our tension under need or demand. And then left to right on the plus sign is more about the executive function and sleep regulation features. So, the the left one particularly um is a stabilizer of our executive and a stabilizer of our sleep. Its job is to kind of put us in gear, keep us in gear, uh help us decide that we are on task and therefore that we don't want to wander off into, you know, doing something different. And it helps us lock in even if we don't necessarily find things super compelling. That's why we can do something when things aren't stressful. Um it also turns off executive function, turns off alertness and vigilance and focus that is sustained so we can stay asleep at night. So that every little dog that barks from two houses away doesn't wake us up. Um the right-hand side, I call it the supervisor, kind of sits in the passenger seat and reads the map and says, "Hey, we're going to adjust. Let's uh let's adjust. Let's adjust behavior based on some new information, new goal. Hey, we're not on task." And so you have the stabilizer and the supervisor sitting there uh initiating and and then inhibiting a little bit. And those resources we all have them, the precentral and postcentral gyrus uh the there's a division as you go uh through the brain and just in front of it you have the frontal lobe essentially and the precentral gyri or the most posterior part of the frontal lobe. And they receive and send all the information out to the true sort of thought areas in some way. They also uh receive and send with the pre- and postcentral gyri receive and send all the information up and down into the body. So to a very large extent the stabilizer and the supervisor on the left and right are the mind-body connection as well. So they really scaffold this mix of self-control, executive function, uh acting when you wish, staying asleep, falling asleep. So, very core resources. And whether or not you have ADHD or sleep issue or something else, you may have difficulty in these resources. So, the act of You know, I've done this before, but the act of going through someone's brain is not like, "Oh, here's the thing. Here's what's true for you." It's more like, "Oh, here some beta waves that are different or alpha waves." You know, that phenotype, that pattern often right if you're presented by this experience, can often come mean this. And we don't know what's true for people because people are unusual, but we know it's plausible. And so, we often tell people things about their data that they already know subjectively. That's really when we're doing our work well in brain mapping. So, we have these these left and right um central precentral gyri, front and back of the cingulates, the anterior cingulate and the posterior cingulate. And I call the one in the front, the anterior, the CEO or the project manager, whose job it is to sort of stabilize the internal stream of thought, and allow uh particular thoughts to assemble, let things through, so you have a stream that is stable. It also holds a moment of value. Uh there's some evidence the anterior cingulate can be involved in the experience of love. Um but very much the stabilization of the executive. And then the one in the back, posterior, is more about the outside world. It's uh orienting you. I call it the lifeguard, orienting to the outside world. You know, what's what's the road? Heads up. Heads up. And so, when these areas cramp up, when they get stuck, the one in the front can produce incredible hyperfocus or obsessiveness. So, that's the gift and the torture, depending. Uh and the one in the back can produce a very dramatic awareness of the environment, very checked in, very able to handle crisis. But when your lifeguard learns the world isn't especially safe, it cramps up and starts looking for sharks in the indoor pool. We end up with this hyper activation of that resource. So, you can look at someone's brain and say, "Oh, your cingulate's your anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, kind of in high gear." You know, that often means people are stuck in their head in the front, stuck in their gut. Do you have a little bit of obsessiveness? Are you Are you a little threat sensitive? And people, you know, generally go, "Oh, yeah. That's That's That's me." Um but you can also see other quirky phenomena like the anterior cingulate when it's running lots of beta waves is a sort of stressy, obsessive kind of stuck mind for many people. If it's running lots of theta waves, which is a disinhibition like lifting your foot off the brakes, instead people have songs stuck in their head all day long, or they bite their nails, or have a little If it's a kid, have a little tick or something, a little cough tick or blink tick. So, the same tissue can have different sort of cramp modes or regulation modes, and you can see, you know, one of a handful of things and say, "You know, unusual cingulate, here's a re- a regulatory phenomena that can happen. Is that happening for you? Do you care?" And then of course the fun part is if you, you know, if it's in the way, you can change it generally. The cortex, these these resources are not They're not like vision or hearing or language where they sink in and then uh crystallize. They're We have um things called uh critical periods for like visual fusion, you know, the ability to see one image out of two eyes uh merging the visual fields. Is a thing your brain learns to do in the first 6 months of life, and then it locks down the visual tissue. Um auditory tissue, uh for from from uh boys and men around age uh 9 or 10, we lose the ability to hear new speech sounds. For girls, it's about a year earlier. It's The basis of this is so we can understand the accent from the village next door. If they have a weird sound, it's probably some variant of what we've already heard. Therefore, you know, But of course this is why we sound different one to the next, you know, after age 10 we have accents. Uh, so um, the the that's a part of the brain as well that sort of will, you know, manage and monitor the incoming information. Uh, the behind the left ear we have a circuit whose job it is to know what is being said, to interpret the information, to extract the meaning from language. I call it the interpreter. Not that creative. Um, and it's involved with all aspects of language. So, if you don't have an intact interpreting circuit called uh, it's also called Wernicke's area, then you can't understand language as it comes at you, but you also can't understand your own language as you try to make it. And so, we produce language with the front, but we receive, we understand language back here, and they're connected by a a bow-shaped ribbon, the arcuate fasciculus. And changes in that that tissue will create changes in language that can involve things like aphasia or lack of production or fluent aphasia, you know, speaking sort of nonsense cuz you can't monitor, that could be less aggressive, difficulty with stuttering, a little bit of dyslexia, some maybe if you if it's more uh, in the way, some nonverbal learning issues. So, you can see these areas of brain cramped up and go, "You know, is this area in the way?" And then many of these areas become uh, again, under our control if we understand them. So, that's the big premise. Uh, those are about half a half a dozen or so of the uh, the phenotypes. There's a few more, but those are the big ones. I want to take a quick break to tell you about the Bon Charge infrared sauna blankets, my go-to way of getting 20-minute sauna sessions on the go without needing to spend an hour to warm up a regular sauna. Taking a sauna is, in my opinion, one of the best things for your overall health and heart function. Studies show that taking a sauna regularly is associated with 63% lower risk of sudden cardiac death, 63% reduced heart disease mortality, 46% lower risk of hypertension, and 40% reduced all-cause mortality. This is mediated by an increase in body temperature and increased heart rate that mimic a cardiovascular workout while at the same time improving arterial stiffness, endothelial function, blood flow, immune system function, blood pressure, and metabolic health. It doesn't matter if it's a traditional wooden sauna, an infrared sauna, an infrared sauna blanket, or anything else that elevates your body temperature above what's normal. One Charge infrared sauna blankets have the advantage of shining far infrared light that can penetrate deeper into your tissues than regular saunas can. It warms up in 2 minutes to the optimal temperature of 70° C, and it's low in EMF. You can get a 15% discount by heading over to onecharge.com/siimlund and use the code siim for 15% discount. You know, there is a spectrum of different types of behavior, where I guess uh we all exhibit all different of these phenotypes in some degrees or another, and uh some people are just, you know, like uh more ADHD or more hypervigilant, etc. Like, we all exhibit all of these traits in different amounts, and uh which trait you're, you know, mostly the predominant in or more leading towards, that is what determines uh your phenotype. Yeah, exactly. We all have these regulatory, you know, resources. Um take something like heart rate variability that the the show audience will understand pretty deeply. Um we, you know, we don't necessarily know yet uh you know, from a science perspective, what the absolute number means, but we know it changes in HRV mean within one person. And so, looking at a brain, we don't necessarily know what it means, but we know, again, changes within one person are very meaningful, and you can come up with some some uh ideas. Oh, your HRV dropped a little bit over the past 2 weeks, you might be experiencing increased stress or some oncoming illness or something, or you're traveling a lot. Looking at a brain, you can see, oh, hey, your uh the speed of the alpha waves, which synchronizes that speaker and that and that interpreter, is running slow. You You that often produces word-finding issues, tip of the tongue, hunting for names. And people start laughing or their or their spouse does in the background. Oh, yeah, that's a thing. So, you know, that's about how fast your brain can synchronize. But knowing that it's there gives you that sort of perspective on oh, okay, here's some ideas like from a biohacking perspective and anti-aging perspective. There's a great um aging support compound that I love to recommend when it's appropriate called citicoline or CDP choline. And it has a couple of really interesting interesting properties. One of them is it speeds up the alpha speed, the speed of processing synchronizes and speeds up a little bit. And this produces improvements in verbal fluency. And it helps offset things like word finding issues and tip of the tongue and delayed recall after a couple of days for most people. It also uh supports remyelination. In the case of oxidative damage, long-term stress, there's there's myelin damage around neurons, we believe, and this may be one of the factors of aging. Certainly in pathological aging, but maybe in normal aging, too. And we believe that more myelin is generally better. So, the idea that a choline source, a cholinergic, will support faster, smoother brain and make it fatter and happier in the longer term is sort of a a lovely thing that you might not know or or have a perspective on why you have a word finding issue or you can't remember what your friend's name or what that, you know, thing your friend said after dinner was last night. People are very concerned, typically, often secretly, that their delayed recall or tip of the tongue is an aging phenomenon. Oh, I'm having trouble remembering that my grocery list is in the store, and they think it's aging. They think it's, you know, a a true memory phenomenon. And if you look at someone's brain, you can often see that there's something like an alpha speed dragging down causing the speed of processing. And when you see a thing like that, you know it's not uh aging. It's not an age-related cognitive decline, it's a speed of processing. And therefore, your perspective on it shifts. It's not about, "Oh, I'm 55. I'm getting old. I'm having senior moments." It's more like, "Hey, your quality deep sleep might be a little dysregulated. You know, um few modifiable behaviors, maybe don't eat before bed. Let that blood sugar drop, more growth hormone at night, get up early, uh little bit of movement before coffee to burn off that cortisol without calling for more and initially. These things might help your sleep quality. And then, you know, you can start digging into that. Maybe it's more significant. Maybe there's some apnea or there's some something else you have to address, but that then becomes a strategy to go after and to iterate through instead of like, "Oh, I'm getting old." You know, it crystallizes the perspective for people sometimes. And And it helps them also motivate for for behavioral change. If I show people, you know, their brain, sometimes it's a little bit like looking at your lipid panel and going, "Ooh, I better back off on the ice cream." You know, you see those those features and they make sense and you go, "Oh, yeah. Okay, maybe I should stop eating before bed because my sleep is really crappy and oh, that's causing my word find and that's my short-term Oh." And there's this little loop that gets created and people's behavior starts to change, experience changes, and then you can see those changes in the phenotype mapping, the quantitative EEG, um meditation, sleep hacking, nootropics, medication, uh supplements, especially methylation-style things, will have a very strong impact almost immediately for some of the the more acute interventions like meds and supplements, but pretty quickly over a few months for things like meditation, sleep hacking, and in a couple of months for things like neurofeedback or brain training. So, the whole premise of this book, Gifted and Tortured, is, you know, we're all a little bit gifted and tortured, especially if you've been told you're too much or you've been struggling with, you You a mix of all the ideas and none of the motivation or you know, mixes of anxiety and ADHD that seem to both be uh your awesome quirkiness, but often in the way, you know, if you're always paying the ADHD tax, that creativity is not that great necessarily. So, the idea is these phenotypes give us a perspective on how we're built and then knowing that gives us ideas, strategies, agency about how to move through and make change. Yeah, it's like not looking at it as that something's wrong with your brain. Uh it's more so that understanding what type of a brain you have. Exactly, yeah. Mhm. Yeah, I mean, you've done uh I guess like thousands of scans, brain scans in your career. Um what's like the most common phenotype that you see? Mhm. Um the most common phenotypes are um probably on the left and right side. There's There's really two of them I would say they're most common. Uh the left mid central gyrus and the front midline. Left uh precentral mid central is uh the um stabilizer of executive. Keeps you awake when you're awake and asleep when you're asleep. And then the front midline anterior cingulate is pretty strong for holding our focus, the the CEO. These can be really dysregulated in a lot of different complaints, a lot of different, you know, problematic things, but also a little bit off in typical life. So, that left side, you know, if you're not sleeping very well at night, it looks weaker. And if you have a lot of inattentive ADHD, it looks weaker. And you can't necessarily tell those things apart super clearly on a on a quantitative EEG. You can say, "Oh, your left side beta is a bit lower." You know, that often produces difficulty staying focused when things aren't intense and difficulty staying asleep. People go, "Yeah." And you know, that's among the most common, but it doesn't sort of uh it doesn't breed to a place of diagnosis. The goal is sort of unpacking things so you have that that perspective. So, that one tends to be very, uh, useful, you know, to know about. You can change it with neurofeedback. Uh, on a bell curve, we move the brain by about a standard deviation every couple of months, uh, which is pretty quick for human experience in making change. Slower than meds, but faster than almost anything else. And the, uh, the phenomena can show up with a lot of sleep regulation issues, which are very common. Some inattentiveness, very common. Chronic stress can throw off that left side and make you not sleep as well. And so, once you know it's there, something like neurofeedback might work. You might decide to go after psychostimulants. You might try a more stimulating nootropic or supplement. Um, meditation of a concentration practice, not a not a an awareness practice, not present time awareness or meta or something watching stuff flow by and observing the tone, but concentration, anchoring your attention down narrowly to a point or theme or an idea or a concept or a point, you know, in space, that will bring the left side precentral up very, very strongly. And for those of you who meditate, you know this, but the act of meditation is not being calm and peaceful on a cushion. It's deciding how to focus, then noticing that you're not doing that and going back to it again and again and again. And that left side will really participate strongly in that activity. And if you practice bringing it up again and again, stabilizing that executive, you'll change it over time. It's a regulatory tissue. So, if you see your brain like this, it may give you the sort of permission or encouragement to then start your 20-minute meditation practice or something. The other big one is the anterior cingulate. You get a lot of obsessiveness, a lot of high performers, both, you know, good and bad. Uh, you know, the anterior cingulate can make you a CEO, but it can also give you some OCD. And that can be the same person depending. So, that one you might decide to go after with things like um the supplement NAC can work really well for some people. Or do a more comprehensive methylation analysis on your genes and see which, you know, MTHFR, COMT, etc. you might have and dial it in that way with different B vitamins. Um sometimes traditional medications like SSRIs can be really effective for that anterior cingulate. Uh or just knowing how it exists can give you that control. So, those are the the executive and the um the anchoring on with a bit of a stress in the front is what I tend to see. Um showing up the most often, I would say, yeah. Mhm. Right. Yeah, I would imagine most people either, you know, want to um you know, they're too too uh I guess stressed out, too hypervigilant, or they're kind of all over the place, they're not able to focus, that they want to balance the spectrum of being able to concentrate on things or help to relax. That's at least That's my impression that there's a kind of a That's one of the major I guess axis where um people fall into in terms of either being very vigilant and focused too much often times or too all too all over the place and not, you know, focused. Yeah. So, that would be the left and right, probably, yeah. Mhm. Yeah, and is there something You mentioned a few of these things like supplements and the medication and etc. Um People always ask, yeah, like is there some supplement I can take to either focus or help with my stress? What do you think? Do you have any answer to that? Yeah, I mean, supplements can can be certainly impactful. Um and there's some nootropics that have pretty amazing results on executive function. I think once you're dabbling out in things that are less well understood though, you have to be careful. I'm I'm of the opinion when doing any sort of biohacking that if you don't have deficits, you should be extremely cautious. And sort of hue to the true definition of nootropics, which are things that are cognitively supportive without side effect. Um and that isn't always, you know, easy to find out. I mean, there are some things we we use as a brain performance thing, you know, caffeine for instance, coffee. We know generally it's exceptionally healthy healthy, but not everyone tolerates coffee or caffeine all that well. So, any advice, any any perspective I have here should be individualized and take it through a lens of this might not be right for you. Please ask your doctor or, you know, do your own research, but um there are lots of things you can you can do to bring up that whole tissue, that left to right stabilizer and supervisor to stabilize your executive function. And then to get control over distraction, inhibiting, pumping the brakes so you don't go squirrel. And you know, fidget or have your mind pulled off of task. Um those are really those two pre- and post-central gyri, left and right. And stimulants, psychostimulants will bring them up pretty aggressively. And within you know, one dose, one day, you can see the change. Uh often a couple of standard deviations instantly. Um performance testing, this is interesting. Uh we always combine uh brain mapping or EEG with performance testing, which is a really boring clicking on a mouse when the right stimulus pops up, kind of go no go thing. And you can tease apart different aspects. And sometimes you'll see that stimulant medications will support one aspect, like the speed of the attention, without supporting things like the accuracy. Or people won't get any change over impulsivity. So, for the most part, somebody who takes stimulants gets more focused and less impulsive as you bring up the the resources there. But some people just get more awake and more impulsive or more awake and anxious. And so you can see these features jumping out in the brain maps. You can see their tendency, let's say, for the cingulate to be hot would tell you you might not want to take Adderall because it'll wake up this left side, but will also wake up that front middle and you'll start developing a tick or chewing on your nails or being a little bit, you know, anxious. So, you can go after making these uh sort of medication changes. Um but if the sing if if the left and right executive function areas are the goal, I would start with sleep hacking. I would follow up with meditation practice. Only then would I bring up other interventions or suggest other interventions. And you know, you can do a lot with medications or supplements. I would rather suggest somebody just change their brain, though. Cuz you you can take medication for a few months. While you're not taking it, it's might you know, it's not helping you. And when you are taking it, it's not helping you perfectly. You know, it's a mixed bag where you do get some side effects and some, you know, brittleness and some sleep disruption from stimulants uh sometimes. So, I'd rather teach somebody to, you know, over a few months make the changes. And sometimes that's things like meditation. Often it's just getting in there and measuring your brain and in uh with with neurofeedback with EEG and then applauding the brain when it shifts itself a little bit as an exercise. Uh doing this several times a week, you can change your brain over uh a couple of months. You can start feeling changes in a few days and have them build up. Very much like a personal training process for your EEG or your brain's blood flow. So, um I prefer those techniques, you know, the more sort of personal training physical fitness for the brain because you create resource changes that then build on themselves. Um I would say that you know, our I I I know you will have to guess that your perspective is is similar. You'd rather teach somebody how to build a good foundation than find the absolute most mysterious nootropic that they could find at a research lab to try just in case it works to give them, you know, 5% more myostatin or something, you know, like you you what you want to teach them how the systems work to make the foundational change. That's how I think about this this data perspective is you know how your phenotypes work, you can start digging down into well, how do these resources manipulate? You know, how do they how do they modify themselves and each other? What do they respond to? And that can give you a much more nuanced sense of what to do than just like, oh, let me try a medication. Let me try a nootropic. Even though again, I'm I'm not adverse to those techniques um and those strategies. I helped found a nootropic company a few years ago called TruBrain. Um I do neurofeedback primarily with Peak Brain, but I'd still rather somebody start off with the perspective of here's how I'm built, here's how I'm feeling, here's how I want to feel, here's how I want to perform. And that can actually paint out a lot of perspective on on on interventions without having necessarily to find your next guru or the secret nootropic that the random, you know, website has in their corner shelf. So, I I again, come back to the idea of know thyself and then things tend to tend to follow from that. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. Um but how often is it that people I guess you know, everyone thinks they have either ADHD or they have some other uh condition. So, um you know, how accurate is someone's self-perceived opinion about their phenotype or, you know, some in which direction they are Yeah. >> versus actually getting it uh measured? Most people are really good at knowing themselves and know themselves better than they believe. Um when you're going through the phenotype mapping and saying, "Here's one and it often means this." Most of the time, 90% or better, people like, "Oh, yeah. That's That's That's me. That sounds like me. That's the thing I know about." Or my spouse is laughing cuz they know about it. Um, what I will What's What's kind of funny is people often know themselves better than the doctors sending them in with diagnoses. Like, very common to bring up an executive function issue on an attention test and a brain map and say, "You know, what about attention and executive function?" They're like, "Oh, yeah. Never formally diagnosed, but I'm super ADHD." And they know it. But on the same token, you have people coming in sent by their doctors. You do a brain map and you're like, "Well, you're not staying focused, but all of the feet ways in which you're not staying focused are happening when the intensity comes off. And we're seeing that left-sided precentral gyrus not being that that stabilized or not be stable." And you're like, "Usually comes along with a sleep maintenance issue." Oh, you have a big sleep maintenance issue. Oh, and your alpha's slowing down. Yeah, your executive function, your inattentiveness is due to lack of deep sleep at night, I'm guessing. It's very, very common to have to have an um especially an adult come in with an ADHD diagnosis. You look at their brain and there's no excess theta or alpha, which is what you tend to get in ADHD. About 90% of the time you can see these ADHD phenotypes, if you will. You don't see those. Instead, you see stress and fatigue fighting. You know, the the CEO is driving around metaphorically with the handbrake firmly engaged, foot on the floor. And from 20 ft away, that can look like impulsivity. Um, but it's really just this like stress and fatigue. They're brittle, you know, kind of keeping things grinding ahead, but then when the pressure comes off, things lull and the person kind of browns out with performance. That can look like inattentiveness. But it's also lack of stability of attention because of the lack of deep sleep at night. You know, if the bucket isn't being full at night, then there's micro sleep phenomenon that starts to emerge during the day where you end up um having little micro lapses of attention as you go into something that's near sleep in the background of your brain. So, yes, people know themselves, but the diagnostic landscape is often a near miss when it comes to them looking at their brain against, you know, the diagnosis they have. You see the things, but you often see that they're coming from a different direction than the doctor suggested even though the person tends to know. I mean, this is true in all flavors in some ways of like, you know, brain assessment, even something as simple simple as like a sleep tracker. Um there's good research showing that in spite of all the billions we've spent on developing sleep trackers, we have our watches and our rings and our, you know, smart beds and things, a human making a note on a piece of paper about the quality and how they feel in the morning for 2 weeks approaches the accuracy of a sleep tracker. We know. We know how we're feeling if we make a note of it and write it down and start measuring it, it starts getting managed, you know, ala Drucker. So, we end up with this loop that's closed and and, you know, in in the neurofeedback practice and the landscape of making brain change, it's very much a personal training. You have goals, you have a brain, and you iterate towards effects, noticing what you're feeling. And that act of writing down how you're feeling, making notes about your sleep, making notes about how crappy your day was or how awesome your day was, that reflection itself is part of this process I think that is valuable of like, "Hmm, here's how I'm built. Here's how I'm performing. Oh, okay." And it gives you some perspective on how to close the gaps. So. Yeah. I would imagine you know, peak performance, whatever it means, differs for different phenotypes. So, Um, do you think that there is some I guess universal brain state and a state of being and performance that every phenotype can like aspire towards or is it that, you know, if you have a certain phenotype, then yeah, I mean, you could maybe make yourself a little bit more uh, let's say a little bit more creative versus very more CEO type. Um, or you do you think that the yeah, every every phenotype has I guess like a peak performance for their own phenotype? It's a great question. Kind of both. Um, what I would say is that a lot of what peak performance um, a lot of how I think about peak performance is in terms of how things are in the way of it. You know, different things get in the way for different people differently. You know, so it's for somebody the lack of ability to go into flow state is because they're too tired and they have to remain stressed to stay engaged. For somebody else the stress is a trauma response and they can't drop their linear mind enough to go into that non-linear uh, receptive attention space to get into flow. For somebody else you know, they've been dealing with stress and anxiety for years, so they're drinking too much and the alcohol uh, is preventing the flow from happening when it drops out of their system, you know, the sort of glutamatergic dominant state. Um, so I think that we all have different bottlenecks, just the same we have different different gifts. Um, as we drop those away though, as we get out of our own way with our anxiety, rumination, perseveration, inattentiveness, lack of sleep, I think what peak performance and flow states look like for individuals is actually relatively similar. Now, your experience of it won't be the same. You're somebody who's making art and diving into their sculpture for 7 hours straight in flow state is going to be probably feeling a little bit different than somebody who's sitting trading on the stock market just crushing it on a beautifully green day, and and really making all the all the right choices, and and knowing why. That's a different experience, intellectually, cognitively. Um one person's got a butt that to sleep on the chair, the other person's, you know, got a stiff neck, but the flow state, I would say, the control over their brain was similar. They could decide to put their brain in a certain mode and and hold it there. And so, that stability of resource management is a thing that we often don't talk about in peak performance or flow state or even aging is that there's the resources, and then there's there's the the stability of the management of the resources, the control, the choice. Like, it's great if you can hyperfocus, but you know, not if you can't turn it on when you want and not when you if you can't turn it off when you want. I mean, if you can only hyperfocus on video games, I mean, that could be cool if you're a video game tester, but not ideal, perhaps, in, you know, other aspects of life. And if you can't put down your hyperfocus, you know, if you're always solving problems and you're always holding the problem in your mind cuz you're the world's best CEO or something, that's great, but, you know, your partner might not need that at home, or your kids might not need that. They might need to be a be a good listener. You might not need to be in linear mode all the time. And I would argue that, depending on the phenotype clusters you start off with, um the ways in which you might need to sort of work out the system to get control over it might be different. If you're cramped up with anxiety versus executive function, then your core complaints, your goals will be different. But, where we get to, again, while we're all individuals and have different experience, I would say that it's more about getting the bottlenecks out of the way, and I do think that most humans, maybe all humans, have the capacity for deep uh flow and extremely high performance. I don't really believe in the idea of an elite performer as a sort of you know, something that is created genetically or created out of, you know, uh billions of years of human just, you know, iteration and we happen to get a golden one. I think that we end up with infinite variability and infinite possibilities, infinite combinations. And then within one person, we get to sort of shape that into the best version of that. And so while your high-performer flow state might look different than mine or someone else's, you and I might have dropped away similar bottlenecks to get there depending on if we started off with, you know, phenotypes that overlapped. Mhm. So, so both. Long-winded answer. Yeah. You know, I think many people know if if they first know what type of a phenotype they are, then they're more uh more likely to also recognize what do they need. Uh so, let's say people who are very eager to exercise, they're more likely to overtrain and get injured or get over stressed from too much exercise. And people who are, you know, let's say more likely to be lazy and uh skip workouts, then uh for them, it's probably more important to you know, actually try to push themselves a bit more and uh not immediately give in to whatever your body's telling. Let's say you feel a bit tired, you know, it doesn't mean that you are overtrained if you're more likely to be the person who undertrains. But if you're the person who's more likely to overtrain, then yeah, if you feel sore and uh kind of fatigue, then, you know, probably you are overreaching at least to a certain extent with your workout. Yeah, and having a self-perspective will give you a sense of is this too much or not? I mean, if you always sit on the couch and you know it, and you know you're kind of, you know, out of shape, that soreness you're experiencing and that tiredness, that that lack of desire to jump up and go to the gym makes sense and you should push through it. But if you're somebody who's an elite athlete and you're sitting down noticing new pains and stuff, maybe it's a it's time to rest. And so the same thing can be true of your brain. Once you know how it works, you end up having sort of sort of accommodations. You can go, "Aha, let me let me take care of some resources." Or, "Oh, let me push through that. You know, let me accommodate by changing the environment." Um Yeah. Cuz you know, of course, we're all about not just changing ourselves, but the environment to match. That's one of the things humans get to do, so. Yeah. I think maybe it would be nice if we put it into a little bit of visual practice this. So, we can take a look at my brain scans that I did a few years ago. And yeah, maybe you can share what do you see and what kind of phenotype maybe my brain is. There you go. See, you can Yeah, it's more of a slices through the head. So, you can see your This is called the Loretta Loretta analysis. We did We took your brain and we took a flat EEG off your scalp and we solved for where in the brain things were coming from. Mhm. So, this slide and the and the previous slide are both showing that you're making lots of beta in the frontal areas. We saw a couple things in your flat maps and a couple things in your three-dimensional maps here. And in three-dimensional ones, we saw a lot of um actually in both, we saw a lot of front midline uh activity. So, you have one of those CEOs, one of the anterior cingulates, that's a little bit in higher gear. Mhm. >> And yeah, you see the middle the middle uh panel here of this three set is showing side and then that little orange lit up area is where your your beta waves are stronger than the average person. So, the perspective on that phenotype would be your brain tends to hold things very, very strongly. Tends to have this steel trap capacity where you can like latch on to information and grab it. But, you might get stuck there at times as well. So, you see you have that you you seem to have that CEO phenotype as one of the dominant phenotypes. Where you can, you know, sit in hyperfocus, but you also might get stuck in your head. And so here we're doing a source analysis. If you want to go back to the um We can do some amplitudes. Let's go back to uh go back up a level. Yeah, exactly. Let's go up one more level. Let's go out of the Loretta. And why don't you open up your PDF from the most recent one if you could. 8:31 This one? Yeah, and then um this is the first page. You can see we're looking at the amplitudes now, flat maps. And the second page is a higher level. Let's actually stay here for a second. So you see in the top row we have on the left-hand side some delta waves that are orange there on the right-hand side of the head. Mhm. And also a little bit on the left-hand side. In the second row, the beta waves are blue in the same place. Now, that's some tiredness for you. Um that was getting in the way of attention a little bit. And we managed to capture this. Uh now I don't I I think you may have been traveling a great deal at that point. And I think you might have been tired. I forget exactly. >> in London, I think. We measured in >> Yeah, that's right. That's right. And usually we don't get a lot of change based on just like a little bit of sleepiness or travel, but sometimes it can do that. So I'm not sure to what extent this is you at rest or you with some acute tiredness. But the the left and right areas are making lots of delta and some theta. And they're also making love amounts of beta. So that can mean a little bit of inattentiveness on the left and trouble with the depth of sleep and some distractibility on the right. And we actually can see this in your attention test as well. If you want to look at your attention performance, yeah, all that all that red cluster there is uh your delta waves are hypercoherent. So your delta had swelled up a little bit that day and we were catching a lot of fatigue in your brain. So yeah, from this map uh from these maps we were seeing those singulets It would be basically the the plus sign we started off today talking about coming full circle. Um the anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, left and right precentral gyrus. Um those are the primary areas for you that are a little unusual and they are for many people. But these are the ones that I would, you know, if I was coaching you about how to, you know, regulate them or how to take control of them, uh you know, stabilization of resource in the left would be about meditation, sleep hacking, depth of sleep, sustaining sleep, as well as bringing up the attention uh resource in the left through some sort of, you know, anchored attention. Here we have the uh speed. Want to zoom in here on the alpha speed in the top block. And once you scroll down there to the next page, yeah, the the Z score peak frequency. This is how fast your brain is uh compared to the average person. And the top block is is your left hemisphere. The alpha column is showing that your alpha waves are running a little bit slower than average um in some places, but also uh not staying synchronous. This is another sign of tiredness. This is that alpha wave spreading out that I mentioned earlier where you can see that within the hemisphere the idling is not all staying tightly locked and that'll produce a little difficulty lifting the brain out of neutral into thinking. And so the common experience of that is a little bit of uh tip of the tongue or word finding or stuff like that. So I forget what we talked about a few years ago when we first um went over this. But the big takeaway from this data set is you're running a little bit of fatigue kind of chronically and it's sapping your your uh sapping your um clarity. And so much so that we actually blew up um probably a false brain fog marker. This is It says TBI here, but it really means brain fog, not injury. We're picking up some delta wave clusters uh so it was acute enough to I think to throw the data off a little bit. And there's your cingulate. See that alpha blob right there, the orange blob in the front middle? That's your anterior cingulate. That's your your CEO. He's in my He's micromanaging in high gear. Think of this Think of this. Think of this. Think of this. So, you apparently have uh, just on this one slide, we're seeing a little bit of difficulty focusing and the ability to hyperfocus, all on the same person. Okay. So, the the blue blobs left and right is more executive function. And the orange blob in the front middle is more your ability to lock in, like at your job. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. You see that alpha there, that stripe left to right in the middle column on the right-hand side? This one? Yeah, so that actually that that alpha on the left is that stabilizer. And the little blob of orange there on the left-hand side of the head. If you want to go to the attention test, you can see how this operates in your performance as well. That's the IVA test we have. If you go up a level two, we have one of those. You can see that you're uh, it's on a different document, a different PDF. Um, IVA and then, yeah, there you go. So, the middle bar on the left-hand side is called focus. The red bar is speed, the purple bar is focus, the blue bar is called vigilance. Now, your speed is just ridiculous. You're nearly off the chart, you know, nearly four standard deviations in your auditory speed. Uh, it's just a little bit nuts. And your visual, too. Your your speeds are are off the chart. And your vigilance, your alertness for things changing gear, the light blue bar, very good. Um, above average, typical. But then you see how the purple bar is lower than the other two. And that's called focus. That's when things got boring, especially the auditory system. That was when the computer was going, "One." "One." "One." And you had to keep responding. You had to keep bringing yourself online. This purple bar is showing us that when things get boring like that, you disengage a little bit. And that's what the alpha waves were. That's that stabilization of the executive not being quite as crisp. And we see it here and on your brain. However, we can also tell, this is why you should never just do a brain map, you should always do performance testing alongside it. You can also tell that your speed and your vigilance are powerful. And that means you're sort of like being quick and alert to catch the stuff you're about to miss. And so your scores overall are above average. Oh, I skipped explaining this, but the average score on this sort of thing is 100 on a bell curve. Age-matched sample plus or minus 15 points is typical. So, 85 to 115 is sort of the normal range, the typical range. And your global scores for attention are a couple of standard deviations above average. You're way more on, I mean, dramatically more on than the average person. And yet, when the intensity comes off, there's this lulling, there's this drifting, there's this disengagement that was creeping in. You can also see a little bit of that in the right-hand side. Your stamina, the dark blue bar, is a little bit lower, especially in the auditory system, than you might want it to be. So, later in the test, you were starting to tighten up a little bit for the auditory trials and slow down or get a little bit less accurate. So, we count for you in performance a little bit of drifting focus. That stabilized on the left-hand side isn't quite as robust with the alpha taking over. And a little hint of distractibility in this test. And then, those both show up in the brain maps or the the phenotype mapping. We also see in the phenotype mapping what it's not showing up here, which is the more hyperfocus and the tendency to get a little bit stuck in that at times. Mm. So, that's for folks that didn't know the secrets of Seem. Here we go. We're getting a peek into how you're built. Yeah, so I'm basically I'm like super fast and super vigilant, but I also get bored or distracted. Yeah. Right. >> Yeah, and and then I think there was some fatigue phenomena you've been managing for a while before this. This is not just this day. It's more a slight trait. So, you probably are somebody with this brain who tends to push really hard and then you know, when there's not as much structure, not as much thing to do, tend to not have as clear performance, I would guess. Yeah, yeah. I got I I I do think that's pretty accurate or I guess I need to focus more on um uh recovery or sleep and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So, this is 3-4 years ago now, but it you know, if this was this is still probably relatively stable. Uh brains don't change very quickly at all. You're of course welcome to get a fresh map. Um go see us in London or Sweden or uh the US, of course. And we do have some other places where you can get maps done, so we can talk after, but um this little attention test is easy to do online. You can do this pretty quickly. I bet it's very similar, but I've been watching you, you know, work on yourself over the past few years, uh ever evolving. Uh you've gotten, you know, more fit. You appear to be healthier. You You appear to be getting younger, which is weird. Um over the past 5 years, so my guess is we're actually would see a little bit less fatigue now in your executive function testing. But the alpha waves showing up, the slight spaciness, the slight hyperfocus tendencies, those are probably just you. We'll have to ask Inka, you know, she might be a better better uh perspective if you're a little obsessive or not. Yeah. >> Um but uh but yeah, these are features that we would, you know, help people understand how they how they run and then you can uh change them if you wish. Yeah. Yeah, I do think that it's probably accurate. At least that's what I feel myself that um you know, I I do tend to like under sleep sometimes, but yeah, nowadays I sleep a bit longer than uh 2 years ago, so maybe the focus is better. Um It can look. Yeah. Yeah. Um what about you? Do you know your own phenotype if I might ask? >> Mine are not dissimilar. Mine are somewhat similar to yours. I have that same front midline fast alpha that tends to be a little bit obsessive but also oddly enough with a lot of procrastination features. Um procrastination for folks that don't uh understand it deeply is not really the avoidance phenomena. It's the It's the lack of ability to reconcile the approach versus the avoid drive. Those are more phenotypes. We have the on the left-hand side of the brain there's a happy little kid who goes, "Hi world, yay!" and wants to get into things. On the right front corner there's more avoidance. "Right, go away. This all sucks." And the bias, the laterality uh can be tuned. Um so you have this uh um uh you have a fast alpha variant front midline as do I, and that tends to make it hard to reconcile the approach versus the avoid as it comes in. And I I know you're successful, productive, driven, so you must have found a way to work with that versus have it get in the way. Um I also changed my brain a fair amount, so the phenotypes I had when I was in my 20s and 30s, you know, I did a bunch of neurofeedback, I did a bunch of meditation, and I shifted fairly uh aggressively a few of the big phenotypes I used to have um tons and tons of theta brainwaves on both sides, which is essentially classic uh ADHD. Mhm. I was in my 20s, I was about the the most uh textbook classical case of ADHD you could, you know, ever point at. And then I started working at a neurofeedback center um that did mostly autism and other uh neurodevelopmental work. And I'd had about a decade of of uh experience working in uh that environment, working with uh autism and ADHD and crisis psych and a bunch of stuff. So, I got a job in this environment where we did neurofeedback or brain training. And I started to see people change and was like, "Wait, what? People with anxiety and seizures and all kinds of things were shifting very quickly relatively." And so, I started to hang out after hours and, you know, stick wires to my head and exercise my brain and over a couple of months managed to change uh most of the executive function things um pretty thoroughly. And that same anterior cingulate uh I don't have it now, but I used to have a blob of theta brain waves there. And this is, you know, more than 25 years ago now we're talking. And I don't recommend doing this, but I would hang out and like, "Oh, here's a cool thing on my brain map. Let me train that and see how that feels." I don't recommend doing that. But um I trained down some theta on the front midline, and the next day I was really tired for a day or two. And didn't think anything of it. Thought, "Okay, maybe not a good protocol to do." That's, you know, often true. You don't want to get after effects in neurofeedback without adjusting. So, I didn't repeat the protocol, but I felt really tired, especially my my my body, my legs for uh a day or two. And it was um a little odd, and then it wore off. I didn't think anything of it. And about a month later, I realized I had to go buy nail clippers cuz I had stopped biting my nails a month earlier and had not even noticed. And like from like from age like 2 years old, you know, this area will create a lot of nail biting, a lot of songs in your head, a lot of like, having things with your mind as well as with your body. And I turned it off so thoroughly that the behavior was abolished to an extent that I didn't even know I wasn't doing it as opposed to like constantly trying not to do it for the previous 20 years whatever. So, um all this to say, you can change the phenotypes. If you see something in your brain, or even without doing brain mapping, if you know you have these resources uh that are a little bit pinched off of obsessiveness or rumination or inattentiveness, poor sleep maintenance, sensory sensitivity, social sensitivity, delayed speed of processing. These are regulatory resources. We're meant to change these things unlike visual fusion or language. We're meant to keep tuning our sleep regulation, our social regulation, our executive regulation because the world is dynamic in those ways and we might need to, you know, modify behavior. Humans can learn to, you know, work all night and sleep all day if they need. We have this not necessarily ideally, but we have that flexibility of moving resources around to meet the environment. And these phenotypes, many of the ones we see, uh respond really well to shaping over time. So, I changed a bunch of mine, so I I still have some of the same ones that that that you represent, but I have a few that I've gotten rid of, so. Yeah. So, is it possible for someone to, they're suffering from a poor focus, etc., can they then, you know, retrain their brain to be more focused? So, I guess like manually trying to force themselves back to the task at hand if they get distracted. So, like just repeatedly, like the same way you build a muscle, you just repeatedly, whenever you get distracted or unfocused, you just, you know, have to bring it back and then over time you get better at maintaining the focus. That certainly does happen. If you can if you can move through that behavioral practice, it will work, but the problem is is that executive function tends to be at the moment of initiating or stabilizing, not the moment of follow-through. So, it's hard to, you know, it's hard to to do that when you know you should and can't. Um this is why I like meditation and concentration practices because they bring up that left side so thoroughly that you can end up finding a way to move through stable and sustained attention. Um there's different techniques, you know, neurofeedback can make a rapid change, medication again a rapid change, uh uh uh um, meditation a slow change. Um, there's also behavioral things you can do. I mean, I think if the left side is not as sustaining of your focus as you want, um, you know, you could do things like intense task blocking, you know, Pomodoro technique where you're on task specifically for 20 minutes sprinting through with intense focus and then requiring yourself to take a break. What I often see, um, people with a little bit of inattentiveness that has fatigue phenomena, and I recommend that they grab, if they can, like a walking treadmill to do their work on. And suddenly the kid who didn't want to read because they were falling asleep when they were reading a book or it was too boring because they have a little bit of an auditory processing issue, they're playing loud music in the background and they're reading a book because the brain's woken up enough to drive the system up. So, you can make changes both in the moment and over time. Um, it just depends on how these these tissues are working for one individual. So, I encourage everyone to learn about your brain. And then if you're really struggling, things like neurofeedback can change your brain in just a few months and usually in a stable way cuz your brain sort of practicing all these things uh all the time. So, if you get far enough, it it takes over. Um, but also learning how the brain works, your brain works, will help with the smaller things, the modifiable behaviors. Oh, maybe I shouldn't eat right before bed. Oh, maybe I should uh think about not smoking cigarettes or whatever. Like you like the the the behavioral choices become a little more crystallized. So, I would argue that the perspective is actually most useful in some ways in the smallest aspects, you know, why am I experiencing, how am I experiencing, what's going on? How does that affect my choices? It's not all in my head, it's also, you know, in my head. It's it's this real physiology where we have a perspective of and you can also see when you find true, you know, difficulties and deficits, suffering people are experiencing, which you'll see often in people's brain maps and performance. It's not a experience of like, here's what's wrong with you. It's more like, oh hey, here's some things. The person always knows about it already and is usually like, oh, there's my tinnitus. Oh, there's my ADHD. There's my trauma response. Oh, okay. Phew. Or you can see someone has an auditory processing issue, you know, if the two auditory tissues aren't synchronizing well, that'll produce a lag in turning on the auditory, which you can measure behaviorally. It'll also produce a lag with attention. Someone starts talking and you say, oh, sorry, what? Cuz you weren't already listening. It's a auditory attention phenomena. You see that in someone's brain and you can have their spouse or their parent now just call their name, wait 3 seconds and keep talking and suddenly the auditory problem is worked around. So, it's not just about making change, it's about knowing how you're built so you can sort of get what you need out of the environment, out of your relationships, out of your support from people around you. So, um So, yes, you can change it, but I would argue that just the knowledge can be can be as useful sometimes, you know. It It changes how we relate to each other. If If you know your kid has an auditory processing issue, you're not going to be quite as annoyed when they don't respond when you call their name the third time, you know. You're going to find ways to wave at them, get in their line of sight, that kind of thing. So, Yes, you understand what is the issue. It is not >> Yeah. something deliberate. Right. Um I guess we can start wrapping up. Um What is like some major idea you want people to take away from the book or this conversation? What is like, a big overarching idea? Yeah, the overarching idea is that I think that we are comprised of, you know, many regulatory resources. And if you understand how they interact and how they work, then you can steer them. You can take control of your life, improve your sleep, improve your executive function, reduce your anxiety, improve your social function. And these are things that are hard to manage unless you understand them. You know, it's not as useful often, I believe, if someone just hands you down a diagnosis. Um sometimes it can feel like something's happening to us. Our anxiety or ADHD or sleep issue is happening to us. And it is, but it's also resources. And if you know how those work, it's a lot harder to be overwhelmed or ashamed about what's going on, and it creates this urgency, this agency to take control. And that is fun. It is fun to train your brain or do some intervention and feel different in a way you wanted to. It's very reinforcing, you know, no pun intended. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yes, and great. Before I ask my last question, what's this Oh, sorry, where can people learn more about you and your work and the book? Yeah, people can go to giftedandtortured.com to check out the book. And if they want to see me, come to YouTube. I'm just Dr. Hill. youtube.com/drhill. And I do a weekly live stream every Monday. Um and then start to roll out some more videos. I've got a couple years worth of individual biohacking topics, doing deep dives, and if you want to come chat live, I'm there Monday, uh in in Monday evening, US time. All right, sounds good. Put the links in the show notes, and uh my last question is, what's this one piece of advice or habit that you wish you adopted sooner? Yeah, I wish someone had taught me uh how to meditate in the '70s, not in the '90s or the or even later. Um the ability to voluntarily stabilize your attention and learn how to do that. I mean, I developed pretty good regulation when I was in my 20s and 30s by by being in crisis environments all the time. That was my sort of strategy as somebody with severe ADHD was just to be in the most intense crises and then I was ready to call them all the time. And I would always, you know, jump in action very smoothly. Um but I didn't necessarily learn how to regulate my executive function. Neurofeedback helped, but meditation and other contemplative practices helped a great deal. And I would say both were what let me go back and get a, you know, PhD in neuroscience studying this stuff. It would not have been possible uh without some of these tools. So, I wish someone had given me that brain perspective. You know, we we knew some of this stuff in the 70s and 80s. I wish someone had sat me down and said, "Okay, here's how your brain works." because it would have created a lot less suffering of the uh the the teenage me at least. So, um yeah. That's a good information. I I agree the meditation and I guess controlling your mind is one of the best skills to have. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming to the show and it was a really interesting conversation. Thank you. Thanks, Sim uh thanks for having me and uh everyone thanks for listening. Take care of those brains.