The results are in! I have been waiting since my last video and am excited to share with you the brain scan results. In this video, I am joined by Dr. Andrew Hill from Peak Brain Institute as he explains the results of the QEEG Brain Scan I had in London. Learn more about the Peak Brain Institute here: https://peakbraininstitute.com/ 🎞️Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 0:32 The QEEG Brain Scan in London 0:59 The Performance Test 4:16 Happy Child vs Grumpy Old Man 6:17 Brain Fog and Fatigue 7:39 Sleep & Recovery 9:06 Visual Stress & Tension ----------------------------------------------- 👋Welcome to Autism From The Inside!!! If you're autistic or think you or someone you love might be on the autism spectrum, this channel is for you! I'm Paul Micallef, and I discovered my own autism at age 30. Yes, I know, I don't look autistic. That's exactly why I started this channel in the first place because if I didn't show you, you would never know. Autism affects many (if not all!) aspects of our lives, so on this channel, I want to show you what Autism looks like in real people and give you some insight into what's happening for us on the inside. We'll break down myths and misconceptions, discuss how to embrace autism and live well, and share what it's like to be an autistic person. Join me as I share what I've found along my journey, so you don't have to learn it the hard way. Make sure to subscribe so you won’t miss my new video every Friday and some bonus content thrown in mid-week too. ➡️️ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-FpBZR7DbpvNj5UrFN8qUA?sub_confirmation=1 👋Connect with me: ➡️️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aspergersfromtheinside ➡️️ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/autismfromtheinside.com.au ➡️️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AspieFromInside ➡️️ Written Blog: https://aspergersfromtheinside.com/ ➡️️ Email: aspergersfromtheinside@gmail.com Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy my channel! Peace, ~ Paul #autism #asd #autismawareness
Episode Summary
I recorded this read as a guest on Paul Micallef's channel Autism From The Inside. Paul had a QEEG brain map done in London, and I walked him through the results on camera. You can watch the original conversation. What follows is my own read of that map, the mechanisms behind what we saw, and the training options that follow from it. Paul gave permission to discuss his data; I have kept the focus on his findings and what they teach about a common autistic brain pattern.
What does a performance test add to a QEEG map?
I start with the continuous performance test before the QEEG map because the behavioral data is more straightforward to read. Paul scored at 100 for his age cohort, the top edge of typical, with no problem on impulsivity or reactivity. Sharp, with one clear cost: stamina.
Under each of the four big resource scores, there are smaller bars that track how the resource holds up across the test. Paul's stamina bar sat low. That means performance is fine early and degrades later in the session, or degrades faster when he runs several tasks at once. He also showed cranked-up prudence. Prudence is a specific construct here. It measures what you do on the trial after you start to make a mistake. Do you correct, or do you repeat it? A high prudence score means the brain is monitoring and adjusting constantly, noticing, second-guessing, course-correcting.
Paul named the trade-off himself: he does well on these tasks because he is extremely careful, and the carefulness exhausts him. That is the signature. The output looks typical. The metabolic cost to produce it is high. This is a recurring pattern I see in bright, careful, easily-fatigued brains, and it connects directly to the vigilance decrement that drives most performance drop-off over time.
Why is there a delay before I respond when someone talks to me?
The performance test showed something else: Paul shifted gears oddly fast in the auditory system, but not in the visual system. There is a subtle auditory processing pattern sitting behind the right ear.
I described what I expected behaviorally. Someone starts talking to you and your habit is to say "Sorry, what?" because you were not already listening on automatic. Paul corrected me with something more precise and more revealing. He hears the question, holds it, finishes what he is doing, and answers about twenty seconds later. The input lands. The orienting response and the verbal reply are delayed because the brain is committed elsewhere.
The mechanism is allocation. The auditory stream is not being passively monitored in the background, so incoming speech does not get an automatic interrupt. It gets queued.
The short-term fix is social, not neurological. I told Paul to teach his partner and close colleagues a protocol: call the name, leave a beat, then continue. "Hey, honey." Pause. "Do you want pizza?" That alerting cue plus a beat of time lets the brain hit the brakes, orient, and come online before the content arrives. It works far better than front-loading a request before attention has shifted.
The longer-term option is training. Bring down the theta, raise the alpha, raise the beta in that region, and you get more voluntary control over the stream of information that is always present. That is standard SMR and beta neurofeedback work applied to an auditory and sensory processing target.
What do the frontal lobes show about motivation and overwhelm?
In Paul's frontal tips, both the alpha (the chill, idling, rest tone) and the activated voluntary beta tone were low, and theta was taking over as the automatic frequency. That means the frontal tissue is acting and reacting on autopilot rather than under voluntary command.
The frontal poles balance the approach and avoid systems. I use a front-porch metaphor for this. On the left side of the porch is a happy little kid who calls out to the world, come here, let's go. On the right side is a grumpy old man who says leave us alone, too hard, this sucks. How you weigh those two depends on how safe, rested, and energetic you feel.
Paul's left front carried a lot of theta and not much beta. When the left frontal approach system idles like that, the happy little kid does not want to go outside even on a sunny day. Too much work, not interested. The lived experience is low motivation, joy that is hard to find, effort that does not last. Paul recognized it immediately: he has to push hard to motivate himself, and the energy drains fast.
The right front is the avoid side. When the grumpy old man carries heavy theta, it reads as more than irritability. I call it the dread marker, a sense of bracing against things being hard, exerting against the day before the day has even pushed back. Frontal asymmetry of this kind is some of the better-established EEG literature linking left frontal activity to approach motivation and right frontal activity to withdrawal. The training target follows from it: this frontal pattern is tractable. You can train the frontal lobes toward more natural buoyancy so the system can ride stress instead of listing in calm water.
Why do I feel foggy and tired all the time?
Paul's map showed extra delta amplitude and low delta phase lag in specific regions. Low phase lag means slow-wave activity that is stuck together, over-connected. When I see that delta signature during the waking record, it tracks with brain fog, persistent fatigue, and the feeling of being tired in a way that rest alone does not fix.
Paul was four months into a deliberate break to recover, and he had noticed that rest helped but did not solve it. He is right. Sleep architecture is the problem, not the quantity of rest. Delta is the rest-and-repair band. During the day you want delta close to zero. When sleep cycles are not reaching deep enough stages and not banking a little more deep sleep on each cycle, the delta drive feels shorted. It then rushes around during waking hours trying to repair you while you are awake. The result is the contradictory state Paul described: chronically burnt out and rushed at the same time.
When daytime delta pushes high the way his did, it reflects that deep sleep is not landing reliably night after night. Apnea is one common driver worth ruling out, given Paul's diagnosis of excessive daytime sleepiness. The maintenance of sleep, not the falling asleep, is where the breakdown shows. If that high-delta pattern persists for months it can eventually collapse into a flatter, depleted state. Getting deep sleep back online is the highest-leverage move here, which is why I treat sleep architecture and SMR training for sleep as the foundation before anything else.
What does the "gifted poet brain" pattern actually mean?
Before we left the speed page, I showed Paul how fast his brain runs. Looking at the left hemisphere alpha peak, his processing speed sits about as fast as a brain can be built. Alpha frequency is a reasonable proxy for processing speed, and a fast individual alpha frequency is generally an asset.
I call this configuration the gifted poet brain. There is a spectrum in how people focus and how they take in the outside world. At one end a person cannot handle the information coming in and cannot process it. At the other end the person processes all of it, too much of it. Paul sits at that second end. It is a rawness, a fire hose of social and sensory input that does not get filtered down into a manageable stream.
The places where his processing numbers ran a little draggy were the same places where delta ran fast. A fast brain with a shorted repair system is a fast brain that burns hot and cannot cool down. That combination explains the burnout cycle precisely: high capacity, high input, and a recovery system that is not keeping up.
What did the visual and sensory regions show?
With eyes open, Paul showed strong theta and strain in the back of the head, the visual attention regions, more than in the auditory regions on the side. The right visual attention area was carrying heavy theta. I described it as a kid playing baseball who forgot his sunglasses, squinting into the glare, where's the ball.
Paul's behavior matched the map exactly. He avoids TV, averts his eyes from flashing screens in public, and actively filters visual input. The map showed one visual channel wide open and another struggling, what I called a mixed social and sensory junction box. Given that, it made sense that he has spent his life focused on emotional processing and the social-sensory world. He confirmed it has been a special interest for more than thirty years. The sensory and social processing systems are doing unusual, high-effort work in this brain.
Where should training start?
I do not tell anyone what to do with their brain. This pattern is generally tractable if you want to push it. Across the ratios at the end of the document, the same themes repeated: shorted sleep depth, low motivation drive, sensory load in the visual and auditory systems.
Paul chose his own priority, and I agree with it. Sleep first. The auditory delay is real but low-impact, maybe a two out of ten for him. The deep-sleep deficit is the bottleneck. His description of his own bandwidth captured why: low capacity to do things, burns out on first use, has to rest, comes back, burns out again. Sleep, stress, and attention draw on the same underlying resource. Restore the recovery system and the capacity for the rest tends to come back online with it.
If you recognize yourself in this map, the practical sequence is the same. Rule out a structural sleep problem like apnea. Rebuild deep-sleep architecture before chasing focus or mood. Use simple environmental supports, like the name-plus-a-beat alerting cue, for the auditory delay in the meantime. Then, if you want to train the circuits directly, the frontal motivation pattern and the sensory load are both reasonable neurofeedback targets once the sleep foundation is in place.