Hi, I am Jennifer Purcell and welcome to my podcast living with an invisible learning challenge where we will discuss, discover and learn more about the challenges and times of those with NLD and other learning challenges. I do have a website for this podcast and it is called livingwithn.com. I also have a Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter account for the podcast. They are all under the same name, which is Living with an OD. I also have a YouTube channel for the podcast, which can be found by googling the title of the podcast, which is Living with an Invisible Learning Challenge. I would like to tell you about a nonprofit that I use for my research for this podcast. It is called the NBLD project and I use their blog for my research. They are a nonprofit that is based in New York and is trying to get NVLD back on the DSM and they provide many resources for people with NVLD on their website. I'll provide you with the website for them in the podcast description. All proceeds from the ads on this podcast will be donated towards the NVL day project. Please feel free to explore the other topics on the podcast and hopefully you will learn something new from them. I hope you enjoy today's episodes. All right, good afternoon or good morning dep on where you're listening from. I'm Jennifer Purcell and I'm here with Andrew Hill today to uh ask him some questions about neuro feedback and uh his business Peak Brain. And um I'll have him start by introducing himself. >> Well, thanks for having me. Nice to be here. Um of course, my name is Andrew Hill. I'm a neuroscientist that helps people understand their brains. Uh we do things like brain mapping and we also help people uh make changes using both lifestyle sort of biohacks as well as specific tools like neuro feedback which is a process of training the brain to make changes in executive function anxiety sleep you know broad features like that essentially so yeah I'm I own peak brain and we are a brain gym and we teach people to understand themselves and uh so take agency you know understand yourself without necess necessarily rushing to that diagnosis but understanding the executive function, the sleep, the stress, the speed of processing uh specifically how they might operate for you regardless of what somebody calls that particular you know landscape or diagnosis for you. >> I was wondering if you could speak a little about uh QG mapping what that is. >> Sure. So brain mapping or QEG is a process of picking up the uh baseline sort of fingerprint patterns that you will produce in your brain. >> Usually we combine uh it's good practice to combine a brain map which is a physiological measurement in EEG. Basically it's good idea to combine that with a performance measurement. So best practices is to do some sort of executive function testing a go no-go style test alongside the EEG. And when doing an EEG, you put a cap on the head or you stick 24 wire to someone's scalp and then you measure their brain at rest for about 10 minutes eyes closed and 10 minutes eyes open. And the stuff we're measuring, those big patterns are not the content of thought or little experiences you're having. It's the the standing resources, the stuff that's usually there. So brain mapping is a little tricky to interpret, but it's always the same unless you're pushing your brain around. performance testing is easy to interpret, but it's sensitive to how you're feeling that day a little bit. So those two things held in contrast >> and both are compared to age matched samples. So everything's sort of bell curve driven where in performance it's pretty straightforward. If you're inattentive or impulsive or if you have >> difficulty with auditory versus visual or reaction time issue or a stamina issue that jumps out in performance. >> But then you look at a brain, you're like great. Well, you're weird in these three ways. Good job. be weird. We don't necessarily know what it means because people are so unusual, >> right? >> However, stuff that gets in the way in executive function especially, several flavors of anxiety, sleep dysregulation, and a few other things that might be interesting to the folks who listen, uh, including sensory processing, social processing >> will show up pretty clearly. Um, other things might not, like you can see sometimes language-based phenomena like dyslexia. Um, but like for instance, I'm profoundly discalculas in my brain. I have two language areas, bilateral and no math area. You're supposed to have language on the left and math on the right for the symbol manipulation areas. >> I got two language areas and no math area. So, I just cannot do >> addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in my head without it >> being like a foreign language and I have to translate in and out and make lots of mistakes. But I don't see a quirky back right area in my brain maps because it's working fine. It's working typically. It's just not doing math. It's just doing other symbol manipulation for me. >> Um, so you can't see everything in a brain map >> and you don't see all your suffering. If you're really concerned about something, you don't see it on a map. Doesn't mean it's not there. Your experience is real. M >> but if you do see big features sticking out for executive function, anxiety, sleep, sensory, social, speed, speed of processing, um stability phenomena, you can sometimes see migraine tendencies or seizure tendencies. Um these are the things that you can sort of start working on like it's your body. You can sort of say great I would like to change my impulsivity or my >> reaction time or word finding. And you can actually exercise the tissue the the the brain using bof feedback on the brain waves. So QEG is an EEG that's processed compared to population averages. But since you see those patterns that might represent difficulties or complaints or goals you have well then great, you can now exercise those features you're seeing with BOF feedback and make changes over a few months. >> Okay. Um, I was curious kind of what got you into uh doing your feedback and how long you've been doing it. >> Um, I've been doing it for about 25 years. >> Wow. >> Um, and I've been running my own companies for about half that time. Uh, >> and 26 years ago, let's say, I was working in psych hospitals and I had had about a decade of really deep experience with pretty much all of the really acute human suffering stuff. M >> so I was doing impatient lock facility hospitals with psychiatric complaints and violence and drug abuse and all kinds of things. I was also working running uh residential facilities for folks with multiple disabilities. Usually they were blind, deaf, no language and had uh uh CP or some sort of uh other developmental issue that was really in the way. So these people had communication, perception and sort of cognitive challenges usually, >> okay, >> and just really extreme edge cases. And then same thing in the hospitals I worked in, really really violent hospitals, like the worst in the country essentially for for managing people uh at at acuity levels >> and then I got injured >> and I couldn't keep doing the work that I was doing. So, I spent some time doing other things, working in high-tech, and then I eventually said, you know, I kind of miss working with people, and I have a lot of experience working with autism and other developmental populations. Oh, there's a place nearby that does this thing called neuro feedback. I'm kind of interested in that. Let me go and see if they'll let me observe. >> And I walked out with a job. >> Wow. >> And spent a couple years doing this work. And I'd had a lot of experience with autism, ADHD, childhood anxiety, childhood sensory issues and seizures. And I had not seen a lot of people getting benefit. It was, you know, in traditional mental health and psychiatric work, it was mostly holding patterns and paliotative work and sort of this like revolving door of people coming and going. So you'd get somebody stable who was a teen and they'd spend a few days in the hospital and they would leave and be discharged into an environment that wasn't supportive and a couple weeks later would see the same kid back again again and again and again. And a lot of this was childhood trauma, anxiety and impulsivity in in the uh population I was seeing in the in the hospital. But a lot of kids who are autistic and you know non-verbal, I just didn't see a lot of change happening. And then I got this job at this place in Providence, Rhode Island called the Neurode Development Center. Still there >> and was seeing in six or eight weeks dramatic changes in executive function, sensory issues, stmming, seizures, sleep, bedwedding, obsessiveness, all kinds of issue of things just changing. And so parents would come in after a few weeks of nerfy back and be like, "Oh, the school called home and was super happy we finally put Jimmy on stimulants." aha we didn't do this other thing. >> So that really blew my mind because it kind of flew in the face of what I thought was possible for for making changes in brains. >> And after a couple years of that I went back to grad school because at the time the field I mean still somewhat of a of a nichy area. It's a bit of an art to do neuro feedback. You have to understand the brain and people and learning and a bunch of stuff at once. But 20, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, it was all, you know, three or four schools of thought that were in sort of vitriolic opposition, fighting each other. You know, my way is the best way. No, my way. You know, a bunch of crabs and buckets trying to clamber to the top and and be the most legit. And yet, it was a really nichy kind of random little corner of mental health. To give you an idea how long ago it was, >> we were arguing on the Usenet. So for folks that don't know, that's before like Facebook and modern forums and things. It's an old school like news servers and you'd have these news email lists come out every day and so you had these >> all the greats in the field would sit and like pen these really aggressive y letters yelling at each other about how no it doesn't work that way. No, this is the best way to do it. No, it must work like this. And yet, of the three big schools of thought that were all, you know, proclaiming they had the the solution, all three of them had better results than traditional mental health, dramatically better. >> And yet the ideas under those three different parts of our field at the time were not reconcilable. >> Brain couldn't work in all those ways. So somebody was maybe maybe many of us were were not really understanding what we were doing. So I sort of saw this as a blind men and elephant situation. you know, describing a piece of what you've got and and extrapolating poorly from there. and I went back to grad school uh at UCLA and I studied cognitive neuroscience which is sort of the way the brain produces the mind and behavior and did a lot of work assessing uh or or learning to assess brains looking at how each resource operates in a hemispheric way lateralized uh uh division of stuff which is really important for a neuro divergent population. One of the biggest things that's quite different in us who don't have typical brains is our brains are not left right lateralized the same way as most people's. >> So you might not be lefty, >> but you probably if you're neuro quirky or neurospicy, you probably do have a brain that's got left right divisions. It's a little unusual and not like everyone else's. >> I mentioned earlier for me that meant two language areas and I'm also strongly left-handed and I feel there are quirky lefty things that come along with that. But you sort of seeing this unusual brain And then in our field, we had people working with really unusual brains. And >> you know, you have gifted individuals making uh a lot of benefit for for individuals they're working with, but the field wasn't really well um it couldn't just do replicable work across people. You know, you needed gifted people to do the work. So went back to grad school and I studied not just laterality but um EEG and how to do assessments. And then I did a PhD work. My my grad work uh for my dissertation was on well how is this happening? What is actually happening in the brain when you do neuro feedback? Because up until that point nobody knew. >> Um there was no double blind studies before that. I think I did the first placebo control sham double blind study or one of the first. A couple were happening about the same time that I started. But I did my dissertation work in like 2009 2010 or so and then wrote it up afterwards. So the field of neuro feedback was discovered in the mid60s in this form. And EEG was discovered 100 years ago this year. So it's not that new as science and and medicine goes. But neuro feedback is really new. It's only you know 60 years old or so. And only for the past maybe 15 years have you been able to do really good research. Um, so I studied this stuff, you know, how is it working? How does the brain know? So for folks that are wondering what the heck we're talking about, maybe I should explain, >> yeah, >> what it is, and then I'll explain if you're if if you want to get really geeky, um, what I actually found because I don't usually do that on podcasts. >> Um, so neuro feedback is a process of involuntarily exercising the brain. Basically, >> you can't control your brain waves. You can't feel them. >> They're sort of subperceptible. Um BOF feedback is generally taking something that's not perceptible raising up the level of perceptibility like your heartbeat or your uh body temperature or something skin temperature and then you work on voluntarily controlling something because it's now aware that's bof feedback peripheral BOF feedback. Central BOF feedback on the brain also called neuro feedback is involuntary because you can't feel the phenomena that you're trying to train. So you end up exercising a resource and then noticing afterwards did it shift briefly in the right direction and then it wears off >> and if you like the effect you do it again. It's sort of iterative personal training in some ways. Um so let me give you a practical example. >> Maybe we should give you an example. Give us an example in executive function. >> Yes, that would be a good one. So from an EEG perspective, there's a handful of things you can pretty reliably see that sort of scaffold or support executive function. They're not the only things involved, but there's some big gross resources, if you will, that are visible on a brain map. You can see them sticking up, and they're among the most valid and reliable features we see in a map, too. They often mean they're conserved across people. They mean what we think they mean usually. And those are two big circuits sort of between the crown and the ear on either side and the center of the head. The left one, the left mid- central cortex. Its job is to stabilize the mode you're in. So it keeps the car pointed in the right direction, the the headlight on the road in front of you, even if things are boring. And it uses beta waves to do its job. And the one on the right is a supervisor. It knows if you're on the road. It's reading the map. It's orienting. It knows if you're appropriately engaging with the behavior you want to engage with. So left side is the stabilizer, right side is a supervisor. And they both use beta waves to do their job. The one on the left has a tendency to make other slow brain waves called thetas and alphas. Theta is a release in the brain and alpha is a neutral. >> The one on the right tends to produce lots of theta as well. If you're dominant in those slower brain waves, if you make lots of alpha on the left, that circuit can't stabilize our focus and we start to drift and and wander with our attention instead of having it remain stable. We call that inattentiveness. >> The one on the right, we want to be doing internal direction of focus and reacting to things we wish to. But if it's not active, if it's making lots of theta, then the outside world grabs us with whatever is interesting. squirrel and we call that impulsivity or disinhibition. >> And you can have these features. We all have these circuits. These can be not operating ideally for you with or without a diagnostic label actually with or without ADHD. You can have issues in the left from deep fatigue, issues in the right from anxiety perhaps. So the circuits will operate at a lower level than the diagnostic framework if you will. And that's useful. Looking at your brain, you can figure out the different resources without worrying about what it's called. It's more like, well, here it is. What do you want to do? Is it important? >> And that's really freeing to some people to see their their their brains. So, if you wanted to change, if you wanted to improve your inattentiveness and your impulsivity, it's a very classic way we go after stuff in uh neuro feedback. The average workout or exercise in neuro feedback is about half an hour long. >> Okay? >> Do it three or four times a week. >> And you would put a few wires on your head. So, a couple ear clips. And you might stick a wire on the left hand side for the first 15 minutes and the right hand side for the next 15 minutes. And for both of those chunks of time, you set the computer up to measure what your brain is doing moment to moment. Measure the beta waves, measure the theta waves moment to moment. As your brain makes these things are going to change a little bit. And whenever the brain briefly moves in the right direction, the beta comes up on its own. The the theta comes down. The computer sees that and goes, "Oh, good job brain. Good job brain." It makes a game on the screen start to move. The brain says, "Whoa, stuff >> kind of like stuff. Hey, stuff." And then it moves in the wrong direction. The alpha comes back up on the left. Let's say >> the game slows down or stops and the brain says, "Hey, uh, I don't like no stuff. Where's where's where's my stuff?" >> It happens to move in the right direction again a couple seconds later >> and the applause continues. The brain starts to notice, oh, oh, raising beta, lowering alpha on the left, makes stuff happen. Okay. and it has no idea. It's not a real thing that you're trying to do in the outside world. The big trick is we move the criteria every few seconds. We adjust the computer next to where your brain is. So as you shift, you're always being tracked. And then when the brain flexes itself in the right direction, that's what triggers the applause. You know, one thing out of a billion things the brain is doing. And so the brain starts to notice these repetitive bursts >> of information that are only yolked to one thing or two things. things the brain is doing. And that's what I did for my dissertation work. I set up four groups of people and I did a left side beta, a left side low beta training as two separate protocols, a right side low beta training and then a sham training when the beeps and the information wasn't actually tied to their brain. It was coming off of stored data on disk, not their real data. >> And so what I found, you guys can Google me and pull up my open access dissertation. What I found was the brain reacts to the frequency being applotted. So if you're plotting beta, you get a burst of beta right after the beeps happen, telling the brain, good job for making the beta, the brain then desynchronize, makes a burst of of strong beta. And it happens under the location you're measuring. So if you're measuring the left, you get a desynchronization, a burst in beta on the left. If you're if you're rewarding on the right, it happens in the right. If you're rewarding sham, it doesn't happen. You don't get a burst of beta waves in response to the stimulus. you only get like just basic input output sensory uh uh brain waves happening. So in one paper I demonstrated lateralized effect you know left right hemisphere where you put the wire matters which frequency you measure and train matters and it works when it's real and doesn't work when it's sham and so you would think this is a pretty basic research but up until that point up until the late 2000s we still weren't sure that we were still arguing in the field does it matter where you put the electrode does it matter what the location is and and the frequency is or is this just an exercise phenomenon? If you just give the brain back any information, will it figure it out? >> Turns out no. Sight matters, frequency matters, and if you're doing real training, you can see it happen in in the brain in real time. So that was my dissertation work. And then from there, I went back out into the world and started opening up uh neuro feedback practices to help people dig through their own brain data and their assessment data, come up with ideas. And I started doing it in like an addiction and alcohol and you know cute environment and really rapidly even in that environment I started to realize wait a minute teaching somebody how their brain works on their data >> it doesn't create the init like the immediate change that they're looking for for their anxiety their cravings their impulsivity whatever it is but just sitting down and showing somebody their impulsivity and their high theta on the right that's producing that and describing to them how that physiology is arranged and what it's doing and how it serves them. You know, I'm basically telling somebody something they already know if I'm doing it right and they're going, "Wow, yeah, that's me. Oh my gosh, yeah, that's me." The end of that conversation, their big suffering or goals aren't dramatically different, >> but it's a lot harder to be overwhelmed, ashamed, confused, and feel like this thing is happening to you. And instead, you start thinking about the resources and you start wondering what you can do about them. And I can often give people behavioral strategies, biohacks, you know, for of technique, sleep hacks and exercise things and dietary things, meditation things that will actually move those resources. So really quickly I moved into this non-diagnostic, non sort of medical way of doing this where instead we teach people how to think about them themselves through data. We ask them not, you know, is this diagnosis right, but is there a goal here I'm seeing for you? Are you impulsive? Are you inattentive? Are you having word finding issues? Are you having sensory filtering? Do you not pick up face expressions real well? Whatever it is, you can see those features in the map. And I'm not judging and saying, "Oh, you have autism." Or, "Oh, you have ADHD." I'm saying, "Oh, look, you're kind of impulsive >> and also you're really not well rested." Is that sound that sounds right? Okay. Not sure where it's coming from, but clearly your deep sleep is a great goal and so is this impulsivity. Does that sound right? It does. Well, then great. These become things we can now build neuro feedback plan for. And three, four sessions in you start feeling neuro feedback. Not the first session usually, but three four sessions in. And then after that, every session produces an after effect. And you get a little flex in your brain for a few hours to maybe as much as a day where you notice changes in the big resources, the the stress, the sleep, the attention, maybe some sensory filtering, maybe some anxiety and then it kind of wears off and you're like, "Huh, I I might have noticed something. I might have felt different. My mother-in-law called and I wasn't mad at the end of the call. It was weird or whatever it is." Like, you know, I sat down to do some homework and I just did it. It was kind of weird. This is kind of silly, but I get calls from parents all the time between like weeks like three and six. >> Calls are like, "Oh my god, I asked my kid to take the trash out. I asked once. He got up and did it. What do you do to my kid? I asked one time." >> Or a call comes home from school. Thank you for finally putting your kid on on medication. Oh, actually we didn't. >> Right. >> And all the time. Or I get calls from the spouses of really uh uptight CEOs. Oh, whatever you did, do do more of it. We had the best therapy session. He was talking about his emotions. It was weird. It was awesome. He brought me flowers. Do do more of that creativity work you you guys are doing >> because the creativity neuro feedback also produces >> emotional access, flow states, awareness of your emotions. So, you can kind of use techniques for a goal, >> but you're working on resources. You go to the gym because you want a nicer butt. Well, guess what? You also get really gorgeous thighs and your balance is nice and your sleep is deeper. And when you have that heavy thing to pick up in the middle of the road, you can do it. So the resources once they're made more robust, once you're you're you trust them more, you feel them changing, it starts to change your behavior pretty broadly because you know if I took you out of an old beaten up car that's hard to drive and you weren't sure you wanted to and the brakes didn't work right and it runs out of gas a lot >> versus putting you in a car that everything's just perfect and responds how you want and then you can trust it. People start leaning in and pushing themselves harder, trying harder. Procrastination drops away. People get excited about things. And this is true of almost without, you know, uh uh concern about age or functional level. You know, if you give somebody more access to the resources, they generally want to use them. And so it's just kind of letting people be free to do the things they want to do with their brain is sort of how we end up, you know, building our our approach. >> Yeah. Um I was going to ask you um to like how um how the neuro feedback has specifically helped uh neurody divergence with some of their um >> yeah, >> I guess you could say goals. Like we've been using that word a lot of what they want to work on. I I really prefer goals to symptoms or complaints because people are so weird that you know once you give somebody a label or a complaint or a symptom >> it doesn't necessarily fit them. people are not their diagnosis and the word someone uses for a diagnostic feature might not be the same subjectively from one person to the next, you know, but when I go over brain map data and I can find the unusual stuff and say, "Hey, are you having sensory difficulty or language production or speed of processing uh or you know a lot of the time in in in those of us who are uh neurospicy you know neurody divergent you get broad changes in sleep, stress and attention. found that human brak >> but they're changeable. That's the thing. The a lot of the things that uh I would consider neurode divergent. I also put in the same category as regulatory. So there's features in the brain that do not change easily. >> Visual fusion making one image out of two. If you don't have good visual fusion by the age of one year old, you probably never will. >> Language, if you haven't learned how to say certain sounds or hear sounds in a language by age nine, you probably won't. Um, the brain prunes away after a critical period. It locks down change in language tissue and in visual processing tissue because it's so complicated that it needs to be structured and then kind of left alone. >> But other things are meant to keep changing. executive function, the sleep regulation, the sensory filtering, the social queuing is actually meant to keep changing. And then other things you can see change as a consequence of the brain not being optimal like speed of processing will get completely thrown off if your deep sleep is lousy. So I can take one look at someone's brain who's in their mid years and say, um, you're having word finding issues and they go, "Well, yeah, tip of the tongue, it's really in the way." Yeah, that's not your memory. That's your speed of processing. And the reason it appears to be off is because your delta waves are super high and in the foreground. >> Probably means you're aren't getting good deep sleep. And therefore, you're walking around all day kind of tired. >> And one of the consequences of that is your brain is tired and can't hand off information between parts of the brain real well. So you're like, "Oh, give me a word. Here it is. Here's the word." You kind of keep missing it as you reach for it as a timing mismatch. So when I find someone's speed of processing or tinitus or uh trauma response, you can see uh threat sensitivity in the back midline, the lifeguard in the brain is sort of like where watch the road, watch the road, watch the road. I don't know if the person's experiencing tons of anxiety or if they're actually a lifeguard or a mom with nine kids who's very effective at managing the chaos, >> but I do know your brain's kind of quirky and unusual. And I can say look your posterior singulate kind of active often that means somebody is experiencing some rumination kind of worried and threat sensitive you know is that true for you oh it is h that's so frustrating sorry dealing with that is that in the way would you like to work on that you do okay great so those are the big features executive the anxiety stuff including the more subtle anxiety and then I would build a plan that should move those things you know okay a little more beta here you might want not enough alpha but I'm Sure, people are weird, >> really, really quirky. So, the goal is not to say, "I understand you from the data any more than I would understand you from a diagnosis you walked in." You're a lot more rich and nuanced than those things. So, you start moving people's brains a little bit and then you progressively iterate based on what they notice. And I've had an awful lot of people with some neurodeivergent qualities, so to speak. I mean, I would say that well over half my clients don't have typical brains. Um, and I, you know, the the word neurode divergent means so many things, especially these days. But if we go back 10, 20 years, it kind of means low-key or not so low-key learning disability with anxiety and with ADHD. And you might get other things, dyspraxy, dyslexia, dcalcula, other, you know, sensory processing, social processing, but it's kind of a giant umbrella at this point. But if you go back 10, 20 years, I've had a lot of people who would have been diagnosed with Asperers, let's say, or high functioning autism 20 years ago. And now, uh, the diagn diagnostic landscape is a bit different. Many of those folks, I would say almost all, if you're cognitively intact and your language is intact, that's the stuff again that's hard to change. So if that stuff's good, >> the other stuff almost without fail can be changed. So several kids I've worked with, I say kids cuz I I I met them when they were like 12, 13, 14, >> and very classic presentation. Um very intelligent, absurdly anxious, obsessive, phobias, sensory issues, maybe some stmming. Um uh uh they're picking up social information, but it's it's awkward. They're really anxious. They're geeky. Um, and in the two that I'm thinking of off the top of my head, both had artistic skills that were just amazing. One was a pianist >> and one was a sculptor. >> But they had an awful lot of broad challenges. And when I met them, the parents were both worried that this kid's never going to be independent because I can't have him in the back seat over a bridge or he freaks out. >> You know, after an hour being in in in social environments, he shuts down. So very classic kind of, you know, the system being flooded stuff in both of these people. And um this is a long time ago, so I'm picking them. I've worked with these two people off and on. Uh one of them graduated valadictorian from his high school a few years later >> and he's actually opening up neuroch companies now as a CEO and leading people and you know making big inroads into making change. The other one is running uh um his own jazz uh trios. He teaches jazz and he runs trios. who travels the country and runs and and sits in in on jazz trios. He couldn't even drive. He he drove from the Midwest to California a few years ago and he's like, "Andrew, this is the biggest sign that I've I'm different." >> My parents were concerned I would never leave leave the basement and I'm living in my own apartment in Santa Monica alone and I drove across country and it felt awesome and I have new students and new teachers I'm working with and I'm not bothered by it. So, you know, it's a very specific person's example, but I didn't say to this person, "Oh, I'm going to fix your developmental atypicality." >> I didn't tell his parents, "Oh, we're going to fix his social function." I said, "Well, what's in the way?" Oh, it's this obsessiveness and these phobias and the sensory. Okay, let's work on that stuff. But by working on the brain, not the diagnosis. This guy is, you would never know he had any diagnosis ever. you know, he's he's just a gentle, happy, emotionally sensitive musician whose music is amazing. >> And, you know, I can go through kid after kid after kid. I I often get a lot of kids in their in their teen years, and I get a lot of like 40s and 50s. So, people come in often when they're young or when they're older. >> Um, and I often get the 40s. This is I'm I'm not convinced this is a real thing, but I get a lot of women who are 40, 45, 50 with their very first diagnosis >> uh from somebody else and they come in like, "Oh, my doctor said I have ADHD or I have some autism or I have some like sensory processing issue. I didn't know that." Mhm. >> Often it's because the menopause has taken out the sleep and without the sleep to support the resources suddenly you can see the distractability, the speed of processing, the sensory filtering because >> when you're rested and and resourced can resist a lot of that stuff. We can kind of push through our impulsivity or inattentiveness. But if your sleep is thrown off and you have some increased anxiety or fatigue or aging, suddenly these let's call them subacute, you know, neuroatypical things can suddenly burst through and get in the way. So I see a lot of folks in their 40s and 50s when they get a little burnt out and things can can rise to the surface. >> Yeah. Um, I was also curious cuz um, hopefully what you can do with these episodes on this podcast, Living with Invisible Learning Challenge. I would like to challenge you to journal about the p the episodes and just see what you learn from them or you can share about the episodes with your friends and family and see what they can learn from them. And um as always, I will post the links to the articles that I use in the description, the podcasts. And please let me know if you know somebody who you think would want to be interviewed on this podcast or if you yourself would want to be interviewed, please email me. Um, I have my email on my website and I also have it um pretty much uh pretty accessible on Facebook and Instagram through messaging as well. So, you can get in contact with me in those ways.