Lifelong Cognitive Health with Brain Mapping & Neurofeedback with Dr. Andrew Hill

change happens shift happens people's suffering is not as permanent as it usually feels uh you didn't always feel this way you won't always feel this way and so if you're not satisfied especially with these regulatory features of stress sleep attention speed of processing social integration sensory processing if you're not comfortable with how those things are operating those things are changeable they change probably to pinch up this way so your s offing you can learn how to change them are you ready to boost your longevity and unlock Peak Performance welcome to the longevity and lifestyle podcast I'm your host Claudia from balaga longevity and Peak Performance [Music] coach my guest today is Dr Andrew Hill uh Dr Hill is the Visionary behind Peak brain Health Institute and is pioneered a groundbreaking approach to Brain Training Services as many of you know this is a topic close to my heart with my mother and her dementia and figuring out how do we optimize our brain before it's too late um and he holds a PhD in cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA and has extensive experience in the field of neuro feedback and qeg which we're going to dig into today Dr is an expert in functional brain health and performance optimization and has lectured on Neuroscience dur ology and psychology at UCLA welcome to the longevity and lifestyle podcast Andrew it's such a pleasure to welcome you on today oh thanks so much for having me I appreciate it yeah so I'm excited to dig in and maybe even just for people listening you know what is brain training people know to go to the gym for workouts but like how do you work out your brain what is that yeah so um a lot of the particular technique that I use is called neuro feedback which is brain training of the actual uh brain wave the EEG the electricity you make but broadly the perspective is one where you can sort of look at some of the Machinery some of the physiology inside your skull inside your central nervous system the same way you might look at you know your blood lipids and go oh I better back off on the Ben and& Jerry's or whatever your favorite flavor of ice cream is um the the goal of doing brain training I think is often it often starts with developing that perspective of agency of well what is happening instead of it being a a diagnostic label oh I've got this particular you know sort of psychology defined bucket oh this thing happening to me or this label applied or know then you're entering into a landscape of treatment only and you're entering into a landscape of sort of the things that are attached to that particular diagnosis and while there's room and and even need for that in Psychology and mental health and wellness it's not the only way to think about what's going on in your body or in this case your brain so I like to first you know when going after brain training think about the fact that these are actually resources you can train at least there's about six or eight sort of resources in the brain or or features that are meant to adjust meant to train um sort of in response to how they're being used they're meant to be efficient but also to minimize pain maximize gain rest well do all the things that humans are supposed to do and you can think of these resources as uh the kind of secondary or regulatory phenomena there's primary phenomena in the brain which is like the eyes producing Vision in the visual tissue sort of a direct connection or auditory producing uh sound in the auditory tissue it's a direct connection primary tissue but then you have these other tissues whose job it is to manage the behavior the functional behavior of the system at a at a large level if you go to the top part part of the brain the cortical areas you can start to look at different resource uh modules or networks and and might be a little more practical uh things like attention or various types of stress response or anxiety or sleep regulation uh sensory regulation for sensory integration filtering social queuing social context speed of processing and then sort of keeping things stable resisting migraine phenomena resisting seizure phenomena those those are all the sort of regulatory aspects and not only can you sort of get uh a change in those things by exercising them or uh shaping them based on Behavior you can actually assess them you can look at someone's brain and say ah your speed of processing might be a little iffy because your alpha waves are running slow or oh look you've got tons of alpha or Theta on circuits involved with pumping the brakes and staying focused you're not doing that so well you might have some impulsivity or some inattentiveness Tendencies based on the brain and if you also measure someone's performance executive function and tension performance alongside of brain measurement you start to develop this perspective where you can outline phenomena say oh look your executive functions doing this brain's doing this that often means X Y and Z is that interesting would you like to change it do you know what's going on with your resources does this make sense does this fit your perspective and so brain training and and broadly qeg which is what I'm getting into now quantitative EEG or brain mapping is this process of starting to you know metaphorically peel back uh the mystery a little bit and figure out what might be happening in these regulatory features so if your attention your stress your sleep your ability to suppress seizures or not have migraines uh even some pretty subtle things you can get into with uh with brain mapping and brain training training but I would say brain training comes out of the perspective of brain mapping often which is understanding this thing we carry around on top of our shoulders at a more nuanced level than the sort of philosophical and psychological levels we you know sometimes apply to these these things so kind of high level but I love it and we're going to dig into a bunch of things there so Step One is the brain mapping and I'd love to if you could share what exactly does that entail I think people probably have like a visualization of being plugged into you know thousands of wires coming out of their mind in some lab like it sounds scary it sounds complicated but um with anything around longevity Health optimization I would say my clients like we have to establish a Baseline and obviously for your brain this is establishing the Baseline right so can you talk about how that Baseline is established and why people shouldn't be fearful of it but embrace it instead because of you said there's a There's Hope in terms of there's training as well so can you through that um sure experience so it's it's not that hard to get your brain mapped it's a little bit messy but it doesn't hurt or shouldn't hurt um it's over in about half an hour to 45 minutes and at least the actual brain map part the EEG so a brain map is is uh an analysis of an EEG an EEG is your brain wave sort of uh making millions and millions of different little firings all the time and and we have a cortex or the bark the surface of the brain that has these Columns of tissue that will fire and burst in different frequency ranges a couple times per second is called Delta 10 times per second 10 Hertz is called Alpha so those are communication uh features informational flow features that these little bits of Cortex can do and they tend to hang out and rest or have certain tuning modes that you might uh carry around most of the time so you can look at things in the EEG the electricity you're making in momentary events like you saw something interesting and so your brain had a little interest wave or an atttention wave about 300 milliseconds after you see something interesting or you can look at the background features like how fast are your brain waves or where are the resting patterns and you can the same sorts of things you would look at in like a sleep study if you were having apnea or trouble with uh a sleep phenomena Sleep Quality you might stick a bunch of wires to your head and sleep with them all night long so those are all eegs just measuring the electricity your brain is producing but in qeg in quantitative we're taking a cap and putting on the head and squirting it full of gel and it's got 21 holes in it plus some ear Clips so it's not a huge number um but that's enough to get a good uh reading so to speak of the different areas and uh takes about 15 to 20 minutes to fill the cap with gel if you have lots of uh braids or natural dreadlocks having lots of thick hair makes an EEG really easy actually having I'm I'm bald right and it's really hard to get a clean EEG on me because uh the scalp is thicker and has more oily layers and also there's no padding so any little pulse that happens in my scalp tends to get picked up as fake or false you artifact data it looks looks like delta waves but it's really a heartbeat contaminating EEG is hard to measure it's very tiny amounts of electricity inside the skull the scalp the meninges all this fluid and layers and every time electricity passes out through one of those layers it's filtered and dampened and so it's very tiny amounts of electricity you can measure so it's all about getting good connection and we these days use caps unless you have thick dreads or or braids or something then we'll use individual wires like Old School uh EEG and you stick on or fill the cap about 1920 locations plus some ear clips and then you sit still for 10 minutes with your eyes closed and about 10 minutes with your eyes open and your brain is mostly doing the same thing in terms of where the general patterns the Fingerprints of EEG waves are know this circuit's making a large amount of theta this ciruit is making a low amount of beta something and these don't necessarily these patterns don't necessarily mean a whole lot by themselves people are really complicated and really weird so good job be weird like just looking at your brain right yeah so one of the things we do with qeg is we first take your resting baselines your eyes closed and eyes open data and we compare it to normative age match samples uh big databases of thousands of people with a sort of you know arbitrary mathematical representation of your age and we look at how unusual you are compared to that population metric and develop a bunch of heat maps and bell curves and say look here's all the quirky stuff here's all the interesting things here's the places in which you are not typical but again nobody's average and the goal is not to say why aren't you average the goal is to sort of look through the features that stick out the biomarkers or phenotypes and say you know here's one that's often interesting and here's what it can mean so again brain mapping or qeg is not diagnostically valid because people are so unusual there are some features in the EEG that rise almost to diagnostic level the classic one is a high amount of theta relative to beta theta is sort of lubrication in circuits and beta is activation if you have a lot of theta to Beta ratio on the parts of the brain involved with controlling Behavior you get something called ADHD at least that's how we label it where it's disinhibited or hard to sustain your attention under low load which is impulsive or inattentive respectively so you can look at these resting patterns of your brain compared to the average person and say interesting things and then we also do uh the world's most boring 20 minute attention test uh for 20 minutes we have you do what's called the go no go or a continuous performance task where you click on a mouse when a one pops up and you don't click on a mouse in theory when a two pops up and you alternate uh auditory and visual trials and it's very slow one one two again and again and so for about 15 20 minutes you sit there and do that and of course you drift and miss the one click inappropriately on the two um it might be auditory visual you might be able to tease apart aspects of stamina or consistency or get some other subtle aspects you're really exploding this idea of executive function into more than a dozen different sub aspects of uh things not just the overarching label if you will of the problem and again compared to AG match samples so I can tell somebody oh you know yes you are having an executive function difficulty that's you know at the level of ADHD or something even though the goal is not necessarily to get to that diagnostic I mean ADHD behavior or performance distractability and attentiveness shows up from classic ADHD in the brain it also shows up from concussions or postco fog it can show up from anxiety especially stress and fatigue fighting each other you know driving the car around with the E bra rubbing and your foot on the floor looks a lot like ADHD but it's usually anxiety and fatigue kind of fighting uh and you know leaving you brittle and reactive so you can look at a brain at rest and say Here's a bunch of features in your brain look at performance and say Here's your performance and start to Model start to outline phenomena and that's what brain mapping is is you sort of sit down with data and walk through it and start to see these emergent phenomena these patterns that you have the meaning uh you make starts to attach to them oh yeah that thing there that makes a lot of sense to me wow that sounds just like me oh that not sure and so your neuroscientist job is to walk through and teach you to read data your job is sort of to extract that oh these things are you know the parts that are most important or most interesting um and then as you were saying there is hope because if you see things in arresting EEG uh especially these regulatory features of attention stress sleep speed sensory social these things you can generally shift pretty reliably um the field of neuro feedback which is the brain training part was sort of discovered uh a bit accidentally in the mid-60s there's a couple different people doing uh work in California both I think uh Southern and Northern California in the 60s and in Southern California Dr sterman Barry Sturman UCLA was uh examining um how dangerous Rocket Fuel was by exposing cats to Rocket Fuel uh because I guess astronauts were getting sick and hallucinating and having some issues breathing in Vapor so it was a toxicity study done in 60s animal research and Dr Sturman was exposing cats to Rocket Fuel and watching symptoms emerge and of the 32 or so cats he ran eight of them refused to have seizures and were these like Ultra stable cats that weren't showing toxicity events when the other 24 cats were having seizures 40 minutes in these eight cats two hours two and a half hours in were just starting to show something which is very kind of uh striking to Dr Sturman so he was trying to figure out if he discovered a new breed of cat or something but no it turns out uh he' done another experiment with those cats six months prior MH he taped a little uh eye dropper into their cheek and whenever they made a certain brain wave that cats make a lot of he squirted chicken broth into their mouth little repetitive reward oh interesting and so just for a couple of days trained some brain waves essentially using something Operate conditioning or reinforcement learning and saw saw the change documented it put them back in the subject pool uh and months later these cats had seizure resistant brains so he took a uh associate who was a research assistant or something and she had medication uncontrolled seizures tens of seizures every month and on on big drugs back in the 60s meol tegral they land big heavy duty neuroleptics that were you know they're hard to manage and they were not controlling seizures and they trained her with an audio feedback machine off and on for a year and then she went off all of her meds and was seizure free for a year so that was the start of the field of Nur feedback clinically as we do it now and that frequency that cats make humans also make it's called sensory motor Rhythm it's so the core in some ways of um a lot of neuro feedback still so SMR sensory motor Rhythm is a brain wave you make on the strip of tissue that runs ear to ear the sensory motor strip so this there's there's two adjacent strips of tissue just in front of the midline the the the central divide you've got the um descending information motor control down into the body and just behind IND that Central divide you have the ascending sensory information in general the things in the front of the brain are about more inside self and and the self-d doing things the stuff in the back of the brain are about the outside world so all the sensory the visual the emotional the attention tracking things R in the back and the more purely emotional internal thoughts holding things your mind or in the front and you can start to see these things on a brain map so if you look at someone's brain on a brain map and you see for instance that their front midline the anterior singulate is running lots of beta ways you would say oh hey you're anterior singul is pretty hot often uh because the anterior singul a little CEO's job it is to say think of this do this think of this we care about this we care about this often beta waves mean that you're kind of stuck doing that and that that can mean you're perseverating or obsessing a little bit someone starts laughing oh my gosh or or their spouse in the background starts laughing usually um so we have this this ability to not sort of say diagnostically oh you have OCD but to sort of say oh do you have a bit of a steel trap mind that tends to get stuck and both can be true you can have diagnosed difficult clinical level problems or you can have a resource that's cramped up the line between those is pretty shallow pretty hard to to spot also it can be both you can be both a CEO with a high-powered brain and have OCD and it can be a useful set of resources in certain environments that have cramped up a little bit and hard to uh shift in others same is true of ADHD type folks when they have a low stimulus environment not the most effective uh control over executive function but you put somebody with classic ADHD in a high stimulus sport crisis High pattern matching high Dynamic information environment and they're going to perform better dramatically better than the average person who has typical quote unquote executive function regulation so all this to say you can look at resources and say hey here's your performance here's your brain let's start demystifying it painting out these phenomena for you and then as you alluded to earlier there is hope uh you can exercise um these things with what's called neuro feedback and I can explain the technique in a second but essentially the the hope is or the the promise the the The Wonder of neuro feedback is with these classic regulatory features ESP especially things like attention sleep anxiety you can train the brain to the tune of about one standard deviation on a bell curve every other month every 20 25 sessions training three times a week you can iterate change so you get someone who's severely ADHD or has classic PTSD phenomena isn't sleeping because of a decade of drinking um and you train them for couple of months 20 sessions 30 sessions 40 sessions and the difficulty just starts dropping away and people feel neur feedback in three four five sessions typically so it's not this delay for most things in Psychology you do a lot of work slowly and you gradually change years and years this is sort of like okay I'm not feeling it okay I'm not wait wait wait a minute huh that was interesting a few sessions in you I'm kind of feeling something and then it wears off one of the things people are often first wondering about n feedback or worried perhaps is like I don't want to stick wires to my head and change my brain um neuro feedback most forms of neur feedback are transient initially there are forms that are mildly invasive there are micro stimulation forms that do zap you but most forms of ner feack do not I would say you know 95% of the field is a passive practice where the basics of neuro feedback are you just measure the brain in real time you stick a couple wires on those circuits involve an executive function you measure the amount of theta which is disinhibition you measure the amount of alpha which is being in neutral and you measure the amount of beta which is sort of voluntarily pumping the gas on those circuits circuit on the left is the vigilance stabilizer keeps the spotlight clear bright and on the road it also keeps you deeply asleep at night so so maintains the Moor in and the circuit on the right is a supervisor who walks around saying are you sure you want it no no no okay are you no no no uhhuh yep and pulls back and pumps the brakes gently everywhere so you can kind of keep the machine you know between on the road so if you measure these alpha waves and theta waves moment to moment and measure these beta waves moment to moment they fluctuate and whenever they happen to briefly move in the right direction and simply applaud that with a bit of audit auditory feedback or visual feedback so you sit and watch a game and whenever your brain happens to make a bit more beta and a bit less Theta then the game starts to run faster your Pac-Man eats more dots your car smashes more zombies some beautiful music starts to play and then a couple seconds later your brain moves in the wrong direction and for the workout anyways and the game slows down or stops and your brain says hey I don't like no stuff where's my stuff I I I want some stuff and a couple seconds later it happens to move in the right direction and the game resume the brain goes okay interesting and I do say brain not mind here because it happens within the first five or 10 minutes the brain starts to yoke starts to uh react to the information oh interesting oh beta waves are being rewarded oh Alpha oh and you can see it in the brain this is actually what I did a lot of my uh dissertation work on was well what is happening in the moment of neuro feedback how does the brain know which brain waves you're plotting yeah you're measuring them yeah gameplay is happening but where is the closed loop how is the brain actually figuring it out yeah so I looked at what's called an evoke potential a momentary event in the brain and you can see within the first 10 minutes the brain is creating a change in Potentials in the frequency you're applauding right after you applaud it goes whoa and creates a little burst of the frequency or a dip in the frequency in the way in which you applauded it so you have this information Loop created and the mind doesn't really participate all that actively at least at the beginning because W you can't feel your brain waves so you're sitting there going really this Pac-Man stopping and starting is training my brain puzzle pieces Falling Away occasionally that's doing something but the brain's hearing good job brain good job brain good job brain nope good J good J up good J up good J up no how interesting such a after time you get to get a shift super interesting so like can you see or could one see then like neur new neuros synapsis being formed in that place because it's realizing the reward mechanism is is is is this way and that quickly you you would see synapses if we could image real synapses in real time you would see them you would see them changing or strengthening uh neurons will change the the strength or the likelihood of firing between two synapses and they'll also create um new synapses you know cells can send out new processes and create new connections um we can't really image in real time living tissue uh at that level to know what's happening you can do some things in dishes and look at stuff on microscopes to know how learning occurs this is we how we know what happening yeah but in terms of humans there's been a couple studies looking at um neuro feedback uh you know single session neuro feedback will create some really interesting effects there's a couple studies looking at what are called motor evoke potentials which is when you take a coil a magnetic coil and you um you zap the hand area on the motor cortex and it causes the hand to jump when you zap it with magnetism little magnetic pulse motor evoke potential and there's a couple of studies showing that if you do neura feedback a single session for 24 hours you get this really reduced threshold of activation where it takes much less energy to cause the brain to react change so it's a sign of plasticity so you're getting this measurable from neur feedback this measurable boost of plasticity that's pretty high for a chunk of time so when we're tuning these individual circuits that's wonderful you get specific effects you'll feel the effects afterwards you know subtly and then it kind of wears off initially but you're also getting Global effects on plasticity so all the time someone comes to me for you know difficulty with brain fog let's say after a brain injury and then I a call from their physical therapist saying what are you doing to my client she came in without a cane today her balance is better her spasticity is down and I wasn't necessarily working on those things I was working on the tenius or the you know the brain fog or the word finding issue or the Sleep onset difficulty or whatever the executive function issue from you know from from from the Aging whatever it is and other things start to change because your brain is sort of in control of it all so as you boost the plasticity other stuff starts to get in so I get reports from teachers where kids are learning better I get reports from therapists I get reports from SP from spouses that their husbands are being nicer and therapy's working better uh whatever you did last week do it again he brought me flowers oh my gosh you can like start programming things in you well you can get access to flow States and that's that it's done for uh sort of therapeutic if you will healing you know trauma intervention work as well as creativity there's a there's a moment um as you're falling asleep where the mental mind if you will starts to drop away and the awareness the Insight the access is suddenly there and that's when you have the world's best idea you you write the best script and you solve world hunger and then you fall asleep and wait what did I remember last night right so um that's the hypnogogic access moment where you're really shifting uh to the edge of Consciousness and you can train yourself to do that to get access to that state using technique called Alpha Theta neura feedback where you bring yourself to that edge of Consciousness and then hold yourself there for 20 25 minutes wow and stuff starts bubbling up Insight access Consciousness awareness access to your emotions be able to talk about how you're feeling uh it also seems to bring up te- cells pretty dramatically creates a deep Rel ation response that's not going to be a permanent effect most things in nerfy back are permanent eventually because your brain is uh practicing these states all the time but there's evidence in Alpha training that you can bring up uh T cells CD4 plus cells in uh amuno compromized populations pretty powerfully it's got to be a relaxation response caused by that hypnogogic sort of you know State access so just a a sampling of the ways you can go in you can modify these executive function things or the stress stress response uh features or things that are a bit more more esoteric like creativity or your immune function a little bit intuition things like that too I've done Alpha Brain Wave training I have also the brain tap so I do different things um with that but do you do then customized brain training protocols for the patient depending on what comes up or what those protocols look like yeah so I sit down with people and uh go over Q EGS and performance testing with them and again I teach them to sort of read data and they tell me what is important so I'm very goal focused as opposed to let me fix you you know focused uh it's not about my judgment of these resources it's really about the person's perspective on what is most important in the data they're looking at or what what can they describe about their function you can't always see things you can't see a lack of creativity in a brain map but you can describe that you want access to creativ and then I know to build in some you know Flow State type protocols so it ends up being a mix of hey let's understand you from your brain that will frame maybe highlight some goals you already know usually brain mapping and performance testing tells you things you already know that's when it's in The Sweet Spot oh yeah that I care about that okay great now we go after that and generally we build those uh uh I I I built plans workout plans essentially which can include you know a handful of different locations on the head different frequencies to train and this is very much like personal training where you iterate through different interventions and and adjust you don't just give a particular neuro feedback protocol and train that way for many many times you learning will slow down at best and at worst you might cause some trouble if you don't change the workout and imagine doing nothing but bench press all the time in the gym for two hours every two days you know you you would eventually have trouble with those resources um and uh the the the range of goals is you know again really set by the client but includes all those regulatory features generally executive function anxiety and stress features sleep sensory social speed of processing and then migraine seizure brain fog creativity all that kind of stuff also there's a fair amount of uh use in the field I have some good experience with this although it's not a very large amount of my client base uh these days with substance use disorder the same technique of alpha Theta the creativity work powerfully reregulate alcohol cravings and the inability to downshift after years of drinking so those dry drunks who have been sober for 10 years but are still nervous and shaky and can't fall asleep the brain is hot it's in solid locked up beta it's very glutamatergic because it's never really been able to make all that Gaba again that alcohol had been replacing and so these people are shaky on the edge of a cardiovascular crisis or anxiety attack can't fall asleep and their brains look like a resting pattern of hyperactivation hyperarousal for decades sometimes but you can exercise the alpha Theta resources and bring up that downshift that gabaergic ability to sort of soften and after a few months of neuro feedback folks are able to fall asleep at will wow relax if they feel like it Cravings go away um I think the the the research on alcohol by by peniston Eugene peniston and and uh uh showed that this research was done in the 60s and 70s and the the 80s sort of concurrent with sterman discovering SMR training we had Joe Kya doing work at I think Berkeley maybe UCSF on Alpha training in humans which is relaxation and soon after you had people doing work around meditation alpha alpha Theta long-term meditators Etc throughout the 70s and 80s so that's sort of this end of the field the alpha stuff came out converged with uh the interventions of you know the manipulation of the bands like the SMR and thetas and things and became this technique to create massive creativity and uh peniston's work I think showed that the one-year relapse rate for alcohol is reversed the all intervention if neur feedback is added it's a 25% recidivism or relapse rate for alcohol and if Nur feedback is not in the mix it was 75% is the standard statistic so um pretty big impacts on things like acquire difficulties from you know alcohol so these are all the different resources you might want to go after but I don't you know I don't know for you if the drinking is a problem or if the Cannabis is or if you're too anxious or you love being kind of high-powered and a bit you know stuck in your head so I walk through data without without too much judgment and help people figure out you know what might be interesting and they tell me what's what's the most important stuff and then from there we iterate so I mentioned earlier you feel nerfy back but it takes about three four five sessions and usually you're like hey wait huh am I feeling something not sure and then it wears off and you pretty sure you imagined it and you repeat it and it happens a little stronger oh wait a minute no this this your feedback stuff I feel calm oh I feel focused maybe huh and then your sleep is different that night perhaps so you start to have this opportunity to examine the uh the the posttraining effects kind of like you worked out at the gym and then later on you're like oh yeah I feel great versus I can't pick up eggs they're all over the the floor at the supermarket because my arms are noodles you know you kind of get a sense of the resource and then it starts to become this different relationship with your brain because you feel your sleep your stress your mood your attention your focus your energy shift a little bit and you go huh hey um I like that more of that please and then you build a workout around that experience you had and tune the neuro feedback a little bit and get a different effect so it's mysterious but not blind you know you sort of are very quickly validating what you're getting refining what effects are emerging trying different workout protocols tweaking them adjusting them and over a few months you move your brain and we map the brain again every couple of months every 25 sessions or so and that's about the range you can see typically about a standard deviation of change in executive function or anxiety features in the brain so enough to really get um a sense of your goal shifting and that also gives us an opportunity to refine the goals and you to come up with a different sort of set of perspectives often the really big important things you have been wanting to solve for a very long time are changing so much a couple months in that your goals are changing and your idea about what you want to do for another month or two is is is changing um and I say that because you often have to do about three or four months total to get to really a permanent place it doesn't happen instantly it doesn't build up right away it's closer to exercise than it is to medication but as you do it the brain takes over and so somewhere around 30 40 maybe 50 sessions you've reached that first real stopping place where the resources will likely support you unless there's something pushing back against it you know uh new mold exposure new concussions that kind of stuff will will erode stability or if you have a lot of damage big seizure disorder or you know maybe a lot of need big developmental difficulty then three months or four months won't be enough training you might want to do six or even 12 but for classic stuff like ADHD or PTSD or cravings for alcohol or sleep issues uh three maybe four months in your feedback 40 50 sessions is sort of the classic uh dosing if you will to have that kind of trajectory where you end up uh in a different place so exciting so thank you for sharing all of that is it um you said like 30 40 sessions um over several months so is it at the beginning you do once a day twice a day and then you you know pce it differently or how would you recommend I think for people interested in in looking into this just to the time commitment um and how it's done and it's in person I assume or or is is there also remote training so we recommend doing it three times a week as a nice sweet spot the learning seems to be maximal for the sessions you get I think three times a week is about twice as impactful as twice a week but four times a week is only slightly more impactful than three times a week so Peak brain might my company has uh locations uh around the world most of the big training offices are in the US allthough we have uh some small uh popups in Stockholm and London as well as the the offices in the US um but only about 20% of our clients trained from our offices mostly we do remote neuro feedback where we send out equipment and do brain mapping remotely and then teach people to stick some wires to their head for the neuro feedback so I mentioned the cap for the brain training the for for the brain mapping the qeg uses the cap brain training or neuro feedback doesn't typically use a full head cap Ian you can but it adds a lot of complexity a lot of benefit so instead we use a one to four Channel training where you stick some ear Clips on and you might put one or two wires on uh for that day's exercises then you set up some software so it's not that complicated and we have people in our offices train three times a week and get the effects they're trying to get and know we nice linear change for the first few months and we can map it we can really Shepherd a lot of shifts folks that are training from home why don't you train more you have the gear you have the brain you have the goals we have coaches on seven days a week 12 hours a day for you can jump on help you place a wire troubleshoot some software kick Windows when it was trying to do an update maybe remind you to fill out your sleep surveys because we haven't seen from you or heard from you in three or four days because that happens you know so it's this coaching process we provide where the coaches are on a private chat and able to have this real time hey thanks that sleep survey we think that new thing you did might have been too pushy because you cleaned your house and couldn't fall asleep after it um let's back off a little bit and try a slower beta and some of this as well if you notice that's in the chart now try it let me let us you help setting up so you get this real-time support where you can gently push your brain index the effect and then with some support know what the next step is because doing neuro feedback is not hard knowing what to do is so you know anyone can can buy a kettle bell or a weight machine but getting in really good shape takes some functional use of those techniques in a very particular and tailored way so I encourage folks who especially who have really complicated stuff going on getting an assessment done a brain map done uh digging into tailored neuro feedback working to do iterate iterative work that's about your goals and your brain instead of a one-size fits-all kind of magic box is the way to go there are some of those there in the marketplace uh they don't work super well and they can cause harm if if you at best they don't work optimally you can get the the most you know change and at worst you might be trained in the wrong way and for you and have side effects start to emerge and that can happen in neur feedback you can get side effects the same way you get side effects when you work out the wrong way in the gym you know if your shoulders hurt too much maybe the seat height was too low in the press machine and that kind of thing happens in neur feedback where you're like oh you're B wired after that session or kind of tired or your sleep maintenance was interrupted H okay beta waves aren't too in for you alpha waves are too pushy something and so you learn gently early on the process what works for somebody and you make small adjustments and try some stuff and get better effects so these side effects are transient they're self-limiting unless you continue the Nur feedback and they're informative about your brain because we don't want to believe all the ideas we had about you doing brain mapping we want to believe what you noticed and experience As you move towards your goals so that does take a little bit of uh attention that's what our coaches do at Peak brain is spend all that time saying hey how you feeling how was that new session did you like it oh sorry your mother-in-law is a jerk here's a protocol for you know when people are being mean to you um and staying with you in your sort of brain landscape so you can develop you know goal progress but also we can be a little responsive to the day-to-day suffering and support you might need uh with stress and fatigue and other kinds of uh you know resources you're you're feeling this episode is brought to you by one skin there is nothing like the feeling of being confident in your own skin that's why I'm excited to share about a skin longevity brand I love called one skin their products make it easy to keep your skin healthy while looking and feeling your best no complicated routine no multi-step protocols just simple scientifically validated Solutions the secret is ones skins proprietary os1 peptide it is the first ingredient 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spectrum um people maybe with early onsets or even early stages of dementia cognitive decline um is this also a really helpful tool as well so could you talk to about that sure yeah so the developmental perspective um the short answer is on the low end for kids There's No Limit um we have q EEG databas comparison databas is as low as six months of age so if you need to see what's weird in a kid you can um often my colleagues and I and I will say if someone asks me hey at what age do you start working I'll say four because at four years old you typically have enough observable Behavior often language so you can have the person to be being a participant in the process oh I like that or I felt tired or whatever but I've worked with plenty of kids that um parent whose parents have just discovered that the kid is autistic just gotten that diagnosis at two years of age and they're bringing a baby in saying oh my gosh my toddler is not making eye contact and the sensory issues and it's starting to stem can we work can we can we do something yeah probably um it's not quite as straightforward as a kid who can put up with every aspect of it like we don't do attention testing for kids below age seven it's just too much they just don't don't like also the behavior is too variable below age seven for for attention and you know it's often hard to get a brain map done a cap on the head for a kid who's you know screaming and stemming can be really hard yeah but not impossible you'd be shocked at what kids actually occasionally put up with especially new environment a new person they'll kind of be tolerant for a little bit sometimes and the neura feedback actually feels kind of good and you can do the neur feedback in a way that's repetitive or interesting for a kid so if you got some non-verbal kid who won't put up with anything you can play that same movie they want to watch a thousand times a day on the screen as the feedback and make the screen dim or or stop and start the movie as the feedback if you want not the best way to do neur feedback movies are kind of weak uh socially loaded stimuli is kind of a weak way to do neur feedback because um social engagement breaks implicit learning and neuro feedback is a process of implicit learning learning versus voluntary control so if you load up all the social information processing you can impair the sort of involuntary aspects of learning um but for kids that will not sit still and got to watch My Little Pony a thousand times it gets them to sit there and then the training starts to happen and it it builds on itself where they get better motor control executive control so you don't have to be verbal for Nur few back to works it was discovered on cats cats are really bad instruction followers this is not a voluntary process it works if you're in a coma one of the great uh uh uh people in the field uh who died recently a couple years ago Margaret SS uh last decade or two of her career was spent on at coma bedsides doing neuro feedback to change the coma status uh successfully often so you can do all kinds of interesting things by involuntary involuntarily shaping the brain activity because the brain likes to learn this is no different than a baby flopping around who does a random baby push-up and goes whoa I can see 12 feet holy cow and then 20 minutes later the brain wants to see more you do the pushup you don't think left arm right arm wrists you just do the thing the neurons all fire in that unique cons confirmation and the same thing happens if you're a little kid who's sitting there watching a computer screen and whenever your Theta goes down the game starts to run the kid sits there and and relaxes and watches it because if they move too much interrupts the signals The Game Stops they learn to sit still and then the different brain waves start to get trained and it creates this engagement so at the Young end it's actually really easy um and you can also train teenagers who don't want to be there who sit in their phone the whole time and I'm fine you can train them too they get some changes wow my team was very nice yesterday that was great what we do um and then Elders uh I would say it's a complicated story if it's actually age related uh deficits and it's probably if you're north of your late 60s and it's an age related illness if it's one of the big four or five things we tend to uh be concerned about with regards to the big diseases of Aging meaning all the dementia bearing phenomena um diabetic phenomena that are quite strong cancer that's quite strong these are the big ones uh and all all of them to some extent are driven pretty dramatically by metabolic disregulation so I know you've had uh Dr Dale uh bzen on the on the program talking about I assume the recode program and metabolic health and those 37 factors you can actually steer and measure in the metabolism to to to move yourself away from that phenomena so dementia's aging related cognitive decline that's pathological uh it's a metabolic phenomena it's 20-year phenomena but it's not a disease phenomena the same way as like an infectious or an injury phenomena is and you can steer it in the other direction often at least potentially for mild uh phenomena and and pre if you will Alzheimer's phenomena does look like you can address those metabolic factors and steer someone away so someone came to me in their you know 70s or 80s and said look I'm getting some dementia uh well half the time they're actually wrong half the time they're having word finding issues and they're really concerned about dementia guys word finding issues delayed recall for words and names and tip of the tongue stuff that's not actually dementia and it's not your memory if you're having trouble finding words it's not your memory it's your speed it's the speed of processing it's a handoff thing your brain's pretty good at storing language and handing it up to you when you require you're not always that good at grabbing that information and stitching it into sentences and dropping it out your mouth so when you're having word finding issues in your 50s or 60s it's all almost always because you're having a speed of processing issue and if you look at why you can often see things like the quality of Deep Sleep has gotten thrown off and that's essentially driving around with the E bra rubbing or handbrake as you guys might say across the pond um so you know again all of this is to say you can look at the phenomena and go hey wait here's the thing and so I would send someone to the Apollo health program to have that metabolic screen done if they had actual age related cognitive stuff and I might be more of a coach and less of a neuro feedback provider in thinking of ways to address other stuff you know other interventions or other ways to go after healing for instance if you do respond let's say to exogenous ketones well that means that you still have intact neurons because one of the big things that happens in dementia is the neurons become insulin resistant but they're insulin resistant with spared Ketone metabolism so you take somebody who's actually got cognitive difficulties and if you supplement exogenous ketones Ketone shakes and things especially the Esters and you get a a brightening a lightning a Clarity a a sort of a reverse Sund Downing phenomena where they seem to get better well that means you've got some intact cognitive resources if you could feed the darn stuff and of course these same folks who are getting disorganized cognitively are often usually having you know of course there memory issues is usually irritation and anger m carb Cravings because the brain is insulin resistant so if you see that phenomena or you can get a little bit of Behavioral hack in and make your grandma protein Rich you know Ketone Rich smoothies and you get a lift well okay now you can pursue the Apollo health program to get all the factors screen but now you have maybe a window of going lower carb uh moderate protein higher fat and and Elders don't absorb protein especially well anyway so you often have to go up higher and higher in protein than you might think you would for a kid or a younger person um so if you're already having trouble with age related cognitive decline it's truly pathological the neuro feedback doesn't have enough neurons to work on so it'll keep the plasticity high but it's not probably going to reverse the the the syndrome I have a hunt that will slow down things like Alzheimer's um but I don't think once you developed symptomatic significant symptomatic aging phenomena you the other big one being parkinsonian phenomena um to unpack that one for a second and of course this Dimension Parkinson's but to unpack the the uh incidents of Parkinson showing up it sort of tracks the same thing that happens in Alzheimer's where it's probably a 10 or 20 year phenomena probably 10 years for Parkinson 20 years for Alzheimer's but it seems the reason that this is a useful uh thing to unpack is it demonstrates the fact the brain is not a bunch of switches Parkinson's is a is a difficulty in dopamine the same way that memory and dementia is a failure or an issue in choline or cetal choline so dopamine is involved with movement as well as attention and a bunch of stuff and deep in the brain the basil gangly is a circuit of movement structures that kind of zip around movement in a little track and when those circuits get disregulated one of them stops getting timed well you get a bit of like a timing issue and then you get Tremors and other parkinsonian phenomena and that's a dopamine uh dip essentially you have a dopamine one of those circuits down there is called the substan the pars compacta of the substan the dense part of the black stuff is what produces all of the dopamine in your brain and some of it's used there a lot of it's sent out into places like the frontal lobe where it's used for other stuff for learning but if you disregulated if if you damage the basic ganglia that produce dopamine they start to die chemical insults other insults we aren't sure about can create damage in those tissues and they start to produce less and less dopamine but parkinsonian symptoms don't show up right away and you can lose you do lose something like 75% of your dopamine production before you get any symptoms at all wow does this mean that the first 75% of dopamine was relevant not really but it does mean that your brain doesn't care about the absolute NE level of any neurotransmitter there's no such thing as a chemical imbalance in the brain unless you're basically on the edge of death and you know you're having a a metabolic crisis or something there's no such thing as a meta as as a chemical imbalance you know Parkinson's is a failure of the dopaminergic systems broadly not the amount of dopamine and dementias are a failure of uh mid-temporal tissues hipocampal tissues per hippocampal tissues Etc not just the level of acetylcholine so this is why I I I drew the people's attention to the idea that speed of processing is not dementia because you can think about the different tissues there's the hippocampus there's the parahippocampus and memories used differently in different structures and you get sort of signature issues you can have really big problems with your hippocampus having degraded dramatically and still have no problem with word finding so those two things are not necessarily yoked all that well together language production is not really a memory thing it's in the front left corner typically not really in the in the mid-temporal lobe and you end up with intact language processing if you're fast enough and rested enough even if you don't have any idea who the president or your kid is you know word finding can be totally intact so word finding is not a concern doesn't lead to dementia but does usually mean you have some suboptimal Rin fog Sleep Quality something and it's probably worth addressing just like you know body fat getting pudgy losing muscle mass losing bone mass these are normal things that are not pathological the sarcopenia stuff but there're also things you probably shouldn't tolerate and you can work against those trajectories and end up getting better or at least flattening trajectory you don't degrade that's why I I frame my answer about age into this late 60s and 7 s because before that you can probably improve trajectories you know work on a particular problem address stuff really pretty well things remain really plastic in body and brain uh uh up until I would say late 60s even sometimes later if you have a healthy body generally if you've been smoking and drinking your whole life you won't get to your late 60s remaining plastic and fresh but if you reasonably uh careful and healthy then even if you're not in every way you can still do some damage control in your 60s but it's really hard to do in your 70s um so any big change of health status body fat blood sugar status about the mid-60s on any change at all predicts that you're going to have a lot of difficult Health ahead of you and probably some death um so you basically want to go into your mid 60s to late 60s with all the resources you got dialed in as much as you can because it's kind of tough and kind of ful if you're really heavily overweight at 70 enjoy it you're going to be that way don't lose 50b 80b at 70 unless you're having unless there's other reasons to do it because a big stress or like that actually would predict um many more Health crises by causing changes in your 70s that way you can't really handle the the disruption of systems in the same degree and they're a lot harder to to go after so uh so for everyone listening now is the time now is the time exactly right the best time to start exercising was yesterday the next best time is is today yeah so as we finish up uh today um what trends and developments are you most excited about in the neuroscience and Neuroscience for longevity space yeah I mean just just the idea that we can get a blood test Dr work on uh the recode program and we can understand these metabolic phenomena you know I I taught gerontology for 11 or 12 years at UCLA and I had a a whole course sequence on the diseases of aging and the cognitive impact and brain aging and when I started teaching that course the first two three years that week or two those were somewhat you know somber at the very least um uh uh weeks and with some heavy topics and then as I got into that later decade I was teaching there I started seeing uh all of these metabolic biohacks coming out and what became the recode program so I I had a very different perspective and that's I think a very big thing for um giving people agency to take actual control I mean you know our grandparents didn't look at their triglycerides or our great grandparents you know our parents now ourselves you know we're looking at sleep hacks and we're measuring B density and we have all these other different things we go after I think that what I what I think we need to do I think we will do we're about to do is bring all of that information together you know I I coach an awful lot of people not just on brain but on General performance and and and optimal you know wellness and I hear an awful lot of people frustrated they can't take their list of supplements symptoms complaints goals interventions and share them with their team member reliably I mean I have tools for sharing things and doing coaching but like they can't take their s logs and give it to their medical doctor in a way the doctor actually wants to look at or can look at and I think that's as these platforms are integrated we'll also we'll get sort of intelligent agents I think we'll be able to test our interventions just like we can look at our genes and say ah this drug or this you know this B vitamin is not great for you but this one probably good for you based on MTHFR status or something examples like that we're to pull huge databases of ourselves our qegs our sleep logs our substance history our workout history when we meditate what we're eating what supplements I think we'll be able to start taking that and essentially running um intelligent agents against it okay here's a new study that just came out suggesting here's a new compound how does that look against me and have sort of a a machine learning uh uh Fit made against my own health status or goals I think that's where we're going yeah this idea that individualized or personalized medicine is the old you know last decade buzzword there's something else that's going to replace it which I think is going to be almost like a health assistant or a performance assistant who is an avatar that models all the data that's accumul I mean as it is now I'm a sophisticated consumer of medical and psychological and and science information and there's a lot out there even my own health status you know take me a year sometimes to get an answer to things and I understand more about the brain and the body than most people I think and I still run into doctor Doctor Who just doesn't have curiosity or isn't kept up on Research or you know one finding these days is doctors often don't have any ability to really do things outside of their narrow era of Interest oh that that's another specialist go see someone else and there's not this continuity this this this bucket where they know all the things and that creates aging medicine creates poly Pharmacy and drug drug interactions and you know people doing all kinds of and I think that stuff's going to go away I think soon we'll get to the place where a drug drug interaction is not going to happen because of course you're going to register all your supplements and medication maybe your phone just going to know because it's just gonna you know because the the pill bottle came from Amazon and it's going to register the supplements you took when you order who knows but there'll be some way of bringing it all together bringing it all together in a way doesn't require you to have two phds and an MD and then you know get a research Grant to manage your health and I think we have more tools now available yeah than we use because we haven't brought this stuff together effectively which is why you know people like me and Peak brain have jobs is to help you navigate some of the complexity I love it yeah know in my other company Athena healthspan we're building um something along this line focusing first on clinics to help bring it all together and also to interpret like all this wearable data that's like the so what and exactly because medicine is siloed longevity science is typically siloed as well but we're holistic beings and as you said as well like you don't want to have to have a double PhD and an MD to be able to interpret all the information and that's why I think the exciting point of technology is is to assist clinicians to better interpret the data and understand okay for you specifically like we need to do this protocol versus the next person or even your twin might need this tweak because of y z so true yeah I'm very excited twin just as an aside identical twins don't always but often have the same brain patterns interesting I would say it's like maybe 90% of identical twins you're like wait is this the same brain I know it's not actually wow and the other 10% they look like just another sibling or another family member which with with there's some similarity but you actually can see the same resting brain patterns in twins a lot of the time wow exciting wow interesting for studies as well right right that's right Andrew where can people follow what you're up to where would you point them to websites social media handles Etc and we can link them in the show notes yeah folks can check us out at Peak brain la.com or Peak brain Institute which is the same thing.com most of our socials are Peak brain LA because we started off uh in Los Angeles but we're also in New York City St Louis Orange County California London and Stockholm and if you're not in one of those cities we have Partners in Australia and a few other countries and uh we work with folks remotely so depending on your goals and needs we can send you hardware and software and work with you virtually we have clients in like 30 countries right now um so check us out at Peak brain LA and the socials or Peak brain institute.com you can find me uh in a bunch of podcasts at Andrew Hill phd.com and uh yeah come come ask your brain questions and come get a brain map and let us uh explain a little bit of the mystery that is you exciting Andrew do you have a final ask or recommendation or any parting thoughts or message from my audience only thing I would say is which sounds somewhat Bal but you know change happens shift happens people's suffering is not as permanent as it usually feels uh you didn't always feel this way you won't always feel this way and so if you're not satisfied especially especially with these regulatory features of stress sleep attention speed of processing social integration sensory processing if you're not comfortable with how those things are operating those things are changeable they change probably to pinch up this way so you're suffering you can learn how to change them be it meditation or neutop or sleep hacking or exercise or tailored work like neuro feedback or Psychotherapy or some really really you know Cutting Edge intervention we'll come up with next the point is that you can learn a lot more now about yourself than at any point in history and you can do so much more now than we ever have with a lot more control so don't just suffer in silence don't be overwhelmed as overwhelmed if you can look at the machine figure it out just knowing how it works suddenly makes it a lot harder to be overwhelmed or ashamed or guilty oh just in my head don't worry about it so very exciting thank you so much Andrew for coming on today and sharing about this important super computer we have between our ears and what we can do to to tweak it and find tune it right so thank you so much oh thanks for having me I appreciate it [Music] pleasure