Live Q&A: Neurofeedback & Mental Health - Dec 2024 | NeuroNoodle

Anthony long time hey everybody it's been a bit huh it's that time of year yeah so there was get a good break Pete from us from all yeah did you get a good break from me you know we're trying to fit what we can here in the holidays before we uh come out of the gate yeah I I see there's a cool new grid format going on with our name or something that's kind of neat ah you can do this you can do this you can do this ah you've learned some things while you were you the time well he went to video production camp and came back smarter yeah I did it's always changing like I think I'm a smart guy but I'm I'm obvious having to figure out the new you know uh OB streaming it's a little bit of the ban of my existent it's kind of hard to use you know you just got to catch people where they are yeah so what's what's what's going on peeps we got uh let's see next week is uh Christmas we got we got all the all the holidays coming in uh do we find an overabundance of people being very happy or sad or is it the same well I'm a devout hedonist I'll take any excuse for a party um and uh festiv us I don't care you know um they're all good for me but you know is a season to be jolly doesn't work for everybody and uh kind of pushing the issue of it you should be jolly this time of year really pushes some people in a bad way and um you know if you've lost uh loved ones near the holidays they become memorials for the loss and yeah it's it's it's difficult for some people when you get to the holidays and um um my mother was passed in December but I don't couple that with Christmas you know just because it happened at the end of the year just like my dad passed in early January I don't think of New Year's Eve as a a a Memorial Day for that I mean those those couplings are artificial they it's not really a meaningful coupling Anthony what's been going on in uh in your in your uh tech room yeah uh I I found something the other day I have a feeling that Jay will think this is a uh a hoot you know maybe not the good kind uh there is a clinical trial using the anesthetic propofol or uh for um for uh insomnia uh and uh it's in the brain m Master group and um they uh the researcher says Anthony I'm going to interrupt Pete I hope you did a freeze on all three of our faces when you just said that not not as bad as a freeze as Michael Jackson yeah so please go on Anthony I I just wanted to project that lovely humor immediately well the researcher says that this is a she she thinks it will actually restore your normal sleep she says we anticipate that the neuroplasticity will reestablish yourself after a few sessions you'll remind your brain how to get into REM sleep uh somewhere along the way our brains forgot to get how to get into sleep uh without the drug or drink and so we remind them and so that is so foreign to me I suppose other than psychedelics but but many drugs I recall do the opposite you know you you build tolerance a or dependence even so that's so I have no clue what's going on there but I thought it was quite striking I have to say that being unconscious at night like Michael Jackson is not like sleeping so uh used for eroding memory consolidation in trauma like you know a direct crisis workers First Responders are given uh beta blockers going into major crises now ever since 911 that's been an option that was the one of the first times it was used and people that have that uh beta blocker on board don't have the same kind of trauma of uh memory formation doesn't have the emotional access uh sinking in doesn't create the trauma the same way so um it's used in some very advant guard therapy too to erode memory while you're reexperiencing phenomena so I think that's propanolol oh you're right is like our main surgical anesthetic but I have I am familiar I think the Armed Forces has done that propanolol research I think that's very interesting yeah it's happening in NYPD and fire departments and things there too I think I heard um actually I'm not completely informed but I did hear that uh shortterm it seemed to help but long term it really didn't help in terms of generalized processing of of of stressful uh events Etc so there are two sides to that story too but Anthony in terms of um of what you brought up I'd be very very concerned especially what we know about uh elders and anesthesia um you know and how the heart how can it can really accelerate age related cognitive decline all of that has anybody looked into that I mean my my little yellow lights if not red lights are going off but again I don't know if they if they looked into all of this maybe but I immediately as I said all three of our faces kind of went who unlikely that they've tested on an elder population that's not usually characteristics for getting drugs passed into safety and you know my concern it would be respiratory suppression in a in a gero population interesting primarily with with most anesthetics I don't know I don't know I'm not a medical doctor I don't know if that one has that strong risk but I'd be a little conc wonder how Michael Ja passed you know well there you go I just happen to you know have it wasn't it wasn't a positive side effect wasn't it yeah yeah so respiration heart his sleep is now permanently restored yeah but but Mari is right I there's been some recent research showing that um basically I think they say any surgery after a certain age can be have lasting cognitive impairment they think might be directly linked to General anesia yeah the anesthesia self um and one other thing this is kind of just funny some friends I don't know if you guys ever watch Hulu but some friends and I noticed I thought it was just me but I asked around on Facebook um Hulu always gives you prescription drug ads or at least it does us maybe it's an age group I don't know and the one they love the most a friend even cracked like I don't need sprado and spato is apparently a nasal preparation of esketamine for depression and I I think probably we've talked about um maybe like the clinic version where you go in to have um uh ketamine administered but I don't know if Jay or anyone else knows much about the nasal uh formulation in fact ketamine can be IV or nasal uh and the uh the psychiatric offices that don't want to have somebody there that's licensed to do Vena puncture will do the nasal and there's a question as to whether it's as effective or lenes right sometimes yeah which is esketamine without the full like like esketamine seems to be rapid onset but not as impactful as okay yeah it's not it's not a dissociative is that right doesn't have the same dissoci of cap qualities is that accurate I'm not I'm not super familiar with it yeah I sorry everybody or not sorry I'm I'm not getting on the bus just yet I I want to see some research and safe populations and then you know uh Branch thing these things out I mean indifference I mean one of the beautiful things about neuro if you do it well and you watch the live EEG you can see if the brain is following in a good way in a defensive way or you've got it wrong and what I don't like about a lot of these meds is you take a hit and you don't know where you're going until the cycle is through and and then for many it's it stays in the brain and the body for a very very long time time till it clears it out and some of them are permanent effects so um yeah I'm going to be the conservative one on the panel still I mean I'm I'm I'm reading some of the literature some of it sounds pretty good um but I'm not getting on the bus yet how big of an N do you need well Min like to to get any any anything is 30 the way that I make that that call or the way that I I perceive it because I'm not prescribing ketamine obviously I'm not a a medical doctor is um I work with tons of large medical organizations like specialty medical care groups who have rosters of clients who pay them for specialized advice they do genetic testing and functional medicine and all this stuff and then say Oh and I they keep going to me and saying hey my medical doc over there said nyback plus ketamine is the way to go and I'm like have they seen nyback alone like like whenever they're super Blown Away by neur feedback and ketamine have they ever seen it by itself like do they know you know what we do but um I I'm I'm getting pressure from lots of medical doctors in these big organizations essentially saying hey I'm interested in I'm using I'm thinking of using I'm gonna use ketamine so I'm hearing it from that that strata so to speak yeah well I mean some of the genetic testing I think is pretty fascinating in terms of helping uh determine how receptive uh we may or may not uh be to certain things so that that door is open but that that's information um Gathering I don't know I mean a lot of the things we used to do um you know with the the yogis and the like is you do your thing and we'll record the brain and see you know using um our equipment to see what actually does happen before you start to combine and you can't you know identify what's doing what I think think that's a very very not conservative but a good way to to start to get into this um I don't know I just I've seen so many train wrecks uh with um obviously um street drugs um and then you know even prescribed drugs in terms of you know freezing the brain in States you know certain um Benes and ssris it's like people cannot get out of these Cycles in terms of the second start to tie trate off you know everything kind of comes back so I'm wondering about you know whether a lot of these meds just essentially reduce the capacity of the brain to self-repair or to depression there's some stats on that it's um for ssris the rule of thumb is I think I I worked at mlan hospital for a while doing Imaging on MRI and stuff on people that were trying to uh withdraw from dep anti-depressants mostly ssris and this was a long-term population of major depression and I was working with uh Dr Mike Henry who ran the ECT unit yeah so I got to see lots of ECT at that time as well and which is you know not done the same ways it was done in the 50s and 60s for folks that are instantly cringing it's not always that you know terrible it has a yeah it's very very different but um we were trying to see if there were changes because the the truism the knowledge from Psychiatry is that you can discontinue or try to wean your anti-depressant and you know you may have a relapse and if you do go back on it and if you have a sec if you try to do it twice and you relapse both times you should probably never bother trying to come off them again is the Psychiatry perspective because you're likely not going to be able to discontinue and so what we were trying to figure out is is there a brain structure change that we could see over a month or two we did a bunch of MRIs we're Trac and doing you know track tracing and structure tracing trying to figure out if the Globus padus was having a structural change and I'm not I don't think we actually found anything that was our our Theory at the time so so well structure and function you know again a lot of the earlier work on structure seemed very very interesting except it didn't tell you we assumed that there was function based on structure we do see hipocampal volume changes in depression we do see uh frontal asymmetry a cortical thinning and depression or you know we don't know if it's causal but the cortisol state do do strip tissue and do create a reduction of bdnf in the hpoc campus which strips temporal lobe so yeah there's probably if we knew where to look if we knew where to put the spotlight we could look for our keys you know so and you're probably looking at fairly severe intractable depression if they're talking about ECT treatments they're they're already pretty far down the line towards the last possible treatment um you know camine uh uh does have uh negative uh consequence uh at the time as well as some people afterwards and the the khole experience to some extent can be predicted uh very much the same features in the EG that predict medication failure predict katamine negative side effect failure what are those epileptiform content in the EEG and beta spindles big spindling excess beta F2 beta spindles 20 microvolts or greater so does that cause dissociative anxiety instead of like you know there's a EP there's an epilepsy spectrum that uh you you need to recognize you can see spikes on on the peak of the spectrum and seizures you see some people that have spikes with no seizures you'll see some people you won't see the spikes with eg but you'll see them with Meg subcortically and then there's some people that have hyper excitable cortex with beta spindles that don't make spikes but that's on the same hyper excitable cortex you know uh hierarchy but but but is beta spindles epileptiform always the in in fact beta was initially described in the early 1930s in lennox's lab by by Gibbs and Gibbs as a form of epilepsy U because they saw gigantic beta spindles the the tonic for form of tonic clonic seizures is beta spindles seen as poly Spike they're so big and organized that they look like poly spikes as opposed to Beta spindles but are beta spindles always epileptiform uh if they're greater than 20 microvolts they're hyper excitable cortex they're not necessarily considered epileptiform but they were originally described in epilepsy and when you see people with epilepsy you quite often see beta spindles again in the tonic form of tonic clonic and quite often in the seizure Focus you'll see gamma excess and beta excess as hyper excitable cortex in that spot but you know the I if you look before you jump into using a dissociative drug uh you'd be well advised to think twice about whether there's a cost versus benefit if you've got epilep form content in your EG or you've got again giant psych you know spindling excess beta they're they're uh not just a little bit of fast activity in the EG they actually have a spectral peak in the Spectra um and and they're they're not at all healthy uh they can be in the 20s but they can also be up above 30 htz and and you can see that without seeing slow disregulation oh yeah yeah and it can be epileptic form interesting was that and uh the again and uh there may be a time at which that beta spindle Focus was is going to act up and be a full-blown seizure and you'll usually see you know giant repolarization slow waves and this won't be a transient made a a spindle this will be a persistent recur yeah they're persistent yeah okay so it's not just a little bit of a okay yeah it's it's an Achilles heel just sitting there waiting to fire off and toss in the stimulating side effect of of the dissociatives ends up being enough to trigger these things and you know not in a good way so my grandma was right don't dive under the water unless you know what's under the surface and in considering a dissociative drug take a look at your EG uh and and at that point judge whether there's an enhanced risk factor and you know bad out outcomes uh uh May kind of tweak your brain in a in a a relatively bad way um um you you don't necessarily end up with a happy outcome from ketamine when you go through a khole experience yeah another another angle real quick just I know a Yale psychiatrist and he said that and I don't know if he had had hard data on this but he said if somebody has a problem with alcohol he advises personally that they not use ketamine or dissociative he says the dissociative effect might resemble alcohol and I kind of just heard that and forgot about it until Matthew Perry passed and I know he had a big alcohol problem and I know he was probably uh he had a lot more ketamine in his system than would have been I heard typically administered so I just want as well well I mean just kind of playing with that a little bit I mean we know so much about alcohol volume tolerance um and we we don't consider that anywhere you know you have these standard you know 14 drinks for men seven drinks for women regardless of whether the the fellow is 5 foot two in a week you know Friday or Saturday night yeah week yeah and you know regardless of culture and EP gentics and all these type of things and you know we still haven't learned from from Al alcohol when the knowledge is all around us surrounding us and we don't apply it um in our medical do a little bit I I work in I worked in addiction for a while and we were testing for the um the variant of the I forget it's mu or Kappa opioid receptor that makes alcohol you know 25% more repetitive yep and we were you know psycho educationally saying oh look at that it's a little more yummy to you therefore maybe you want to try an abstinence versus a moderation track yeah you know brilliant um so I think we can get to this stuff and you know I was giving people breathalyzers to like hang out at the bar with to figure out what it feels like to drink and what it actually means so it creates this agency this this piercing of mystery I think I think these you know we can wear a sleep tracker we can do an E we can do a qeg or an EG we can yeah yeah well I mean those of us playing with it yeah but what my comment was in terms of the general knowledge and and how if you go to your md or um many traditional therapists are not looking at it that way and I think the same thing we really jumping in with ketamine woohoo uh it can do this but as Jay said hey watch it we know under these circums there's this and we're not even talking about volume and and we don't have any good drugs for for depression that's the thing is I mean this is why people I think psychiatrists are so excited by ketamine is because it does create a rapid lift a rapid change in depression and there's very little that works on depression like that very very little and so it's and depression landscape depressions isn't one thing anyway uh you know it's a it's a a lump category in the DSM uh but when you're looking with the thalamocortical D rythmia for more direct physiologic uh things like tinitus where you've lost hearing and now you've got tinitus or Phantom Pain uh or a movement disorder all of those are really quite you know standard medical model depression looked for with the Pham cortical dysrhythmia gets the anterior singulate but that is also the same spot that you get for reward deficiency uh uh uh addiction uh things uh OCD so um it's not quite the same kind of a distinct marker for a specific pathology uh it just points at the anterior singulate which is affect of Regulation and and cognitive regulation but you know obviously when it's working right yeah and then do you know what's the what's the longitudinal studies what's the longest one I've heard around three months um what's the of an anti-depressant uh no no ketamine um oh I I don't have that um well I might but it'll take me some digging I'll look for you let's let's take care we have a question here guys is L you know should let's answer mo mo is it moat or moat 23 AE mobat moat I like I like mobat from now on you shall be mobat 23A I have a friend who takes antidepressants how would some go about convincing the psychiatrist to integrate neuro feedback if the psychiatrist is anti- neuro feedback have them get a brain map of themselves they will then start referring you clients for you know or whoever did the brain map will suddenly start getting lots of uh map psychiatrists love data and they just and they are and they have a very mechanistic mind so there's kind of this anti-euro feedback perspective in in Psychiatry that's I find about 50% of them have and the other half are like oh what's that and either way you can create converts and get people excited and educate is my short answer but what what do you guys thinking well same I mean you said about 50% like wow about 50% are are coming on board um and I I would say even 15 years ago it was Zero you know people were not skeptic they were combative like not even wanting to uh to look into it so we still get that dismissive psychiat or psychiat l oh that's stupid what are you doing or you know and I and I don't waste time I talk with the client and I say you know you're the boss you're G to get many different perspective based on professions and you know you're hiring all of us for our knowledge um you know what would you like to do most most CL clients are are very very Savvy you know very very Savvy well they've had to be that's the thing I don't know about you guys but I get clients who've gone through all kinds of uh hassle before they find neuro feedback you know they've they've tried this they've tried that they've educated they've usually you know refine what's happening for them and they're you Diagnostic and process in a way that's not really what they were first told yeah they figured out some coping strategies and they now they have exhausted the traditional and they they hear about this thing called brain training or neuro feedback so I I I find a lot of people especially populations for whom there are not a lot of good Solutions like you know we would all agree I would I would assume that autism is a pretty big chunk of the neuro feedback field like disproportionately represented as a client base I would say it's I don't know 25% of our our whole field at least yeah um maybe more and the reason is only because it does something there it creates visible change and sensory in seizure in Social in obsessive and sleep and executive doesn't necessarily change language all that much although I've seen it change but the but it creates such change in individuals that is different than what parents often parents you know not always but parents have seen in the kid up until then so yeah but it's a desperation thing where they're like okay I've tried everything else I heard about this thing some other mom told me and then they you know find us that way so I we have yet to re to to cross the C them into a more mainstream I think Marketplace it's early adopters and a bit of desperation that we tend to get it's a perfect time to remind everybody the shows for informational and educational purposes only please check with your primary care phys don't listen anything that pizzas the long the long Arc of of Neuroscience is is turning towards the biological yeah and the APA has shrunk to a small bit of what it used to be as the total number of psychiatrists even attending but the the section of it that's grown dramatically is biological Psychiatry and biological psychology at the APA for psychologist as well the the uh if the DSM isn't real and doesn't have predictive validity how are we going to figure out how to treat our patients well biological Psychiatry has your neurophysiological answer in the EG and and other testing as well spec scans for Aman's clinic and so forth so uh but but the the long Arc is twisting away from uh the talking therapy stuff towards something that's more biologically we're so early on I mean you know Dr aon's work is amazing and his clinics are have you know having great penetration 11 centers in the US and thousands and thousands of clients seen every year and you know I'm I'm trying to do big Nur feedback worldwide and trying to get access out there but it's it's still like you know we're we're still breaking new ground everywhere we go in NE feedback it's not yet in most places understood yeah uh utilized I mean if if I could call a 100 therapists and say hey by the way trauma response impulsivity sleep onset Cravings ticks Alex thyia what's in the way yeah send me your send me your your huddled masses and I'll send them back regulated you can do your therapy but they don't you know the knowledge is not there so I my marketing ends up being evangelism not selling neuro feedback we more like oh hey here's how the brain works you can understand it have fun take control do something yeah and that's really the the resonant message is why I lean into it but I feel let's all not lose hope because just you know what you were talking about earlier um Andrew in terms of autism you know yes part of it is you know people really really see what we can do with Neurotherapy but there's also nothing out there that has really helped this population right um and we're seeing individuals younger and younger and younger so you were talking about speech for example we all know that the the cut off for speech is around nine or 10 um but you know when we're seeing the little munchkins you know we're able to really do some magnificent things with speech um and because we don't see them older you know the parents don't know what didn't happen in terms of the negative trajectory so I I love that and you know world word spreads like wi Fire Within communities the other thing is when you find resistors the educational system is a big one you know when you have a teacher again who is not supposed to suggest your child gets on methylphenidate but when you have a child who you know a teacher or a school counselor or whole school system who's really we want your child on meds you're being an irresponsible parent and they come to us I say um well don't tell them you know say uh thank you very much we're seeking our assistance through our doctor our psychologist or psychiatrist thank you so much for pointing out that our our child needed this assistance and don't specifically tell them what you're doing and then see if they in the next report card or with it's hard though parents sometimes by the time they have to deal sometimes the schools told them three or four times look your kid needs to regulate or you know I don't know how it is in the US but it drives me crazy that essentially the child gets rewarded for bad behavior by having a a vacation from school right so that is a big big issue for the parents to deal with well also I mean you know even outside of a pathology landscape just parents understanding how their kids brains work helps yeah I mean you know you mentioned Lang language development boys it's around 9 to 10 girls it's around 8 to9 with the Left Right hemisphere finish a laterality thing and you end up losing plasticity your brain prunes away phones you haven't heard you can't hear new speech sounds after that age the basis for accents so you can understand other people who speak differently basically but you share that with so do I and I think that's I said you share that with your clients and so do I and I think it's not just that but I tell parents of of of kids are below a certain age hey look here's a superpower find the SpongeBob SquarePants or the whatever it is in all the different languages and make it a reward to like you know put the English subtitles on but watch it in farsy and Arabic and Mandarin and Spanish and everything you haven't exposed them to because if they decide to learn that in college or later they'll have the phones intact and they can hear and speak and sound as if they're native yeah and that is a laterality kind of superpower you can build in a little bit of Left Right hemisphere integration with like a couple hours of work here and there making it fun to watch a cartoon so yeah that's education and provides the agency for people I think brain mapping and even neuro feedback becomes that thing I think that's the our way in we around the resistance by insurance companies resistance by 50% of psychiatrists the weigh in is by saying well we're just helping you understand your phenomena and your brain and take control over it because that is valid without necessarily pushing back against the things that are happening in a psychiatric landscape yeah and for us all to share our knowledge on these things and for those who don't have it who want to get in the field or entering the field to be able to know these things I think is very very important we have a question from the question on on Bard is really I think the first sentence in that is is a common misunderstanding that ADD ADHD is low IQ often a high IQ in fact you know more often than not yeah just inhibition with high IQ rapid processing speed there's three things make up IQ you can measure processing speed implicit learning and working memory you have disinhibition and high processing speed in most of the ADHD so you you have a leg up and at least a third of the regulation stuff yeah busy brained and busy body children you know back to the school they're they're harder to educate they're harder to parent but boy oh boy are they worth it uh but you know when you have really really large class sizes where you're expecting people to stay still for so many hours o that's a bit of a problem for for many children and the ADHD is probably a misnomer it's not really a deficit of attention yeah they're paying attention to more things than you're you're think they're supposed to be paying attention to so they they have executive control of attention difficulties but they don't have an intentional problem they can pay they pay attention to lots of things that you're not seeing or hearing and and there's a lot of misdiagnosis where it ends up being a sleep issue yeah or trauma response yeah or anxiety you know generalized anxiety or something those can all manifest especially in kids yeah um as as you know in attentive if it's a sleep issue especially or brittle and reactive instead of all the time I see people adults and children who have ADHD diagnosis and you do executive function testing and brain mapping you're like no there's no issue in your andry but Accord but my gosh your Alpha Speed is dragged down your Delta's through the roof you don't sleep at night huh okay you know you're you can sit for 20 minutes and perform beautifully on a performance test but you know we're seeing fatigue and stress features everywhere so that can really mimic really easily mimic ADHD and I think that's the big misdiagnosis is that fatigue and stress overlap that that create the same behavior but that's the absolute yeah I have a nice paper on that that estimates that 25 to 50% of the ADD ADHD population really has an underlying sleep disorder yeah and they break it into a few different kinds uh all of them basically different kinds of a sleep disorder but the first one they point at is the the primary disorder of vigilance the kid sits down and can't stay awake and that they're going to look in attentive because they're in stage one as soon as they sit down and uh they're going to doze off and in your 10 minutes of eyes closed AEG you're going to see them fall asleep precipitously into stage two they they actually have a narcolepsy with no cataplexy and they work really well with modafanil you don't need to speed up their Alpha you don't need to get rid of frontal Theta because they don't really have that kind of a problem they have a primary disorder of vigilance and it's an ereen problem uh which modulates your wakefulness drive U then obviously there's some that have a disorder due to uh circadian rhythm delay and uh in the desert Southwest on a state-by-state basis there's 10% less ADD ADHD measured by the CDC than there is in the east coast where the sun isn't so bright that 10% variability between 15 and5 You Know It uh the the the national average uh is high and low depending upon where you are but the desert Southwest basically treat treats based on Bright Sun the Circadian rhythm delay and that percentage of the Sleep disordered population is treated effectively just by living there exposed to enough bright sun to reset and U their circadian uh rhythms and that that circadian delay group is basically a treatable group and they're treated by bright Sun uh but then there's breathing problems at night which are going to end up making you sleepy during the day or they occasionally somebody who's got epileptiform content at night so the the Sleep disordered sleep will yield poor attentional skill set yeah but you know even you know not going into geography and circadian rhythm and all those things um I think the the absolute beautiful basic of what we do is if you bring in a child with that label we can see what area of the brain uh what efficiency and what inefficiency uh is responsible for it I think that's the absolute Beauty I mean I think we all completely agree that ADHD is a complete misnomer it's an absolute umbrella term for we don't know why this kid isn't doing what we want them to do in this moment or an adult I have a huge the past 5 10 years of middle womes as well yeah women getting new ADHD diagnoses is like a my is my is a very significant segment of my client base over the past 10 years middle brand new ADHD diagnosis where it like breaks through as sleep dysregulates with menopause the nent ADHD breaks through and suddenly gets in the way and they go to the doctor and they don't get a Sleep Diagnosis they get an ADHD diagnosis generally yeah yeah or well at least now they sorry I'm going to say they get it as a positive um but my generation and older and I would probably say even you know women probably 10 15 years younger than me um they were just considered the ditsy female they they were not giving any assistance whatsoever in school they were just considered dites and talk about not just genderism but overt educational sexism you know and for these women when you say oh yeah this part of their brain is doing this this explains all of it they they just burst in into tears it's like I know I wasn't stupid you know and and how they started to play that role um yeah so there's a lot of power in what we do we had another question before this one though in terms of raising IQ uh you bet not even a special protocol uh generally speaking people's IQ go up by around 10% no matter why you're doing your neuro literature shows half to a full standard deviation based on what population you're looking at is pretty standard across the papers that exist y Anthony take care of our our s s yeah we have another question uh can you talk about the elevated Alpha at T6 as a potential biomarker or phenotype and I know that is one of Jay's identified phenotypes oh we can't hear you Jay it's a phenotypic pattern that cuts across the DSM so it's not going to be specific to to a diagnostic category but it's a specific skill set uh uh lots of spatial perception occurs on the right parietal area and the specific detection of faces and the emotional positioning of the body body uh uh U body language basically can be picked up at the T6 location so you expect to see that spot off in PTSD you expect to sometimes see that spot off in anxiety but it's also in Aspergers in the Asperger's autism as a spot so and sensory integration difficulties and it's also seen reactive attachment so that again a whole wide variety of different categories but the skill set of emotional perceptual skill is is the commonality and uh if that's not working it's foundational for or expression of other things uh very much like wernick's area for language comprehension is a is the foundation for speech it's not speech motor but if you don't have comprehension speech motor is not going to do you a heck of a lot of good um I guess uh is the idea that reducing the alpha there should help with various types of symptoms as you described well normalizing the Spectra there okay you know and it might might not just be Alpha that's deviant you know and this frequency of the alpha varies wildly uh 8 to 12 might be the right answer for bcia but neurology doesn't believe 8 to 12 is Alpha they they'll look to see what rhythm in the back of your head attenuates with visual eye opening and that's your Alpha and it could be three four Herz at the bottom end on up to the mid teens very EAS and there's a couple of different functional Alphas that overlap you know as well so there's idling Alpha there's Preparatory Alpha and those will look very similar but be more slow versus fast and you can kind of look at that area T6 and tell if there's a dir of one of the alphas there's going to be generally relative power changes in this this usually is developmentally at typical right so you'll usually see other things in betas Andor thetas and deltas and Alpha is one of those things that you got to be cautious mucking about with because it's index frequency of the brain and tends to push back when you train it in a linear fashion so you have to kind of as Jay was saying look at the entire spectrum and figure out what other frequencies are cramped up or dish reggulator in their their failure modes and then based on the tissue taking the world in mapping the sensory and the social in you can kind of start to map for yourself what this is likely doing for someone if it's too much Theta it's overreactive it's too much beta it's cramped up in high gear too little Alpha can't relax you can kind of you know model your way through Reading uh eegs that way if you uh think of the phenotypes that Jay has helped identify and you know stake some ground around and it could be acquired it can be acquired as well uh head trauma uh can give you the slow edge of alpha with post-traumatic esea you know the pounding headache that you get after the the concussion is an esic headache like a migraine esic headache it's a pounding headache question that for all you guys I see a lot of bilateral deltas and thetas and there's often concussion or injury you know this this KRA cou stuff lateral impacts whatever but I have become I I have begun referring people more and more and more to Upper cervical doctors for analysis whatever they have any reason where their bilateral temporal thing could be from Impact or could be from neck if they report other kind of eighth cranial nerve type of phenomena like tinius or tibular I I refer to Upper cervical people now a lot I'm wondering if that's something you also tend to see or tend to like come across in a in a referral landscape they've normally seen everybody else before they get to us so um and um in head injury the very slow content is associated with the more severe injury where there's there's white matter injury not just gray matter uh uh Bob basically did a very nice study looking at quantitative MRI and quantitative EEG and Mild TBI and the delta in the EEG corresponded with white matter changes in the MRI and Alpha and Theta excuse me Alpha and beta frequency changes corresponded with gray matter changes so the what you what you're seeing when somebody comes in with a lot of slow content after a head injury is a more severe injury and you know white matter deeper uh and that it it ruins connections also Crush injury you'll have Delta after a crush and and beta after a Shear because you lose the inhibitory interneurons and so you get the beta hotpots running after a sheer injury yeah I'm not talking out of scope here so Pete this is probably where you want to do your flash thing but you know in terms of you know who um uh passes through my office when we have this um you want to be really really careful sometimes of Chiropractic uh intervention um you know the bone crunching versus the French osteopathic tradition of you know gently maneuvering and I have found that many clients who uh go to French osteopathic tradition yes Andrew you're on to something in terms of helping to to release there but it can be exactly the opposite oh yeah yeah we I I don't recommend chiropractors I recommend NAA or Atlas usually Nuka the which is in the US and the North American upper cervicals they don't they don't do manipulative cracking they do gentle traction and then holding holding tension for a while to create slow shifts talking after doing really really sophisticated x-rays through the bones and looking at you know Stacks so they're it's a very sophisticated subtle practice but yeah I see a lot of a shocking amount of cervical instability diagnoses walking in now and people with pots and dis and autonomas and some a lot of that will have neet components to it with or without injuries yeah so it's very confusing seeing this huge rush of that phenomena in our here's a here's a Google Buster from Mobi compared to MRI is qeg reliable as a diagnostic tool for head injury or is not no full stop the problem is diagnostic yeah yeah brain mapping is not qbg is not a diagnostic you identify patterns that are real yeah and then you try to fit them to for TBI Erp is diag tic uh EEG is going to give you a lot of good therapeutic intervention information um and it'll track changes that are positive but it's not diagnostically specific very sensitive but not diagnostic postco looks the same as a TBI apnea looks the same as a TBI and a qeg mold lime chemotherapy sleep deprivation from you know trauma based stuff where you're you know it all looks like brain fog and it all trips the TBI sort of visibility stuff when you look at the statistics against the classic concussion databases you see you know post viral stuff as a TBI you see yeah trauma causing sleep issues as a TBI so you can be really cautious I always have I I have a page that I look at in data and I before I get to it I say okay the next page we're gonna look at has the word injury on it don't believe it because it's not measuring your injuries I'm using an injury population as an index for brain fog and and that's valid when you're looking at the TBI discriminants first of all the EG has to be normal right which means it has to be read by a professional who looks at it and can tell you that it's normal typically if you're the software operator with the with that software you don't necessarily have that credential you have to have the EG cleared before you run that software otherwise you're using it as a screener if you're using it as a screener we just looked at that quite a few years ago now we found a 50% false positive rate right right 50% false positive y now that's no good now the author of the software says it's got a 20% false negative rate which means one in five who have had a head injury are going to be told that they didn't yep and I see that as well I see people who have known concussions or working on concussions and but I I use how that metric shifts across time as very informative thing I don't believe the labels but I watch the you know fatigue phenomena shift and it creates a shift or I watch somebody who's you know done jet lag you know I I do the executive function testing also run that sometimes to see how bad the fatigue is has it thrown them off enough to trip that index and if you look at the index there's a TBI versus no TBI and that's almost all Alpha and beta there's one Theta metric in it and they overlap too right there's the the severity index the little SP speedometer at the bottom and that if you look at what's in it half the metrics are Theta and Delta again looking for severity you're looking for how much white matter there is and that metric is loaded very heavily towards the slow content looking for severity you think neuro feedback can be used to reduce inflammation reduce to reduce inflammation yeah uh well it's probably not the not the first uh line of defense for inflammatory anti-inflammatory but uh U inflammatory markers are reduced during the training uh so I uh we've seen it reduce inflammation uh but that's you know if you've got an inflammatory problem you're probably going to be seeing a functional doctor before you're going to be seeing a neur neur feedback person lights better for that uh uh phot photob modulation yeah uh well photobi modulation is is able to work with people that have inflammatory processes but again it's probably not your first line of defense if you've got an inflammatory condition you're going to be seeing a medical doctor to try and get that under control and inflammatory processes are really uh quite dangerous because when your brain is inflamed it's SWS it can't go out when it swells it's compressing things and the brain doesn't like to be squeezed and the blood vessels that are in the brain are going to become uh insufficiently capable of providing flow when you compress them uh uh the inflammatory process creates esea in the brain which is seen as the slow edge of Alpha and uh if it's localized you're going to see it very locally but quite often if you have an inflammatory problem it may be systemic and those aren't good lupus um yeah things like that are really quite severe yeah and generally speaking I would say not a good ideal to train a swollen brain are there any advantages to using lasers for photobiomodulation over LEDs it's not our thing we've had if you want to that's that that's all it it'd be nice if there was actually a study side by side of the two to evaluate that but there really is not uh that uh my frequency is better than your frequency has been claimed by a lot of different things and U lasers is another one of them so you y you've got to provide the data if you're making the claim well does the IM medicine KET do that uh I Med the Sync has uh photobiomodulation built into each of the electrod sites uh but that's not my specialty is you have to talk to a different uh person about that not a problem moving along nothing nothing to here uh let's see radar they're talking about the thyroid in here uh yeah good thing Jo you got you got any thoughts a thyroid there Dr Marie no I what was they were saying T3 T4 has something to do with thyroid what can that um I recall hearing thyroid issues4 yeah I can't imagine band training affects the thyroid but maybe maybe below one Hertz might uh thyroid ends up having uh problems that can end up influencing EG Hashimoto's thyroiditis which is an autoimmune problem uh where you actually have a peroxidase antibody against your thyroid it takes T3 T4 out of bioavailability they'll show still show up on standard T3 T4 blood test but if you look for peroxidase and find you've got a a an antibody that's high you're you're the availability of it's essentially they're bound already they're not available on a cellular basis um if you're if if you think you have T3 T4 problems you need to be seeing an endocrinologist he's talking about T3 minus T4 Montage ah and and I was wondering if that was ilf and look at that he said it yeah remember T3 T4 is is thyroid um TSH is thyroid stimulating hormone that produces T3 T4 they they have to be in the proper ratio to be uh used uh and they have to be bioavailable so the oxid antibody can take them right out of bioavailability the um Hashimoto creates gigantic paroxysmal slow bursts in the EG it it's it's it's a it's a dramatic abnormality and it's quite often mistaken for other kinds of abnormality uh but it's you know Hashimoto is dramatic abnormal well it we're going to have another two week break here I'll be on on Monday you guys want want to want to come I'm doing a one on Photo bio modulation on Monday on YouTube so right I'll carry the uh the the bye week for you there you go well let's see next week is is Christmas and then you have new years's after that and then we should be back into the swing of things there but Dr Andrew here Hill where where can people learn more about you we got to get something for you for spending time with us us out at Peak brain institute.com or you can find me on YouTube under Dr Hill D RH i l l you're hiding you're hiding yourself out there under that Dr Hill label huh what's that well you know hey my name's short enough that if I got it you know I can I can take it so well at least it's uh it's one that's easy to spell and uh should be able to find it really easy you know yeah youtube.com/ Hill works yeah thanks Dr Marie swingle I hear you got a book and an app yeah well the the good old IM Minds book uh you talking all about the effects of Technology screen technology on the brain and behavior and then yeah we're uh going really strong with our new app for brain calming insomnia and the probably in the New Year our Focus one is going to be out and you can check those out at swingles sonic.com and we we use them to complement as a home protocol for the Neurotherapy work and we find it really really potentiates really potentiates yeah I don't know another show I can talk a little bit more about it but specifically how it affects um gamma beta ratios low high alpha ratios as well as Theta beta ratios in the exit region so we've got strong data Jay always says data we got the data y all right hold on before I one last one will infr slow neuro feedback help my anxiety disorder uh here I got it it depends no I'll back off infr slow isn't my $2 my my my forte but uh Dr Hill or Jay do you do you use a lot of that I don't no I use I have to say that that the the diagnosis is not the way to predict the treatment uh uh DSM doesn't predict therapy the the EG is not good at Diagnostics but it's really great prognostically we can see where you are and where you need to go and how to get there so um you know and uh you know we're we're going around the room uh for uh things for their promotional value I'm retired don't even try to get a hold of me so so but we can hear from the man who's read over half a million brain scans because we do our Thursday show yeah and we talk about what we hear hear about it in this room to expound on things that's perfectly good promotion of that and and I'll pop in there when I can as well so um okay uh but you know uh being retired I have uh a lot of EG stuff still going on looking at Raw waveforms with folks so um there are groups if you're interested in EG raw waveform interpretation look around for groups because um individual clients just there's no uh efficiency for training one person at a time so uh groups work really well uh people send in their weird EGS not just a routine EG so everybody gets to see kind of outlier EG features and uh we go over waveforms um as a as the core basis of the groups and uh those those occupy my time here in retirement just to try and hand off the wave form recognition skill set well Jay we're lucky to have you and hey thanks for everybody for showing up you know the fans the listeners the Watchers that are out there I know we answered everybody's question here not to may they want it but that's you know for entertainment informational purposes only we're going to take uh Christmas and New Year's off and we'll be back should be about three three weeks all so uh have a great holiday all all right bye bye yeah bye are we on tomorrow morning by the way yes we are yes yes ma'am okay see you then bye bye