🎙️ Join NeuroNoodle Q&A Live as we tackle your real-time questions about neurofeedback, brain health, and mental well-being. This special episode features our expert panel: Dr. Andrew Hill (Founder, Peak Brain Institute) Dr. Mari Swingle (Author, "i-Minds") John Mekrut (Advocate for PTSD and Neurofeedback) Anthony Ramos (Neurofeedback Practitioner & Mental Health Advocate) Host: Pete Jansons Key Topics Covered: ✅ Concussions: Fencing vs. Posturing Reflex Explained ✅ ADHD: Can Neurofeedback Help or Cure It? ✅ Autism: Understanding Meltdowns and Shutdowns ✅ Psychedelics: Potential Role in Neurofeedback and Mental Health ✅ Why Every Young Athlete Needs an EEG Baseline Key Moments: 0:00 1:20 Guardian Helmet 2:19 Tua Concussion Podcast Clip https://youtu.be/L85eahW6cH4?si=62DUzis9YCrliDEV 2:26 Fencing versus posturing https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTYfvy4zqjr0K2O6N9yWLwO0M03yBgDgO&si=dfQkZCPEhPVNv8zy 4:20 What is a concussion? 6:40 Difference between posturing and fencing response 10:30 It’s not just American football—female soccer players have a worse incidence of brain injuries 13:50 Bike guard sensor 15:40 Have helmets increased brain injuries? Soccer? 16:35 Hockey 17:45 TBI is linked to a likelihood of depression and sleep issues 20:17 If you get a physical every year for a baseline to play sports, why not an EEG? 21:08 How young should a child be to get a baseline EEG? 23:50 Question on OPCA 24:50 Brain source of meltdowns/shutdowns in autistic kids 27:35 How to find a threshold on a brain scan EEG 28:30 How does Dissociative Identity Disorder show in an EEG? Is it a lot of hypercoherence, typically in the beta range? 29:30 Psychics 30:20 How close are we to automatically cleaning EEG artifacts to trust that the results are accurate? 32:47 Is there an open source where we can all share our databases of EEGs? 33:46 Question: How effective are BioExplorer and BioEra.co? 35:13 Dr. Andrew Hill's business is 80% remote—what program does he use? 38:20 Question: Psychedelics in neurofeedback and mental health 42:45 Beta spindles in EEG and psychedelics 44:45 Question: Will neurofeedback get rid of ADHD or just help manage it better? 45:26 Clip to Jay Gunkelman ADHD show clip https://youtu.be/A6pWXmn9tqg?si=NKD7Kr3tbLoGXGgH 48:12 Question: BioEra and BioExplorer 51:29 Question: Meditation and neurofeedback—can they complement each other? 54:00 Question: Doing low-level laser therapy before or after a neurofeedback session? 56:50 Overtraining on home training protocols 58:30 Question: How can I learn neurofeedback effectively? 1:00:40 Is there any relation between beta hypercoherence and intelligence? 💬 Have questions? Join our next live session every Wednesday at 6 PM CST on the NeuroNoodle YouTube channel! Disclaimer: Content is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding health decisions. #Neurofeedback #Concussions #ADHD #Autism #MentalHealth #BrainHealth #QandA #NeuroNoodle #EEG #Psychedelics #LivePodcast
Episode Summary
I joined Pete Jansons and a panel on the NeuroNoodle podcast for a live audience Q&A on neurofeedback, brain injury, and brain health. What follows is drawn from my own answers in that conversation. The panel also included Dr. Mari Swingle, John Mekrut, and Anthony Ramos. You can watch the original conversation.
This is for education, not medical advice. Check with your own physician before making health decisions.
What actually happens to the brain in a concussion?
The image most people carry of a brain comes from television, a firm object held up in a morgue. That brain is dead and fixed in formalin, which makes it stiff. A living brain is closer to jelly. It pulses and moves, almost as much as the heart. At night you get two-hertz Delta waves washing through the tissue like agitation cycles in a washing machine, a large amount of physical movement and fluid ducting, including the lymphatic clearance we are only now mapping.
Now picture that soft organ inside a hard skull, and then snap the skull sideways. The brain slams one way and rebounds the other. That rebound injury is the contrecoup, the bruising on the side opposite the impact. Put an egg in a jar and shake it, and you have the mechanical problem.
A fencing posture after a hit is not a mild event. When you see a downed athlete with one arm extended and rigid, you are watching a primitive reflex reassert itself.
Why does the fencing response signal a major brain injury?
The fencing posture is the asymmetric tonic neck reflex, a wired-in pattern present in babies up to roughly nine months to a year. Turn an infant's head and the arms move into that position. It exists so a baby can roll from back to belly and begin to crawl. There is also a symmetric version, where the limbs and neck extend to prepare for movement, and that one usually matures out before birth.
These reflexes never leave. As the nervous system develops, higher tissue lays inhibitory tone over them and folds them into voluntary motor patterns. When an adult shows the fencing response after a head hit, that inhibition has failed. You are seeing brainstem compression and a decorticate-type phenomenon, the cortex briefly disengaging from deeper tissue. It runs parallel to a positive Babinski sign, the foot reflex that also vanishes with development and only returns when something serious has gone wrong centrally. If you see fencing on the field, that is a major brain injury with likely bleeding and secondary inflammation, not a bell that got rung.
Are some athletes at higher risk than others?
The largest injury population I see is women who play soccer, especially young women. Part of the reason is anatomy. A thinner, longer neck carries less muscular mass to absorb and slow an impact, so the same blow transfers more force to the head, in heading drills and in whiplash from car accidents alike. Goalkeepers are an instructive control group. Outfield soccer players run a far higher rate of neurodegenerative disease than goalkeepers and the general population, and the difference points straight at heading the ball.
The data on heading is sharper than most parents realize. One heading drill, a single weekend session in a high school, produced inflammatory markers in the brain and a drop in short-term memory equivalent to a concussion for about 48 hours. Researchers measured a GABA-related metabolite and short-term memory before and after in roughly thirty kids. The drop looked like a subacute concussion. It cleared in a couple of days, but it was real.
Football has a different problem. The damage is inherent in the design. You have large, fast athletes colliding by intent. Helmets may have made this worse by letting players hit each other harder. Body armor protects the limbs and torso. The brain has no armor.
Why should young athletes get a baseline EEG?
You get a yearly physical before you are cleared to play. The point is partly a baseline. So why not a baseline of the brain too?
Most TBI goes undetected, which does not mean it lacks effects. A UK study of 617 supposedly healthy 40-year-olds found that traumatic brain injury was the likely main culprit behind their depression and sleep problems, injuries that for most people trace back to school sports decades earlier. A brain map gives a family a road map back to baseline health, useful whether the event is a sports hit or a car accident.
On timing: I will map a brain as young as six months when there is a reason, such as a fresh autism diagnosis where the family wants to do something. For a stable reference point, I prefer waiting until the first big developmental phase slows down, around six and a half years. At that age the normative databases stabilize and a child can participate with assessments well enough. For a longitudinal map I add a second point after the left-right hemisphere and language divides settle, around nine or ten. I run a QEEG and a continuous performance test side by side, never one without the other.
You do not have to act on what you find. Knowing how a child's attention, sleep, and stress work lets you scaffold behavior and strategy around their actual build. It is just data, and data helps.
Where do autistic meltdowns and shutdowns come from in the brain?
There is no single location. My working view is that you are looking at hyperarousal nearly everywhere, which means you can enter the system at many points and help. Mapping matters here more than almost anywhere else, because the picture is highly individual. Put ten autistic people in a room and you get fifteen different brains.
One pattern shows up reliably in classic autistic presentations with social deficit: a lateralized avoidance response. In a socially intact brain, pleasant repetitive stimuli light up the left amygdala, and aversive stimuli light up the right. In a classic autistic presentation, any intense emotion, good or bad, lights up the right. That is a stress phenomenon driven by intense social input. Add the temporal regions for sensory and social processing, frontal regions for conflict resolution, and central pre-central areas for inhibitory tone, and you can see why this looks like it is everywhere. FZ in particular tends to be implicated in rigidity.
That breadth is also why neurofeedback can do real work in this population. There is a great deal to see and many doorways into a self-regulation process. For the broader picture of how sensory and social circuits can be trained, see Biohacking Sensory and Social Processing.
How do you set a good neurofeedback threshold?
Measure the signal you intend to train and let it stabilize. An amplitude of a given band or a speed will settle into a range over a short window. Then set the reward or inhibit as a percentage of that range. That classic approach works fine.
If you want to do better, never train on automatic. Go manual. Some people respond far more strongly at a different percentage than the algorithm picks, and you only find that by watching.
What about dissociative identity disorder on a brain map?
DID is a strange and loaded topic. I have worked with many people carrying that diagnosis, and I still cannot tell you with certainty what it is. What I can report is that I have seen different QEEG signatures across alters in the same person: different attention laterality, handwriting that shifts, different hemispheres taking the dominant alpha speed.
DID may actually break the core assumption of QEEG, which is that we are reading traits, not states. A handful of times I have seen a state shift so large it produces what looks like a trait marker shift. I once mapped a psychic who channels and watched her voluntarily change her EEG the same way twice, two months apart. Changing your own EEG on purpose is rare, but some people can do it. Something like that scale of state shift may be what is happening with alters.
Can software clean EEG artifacts automatically?
I am cautious about fully automatic artifact removal. There is information in the odd-looking data. I would rather call it an unknown variable than an artifact, and studying outliers is where some of the most interesting findings live, especially with last-resort clients. Cleaning data with AI infill, doing mathematical modification to manufacture clean signal, sits even lower for me.
What I am comfortable with: running an amplitude or blink threshold through software to tag suspect epochs, then visually scanning to make sure it did not throw out something real. Sixty-cycle and fifty-cycle line interference is its own category and is fine to handle. The rule is to match the cleaning method to the analysis you are running, which means the process is always somewhat imperfect.
What software and equipment actually matter?
About 80 percent of my practice is remote, so the tool has to get out of the way. I use EEGer because it is straightforward, well maintained, and shows the signal, the threshold, and the training metaphors plainly. That clarity matters when you are teaching someone about thresholding, signal quality, filtering, and gating. I make some tradeoffs by sticking with it. I have not moved into infra-low or z-score training, mostly because I have not found their efficacy meaningfully better.
BioExplorer and BioEra both work. BioExplorer is long in the tooth and depends on several layers of timing and translation, so a weak Windows machine can break the training loop. BioEra is more of a construction kit; it is what other packages, including some German systems, get built on. Both sit a step above open-source roll-your-own routes like OpenEEG, OpenBCI, BCI2000, and MATLAB. The catch with all the build-it-yourself paths is that you already have to know how to do neurofeedback to use them.
The deeper reason the software all looks like it was built by engineers in 1985 is that there is almost no market pressure. Install bases run in the low thousands. If a single license sells for three to five thousand dollars and people pay it, nobody is racing to rebuild it. Hardware has moved; you can buy an amp for a few hundred dollars now that matches a several-thousand-dollar amp from twenty years ago. The software has barely changed.
If you want guidance on running sessions outside a clinic, see Remote Neurofeedback: How It Works.
What is the role of psychedelics in mental health and neurofeedback?
I am a middle-aged conservative on this. I have seen too much damage. Some people report it changed their lives; others slide into episodic psychosis and never recover. These are our brains, and the field is in its infancy.
A useful frame is scrambling. A psychedelic can give the brain a hard scramble, and for some people with severe depression or anxiety it resettles somewhere better. For others it resettles somewhere worse, and we are hearing far more about the favorable cases than the unfavorable ones. The risk is not limited to party drugs. There is a whole Reddit community documenting harm from lion's mane, where pushing plasticity too high produces indiscriminate change that looks like post-SSRI anhedonia and depersonalization. More plasticity is not a goal in itself. If you want controllable plasticity, meditation, neurofeedback, and cold exposure give you more steering.
There is a real place for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for trauma. Here in LA, therapists use MDMA and psilocybin for guided work. Over the years many clients have mapped before and after Burning Man or similar experiences, and most of the time the EEG shows little aftermath, good or bad. If someone escapes acute drug damage, you usually see no lasting EEG signature. Occasionally I do see something. Heavy past heroin use can leave massive diffuse alpha. And rarely, after psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, I see someone move through a healing trajectory in a weekend that looks like years of rebuilding.
Two practical notes from the literature and from Jay Gunkelman's work. If beta spindles or subclinical epileptic discharges are present in the EEG, bad trips and adverse long-term events are more likely. And response rates are humbling. A recent trial put psychedelic response around 54 percent, better than antidepressants but not dramatically so. When Martin Arns matched treatments using an EEG biomarker, TMS, antidepressants, psychedelics, and ketamine all clustered near 50 percent. The durability question is also open; reports range from a few months to longer, and our goal in this field is measured in decades.
Will neurofeedback cure ADHD or just help manage it?
Both, depending on what you mean. You can reliably get a couple of standard deviations of improvement in impulsivity and attention. These are core resources that get stuck, not the diagnosis itself. The change is reliable across people, it usually stays changed, and it can take a few months to get there. I tell clients to expect roughly a 50 percent change, which for most people is more than enough to do what they need to do scholastically.
The psychosocial layer is more subtle. Procrastination and rejection sensitivity do not always move as cleanly as gross executive function. You also do not want to flatten the curiosity and drive that often ride alongside ADHD. The target is the ability to follow through on that curiosity, not the curiosity itself.
The clients I value most are the ones I see briefly, who run into me years later and have no memory of ever having a problem. Better still is the child who came in distracted, never got diagnosed, and simply learned how their own brain works and felt empowered by gaining control over it. For the deeper mechanics, see Does Neurofeedback Work for ADHD?, and for parents in the thick of it, Why Does My ADHD Kid Make Me Yell?.
Can meditation and neurofeedback amplify each other?
Yes. One of the original uses of this technology was to get ordinary people into states that took yogis thirty years to reach, in something closer to thirty days. A feedback loop showing where your brain is going lets you potentiate meditative states.
There is a caveat. For some people, meditation is torture, and I tell them not to do it. Some brains need quiet to reach quiet; others need arousal to reach quiet. Many busy-brained people sitting in a silent room are not calming down, they are winding up. Know which one you are. One pattern I have heard described, and that fits what I see: high performers can treat meditation as a task to perform perfectly, which drives high beta upward rather than down. For more on training calm states, see Biohacking Meditation.
Does combining neurofeedback with red light therapy help?
Photobiomodulation streams red and near-infrared light into the brain, mostly in the 1170 to 1180 nanometer range, up toward 1800 in some devices. The mechanism: that light interacts with cytochrome c oxidase in the mitochondria and speeds the electron transport chain, so you boost ATP production in the tissue. Many devices add entrainment or quadrant-driven stimulation on top of the basic glow.
I use it before a session as a prime, and I am seeing strong potentiated effects when clients combine photobiomodulation with neurofeedback, similar to combining neurofeedback with hyperbaric oxygen. Dosing varies widely. Some clients do well at four or five days a week, some twice a day, and some get overtrained and exhausted by it, so I ease them in. Low-level lasers, by contrast, are unpredictable, and I am cautious there. More is not automatically better, which is true across these tools, supplements included. I had a client with a rare sulfur metabolism issue who pushed N-acetylcysteine higher and higher until she was nauseated and activated by one of the most innocuous compounds available. Start low, check in the same day and the next, and titrate. For the full picture, see Brain Biohacking with Photobiomodulation.
How do you actually learn to do neurofeedback?
Learn to read raw EEG. That is the key. Once you can read the signal, you can use almost any device and any flavor of neurofeedback and adapt your approach to the person in front of you. Skip that, and you are locked into recipe books and limited software forever.
Get a good mentor. Look at BCIA-listed mentors as a base level of vetted knowledge, and watch which names keep coming up among people who do not push box programs. Treat it as a red flag when someone tells you that you do not need to understand the brain to train it. Get a PhD if you can, look at a great deal of raw signal, and then the equipment stops being the constraint.
Is beta hypercoherence related to intelligence?
There is a real relationship between sped-up alpha and beta hypercoherence, and fast alpha is one of the bigger drivers of IQ. The link is correlational, not causal. You can have fast alpha without beta hypercoherence and beta hypercoherence without fast alpha, though there is a route from one to the other.
The same pattern needs context. High beta in the occipital region shows up in many people with addiction and in many elite athletes; the difference is what hook the drive catches at age thirteen, soccer or heroin. High beta ratios can read as extreme productivity or as extreme anxiety depending on whether there is an objective to point them at. This is why I follow the normative and clinical databases and still ask what the person is actually doing with their brain, and whether it works for their life before I decide what to train up or down. For more on how these patterns sort, see Biohacking with EEG Phenotypes and Decoding Alpha Waves.
The through-line
Most of these questions resolve the same way. The signal carries the answer, whether you are reading a fencing posture on a football field, a lateralized amygdala response in an autistic brain, or a beta ratio that could become a career or a habit. Map first, read the raw EEG, match the tool to the person, and titrate the dose. If you have a young athlete, the most useful next step is concrete: get a baseline QEEG and a continuous performance test before the season, so you have something real to compare against if a head ever gets bonked.
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