Neurofeedback Q&A: Concussions, ADHD, Autism, and Psychedelics Explained | NeuroNoodle Live

welcome to neuron noodles Q&A live a special segment brought to you by the neuron noodle podcast I'm your host Pete Janson and today we're sharing a live recording from our recent Q&A session where expert panel tackled real-time questions from our audience on neuro feedback brain health and mental well-being and neuron noodle Q&A live you drive the content you ask we answer our expert panel includes Jake unclean neuro feedback Legend with over 500,000 brain scans analyze Dr marce swingle author of ey minds and leading expert at neuroscience and psychology Joy Lun neuro feedback specialist focusing on autism and sensory processing disorders John Mack advocate for neuro feedback particularly in PTSD and mental health Dr Andrew Hill founder of peak brain Institute Santiago brand International leader in biof feedback and neuro feedback and of course Anthony Ramos neuro feedback practitioner and mental health Advocate you like to be part of the conversation Drive the next session's content join us live every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. central Time on the neuron noodle YouTube channel it's your chance to get direct answers from the experts just like in the recording disclaimer the content provided in this Q&A is for informational entertainment purposes only always consult with your primary care position or a qualified health care provider before making any decisions related to your health now let's dive in neuron noodle Q&A live sit back listen and learn yeah you're talking about the guardian helmets supposedly each person that wears it the 10% on the hitter and 10% on the hit to reduce concussions yeah so why doesn't tour wear one well vanity probably existing helmets look so good yeah yeah they got those they got the cool stuff on the side with the flames you know or whatever I there was there was a whole discussion about the evolution of helmets and it used to be just you know some leather thing the guys put on their head when they finally decided to wear helmets it had no and all of a sudden somebody said this is a great marketing idea we put the name of the team on the side you know promote you know boosterism etc etc and I like all right that was the evolution so now we have this helmet and the new helmet doesn't allow for that because it's got these lumps in it so it's not as cool looking well to a to a taba Leola Anthony Ramos however you say it uh he has done a lot for the mental health field for us because uh the traffic that pours in when people want to see what a fencing posture looks like uh does anyone want to take on what that means when you get a when you get a jolt to the Head now I've heard there's posturing where you kind of freeze up like this and then there's the the on guard asymmetric uh tonic motor reflex atmr it's it's a childhood reflex that's there up until about age uh oh I think it I think it vanishes between nine months of age and a year of age it's very similar to The babinsky Reflex the foot scratch you know reflex that changes as the moot as the nervous system hits a developmental milestone and if it shows up later in life big things have gone Ary you don't want to see a positive binsky sign that means you have a significant you know central nervous system issue probably in this case you're probably getting compression of the brain stem and creating that uh babies do it so they can um learn to crawl because it's the it's the position from which you can turn over most easily so they do it reflexively as a way of starting to learn to so that's getting off getting off their back onto their stomach kind of thing yeah right on that's what you're seeing you're seeing that primitive reflex assert itself when the brain stem gets significant uh trauma so these reflexes are still still hard are still wired in there just long forgotten and disused and other things will be on top of them right you know other systems will be masking them or have have secondary inh inhibitory tone development as more tissues develop what you're seeing is a failure of inhibition and a prim one the Primitive like the Moa or the grasping or the suck know this is the Primitive reflex reasserting itself right in a 300 pound guy who's hurdling to the air because he just got a bell rung you know so well get out he'll he'll get going on this so before he gets there anybody want to take out what a concussion is for the lay people in here I the lay person in me says that your brain's getting hit one way and the brain is getting slashed back the opposite way what do you call that Contra coup or something like that anybody want to take it Contra coup exactly right Andrew you're you're ready to roll on that one touch oppos touch opposite touch C Contra cou the FR because we think we think of the brain because we see it so often on television you know a guy in the morg holding up a brain in his hand you know and it looks like this sort of pretty hard object you know in a dead brain kind of is but a live brain not so much it's much more fluid like jelly like I don't know what's what's a good word for it I've never held a live brain in my hand so I don't know and even those ones you see in the TV shows or if you went to a uh a lab where they use the same brains year after year to teach medical students right those brains are firm because they're fixed with formaly or formalin exactly a dead brain is pretty sloppy you know it is pretty like a it's an organ and the Brain the human brain moves it's it doesn't move as much as the heart but almost it like literally pulses and moves two Hertz waves of Delta at night create these agitation waves to the brain like a washing machine a huge amount of physical uh ducting and movement and tissues we're just now figuring out in the lymphatic system so yeah it's not a very stable still organ it's probably a mercy we can't feel it yeah so you think about it encased in this hard skull and then slos that around like you know put a put put something relatively fluid in a jar put an egg in a jar and then just throw it around for a while see what happens not PR getting back to Tua I mean two years ago people didn't know at least the people that I talked to in sports didn't know about the posturing and all that now parents know that if their kid gets hit in the Noggin and they go like that or anything like that they're like you're not going back in the game I don't care what what happens that I do not a mild concussion either if you're if you have a posturing response a fencing response A reassertion Primitive F Lexus it is a major brain injury um there is bleeding there is secondary inflammation there's likely a lot going on not just getting a concussion what is the difference between the two Dr Hill between uh the posturing and the fencing or is it both the same because people reference both both of them because per reflexes different reflexes are all posturing right so you can have a um a symmetric uh tonic motor response which is again these you'll see these things in babies characteristically as healthy things but um babies will lift their arms up and stretch them stretch their neck and pull their legs up and that's the symmetric one it's to get ready to start to move basically to crawl and then there's the asymmetric one which is the you know Elvis one where you're you're doing your your fencing posture um and that's so you can turn over and those things go from reflexive into voluntary uh motor pattern as you mature and the symmetric one usually matures out by the time you're born actually so it's it's more it's only voluntary but in pries you'll see it you'll see the symmetric one the involuntary crawling stretch you'll see it in pries up until they finish developing basically it's one of the signs they're still premies if they do that thing so these are the the Primitive reflexes the posturing MOA which is the suling reflex the grasping reflex they're all there but then secondary systems either move them into more of a voluntary thing because they're inhibited or they become part of a deeper motor pattern generally so uh you're almost seeing a decorticate kind of phenomena decorticate phenomena from uh concussions or the big differences off fencing posturing or or posturing response is instant you see it right away as the change in mechanical uh tissue happens but with a swelling event you then see the cortex gets kind of disengaged from deeper tissues and you can have similar kinds of phenomena happen you can you don't usually see a motor response the same way but you might see torticolis or Donas which is the same thing in a baby you can create the fencing response reliably who's below about nine months of old by taking one arm uh and bringing it out and turning their head uh well I think you can just turn their head in One Direction and The Arms will do this by themselves actually usually it's it's it's triggered by the neck turning triggered by something in the neck happening so it gives us a sense of why concussions can uh trigger I think so hi Dr Marie we're talking about uh football football players getting their heads knocked around once again once again yeah American Gladiators what do you say would you yeah would you let your kid be a prize fighter why are you letting your kids why are you letting your 14-year-old play football what's wrong with you well that that's my issue John I'm 100% with you you know when we're at adults we we take calculated risk okay and if you're going to pay me $5 million a year okay um and I might get injured or you know if you're a Formula One driver there are many many professions and you're an adult and you make that choice yourself then that's your choice yep my issue is when we throw young children in here when they do not have the the proper development to make those rational choices and we injure them I know it's a very very un popular stance um but I'm 100% behind you doc 100% yeah but but you we also know that uh unless you train children young they they don't grow up to be as fine players you know in terms of the training and the tuning you really want to throw this further is this a form of child abuse I don't know like like how extreme do we want to have I I have said that I have said that publicly that's my opinion I think it's I think it's neglect at the very least yeah yeah yeah but you got kid little kids playing soccer cheerleaders the sports you wouldn't think of and they're the ones that are getting uh messed up worse than football well I think you I don't know about worse than I'm not sure about worse I'm not sure about worse than football what was the stat on CTE for retired football players 98% there's a stat for the football players there's no stat for the cheerlead ask around I could I could my experience the biggest injury population is women who play soccer yeah especially especially young women that that's the that's the most injury-prone sport that exists in my and they they banned the header women actually you know the U one of the things that a lot of people you know there are we talk a lot about gender here and how gender has become uh political but there are some very distinct physical uh differences in males and females and one of the primary reasons not just in football or or soccer um uh for females but also in terms of car accidents and Whiplash our neck girth you know we're much much more elegant and elongated here we don't have you know the larger neck so when you get that impact it's a huge impact because we do not have the muscular protection to reduce the velocity of the hit so if you are a parent or a coach working with young females I don't know do you like really build up the neck muscles the way we do and like if you look at American football players I mean the running joke is they have no neck you know um and quite frankly if you have no neck you're you're more protected I mean who can we think in terms of celebrities Kiera nightly comes to to mind because she was actually in a soccer sorry I I bounced back between soccer and football but she was in a soccer movie as a soccer player that well now she's a um a mature woman but as a as a young female that's exactly the type of neck that you are going to get horrendously injured in uh in a sport um accident as or or regularly playing the sport the way you're coached to play as a young female I mean it's it's Anatomy it's basic anatomy female to female and of course male to female Andrew you want to pipe in there or well just that you know we're we're sort of also operating in the dark right we don't have good tools for screening and catching injury so one of the arguments sort of being alluded to here or or framed is that it's inevitable and it might be and there may be some aspects of sport that we have to modify I I'm over the past 25 years of working with teenagers and adults I'm seeing a huge drop off of American football in at the teen level you below college level tons of of people are just dropping out entire Sports programs are closing in towns because there's just no kids to play football um and the football that is happening below the high school level has turned into touch football now no longer contact football in most places so I'm seeing that modification that awareness of parents I would also argue that you know maybe these are sports where there's it's unavoidable I don't know and that's a long question but what we don't have uh uh in in place that we could have is reliable mechanisms for screening and catching phenomena you know there's there's uh things that are like qegs that are used fieldside um there's an amazing device that Professor uh Mike loosmore in the UK has developed which is it's the bik guard um sensor and if you're if you're a soccer player football player and you head the ball or get a concussion in real time from the accelerometer in the bike guard they model the accelerative force of the impact and on a computer show inside the brain where it's likely to have done based on the impact and make a real-time judgment about oh no no out of play too much force based on a likelihood of later damage and they've modeled it all out amaz so that kind of stuff qegs for your kids every year a sense of brain health yeah field side screening we could be doing a lot more to catch because we're also up against the Dignity of risk here right we don't want to coddle our our young people they need to develop power and you know they we send them to sports because we also send them to war right that's sort of like we're we're creating powerful people there's discipline there's all kinds of cultural stuff probably are not going to drop contact Sports out of our cultures just a hunch but but the point being it there's something about football that I think is unique it it it's inherent in its design that people are crashing into each other that's not true in soccer it's not true in all you know there's a bunch of sports where there are high levels of of injury but it's inherent in its design inherent you got two 300 pound guys racing each other these are doing a 4840 you know these two guys crash into each other yeah yeah it's not going to be pretty they're wearing they're wearing armor the brain doesn't the brain doesn't have that armor the brain doesn't have that armor so here's the thing on football guys so I read something recently that helmets may have increased the traumatic uh damage to the brain because now people are going at each other harder it might be incentivizing it and I think I even heard a friend who's a football fan said oh yeah they used to not be able to tackle a certain way I don't remember what he said but they weren't allowed to be quite as Direct on soccer I posted in the chat I've been posting stuff in the chat um soccer players except for goalkeepers and that's important are 3.5 times more likely to suffer neurogen degenerative disease uh compared to the goalkeepers and the general population um and the it's greater even for defensive player and I think what's happening is it's the heading so we just need to get rid of heading I mean Y and uh yeah I think I I heard you kind of say under your breath or we we were yelling over you but also hockey this is a big one you know in terms of Canada well yeah you're meant you're meant to do cor cor you know body onbody in hockey the game can be played completely without smashing into the boards Etc and many of have just been but but you know in I I don't like hockey I I just don't like to see that type of um the destruction and intentional harm um and the fact that the game can be played and enjoyed without it so I think we also have to take some responsibility as as as fans as communities um that there like as as Anthony said just take the heading out of soccer um the hockey take away the violence but that the fans aren't interested fans actually go for the violence so maybe we're just talking a lot more about our ourselves as human beings well I mean if you look at heading just to back up for a second we're all scientists you know practitioner types there's literature showing one single heading drill on a weekend in a high school one single drill creates inflammatory markers in the brain and a drop in short-term memory equivalent to a concussion for 48 hours oh my gosh yeah oh my go 30 kids did one drill they measured a gabit metabolite to the measured short-term memory before and after and the drop was equivalent to aable it went away in a couple of days it didn't last the same way but it looked like a Subacute concussion basically yeah so well we also look at our our stereotypes of athletes okay going back you know 1940s 1950s you know the the athlete you know and athletes were were were commonly thought to be poor performers scholastically having a lot of ADHD Etc I strongly argue that we have a lot of brain injury and cumulative brain injury um that we're just now again probably also had undiagnosed ADHD and people perform under high stimulus circumstances getting tracked into non you know supportive academic environment otherwise proba some of that was happening so guys I also post one it said that a majority of TBI goes undetected but that doesn't mean it's not having effects the last thing I posted uh was a study that says in the UK a study of 617 supposedly healthy 40-year-olds uh found that TBI was the likely main culprit for depression and sleep problems and so that's probably from their high school days I mean most people are not College athletes so this is maybe affecting people 20 years later yeah well if you grew up where I grew up and you know I I literally used to skate to school in the winter I had the just the joy of being on a on a canal but my own nobody wor a helmet one little V right on the back of your head you know so there is this thing called life as well but I I think we we probably have a duty now to know what we know um knowing what we know to eliminate um the instigation or of the the possibility of these known injuries versus you know that stuff happens when children and adults play um so looping back to we were saying before we can do extreme danger um to people's development and lack of resilience if we try and protect everybody from anything but I think we want to really think about taking away the irresponsibility of of known side harm why do you have to get a physical every year why do you have to get a sign why do you have to get a physical every year to get signed off on before you play a sport I guess so you get a baseline so why don't you get a baseline with an e g right yeah what what how would you guys do it well we do that at any family of wealth I mean I hate to put this in socioeconomics but we have a lot of individuals they don't pursue a course of the of therapy they come in they want a baseline brain map just in case anything happens whether that's a car accident or they know that their child is going to be playing sports so they have a road map back to Baseline Health um I highly recommend that if if you're a family that can afford it do it and you know Peak brain does it cheaply sorry Peak brain does it cheaply you don't have to be wealthy to get a peak brain okay didn't say Che did you how would you do it though what age how what age yeah depends on the the goals you you can do brain mapping I I routinely do it as young as six months that's a hard sell my kids little tiny caps I have little tiny caps this big they're really cute that's cute seriously kid five six years old whatever that is when they're running around they have no idea what they're doing they're just running down the street following the ball when should they get a baseline so you got something to compare to in case they do get bonked I don't know I mean developmental model you know before I I kind of say that you know before five you you really got to put in your measures for for for eight and then you know when we're talking about ADHD learning disabilities Etc you know 7 to n is when the brain is really fine-tuning and then you know whether you have you know a miss learning phase versus um a true learning deficit um so if if you really want solid traction of who and what a person is I would say get them at nine uh but I sure all of us here on the panel will say lots can happen before then so I mean it's a huge it depends you know what what is the purpose of the baseline or Pete as you were saying and also Andrew which is if you can afford it get one every year like yearly physical yeah and you can see enough variability once developmental changes slow down across people so that's about six and a half years old yeah at six and a half there's enough stability that all the databases start to show up and show Norms at that age that are really stable in Behavior and the kid generally is functional enough to have the ability to participate with yes assessments appropriately you may want to you know map or work on a kid who's 18 months old right after their parents got the autistic diagnosis and they're freaking out because you can do something yeah different yeah and if you're doing a longitudinal map I like to do it when the the first developmental phase slows down which is at uh six and a half and then do it again after the Left Right hemisphere divide and the language divides we're talking about like nine or ten yeah so when you're going to grade school you recommend getting EEG yeah yeah qeg and a CPT side by side never one of the other I I'm I'm I strongly believe they should always be done together so if they play sports or looking out for a learning disability it just seems like common sense but uh yeah you don't have to do something about ADHD but if you understand how your attention works or sleep or stress works now you can scaffold behavior and strategies around support so just knowing it's just data knowing how somebody's build can help a lot yeah oh we got a comment here Jody Co any thoughts and neuro feedback for Oliva Pon cbella atrophy opca wow not familiar with that but if it's Ponto cerebella it's going to not have paramal neurons as part of its physiology instead it will have you have you have a hard time affecting with classic EEG neural feedback because there's no EEG so you'd have to do INF for low in for slow or blood flow training so my hunch is what I would do is find somebody who works very very well with um pots with metabolic with disautonomia phenomena because now we're talking about potentially life-threatening brain stem phenomena and they may have some tools for helping but my guess is you're talking about infr low infr slow to affect that if you can affect that with your feedback Anthony can you read our V VJs trying to get caught up and we'll go back yeah which parts of the brain do you find to be the source of meltdowns shutdowns in autistic kids everything few yeah there there are many I think you're probably going to get a different uh perspective or different lens I should say none of them are going to be incorrect um on this I mean one of my very strong theories on autism is you're just work you're looking at hyperarousal everywhere so bottom line is you can go in anywhere and in theory be able to assist with that um so this is where again the the mapping is so important um there are some Universal spots where you know almost always uh location FZ is implicated in terms of rigidity um but other than that it's very highly individualistic I'm sure any of us could run with that who wants to take the ball now pun intended well well you will see you know it's also not just a different answer from each of us but like you put 10 autis of people in a room and you got 15 different answers you know based on their brains yeah there's a lot of variability for the uh for the individual but you will see in a classic autistic population with social deficit this phenomena of emotional veence changing the laterality so in nonautistic brain socially intact queuing when you show a lot of happy exciting yummy repetitive phenomena you get a left side light up of the AMD an activation to the left and when you show a lot of Avers adversive things and scary things and icky things the right lights up but if you have somebody who's got a an autistic classic autistic presentation with social deficits any intense emotion good or bad lights up the right one right so you have this asymmetric lateralized uh avoidance phenomena it's a stress phenomena caused by intense social input um yeah like Dr Dr swingle said you're talking about Rial areas for the sensory and the social frontal areas for the uh conflict resolution Central pre-central areas for inhibitory tone so it's kind of everywhere yeah yeah so I and just going really positive here that this is also why I would say neuro feedback is is one of the most successful interventions for change uh in the population with with autism because there's just there's so much we can see and so many um venues for uh for brain change or or entry into a therapeutic process so uh Kym what would be a good way of finding your ideal threshold should you first find your Baseline threshold and then set a reward inhibit from question mark that works yeah you set you you measure the state signals the measure the parameter the thing you're trying to train let it stabilize and it should kind of hang out in a certain amplitude if it's a you know amount of brain w for instance or if it's a speed it should should stabilize in a Range then yeah you can parze the function of that as a percentage of that very classic way to do it it works just fine and I would say if you want to up your game never never do auto never do automatic do manual because you'll find that some individuals will be significantly more responsive at a different percentage very very important from VJ yeah yeah Pete I can go he says VJ says how does dissociative identity disorder show up in qegs seriously it's very strange you actually can get a different QED signature based on Alters I I've worked a lot with vi just in impatient crisis environments and I eventually saw brain uh and I I it's it's a very loaded topic did right like there's some question of does it exist and is it a real thing and I am I've worked with lots of people that have that diagnosis and I still don't know yeah but I will say I've seen lots of brain Maps or a handful of brain maps of people with different altars presenting and you see different things in the brain I've seen different attention laterality I've seen handwriting shift you've seen different hemispheres going to dominant Alpha speeds so I don't know what it is uh but and I I would say that if anything VJ the qeg might not be a good tool for did because it breaks the assumptions of qeg which are that we're picking up traits not States yeah um I I I I did a bunch of brain Maps recently on a a psychic psychics keep finding me it's kind of funny I have psychics all the time finding me now and I have this pet psychic who uh channels pets you know she she reads your pet for you and tells you what's happening and she did a brain map for a fun experiment and did two different channeling experiences and and altered her brain in I'm like wow that's really interesting and she a bunch of neur feedback with us and then did another experiment looking at Baseline change like you do with brain maps and did her her exercises again for her little channeling experience and she changed her brain the exact same way voluntarily the second time two months later really rare to be able to change your EEG by doing something with your mind and yet people can do it sometimes and that is sort of I think what's happening in did is such a huge State shift that you're getting a trait marker shift but I don't understand I got a quick quickie how close are we to using automatic artifact re uh removal with all the software out there or do we have just going through the EG taking out bad data how close are we just saying okay let me just hit the automatic button or do we have to to get to qeg bit Maps or something else I'm just saying the clean you have software out there that says here Pet's Pete's pushing my buttons I I'll jump uh I am very very very anti- um artifacting programs you you miss so so much in fact a lot of the work that I'm known for is I study the outlier you know study many things that look like artifact or look odd that we re remove and you can find some really fascinating things especially for your last resort clients so there is information in the um in the the unknown variables um and just because note my term that it's an unknown variable not necessarily an artifact now I'm not talking about 60 Cycle or 50 cycle interference let's just get that out of the way um but I think um pardon the Judgment but those of us who really really are good at our game um Do It um uh you know manually or we watch the we watch um as the um the automatic programs do it and we'll we'll bring things back in or put things out so I'm not against the combo uh but if you just want to press a button and and and do it like you're you're missing so much if not doing well so we're not like or cleaning data with IA that's another hot button topic like I'm I'm not a huge fan of doing mathematical modification to get clean data but I'm okay with running a threshold amplitude threshold or blink threshold through some automatic software to tag it and then visually scanning it to make sure it didn't do something wrong but you have to match the EG to the same analysis methods of the findings you're looking for always so it's you know it ends up being always imperfect so I don't know yeah is there an open source where all this data can go we have all these eegs that are done not now well a lot of it is just garbage you know I'm not not going to name uh certain software products but you know you're you're getting all kinds of things dumped in and you know we have five million eegs of eegs of what you may with the top HTS of 30 yeah you want to trans like for that for people John no no no they don't get the joke they shouldn't be in the biz I'm not I'm not looking for a lawsuit oh that's a good point uh the uh disclaimer please check with your primary care physician first this is for entertainment and informational purposes only the HD recorder says how effective are bioexplorer and bio era Co they're not effective they're programs use yeah they work fine well I have I have strong opinions I've used bio Explorer a lot and you know they're really good tools but they're not easy to use no um bio Explorer is super long in the tooth has some issues because of it it runs on several layers of crft and and translation and timing so you can break the training process and make it go away if you don't have a good Windows computer and you haven't done too much with the software but it works okay bio error works better but it's not runnable out of the box it's me to build other pieces of software with which is what Signet is and there's a couple in in Germany that use bio era as underpinnings so they they're step in my opinion they're a step up from things like open EEG and open BCI BCI 2000 and mat lab for build for rolling your own but you kind of have to already know how to do neuro feedback yeah to do all those roll your own things and I'm a big fan of like just buy the software that works gets out of your way it doesn't cost you that much and then you can not worry about the software because there's no really we get this question every week every you know every one of us gets this question what's the best device what's the best software I can do really good ner feedback with almost anything that gives me the option to make control decisions of what's happening right and I and and somebody who doesn't know how to do neuro feedback can't do neuro feedback with the best tool set right well Dr Andrew 80 80% of your business is remote like how what's the EAS some you gota have to have something easy so what do you use I use eager I use eager because it gets out of the way it's pretty straightforward it's a granddaddy in the field at this point and it's relatively you know kept up so doesn't over complicate I do make some uh sacrifices like I haven't gotten into infra slow or infra low I don't do zcore training mostly because the efficacy I haven't found to be all that better in that with those tools so I haven't bothered to to use them but you know eager is a tool that that other uh software emj agrees um other software um sorry other providers have learned their neuro feedback shops on and it's a tool set that Howard lightstone for years he would go to all the meetings every year and talk to Providers and say what are you trying to do what would you like to do and he would do like market research at all the conferences every year go back and develop every winter and would have new software with these really bizarre features so if you dig around and E eager it's got these like Swiss army knife bits where you're like what does that tool do I've never seen that tool before but if you want to do something you know like Rob coin's four Channel multivar coherence or complicated you know some and ref Channel training classic stuff you can do it and eager gives you the signal on the screen and it gives you threshold and it shows the metaphors of training in a very straightforward way and that's important when teaching somebody about thresholding or signal quality or filtering or game triggering it's important that it be simple enough and that may be some of the complaints I have around some of the sign some of the uh bio era built software packages is they don't actually expose enough of the process sometimes to the individual and they're great for the one thing the one screen the the the the IP the Special Sauce that they're exposing but they don't necessarily create a tool set that's broad I mean at one point Signet had regular band training in it you could do alpha Theta band training or infr low kind of stuff nowadays it's just the infr low stuff basically so it's it's more business that's doing that than the actual tools um but I I just use um eager so VJ VJ uh is is an eager user as well he's he's given us given some props to eager I am not I don't own eager I just use it I I may be their biggest Customer because I have so many clients using it I don't know but uh sounds like they need some Pat makes lose some friends and make some enemies here but I I find that um you know the better equipment you really really or the the best equipment you really really need to know your craft to use it um and I I think we've said this before that we're we're kind of lacking uh the simpler reliable um valid that has good reliability and and and and good validity um so that that's that's the bane of our our discipline I'd say to this day well we have another question from VJ he's keeping us going here youj yeah thanks VJ he said uh I'm curious uh if people could talk about psychedelics and mental health or she well IJ is probably male but we'll see uh if you could all talk about psychedelics and mental health and how neuro feedback can interact with it I've noticed multiplicative effect in trauma and emotional processing yeah don't be shy is it a plasticity answer is that what we're what we think what what do you guys think some of you are more in the therapeutic you know clinical space than I am I'm I'm gonna put my my qualification here that I I am very much um on not whoops not just on the fence I'm I'm I'm not into this stuff um I've seen uh a lot of people just report it's changed their world and I've also seen you know the Other Extreme that people go into psychosis um episodic of psychosis and never recover so it's so much in their infancy and these are our brains I don't agree with playing with them we don't know enough now that's my qualifier now one of the things I wish Jay gunman were here um because he you know he can share and show some data but what I think is happening with a lot of these things is we get a scrambling effect um and for some people with very very um severe depression severe anxiety Etc you give the brain good scramble and it resettles back somewhere better but I think with other people you give the brain a good scramble and it resettle somewhere worse and I don't know what the percentages are but of course we're hearing a lot more about the ones that are the positive res scramble and I don't know whether that's a marketing effect or um or it really is helping a lot of people but you know you many of these things as well if you just go on a good high with a really nice person holding your hand especially you know there's certain classes of the psychedelics that that just help with a lot of positive emotionality and if you're having a lot of difficulty accessing the positive and you have a support of individual helping you access it I'm I mean I get why some people are into it um but I'm I'm a middle-age conservative I was going to say an old conservative I'm not there yet I've just I've just seen too much damage I've just seen too much damage it's also not just the really you know quote unquote party drug psychedelics that are moving now into uh therapeutic usage you can go to Reddit and look at a whole subreddit on damage caused by Lion's man because it's bringing up plasticity too high and you're getting indiscriminate plasticity resulting in what looks a lot like post SSRI effects and anhedonia and depersonalization simply by bringing up plasticity super high so indiscriminate plasticity isn't really something you need and generally we don't need more if you do meditate do your feedback do an ice bath etc those are more controllable I do think VJ there is some rule for role for psychedelics in psychedelic assisted Psychotherapy for trauma I think that's a very interesting place here in La there's a lot of that going on with psychotherapists using MDMA or using psilocybin for guided Psychotherapy and I've had lots of people over the years map their brain before and after they're burning man or they're this or they're that and you don't see a lot of after effects if somebody escapes damage from a drug of abuse or a drug of party later on you don't see any effect oh I use heroin 20 years ago a lot I Andrew I've seen I've seen massive massive diffuse Alpha sitting around can see sometimes I can see and and when someone goes through psychedelic assisted Psychotherapy I sometimes see them go through massive healing trajectories in a weekend as if they've done rebuilding of their brain over years and years it's rare and most of the time when someone looks for those effects don't see it in the EEG and they're like convinced like well how you feel doesn't really impact the EEG at this level I know but I've had a life transforming experience everything is glowing and like looks like you're a little more awake you know guys maybe Jay it is bad that Jay's not here because he likes to talk about I've heard from him several times that if you have beta spindles present in the EG or subclinical epileptic discharges you're more likely to have a bad trip and you are more likely to have uh adverse negative long-term events yeah I do see to back up Mario I have met individuals who told me my brain has never been the same since I touched LSD that is one that I hear that often about I think Jay has even said the arousal level matters more with LSD I think I've heard him say and um the other thing I want to say is there was just a big um trial that came out I'll post it in the chat it's from Medscape it said that these anti-depressants I'm sorry the psychedelics uh have about like a 54% response rate I just shared it what they said is that's better than anti depressants but it's not that much better Martin arens when he prevented at cisson last year um at Jay's conference he even showed even when you use a biomarker an EG biomarker to match it we don't know all of them yet but when he used one basically he said all these treatments like TMS anti-depressants psychedelics ketamine they all cluster around 50% even when he used his biomarker he said it's kind of interesting I don't know why that is anyway just that was the research I I wanted to get out there yeah the other thing is the stick Factor um Ju Just in terms of how long people supposedly feel better it doesn't it doesn't have a big stick Factor really I've heard the opposite I've heard that when they test people say up to six months even one or two years that they're still reporting now there's a range but I've heard six months fairly consistently Mari okay our frame our frame Anthony is decades well yeah I I'm not the go out and use that I just yeah that's our go our our goal here is decades long sticking factors yeah you're right yeah yeah yeah no I've heard around three months and then it's gone yeah okay okay sorry about that oh here's a here's a great question Dr Marie will like will things like neuro feedback completely get rid of ADHD or does it just help you deal with it better well sure both yeah depends the panel is in unison oh no maybe sure yeah you know it you know we don't want to change personality right we want to help you know people to pay better attention to be able to do what they want to do um but there's certain components of quote unquote ADHD that can you know this this curiosity this Innovation is fabulous you don't want to change that what you want to do is change the ility to follow through on that Curiosity and Innovation right hey football edit here's a little secret just between us I put an early link to tomorrow's show where Jay gunman do an hour screen share on ADHD don't tell anyone it's just for you okay perfect all right VJ more a little more discreet though you can reliably get a couple of standard deviations of improvement in impulsivity and in attention reliably people most of the time in core features that are not the diagnosis of ADHD but are some of the core resources that do get stuck it is reliable across people it does usually change it does usually stay changed it can just take a few months to get there but to credit what Dr Mari said the psychosocial aspects of ADHD are more subtle than that and you may still have this procrastination and rejection sensitivity and some other aspects that are not quite as straightforward as gross resources of executive function but you can change the executive function if you need to what I like to share with my clients is generally speaking we get around a 50% change um and for most people 50% is more than enough to uh achieve everything you need to or want to achieve scholastically so that you can go on ticket EV boo you know the other thing about that is well you don't want to be in therapy for years and years and years and years especially if you're a child because you're really going to start to believe something is wrong with you my favorite ADHD client is a client that you see for a certain short period of time and when you meet the family coincidentally or what not 10 years later the client the child has no idea who the heck you are and that they ever had a problem that is my ideal ADHD client Absolutely I'll go one step further the client that never even knew they were ADHD and came in because they were distracted and you never had to diagnose them and you just taught them how their brain worked and help them move it and they felt empowered because they just got more control over their brain by looking at it that's one step even Beyond yeah the the brief intervention I would say just to just to give a little little oh we I think we well let's get into our beautiful stories I mean I I've worked with children that have come in for adht or learning deficits and you see these like oh my gosh talk about frontal lobe deregulation um you know and you know what that's going to start to look like in adolescence if it hasn't if that liability hasn't expressed itself but to be able to go in and correct that uh before it expresses itself wow is there a power there because we know what they they avoided um nobody else does but we know that's powerful talking on bio era or bioexplorer when are you guys going to do on how you should use with well Kym H probably not but we will hook you up with somebody will know something about it unless you want to do a screen share on how to use the product is that what kym's asking for Anthony yeah I think so they want to how to but that's up to you the thing is learning how to use the software doesn't teach you to do neuro feedback right I can teach you to set up a a protocol in BIO bio Explorer or eager or brain master or you know J&J go back a little bit anything you want why is all those interfaces look like they're built by Engineers they are they were yeah I mean all the ner is Cutting Edge CC 19 you know 85 basically at this point um yay Excel yay Excel it really does look like like Google wrote it wrote the code and it's just engineer well we have no pressure on the on the on the uh Marketplace to build bu something better it's a niche yeah it's expensive you don't you don't buy lots of copies I mean I buy hundreds of copies of eager a year and that's weird like I'm I'm a weird outlier in the field most you know so there's no real pressure how many copies does Howard lightstone or Lars sell of eager a year total how what's the install base a few thousand what's the install base that Tom Kera has for brain Master a few thousand how many copies of neuro optimal out there you know like there's just not a lot of pressure in the marketplace to create uh better software and so if you can charge three or four or5 th000 for a single license and people buy it h there's no real pressure so I I think that's what's happening it's much easier to make hardware and software now than it was um a few years ago and and the hardware side is caught up where you can get an amp now for a few hundred bucks that's as good as an amp was for a few thousand you know 20 years ago the software is the same software 20 as it is as it was 20 years ago there's almost no movement and there's no Market pressure we need someone who has yeah Vision or yeah who's that hungry to take the marketplace Over You Got Me Now Andrew you got me thinking here now ai evidently can write code I don't know squat about writing code and I understand somebody some coder says oh AI will write a hell of a piece of code for you it can yeah I'm wondering if that's a PO ask well that's believe me I'm not the guy I'm not the guy one things where you have to know how to build the thing to build it without writing code you have to know how to write the code to build it anyways yeah yeah and data you know D garbage in garbage out that's my issue with AI as well like what is AI building the code upon as well right we've got to be really cautious about that yeah well I'm gonna get on my soapbox again just in terms of you know a lot of the programs that are coming up you know the software it looks really good it looks really really really really really pretty and really really really flashy but I'll take any day Kym I'm just blowing you little crap don't worry about it you should see my grammar all right i' wor I've worked with Dr Hill on this but have any of the other people been able to talk about meditation and their feedback and how they can amplify each other yeah that's some VJ fj's busy today well any of us could take it I mean the answer is yes yes and yes I noticed vj's really into amplification like it's it's not enough to do one therapy he wants to you know multiply but go on guys he has your number VJ Anthony has your number well right at the beginnings you you know one of the key things that this was used for is to figure out how can we get you know normal people to get their brains in the states that yogis took 30 years to get you know we could we could have a person get there in 30 days so you bet you know when you can literally be on a feedback loop uh to see where your brain is going you can really potentiate meditative States hugely so now this is another one where people might disagree I also clearly can identify individuals where meditation would be torture and I tell them don't do it you you're not wired this way um you know there I say there per certain individuals who need quiet to quiet and then there are other individuals who need a rousel to quiet um and many of us busy brain people you know sitting in a room um okay I'm exaggerating a bit that that that's that's an element of torture right so so know who you are um and know if a state of quiet is really really helping uh to calm the autonomic nervous system etc etc or if it's actually that level of quiet is contributing uh to uh your arousal had to put some spice in there no very spicy Anthony you got that one well I heard oh this is a new one um just real quick I heard Nikki uh wit rdge again say uh at aapb one time he said uh he thinks that maybe people who are high performers they get into a meditative State and they that it raises their High beta they perfectionist that's what it was and so he's wondering if the pressure to they treat treat meditation like it's a a task and you've told them to perform it so they have to do it perfectly so just I'm wondering if those are the people who get over roused to speak speak to um Stan's question here uh what do you think nikk can't sleep what yeah exact what do you think about doing low-level laser therapy before or after a neuro feedback session I'm not biting this one any of you do you mean actual lasers or we talking infra infrared LEDs lowle lasers be a little bit unpredictable that's the problem it's like you're you're doing a lot and you know lens makes a low L laser device now uh as a secondary stimulation device for doing laser light and I've you can do some weird things with uh laser light I don't know I think it's stand it's probably a little bit unpredictable both John and I maybe others here will use photob modulation red light therapy um and I do that before I use it kind of like I use what's the difference between the two well photobiomodulation is streaming red light into the brain in this case and it's depending on the device it runs between you know 1100 up to about uh 1,800 nanometers and most of them are 1170 1180 so red light and the theory is and I think there's some good science here is that the red light in that frequency range interacts with the cytochrome receptor or something in the elect in the mitochondria and causes the electron transport chain to spin faster so essentially you Goose the production of ATP by giving red light to the tissue and several of the devices out there go a lot further than just that basic stimulation of red light and we'll do uh entrainment driven stuff or quadrant driven stuff John and I are both playing with those devices clinically uh supporting people and I'm I'm getting really interesting strong potentiated effects uh when people combine those two um combine PBM and N feedback very similar to how you you can accelerate effects when you combine Nur feedback with Hyperbaric medicine or with HG or with some other technology so I'm still yeah Andrew just directly to that point I still struggle with it's a couple of times a week putting the helmet on somebody's head really that effective I think you know I've asked the people who make the machine they go oh hell yeah and I'm like part of me like well for you and I maybe because we're priming the system and then training the system so we might be able to get somewhere but no it's a short answer I mean it's kind of like neura feedback where it really should probably be three times a week and and right my clients I'm combining it with at this point I'm having all the clients who want to do photoi modulation just purchase their own device because yeah they usually have to have a big enough reason for it either Peak Performance or suffering where they're going to need it for a long time right right and I'm having them use it four or five days a week I have some clients using it twice a day right um but I have other clients that I have to ease in they get overtrained by it you know mix it with feedback exhausts them so there's still a pretty wide range of responses even with a light neuronic thanks danan it's exact what we're talking about yeah he a little bit on overtraining uh as well like that's one of the overt I would say dangers of a lot of you know home home protocols um for sure you know whether you know vitamins home vitamins you know how many do you take before you can actually poison yourself with the vitamins yeah if a th000 milligrams is good 3000's got to be better yeah well I had a client who was taking n Ste cysteine she like oh my God this stuff's amazing thank you for pointing out my brain map that I had this anterior singulate an NAC is amazing and she started taking more and more of it because it was so awesome and she was one of those rare people with a sulur metabolism issue and after about two weeks was like nauseated and feeling really activated W and NAC is like the most innocuous substance out there used for cognition but every so often yeah right things don't mix and so more is not always better yeah yeah just to I mean to get back to stand yeah more can be not good so yeah you gota we EAS into this and I'm sure Andrew you do the same thing you you start slow do a couple of minutes of just glow you know just the basic non- pulsated see how the client feels about it you ask them afterwards you ask them the next day next session and just sort of ease into perhaps you know frequency based pulsations it's a tough one this is going to be a free-for-all here oh whoever's got the best sales person learn how to read the brain Maps that's all start that yeah you can you can use any tool you can do any flavor n feedback you can do any you can you can adapt your style to be skillful under any circumstances if you understand the brain adequately and you will be forever locked into recipe books and silly pieces of software if you don't who do I my $1,500 to get a mentor [Music] got a mentor do itcb or the school neur therapy go get a PhD got a lot of raw EG look at a lot of raw signals that's the key once you learn the raw EG Then I then I support the Liberty to I I was gon to say play with anything but I think everybody here knows me I'm not saying play but you can you can really use any piece of equipment once you know what you're doing right right so that's what I'm saying get a get a good Mentor who will teach you to know what you're doing and then the world's your oyer how do you get a good Mentor though you go to Google and there's sponsored ads all over the place you don't know what the hell you're doing it's who do I give my $1,500 to and who do I pay $200 an hour to Mentor me how do I find is towards bcia mentors you know there there's a base level of um of knowledge testing there um and I would also see you know what names are popping up uh that that don't use box program what names are popping up who say you don't who don't say you don't need to know what you're doing to do this um you know bad time when someone says you don't have to understand the brain to the training yeah so that that's a little bit of a red flag perhaps yeah yeah no I think the you know the same uh names circulate in terms of um master trainers or master practitioners um and all of us have slightly different methods and slightly different uh pieces of equipment and our favorites we all have favorites I mean I I I share very openly I'm I'm an amplitude and um um yeah primarily an amplitude trainer you and frequency trainer yeah uh it's he says uh is there any relation between beta hyp hyper coherence rather and intelligence seems like every High performer in Tech has some symptoms of [Laughter] aspir absolutely there is a relationship between sped up Alpha and beta hyper coherence yeah and fast Alpha is one of the biggest drivers of IQ so it's there but it's not causitive you can you can have fast Alpha without having beta hyper coherence you can have beta hyper coherence without having fast Alpha but they are correlated there's a way to get from one to the other yeah we have to be really really cautious I'm I'm going to go to the other end you know it's like every uh addict is walking around uh with a whole lot of beta in the occipital region okay but majority of elite athletes also are because it could be turned into drive so you know when you're 13 years old what is around you you know what hook does that beta catch if that hook catches heroin versus if that hook catches soccer right or swimming or or something the other thing is most of um uh I would say high performers have you know really really high high beta beta ratios okay um and if you don't have an objective um you're you're just extreme OCD but if you do have a project and an objective you know you write programs and books and whatnot in four or six months so you know I I kind of talk about you be careful what you wish for you know if we talk about like the same um brain wave pattern we can see an extreme productivity as well as an extreme anxiety so uh it's a it's a really this is why I'm True Believer yeah we follow our normative databases and our clinical databases but you also have to look at what the person is doing and if that brain works with their lifestyle if that works with their family Dynamic etc etc and be really really cautious about what you train up and what you train down for for what objective or what purpose I mean it's not just a science it's an art in that regard where we're at time every one I'm I'm sure you guys are pounding the table and are very unhappy uh John mecr Anthony Ramos Dr Marie swingle and Dr Andrew Hill all your contact information will be in the details uh okay VJ okay hold on VJ says just want to give a moment of thanks suffer a lot of my life cptsd autism psychosis nerve feedback and save my life bless you all for contributing to this field BJ thank you my friend we're trying to get the word out who knows what Google's algorithm's GNA trip over maybe this say two is concussion hey look at what they're talking about that's right hopefully it's it VJ was on my God I gotta watch that video vj's on it thank you thank you for your contributions and then the panelists you know we do the show tomorrow if anybody's interested Jay will be around tomorrow Dr Marie I I I hopefully you'll be around we we're using that show to do a continuation of this show so if there are any questions that pop up we'll address more of them there every everybody have a great night thank you so much peace be with y'all thanks Pete bye bye thanks for tuning into this special edition of neuron noodle Q&A live we hope you found the session formative and insightful remember if you'd like to join us for the next live Q&A we go live every Wednesday at 600 p.m. central Time on the neuron noodle YouTube channel it's your chance to ask your questions directly and shape the conversation if you enjoyed this episode don't forget to subscribe rate and review the neuron noodle podcast on your favorite platform to stay updated on all things neuro feedback and brain health and one last reminder the content provided in this Q&A for informational entertainment purposes only always consult with your primary care physici or qualified Healthcare provider before making any decisions related to your health thanks again for listening and watching we'll catch you in the next episode