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Neurofeedback Training with UCLA Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Hill

Book your free strategy call with me here: https://letsmeet.io/adelitamontero/free-strategy-call Follow me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/adelitalive Find me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adelitalive/ Visit me on the Web: https://adelitamonterolive.com/contact THANKS FOR WATCHING. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE. ABOUT ADELITA MONTERO Adelita is a 4x jiu-jitsu world champion, clinical mental health counselor, certified clinical hypnotherapist, and neurofeedback technician. Adelita works with high-performing entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and athletes who struggle with unresourceful emotional and mental states causing them to fall short of reaching their goals. Adelita guides individuals and teams in developing a warrior-champion mindset for maximizing results and creating more freedom & success. As a world-class athlete, Adelita teaches the proven techniques & tools used in developing her own winning strategies for success on the mats and in life. SHOUT OUT to @Bioptimizers's line of NOOTROPICS for cognitive and performance enhancement supplementation: NOOTOPIA NOOTOPIA -- https://nootopia.com/sp Discount Code: ADELITALIVE123 BIOPTIMIZERs -- https://bit.ly/31OvjEj. Discount Code: ADELITALIVE123 ABOUT Dr. HILL ANDREW HILL, PHD Founding Director and Lead Neurotherapist Dr. Hill is one of the top peak performance coaches in the country. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA’s Department of Psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognition. Research methodology includes EEG, QEEG, and ERP. He has been practicing neurofeedback since 2003. In addition to founding Peak Brain Institute, Dr. Hill is the host of the Head First Podcast with Dr. Hill and lectures at UCLA, teaching courses in psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology. https://peakbraininstitute.com PEAK BRAIN Book your qEEG with my code: ADELITA to receive a $250 off discount. DISCLAIMER: Any information or advice I give is purely based on my own experience and research. This content is meant for educational purposes. If you have a severe medical or psychological condition, consult a qualified professional in your area. #neuroscience #neurofeedback #biohacking #biofeedback #hypnosis #clinicalpsychology #jiujitsu #psychology #biofeedback #psychophysiology #martialarts #anxiety #stress #mapofconsciousness #emotions #depression #fear #mindset #championmindset #loseweight #achievegoals #goalsetting #smartgoals #mindsetcoach #entrepreneur #lifecoach #loseweight #fatloss #musclegain #mentaltraining #champion #healing #gratitute #love #joy

Episode Summary

I sat down with Adelita Montero on the Adelita Montero, MA, AMFT, BCN-P Psychology Podcast to walk through what neurofeedback actually is, what a brain map shows, and what changed in her own data after twenty sessions of training. You can watch the original conversation. Here is the substance of what I shared, in my own words.

What is neurofeedback, and how did I get into it?

I have a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA's Department of Psychology, and I have been working with brains for about thirty years. Before grad school I worked across health and human services with inpatient developmental disability, drug addiction, aging, and child crisis work. I came to neuroscience to answer a specific question: how does neurofeedback actually work? When I started in 2005, the field had several schools of thought, all of them with good results, none of them reconcilable. Something was missing.

For my dissertation I ran one of the first placebo-controlled, double-blind studies of neurofeedback, looking at how the brain binds to feedback information in real time. The question was whether you could establish a genuine learning loop between a brain and a computer, and whether that loop moves the brain. That methodology, around 2009 and 2010, was the first time you could do double-blind placebo-controlled work in EEG. That matters for how we read the research, which I will come back to.

After UCLA I moved out of the academic route and into coaching and entrepreneurship. I helped start a nootropic company, then opened a brain and addiction center in Beverly Hills, and the brain side grew into Peak Brain Institute, where I have read brain maps for about 14 years, with locations in Culver City, Orange County, New York City, St. Louis, and overseas partners. We also work with remote clients all over the world.

Is neurofeedback closer to medicine or to personal training?

I call what I do functional neuroscience, and the right comparison is personal training, not medicine and not psychology. It borrows tools from all three, but the work is iterative, goal-focused, and measured, and you do it to yourself with guidance. My role is coach and scientist, not clinician. I am not running transference the way a psychotherapist does, and I am not the expert with the one right answer the way your physician needs to be. I want to demystify the brain so you can understand yourself, decide on a target, push the brain around, transform it, and measure again.

Training the brain works a lot like rehabbing a shoulder or drilling a new technique until it becomes second nature. It is iterative and progressive, and your resources change. It is not a voluntary process the way a bicep curl is, but the loop is the same: target a metric, make an intervention, measure, iterate. We also coach a lot of bottom-up work, hacking the body to support the brain, including the sleep cycle, macronutrient and food timing, ketones, and the broader biohacking toolkit.

What does a QEEG brain map actually show?

We start with QEEG brain mapping, a quantitative EEG. You wear a cap, we fill it with gel, it is painless if a little annoying, and you come in uncaffeinated for a clean baseline. After that you can map caffeinated, on Adderall, on cannabis, on pre-workout, whatever you want, and you see how each one moves your brain. It is like having a good lipid panel and watching your triglycerides change with your Ben and Jerry's habit. You get control because you can go after a metric and measure it.

A map is not diagnostically precise. I cannot say "this circle means that disease." I can say you are different from average in a specific way, then build a plausible reason for it, tell you what is often true for that pattern in the research, and check it against what you actually experience. Slow brainwaves, the deltas and thetas, show up in orange on the left columns of the display. Slow waves are where deep sleep, metabolism, and life maintenance live. The fast beta waves are the mind. Green circles mean typical. Red lines mean overconnection, where regions are locked together and not letting go.

To frame the hypotheses I cheat a little and add a continuous performance test. The computer presents ones and twos, and your job is to click for the one and resist the two. The left side scores attention, how well you activate and grab a target. The right side scores response control, how well you pump the brakes and resist clicking. That separates a real attention pattern from sleep, anxiety, or a concussion masquerading as one.

How do we read a real set of results?

Adelita let me show her data live, so here is the reasoning.

Her baseline showed a lot of delta and some theta behind both ears, especially the right, sitting about two and a half standard deviations above typical, with red lines showing the delta was overconnected and stuck. On the performance test, her overall auditory score was 72 percent, roughly two standard deviations off the mean. Her visual system sat in the 90s. That contrast matters. A spacey, global attention problem would drag both systems down. This was specific to the auditory channel.

Drilling further, her auditory speed was 98 and her focus was 92, both fine. Her vigilance, the ability to grab something when it changes gears, was 48, three to four standard deviations off the mean. That is the kind of pattern where you are a beat late with auditory input, you say "sorry, what was that" to your partner, and a boring lecture at the end of a tired day is brutal. It would not touch her on the mat, where she uses visual, proprioceptive, and deeply learned premotor skills, but it shows up in daily listening.

Behind the right ear I also saw hot beta at the temporoparietal junction. That region is a junction box for bringing sensory information in. When beta runs high there, filtering breaks down, and a siren six blocks away or a dog two houses over gets in when nobody else is bothered. I call that the princess and the pea marker. So she had two opposite auditory problems at once: sluggish automatic grabbing, and poor filtering. Brain fog, tinnitus, and balance issues all sit near that same territory, so those are the questions I ask to confirm the hypothesis.

The hot, hyper-coherent beta across the rest of the head is a different story. When everything is connected to everything at once and the beta will not let go, the common experience is generalized stress with poor sleep maintenance. You wake easily, you do not fall back asleep, and you run a little on edge. Psychologists would call that generalized anxiety with a sleep disturbance. I see it constantly in fast, capable brains. When you run that fast you tend to get brilliance and anxiety at the same time, and your comfort tracks how much control you keep over it.

What changed after twenty sessions of training?

We mapped Adelita again at about twenty sessions. Behind the right ear, where she had been making enormous amounts of delta, only a shadow remained. She moved roughly two standard deviations in the delta and about two to two and a half in the theta, and the red overconnection lines dropped away. On the performance test, her overall auditory score went from 72 to 99, about two standard deviations of improvement in six to eight weeks. The vigilance score, the acute bottleneck, went from 48 to 108, which is half a standard deviation above average. That is roughly four standard deviations of change in the worst feature.

What she noticed matched the data. She reported being more present with her partner and more emotionally regulated. The improved emotional regulation is the beta change. Her foot came off the gas pedal of her emotions. The improved listening is the auditory change. The point of the second map is to close the loop between the data, the mechanism, and the lived experience.

The delta behind the ear was probably an old, mild injury given her sport, though I never assume that, because fog all looks the same on a map. A concussion, COVID, chemotherapy, mold, Lyme, apnea, and chronic stress with PTSD wrecking sleep can all read as the same foggy delta. The cause does not change how I train it, and your brain has no sensory nerve endings, so you never feel the wear and tear directly. You can only see it on the map.

How does the training itself work?

We tie a game to your brainwaves. If the target is to bring down theta and bring up beta on the right, we place a wire there, measure those bands, and whenever your brain moves in the right direction for about half a second, the game advances. The mechanism is operant conditioning: the software rewards what is already happening so it happens more often. You sit and watch something like a video game without a controller, and your brain gradually recalibrates toward the rewarded state.

The change tends to feel like something. Some sessions leave you wired with too much energy, some leave you too calm, some make it hard to stay awake. When Adelita could not keep her eyes open during beta training, that was a frequency too high for what she was used to, the equivalent of putting too much weight on the bar. We back off the beta frequency a notch and within minutes it feels better. Push through and you often wake up with fresh energy a couple of hours later, like a hard workout that leaves you loose and chatty afterward. The coaches track your subjective sleep, stress, and attention every twenty-four hours and tune the next set of workouts. You can read more about that specific frequency in SMR neurofeedback and the role of alpha waves.

Who is neurofeedback for?

We tend to see three groups. The first is classic neurofeedback work: autism, ADHD, seizures, migraines, concussions, childhood development, brain injury, and alcohol cravings. These are high-impact targets. The second group is people whose ordinary stress, sleep problems, or old trauma history has gotten badly in the way, and who want to optimize the whole person. The third group is peak performers: musicians, athletes, actors, creatives, and high-level CEOs trying to squeeze out more or shift from linear into creative mode so they stop being a jerk to their partner when they get home.

Neurofeedback grew out of work at UCLA in the late 1960s, where Barry Sterman trained sensorimotor rhythm in cats and later found it raised seizure thresholds (Sterman & Friar, 1972), and cats are terrible instruction followers. That is the point. It is an involuntary exercise that works whether or not you want it to, which is why it has been applied to people in comas, nonverbal patients, and reluctant teenagers.

There is a related lesson here about labels. People come in with an ADHD diagnosis, and when I look at the brain and the performance, I often see a large sleep problem, an anxiety pattern, or a concussion instead. You can drop below the label and look at the physiology directly. When someone sees a small injury on one side, or sees the front midline marker for obsession and the back midline marker for threat sensitivity, their relationship with their own brain often shifts in the room. It stops being a character flaw and becomes a natural resource that is cramped, like a muscle that spasmed. That moves people from shame toward function.

What does the research actually say?

The literature has tons of papers, and most of them have problems. There is no real uniformity in equipment or protocols, so comparing studies is apples and oranges. The deeper issue is that neurofeedback works best individualized to each person and adjusted as you go, and that is the opposite of how a clean group study is usually run, where you do one fixed thing to everyone. Add to that the fact that placebo-controlled, double-blind EEG methodology only became possible around 2009 and 2010, and you have a young evidence base for a fifty-year-old field. In ADHD specifically, when standardized protocols are followed, controlled trials report medium-to-large effects on inattention that hold up at follow-up (Arns et al., 2009; Arns et al., 2014). For decades, insurance incentives kept neurofeedback in a fringe space.

The picture is changing. When I started grad school, saying "neurofeedback" too often made serious scientists' eyes roll, the way "consciousness" did in the 1960s. By the end of my program, senior researchers wanted to collaborate. If you want a fuller treatment, see is neurofeedback legitimate and what the research shows for anxiety.

How to get started

If you have goals around sleep, attention, executive function, mood, or stress, the first step is a brain map. You see your own data, there is no guesswork about whether something is landing, and you can use the map to test your nootropics, your sleep depth, and your other interventions over a few months as your brain picks up the changes. Book a free call through Peak Brain Institute, or visit one of the offices in Los Angeles, Orange County, St. Louis, or New York. Listeners who came through Adelita's podcast can join the club at half price, which gives you unlimited baseline brain map recordings within reason plus consults to dig into your data. From there, most people get equipment and train with our coaches.

Get the map first. The map turns a vague sense that something is off into a specific, measurable target you can train.

References

  1. Sterman (1972). Suppression of seizures in an epileptic following sensorimotor EEG feedback training. doi:10.1016/0013-4694(72)90028-4
  2. Arns (2014). Neurofeedback in ADHD and insomnia: Vigilance stabilization through sleep spindles and circadian networks. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.10.006
Full Transcript
dr hill thanks for joining oh it's my pleasure adelita how are you today i'm great so today i'm here with dr hill he is one of the top peak performance in coaches world and he holds a phd in cognitive neuroscience from ucla department of psychology so he's a neuroscientist trained by ucla a neuroscience department and he continues to do research in cognition through neurofeedback training eeg qeg and is also the owner of peak brain institute founder owner he has several uh locations around the country and he also works with remote clients so thanks for coming oh it's nice to be here thanks for having me yes it's such a pleasure to have you because in the field of neuroscience i think to me like you were the very top of the food chain and you've been doing this for how long the i mean certainly in the human focus like applied neuroscience world i'm a little unusual but i've been doing this uh professionally like after my phd for about 10 years a little over 10 years in terms of running companies and doing this this uh peak brain kinds of things um but i've been working the field uh with brains for a long time for more like uh uh gosh 30 years so quite a while 30 years 30 years and growing up in your family did you grow up with like academia parents were you were your parents into graduate studies and they're heavy into learning and cognition yeah they weren't academics but they were sort of intellectuals you know like uh i grew up in the northeast in maine and boston area and you know very very like about consuming information and understanding science and a very intellectual style you know encouraging intellectual pursuits my sister went on and got a master's in math my you know and and taught for a while i think i might be if i'm forgetting my parents can be annoyed but i i might be the first person to get a phd uh in my family uh uh which is you know fun i guess yeah no that's fantastic i think that the environment that you grew up it seems like he helped to pursue academia and achieve such a high level i i did i mean i had certainly the privileges to go through academics and to you know i i grew up in the northeast and was able to come to ucla one of the best psych schools in the country um you know i shouldn't forget i do have an aunt and uncle who are both neuroscientists so they they that you know runs in the family it does run the family a little bit yeah my my dad's sister's a a neuroscientist and her husband is too up in michigan at alma college uh but uh i was i went through health and human services um working with everything from inpatient uh developmental disability to drug addiction to aging to child inpatient crisis work for several years and then i went back to grad school and got a degree studying this cognitive neuroscience stuff and and using the tools of eeg and attention assessment and things to understand how brains work a bit better and then from that i did the peak brain stuff yes it's it's a fantastic journey really i've been following i know you've been at the uh joe brogan podcast and all the bio hacking podcasts you're kind of like a well-known figure in in in the field of biohacking neuroscience and a very public person and um has helped many people thousands of people remotely all over the world so um i was just curious to see like uh what was your experience like as a student and a professor at ucla um so i was at ucla for a while first getting my phd and like many uh grad students you start teaching and i was a lecturer for over a dozen years there and i did a lot of work you know i i found some of the stuff that i ended up teaching just because there was courses available or because it was somewhat interesting to me became areas that i either really enjoyed sort of dabbling in or became things i did a lot of so i for instance i'd had some experience working with inpatient uh geriatrics and geriatric psych and stuff and i'd seen a lot of alzheimer's and dimension stuff you know professionally before grad school but i ended up teaching for several years a course on aging and we it was ucla has a really interesting program for their freshmen they keep them in a cluster for several classes across a topic and they have several like liberal arts style things you can do where you stick with the same 100 200 kids the whole year and we have an aging cluster ucla that i taught it for years as a had a fellowship to teach there and i was somewhat interested in aging and and gerontology and geriatrics and things before that but after doing three courses a year for years and years and years i ended up teaching really specialized courses in aging brain and healthy brain uh performance and the courses ranged across everything from politics and sociology and psychology and development and so really it sort of made me uh before grad school i had a lot of experience with children and developmental stuff and autism and adhd and childhood type you know difficulties that are broad and then i got a really serious grounding in the uh the science of aging just by teaching and then ironically sort of as an aside um i'm feeling i'm grateful right now that i taught this course for a few years with a with a professor named paul abramson at ucla the course was titled sex and the law so i learned all about all of the constitutional cases and all of the progressions in this country for the past 100 plus years that led to sort of the the penumbra of the privacy rights expanding to things like free speech and who you can marry and privacy of sex and things like that so it's really interesting right now in the summer we're in to see sort of the supreme court doing random things that are striking at all those laws and i feel like as a neuroscientist i have an oddly direct perspective because i taught students for years through you know i was i was the i was a ta for paul abramson teaching sex and the law learned an awful lot so grad school is a rich thing it's not just about i mean the joke about a phd is that you go to grad school and you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing essentially you know you you hyper focus but i found that because i was there for a while teaching courses and getting deep that my perspective as an academic you know instructor became really broad with the gerontology and the neuroscience and i did you know modeling and research courses for teaching and lots of great skills but then i would pick up these courses and teach for a few years here and there in these other topics like sex and the law and i found that you know you don't you don't think of grad school as like an enriching it's like undergrad has like liberal arts and the other stuff but i really found i was surprised at how much i rounded out my you know academic experience broadly by going to grad school which wasn't why i went i went to like learn how neurofeedback works because no one knew how it works we still don't have a clear sense deeply of how it all works but still before i went to grad school we were sort of blind men and elephants all claiming that we knew how it worked and those ideas were not reconcilable you know all the schools of thought in the neuroscience area didn't agree with how neurofeedback could be working and yet the software packages that had those approaches all had great results so there was something missing and i went back to grad school and did um actually for my dissertation i did one of the first maybe the think was the first placebo-controlled double-blind study of neurofeedback looking at how the brain's binding to the information of neurofeedback in real time like how the actual loop is established between your brain and the computers the brain can be moved by the exercise because that wasn't understood before that and uh so i combined things no one had done a placebo-controlled experiment before and no one had done the actual establish the learning loop so to speak so i had some fun in grad school putting some stakes in the ground with science and then as i was finishing up decided to not pursue the academic you know ivory tower route and moved into clinical practice and opening companies entrepreneurial stuff biohacking and other biohackers who are listening will know the first biohacking company i helped start which is called trubrain which is a nootropic company here in santa monica and then at the same time i was launching a center in beverly hills which was mixed brain and addiction and the brain side kind of outgrew the just addiction side after the first couple of years and then we split off into peak brain in culprit city and that first branded peak brain was coming up on seven years ago or something now and we have other peak brains peak brain of course is brain mapping and neurofeedback and we have them in orange county uh new york city st louis missouri and some overseas partners i think you may have mentioned on the intro we also work a lot with remote clients and so i went from an academic teaching courses about these things into a essentially a coach because even though i am sort of like dr hill i'm really in this role of coach and and scientist for people not really you know uh interventionist the way a doctor is my goal is not to create sort of this container and then do transference way a psychologist does and sort of work through things nor is my goal to be your expert and have the right answer for you like your serious medical doctor might you need the answer you see the doctor i want to un unmix and demystify and explore the brain with people so they can understand themselves better decide to transform go after strategies transform and then use more neuroscience tools to further demystify so the neuroscience side and you and i have experienced some of that together you get into your brain you dig into it you learn some things you go after some transformation push the brain around and transform it's very similar to picking up a skill you know maybe after you have an injury for a match or something you have to do some rehab on a shoulder or you learn a new hole and you have to practice it a bunch before it becomes second nature as a strategy you can use in real time so to speak you know so neurofeedback training the brain is really similar to training the body even though it's not really a voluntary process it is sort of iterative and progressive and resources change so i moved into what i call functional neuroscience where i'm teaching people to take control of their neuro and we started at the top obviously but we tend to do a lot of coaching around bottom-up stuff or teaching people to work on the neuroscience of the body to control the brain which includes things like hacking the sleep cycle activity um playing with uh macronutrient or food timing working with ketones doing all that other sort of broad biohacking i do all of that hacking the body to support the best performance in the brain or to address difficulties perhaps so so for the for for people that are you know just listening this about this for the first time like what is neurofeedback and what is the process if i were to engage with you and say hey i want to understand this i want to understand my brain i want to i want to perform better for for work for life and for for my physicality so yeah sure um so so we do what's called brain mapping or quantitative eegs and we also do neurofeedback or pushing their brain around and exercising it and the peak brains all operate like a club where if you're near one of them you can pay a small fee and your listeners get a half-price club membership and then you have access to mapping your brain throughout the year without charge and the science team will do a couple consults teaching you to dig through your data and read it so that's the club membership level we have mindfulness groups and other sort of healthy habit pro health stuff we do but then a lot of our clients will do neurofeedback and train the brain three times a week and you can do that in one of our offices or from home if you're working from home we send you equipment and the coaches work with you to teach you to stick a cap on your head for the qeg and just a couple wires in your head for the training sessions and then we give all of our clients live support in real time seven days a week as they're setting up so they can set up at home and ask for some help placing a wire or something on their head but generally people come in first and do a brain map or a quantitative eg which again is a cap on the head you squirt it full of gel um it's painless but a little annoying especially because you have to come in uncaffeinated generally to get a clean map although i do lots and lots of maps that are first baseline clean maps and then maps that are caffeinated adderall cannabis pre-workout whatever you see huge interesting things the person really whose brain it is really finds that super useful generally to understand oh wait my adderall wakes me up but i'm more anxious or i'm less accurate or whatever or my caffeine has these mixed effects on my stress and sleep so you can sort of navigate your brain with more information i mean it's kind of like having a good sense of your lipid panel and then you can watch your triglycerides change your ben and jerry's habit and have the triglycerides drop and go nice yeah and you get control over it you aren't going uh cholesterol you're going hmm triglycerides and you learn to like go after a metric make an intervention and then measure it and iterate so it's very so that's why i call it functional neuroscience it's very similar to functional fitness where you're like hey i have a skill or a limit or a thing and you work on the complex skill you work on the on the functional movement thing until you rebuild it and it's not about the things that the system you're working on in general so it reminds me of like functional med functional doctor functional medicine is it kind of related because i tend to kind of go that route i think so a little bit because functional medicine docs are generally looking for shapes of data trying to figure out a thing that might be related without knowing necessarily the discrete piece of it and that's a lot of neurosciences here's a feature of your data it may be relevant let's see is sort of our approach so i really consider neurofeedback and the sort of functional neuroscience stuff closer to personal training than to medicine or psychology uses tools from neuroscience tools from psychology tools for medicine sometimes but the practice of it this iterative client focused goal focused measurement focused thing is closer to physical therapy or personal training or occupational therapy or something it's not really a medicine versus a not done to you it's something you're doing to yourself with guidance and skill yeah so so folks come in and get a brain map and then i work with them a few days later on zoom usually and dig into their data and teach them about how to read maps whoa whoa wait a minute so you you mean to tell me that if i come to your clinic and do a brain map i can have like a 101 consultation with you and you go over the details right i actually done like that yeah you of course interned with us and worked with us and learned how to do it so you you got me directly but everyone gets me initially at least once uh they get me helping them understand this um we're a pretty big worldwide company but we do uh i i do make time for every client to work through brain mapping and teach them about it i think this is the most valuable piece because i mean you have to spend like i spent a lot of money in like school and like improving myself like you know two hundred thousand plus two hundred fifty thousand i i i bet you probably double that if right i don't know plus all the equipment all the experience the time that you put in it's like a million dollars worth of like sure anyone has access to a million dollar worth of knowledge uh experience um technology ucla trained neuroscientists um for like a a small fee so i think that people don't know that that's possible they don't know they can't have their own ucla training neuroscientist so i'd like to make this very clear and very available that it's very affordable and then you have um all the data in front of you and you can see the changes there's no guess work like i don't know if this works for me maybe um maybe works for other people sometimes you enroll in things and buy programs like like a gym membership or like a coaching thing and you don't know if it's gonna work but this is there's no guesswork so i'd like to see would you be up for like maybe like showing my brain sure like commenting like i did one brain map before i start working with you guys i've done like now maybe 35 sessions or more but i started with zero we did a brain map what does my brain look like yeah so we we we map the brain every 20 20 25 sessions we map the brain and we work on goals and push brain waves around using biofeedback and create change okay it's experiential change it feels like something generally and then we measure the brain again and get the data again so we have uh for you we have two sets of data could you show it sure yeah so like live we have the beginning yeah i'll pull it up we have the beginning map for you which is baseline and we have a map done at about 20 sessions of neurofeedback and we're coming up i think you've done closer like 35 or almost 40 sessions we usually got another map about now for you so we definitely should grab a second one for you at some point but let me share my screen let's see my results yeah let me see uh can we open this up for you and open this up for you in the meantime while you're doing that i'd like to say um you know i'd like to thank like my sponsor like knew tokyo like um they they have this new line of nootropics for brain for cognition have you ever heard of newtopia i have actually yeah i haven't tried their products but i've heard of the company yeah i can definitely if you want some i can leave some for you i i hooked up all your staff it's it's using it so now they're going to sell more they're going to work faster and i don't want to we can also look at what they what it does to the brain too you know clean and without it so to speak absolutely we would love to do some some kind of testing about that with you so nutokia.com no tokyobrain.com so we pulled your brain up just now and you're looking at lots of colored circles which is your brain activity and that's a little subtle and i can get into it but if folks that are looking at the video we'll see that there's lots of orange in the left-hand columns which are slow brainwaves called deltas and thetas and slow brainwave is kind of where life is the fast brainwaves the beta waves are kind of the mind and deltas and things are deep sleep and metabolism and you have you had back in the spring an awful lot of delta waves and even theta waves like a lubrication wave behind the ears on both sides especially and the right side was really quite high and often that means now i should say to folks when looking at brain maps they're not diagnostically precise we can't say aha it means this we can say aha you're different than average in this way and now let's come up with a plausible reason for it tell you what's often true and we tend to get to things people care about that way but it's not me saying here's what's true for you it's me saying hey here's a plausible oh that sounds real okay let's go after it and see if we can make it move for you now i do cheat a little bit as you know we also do a really boring attention test that's kind of you know i joke it's a lot of fun but it's really not a lot of fun the computer goes one one one and then twos or into interspersed and your only job is to flick for the one and resist the two so it's attention versus impulsivity essentially but we team one team one yeah yeah exactly click on the one so what we would do combining the brain map and the performance is sort of like using to frame ideas and hypotheses because the brain maps show what's unusual and we can get some sense but the performance is just performance so for instance here's your performance graph for the auditory system and the left side of the test here sorry the left side is called the tension and attention is how well you can activate and grab stuff when the one comes up how well you can click and the right hand side of the test is called response control and that's how well you can pump the brakes and not click but initially when i met you your attention was an 82 percent and the way this works on a bell curve is 100 the middle of the bell curve plus or minus 15 points and things start to get in the way right around 85 about one standard deviation off the average things can get in the way and overall your attention was about there you were a little bit in attentive but one of the great reasons to use this kind of test is because we can instantly see on this test it's not actually like a spacey 80d or something because the visual systems in the 90s and the auditory systems in the 70s so this is an auditory issue not an attention specific issue in some ways and we can drill down further these little three little bars here your speed was typical 98 and your focus grabbing boring stuff when it repeats was 92 also fine but vigilance grabbing stuff when it changes gears is only uh 48 so you know several standard deviations of three to four off the mean and that's in the way that's going to be you not being as alert auditorily as you want not being as quick not responding to your partner quickly or going sorry honey what what was that you know being a little bit like a beat late with auditory stuff um no issue in visual so unlikely to impact you for instance in a competition or a match because you're gonna use mostly visual and proprioceptive skills and and deeply learned pre-motor skills where you release complex motor patterns you won't have to listen for that you know it won't have any impact at all but it will mean that you you know might bore pretty easily at the end of the day listen to boring you know someone drone on or a boring lecture when you're tired will be brutal that kind of stuff and that was coming at 72 percent overall that that big bottleneck was about two standard deviations off the mean in the auditory and we saw in the brain maps that the auditory system has a lot of deltas and theta waves right behind the ears so this becomes a plausible thing to think about that the you get a lot of sluggish brain waves especially behind the right ear and you can see here on the left it's orange dark orange colors and there's a bell curve color bar hanging out in the middle of the page here and that dark orange is about two and a half standard deviations more delta than is typical on the right hand side of the head and those red lines at the bottom suggest your two to three standard deviations more stuck together you know over connected if you will in those delta waves and the experience of that here would be the hypothesis for somebody the experience of that is often brain fog and some listening difficulties and we measured the auditory stuff i know they're real so i would go oh okay this delta is probably plausible at which point i would have gone and asked you hey you experiencing some brain fog yes some other difficulties that kind of stuff and you were exactly you said yeah that sounds valid at which point i was like okay checkbox let's add that to her list of things if she wants to work on that i asked other questions i'm sure back then in the spring auditory stuff behind the ears can produce balance issues and can produce tinnitus or tinnitus that ring in the ears so those things are things i would have asked about and then i also see the beta waves are pretty hot in that same spot behind the right ear and that's the tempo parietal junction it's like a junction box for bringing things in and when the beta gets high there it's like you can't filter i call this the princess and the p marker where everything irritates you so you have a couple different flavor auditory things going on one is not being crisp and grabbing stuff automatically like if you're reading a book you won't like yeah uh-huh you'll have to like shift gears to listen and the second one is the opposite problem where it's hard to filter things out and like the random sirens from six blocks away gets in and a dog barking you know two houses away kind of why is no one else bothered by that kind of stuff like it's hard to filter so yes i would have guessed a bit of a rawness and a bit of a fog in that auditory system as a high level thing it's nice to be able to see this and to catch it while you're young because i kind of imagine that as you get older these things could get worse like it just continues to to to to get worse and worse it depends on what's causing it right i mean if you have features in your brain that are foggy and in mild injuries those can interact with aging to become worse you can also have features in your brain involving big difficulties with attention anxiety or sleep and those things are sort of day-to-day limits that will make your experience really uncomfortable and or will progress worse themselves especially if your sleep is eroded you'll dysregulate over time it won't handle things like stress illness performance very well at all so i think it's useful to understand it not because it's good or bad but because you go like okay yup makes sense to me and then you can start to demystify what's going on and go after things so we did train the sides of your head a fair amount over that first 20 sessions and what you can see is behind the right ear where you made huge amounts of delta before there's a shadow of it left you've made about two standard deviations of change in the delta in 20 sessions of neurofeedback and about two to two and a half of the theta and with that and you see the red lines have dropped away so all the all the hyper coherent or stuck delta the fog and stuff has lifted and all of this would suggest reduced brain fog deeper sleep and better auditory performance uh as a you know and maybe sensory you know filtering is better as well so all looks all this i was hypothesizing about would have been better we also see the beta waves were pretty hyper coherent before and that usually means some generalized stress and poor deep sleep it's a sister you look kind of burnt out and not sleeping well and kind of stressed and then there's a specific auditory thing and knowing you know your history and and skill set and avocation this delta behind the ear is probably an old injury for you i wouldn't normally say that because you don't know it could be lots of things maybe you're built this way but you've probably hit the mat hard once or twice or got your bell wrong once or twice i'm just guessing in all the journey you've gone through you know uh there's probably a little bit wear and tear brains experience that not a big deal but you don't feel your brain there's no sensory nerve endings in it so you never know if your brain has got little bits of scar tissue wear and tear inflammation just don't know but you can look at it on this kind of thing and you know i wouldn't know the delton the sides of the head i wouldn't know if it's from a concussion from a few years ago it could also be something like covet or chemotherapy or mold or lime they all look very similar it's like a foggy state or apnea or chronic stress and ptsd screaming with your sleep or mold exposure they all look the same they'll look like fog so it's plausible given history and given the focused nature of it that it's a mild injury but it doesn't really affect how i would go after it doesn't the cause of fog is an important lesson in keeping it going basically so basically the the the little the circles when it's green it's normal and it's typical yes when it's red as you can see that there's trauma there's injury there's like it's over active or something yeah overactive in beta is stressed and overactive in the delta is like fog so stress and fog right and then when things are more you know the lines drop away and the green heads show up you're getting more towards the average brain which means you're waking the brain up dropping that delta relaxing the mind dropping the beta and sleeping more deeply where do you see stress what does it look like this beta here is hyper coherent it's locked together okay and it means it's not letting go all the spots the brain are talking to all the other spots of the brain all at once and not letting go of that beta wave the gas pedal like busyness in my brain yeah yeah and this particular pattern everywhere connected tends to produce here would be the hypothesis for people intense bruise of general stress and poor maintenance of sleep psychologists call this generalized anxiety with sleep disorder but it's a very classic phenomenon being on edge and not letting go of the world so you're kind of a little bit easily woken up and don't fall back asleep super easily and kind of on edge kind of anxious very classic you know and it tends to blow up with that little sensory area too it's kind of a giftedness thing a little bit of anxiety a little bit of sleep crap where it's interrupted easily and you also have all of the awareness and your mind works super fast you have all the feels you know it's sort of that kind of brain it's a bit of a gifted brilliant but kind of a hot brain that you have uh i don't mean that to objectify i mean like it's it's it's running kind of hot it's a powerful but also a bit of an anxious brain that's what happens when you run really fast is you tend to have brilliance and anxiety at the same time and the degree to which you can remain in control of it is the degree to which you're comfortable you know so yes it's so fascinating because we also did a brain scan this is great for kids to see like how your children are doing oh we didn't want to look you can live that's right that's right we can see there some similar patterns i don't know if you recall but there was he was very gifted yeah all that all that fast and gifted stuff is there for both him and you so we were like ah it's both you guys now just to close the loop on your data sure um we saw the auditory system in the brain change by two two and a half standard deviations behind the errors and here you see the auditory system after 20 sessions of training is a 99 versus the 72. so you made about two standard deviations improvement in the big bottlenecks in your auditory system in the first six or eight weeks and the alertness aspect which is called vigilance grabbing new stuff was a 48 initially and now it's 108 so it's half a standard deviation above average now you've changed by four standard deviations in the most acute bottleneck probably from an old injury and my hunch is it actually something you notice you probably feel a little more present auditorily or your partner is not as frustrated because because you're not lagging responding or something i haven't asked you this but are you known to put you to put me on the spot and peek bran on the spot are you noticing any difference in how you perform auditorily yeah it's it's noticeable that um to my partner and uh that i am more present um like there's like more emotional regulation and uh ah okay that's the beta waves not so you aren't like your foot isn't on the gas pedal of your emotions anymore quite as much not as much there's a lot of improvement it's really crucial for me the auditory uh portion and um well sure i need to be able to listen like so my listening is improving and my focus is improving so sometimes people may think that you come across as like you're not you you're not paying attention or that you're maybe like aloof or something but sometimes you see that's why you shouldn't judge it's like it's not the person's personality it's like something in their brain that it's it's it's not firing correctly it's not it's not working right so absolutely some compassion some empathy for everybody and hopefully it lets you have some self compassion i mean if i show you the little injury on one side and you have some tinnitus and balance issues whatever people sometimes their relationship with their brain suddenly changes because they see the problem go oh it's my brain especially with like anxiety features the front midline for obsession the back midline for threat sensitivity when you see it you're like oh it's my brain and it's not a disease it's a natural resource it's kind of cramped like a muscle that spasmed suddenly you can stop being uh guilty and feeling ashamed you can be frustrated you don't have to be mad at yourself yeah you can go function it's functional now not my fault and it starts to become very obvious and you can also tease things apart you know people come in all the time like an adhd diagnosis and they have when you look at their brain and their performance you don't see adhd you see like a big sleep issue and anxiety fighting or you see a concussion so you can tease apart the actual physiological stuff without relying on which label someone's giving you which is kind of fun so you drop below the labels to some extent look at this stuff yeah that's wonderful i just wanted to um kind of understand who are your clients who who is your ideal client um what what what kind of people that are looking for this what kind of uh people benefit the most from from from neurofeedback sure um my marketing guys hate this but it only works on people that have brains like that that's our segment uh it's just too broad um we tend to have three types of clients one type i would call classic neurofeedback clients and those are a lot of autism adhd seizures migraines concussions uh you know childhood development stuff and brain injury stuff alcoholism's in that same category these are things uh that are very impactful neurofeedback is really impactful for seizures migraines alcohol cravings uh adhd you know all that stuff yeah and then all the flavors of anxiety and obviously there's another third is like normal stuff that's gotten really in the way and that includes you know sleep issues and chronic stress and maybe some old trauma history but it's the complete person trying to optimize it's necessarily like a specific problem and then we have a whole another third category which are peak performers we're kind of awful lot um i would say more than most practices that do not feedback we work with musicians athletes actors creatives of all stripes high level ceos who are trying to squeeze out a little more performance or shift from linear into creative mode when they get homes they can stop being a jerk to their partners and things um so we tend to have that peak performance group the neurology the the neuro focus you know kids kids are dealt with with brain needs in some way the rest of us who want to work on our stress sleep attention and regulate so it really is everyone with a brain pretty much i mean this stuff was discovered in 1967 at ucla wow on cats and cats are very bad instruction followers this is not like i love them they're wonderful but this is a involuntary exercise thing that works whether or not you want it to work and providers in the field have specialized in working with people in coma people that are non-verbal um teenagers that don't want to be in your office and it's still work so i mean you've experienced sitting down putting some wires on training for for half an hour and feeling a little different afterwards absolutely but we're trying to feel different just kind of happens and so a lot of the important part of neurofeedback is working with your coaches to say oh hey wait a minute yeah i liked yesterday's session or i don't know i was kind of kind of wired after that session kind of too much energy or wow i was way too calm i was not very present after that i was falling asleep i couldn't stay awake in the session what is that about that that particular effect of not being able to stay awake in a session when you're doing beta training which is what you were doing bay is an activation mode and you saw that you had a lot of slow brain waves and there was some blue in the right hand side of the page which is your beta waves being a bit low so we were saying to your brain hey relax or bring down the slow brain waves and bring up the fast brain waves and when we were doing that we were asking for a fast frameway frequency that was probably above what you were used to so metaphorically we just put way too much weight on the bar and you were like oh wait two reps in wait a minute this sucks it wasn't uncomfortable but it was it's a little weird when you're like whoa what the heck my eyes are closing i can't keep my eyes open in neural feedback we usually just back off a tiny bit in the beta wave frequency uh for future reference and it tends to uh within minutes you're like oh okay this feels better because it's not it's not a bad effect and if you push through that what happens is you generally wake up with like like more fresh energy in a couple hours it's kind of working out really hard at the gym you leave and you're like oh but then two hours later you're like loose and warm and kind of silly and have tons of energy a little hungry chatty i guess so chatty like i want to talk about everything i'm so happy like after this that's a sign you're pushing you're pushing your brain hard you don't need to push that hard but you can um and then we tend to watch the subjective experience of sleep stress attention and other stuff every 24 hours afterwards so the coaches can fine-tune the next set of workouts for you so we're just personal trainers to your brain but we work on a rather mysterious stuff that people don't usually work on in this way so i'm a trained coach now i'm not the wrong coach so if you guys wanna learn more about it i wanna make this known and available to everyone that i know everyone that i come across any group that i go to i just tell them about brain training about neurofeedback how this therapy is so effective there are so many studies i've read like 15 or more clinical studies that all of them speaks highly about the efficacy of neurofeedback training it's not like it works for some people it doesn't work it works for everybody at different degrees different animals yeah but what is interesting is that in the literature right now there's no real uniformity in the types of equipment and protocols so it's kind of hard to compare apples and oranges but one thing in common is they all improve yeah and the research is i mean there's tons and tons and tons of papers but they all basically have problems and there's a couple reasons for that one is um neurofeedback is best done individualized to the to each person and you change it as you go exactly so that has not been how the research is done to do one thing to group of people that are individualized generally um or you know you need very variable people to get different effects across um it's also been until i did my dissertation work i tested out the first placebo double blind controlled methodology in like you know 2009 or 10 is when i was doing that research and that was the first time you could do double-blind placebo-controlled research in eeg so that's very very recent the field's been around for a very long time you know 50 plus years and for most of that time the insurance companies have been paying doctors to go to like the adhd meetings to say didn't work and poison the well at other insurance companies there's like a whole like pushback that's kept the neural feedback in this little fringy space right and i started grad school in like 2005 where if i said the word neural feedback too much eyes would roll and serious scientists would think i was you know it's like using the word consciousness in the 60s no one thinks you're serious now you can research consciousness but in the 60s they wouldn't much into grad school if you use the word consciousness to think you were you know a joke so by the end of my grad program all these senior scientists like ooh neural feedback yeah we want to do some work with you it's cool now yeah it really is and there's a sea change somehow but on this on on the same token it's still a little bit of a mysterious uh space we like to you know we really do like to teach people not just our our coaches like you adelita but we like to help people understand what they're doing as they move through this stuff so that's wonderful so now how do people uh get started with you what kind of deals can we make it available so people are watching and saying okay that's it i get it i want to do this and i'm ready to go now so gotcha so we of course have offices in la and orange county which is where we are but then st louis and new york if you guys are near one of the offices the normal club fee is 500 bucks a year but adelina's listeners get it for half price and half of that so it's 250 and you'll get unlimited brain map recordings within reason but but definitely a couple of consults to get in there and dig into your data and that's you know basically a thing you can make use of to help you navigate your own biohacking test your nootropics test your sleep depth test your different interventions range change slowly so you don't uh see much change rapidly but as you layer interventions for a few months your brain will pick up those changes over time and that can be really important to know how things are landing and then folks will often get equipment and train their brains and our coaches run with them so i would say you know people can book a free call with us they can go to the website and grab a free call they can hit us up on social media with questions and tell us about their fun brain things but if they tell us they came in through your podcast look at the half price membership and then that has some other benefits too once your club member if you refer in you can earn some additional uh sort of free sessions of training um we have some we have uh mindfulness groups that are offered to our training groups or our our club members for free we are working i haven't told you this but we're working on all of the remote training manuals and coach training manuals and removing them to a membership system and a membership website for all of our peak brand affiliate coaches worldwide so exciting members area to log in and learn more about smr training alpha data training the spot in the head this feature of research whatever so we're creating a whole community for our coaches and affiliates and our training clients to get in there and you know do more biohacking from this functional neuroscience perspective so so if you have goals like to improve sleep improve attention executive function mood stress all those kinds of things neurofeedback has been amazing for me as you can see the data there's like tons of studies and we just have you know uh dr hill like the top of the food chain here in the industry that it's available to to work with you so i suggest that you you go get your brain scan you know and uh and then the training is fun you pretty much sit in front of a tv and you watch a video game without the remote control so how hard is that you're just kind of watching a video and then you're flying around and crashing cars and just having fun as your brain is is improving so i have the way that it works just for folks just to to pierce the mystery there a little bit the way it works is we tie some game to to your brain waves for instance you want to train down your theta and bring up your beta on the right so we stick a wire there measured your theta and beta and whenever your brain happens to move itself in the right direction for half a second the computer game starts to move so it's gentle it's passive we aren't zapping your brain but it's what's called operant conditioning we're plotting things that are already happening and they they happen more essentially so wonderful so happy to have you thank you so much and be mindful of your time i'm sure you have a lot of clients and things to do right now but uh thanks for everything we'll set up the links and everything on the description box below and um i hope to see you guys in one of the clinics definitely thank you thanks for having me oh my pleasure take care guys talk to you have a great day ciao
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