🎙️ NeuroNoodle Neurofeedback Q&A - Live with Experts! 🧠 | Jan 15 @ 6 PM CST

feed back that might you know taking somebody who has power and money and like making them less impulsive and Mak let's dissect Elon Musk what's that let's dissect Elon Musk since we started two minutes early to give everybody a treat Diane Costo how you doing welcome back great how are you this evening M on a mission we just we need that female in the Crowd Oh we do well we also value Diane for her uh country rtion and wisdom permission yes yeah thank you all right let's uh Elon Musk does he has Ash bers or what's his what's his deal oh I mean I'm not sure we should diagnose him he's just kind of a jerk right I mean I'm a jerk you're a lot more charismatic oh charismatic I'll write that one down charismatic jerk no I mean you've never been a jerk to me Pete so I I don't have anything to judge oh well that's a beautiful thing about podcast you got an hour where you can make an opinion versus six minutes you know what I mean so it's like if you want to pick out anything that I say two minutes in 60 I'm sure I said something wrong maybe I mean yeah it's okay as long as you aren't held perfectly accountable I feel better I feel better so my big bone to pick with the on musk is that this whole uh you know BCI stuff he's doing he's touting as like Revolution and you know brains will control wait you talking neuralink yeah neuralink but he's doing exceptionally bad science especially especially bad medicine he's you know doing all kinds of bad ethical things and there's animal endangerment in the early research and the thing he solved and he's touting this as some giant breakthrough the only thing he solved is basically like a robotic surgery for a Precision surgery a particular one but the technology has basic flaws that have not been engineered around like the placement of the wires doesn't stay put and the Brain tissues job under a particular location doesn't stay put and so you have this phenomena where you have migrating uh signals and you can't recover from them you know and so I I think that it's a uh very expensive Vapor wear for most people and it will not solve anything in the next you know 20 years it's saying the sewing machine doesn't work I'm saying it's not a solution for humans to be you think it could be a start though I mean it's not like's totally I mean he's been able to send a rock it up and bring it back and do a lot of pretty heavy duty scientific things so can it be just the beginning of something I don't I don't think he's done very much honestly I think he walked out and purchased companies and you know worked with good people that he's you know I I I don't see him as a Visionary I see him as a bit of a talker um and lucky what I don't know him and he's never person I know him either talk on you know he's he's out there tell showing us who he is well day know type well you show him who he is but I mean there is his brain is wired to be like that I mean to do PayPal to do SpaceX to come in and do Tesla and all that stuff most of those things he just acquired a company instead of but so did Microsoft so did everybody else no not really no Microsoft I would say actually became like Microsoft created you know an industry W that's very interesting I yeah I don't know that I know that as a fact I thought that he had some participation in his vision I my impression is he's all Sizzle no stake you know he's all he's a good talker but he lacks fundamental understanding of some of the things he talks about like often and especially when he talks about anything involving in the brain so you know I I I have uh uh my respect for him has eroded every time I've looked into his nuring project eroded further right hope he hires some really awesome experts that do know people are flooding are fleeing the company theast years he can't be the one to know everything about electric cars he can't be the one to know everything about how to get a rocket out of the orbit and then back and he can't be the one to know everything about the human brain he can orchestrate an awesome team and make stuff happen I think he makes [ __ ] happen so I hope that he can find the right professionals to clean that up he's not though because people are flooding out of neurolink the company um I think the Mars stuff is is a is a bait and switch because we can't live on Mars with the atmosphere and radiation the way it is the radiation especially there's no Shield so we're you know never going to be self-sufficient in the next 200 years with all the things he's saying it's he's saying the Moon is too hard so he's pointing at Mars as the distraction do anybody from California like him he's not from California you know he left California and it pissed a lot of people up didn't it oh no one cares yeah okay I mean really no one cares do you live do you live in California in California yeah nobody in California as far as no one I know cares that Elon Musk moved to Texas okay like just nobody like it's never come up you know so so so we we started with Elon and the and the sewing machine neuralink there's there's no value of connecting whatever's been cut in there like spinal cord victims or anything like that I mean I think there there may be some utility but I'm not sure that's the right way to go about it like what are you to solve what is the actual problem and if it's brain computer interface there's non-invasive and dramatically better ways to do it that could use some engineering and some money and would be more successful than getting better at implanting direct connection electrodes which we know is kind of a weak science and and will remain so fundamentally because of how the cortex is organized so you know he should be working on high impedance passive electrodes that can do brain EEG with no content those exist in the physics there papers all over the place showing non-c cont electrodes work fine there's cardiac versions being created in labs in uh UK I forget what what what university is um in the UK but it's one of the big research universities and they have a cardiac version of this where you hold a little ball in in your lap so that the computer knows where you are and then it does a super high impedance electrode scan of your cart and there's a three-dimensional image of the EKG with no contact to the person nice so jff like that would be useful Jay I don't even want to tell you what we're talking about I'm just catching the end of it it sounds like an interesting one no why does the topic is why nobody from California likes Elon Musk I'm I'm an N of one I mean I'm the only person who thinks he's kind of you know overblown I think oh Jay's Jay's probably double you Dr Hill 50% maybe then I'm not really a big fan of his but it doesn't matter you know I mean right exactly who cares yeah I think he's focusing on the wrong things and everyone's always because I work in brains everyone's like oh Elon I'm like oh really okay you know I'm forced I'm forced to like pick a side because everyone's like you know yeah like every single brain article psycho Farm article God forbid a neuro feedback thing I get you know everyone everyone's aunt and their mom and their Barber sends me the Articles and the clippings like you know something hits like my Apple news feed and then like all throughout the day I'm getting forwarded emails from several people hey did you see this yeah but isn't that softening the market for at least for educational purposes where like what if he's doing the brain computer interface incorrectly who's doing it right and what is the difference it's not being done yet correctly you know enging has to be solved yet you know cutting holes in heads better is a solution for BCI uh we need some fundamental uh engineering fixed first which is you know signal decomposition and some understanding of the information processing at the cortical level that's you know more refined and more predictive and those things can be created and I was what you came in on the tail end of Jay was me ranting about you know what you should spend money on is ultra high impedance electrodes like they're building he's behind the curve on on the the development of BCI anyway I mean uh what he's trying to do has been done before from the surface well enough but you know uh you have to get in there to have high resolution and Neil bur bomber with an implanted electrode had think to talk working nicely recently but there's also people that have uh nanotechnology designed amplifiers that are powered by ultrasound and they're they're injected in into you and they float around until they reside somewhere and then they find them they can be turned on with again ultrasound and ultrasound is not damaging to the assuming you don't overpower it but ultrasound can be microwave as well you know uh uh but you can power them up and actually pick up distant locations and uh identify where they're located and and what the networks are in that area you you can end up with an an interesting set of data with implanted but not going through the skull but coming up through the blood vessels and so there there are people working on fairly ingenious uh uh new ways uh but you know uh uh if you've got your head open anyway it'd be nice if they put one in you know uh I I I had uh brain surgery but uh they they didn't give me anything extra you know so nothing added yeah you know if they even had that nose off they could have done something about that you know but uh there was a company in Santa Monica a few years ago uh at this point 10 years ago that was that was triing uh chips and I think they made it to Market but I never saw what happened after that where they were taking um it was a piece of silicon that they built an interface to a hippocampus against it they were planting an animals and creating synthetic hippocampus storage for animals and showing increased learning and memory storage on maze runs and things and they were touting this as a potential cybernetic implant for memory disorders you know medial temporal love implant um but I forget the name of the company and I don't know if it ever came to Market I'm thinking we would have heard about it if there was that that degree of of uh augmentation starting to show up well if if you ever want to uh kind of uh delve into implant Ables and uh the that realm uh look up jerk Dar Ritter online um he he has uh a video recording of him uh presenting about uh implants and very similar to his discussion at Cynthia kon's event a couple years ago um but you know he he invented the Burst Mode stimulator there there weren't any Burst Mode stimulators before he said well let's mimic the brain a little better give me a chip that has 600 htz high frequencies and can mimic the spike trains uh you can record in a brain and play it back in another brain um so he's he's far in a way more advanced than most everybody else I've everon Parkinson is a positive thing right for for it yeah he he implants into the subthalamic nucleus for Parkinson's with without uh any difficulty uh he actually has implanted stimulators that record the EEG there as well so it it' be an interesting test for those who think they can see deep into the brain from the surface whether they can actually predict what he's seeing in that specific nucleus which they list on the bunch of subcortical sites that they think they can see now I'm I'm a conservative uh neuroscientist I want to actually uh see some extraordinary evidence to validate that extraordinary claim that you're seeing you know cerebellum and subthalamic nucleus and nucleus accumbens and you know deep small structures and uh yeah they asked me what I thought of it and I I said the EG is made up of the poptic potential uh and uh also uh event related potentials and slow cortical potentials of Gia making and forming and and unform networks and when you add all those together uh that's what you get on the surface but it doesn't mean you can see things that are monopoles where the the neurons are structured like a bass cell and if they discharge the all all the vectors cancel you don't really see something outside of it a lot of activity in the nuclear body but when it discharges it cancels for seeing it from outside so the the likelihood of seeing that kind of a structure at a distance is awfully slim and it requires extraordinary proof because it's been you know uh said for the last 100 years of EEG that you can't see it so if you claim to be able to see it you should provide uh substantial evidence of that and so far uh uh refusing uh the test for that has been the only response I've seen well we have good cortical resolution right with Loretta uh methodology it looks like yeah yeah and but cortex everybody's agreed you can see the cortex you know uh and you can see some cortex that hasn't classically been seen all that readily uh like insular cortex perhaps insular cortex and and deep in the brain in the in in the singulate you know you can actually localize to that um the the first Loretta that was done was uh Marco Kito at uh at lubars lab and we had sent uh Marco and um also um uh Leslie sherlin over to Zurich to learn learn Loretta and they came back with uh batch processing code that would run Loretta for folks luckily the first page that would come up would be pant correction for multiple comparisons and it would tell you which one of these various images that are about to be shown to you were valid you know meaningful images and which ones were just too many stats um that that's not being done so well now um but yeah that's in general that that you're getting into something about EEG in general people really underestimate just how much data is in a 10-minute a 20- minute EEG and we do so much reduction forget the issues with like not knowing if data is clean because you haven't looked enough at the raw forget that for a second just the just the like variable space reduction because how many things are are then lost I mean what's the joke a physicist spends an hour a year planning experiment runs it for an hour and has an answer an EG person runs an experiment for an hour spends a year analyzing it you know we end up with this like deep density of data that are it's it's it's chaotic data we don't actually understand it's phenomenological data often I find so yeah and uh looking at it and trying to understand it is a good thing you know uh there are people that disparage people that look at the raw waveforms as eyeballs but you know uh I'm I'm just I understand valuing the I'm just a one eye eyeball now I used to be I used to be a double eye baller but now it's get an eye on that for you yeah exactly so so Marco conito the first Loretta that was done was at the anterior singulate for Theta and that's a treatment resistant form of anterior singulate failure and you can treat it you can treat it really easily with neur feedback you know and and it work works very well they it it was the first one that was shown and and it worked very nicely uh we we we basically have a fix for the OCD Theta variety that doesn't respond to meds so and tends to show up with songs in your head and biting your nails and little ticking and picking kind of phenomena well the interior singet when it's not working right is going to give you a failure either locked on or locked off you don't have the flexibility that it normally provides do you consider OCD OD but the beta spindle and the Theta and the alpha Behavior looks the same you're locked on or locked off uh anhedonia lack of initiation lack of motivation if you're locked off if you're locked on OCD and oppositional Defiance that goes along with that um perseverative features addiction this is why we get we get some response with stimulus with people that have the Theta and Alpha variants well the alpha variant ends up responding if it's below 10 Hertz to ssris if it's way slow an snri if it's faster than 10 probably a tetracyclic but the Theta pattern for meds just typically doesn't respond if it's the anterior singulate now Theta in kids is not the anterior singulate alone there that that's dopamine deficit and a stri and kopov has a nice section on that in his first book is that why the singul mature in kids where you'll see the the tick like phenomena start off at pz posterior singulate and it matures from the back to the front and in kids they don't even haveed in yet it's a strial inhibition kind of thing or or dopamine the the front of central Theta end up being a dopamine deficit in the striatum and when you give them methylphenidate which is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor it basically balances out that deficit and you get rid of the Theta uh but not anterior singulate that's basil forbrain and anterior singulate really does not respond well to meds um there's some evidence that ketamine may work well for somebody has an anterior Theta presentation but that's that data is not well done well it's most of the current ketamine data is not all that well done it's uh popularized and U gone kind of out of spun out of control a bit so there's research on anical cysteine in the interior singulate showing that medication resistant kids uh 40% of them get strong relief in intrusive thoughts with anical cysteine but I don't know if the EG failure mode is a high Theta High beta a low Alpha you know much what they it wasn't EG paper it was a intervention paper yeah but do you have a sense in that population it could be either combination it be interesting to look at it some if it's a 40% it's probably either alpha or beta the the Theta brand is not the most common do you know what netal cysteine does to the EEG to the the front midline EEG I would love to see a good paper on it yeah it's easy enough to test it's an acute effect people get a perose effect generally sub L when when they're responsive even nonoc people feel NAC uh generally so what's the brand name of that medication you're just talking about an acetylcysteine is a um just an amino acid Asel amino acid and it's used as a supplement essentially I believe has a sulfur metabolism loading so there are there are some rare side effects including acute nausea which you shouldn't ignore and there's rare cases of people reporting an onia or feeling blunted on it but generally it it does a bunch of interesting things as a supplement including lung function tends to improve it was used for a while off label for ADHD but I'm not sure it's impactful there um but it is impactful apparently according to literature for medication resistant childhood OCD with intrusive thoughts so that's that that has to be that singulate uh inv involvement so yeah I got I got a question uh from the video editor uh this is from an email I got a while back uh term I never heard before brain zaps I guess if you take ssris and you get off of them you get brain zaps where it's like little jolts when you're coming off of that is that different from you take an SSRI before you take a benzo I'm getting way ahead of my skis that's why I got you guys here but you take an SSRI and then you need something else and you take a benzo on top that is there a difference in the withdrawal on the SSRI or benzo or just a a different type of extreme you're going to be withdrawing from two totally serotonin and also uh your your Gaba receptors are are going to end up responding so um withdrawal from uh ssris are are a lot of people just stop them and and don't think about it as having a withdrawal problem but uh SSRI withdrawal is rather severe for some people um it's not inconsequential uh uh but uh I I would recommend uh stepping it down not just stopping any Med that you've been on for a sustained period of time because your body has adjusted to it and you know but zap that's a that's a real thing it's you feel like a zap is that well subjective experiences has got a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily expect to the um there there's U the exploding head syndrome uh where the person actually experiences what they feel like something popped or blew up inside their head subjectively they feel like was explosion inside their head now it without exception they go to the doctor and the doctors usually start to do exams thinking oh stroke or you know maybe a seizure or something and they they can't find anything so it's a subjective experience it's a benign phenomenon and it's well documented exploding head syndrome there's several things like that my you know I I have some family members that have had or one that had a alarm clock alarm clock headaches for a while which is a particular headache that wakes you up exactly the same time every morning with searing pain and it's a it's a phenomena and you know it was ruled out as a benign unusual headache phenomena eventually worked it it's worked it way out after a couple of years but randomly out of nowhere your brain starts waking you up with searing pain at like 3:33 in the morning or something you know is that is that's tied to withdrawal or just no just like a just a just a head phenomena so I would go straight to a sleep lab if I had something like that to make sure that you weren't experiencing vascular pain or you know from uh yeah all the V stuff was handled but uh very strange phenomena so it sounds like it also could be related to like a drop in your blood sugar because your system kind of alerts you and wakes you up and that's one of cortisol starting to change at that point something yeah but no one knows what alarm clock headaches are caused by but I've I've seen them clinically I've seen them come across you know our our complaint death so to speak here and there as well but the brain zaps are a thing and you got a you get it for a lot of the drugs Celexa was the first one I heard about that produced really aggressive brain zaps as folks withdrew but you'll it's it's not the same thing is that SSRI withdrawal the the post finasteride syndrome that you get that's the same thing as the SSRI withdrawal syndrome where you get this blunting of libido and an anhedonia and a dpdr a depersonalization thing if it's really bad that happens with the serotonergic and I haven't heard that sxa seems to be another newer serotonergic seem to cause the zaps in withdrawal mode as people try to get off the effector might be one too it seems to have a brain zap uh signature so to speak as you withdraw so maybe some Balta I forget and all for all the uh the Google doctors out there that say you know what I'm gonna get off the SR I'm gonna go cold turkey and I'm G to replace my ssris I'm GNA go down to the gummy store and load up on my uh chocolate Edibles why is that not a is that a good thing or not a good thing to do or you trading you're or you're picking a different poison well let's let's say two things one is we're not your doctor and so if you're listening to this uh ask your doctor not us uh two um the real big risk is combining them you know if you're on strong serotonergic and then you go after cannabinoids you're like not likely but your chances of getting a significant experience where you're left with what I consider like a serotonergic injury um and people are are left with depersonalization and very aggressive you know blunting of uh libido and Focus I've seen this a fair amount because people with weird brain things look for neuro feedback answers and so we end up you know Finding lots of things but you see if you combine a serotonergic which often includes herbs like lemongrass or St John's War people combine those with their SSRI which creates a massive amount of Serotonin signaling then they go smoke weed and then they have a profound panic attack and are left without feeling present afterwards with no libido and can't feel deeply that's that's that's not that uncommon and yet it's this mysterious phenomena that lots of people complain about without getting a lot of relief and I've seen some Mech some uh uh things make an impact but it's a it's a pretty big deep of suffering a big place of suffering I've seen that people haven't got a lot of good answers from in our modern either you know alpath or alternative medicine space but if you kick the ssris you kick the benzos and you're going cold turkey and you're just going to tea HC like what is what's going on in the brain I'm sure the executive function might be at risk is that possible Jay you know um uh THC is well studied CBD not so much um by comparison um THC does not really have long-term uh debilitating uh uh side effects it's a short term uh effect uh but if you take it chronically you end up having uh frontal hyper coherence in the alpha band usually and that's the apathetic lack of initiation that will sometimes be associated with people who are uh chronic users and uh the the acute effect is a slight slowing of the background Alpha which uh people take it to go to sleep at night as a asleep Aid and that that slight slowing of the background is a nice assist with falling asleep the thing is a month after you've been doing that now you're starting to feel bummed out a little bit and lack of energy or lack of motivation well that's the frontal lobe uh long-term effect starting to set in so you you can't necessarily judge it based on the initial exposure you you've got to look at the long-term effect and you're not going to get an anti-depressant effect from THC you're GNA get you're gonna get a euphoric effect you get high maybe if you're lucky and you know longterm the negative impact on affect is is what you expect with long term so but you know that it it's not uh it's it would be somebody who uses it at a high level on a chronic basis to end up with a hyper coherent Alpha up front somebody who Puffs once a week with some friends or something you don't get that chronic effect what works on that front midline hyper hyper coherence at Alpha what works on that phenomena yeah is is there an impactful approach to that either medication supplements ner feedback what is your what is your when you see that what do you do Jay if I see somebody with Hyper coric Alpha up front I usually suggest that they cut down on their their consumption you know it's it's a self-inflicted uh State and you don't need to be doing that right if you want to slow down your Alpha you can learn how to slow down your Alpha if you need to learn how to fall asleep better neural feedback does a really good job with sleep onset insomnia and wakefulness insomnia I mean that's it it goes back to the early days but it wasn't the purpose of the study at that time uh lubar mentioned oh by the way these hyperactive kids now say they sleep a lot better you know well uh SMR you know training uh for Sleep problems was talked about back then in the 80s well evidence for SMR and sleep at a scientific level didn't really exist until about 2005 uh U the Europeans were invited to the United States to uh then isnr with a different meaning for the I they switch that the meaning of that around same same acronym but um but it was an earlier uh era and uh they were exposed to neuro feedback and they took that back to salsburg at to the Consciousness and sleep lab in salsburg and they took University level students that had complaints of insomnia now that's not a that's not a world-class insomnia act that's a student who's got some insomnia so they did 10 sessions of SMR and the control group got randomly selected Ed each session had a different frequency trained anything but SMR and 10 sessions 10 sessions was effective for college students that was replicated train where in the head that basically is usually C4 pz okay C4 pz yeah and that gives you a an alpha pz your default Hub and it gives you samata sensory SMR where you can call it SMR if you call it SMR at pz Barry will still come back from The Great Divide and he will get you you know he will he'll he'll pop up like one of those Star Trek gently smile and say no no it's Barry he won't gently smile and say he'll whack you one for for calling it SMR where you can't call it SMR you know but you know the uh it was replicated exactly in gra Austria 10 sessions SMR good sleep for University students now Consciousness and sleep salsburg decided well we've got to recruit you know professionally recruited uh candidates that have severe insomnia 10 sessions was not adequate yeah uh we replicated only the experimental group at Alliant University converts his student Diego Garcia Rodriguez uh got his PhD dissertation uh 24 training sessions was effective for severe severe insomniacs that were recruited for their severe insomnia uh the only ones that were thrown out that were severe insomniacs two out of the larger group had epilep form content in their EG and they were just set aside as a different animal basically they should have trained they would have gotten the same you know sleep regulation and some antiseizure effects well but at the same time you're looking at insomnia not necessarily epilepsy so people with epilep from a research design perspective it'd be really bad but it was set up ahead of time that that the EGS would be reviewed and any that had clinical abnormalities would be thrown out of the study which is a good St because insomnia insomnia is not a stroke it's not a tumor it's not a you know it's not a thing in a spot so uh and and epileptiform content was enough to throw somebody out of the study now he got his PhD off of that uh I I was uh recruited in to sit in on his oral defense so there was actually somebody there that could understand what he said uh uh in his response and uh ask appropriate questions so but it was uh it was uh uh basically 24 training sessions also which was what we had done in in Australia for the sports folks that had insomnia uh they set up a control group and an experimental group and after the experiment uh if you have insomnia and you're in the Australian Institute for sports which is like our Olympic Committee here that they basically end up just assigning people to do SMR now so it's a routine treatment now after it's been proven Jay for the people that don't know that are just you know peeking over the fence looking in you brought up Barry Sturman uh can can you just give us a little background so we can uh crew some people in on on his work with uh NASA and cats and all that well that's a long long story if you go all the way back to the cats but uh you know uh Barry was initially in sleep and in sleep you saw U uh REM as corresponding with dreaming there was a correlation between subjective State and an EG feature so uh Kamya was looking at Alpha looking to see if there was a subject coret of Alpha and Barry was working with uh cats and basically was looking in the frequency of the Sleep spindle uh but not really calling a sleep spindle cats do a lot of sleeping but they they make uh a fair amount of SMR frequency he trained cats with a central stimulation to the reward center uh if if they uh if they got the EG right uh they would would get brain stimulation in the reward center and uh they they basically started to produce a tremendous amount of it uh they they did it for tapping a bar and getting milk and broth and the cats learn well that's great cats learned how to control this EG frequency you set that experiment aside NASA then hired him to try and figure out what was going on with the uh the the rocket fuel monomethyl hydren is making people have seizures and uh they they were concerned because some of the astronauts had reported some kind of funny mental things and they thought maybe they were hallucinating a bit and it might have been a little dab of that Rocket Fuel so they were trying to experiment with it rather than getting rid of the cats that he had already done in an experiment he figured well we're just looking at a dose response curve to monal hydren these are perfectly good cats uh so they started to expose them to a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more and they they progressively had changes that would lead to a seizure but the cats that were trained on SMR didn't have seizures so two and a half hours for any event in their brains versus 40 minutes and seizures for the cats that had not been trained then Barry had a human who said well I have seizures if you can train cats not to have seizures how about me and his first subject that was a human was a friend who had intractable epilepsy and they had a good outcome with him but there were there were studies after that very good studies that that showed that SMR could end up being a valid efficacious treatment for intractable epilepsy in fact they worked only with intractable epilepsy for the metaanalysis and um had a 70 plus per success rate with in epilepsy and his review article from 2012 says that 5% of people get complete control of seizure for the length of the monitoring period which is one year and that the average reduction in that study was 50% I think and I don't know if I've ever seen somebody get a result as poor as 50% reduction it's always really dramatic now I will say I tend to see seizure stuff push back a little bit not sort of like just stay changed you know a lot of things just stay changed in neuro feedback after a few months but seizures I think push back and often need a second round to really get the stability but sterman research suggest the metadata the the review article suggests that there's a pretty big effect for a certain chunk of people yeah in seizure ruction I would suggest that my experience right now the last bit of clinical work that I did before I retired at age 70 uh was all focused on epilepsy and intractable epileptics and the the six cases all six cases seizure free medication free and to this day still medication free seizure free uh 7 years for for one young woman she just graduated um uh about a year and a half ago with her bachelor's degree from uh from Baylor and just got her master's degree in December and uh uh she's going back to Spain she's going to play pro tennis for a while uh she had a tennis scholarship at Baylor and uh four years tennis scholarship and uh now uh she's going back to play pro but New Zealand where she was in school uh recently also she's got a dual citizenship and they want to have her on their used to be FedEx uh but it's it's now Billy Jean anyway it's a it's a tennis uh tournament and uh uh New Zealand gets five people and they want her to be one of the five so her her tennis game is good uh but she was having hundreds of seizures a day and was not able to compete at that point so um U they they thought she was uh going to have to have brain surgery they were ready to cut out her right temporal lobe where they saw the large voltages when I looked at her EG the large voltages were on the better side uh the we actually found good success working on the left side not the right side where the large voles were but the left side where the small fast stuff was homotopic area the same the same area uh essentially the insula on the left side was the trigger point and once it triggered it became bilateral with the right side capable of producing you know large UD 600 to a th000 microvolt spikes you know so yeah gigantic voltages you don't normally see so Andy welcome to the show uh we we talked about this a little bit earlier I'm going to try to sum it up and you guys can follow up with the neuro feedback it was somebody's doing a inhibitor for a while and they're trying to get off of it obviously going to check with their primary care physician first before they do anything because this show is for entertainment and informational purposes only but uh you would tie trade off of your SSRI uh I'm guessing your primary care physician would say and while doing that would neuro feedback help you on those with the the brain zaps from that and if so what would you do on the neuro feedback it may you know we we don't have a study of people that have Brin zaps that have EGS from it so um but uh people that are on ssris for a reason usually have an EG pattern that it's addressing and um you can end up red reducing the demand by normalizing brain function and uh the withdrawing from it stepping it down ends up being something that is more well tolerated if you get rid of the drive that has you taking it in the first place so um I I would take a good look at the EG uh look at the frontal loes function because that's where uh AFF effect regulation basically resides typically and uh uh take a look and see what's going on up there and get it normalized and see if that doesn't reduce the demand for the meds and kind of take away yeah the need to be on them that that's really important Jay just to stop you for a second you don't need to withdraw the medication to get the benefit from neuro feedback you can literally just train the floor up to meet you and then once you feel the floor under you then you can worry about withdrawing the meds in a careful Safe Way and you'll find that they don't drop you because you have the support so it's not either or for most medication it doesn't get in the way of neuro feedback you a little bit with benzo definitely with some opiates but barring large levels of those drugs you can train straight through anything generally and at worst your need for it changes like cannabis the tolerance for cannabis is dropped generally by neuro feedback which creates the same thing Jay just described your drive for things is reduced your your your tolerance is lower so you start moderating Behavior that's a a drug of abuse sometimes or or Recreation and Ariz are a different kind of you conceptualization there but you can train straight through things your in your system with neuro feedback you can't always assess the brain with a qeg with all things on board you have to be careful with timing but you can train the brain relative to its self moment to moment that's what neur feedback is doing for most flavors of neur feedback they're not really doing some some magically absolute perfect brain they're training the brain that's sitting there so you can walk into the gym with caffeine or a pre-workout in your system and pump harder you're still getting muscle workouts yeah so that's how I view you know people training with drugs in their system basically well it's like doing a stress test you can either ramp you up on the treadmill or just give you that shot right all right radar Ashwood asks how much of an improvement in seizures do we typical get with SMR can I answer it depends depends a lot a lot for most people it's a lot yes um uh in my experience uh the the people who have learned SMR and up seizure free uh uh but that's uh a whole series of people that I've worked with directly um I've seen SMR work very well with people that don't necessarily have uh detailed EG qeg guidance ahead of time that just do SMR uh as a as an intervention but SMR can be done centrally and it's SMR and it will benefit you if you have seizures but if you actually see the discharge you can stick one electrode where SMR is in the other electrode where the paroxysm is and suppress the paroxysm at the same time as you're training smmr and at that point you you end up with not just the SMR stabilization but also direct suppression of the he he had very good interesting results that's how they came up with the bunch of little tiny experiments to put together the meta analysis uh what's a meta analysis it's a study when you didn't have big enough studies to study it you know uh what's the matter with you you gather you gather a bunch of small studies that were too small to say anything and now you got enough data to to talk about the general effect that was seen in those studies so a meta analysis is appropriate for feedback because you can't really find the large funded studies because you don't who's funding them you know so uh the government quit funding neur feedback studies in 1972 about the same time as I had when you started about the same time as I had uh uh the the ability to to sell a brain device in 75 there was nobody buying them because there was no government money for him anymore so yeah because you're using Redwood [Laughter] I had a question Jay when you're doing a lot of your work with the seizure since we're on that seizure topic did you also um inhibit Theta often when you were training SMR up generally the paroxysm is going to end up having a mixture of fast hyper excitable cortex and slow paroxysm and the slow paroxismo down into the delta range but you can pick that on an individual basis when you see their EEG uh if you're just doing it symptomatically and doing SMR centrally you're pretty well stuck with the the effect of SMR centrally you're not you know if you don't see the paroxismo after it and suppress it so SMR centrally is going to be of great benefit but it may not be the cessation of everything uh which is what I've been see so luckily the first case that I worked with with intractable epilepsy was real quick it was 42 training sessions and I've never seen anyone that quick since it's like Kamia first client was a 100% accurate picking Alpha versus non-alpha States so Jay why did they stop funding neura feedback research well pasht and or did a bad study uh that uh pasit and orange study was U uh Alpha training looking uh because there was a lot of a lot of uh talk about Alpha and emotion and calm and centered and uh so they were looking for correlates between emotion and Alpha but they were looking Oly where Kamya was training I don't really see that very much you know affect at 0102 I see primary visual input to the brain uh so and they trained Alpha on and then Alpha off and then on and then off and then on and then off at the end of it they showed no learning curve and at that point they concluded what Alpha training did well if you show me a learning curve that's absent don't tell me what Alpha training does you didn't train it you know but they they basically showed there wasn't an effect and the government they were government experts so they they quit funding uh Thomas malland also didn't help uh by describing Alpha as also being ocular motor mediation when you can moderate Alpha with you know playing around with your ocul motor mediation but it's not all just you know it's not just all you know the way you move your eyes so what what years are we talking here Jay they must really screwed the pooch that that uh they they were uh probably started their study in very late 60s but it was finished in the very early ' 70s and the government quit funding in 72 but you can punch in paskowitz and or uh U you can figure out how to spell paskowitz as well as anybody I'm sure uh Chicago's got a lot of folks the same last name I'm sure so uh Haida hi hied Haida hi du hi can using SMR for spikes cause irritability as well as an ASD what's ASD autism spectrum disorder okay um SMR generally doesn't cause an agitation or overarousal uh but if uh if it's not the right frequency for you then it may have to be shifted either slightly higher or slightly lower in frequency Sturman said SMR is 11 to 19 with a group average at 13 12 to 15 generally catches that with a little speed up or slow down but they've seen SMR as slow as 10 and as high as 19 so the 12 to 15 doesn't fit everybody and if you're at a 10 for your SMR and you train 12 to 15 you're going to have an effect more like beta than the effect of SMR and that's what Barry found with the autistic kid Barry Sturman and and David Kaiser working with an autistic child um and their first session was beta like effect and uh Barry said well maybe his smrs not in the 12 to 15 range and so Barry used to be a barber shop quartet singer kind of a guy and so they sang lullab to this little kid until he fell asleep I'd love to have a video of it uh uh and and he had a 10 Hertz SMR sleep spindle when you go to sleep you get a Vertex sharp wave with a spindle and that spindle is the same as SMR and they had a 10 Herz spindle so they had to shift the frequency they were training down to what normally would be considered Alpha training and you'll see that a lot in ASD populations when I was working with Larry hburg we did we often did 10 to 13 instead of 12 to 15 or whatever I mean it's not a maturational effect I've heard you say Jay that SMR doesn't really mature up over life the way that Alpha does it matures up very quickly in the first like six months or something but that 10 Herz or 11 Hertz or very slowed SMR in a neurodevelopment population is that going to mature or is that just a slowed SMR until they make brain changes through some it's slowed and in adults that are autistic I quite often also see me that's slower than Alpha which is not very common uh usually Alpha is about a cycle a second or half a cycle a second slower than than the central Mew but uh again uh odd frequency tuning comes along with pathologies so Addy Smith is really coming to the plate this show can neuro feedback help with repressed memories I work with folks with developmental trauma and often they're missing chunks of their history is Peak Performance neuro feedback you know memory is tricky and uh memories may have been suppressed uh from traumatic experience um recovering those memories is not always the pleasant experience and um I would suggest that anybody who's going to try to recover a repressed memory uh do it with a uh a a lot of uh support network surrounding the individual because it might not happen in session it might happen at at home or on the way home or you know but you you've got to have a support network because unexpected things come up and it's a risky thing to do in Clin in clinically in Psychology it's a very hot button topic the repressed memory thing and there's been lots of abusive clients as well as you know unethical uh clinicians doing things around repressed memories that were not repressed memories that were sort of you know created through um suggestion so you know people do have atic repression of memory but repressed memories as a broad category I don't know that we have such a thing that we know how to work with and well the reason I bring up the Peak Performance because i' I've seen it myself in in the office or I've heard it they're just doing Alpha Theta trading and all of a sudden somebody is just not feeling very well and you got to get the uh the licensed person in there to deal with it that's why I ask is Alpha Theta part of neuro feedback that's something different like why why does that set off the the memories let let's say you learned something uh traumatically at age two what was your Alpha at age two you you encode frequenc you encode experience in the frequencies that are available at the time and if at age 1 2 3 your Alpha was at 5 6 7 it's in the Theta frequency range it's not in the alpha frequency range and quite often those frequenc IES will be what aniss used to call goose neck there'll be a frequency above and below but there's a gap missing those frequencies are need to be filled in uh um you can train Alpha in the alpha band and when they make that Alpha really well you can do theta Crossovers and the information that was encoded in slower frequencies will be accessed during that slower content being brought up now it's again this is when you need to have the whole network arranged to make sure you don't end up with a bad experience escaping a therapeutic environment uh you you got to be able to capture that and have it used therapeutically not just be a bad experience uh but but people have abreactive uh recall and that happens not so much during the alpha training but during the Theta Crossovers and uh there's a book out the alpha Theta training in the 21st century it's its second edition um there's chapters by a whole bunch of people that all have licenses and are good therapists and I've got a chapter in there too and I'm not a licensed therapist uh but we did a lot of alpha training in Alcoholics in 1972 to 75 and in 1974 we actually applied to NIH for funding for Alpha training and alcoholics to study it because we're seeing it work so well thought it needed to be studied more you know systematically than just a bunch of good outcomes um but U uh alcoholism uh and some drug addiction ends up being a low voltage fast deeg a classic pattern and um they don't have any Alpha to speak of and when you train them Alpha it seemed to be quite adequate to us uh we trained them Alpha and they left the state hospital and didn't come back and this recidivism rate as Addiction Center at a state hospital is usually about 90 plus percent you expect them to come back and uh when a whole bunch of them didn't come back people started to notice so what what are you guys doing over there you know yeah so and that you know try to explain we're doing Alpha training you know good luck explaining that off you know let me clean up radar and Addie here uh memory recover seems sketch how do you know they're not false memory Addie says I'm thinking of a patient who lost her mom at 8 years old and the family never spoke of her again so they don't have memories of her I agree to not help someone recall abusive horrid memories yeah again uh the early life memories can be stored in down in the the Theta band pretty easily uh at eight years old nine years old uh your your your memories are in the alpha band uh most most everybody's got Alpha that's up in the alpha Band by six seven years old so eight you'd expect normal Alpha frequencies at least at the Alpha One range so um you you may uh end up uh uh finding positive work with Alpha training but again Alpha Theta crossovers are usually where you bring back the memories and uh you know the the recovered memory uh with influence on what you're remembering uh was uh uh a pretty major uh uh kind of an embarrassment uh that the the people involved were U uh kind of professionally uh demonized for what they had done uh and uh some of them are actually in the field of neur feedback at this point too that you know that they were working with clients they're still working with clients and that some of the people that were uh disparaged for the recovered memory problems are still therapists so yeah still out there before I turn the uh the open sign to close Dr Hill thank you for showing up I mean three miles down the street from you you got uh you got something going on you got the fires there man you're still hanging tight yep still here in La they're they're you know the the zones are shrinking I think things under control although there was just recently there's a brand new fire that just sprung up a bit uh east of in the San Bernardo area just east of LA are those winds K kicking up tonight they are yeah I think that the winds are still hot for another you know few hours and then they're projected to drop back down but we have another the Santa anas are pulsatile so they come in these huge gusts and then drop off and then they come back and we're we're in another like pushing 100 m hour gust here and there and you know so we we're praying it doesn't uh escape the places that smoldering right now basically well thank goodness you get a lot of your business from remote if somebody wants to help out somebody that has fire three miles away from their shop and they want to do it remotely where do we uh where do we send them come check us out at Peak brain institute.com or come see me on YouTube at Dr Hill drh l l Diane Costo somebody's trying to get a neuro feedback uh office open would you would would they want to call you to get some information or of course of course we'll help them in any way we can to partner we have a shortage of neur feedback providers really so where do we send them symmetry.com you'll see that on on screen right up about there then J G by appoint Invitation Only yeah don't don't even don't even my schedule's look for J full full enough um that you can find plenty of great therapists that are still uh you know practicing and you don't need to come to me uh I'm I'm retired I'm 75 years old give me a break you know um take it easy on me but are you saying somebody's got a couple hundred that's itching in their pocket and they want to get something looked at they can't reach out to you if uh just somebody falls to the Wayside I'm just saying a wait list most of the people that consult with me are the therapists when clients come to me without their therapist I consider that triangulation and that's not a good thing in therapy U if the therapist and the client come I'm more likely to respond positively to the request for a review uh if it's the client alone looking for a second opinion outside of the therapeutic environment of their therapist I'm not as likely to take that case uh the you know EEG discussions are uh deep and deeper and they're not casual conversations and the therapist has a little bit better grasp of what I'm going to be talking about than than somebody who's who's a neoy and um uh you know give yourself a chance have your therapist with you if you're going to be coming to me uh because uh that that's more likely to be somebody I'll actually agree to see even and it's you know I'm my book's solid for weeks out so it's not it's it's not even a possibility for anything acute I'm just you know trying to throw something out there for a weit list but anyways Dr Hill Diane J J Gman thank you so much hey Dr Hill man keep that garden hose going on there those wins send them the other way right send them the other way hey everybody thank you for showing up Addie radar Haida everybody thank you so much see you next week all it's been fun thanks a lot all right bye bye see see you in the morning