🌟 Join us LIVE for NeuroNoodle’s Q&A Panel! This is your chance to drive the conversation—you ask, we answer! Bring your neurofeedback and neuropsychology questions to our world-class expert panel, featuring: 🧠 Jay Gunkelman – The legend with over 500,000 brain scans analyzed 🎓 Dr. Andrew Hill – Peak Brain Institute Founder & Cognitive Performance Expert 📚 Dr. Mari Swingle – Author of i-Minds and a leader in neurodevelopment 💡 Dianne Kosto – Neurofeedback Pioneer and Advocate 🎤 Anthony Ramos – Neurofeedback Advocate & Practitioner 🌍 Santiago Brand – Global Neurofeedback Trainer (joining when available) 🎙️ Pete Jansons – Host of the NeuroNoodle Podcast 🚀 What We’ll Cover: ✔️ Cutting-edge neurofeedback strategies ✔️ Advances in brain health and psychology ✔️ Practical tips for clinicians and practitioners ✔️ Your Questions – YOU drive the content with your curiosity! 🕒 When: January 29, 2025, at 6 PM CST 👉 Hit the 🔔 notification bell to join us and participate in real-time!
Episode Summary
Neurofeedback Mastery: Live Q&A Insights from the Field's Leading Experts
From a live NeuroNoodle session featuring Jay Gunkelman, Dr. Andrew Hill, and Dr. Mari Swingle
What happens when three of neurofeedback's most experienced practitioners get together for an unfiltered Q&A? You get the kind of practical wisdom that only comes from decades in the trenches—the real-world challenges, unexpected discoveries, and hard-won insights that textbooks don't cover.
This wasn't your typical academic presentation. It was three experts comparing notes on everything from international client management to the art of keeping conference speakers on time (spoiler: sometimes it involves physically removing them from the stage). Here's what emerged from their conversation.
The Global Practice Reality
Dr. Hill painted a picture that many modern practitioners will recognize: clients scattered across time zones, language barriers to navigate, and the constant challenge of what day it actually is when you're coordinating care from California to Hong Kong.
"I have clients in India, Australia, Hong Kong, the East Coast, Canada," Hill explained. "I never know what time it is in my own time zone because I'm always thinking about what time it is where I'm talking to somebody."
This isn't just a scheduling inconvenience—it reveals how neurofeedback has evolved from a clinic-based practice to a truly global service. Hill's practice now runs remote services spanning from Nova Scotia to Florida, managing over 100 remote clients at any given time.
The practical challenge isn't the neurofeedback itself—as Hill noted, "If you've done neurofeedback with a thousand people, you kind of get the hang of doing arousal model regulatory training off of qEEGs." The hard part is everything else: seven-day-a-week customer support, language barriers, and cultural differences in how people describe their internal states.
Language and Neurofeedback: Universal Patterns
One of the most fascinating insights came from how neurofeedback transcends language barriers. Hill described working with Cantonese-speaking clients through family translators and Spanish-speaking clients through their children.
"It's still easier to do neurofeedback than therapy in that context because I'm asking about regulatory shifts in people's experience—stress, sleep, attention, mood. These are fluctuating resources day-to-day, so the language barrier isn't too hard to cross."
This points to something fundamental about neurofeedback: it works with universal regulatory patterns that exist across cultures and languages. A brain learning to produce SMR (sensorimotor rhythm) for better sleep and focus operates on mechanisms that don't depend on verbal sophistication or cultural context.
The Art of Clinical Observation
Gunkelman shared stories that highlighted the irreplaceable value of direct clinical observation. His decades of EEG review—sometimes 10-12 cases per day—have built a pattern recognition system that no algorithm can replicate.
"When you're reviewing EEGs live with a group, occasionally you get a pre and post and can show: this is what we saw, this is what you trained, here's the results. The electrophysiologic results are fabulous in some cases and quite dramatic."
The key insight: the areas being trained show maximum change in follow-up EEGs. This isn't just correlation—it's direct evidence of neuroplasticity in action, visible in the brain's electrical patterns.
Beyond the New Year Resolution Wave
Hill observed an interesting pattern in client flow that reveals something about human motivation and brain training. While many practices see a January surge of New Year's resolution seekers, neurofeedback seems to follow a different rhythm.
"I haven't seen as much New Year's resolution push this year, but there's the wave that comes a few weeks after school starts—kids getting their first wake-up call with new classes, new teachers, new progress reports."
More telling: "I find I get a New Year's wave in February. People put off the transformation, put off looking at their brain, put off their dentist appointments and oil changes, and then they're like 'Oh crap, it's already February, I better get on some stuff.'"
This delayed pattern suggests that brain training decisions often come from necessity rather than aspiration—when other interventions aren't working, when the problems become too disruptive to ignore.
The Technology-Human Balance
Despite all the technological advances—remote monitoring, sophisticated analysis software, automated protocols—what emerged from this conversation was how fundamentally human neurofeedback practice remains.
The most challenging aspects aren't technical. They're about communication across cultures, managing expectations across different health systems, and maintaining therapeutic relationships through screens and time zones.
Yet the core mechanism remains remarkably robust. Whether you're training SMR for sleep spindle enhancement in Sweden or working on alpha-theta protocols for trauma recovery in Hong Kong, the brain's learning mechanisms operate according to the same fundamental principles.
The Conference Chronicles
The lighter moments in their conversation—stories of physically removing overly enthusiastic speakers from conference stages—revealed something important about the field's culture. These aren't distant academics debating theoretical points. They're practitioners who've been working together for decades, comfortable enough to chase each other around podiums and still rigorous enough to maintain strict presentation standards.
"That was the most popular video we had—Barry being carried off stage," Gunkelman laughed, referring to removing a prominent researcher who wouldn't respect time limits.
This blend of professional rigor and personal warmth seems characteristic of neurofeedback's culture—serious about the science, relaxed about the personalities.
Looking Forward
What's most striking about this conversation is how it reveals a field that has quietly matured. These practitioners aren't evangelizing or overselling. They're problem-solving: how to maintain quality across distance, how to train effectively across language barriers, how to manage the practical realities of a global practice.
Hill's weekend now runs Monday-Tuesday because he works Saturday-Sunday to accommodate international clients. Gunkelman reviews EEGs from multiple continents daily. They've adapted their practices to serve whoever needs help, wherever they are.
This pragmatic, service-oriented approach—combined with decades of clinical experience—offers a window into neurofeedback's current state. It's no longer an experimental therapy practiced by a few pioneers. It's become a established intervention delivered by experienced professionals who've learned to navigate real-world complexities while maintaining clinical excellence.
The future, based on this conversation, looks less like dramatic technological breakthroughs and more like steady refinement of human expertise applied through better systems. Which might be exactly what the field needs.
For more insights from Dr. Hill on neurofeedback mechanisms and protocols, explore the full NeuroNoodle archive at peakbrain.com
Full Transcript
n r uh uh we had a student presentation would always start the morning and uh there were a few of them but they only had a very brief time period to present and um they they had to do it on time and the student was running out of time and I would give them a five minute mark from the back of the room and I'd walk up to the side and then as there were time was running out I'd get closer and closer to them and as their time was out I would take the mic off of them and switch the next person on well as I got closer he he put another slide on the overlay so he wasn't going to stop and I I stepped right next to him and I literally chased him around the podium and uh the audience thought it was funny as can be but uh uh when it came to the award ceremony later on we chased him around the podium again it turned out this is emus Angelicus he's an now um main editor for a major Neuroscience publication in Europe uh he was a Greek student at lubars Lab at the time so we we always had fun but after that the students would look at a stopwatch and time their presentation you know to be done on time is that operant or classical conditioning and I thought this was uh well it's uh who was conditioning is conditioning them but you know we did it to Barry Sturman too you know Barry the the EG for the New Millennium in 2000 we had the the aquarium for our party in Monteray but the during the meeting uh he he had a full hour we gave him an hour because you know he's a major presenter time came to 10 minutes I gave him a 10-minute sign from the back of the room he said he shook his head no and uh so I I was doing my normal thing I walk up next to the side and as I was getting closer to uh to him it was obvious he wasn't going to stop he he did another acetate overlay he was just barely past the cat story he wasn't really into anything new and uh I looked over to the side and uh then uh uh Nolan white and Big Joe uh Horvat were on the front row and I just motioned to him they both came up one on either side of him picked Barry up by the arms his feet were in the air kicking and he said let me get my slides I grabbed his stuff and the next person was already on so he finished on time as scheduled uh but we gave him a special presentation in another room to finish his talk uh because he wasn't anywhere close to being done uh so anybody wanted to catch the last part of it could get another shot at at finishing it but um that was the most popular video we had was was him being carried off stage I understand I understand it's funny though with timing what was it two years ago now I think it was two years ago uh there around six of us in the same uh conundrum we all thought that we had uh been awarded uh an an an hour each uh our presentations and then we got there and we literally had 15 minutes each you know it was one of the scientific programs um and it was obviously massive communication because all six of us different presentations had prepared for an hour that oh that was that was something that was something just trying to go on the spot well I've always said I would walk out of a talk I wasn't enjoying even if it was mine and I was on a panel discussion there were three of us and we talked at front 15 minutes each and then 15 minutes for questions you know it makes good sense and the first person went like 20 minutes easily and the second person was running long and uh I realized he was going to go over as well uh I grabbed my material and I said obviously you need more time you can have mine I got up and I left I walked out of my own talk I didn't do a talk I got I got up and left so I wasn't having fun Dr Hill I'm a devout edist so Dr Hill what's the update man you all right you still got the same place still got the same place we're still here in California yeah um what happened to all the other Southern California I haven't seen John meret for a while I wonder if those guys are okay uh I don't think the election did them too well oh okay okay gotcha Chad I love you baby joy I love you baby come on love to have you back that's right come on Joy come on come on John don't be shy don't be shy no we're glad you're okay all all of our La peeps all over California peeps rained over the weekend it rained just enough to put like to put some water on the ground without making M massive flows of chemical Sledge everywhere so that's nice good good good good yeah just enough rain so what's what's hot what's not uh you know it's a Tuesday I'm hanging out with some neurog Geeks neuron noodling it's you know it's what we do wa hold on did I just fly around the world backwards once is it Tuesday or Wednesday I'm oh Wednesday sorry sorry wday I thought it was wedes I have clients in India I have clients in Australia I have clients in Hong Kong on the East Coast us on the east coast of Canada and I never know when it is in my own time zone because I'm always thinking about I'm talking to somebody it's that time there and I lose track of what day it is completely I hear you I think if you know if I were ever you know knock on wood in some kind of an accident and to orientate me they they ask me what day it is I'll fail you know I'll totally my weekend now is Monday Tuesday because I work Saturday Sunday it's like I don't know what day it is what kind of people are coming to the uh office or in your case you know 20% Dr Hill yeah well the new year right we have this gym uh new year new brain kind of focus where everyone decides that they're going to do some stuff I haven't seen as much of it this year the kind of New Year's uh resolution uh push but there is some of that and there's a certain amount of people hitting back to college and back to uh secondary school that are getting their first like wakeup call in new classes new teachers new uh progress reports and so we're starting to get some of the kid uh wave that comes uh a few weeks after the school year starts um but I I find I get a a New Year's wave in February sometime people like put off you know the transformation put off looking at their brain put off their dentist appointments put off their oil changes and then they're like ah it's already February oh crap I better get on some stuff so so Happ next week what yeah next week exactly I'm hoping for a big a big Rush come on in on the on the remote stuff anything different not really we're expanding that we now have a remote Services out of Florida um and we're also on boarding a partner in Nova Scotia and so we sort of have the entire East Coast locked up uh from New York City Nova Scotia New York City all the way down to Florida now um but just because of uh we have so many of our clients run remote I tend to run about a hundred or more remote clients at anyone point right now and it's just a lot of customer support I mean the hardest part of a remote program is not the neura feedback um we're doing you know arousal model regulatory model phenotype training off of qegs that is a somewhat straightforward process if you know the brain and if you've done a thousand you know done Nerf with a thousand people or something you kind of get the hang of doing that style n feedback it's a practical approach hard part of remote n feedback is having to have staff on seven days a week 12 hours a day have sta have clients in different time zones uh language barriers uh most of my clients I speak their languages but you know there's occasionally a few that I don't speak their languages that makes it hard to do neuro feedback you know how how do you ask somebody about how they're feeling or Nuance things or explain things about how a brain works or resource works when there's a language barrier so yeah in languages that that are in in a couple languages I speak uh I have to do some work in but I've mostly lucked out in my other big Center outside of the UK and the US is Sweden and swedes all speak English for the most part and I speak Swedish so like I there's no there's no there's no issue there generally with like communication but then I have a few clients in like Hong Kong who only speak cantones and I'm working through their like daughter or their you know Aunt or something uh and we had in the in the US I have a few clients in LA and I don't speak Spanish I should I should learn Spanish but don't speak Spanish I have a few clients where I work through their their daughter or their you know their friend uh because of the language barrier being significant but you know it's it it's still easier to do neuro feedback than it would be to do therapy in that context because I'm asking about regulatory shifts in people's experience and stress sleep attention mood whatever these are fluctuating resources dayto day or experiences dayto day so you know the language barrier is not too hard to cross rad into so good more more meatballs yeah sens kot that's me meatballs thank you yeah is that your go-to no I'm not a huge fan of Swedish meatballs actually I have some of the same time zone difficulties with International clients and some of the groups I I I do have people from all over some from Europe and from Australia in the same group so it's you know it's odd times and odd days um but the good thing is um when you're reviewing eegs live with a group occasionally you get a pre and a post and be able to actually show you know this is what we saw this is what you trained here's the results and the the the electrophysiologic results are fabulous in in some of these cases and quite dramatic and actually show locally the areas that were being trained are the areas that had maximum change but the the person changing is I think the uh the story that goes along with all the data ends up giving it the kind of the emotion and I do 10 of those sometimes a day today's what Wednesday I've lost track already um Tuesday my big day Wednesday yes yeah Tuesdays I do 10 or 12 determined that 10 minutes ago so and and Wednesday I usually do about nine or 10 direct consults going over often change maps with experiences saying here's a feature that looks changed often it means this this what is your experience and validating that and getting those stories and we were talking about I think AI a couple weeks ago I now have I think pushing 10,000 videos of me discussing people's brains with them over live data for 30 to 40 minutes validating hypothesis testing ideas talking about experience teaching them their their Neuroscience um so that's going to be a really good training uh data said at some point if people want to let me use their data I'll have to ask them but uh you know I've learned a lot that's how I got good at doing it was by doing that exact thing that that correlative um yeah review today today I looked at a 75 yearold that I saw about four months ago for the pre and the post he he has a perfect 10 Hertz Alpha at the back of the head beautiful uh the topographies everything he's sleeping like a baby he's dreaming and he's remembering his dreams and what's striking about that I mean you tell people you're dreaming and you can remember your dreams some people say well so what I I I dreamed too you know but he can't remember ever in his past Dreaming or remembering his dreams and uh he's a very famous sports figure and uh he's set up a foundation uh because of the the dramatic impact on his life he set up a Foundation to fund neuro feedback for traumatic brain injury for uh other people in football but they can pay but also people who don't have money that don't have to pay because the foundation will cover it anyway a couple folks in uh the MLB who are in the Umpire Association about trying to find ways to get nerfy back supporters for the umpires because they all have major head injury experiences from being umpires like they all get Balls to the face unprotected un you know unflinching no no response Balls to the face or bats to the face or you know so a lot of them have TBI kind of History worse than than the baseball players yeah speaking of baseball doctor here's a softball for you how far away can you help people I've talked with people in Switzerland and qar or karar guar either qar or Cutter I don't know which is I don't know which is the worst American pronunciation of it um I've got clients in the midd East who have opened a a clinic and um we're the first ones to be allowed by their government which apparently gives some li like a State Licensing Board sort of a thing only for the country uh he's the first person who's not a neurologist to be able to get a EG credential and uh he's the first and only uh Nur feedback uh uh person and he's a psychologist uh but um he's done really quite well he gets people from all over the Mast coming to him U and then all of his EGS come through me so great um and he's he's been doing it for a number of years now so 's pretty big in the in the Middle East um I have a lot of clients in Dubai um currently and I work with both uh a lot of the Dubai community of clients I work with go back and forth between London and Dubai uh and we end up with getting brain Maps when they're in London we also I know at least two different neuro feedback and qbg centers in Dubai that send me data yeah um and gosh in Switzerland I mean I I work with clients in Switzerland but if you're in Switzerland and you're anywhere near uh chure you should see Andy Mueller Andreas Mueller Dr Mueller um who worked with uh Yuri kropotov and helping develop some of the hbi med stuff I believe must Mis remembering inste of and it has a much larger instead of analysis they've worked on that's beautiful in distinguishing ADHD States but I work with clients all over the world radar so you know if you're in a country that I have an office in we rent you gear and if you're not in a country I have an office in you travel to one or you buy a gear and then we work with you so you know anywhere you like that was easy it's it's hard to get far enough away to not have access you know I mean yeah yeah you don't need live internet to actually train although we do Live support so that helps but you just need you know some internet here and there and I use battery powered little Q amplifiers now that are tiny so it doesn't really you know the the hardest part I was I was griping about this on on the nyback Discord Channel yesterday the hardest part is uh the 50 HZ noise in Europe I hate I really hate EEG in Europe because of the 50 HZ noise and all of the building in Sweden and in the UK and other parts of Europe it's just so bad that the the buildings are built differently and I mean 50 HZ I think the I think the reason is 50 HZ won't kill you and 60 HZ will you have a live wire in the US of DC 60 HZ and it will stop your heart but 50 HZ won't do that doesn't interfere with physiology the same way for some reason so there I don't I think that's why there's just ambient 50 HZ noise flooding Europe because no one cares because there isn't really a lot of the European buildings weren't built with grounded circuits all over and like in the US if you have an ungrounded circuit and you you get a 60 htz in that area because of the the circuit not having a ground so but you know um 50 and 60 htz have Notch filters that handle them fairly well but uh a notch filter is only good up to you know about 100 DB and sometimes you get more than that of the noise which means you've got too close to a source as all what about any impact of um even with a notch filter uh is there a there must be a frequency rolloff for where it is sensitive and where it's not like if you're getting 50 HZ bleeding across all frequencies which happens with high amplitude are you able to notch filter it out and affect frequencies that are lower in fact a notch filter from 45 to 55 that drops at 120 DB will take care of if it's a reasonable amount if it's too much nothing can handle it if it's you know you're too close to a a Transformer this is something kind of interesting too I'll hold it up I'll cover the name and well here we go the name's been changeed protect the well no it's just this is currently on my desk they're doing renovations upstairs oh you're catching but it's really interesting in terms of where we get the interference and where we completely don't okay so I'm with the landlord okay like literally what are they doing on the seventh floor that's causing this and we're on the second floor right you know and it actually it it sounds like running water down here I know it's not but it's it's it's fascinating in terms of where this happens and we've talked about this before in terms of how the interference is almost always stronger on F4 and and again look at that it's stronger on F4 it is on F3 compared to F3 yeah perhaps impedance difference who knows it's Universal J it's a mystery that be before I well I'm never retiring but you know how it is I I do trust that uh you know some way sometime we'll figure out why whenever if you can figure out how to retti you let me know because I'm really not good at it at all I mean I'm not planning to I plan to do less of what I'm doing and integrate more fun things um well this is fun too that's the problem this is Too Much Fun Since we have so many shy people then you're they're relying on me to ask the question so I'm G to throw one out there Dr Hill with uh I'm holding a little device that's hard for you to see little Raspberry Pi here with raspberry pies out there of course I mispronounce it and this this new thing with deep 6 the thing that's challenging in yeah deep yeah do you see with things getting smaller the the Raspberry Pi long story short it's about a hundred buck computer that has most of most of the innards with it and with deep6 which is a better going to be a better AI chat PT can neuro feedback build their own AI run their own uh their own chat for a lack of a better let's back up yeah what problem are we trying to solve with that AI yes there's lots of things you can do with machine learning Ori but which particular problem are you trying to frame I I think uh the first one a simple chatbot where you you're going through symptoms intake and and and and all that to get you along in a in a process there's a couple people already on the Discord uh near Discord who've built custom gpts loaded in with 20 30 40 libraries Lisa Taran is in the same thing with her data sets and her way of processing in mat lab and they're and they're getting decent analysis out of their data sets I'm I'm I think it's possible I'm not sure that I would um I'm not sure I trust the ability of the systems to do analysis yet so my solution what I've I'm pretty close to finishing I I built the tool to you know I do these these videos these 45 sometimes minute 30 to 45 minute videos describing you know orienting someone to what what a qeg is what a CPT is walking through it every single time being very very systematic and what I've done is set up a tool so I can take those videos ingest them uh break down the likely phenotypes the likely goals and then pull from my list of starting Place protocols that might match the particular things we found and create a formatted sort of summary but off of the analysis I've done and describe to them not doing the analysis so I'm putting the AI in the teaching role essentially after I've taught it goes and summarizes and creates another pedagogical if you will kind of instrument I find it's really useful for that kind of thing munging reformatting reframing expanding stuff and I trust it to do that I can also read that and make sure it's valid I don't trust it to throw in forums and have it tell me oh there's some transients on this site without it won't save me any time I'll still have to spend all of the time looking at the EEG John Hopkins just today posted news that they've got an algorithm to spot spikes 70% of the time the doctors Miss and they can spot them in the EEG and I'm just saying well that's because half the doctors were in the bottom half of their class and the ones that are neurologists got six months of training so the 70% they missed are yest the data had the it was in the data but they couldn't see it because of the lack of training or because it was a Nial events there was a maybe maybe it's a different group but I saw a paper yesterday or today talking about how there was an algorithmic approach to spike detection but it wasn't looking for spikes it was looking for transient batches of tissue that were suppressing spikes that weren't visible as a spike but as like a little raft of data that was suddenly getting Frozen briefly and then letting go again and that was essentially it's equivalent to a spike apparently is that this group or different paper that it it's the same group interesting you you need to look at the percentages um that you know the again 70% higher detection rate than the doctors looking at it with their eyes well I mean I'm gonna put a little politics in here though it kind of irks that we put money into you know training a machine but we don't put the money into training a person you know and I think you know where we are technologically Jay saying is we can't into into both right because we still need I don't know I'm I'm all for the humanistic you know personto person approach balanced with with the AI I just yeah again it bothers me that we just jump over the um not putting time into training people I refer to it as Pi plagiarized intelligence yeah yeah it's it's not really artificial intelligence they just plagiarize a bunch of data and put it out as though it was intelligent wait what happened to cooption Jay this is different I'm I'm with j i talk about Lisa tatran just heard my talk on farfield phase Rivals and she had her algorithm uh spit out as they spit out long treatises about stuff one paragraph at a time uh all it could come up with about farfield phas reversals and she asked me what I thought of it and going through it it had texts that talked about true sources in EG there's no ground truth what are you talking about a true Source in EG you know yeah scientific analysis is full of hallucination I would have given the the the paper that it spit out C minus in as a student basically they they it should it should have done better uh but it wasn't bad it was a c minus I mean it wasn't you know talking about the bottom half of the class again you know if if you're working on my brain I don't want anybody with a c minus you know that means you've absorbed you have all all of the you know all of those complaints are are looking at a snapshot in time and this stuff is not that this stuff is accelerating exponentially and Pete pointed out that you know the Raspberry Pi uh Jeff Garling demoed installing deep seek on the Raspberry Pi on YouTube recently it's kind of slow and he's using a reduced uh model to get it to run but it runs and this stuff's going to keep changing so you know whenever we start talking about the the problems with AI you know you might as well be talking about oh my God cell phones are so disruptive ah movies the talkies now Andrew we're going to get into a little bit of battle here my issue is that it's going too fast and we're not acknowledging um uh the errors and it's being put out before it's ready and it can cause harm I mean I'm not against it I'm well not it's not done that's the thing this is not a piece of technology like other technology you've ever experienced it it moves so fast yeah that it's going to be it's also falsely accelerated that's my issue yes it's moving fast but if you have an unfinished product that's moving fast um I think it can compound the potential for help as well as compound the potential for harm so I you know caution here you know we we can get a bit over excited well caution is gone because the the models are now open the models are open source deep seek R1 is performing almost as well as the pro model the $200 a month model from from open AI yeah and it's free open source so a beefy computer and a bit of time and you can be running something as good as the best AI essentially that has implications that are quite broad for changing Industries education technology I mean I think we're heading to a place in a couple years that software is no longer going to be a an industry just ask your your your piece of tech to become something briefly turn into nyback software right now please for me it does that hey planning hey D hey uh recipes and it reconfigures itself so that's probably where we're going yeah so heyj couple folks showing up sorry we're ranting about AI well vj's late they're relying on my questions everybody's so shy so here we go spiritual stuff from VJ working on enlightenment huh yeah so our job is to get VJ to develop his uh how would you describe what we're doing VJ Ghostbusters something so I've talked to VJ a little bit about this question he was asking me about what I see when we do psychics or spiritualists or people in ecstatic States because i' I've this point I've done a bunch you know I did kind of humorously Tyler Henry Dr Drew and I did a play-by-play on Tyler Henry's brain when he was doing his e his Hollywood show um and I've done a few other psychics and I had a couple other recently a pet psychic was able to voluntarily change her brain in the same two ways with two different techniques she does for her psychic practice and I was like wow that's really interesting she changed it and two months later came back did another set of recordings and did the exact same thing so I've seen these kind of phenomena in these people with atypical if you will spiritual experiences and I guess that's what maybe VJ is wondering is what have it what what have other folks seen because you guys quite a bit of quite a bit of the spiritual stuff is going to need something beyond your standard medical grade amp uh DC to 70 htz doesn't really catch the gamma that is the gamma that they look for if they really are researching gamma gamma 2 between 80 and 100 Hertz which is outside the DC to 70 range you need to go up to 150 Hertz and get gamma 2 and R you're talking about mostly trait level stuff not State stuff right this is Clif sarin's work around gamma this is traits this is acquired traits through long-term meditation that's not necessarily the same thing as ecstatic experiences which are absorptive and dissociative so I I would argue that gamma's probably not part of the ecstatic State as much as it is it's part of Consciousness yeah but the ecstatic state is something specific as such it'll be part of if you're conscious during something it'll be there it's it's a major piece of anything that's got Consciousness in it that the um if you're conscious you have a active relationship between your slow cortical Potentials in your gamma and if they're related you've got Consciousness if they're not if they're not related you're not conscious you're you're deep enough to have surgery sometimes or you're in a state that's not U effable for folks that are wondering related means time locked or or phase locked basically yeah one of my questions too as well I mean gosh we were you know kind of curious and doing some of the stuff well 20 25 years ago people would say hey record my brain because I can do this now one of the things we did see is the recordings were different but there was wasn't necessarily any correlation between the the differences in the brain waves and what they thought they were doing so yes I would say the same thing for the first 20 years that I did this but in the past five years there's been a handful of people and I've been seeing the same phenomena show up again and again and Tyler Henry was the first one and I'm like wow I mean Drew and I talked about it on air we're like he look like he's dissociating when he's gesticulating moving his hands and sweating and his he has these massive swells of Delta showing up uh at the same time like he was checking out and I that's interesting and I I've seen that since that same phenomenon where there's either focal um well it's it's usually focal Delta big bursts of focal Delta blob right out as if they're shutting off parts of their brain and and I would normally expect somebody to be in a dissociative State turning on you know big Delta isn't necessarily off uh uh years ago uh uh John Duca uh took salvia divinorum at a isnr meeting there it was a group of people that met in a room uh they brought me in to watch the egb recorded to see if it's really EG and uh he he was putting out a thousand microvolts of 10c long waves uh and it was uh well 10c long waves is kind of sub Delta that's INF slow and uh the amount of gamma and the amount of infr slow content was massive uh so massive that um you you would think of it as some sort of an artifact if it hadn't been observed really so um you know you can get gigantic perspiration artifact you can get all sorts of other gigantic slow waves but this was not uh perspiration has random phase initiated at a point in time by the sympathetic trigger but after that each sweat gland is independent as to when it absorbs and re re-emits and so you get large slow sways but they're not there's no SN to them there there's no pattern to them and this was all patterned and uh it was uh the altered state section of isnr ass and uh I haven't heard of that I must have missed that meeting and I I not sure it was it was re three years after we did the event we actually presented the data as a workshop at the and uh uh sometime if you want to watch it I've got John duca's uh PowerPoint which is a rather interesting uh journey in of itself my guess is that video is on the archive the isnr so for those of you who are not isnr members if you sign up you can I think I seriously doubt that it's in isnr possession oh okay okay I don't think it made it out of that that video didn't make it out of the workshop to get into their their archives all right we're keeping on Ghostbusters here have you guys ever seen any spooky like in an EG of two people's EG synchronizing yep I want to take this out of spook um you know there's some really interesting things like we we do know for example that you can start to uh obviously you can regulate and match respiration you can start to regulate heartbeat um and to certain extent in some of the couples work we were doing um and I know uh Castle has started to take this up but we were doing this years and years ago where you you know you would hook two people up um with with one feedback system even uh though the the the two signals were were different and it was just in terms of frequently downt trining the arousal in a couple going through great difficulty and you I I mean it's not like overt synchronization but you definitely see one person slow down or one person speed up to to match there's nothing spooky about that it's just really good um EEG based couples counseling right to take it into spook we we did a publication uh published in society for scientific Explorations Journal um and uh we were looking at a Healer and a Healy couple and the Healer Healy were at a distance they weren't like touching uh but the the Healer was was putting out standing waves that phase synchronized the heale to his EEG now uh creating a standing potential requires uh gigantic harmonics and he hit the Schuman resonances which is plural as not one frequency it's 7.83 and lots and lots of harmonics the fourth harmonic is in gamma uh but it um the the he uh is is not uh volitionally trying to sink uh this is if you're a swimmer and you in a Wave Pool wave table and you're a swimmer or you're a little cork in a tiny wave table uh and somebody was creating a standing potential in the pool it would look like there were waves but they weren't moving and if you were a cork you would float to the bottom of a wavelet so you you phase in Trin with standing potentials and uh the the heale uh was phase synchronized within less than a second as soon as the heer was putting out this specific frequency and all of its harmonics and um the analysis was done by Luke Hendricks in Minneapolis he doesn't really know much about EG and uh he said well now we got it collected you can analyze it I said no you're going to analyze it and uh said well I don't know anything about it I said well just turn on the B Spectrum the display and scan through 4 second epox just scan through the E and tell me if you see it well what am I looking for well if it's there you'll it you know and the next day he shows me uh one uh U pattern which is basically just the the healer's background alpharithm at about 11 it's it's just the bispectrum is simple one line up at seven at at 11 one9 across and they intersect at 11 so it's a simple pattern and then he showed me one that looked like a checkered tablecloth of cross spectral coupling and he said is this it and I said I told you you couldn't miss it if it happened you know it's harmonics and the bispectrum shows the harmonics you need to know what you're looking at you just see oh lots of harmonics and at that point these the the harmonics were present and the phase shifting happened we were invited to analyze a Healer uh event where a person was going to be healed and the Healer and there were apparently 10,000 people across the world that at a certain time were going to have the image of lightning striking this guy and they and Schuman resonances are created by lightning by the way uh but the the they had a f- minute Baseline and two five- minute periods and I would I simply looked which one of the FIV minute periods is full of harmonics and that was the one where they were doing the healing a blinded Raider and they were all excited about the data I said well for God's sakes don't show the data to anybody this is a 5050 chance you know uh you know the next time you're going to do something like this you know don't do this after the fact showing it to me ask me ahead of time I would have said do a five- minute Baseline and then nine periods of time two of which were randomly picked not ahead of time but randomly picked as as you're going and if you picked two out of the nine and still have it accurate then you've got something they did that it was still obvious so healer Healy relationships are uh easily identifiable as uh a big bunch of human resonance happening uh and and that's the coupling between them now it doesn't mean that's the healing it's the connection yeah you know if I call Andrew on the phone and and he picks up the phone that's a connection there's no conversation yet you know that there's there's just a connection there has to be something delivered for healing to happen happen uh and it it may be something really quite obvious but we've we've seenly seen the um ability to identify the connection and that that's a step up from not being able to identify it blindly so gamma awareness Consciousness seems to be implicated for controlling these disassociative or remaining upright during them seems accurate because Hindus talk about awareness during dreamless sleep DJ says or States like astral projection well uh the you being consciously aware and controlling your dreams is you know the lucid dreaming uh which was a spin-off of Carl pram uh lecture at har at at Stanford and um you know a lot of stuff spun off of Carl I think it's a spun off of a 12pack radar Ashwood says since since bipolar inhibits train coherence then why do we bolar inhibits with the expectation that they will actually inhibit doesn't coherence increase power well inhibiting the difference between two locations it if you're talking about bipolar you're talking about an amplifier for God's sakes let's get this technical stuff straight here bipolar talking about an El elod placement is a misnomer it's a common misnomer it's so common everybody thinks it's okay but technically your amp is a pushpull differential amplifier which is bipolar has two inputs and a ground you can use it sequentially with two known active sites and you're looking at the difference between the sites you can have one spot that you assume is a neutral reference point it never will be you know you pick a spot to be a neutral reference the ears are active unfortunately radar so even an A1 or A2 is a is an active ear references awful they're terrible references they pick up stuff off the temporal lobe and manifest it as though it's coming from everywhere you need to switch more than one Montage just to know what you're looking at you know the the the standards for interpreting EG more than one Montage you know you can look at straight at somebody you don't know turn sideways do they have a big nose they have a flat face I mean until you see 3D you don't really know what you're looking at so in EG you need more than one perspective and the Montage is your perspective um if you pay attention to Nunes who's not trying to sell you anything he will tell you that lash and montages are the best way to see the coherence that goes against the saying of other big names in the field who are trying to sell you machines so you know um think twice about who you're believing the the salesperson or the person who writes books about EEG Nunes is awfully sharp he talked about llas and Montage as being the better way to look at it in 1997 uh and I I talked about that in 1998 at a meeting false frontal Alpha using linked ears and U I didn't know about his paper I mean there's so many journals out there you don't get them all you know but it's I still use plasan and everyone you know who's in Old School is newer EG people like oh using lassan that's so old I'm like no no no no here's like four reasons you want to use lassan because it has benefits it has a couple of drawbacks but it has some significant benefits the biggest one is it's a little bit insensitive to gross distortions that are Global so medication fatigue wash that out and a little spatial precision and a drop I I hear people say that llan Montage gets rid of medication affect all time no not doesn't get rid of it but it does it I want to see one EG where medication effect is eliminated by llan or even not eliminated but it is reduced like like you'll see someone's Theta in in an ahd State when they're medicated you'll see it in lassan more than you will link deers I I can pop up a benzo aspine intoxication case and switch montages around you're going to see it no matter what Montage you're in if you want to see it accurately as to where it's coming from you should use a lan technique which shows local function better than any of the others uh but it you know the the the but the term bipolar is commonly referred to as two active sites and it does look at the difference between the sites but um it it's quite often uh capable of training uh differential uh the sequential placement can uh end up training Mr R stuff at C4 and fast Alpha stuff at pz and you're not going to synchronize C4 and pz so you're really training two sites to create any kind of SMR content that you hey I have a question that that particular protocol so I on Monday nights I do this live stream uh neur feedback and chill where I set up myself and do a session and describe it and talk about the technique behind it and then I go into some other biohacking topic or answer questions and couple nightes ago I did C4 minus pz and I do that protocol for me at 11 and a half to 14 a 12 Hertz and I I generally notice I'm fairly sensitive to training I notice it I feel it when I when I do ner feedback and in this case I felt a little bit of you know the classic stuff a little bit of focus a little bit of activation a little bit of calmness but as I was talking so I'm answering lots of questions um I noticed that my voice got tight and I didn't think too much of it in the half an hour but it kept getting tight and I developed a little bit of vocal Strider um in response to that protocol and then it wore off but I was a little bit surprised that I had like a like a like literally a throat tightening kind of response to training C4 minus pz so I assume I did get some beta being brought up at pz through the C4 minus pz Montage does that sound plausible it depends upon what you were suppressing and what you were training as to what kind of an effect you got 4 to S 11 and A2 C pz generally has a tendency to speed up Alpha at P at pz C4 pz and fast Alpha faster than you're used to having feels a little higher function it's not quite like training beta in the same location but it's sort of it it's a very noticeable like voice effect though like I was very I started sound like RFK Jr for a second might not be the protocol that you needed you know clearly but done that before a lot actually so I was a little surprised by that particular effect but yeah since no no since nobody's asking questions then it's everybody there it's the chat room's fault for for letting me come in here's a question Radar's got one there we go dang it oh by the way I watched the Jay Gman documentary I was amazed by how much High Praise Jay got popular guy well earned I might say well you know you can't believe everything you see you know you have to be popular to get a bobblehead made out of you right lots of bobbleheads it um it it was um humbling to have the documentary done uh um and the first time I saw it I didn't know well the editors can make you look like the hero or the fool and I've been the fool a lot so I kind of halfway expected that was going to be a fair amount of it but uh they they they put a pretty good polish on on it it looked like so uh a lot less of the fool apparently good well quick quick technology question this can go to Jay and Dr Hill Jay you were making and selling amplifiers when they were size of an armoir um midcentury armir no less so so so you know little bit about the engineering and Dr Hill you know a little bit about the piie as I'm fiddling with this thing it reminds me back in the old days of the old electronics 101 set where you can take something and plug it together the the AI camera that you can plug into this thing so you can get uh facial recognition you can see object recognition so you have the camera you know looking at the face then you can do HRV bio feedback with it because you can do red level filtering that that's where where you don't need any contact you can do camera based red Lev filtering and get heartbeat off of someone's face and therefore you can do HRV with a breath Tracer and uh a visual processing you could actually build an HRV kit within within a Raspberry Pi really easily yeah HRV doesn't require any processing either it's super trivial for processing yeah so you have that and I'm going back to Jay all an amplifier is is taking something really small and making it really big right well simplification ideally sort of a simplistic way that's how you would explain it but I'm kind of a simplistic guy yeah an amplifier is going to have high high pass low pass Notch filters I mean there's all sorts of other things that you end up having in a good uh uh amplifier a box car filter how many people even have heard of a box car filter you know um but the yeah but but it's amplifying but it's it's it's filtering out all the crap right that's the big thing that you want out of it it's supposed to supposed to it sets up a window of frequencies for you to see but it keeps other frequencies out of your view and there's times that you want to see those frequencies the reason that people want to go all the way down to DC is that there are slow cortical potentials that turn on and off networks and if you filter out from one Hertz on down you don't see any of that uh you know you you can blind yourself to real content uh the reason to go up above 70 we mentioned today if you're interested in Consciousness for God's sakes go up to 150 at least in order to get gamma yeah Cliff sarin Sam project was showing 200 300 400 he pulled out some data about a thousand and show us so like there's there's Stripes of gamma just like I don't know how high it goes but it's it's definitely up to at least a thousand Hertz we got 50 kertz out of people before so it you know uh but not all of it is basically a radi transmitter at that point some some of it some of it is probably chemical uh neurotransmitters structurally uh uh more so they they they place like charged particles towards each other and they try to avoid each other so they have an oscillation because of the structure and you dopamine you you can end up having very high frequencies generated by by dopamine just the structure of it creating it oscillations um anyway we we've got um usually those kinds of frequencies are not of interest to the medical community so they want DC to 70 and that's what they've that's the window they're used to looking through um but again if you're interested in Consciousness you should look outside of the traditional medical window at some higher frequencies and I suggest going to 150 at least because gamma and ripples can be seen gamma 2 and ripples can be seen if you've got an amp that can go up to 800 like the old Nexus um you can actually with Nyquist principal see up to like maybe close to 400 Hertz but you know Nyquist principle is you have to have something sampling twice as fast as a signal you're interested in seeing is only for detection of the signal it's not for actually being able to draw the waveform of the signal you'll get a high and a low and you can see that there's something there but what's the shape of the wave you don't really know so the Nyquist principle is okay for detection but you have to have a five times over sampling if you want to start to draw some kind of a curve with some dots you know which means you can do Nur feedback back on a waveform like that because the five times oversampling smears the relationship between the wave leaving the head and the time and the processing and then the time feedback so you for those of you who are geeky on signals if you sample you do more than third third or of sampling or filters you end up breaking you smear time relationships of SES leaving the head and the information coming back and learning will go away so you can't like set up your bio Explorer and put fifth and sixth and eighth order filters on it'll work it'll seem like it's working the beeps have very little relationship ain't no Fe back yeah the beeps no longer related to the brain all that much in terms of theck the order of the firir filter being so high gets you very very very accurate but it gives you a tremendous latency yeah and uh II are are quick but they're not accurate and the fix for that is wavelets which are fast and accurate you need a whole Bank of them but you know that's easy to construct so the reason I was bringing it up things are getting so small and I wonder what the the the constraint is on the amplifier side of things to keep that small because what I'm looking at my uneducated ey is I am I am coding with something albeit this one is from the Chinese and it does work a little bit better I'm sure they're G give everything out but uh the a computer my laptop is now smaller than the size of a a cigarette pack if all the stuff is coming down what is the constraint of getting an amplifier together and somebody manufacturing this themselves and using AI to to work to measure the signals the problem is funding you know it t it takes money to manufacture something we we made a pocket siiz brain wve analyzer in 1976 nobody could believe you had a a full amp that slipped into your pocket but we didn't sell one of them which is why I went to work in the EG lab that get me all the experience I had because the company I had how do you make a small fortune and your feedback you start with a large one I I spent more money trying to manufacture stuff and into this field than see you made it to when it was the size of an armoire and had a color TV in it and a a I'm just going way back Nostalgia laye you know literally hanging out in my father's lab and I don't know what year when it was it was all wall toall and I would literally assist with the plugging in and out and soling you know when I was like that that tall but no I think it's you know this is just advancement and you know we'll get a small as as long as we can operationalize the the components you can go as small as you can go so technology begets technology in terms of how Nano we get I you know the one somebody asked me for the circuit diagram what we had made so that they could make one and I said well we were using op amps to build an instrumentation amp you can get an instrumentation amp on a chip now and so what we made with great difficulty with two boards squeezed into a into something that slip in your pocket uh uh you can buy it on a chip and that chip if it's a good chip with a very high sampling rate and a multiplexer you can have one ship of an amp ship that is Multiplex similarly to what brain Master does with their amp you have one ship and you Multiplex through it so lots of channels sample and hold and and that you reconstruct them so you know that that good instrumentation amp and a multiplexer and you you'd have you know lots and lots and lots of channels VJ just P me a $20 I I would suggest if you got if you get an amp that does multiplexing you can't do remontage with error being roduced so uh the get an amp that's got a chip for every channel so to ensure prompt service uh VJ asked the last question and we'll split can we talk about infow when is training when is training more beneficial than other waves are there Downstream effects on infr slow from training other waves um what's what kind of training is more beneficial probably the one that your brain needs and the the only way you know which one your brain needs is to actually look uh you need to have an an evaluation uh that can point to what needs to be trained up or down or the relationship between areas that needs to be changed and that's going to guide your training your brain and a good analysis will guide you as to what to train and uh as as far as do infr slow trainers even bother Within with a they don't look at they're they're symptom based they don't look at EEG qeg but there's that's changing slowly that's why I'm quiet on this it's it's not it's not my modality I mean yeah mine either I'm familiar with it but don't use it and same same my perspective ejs a couple of use cases where it seems to work really well watching what Sue Ur did I think the profound autism over aroused nervous system is a good Target and I'm seeing a lot of trauma informed therapists using it with good success but I don't think it's as I mean I'm biased as you know but maybe all of us here are but I don't think it's as nuanced a tool or as me as as operatable a tool as as as contr forc quieting just it's forced quieting I think they're still learning learning what they're doing you know that where to train what frequency tuning to get and all of that is still being hammered out uh there there's some schools of thought that are more advanced than others uh but uh as a as a signal the infr slow content is is critical for brain function uh the the thing is Europe filtered out all the high frequencies and only looked at the slow cortical potentials but in the US we filtered out slow cortical potentials and only looked at the oscillatory EEG you don't know brain function until you put those two together you know that Consciousness is the relationship between those two but to vj's question do you need to worry about training both of them or since you're training a system can you get away you know can you benefit from just doing perhaps one in in fact uh there there isn't any systematic um uh method to say which technique to pick over the other at this point there's no gigantic uh Kentucky Horse Race that's been run with all of the techniques uh with not even little bit of presentations I mean that the the combination permutation to to assess that is just too complicated and when when they're studying neuro feedback they usually require you to do a specific protocol for the group well which basically means you're no longer studying neuro feedback practice you're studying a technique but you're not studying the the the clinical practice of neuro feedback and that's that's what my none of this is per se I mean that's that's what I would what I would suggest is that it has to be personalized and they say well that's you know how can you study that well you set up ahead of time how you personalize it you have a set of rules individual yeah so it could be done but good luck getting the funding for that they quit funding NE feedback really in the early 70s and although they've tossed a few million at it lately with again one protocol fits all Theta beta um you know it's it's not how the field works so um you know it's not really a good test of anything last question last question last question and this goes out to all the patreon people I've been calling up for support are there any consumer devices you would recommend for EG measurement or do they just not have the clinical based accuracy are we recommending products here well it depends upon what you're going to use it for as to whether it's adequate for the task you know if if what you want to do is sit in front of a computer and Float a little image of a ball up and down uh most of them are adequate for that yeah you know um if you want to do an Erp the EG amp doesn't have to be very good at all the EG is noise to Erp you know so it's reliability and validity to your purpose right I mean of us can up jump up and and down on that and some of the interesting debates amongst practitioners is just what you know Jay was saying you know is it good enough for for what we're trying to do but I think all of us agree that you know without naming specific producers but there there's a lot that's just this flushed hogwash um and and and those ones are dangerous right I'll name them if they support me yeah you can't you can't get into the EG space in a usable way for under or a grand or two generally um there are devices out there people will do it for a buck you know yeah but there are there are devices out there that problem is people who do it for thousands and thousands and don't know how to use it what it's doing right right you can get an open BCI gangon board for 100 bucks or something and you have to learn a lot about EEG you have to already be an expert to use it exactly or you can spend because people ask me all the time what I want to come back with hey look we here's this manufacturer here's they spent an hour with us here's what they said check it out make your own decisions yeah we not going to have that in our field because it's all nichy fraction well I know my product's better than your product but we're no no not even that there's just not enough people buying it and so there's just no product maturity there's you know there's 15,000 providers Max including the prosumers there's probably only 30,000 installs of software and Hardware in in the whole world you know actively being used it's just a niche and there's just no pressure no development pressure no Financial pressure you know the field is smaller now than it was last year or two years ago because of everyone aging out and dying who started the field that's what I discovered if you're selling into a niche market you can go broke yeah you sell one to everybody your Market's gone yeah when you don't have another one to sell because everyone's got one you you don't really have a business anymore but you can provide service to a niche market and people require service again and again and again and again so I I quit trying to manufacture EG stuff and allowed people to use whatever EG stuff was out there there were some that I wouldn't accept because they were just you know the amp wasn't safe to have hooked up to a person and I didn't want to have any liability so I wouldn't accept anything from some amps but there are some standards for little wearable things that you can look at that kind of tell you whether the engineering is kind of better than others if you see a solid metal disc for a for an electrode probably not a good one um solid metal has contact Jitter and if it's got a polymer coating then it's not really a dry sensor it's a damp sensor there's some moisture held in that polymer and that's that's a partial salt bridge so if you see one that's got a coating on it that's a step up from something that's a solid metal and those are easy to spot just with a naked eye look at The Amp look at the electrode that the device has if it looks shiny in metal you probably don't have a better design if you see one that's got a a polymer coating they've thought a couple of times about contact Jitter and how to get around it yeah anything beats a needle know maybe should go back to needle it's what we started with but it's not what we wanted to stay with that's for sure so Dr Hill you got a good product where do we send people to to see your remote or take a look at your remote uh yeah come check us out at Peak brain institute.com uh which is Peak brain LA and all the socials or come watch me on YouTube at Dr Hill D RH l l where I do weekly live streams just demoing your feedback and talking about biohacking the brain and that's Monday we'll put the link right here I recommend it highly little little Coop petition Dr M swingle how do people check out imines well yeah that you can kind of get anywhere you know check out your store uh check it out on on online yeah yeah and the swingle app uh the app swingle Sonic swingles sonic.com yeah good day on and don't even try Jay's too busy all right everybody Hollow thanks for stopping by I got your questions on TMS here we're going to do a show in the morning and may and I and I'll bring these up take care all and hey Dr Hill glad you're still there baby and all of our friends at C yeah that's right we're we're we're still here we're hanging in I look forward to the TMS questions I was on the planning committee for the clinical TMS assy for five years until my brain popped a leak and I couldn't get to their meetings anymore so um it's a little side interest of mine um well GL podcast I'm glad you found the cork everyone have a great night see see you guys in the morning you love my humor Dr Hill that's right okay by the way just a heads up