Neuroscientist Dr Andrew Hill

i've got premium quality brain food for you now from a brainiac of the highest order dr andrew hill is one of the world's leading practitioners of neurofeedback what that is and how he uses it to sharpen focus cut anxiety lift mood and brain fog that pesky old brain fog all that and the ecstatic practice of west african drumming that is going to blow your mind and the mind body-powered of ashtanga yoga he's going to be telling us all about that as well as some top biohacks to get your brain at its healthy best over the years hello dr andrew how are you i'm well thanks for having me it's nice to be here yeah absolutely we've had some false starts with this we tried five times we had a blizzard of technical issues so everyone out there needs to just keep everything crossed for us that everything proceeds smoothly away we go on this so let's start with neurofeedback what is it okay neurofeedback is basically a way of um changing the brain through exercising either brain waves which are called eeg or blood flow which are called heg or hemoencephalous so you can measure different aspects of the brain moment to moment and shape their activity and this was something discovered in how it's used today maybe 55 years ago in the late 60s and served by mistake and we use it today to go after sort of tuning the brain like you might tune the body up so you can go after resources of sleep stress or attention pretty effectively it was discovered because it reduces seizures actually so it's still used a fair amount to work on epilepsy and other related seizure disorders and it tends to work pretty well on the gross you know regulatory features of brain fog speed of processing sleep stress attention but how does it actually work i mean how do you get the feedback with what tools yeah so in the classic case of eeg biofeedback or neurofeedback on the eeg or the electricity you might decide based on goals to exercise or shape or change the brain where you would bring down theta brain waves and bring up beta brain waves let's say so executive function beta what's the difference there so we have little modes and modules that little bits of tissue can run in and we have billions of little cpus essentially that are combining and recombining all the time until engines and some have dedicated roles and some have roles that are very modular and can be turned on and off and recombined and they all each of them have brain waves that they can operate in and often they do a mix of brain waves at once things that range from delta which is deep metabolic sleep and energy and the heart and lungs being run and cell metabolism all the way up through things called gamma at the high end which is where potentially some aspects of consciousness might lie but in between those you can get a really clear sense of basic resources by looking through the scalp so in a lot of neurofeedback these days is practiced alongside a tool set called quantitative eeg or qeg which is an assessment so if we did a qeg we might get a sense of how unusual your brain is and that would give us some targets of things you might want to then manipulate or shape or intervene in some way so how do you do it though do you how do you measure it do you stick to stick things to the scalp well not magnets but little little metal wires so we have little silver or other metal wires in the case of doing uh neurofeedback you might stick a couple ear clips on let's say one wire on a spot on a spot on the right hand side that's involved in knowing if you're paying attention and also involved with pumping the brakes on being impulsive and staging in and out of deep sleep and and aspects of sleep so that tissue that little module is going to run gonna help you pay attention and not go squirrel using beta waves and it's going to release behavior and let things happen with more theta waves in fact if you look in children the ratio of theta to beta at that spot predicts adhd about 94 accuracy you can blindly sort uh adhd and non-adhd people into buckets so wait theta is what ph or is it theta th th theta okay so in order of going from slow to fast delta is deep metabolism it's the heartbeat of the brain it's deep dreamless sleep and it keeps all the basic stuff in the brain and body kind of working and then you go to theta which is next delta is twice per second roughly two cycles or two hertz per second theta is about four to seven maybe and theta is lubrication it releases things to happen and within that four to seven hertz range you have different specific frequencies that might do stuff so it's not one thing like six and a half hertz is a moment of releasing uh insight for some people you can bubble up memories that way um the alpha which is a rest mode alpha's a oversimplified category we call many things alpha but you can think of alpha like the car in the driveway running uh fine but not going anywhere yet so that's alpha it's an idling a rest in between mode it's a central frequency in some ways to the brain it's also your speed of processing subjectively um needing delta in order to get the car out of the driveway you need to make delta sufficiently at night to then have your alpha run at appropriate speed when you're awake so you can then shift into your beta modes which are the gas pedals across all the little motors and engines and things your brain might want to do you control it yeah so beta waves are more modular you have little bits of tissue we have things called the default mode network and the executive fund function network and the salience network big rich hubs rich clubs of tissue that connect to other parts of the brain take experience in from sensory tissues and then devi uh design behavior and execute on it so what are you seeing as someone who's reading the the amount of electricity the amounts of weight like if you stick a wire on the head and you measure the amount of electricity you're seeing a little squiggle and that squiggles a mix of theta waves which have a four times per second little shape and alpha waves which are 10 times per second beta waves which are like 12 to maybe 20 or 30 times per second you see mixes of weight squiggles and you're predicting you're you're you're measuring how many times the little bit of tissue the micro column in the cortex is firing is discharging little burst electricity and 30 000 neurons and about twenty five to fifty thousand allele cells create this computational unit that all fires at once it all produces a rhythmic little burst in some frequency a little electrical discharge and the one when you go from brain to brain to brain let's say you've got five people lined up and you're giving them this q e q e g you said q e g quantitative e g yeah q e g and you're seeing the rhythms that are produced um can you instantly see oh wow this is happening for this person that depends yeah sometimes some things some some gross things like if you open if you closed your eyes i would expect the back of your head to produce lots of alpha because that's the visual tissue the occipital cortex and there's nothing coming in in when your eyes are closed so most people produce this nice 10 hertz robust alpha at the back occipital tissue if you don't that's a little unusual i might predict that and visually you can see alpha that's why i picked this example or when you open the eyes if the alpha stays nice and high doesn't suppress and get replaced with beta that's another phenomena that's inattentiveness visually versus hyper vigilance because you can't shut it off so you can sort of see a flavor of anxiety perhaps or a flavor of inattentiveness perhaps based on the amount of the alpha showing up as a healthy thing not showing up persisting when it shouldn't et cetera and qeg takes your recording so cap on your head squirt it full of gel have you sit still for 10 minutes or so eyes closed 10 minutes or so eyes open out of that you then compare all the resting amounts of brain wave speeds of brain waves and connectivity patterns to a database of people that are age-matched for you and we see how weird susan is so but you know it's weird yeah well people are that's the thing the job here is not to say why aren't you average to say oh here's some unusual stuff let's decide or let's some explore some possibilities around how your brain might work and so it is very uh modeling driven not diagnostically valid for almost anything maybe with the exception of some executive function things but how can you get a baseline for me if if i only go into your site you um you have a you call it the peak brain institute that's your hq in los angeles and you've got these let's call them brain gyms all around the world where practitioners are are performing these qegs [Music] i i'm just wondering what would what would you use as a baseline for me because don't you need something qualitative to compare well i would use an age-matched sample i would have i would pick a reference data set that was comprised of people your age primarily and then had some sort of mathematical average brain created out of a mix of people your age people that are a little older people a little bit younger and basically measured what is average for how fast alpha alpha is a good a good example alpha waves are the idle speed like the car in the driveway and alpha is around 10 hertz for humans for adult humans around 10 cycles per second however it slows down a little bit it speeds up as you hit 2025 it hits its maximum speed as the neurons finish their insulation their myelination and you finish uh sort of doing all the building up of the brain and getting the most um a final bit of the frontal lobe built in your early 20s the brain tops out at around 10 hertz for most people and then it slows down a little bit as you lose cell tissue and as you lose some myelination later in life it starts to slow down does it slow down in very recognizable stages across the age groups it does it does absolutely yeah there's two things sure let's let's go through the different decades and what happens with each well um let me give you a very specific example within eeg because electro eeg is a very broad area it means a lot of ways so there's one particular thing in the eg which is really well understood in a lot of across the different domains of of the brain it's called the p300 wave so about 300 milliseconds after you see something you're interested in or you notice or you're attending to or you observe or you decide about there's a positive little inflection so it's not the ongoing brainwaves the the endogenous sort of like background machinery doing the machinery stuff it's evoked by the outside world or induced by something you've decided so it's a little like event related potential it's called erp and you can measure the erp for one person so you hear beep you know if i said to you susan i want you to listen for the unusual beeps you know et cetera whenever you heard that unusual one your p300 way would change get bigger and a little faster because i was tuning into it or yeah you were noticing as the interesting thing okay and the difference in the background one and the interesting one has a certain amount of height you know and how fast it comes online based on after you notice the information that's your attention your dopamine your your alerting you're grabbing information and it's a very robust thing in humans and as you get older and older the p300 starts to drop in amplitude fewer cells come online when you notice stuff and the peak of it goes from 300 milliseconds starts to drift so as you go up in decades you know you might start in your 20s when it's maximal speed maximal amplitude the most cell bodies the most robust firing the fastest tissue you might have that thing in about 300 milliseconds and maybe it's got an amplitude of 25 or 30 microvolts it's a really big little wave um well this is a big wave and then by the time you're in your 70s it might have dropped by 30 40 50 milliseconds and be slower and the height of it the amplitude of the wave might be blunted you might only have like a two-thirds of that amplitude left so this is just the ravages of age attacking it's losing cell tissue well there's two things there's the speed of processing the speed of the alpha the speed of the index of the brain slows down broadly as you lose cell bodies you also have different aspects of communication difference between the brain because of things like wear and tear and how you use your brain et cetera so some of it is just aging and speed of processing this gets back to idea of quantitative eeg speeder processing is a predictable thing so is the p300 changing across decade i could predict roughly how old somebody was based on how fast their p300 and how you know big it was for instance if i had enough people with you know that p300 wave and there are databases obsessed you know lined up 10 people not being able to see their faces or their bodies blindfolded them and then done the neurofeedback and been able to predict i can look at it i look at thousands of brains and i do cold reads yeah all the time because lots of my colleagues say here's a brain and i'm like oh looks like this this and that's happening maybe this and oh ask about this and that's usually right most of it's right you know when you do a cold read but people are weird so it's not perfect it's like you don't want to diagnose off of this kind of stuff you want to come up with ideas and if they ring true then you found something so in the case of alpha waves if i looked at your alpha waves and say oh susan your alpha waves compared to the average person your age are running about a standard deviation slower on a bell curve that's a little unusual just statistically it's a true statement a little slower alpha waves that's your speed of processing which might be a normal variance so anxious making well maybe well hold that thought hold that thought hold that judgment don't attach um if i showed you that i wouldn't know what it meant it might be normal variant maybe you're built this way maybe you've been this way your whole life maybe you just got a chill car you got six cylinders not 12. who cares runs fine or did i get back to my point you know baseline maybe well i would ask you something i would predict something from this i would say oh you're alpha waves slower than average this is often an indication that our speed of processing is slowing down too fast faster than you want it to slow down are you experiencing word finding issues tip of the tongue phenomena hunting for words and names forgetting things you were just told and if you were like oh my gosh yeah i'm hunting for words all day long ah then this alpha speed i'm seeing is slower for you than you want it to be slower than average probably slower than it used to be for you aha performance opportunity can i just put my hand up and say eighty percent yes that's happening a lot if that shows yeah but it's really really befuddling though because and you read about all the menopausal issues and you think is this just because of my hormones jumping around and not doing maybe not performing my hypothalamus is not getting enough of something or because honestly it is the worst probably not getting enough delta waves at night deep sleep at night and therefore your brain runs tired during the day um okay well listen do you know what i want to park all this because of course i want you to run through what we can all do in order to maximize optimize our brain health and to you know beat back some of this slow processing etcetera and i know you've got lots of habits well that's what i'm saying if you if you you shouldn't be dismayed if you find things that are real on a brain map because if you find things that are real and by the way alongside the qeg we always do an executive function test which is very interpretable very readable for distractibility and impulsivity and things like that so the two tools give us a way to understand some things that might be true i think you you kind of know it's true and then if you find things that are real you can change them almost always almost always understanding brains is hard but changing brains is not that hard no i love this but first i do want to flush out your background because you you know we don't hear about neurofeedback all that much the brain has been your thing for a number of years and and i want to you know tell people a little bit more about the brain institute before we get into all of the hacks and all of the exercises and what we can do over the decades because hq in la you set that up some years ago but i want you to chart your path for us from the lecture halls at ucla uh where you did your phd in cognitive neuroscience to establishing your institute and i wouldn't mind it at all if you would tell me the lovely story um about your epiphany at 28 but before that about what happened to your brother the accident that led you to start really thinking about i need to be studying brains so i i did go to ucla you know professionally i i started a little bit late later in life in my mid-30s in grad school uh there and that was after having spent 20 uh 10 or 15 20 years in mental health across different aspects um i worked in patients in acute psychiatric facilities for several years i worked in addiction centers i worked in aging units locked facilities i worked in child units and all of that was after working in residential facilities with people with multiple disabilities who had very little communication no language often we're deaf or blind often were profoundly mentally disabled and had multiple things going on so i grew up in massachusetts where there's a couple of states in the country in the us that tend to have led the mental health and or health and wellness stuff historically both good and bad and massachusetts was one of the first states to develop these state institutions called state schools where they put all the folks that had mental disabilities and they were also the first state to then get rid of those state schools and move them to group homes and people into co-living with roommates for modeling healthy behavior and stuff like that but i was working for an organization years ago that had some of the most profoundly impaired people as they moved out of those state school institutions and so we spent years working with folks that had very little communication skill no language were either deaf or blind or both and had developmental disabilities that were quite severe two or three for living in a house and i ran a home for a few years i mean i we spent a year teaching somebody to use a fork that was that was a big accomplishment and after some time in that uh landscape jimmy after some time in that landscape i went back and uh jimmy uh grab me for one moment here no worries grab grab some water i might need some tooth cause we talked we talked so much as yes before we we started recording um so and you also you had your well snowy massachusetts your brother's accident when he was yeah so uh i ended up going into mental health and working in mental health to some extent because i was really curious about how the brain worked my my brother had had uh sustained a an accident when we were very young i think he was in first grade or something which is about oh i don't know uh six or seven years old or something in the u.s um and he sledded into the street and was hit by a car was in a coma for several weeks and had some difficulties with obviously with his function afterwards but a few things around how acutely his you know state changes consciousness change was uh demonstrated to me and also losing how a very losing a very small part of his brain created a lot of challenges in terms of specific challenges uh in the year two after he recovered from that and then as he came out of a coma how he had to sort of spend time with sensory stuff with motor stuff it's very obvious very kind of like this is interesting it's almost like the brain is knocked back a decade or something or several years into a childlike state in some ways and he was having to then move back through that stuff now he was young enough that he was relatively plastic and those things did change and change back and he you know happy happy end of that particular story he graduated from college many years later he's got a full-time job wife and three kids and you know has a great very fulfilling life so he managed to move beyond a brain injury as a kid um but the how sudden how dramatic his experience was was uh very attention getting for me and started to raise questions around this mysterious thing that we carry around that we didn't understand and you know this is in the 70s uh we understood it very or maybe the early 80s very very poorly back then we still don't understand the brain that well now but back then it was you know 40 whatever years ago was very very uh even more mysterious in terms of how it how it works and what brain injuries do and you know we still have working from a psychiatric approach as well weren't you in pharmacological approach psych pharma and all that when you're in these various institutions it was all about i mean correct me if i'm wrong but diagnosing the disorders and then well i yeah i was working as a psych tech in inpatient psychiatric hospitals and it was it was very much you know working through diagnostic language with psychiatrists and [Music] psych nurses and then managing acute behavior and helping do work with case management towards discharge and planning but a whole you know people coming in with everything from extreme psychosis caused by drugs to schizophrenia to extreme self harm uh across all age groups you know so i saw a lot of very acute things and people whose brains and whose person whose capacity across different aspects their brains were cramping up or falling over were having difficulty were being traumatized and i got a very you know unfortunately rich and deep and broad education in how human suffering and human dysregulation occurs yeah that's really what that's really what i attribute my understanding the brain to honestly i i did a undergraduate degree a bachelor's focus on neuroscience and finished it like 1993 or something and then went and spent all this time working in really acute psychiatric and brain focused work and learned so much just by working with people whose brains were not operating the way that they would want them to honestly but i understand from from reading some of the things you've written um at peak brain l.a when you were 28 you had an epiphany of sorts because you had your own struggle with uh hyperactivity oh yeah i was severely severely adhd like the worst you've seen on the planet uh probably uh i mean i i have worked with attention professionally for now many many years i have never seen a you know severely adhd kid that was worse than me basically growing up and i kept that all throughout college and you know part of why i went and worked in these acute environments is because i was very skilled at working with people and because i was very skilled at working across different challenges and that's sort of fed to the you know it's the same reason that people with severe adhd go into sports or other high stimulus things because under high stimulus you're sort of using some of your strengths and you're not only hit by the weaknesses or the the challenges of adhd but i i ended up defined then though so the whole yeah in 1984 in 84 the um i mean there's the dsm and then there's also the colloquial understanding of it it was pretty well the diagnostic and statistical manual the the list of diagnoses that are used often um to kind of categorize what thing is like adhd for instance but in 1984 there was a revision of that manual and psychiatrists got rid of the label adb which we still use but um colloquially but there's no longer anything called add it hasn't been for many many years now but yeah at that time i mean i grew up in the 70s where it wasn't early early childhood so to speak where it was not well understood and had somebody spotted me then they may have been some different interventions i wish someone taught me to meditate or give me some nerve feedback in the 70s uh would have been a life-changing thing back then but i mean how were you as a kid and as a 28 year old then were you just all over the shop you couldn't focus you were distracted sure and moving nine thousand times faster than almost everyone around me in almost every way you know chewing through books and i mean but the thing is i didn't have any difficulty as a student because nothing took any effort to uh until at least maybe the end of college where i had to spend a little bit of effort but nothing took any effort because i just had a broad you know love for everything so i just dug into everything and chewed through it moved on to the next thing and stuff that was difficult the stuff that took structure and stuff that took uh you know practice those were difficult things but knowledge and just basic learning weren't those things generally so so early on then in your career after you've done the phd in neurosciences in neuroscience and you did you were teaching as well at ucla in gerontology as well as um incognito um then why did you why did you latch onto neurofeedback as the better way to help people well i started off working in neurofeedback before grad school i had been working in all these acute different environments with developmental issues i had worked in acute environments with inpatient psychiatric and then i got injured and ended up leaving working the acute inpatient environment because i couldn't do it anymore uh so after a couple years i i went to high tech for a couple years and missed working with humans and went and found a job that sort of combined those aspects and it worked in an autism center that did neurofeedback i'd heard about it a couple years just curious about it and so i went back into uh human services working in a neurofeedback center and it was maybe 80 autism and 20 adhd in this development center in providence rhode island um but what kind of injury did you have oh i had a back injury working in the psychiatric hospital doing uh restraints i you know was a very understaffed heavily it was a most violent hospital massachusetts has since closed but mental health care was getting rapidly under rapidly defunded essentially and the way insurance was supporting things and hospitals were falling over left and right in the 90s so i was working in one of those environments and just got injured basically as can happen and laughed and then came back a few years later into mental health but into outpatient and since i had such a rich experience working with children working with developmental issues the autism center nearby was sort of like yeah come come work here because you're really good with these hard hard population and i'm pretty good with kids you know so i had a great experience working there but what i started seeing was all the adhd and all the anxiety and all the seizures all the sensory issues drop away in a few weeks and months and i was like wait a minute this does not match my experience of what is possible with developmental populations what's going on this is this is great this is crazy um i still struggle though to figure out how you get to that point because you map the brain and then well let's say we looked at your brain let's say we looked at your brain and saw that you had a lot of theta brain waves over regions involved with paying attention and you couldn't stay on task and you also reported not staying deeply asleep and being scattered and you wanted to work on that stuff i'd say okay great sounds like you should bring up your beta and bring down some theta over the right hand side that'll probably produce executive function changes so again we have a personal training metaphor here not a diagnostic and not a medical i have the answer one it's oh here's some goals great i think we see some goals in your data oh and we of course test your executive function so we'd probably see that you were also impulsive you made errors on a task when you meant to pump the brakes you instead clicked or something so these tests be like you know what have you look at a number as it popped up on the screen right and it'll be a one or a two and uh i might speak it over the speakers or one or two and every other about once per second for 20 minutes one two two one one two and and just click the mouse when the one comes up and don't click the mouse when the two comes up just that just that for 20 minutes will tease apart the ways in which your executive function falls over the ways in which you miss things are the ways in which you click by mistake is it auditory is it visual short versus long term are there trends do you correct them do you get people that are using it in an anticipatory way because i know when i'm getting my test not really because i'm anticipating it's coming so then i use the clip not really because the time the landscape the time scaling of this test is slow enough that your automatic resources have just gone offline there's nothing to push back against so within a few trials you you just kind of get into the rhythm like trying to identify what it is identify you prepare identify respond yes people overreact but there's 400 plus trials and we get the sort of sense of the different ways in which you're falling over again and again and again not just once or twice and we pick up inattention and pick up impulsivity as well as auditory processing stuff and visual processing stuff that teases out as a speed of processing and other stuff like that so that would be then compared to a normative database and say look compared to other people your age you're like two standard deviations below average for how squirrel you are that might be in the way oh look your brain maps a lot of theta brain waves to this right hand side that usually comes along with impulsivity we have a target you want to work on this impulsivity you do okay so now we have a target bring down the theta bring up the beta the right hand motor cortex so stick a wire on the head and put two ear clips on and then watch something on the screen like a little game or animation puzzle pieces or pac-man or a spaceship or a race car and whenever your brain happens to make less theta and more beta for half a second the computer goes oh good job brain and makes the game start moving or move better so it's like a reward reinforcement exactly what it is yeah it's operant conditioning it's operant conditioning yeah and that's the exercise that you use to strengthen this deficit area yes however you can't control your brain waves you can't feel them so it's involuntary the computer's applauding what you just did the brain's like oh hey wait a minute whenever i drop my theta stuff's happening that's weird cool okay because the brain has no idea this is not like a random new car you're learning to drive or a musical instrument or something else it's like wait something's happening it's reacting to me the brain notices that the mind does not just like when you're a little baby and you're flopping around and suddenly something random happens and you push yourself up in a push-up and you're like whoa i can see a lot further cool if your mind notices seeing a lot further you don't think later on that day oh wait gotta activate my right shoulder my left bicep and make him happy you just do the thing and you learn to move so the brain after three or four sessions of neurofeedback of having your theta applauded whenever it dips the beta applauded whenever it climbs after three or four sessions your brain's like i'm gonna reach for that and it drops the theta and it rises the beta and you're like oh i feel calm and focused this is interesting but if you link to your thought you know and intend to do that no no your theta is changing moment to moment your beta is changing moment to moment whenever it happens to go down the computer applauds you your theta for instance and then every few seconds you move the goal posts so it's shaping it saying yay okay now not even less make less theta great good job good job good job make less now there you go good job good job good job the brain's like this is cool the brain likes input over when given a choice over a lack of input yeah any input even annoying input is better than no input according to the brain generally well let's go to that thing that happens to a lot of midlife women when estrogen and progesterone tanks and testosterone as well menopause perimenopause when that's happening for women in their early 40s late 40s 50s and then they have actual menopause what's going on with the brain there in the main and because many women say oh my goodness out of the blue and these are high achieving women people who have had no issues and even people who are just going about their daily lives and suddenly their brains feel as if they've become toffee or molasses or sponge and they're not able to reach for the words you know just basic everyday words yeah speed of processing it's the speed of the alpha but how is it linked hormonally here's the thing it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't matter in terms of fixing it um the reason that you're having word finding issues may be because you're north of 45 or 50 and a woman it also might be because you had a concussion or you had covet or you could expose to lyme or mold or chemotherapy you've had trauma a lot and your deep sleep is tanked there's a thousand reasons we experience this stuff so again diagnostically if you i think you're having some difficulty with hormone regulation and the mechanism there is progesterone not being produced tanks the quality of sleep regulation specifically deep sleep without deep sleep you can't mix you know you're having alpha waves slow down without alpha waves being present for a smooth idle you can't shift between gears you can't find words you can't load them into your mind and move them into working memory but if you have a progesterone issue you want to adjust your progesterone go see your endocrinologist go talk to your doctor you know figure out if you want to approach that figure out if there's an hrt strategy that makes sense for you based on history family genes history of cancer the the pluses versus the minus is very nuanced very important stuff are you familiar with dr lisa moscone's work um she's finding how estrogen decline affects women's brains at menopause irrespective of their age when menopause happens it's a temporary thing yeah but it's really she's over generalizing is my short take on it it's really linked to women who give birth and a whole cascade of particular hormone things that happen when you bear children and have men and then go menopausal to different kind of progression and aging than women who don't have children um and also the thing that happens is not specific to women's brains and it's not specific to menopause that's what i'm saying i think she's trying to think though eventually uh more women get dementia yeah it's not that's not about estrogen that's an autoimmune thing women have autoimmune function stuff that is dramatically enhanced they have a raging immune system for a bunch of reasons if you give birth if you bear children your immune system goes up even higher you have autoimmune priming because you have bits of dna around your tissue from on that aren't yours women have autoimmune stuff and most forms of classic dementia are not diseases the way infectious diseases they are metabolic diseases so alzheimer's most forms like parkinsonian stuff uh frontal temple dementias they're not diseases of infection they are metabolic and if you have autoimmune stuff dramatically accelerated so i think all of her stuff is dramatically over generalized and has almost nothing to do she she found something that is a driver for a more common phenomenon is hanging a lot of ideas on it yes women's brains are different and go through a climacteric change in midlife sudden drop of hormones very destabilizing feels really uncomfortable just like yet for some women like a concussion especially with the sleep concussion that can last for two decades well it can if you don't address it but again the phenomena is what i care about not the reason for it unless there's something keeping it going and i know the metabolic theories as well because i had sam apple the author of ravenous on here and i've had a lot of you know top tier scientists who are talk we're talking about metabolic syndrome and they're saying well that's my take as a gerontologist that most forms of dementia are metabolic my my form my perspective as a gerontologist for aging women is they are more prone to dementia because of increased activity of the innate immune system amyloid is an immune molecule it's not a poisonous molecule it's an immune molecule it's used to keep the body free of microbes to some extent in fact environments where you have high apoe4 papua new guinea for instance populations mostly apoe4 the traditional diet is mostly starchy tubers high sugar high starch and there's very very low rates of alzheimer's and atherosclerosis there because the amyloid's being used to fight the dirty microbial environment but you put somebody in a clean environment and fill them full of sugar and the amyloid just oxidizes into stuff that destroys the brain well and there you just mentioned it the sugar because they're saying that alzheimer's is the third diabetes it's inflamed it's inflammation as well as a big driver and women have more inflammation because they have a more active immune system essentially slightly i i really do think it's that simple and i think that you're seeing the estrogen progesterone drops precipitating unveiling the phenomena provoking more of a phenomena right then but i don't think it's that dissimilar than what's happening in long covet or in post-concussion syndrome in the nfl or in a mold exposure that's significant or lyme co-infections that are significant and linger i think it causes the same phenomena for brains brain fog slow processing alpha slowing down but we can we can arrest it or slow the onset of the the consequences of this by um having had having deficient hormones estrogen progesterone we can augment those we can use um perhaps metaphors hormones yeah not it doesn't make sense for every woman of course because of genetics and because of some some hormone there are trade-offs in all hrt of course but it does seem to produce better health statuses for most women long term but the mechanism for speeder processing is often as simple as progesterone being supported to improve improve deep sleep which then speeds up speed of processing deep sleep lack of deep sleeps that happen the handbrake on in your car all the time so enough deep sleep you release the handbrake things run smoother the alpha runs smoother you have this you know let's go into that a little bit more for for men and for women i mean i won't keep banging on both yesterday um because um we could go all over the shelf with that i i well i'm not a hormone expert you know so but i also don't don't think it matters that much i don't care why your sleep issues there if you're really mid i work with women all the time because it's it's been precipitated by menopause this sleep issue this brain fog this word finding issue so let's just work on the resources and tune them up getting better sleep habits what do you suggest that everyone do in order to optimize their brain function via sleep yeah so i i think that really leaning into the circadian signaling the the information the brain has about what time of day it is is pretty critical and a lot of health stuff that is sub-optimal for performance throughout life as well as things that accelerate aging things that sap uh learning memory growth and performance um are around the circadian system the the brain circadian or about a day rhythm and the earth photo period which is a day those things are synchronized in theory human brains tend to run about 25 26 27 28 hours in natural circadian rhythm and there's a one particular set of structures that will synchronize a bunch of clocks and then the cascading synchronization happens and it's imperfect and there's several signals that will compete a little bit to tell you what time of day it is and over many days the brain will sum and extract the information start to get a sense of okay it's this time of day and adjust and if we're not well regulated if the brain is trying to move into different modes uh hormonally with circadian perspective you know ramping up and down different brain waves etc for different state changes it causes very strange things and generally not great things in terms of health and wellness um the intermittent fasting stuff with regards to the biohackers and anti-agers and things there's a big push in the intermittent fasting world to let's say a simple if window would be 16 8 where you're fasting for 16 hours and then eating with an eight it's pretty typical and for by the way for premenopausal women i do not recommend the window as narrow as eight hours unless you're trying for some specific purpose women tend to suppress young women hormonal production really easily by overdoing caloric restriction or time restriction on uh or fat restriction so there's really this isn't a little far afield here but the three ways i when i think about biohacking with regards to food i think about partitioning three different things time calories and macros and you can play with them all to create signaling in the body and that can be really useful for manipulating insulin resistance or causing a body a composition change or helping you with a performance goal or something but those are important for regulating brain health aging performance broadly especially with regards to figuring out when uh some different ideas than than what many of us are doing because i focused a lot on the big middle on menopause and intermittent fasting time restricted eating and you know lowering carbohydrates in a therapeutic way in order to set you up for optimal so and i know that you don't believe in chronotypes and all of this so if you can pull all of that together for me sure what do you think let's say perimenopausal women what are we maybe doing now when we're skipping breakfast in order to elongate our resting our fasting window i understand that you don't think that's the right way to go um i don't i i think that you should be having more of a fasting window at the end of the day than the beginning of the day and broadly the research shows this you can find papers on e-trf early trf it's called where there is improved outcome metabolically when you have a fasting window at the end of your day that's longer versus the beginning every day i mean think about it if you're able to fast let's say starting at noon or something or 2 p.m you get those hours before bed and then you get all of the time you were sleeping it's a longer chunk of time generally than if you flipped it and if you just you know eat until 9 p.m at night and then you eat again at like noon or something you know you get more time more low insulin because our family and social structures are so tipped in they are they are and there's a urge for carbohydrates as the insulin drops you know whenever insulin drops we have an urge to eat and a bunch of things will will cause insulin to drop one is having just eaten and store storing you know sugar causing some insulin to drop so after you snack you want to snack some more but another thing you know as you get uh if you're if you're well timed a couple couple things tied together one is the strongest exogenous q from the outside world strongest cue for circadian rhythm is not light it's not when you sleep it's when you eat by far by far it's a strong signal so you've got to eat in the time zone you want to live in or you're going to screw yourself up so this regular trf is practiced by biohackers and by many of the gurus we'll have people eating quite late and if you go to bed with any insulin the thai any blood sugar that's high at all you suppress growth hormone completely being released now humans that are young humans have some growth hormone and a giant pulse a few hours after they fall asleep humans our age we have almost we have none and then one little pulse that happens a couple hours after we fall asleep in length how did the separation be then between the last meal are you saying four o'clock that's it and then i'm saying at least like three hours if you're just regulated and if you're eating a bed at least three hours of no calories and you may need more it depends on your goals the goals for fasting yeah people's need for managing macronutrients managing calories and managing time is dramatically different one to the next based on goals if you had a seizure disorder i'd be giving you very different instructions than if you just wanted to like look good uh at uh you know next time focus on regions let's say that that's it and word processing failure or you know intermittent word processing issues so brain fog let's let's focus on that yeah what would you suggest because i would track sleep quality and i would have you track ketones in your breath not your blood but your breath and have you have you track your sleep and use those two metrics the quality amount of deep sleep you're getting and the ability ability to make and generate and use ketones in the breath relatively well the metabolic flexibility aspects of that i would focus on those two tones in the breath better than measuring them well your blood reacts to what you ate within a few minutes your breath takes two or three days of behavior to produce downstream shifts and enzymes to raise the general milieu of production and also of burning them so you know it's a it's a deeper shift if they're in your breath um and also you don't measure them in your urine because they're only high with little strips and things until you're actually using them then they drop again but you're still making tons of them you're not making so many that you're spilling them out in addition so urine strips are useless for people doing keto and blood is not that useful you know if you're diabetic having trouble with blood sugar it can be useful to measure the way you react to certain foods to figure out what's safe for you what's a good goal for you but i like breath ketones i have a i use this thing here it's called the biosense big fan um do you do that regularly yeah when i wake up every morning and before meals i do it and i check my ketones my acetone and the breath which proxies for the blood ketones about ten to one so this morning i was at five when i woke up so that's point five no that's point five it's if i was measuring my blood it would come up as 0.5 at that point which is light ketosis essentially and if i'm eating low carb or doing some fasting or eating very low carb i will climb and climb and climb and like for instance if i did a 40 hour fast if i did no carb or very low carb yesterday and the day before a regular 36 or 40 hour fast would get me up in the 20s to 30s on this thing maybe maybe i'll hit 40 which is the top of this meter you know four blood ketones equivalent because that's when the curves diverge a little bit you can't really measure effectively the breath beyond about four but force pretty darn deep ketosis for most people so if you can learn to hang out if you want to produce ketones in your breath then you know you don't have high blood sugar or high insulin you can't produce ketones because your body's using the alternate fuel well because it's going to suppress the production you can't there's all you're always doing both you're always producing ketones from free fatty acids in the bloodstream uh which is about um you know people talk about ketones versus glucose right the idea are you burning glucose or already burning ketones total fuel use in the body 15 of total fuel fuel use roughly is split between glucose and ketones all the rest 15 and and most of it is if we're eating carbs is like let's say over that of that last little 15 maybe 85 or 95 of that will be sugar burning if you're having plenty of carbs coming in you can feel your glycogen burn it off fill it burn it off et cetera the last little bit will be ketones the other 85 percent of energy is just based on free fatty acid triglycerides and burning those and oxidizing those so when people say you're burning sugar burning ketones well yeah as the last little bit and then that little bit is always balanced between a combination of ketones and and burning glucose essentially bringing sugars and you can shift that pretty hard back and forth but you can't ever get the place where you're not burning any glucose because the brain always wants some so if you're having no glucose coming in at all the body makes them takes yes that's glycerized you know that's the thing that i'm constantly explaining but i'm not a scientist so sometimes i get fogged by my my own explanation and i just said i'll send you an article about this because you know because somebody say well you're cutting so many carbs and your brain needs glucose i said yeah yes but triglycerides triglycerides three fat molecules with glycerol backbone you can take glycerol and you can make it into sugar pick two of those and add a water and you get sugar basically so yeah just make you know gluconeogenesis liver makes enough sugar for the brain and will supply ketones and sugar basically to the brain as long as it needs it but you don't need very much you only need 20 grams of like carbohydrates in your whole system to keep you basically alive that's it like in circulation of regular fasts but start the wind open the window early in the day close it mid-afternoon impossible for many people our kids and the way we structure well eight hours is fine you know but but six might be better depends on the independent depends on goals if you're just trying to stay healthy then 18 16 is fine i would say two three hours of not fasting before bed is fine you can still have a family dinner and don't eat when you first wake up either when you first wake up the thing that wakes you up is essentially cortisol it squeezes your liver and feeds you breakfast so you're like whoo you know you know wide awake theoretically full of energy full of you know stress theoretically enough to then go hunt in the forest for chickens and come back to your cave right evolutionarily so in this case you want to get you want to be woken up by your cortisol because your brain is what time of day it was because you didn't eat too late at night and you want to then move spend 10 or 15 or 20 minutes first thing in the morning moving enough to burn off the cortisol and the glucose that woke you up glycogen not call for more you call for cortisol yeah i don't need a big jolt of fructose in the form of orange juice you shouldn't definitely don't get there anything no no you should and in fact i would say before you eat anything you should be doing uh movement and exercise is actually another strong circadian cue so warming up the whole body by doing a few sun salutations or something else or doing some walking something you can talk over basically we'll burn off the cortisol and burn off the glycogen will look you up without calling for more and if you're if you've had a bunch in your system recently and you and you flood the system with sugar or cortisol stress you're now resistant to cortisol resistant to glycogen or sugar so it's an easy way to like minimize your fat burning cause a stress response so low key workouts in the morning move your high key workouts to the afternoon when your cardiac output is at its best and your cortisol is at its lowest all right okay so there's all this circadian those are all three tied together fast before bed get up early and do low key intensity fasted and cycling back then how does this help just draw the linkage to banishment of brain fog or improvement well if you can if you can cycle better then you'd be sleeping better getting into deep sleep when you are sleeping first of all you'll also you know be able to uh get more sleep from the hours you get so your sleep may actually get compressed and deepened depending if you don't eat before bed you aren't suppressing growth hormone growth when released will drag you into deep sleep and all these things will speed you up and banish fog fog will look like your delta waves being high in amounts or really fast or really slow and your alpha being kind of slow and your beta being kind of low amounts often and these are affected by rest so you can you know you can look at a sleep tracker like the orange or something and by the way rem is nonsense on most sleep trackers you would use just like a deep sleep that's the only thing you care about because that's the only aspect of sleep that flexes in response to behavior so i see you're wearing an aura ring just there and are you i mean do you think though that all this tracking and this data measurement to optimize our brain health and our sleep health and all of this are we becoming obsessive are we taking it to ridiculous levels now and i think our grandparents said the same thing talking about blood lipids and cholesterol and things no i don't think that i think we've become obsessed with measuring well you don't want to become more orthorexic with it but i mean if you before you could measure your blood sugar did it matter if you were a diabetic you know yeah it still mattered but now you can measure it and control if you're having insulin if you're having too much gary was just throwing that out to you that we're getting a bit ridiculous you can get orthorexic with anything you can you can be a jim bro and you can be you know anxiety driven and have dysmorphia around these these things absolutely and obsessive sure but there's plenty of things to get obsessive about i'm not concerned about watching health numbers as i mean you're less likely to judge them as as damning numbers if you understand them if you like back to blood lipids if you know your blood lipid panel and don't just rely on your doctor to tell you about it then you know that let's say you're doing fasting and doing super low carb and you had a relatively high protein diet you would have very low triglycerides you'd have very low vdl or vldl which is the dangerous version you'd have moderate hdl and you'd have high ldl probably the average human would have high ldl in that circumstance and your doctor would say oh high ld sorry high yeah high ldl it's kind of dangerous it's risk factor and you would say yes but you want a statin tomorrow but you would say yes but i have no free sugars floating around nothing's oxidizing look at my vdl look at my tries those are like the best numbers you've seen right oh yeah they kind of are yeah let's do a cac and make sure there's no actual plaques and if so ignore the ldl ldl here is a firefighter not an arsonist essentially so you know who cares um so it's that kind of perspective on this stuff get deeper don't just rely on doctors to give you the answers become your own scientist and dig into the data so i think if you do that you're less likely to be caught in the obsessive hyper-focused medical students disease oh my god i saw a number and i had that problem you know do you think if you're waking up out of a beautiful sleep and then you're suddenly getting obsessed with i don't think i slept properly i didn't get enough deep sleep no no well you wouldn't think you wouldn't be like that you wouldn't feel fantastic if your deep sleep numbers were crappy on your tracker yeah okay well getting back now to um your specialty which is everything to do with the brain i want to know about the stigma that we seem to attach to broken brains anyone with a brain impairment ends up feeling the misplaced personal guilt around people that you know you did something you the human did something to generate this well not just that but you should be in control of it the thing you have the obsession the anxiety the adhd the seizure whatever why don't you control this why isn't it you know because you can't see the broken arm so you can see the you know the the cramped up anterior cingulate producing a tick or tourette's or something you know it's a real brain thing though and you can see it on a brain map on a qeg so that's a lot of the value that i place in using brain mapping and teaching people about themselves is like oh let's look at the brain hey look your brain is different in this way and this way in this way wow that makes total sense oh my gosh wow and when you see suffering so to speak in that way it's not damning like i was saying at the beginning don't be don't be worried you know when people see stuff especially like they see their tinnitus or they see their ocd or they see their ptsd suddenly pulled the teeth of the stigma and they can be frustrated without being ashamed they can be frustrated without being angry at themselves they can you know be not happy with how they're feeling without being guilty so because look at your brain look here your big red blob of beta in the back middle of your head your brain's caught in rumination that's a very classic ptsd thing or wow look at this 25 years of drinking you can't shut off the beta waves anywhere oh wow my brain's damaged okay that must be so comforting to people who have had long story so much aesthetic and then show them then first ten people like them who we change their brain a few months later well let's get into how you change the brain then a little bit more because i know we we started to get into it and then i pulled you back to add some context about your profession and your um academic credentials so tell me what's happening to the brain 30s processing power slows down 40s 50s 60s 70s take us through the different age groups well it slows down just that but but there are just that hacks that you can do um we talked about sleep there's several hacks you can do broadly one is keeping your inflammation down so to speak you know so you keep your protein up moderately high especially as you get older if it's 6070s you need more protein you don't need huge amounts earlier in life it may be counterintuitive intuitive but in your 30s 40s and 50s too much protein can shorten life it looks like um but enough protein as an elder or something 30 40 50s and above keep oxidized basically the humans can get away with eating extremely high protein and very very low carb or extremely low protein and extremely high quality carb you can kind of do either you can do like the hardcore whole food vegan diet and it's successful if you're very very careful in the absence of saturated fats you can actually be healthy or you can do a carnivore diet you can't really do both in the middle there's nothing in life nothing in nature that's like fat carbohydrates and protein all together in food doesn't exist some of the sciences i've been talking to they're talking you know leveraging protein yeah leveraging is really important and that for aging seems to be the safest and the best way especially for brain health so 0.82 grams per uh pound or essentially a gram per kilogram will roughly do it or just below that we'll do it um that's a lot of protein it's a lot of protein for the average person most people don't need anything close to that nothing close to that your brain behaves very well on this doesn't it well it produces more ketones in your liver does and then you end up with a higher ketone bath the brain enjoys eating ketones and using it for structural materials so um the brain does slow down throughout life because you lose myelination and you lose cell bodies so you lose signals slow down because of the wiring uh the fat the myelin that wraps wires starts to degrade um when that's pathological we call it multiple sclerosis but it happens to us all to some extent and and that produces slower wiring zaps a slower transmission and you lose cell bodies lose the number of cells that are firing the message which slows down as well so every decade use a little tiny bit of speed and a little bit of tiny amount of power in the brain but i can look at you and tell you if your brain is losing more than the average person your age if it's expected amount or if it's too much compared to the average person and even if it's the expected amount who cares if you if you would rather it not slow down it's like bone uh density or muscle mass yeah sarcopenia tends to rob us of muscle mass and bone density but if you'd like to have more yeah exactly right vibe plate strength training hype there are all kinds of things based on goals based on need based on if it's impairments and suffering there's all kinds of ways to intervene and that's what i want to do is take the brain stuff out of the landscape of here's what's going wrong and into here's what's happening and then here's a bunch of ways to steer it affect it impact it including well it's more like exercise for the brain what you're doing yeah it's like it's like a a somewhere between exercise and and physical therapy almost or ot because occupational therapy because once you train the brain for resources of attention stress sleep speeder processing it takes over and practices that every day and becomes permanent have you noticed now that we're living longer and you know you can you can get pedantic around some of the numbers and some of the trends and what kova did to give life expectancy um a haircut but we're living healthier longer you've been doing this for a number of decades are you noticing that it becomes more difficult i mean it's the data set that you're comparing things to um changing or reflecting the fact that we're aging differently um no not really with regards to aging but yes with regards to children because aging rating about the same honestly uh healthy aging anyways is the same as now as it was 50 years ago there's different pathological aging but i use an a heavily cleaned average data set a healthy data set to compare people to so no that's the same for aging but children you know the the theta beta ratio there's several papers published in like the late 80s early 90s that showed the theta beta ratio consort adhd from non-adhd buckets thousands of kids and adults 94 accurate accuracy in kids really clean and inattentive spaciness 81 accuracy and high alpha relative to beta super amazing signal like that's diagnostically valid and then several grad students and scientists every couple years tried to replicate it every time a paper was published the statistic went down slightly over about a decade and we realized in one conference one year that hey wait a minute this is the same kind of thing that happens with sleep deprivation so the population of kids in our clinics was getting more and more sleep deprived across a decade and that was producing an insensitivity of one of the things we had looked at it used to just be an adhd marker but now it's adhd and classic sleep issues can't tell them apart anymore so know the you know heavily cleaned average data sets that we use for comparisons the yardsticks are the same is this a byproduct of increased screen time and social media no absolutely not absolutely not screen time screening has no impact negatively why well you would think that the brain a kid's brains children's brains are changing because you know they're having to do homework via zoom at eight o'clock at night well that's that's about i don't know when i was i mean i wasn't asleep at eight o'clock at night when i was awake in the seventies so you don't watch social media yes creating issues and the digitization of pretty much everything no full stops does not change the brain are there other neuroscience habits habits can affect things but no the uh uh all stimulus is managed and manageable and this is just a lot of stimulus there is more stimulus coming in in modern to modern people than young people that than than when we were young 20 you know 50 years ago whatever but no uh stimulus is stimulus and this is not a different qualitatively in any other form screens are not magical there's nothing different about them than anything else it's not a more ever-present stimuli oh it can be screens everywhere at school can be as opposed to just you know going up to the tree fort and hanging out with their pals 30 years ago people were really concerned about radio and television too it's all the same it's all the same lots of parents are are increasingly worried because i don't know anything i don't know any of the stats like you do but it feels as if more people are saying my kids hyperactive they've got an attention deficit past three years parents understand what's actually happening with their kids because they see them and kids are anxious and there's definitely a childhood and epidemic of childhood anxiety and childhood sleep issues that's causing trouble so really it's sleep but there's no more adhd than there was you know 50 years ago [Music] so parents need to get i i suppose get their kids to bed earlier and get them on a better schedule a better pattern and there's and there's bad training if you if you always give your kid a screen if you're giving them a stimulus it's the same as giving a kid a reward under any circumstance like you've got to manage stimulus i can raise your kids still but screens are not more magical than anything else that's stimulating but i guess when i was a kid you know we played kick the can in the streets until dusk and we were out all day on our bicycles in nature you know rocking around the quarry at the edge of town and nature was stimulating our retinas you know we were getting all of that excellent natural juice into our heads i think we're probably still getting a lot of it even in cities even in concrete jungles you know i think we're still getting enough for money humans are ridiculously adaptable ridiculously adaptable we can live on nothing but carbs we can live on nothing but protein we can live on in the dark all the time and we can you know we can live on microgravity and survive like we're ridiculously adaptable we can live in environments that are would not support human life sub-zero environment and survive we extract you know we're ridiculously adaptable that's that gets back to your question about chronotypes yes i was just going to mention that because you read a lot of different people are adaptable to people people can change you and you get up at four and i've done the opposite as well doesn't matter you learn to adapt you learn what the cues are and you learn to drive the system around and once you know where the levers are you can change things and the most important thing to set your circadian rhythm is when you eat when you eat but isn't morning light also weeks it's the we it's the only light that matters and it's a it's the weakest of the circadian cues in terms of environment when you eat is stronger being active when you're active is stronger when you sleep is stronger than light and light is like fourth or fifth and morning light sets only in the first hour of sunrise too once it's hour past sunrise the color of light is changed no longer provides a strong reset on the suprachiasmatic nucleus and the vasopressin so you have to get up early for the story wow because i was getting up at 7 30 and thinking i'll bounce out to the garden to get that panoramic view and the launch so as you get some you know as long as you get some light out of the corner of your eye in the first hour of sunrise you're getting a circadian cue from the light the temperature of light the color of the air you know and then 16 hours later doesn't the melatonin start to dictate that you might start to be thinking about sleeping yeah ideally and you're it's suppressing insulin release in the pancreas that's what melatonin does too that's so that's why you shouldn't eat it by the way because you aren't going to metabolize food you eat as you get tired you're going to crave you know insulin dropping a little bit because all the melatonin releases suppressing insulin release by the pancreas is something you feel the drop and that makes you want to crave i store up your food and go go to sleep and you know store food because we don't grab the bag of crisps that you should never be eating late at night yeah because you like you can't store it so all you gonna put with high blood sugar and then you go to bed and your body's trying to release some insulin high blood sugar suppresses cor suppresses uh growth hormone you have high cortisol you wake up you go to bed full sleep if you have some heavy yes it's better to stay up for two three hours and burn them off a little bit than it is to go to bed with a full stomach dramatically better absolutely now you'll screw your circadian rhythm up either way so the next night eat two hours earlier or something and teach your body about about that yeah yeah i want to ask you a question that um i pitched around to different friends and family members and they wanted me to ask you about their athletic children um about brain injuries and how they present you know right after a kid gets slammed in the head on the rugby pitch how how things might develop years later because especially where you live in the united states we hear a lot about concussion and football injuries less and less yeah you can't fill kid teams anymore in many many states because parents are pulling their kids out i mean is that just a a new worry or is that completely legit to optimize your child's brain health it's dramatically legit yeah you shouldn't let your kid you shouldn't let your kid has a child to do contact sports nothing soccer's okay no really no especially for women you get young girls young girls have uh are just as strong as young boys they receive more injuries from soccer like double the rate than boys do um yeah soccer's not great for the brain neither is american football uh you know defense pickleball i know that's bad i don't i don't i don't i don't think contacting pickleball right i would say non-contact sports is ideal until your brains finish growing and you're you know in college or you're an adult and can decide the risk factor you don't want to you know take that risk on for 12 year old and say look i'm going to have you do football or soccer right now because i think it's awesome and i don't really care if you're 20 duller 10 years from now in college you'll figure it out that's the perspective you're having throwing your kid into a into a soccer game yeah i wrote on your i read something you wrote about you said that these injuries may look like a goose egg that goes away but they bloom over the years yeah yeah half of all brain injuries are silent and have no symptoms and then show up over 5-10 years later as slow processing degrading speed up speed of uh uh quality of sleep through processing word finding all that stuff yeah yeah and the problem and even even simple concussions or even covet postcoded brain doesn't show up right away but three months later you have this foggy state so a lot of the insults the brain experiences produce very subtle initial effects and they grow over a few months so if you have a kid who's doing a contact sport definitely keep an eye on them not just after the concussion they may have gotten but like six months later um there's some good people who can do evaluations and figure out what's going on both you know a sport context and a general context but these are not things you should know if they get a terrible head slam you know note it down because in four or five years you might be able to trace it back not just that but if you have a kick out of concussion that's it end of season do not put a kid back in for play because the second concussion is the one that causes massive damage once the tissue's all stiff and friable and fragile then you go back and get a second concussion a week later that's the one that destroys your brain so i would say so and sports coaches at the schools of course they know this at this point if they don't know this because they don't want to um seriously i mean you know people people know um i if i could have really wanted to play football really wanted to play soccer really wanted to wrestle i'd be like all right but you know here's our rule a we're gonna do a bunch of assessments and a bunch of stuff to minimize inflammation and maximize recovery and b if you get hit if you get a hard hit we're gonna be we're gonna be like that's it for the season and we're gonna give you a two month recovery window because we cannot risk not knowing what's happening to your brain with inflammation have another hit happen a month from now and have a brain injury you can't risk that dude and how would you mitigate inflammation for let's say a 13 year old for similar ways you know depends on what they're doing and how they're creating inflammation but diet no hot and cold yeah depend no it depends a 13 year old might need carbs to maximize athletic performance probably do honestly dr hill i know we've overrun by at least 20 minutes but i do want to ask you about something i teased in the intro west african drumming tell us about why you for a number of years were going up to mountain tops and what sort of brain benefit you got from that well well broadly i think that especially non-western music that involves polyrhythm and involves bimanual coordination really helps bring i mean most forms of music bring the brain online globally it's not on a one hemisphere function and when you're producing music and or listening to polyrhythms you get the much more bi-manual bilateral involvement so for me this particular flavor of music uh i learned a style from west africa called malinke or mande drumming which is countries like mali and burkina faso and ivory coast and senegal many uh other tribe tribes coming from those countries the mali empire you know the lion king essentially the there's about 16 different core rhythms and they involve many different instruments and the one so to speak doesn't resolve the way westerners are used to hearing it and it produces really interesting rhythmic times so there's that inflection there's also the idea that if you look at things like takatina which is a system developed by reinhard flachler who is developing i think the maybe apocryphal story he was developing some psychosis as teenager i think in austria or the uk or somewhere and ran away and studied at the foot of a toblermaster in india learning these really complicated super long rhythmic phrases and as he learned more and more rhythm his brain became better and better integrated fascinating so i learned i found it very integrating and i used to all of our centers been in the before times we had a lot of in-person groups we used to do a lot of classes around drumming because it got people you know in the embodied time thing which is really useful for change i don't want you to crash into your next engagement and i know we're already doing that but i also mentioned that you are a big practitioner of ashtanga yoga why is that i think ashtanga i think yoga in general serves a lot of the biohacks all at once if you're doing a 20 minute you know 10 sun salutations first thing in the morning then you have moved the whole body burned off cortisol burned off blood sugar not moved so much it's time it's timing doing it early it's just enough it's a perfect little balance it's a function stacking thing that brings all of the different aspects of a little bit of meditation a little bit of exercise some time regulation et cetera et cetera some fasted you know burning off cortisol all into play in the same yeah remember you said when you're doing those poses and no one's leading you in them you learn them and then you do them traditional style yeah my source style uh city now known as mysurah used to be called mysore and so my source style ashtanga is a often an open room with a teacher walking around and people being taught the style of yoga but they're working their way through wherever they are in it the teachers usually giving them individual like guidance around their particular practice as they move through its people often different places throughout a much longer practice so i'm a big fan of my of my source style or strong if you're learning it but once you know it once you know a sun salutation it's like nine poses and they become overlearned so you have a direction you're looking away you're breathing and the way you're moving and it takes a minute to minute and a half to do so you can use it as a meditation use it as an exercise if you do 10 of them you just exercise for 20 minutes it's like a perfect little chunk yeah it can be it can be and it's also a better moving meditation is easy if you're bored when you meditate it's easier than thank you so much for all of this of course dr andrew hill functional neurofeedback practitioner founder of peak brain institute helping us to preserve and improve the health of our all important brains a full roster of links of course will be on the show page as ever and always i thank you so much for listening and for watching if you're catching this on my spiffy new youtube channel can't thank you enough for pestering me to move the audio archive over there and now all of the videos will be joining that what is it 100 plus episodes go well dr andrew thank you so much for all of your important knowledge that you've shared it really was fascinating see you all in a couple of weeks bye bye bye bye thanks for having me susan thank you you