Rewiring Your Brain for Peak Performance with Andrew Hill | EP151

I would say the field of Nur feedback is mostly about suffering in in sort of therapy and treatment so then in this environment I'm seeing in like 2 3 months test scores start to Skyrocket on Executive function testing and OCD drop away and people that have intrusive thoughts or behaviors and seizures drop and I'm starting to real wait a minute this doesn't make a lot of sense this isn't what I know is possible hello and welcome to make it happen with will polston I'm will polston this is episode number 151 and in this episode I'm joined by Dr Andrew Hill Dr Andrew Hill is the founder of peak brain institutes and a leading neuro feedback practitioner and biohacking coach for clients worldwide he has lectured on Psychology and Neuroscience at UCLA's Department of psychology where he received a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Peak brain Dr Hill provides individualized training programs to help you optimize your brain across goals of sleep stress attention brainfog creativity and athletic performance he is the host of the head first podcast and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance Andrew is one of the top performance coaches in the US and has featured on a number of alist podcasts including the Joe R good experience and Dr Drew and today he's on the make you happen podcast with Will polston and we're going to be talking about using neuro feedback to optimize your brain health so Andrew welcome to the show thanks so much for having me well nice to be here great to be having our conversation across the pond so you're over I believe in La at the moment that's right yeah uh far far away just about as far as we can get it looks like from uh from you guys in the UK oh good so really looking forward to our conversation and and getting stuck into things so we've just heard some some incredible uh achievements and things that you've done and we're going to get into it's going to be a fascinating conversation about what it is you do and I know there's G to be some really practical takeaways for people but what I would love to know is that in today's day and age cognitive Neuroscience is is very much upand cominging there's lots of people talking about it with the help of social media and certain key people that are very Focus now on on sharing the wisdom of what's possible with our brains and and affecting performance and biohacking becoming more and more common um that's great but you've been doing this for a long time you've got a a PhD in cognitive Neuroscience what drove you to do that I mean was that just a a dream since you're a kid where where did that come from not really yeah don't don't do a phg just because it's uh it has to have like both in intrinsic and extrinsic drive to get you through a program like that at least in the US they're they're long you know they're the average length is six seven eight years the European models a lot better where you get funded for a three to four year project and that's your PhD I I I should have gone to Europe for my PhD would have been a little bit less uh brutal but no I I went back to grad school after about 10 or 11 years uh after undergrad and um mostly because I was working in environments with uh autistic and ADHD kids primarily and this is after working in acute psychiatric and mental health and developmental psych and all kinds of environments for that previous decade and really working at the edge case if you will of human suffering between everything from people that had you know multiple disabilities no language no vision no hearing and everything was tactile sign uh and cognitive you know disabilities as well all the way through to people with um dual diagnoses of substance and mental health uh difficulties through child psychiatric stuff through uh geriatric psych Psychiatry and was really seeing a lot of extreme stuff working in really kind of brutal environments you know where people had to be managed um and got injured in that environment and couldn't keep working in this sort of psychiatric hospital you know dense environment uh and left that field for a while and went into uh high-tech we did some tech work for a while some database work and Tech evangelism and this is before 2000 so the the tech bubble corrected around 2000 and I I was kind of bored and and left Tech and went back into Human Services just because I wanted to work with kids again and get a job at an Autism Center and uh I I sort of knew they did this thing called neuro feedback but I wasn't exactly sure deeply what it was just that it was sort brain training and again this is 24 five years ago or something that we're talking so uh pretty early for me anyways in the field and um I got into that environment and started seeing people change started seeing kids develop executive function in a few months started seeing eye contact and sensory things shift in autistic Spectrum kids saw seizures drop away left and right and was really really impressed with what I was seeing especially against the backdrop of the previous decade kind of working in these holding environments where we were being at best paliative and more often it was revolving door stuff where you know a teen get checked into a psych hospital because of really extreme behavior for five six 10 days and get stabilized and then get kicked back out into an unstable home crime Etc environment and present again at the hospital you know 3 months later and it was just this evolving door or when we had people that were really acute we didn't have treatments we didn't have ways of helping somebody shift I mean I I ran a group home for three years that had four people in it all who had multiple cognitive and physical disabilities and I spent a year teaching I got to use a fork that was my big accomplishment one year was I got this guy Edwin to use a fork woo you know and it was very much a win for him and he could go he could be sort of out in the world and uh uh uh interact more perhaps and you know it was it was a it was a win for him but it was a big push behaviorally so to speak just to get him to a Master this skill and um my experience in mental health was and and and Psychiatry and development was that we just didn't have tools and didn't understand what was going on and I S spent a lot of time with individuals who were not working with their uh regular developmental plan or with without deep suffering or deficit and sort of just looking into the abyss so to speak of how humans can fall apart and not seeing that we were doing a awful lot impatient psychiatric it was medication outpatient it was managed behavior and it just kind of didn't do much more so then in this environment I'm seeing in like two three months test scores start to Skyrocket on Executive function testing and OCD drop away and people that have intrusive thoughts or behaviors and seizures drop and I'm starting to wait a minute this doesn't make a lot of sense this isn't what I know is possible but it's it's happening it's happening most of the time what's going on this is sort of a different landscape so at the time of in the field of neuro feedback um again 20 25 years ago uh there was three or four different schools of thought that we're all a little bit in opposition you know a lot of conflict going on a lot of vitriolic infighting on uh news groups this is before we had uh even bulletin boards and things in the web so it's early web days and people are flam each other back and forth on these long News Group threads arguing about how this stuff works and they all had different ideas and were arguing with really irreconcilable principles about how what was going on and what they were seeing and the two or three big schools of thought maybe three or four at the time did not agree about mechanism about approach about how it happened why he did certain things and yet they all got better effects than traditional medicine for the things they worked on all of them did Full Stop and just quickly sorry sorry to interrupt so just quickly for the people that are listening that would have no idea about what some of these things would be what what are practically speaking what is it that was being done that was getting these results in three months so neuro feedback is a process of training the brain and most of it is done in a passive bof feedback way so you measure the brain in real time you know stick some ear Clips on and let me give a practical example uh that people might be a little more uh familiar with so we have circuits in the brain have certain dedicated jobs or help you uh Orient certain aspects of your stress response your attention your sleep regulation stuff like that there's a big circuit in the back midline called the posterior singulate kind of acts like a lifeguard oh watch the road heads up heads up it helps you Orient to the outside world and redirect your attention in ways that are necessary we all use it all the time just to sort of navigate uh the the Press of the environment when we learn the world's not especially safe or predictable this area kind of cramps up in high gear and the Lifeguard starts scanning the indoor pool for sharks and and it's you know hard to relax so if somebody wanted to work on a rumination or a threat sensitivity or trauma response that posterior singulate becomes a good Target and you actually on Imaging can see often that it's overactivated and say oh are you a little bit ruminating are you are you threat sensitive oh you are okay but you can explore this and give people agency but then the important part may be you can change it so you would stick a wire on the scalp back there and a couple ear Clips on and just measure the beta waves moment to moment that the brain is making which is that activated tone and also measure the alpha waves which is that neutral between the gears that the tissue will briefly go into and watch the brain make those waves on its own back there moment to moment and whenever the brain briefly moves in the right direction the alpha comes up the beta goes down the computer sees that and goes oh good job brain it makes a little game on the screen start to run or run better or more music happen and a couple seconds later the brain moves in the wrong direction let's say for that workout the beta surges again and the game slows down or stops the brain says oh I don't like no stuff where's my stuff I like stuff a couple seconds later it happens to move in the right direction and the game resumes the big trick here is that we move the goalposts every few seconds we adjust the computer right next to where the brain is so the fluctuations that are in the desired direction to applaud or reinforce are always right next to where you are so you're sort of chasing ing adaptively what the brain is doing and going yeah yeah more that there you go there you go and it takes about two or three sessions to feel people do feel it sometimes the first time but more usually the second third time maybe fourth time uh after the half an hour of training you're sort of saying hey wait a minute huh I might be feeling a tiny bit different nah I'm imagining it nah oh maybe nah and then the next time it's a little stronger and you go oh wait a minute I think I'm feeling this and then you have this opportunity like personal training where you work out you feel the shift afterward you you evaluate how it feels and you get a little subtle shift and you adjust the workout and you build it up over time and by doing that you can train the regulatory features of the brain not everything trains super well but there's a bunch of stuff does that we care about including uh attention stuff all the executive function features all the anxiety and stress features sleep uh sensory stuff like sensory processing and sensory integration social processing creativity your immune function your speed of processing brain fog seizures migraines all train pretty reliably where you can get a handle on the phenomena of the physiology start to shape it and about two three sessions after you start the brain goes oh okay and starts to move and you feel that so you start you know grading what you're noticing and having this feedback loop with your uh trainer your your your provider who can help you gradually steer resources you're feeling subjectively in a certain direction and you know we always do uh brain mapping or assessment at the beginning and executive function testing and then repeat that every other month every 20 25 sessions and a couple rounds of those 2025 sessions will usually create on a bell curve for things like ADHD uh metrics of performance or postconcussion or postco you know brain fog stuff where your attention is shot um you get about two standard deviations in a bell curve in three months of stable change because you're always practicing these resources so once you move them enough that's how they are and you're getting a reinforcement naturally because you're always using your attention your sleep your Stress Management yeah so for these big things you can shape resources and if you were ruminating could shape that posterior singulate feel it shift and go oh hey wait a minute yeah I did feel a little calmer let's do more of that and the big the big thing here is it doesn't necess it's not really about the change you're making or about the cool technology or the magical science it's really more about that you have this opportunity to explore your own physiology and your own performance reach in and start changing it and feel it change so it's very direct validation it's closer to again like a personal training or a an arc of coaching than it is like a particular medication you might apply for a problem so the neuro feedback or biof feedback on brain waves or blood flow you can do uh neur feedback on blood flow for migraines and other things um these become a tool you can use to shape your resources shape your activity and this is what I saw happening it was blown away by what was actually happening I didn't think was possible and it sent me back to uh grad school to figure out how it worked wow so if there's so many questions that come up just just hearing you say that but the the the first one for me was with my very very basic understanding when you saying about sort of the uh the sensitivity and that that particular part of the brain sort of in basic terms I always thought that a huge component of it was whether people are kind of in their sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system but you're saying that it maybe isn't maybe is that isn't that but there there's a component of the the brain that specifically you can do the testing on so what what what I was thinking as you were saying that was if we take something that I know that a lot of people listening to this um are either affected by or have family members or whatnot that are affected by which are the three main things so I'm thinking sort of autism ADHD and let's say OCD for example so what what were you seeing were the most common things that people were going through when it came to those three things specifically was there a common theme for people with ADHD was there a common theme with autism that they meant that people could sort make those changes yeah um I uh I I I do work on brains and I work on resources but and I have a PhD but I'm not really your doctor I'm a lot closer to your scientist and your coach and my joke here is that doctors are great but they have to be right you go to them for answers come to scientist for questions and exploration and data and dig in and learn and it's an educational and exploratory role for yourself which is often useful and then we flip into coaching mode where we don't pick goals for you but we iterate towards your goals and try things and be in your team so that's my big take on uh how to go after it and and relevant to your question I don't necessarily look for the ADHD or the OCD or the PTSD or the autism but I always do a a read a physiology assessment and a performance assessment with everyone and I teach them to look at themselves using these tools and you see again and again and again the same phenomena that will drive OCD or drive autism or drive ADHD so I mentioned the posterior singul a minute ago it's a very threat sensitive that one really drives more like PTSD if it's caught in high gear but the front midline is the anterior singlet the singlets are these midline structures and they're really about switching your focus around and broadly the front of the brain is about the inside self the back of the brain is about the outside world singul are switching those environments so the front midline I call the CEO walks around telling you to think about hey do this focus on this we care about this and the back midline is that life guard going watch the road heads up everyone's safe okay and they coordinate but the one in the back tends to ramp up and we ruminate or or get stuck in worries because we're evaluating and the one in the front ramps up and we start getting stuck in our head and perseverating so you can have full-blown intrusive thought OCD with high beta in the front midline if you have tons of theta which is like a lubrication a release frequency then you tend to have things like song stuck in your head all day or you bite your nails aggressively it's not intr of thoughts with complex stuff like germs and you know highle Concepts it's more like a stuck little tick it's a behavior where you're twitching or ticking or chewing and so you'll see a little face tick or you'll see a some bite in their nails or have like a really intrusive radio station playing the same song all day if there's th on the front midline because it's disinhibited and you'll see more classic OCD uh handwashing and other you know classic complex Behavior intrusive thoughts with beta waves in the front midline and then if you beta behind the right there there's this cluster of tissue behind the right ear called the tempo parietal Junction and it brings the world into the self the sensory and the social world gets mapped into the default mode Network right there and I call this area The Princess and the P because it's often like ah too much you know to too sensitive and this area ramps up in anxiety features so if you have the front midline and behind the right ear you know hot yolked up and and reacting like a muscle at once to spasm then you have an environmentally driven obsessive anxiety and there's three flavors that show up including something called misophonia where wives kill their husbands for chewing too loud because it's so enraging and uh and and you know people get mad at small sounds it's that little like can't filter that background thing and you're obsessively focused on it and it's occupying your mind the bucket called Nails on chalkboard is huge and lots of things you know fit into it and you also get oddly enough both claustrophobia and agoraphobia from those co-activations of that front midline and behind the right ear because the environment is stressful and you're sort of hyperfocused and obsessive and it's you know it's got this uncomfortable uh self versus environment kind of mapping going on and that area behind the right ear is involved with understanding tone of voice and recognizing face expression and recognizing faces to some extent so you see that area kind of cramped up in people that suffer from autistic Spectrum features the social component of it the IE the eye contact the social queuing the verbal procity if somebody is talking like this all the time because they have high functioning autism and they can't get the Lil going that area is not monitoring their Lil of speech or yours so they miss your sarcasm and they sound kind of sing song because they're not noticing it necessarily the same way so if that area is hot just to back up on brain mapping for a second it's not diagnostically valid people are weird good job be weird like when you look at a population compared brain map all you know is what is different not what is good or bad and then you want to do a physiology exploration say look behind your right ear kind of hot with beta um no social issues but you might have your empathy might be turned up to oh yeah kind of raw okay that's what it is not lack of social but a bit of a raw you know extra in some way social so you can have the front mid mid and back midline and behind the right ear really cramped up hard in folks that are profoundly autistic with a lot of anxiety obsessiveness sensory and social issues same circuits cramped up in brilliant anxious CEOs and gifted poets without any social queuing issue and a rich internal environment that might be a little bit too rich you know that sort of hurts poets a little too much to you know experience the world stuff that you know those same circuits might present and you wouldn't know at data if somebody Hues more towards Spectrum you know social impairment stuff or towards gifted and anxious you know plenty of resources with which to catastrophize and and get obsessed and and get stuck and maybe a Teck or two but you would know something was up and you could say hey look your brain uh a little strange in this way here's a plausible idea what do you think is this important oh that's important to you you care about that that seems valid okay well we don't know if we've gotten a handle on it for sure because brains are weird you know know but we have agency you can now gently stretch that front midline you know stick a wire there measure the alpha moment to moment measure the Theta and beta moment to moment the alpha surges the other ones relax for a second applaud it couple days of that if it's relevant to OCD or your ticks they're going to be reduced so neuro feedback is mysterious but not blind because you're kind of going push how' that feel huh okay cool and it also wears off initially so you have this freedom gently push yourself feel a resource shift do it again feel it again and really validate the experiences and you can tune the protocols so you might be like training for executive function or ADHD stuff and uh train down the Theta and the alpha on the on the strip of tissue that runs ear to ear on the right hand side there's the principal and he walks around going are you sure you want to do that no I didn't think so there you go have fun oh you sure you want to do that no I didn't think so all right good job behaving that's the right hand side the supervisor of attention right in the middle cortex and left- hand side is a spotlight that keeps the moin stable so it keeps you focusing on boring stuff if you think you should it also keeps you asleep at night so you tend to get with add in attentiveness a sleep maintenance issue an ADHD squirrel you know lack of supervisor difficulty falling asleep because those are also based on sleep regulation uh tissues so you can walk through these Resources with people and start to reframe it from oh yeah you have ADHD into oh hey is this impulsivity thing we're seeing in your brain valid oh we you know measured it your performance seems real you want to work on that and we teach people about these resources and how to change them not just with neuro feedback also with other forms of biohacking mindfulness supplements sleep hacks uh metabolic biohacking which includes things like circadian timing and monking about with macronutrients and you know there's a bunch of stuff you may want to do um I don't tend to have hard and fast rules across the board for any particular biohack because everything is goal focused just like I'm not treating a diagnosis but I'm working on the resources that might be bottlenecking that give you that diagnosis or somebody's you know assumed it but uh I like to reframe it as the actual physiology and then by doing that people suddenly have a different relationship with their brain their front midline OCD is powerful it's a steel TR mind that gets kind of stuck sometimes wouldn't you prefer to have another gear accessible but this is not a problem it's not a disease it's a cramped up muscle because it's so powerful it's spasmed and an awful lot of what you can see in the cortex at this these regulatory level is of that nature it's of that like cramped up resource it's not a broken thing or disease thing generally so you can do an awful lot of tuning for these big human suffering areas yeah so it's I find it interesting I mean then another term I I kind of like and it's a your your brain training you know that neuro feedback is brain training I used to use uh a muse I don't know if you come across the Muse all but um yeah I used to use the Muse device so for people that listen in I would meditate with this device on and then every time that I was getting into a Theta brain wve State then I would hear the little bird so it would kind of gamify me trying to hear the birds more often so I was getting a better form of meditation and I used to love that until it broke so then I stopped using it and never replace it but um yeah it was a it it was a really really useful exercise and being able to go through that so if if people because this this can be used in a multitude of different ways so utilizing neuro feedback I mean everything from um optimizing stress sleep attention brain frog uh brain fog not frog uh brain uh fog uh creativity even even your athletic performance what what are you what are you finding that people are are getting the the best results from I mean when when they when they start doing this is it normally they're coming from a place of optimization with you or they're trying to move away from a pain or or both great question I would say the field of ner feedback is mostly about suffering and and sort of therapy and treatment perspective uh at Peak brain uh we're about a third Peak performers and high level athletes Executives um sports teams really working on human optimization things and you know someone comes in for optimization and Peak Performance they generally do have some things to work on that are also in the suffering category but when a CEO comes in it's usually because he wants to squeeze the juice out of life more or an athlete wants to recover from their workouts faster um every so often I get athletes I'm working with a couple guys right now from the NFL well one from the NHL one from the NFL both of whom what team in the NHL I played ice hockey for 23 years as soon as you mention Conor Carrick got Conor Carrick um I think he's I don't know who's playing right now he's he's getting shuffled around but he got he got out of play because of an injury and we've been working his brain back and he's back yeah yeah exactly and a couple football players as well uh have had this experience where they're um out of play and they're young and they're like I'm not done yet I want to what can I do and neuro feedback can rebuild your brain pretty well from concussions and over time a bit longer than like ADHD I mean ADHD or even trauma like anxiety things that are cute classic PTSD and and things take about 3 to four months for most people maybe up to six if you have lots of stuff going on lots of complicated things but things like injuries or developmental you know being atypical like autism those often take four to six months just as a baseline because there's more to do and there's more change that you're trying to pursue basically um but I would say that it almost doesn't matter if you're a kid coming in or an adult with ADHD and a lot of difficulties or someone who's drinking too much or a highlevel performer squeezing the juice out of life you know getting paid Millions to do it doesn't really matter when you look at the brain you see the resources and anxiety attention and sleep are the big three legs of the stool that keep us all those are the overlapping resources so I I mentioned Regulatory and and there's a half a dozen that you you alluded to as well that are things that are meant to change in some ways meant to tune your immune system your focus your anxiety but the SLE sleep stress and attention those three are special and actually overlap each other in the regulation so sleep and attention have a co-regulation they have a resource they share and attention and anxiety and anxiety and sleep all have a piece of overlap if you dig into the brain one level below the concept of those things and so they really operate like this this intertwined you know three points of balance for your resources so if you have a sleep issue onset depth maintenance whatever and you address it it affects everything if you have an executive function issue you can't stay focused or you can't stay on task and you address it it affects everything in your life or a stress response and so you also mentioned the idea that stress and threat you know has this sort of um body based component and it totally does but the the singulate especially in the default mode Network they're really tied into the Vegas system so the Vegas the the Vegas nerve the 10th cranial nerve um about a dozen nerves leave the brain directly and don't go down the spine they come out sort of wrap around the front of the body mostly and down the front the biggest trunk of that is called the Vegas The Wanderer I think in Latin perhaps um and the Vegas is a bundle of tissue it's a more than one nerve it's a whole bundle whole ribbon that travels down the front of the body and up the front of the body and it brings up the ascending information from the gut from the heart up into the brain and it brings the descending information from the brain down into the heart and the gut and so my my joke is to my Neuroscience students you know what happens in the Vegas doesn't stay in the Vegas although you know we may have to uh exchange the joke for my for my British listeners uh the uh the idea is that the the Vegas the heart rate is integrating so the beatto beat timing of the heart is strongly affected by the Vegas so you can do things with your body that are appropriate at the level of activation you know when you stand up your heartbe gets a heart beak gets a bit rigid and brittle for a minute tight so it can push blood to all the extremities in your brain when you stand up and you want to pass out just from standing up but by the same token it then relaxes because you don't need to run away from a tiger right now you know you can you can tone or or or tune the the heart's timing to the um momentary need to integrate that ascending information from the gut and that descending information of appraisal from the brain and that will keep your heart sort of beating softly or appropriately flexibly beat to beat to beat and when that drops when the Vegas uh tone is not uh maintained by the heart and brain uh so gut and brain meeting in the heart then the heartbeat gets brittle and anxiety starts to climb so you get these singulate activations and you get low heart rate variability as the same phenomena and then you often get sleep maintenance issues where you wake up throughout the night as the same phenomena and you get generalized high frequency High coupling beta throughout the head which is a general anxiety state or you get hypervigilance when the eyes are closed you can see the visual tissue staying lit up just in case you might have to scan the world so any or all of these could show up for any one person and you know most of it makes sense and as you walk through brain mapping and performance testing the fun part is the stuff that makes sense is the right stuff you know what's true about you you know how you feel you know if you're distractable or anxious or not sleeping great at least kind of know it and when you point it out in data you're like oh yeah oh yeah oh wow oh yeah okay yeah I'm that's affec oh okay yeah I am not sleeping great okay yep that makes sense that's why I can't find words huh and you start to give people different relationship uh with what's going on so that's very interesting I mean you you mentioned about low heart rate variability so I I I think I'm fairly inun I don't drink alcohol I sleep eight hours a night I wear my whoop i s track my sleep but there's certain things but I know I've got terrible heart rate variability I'm fit um I'm probably I'm definitely not the fittest I've ever been but I'm fit I mean I can go and run a 10K now and not bad an eyelid you know that kind of thing but my heart rate variability is that of like a 70 year old man I'm 34 years old right now people have said to me what's the underlying trying to meditate pretty much every day so there's things going on there but it's really interesting you saying that actually that the because I would argue that I am kind of in my parasympathetic nervous system so my rest and digest so because people have said that that would be a reason why you would have low heart rate variability but what you're saying there is actually if they're not necessarily connected and it's something to do with that the the the vagus nerve and the impact of of information there then that may be one of the the factors of something else that's underlying it may not just be the Vegas but let me back up for a second what's low in HRV I work with Olympic athletes that are the peak Pinnacles of human performance and some of them have HRV resting that's in the hundreds and some have HRV that is like 30 yeah and it does not track the absolute number of HRV is not a meaningful statistic the change for you within your range is Meaningful you get sick it'll dip if you rest well it'll go up a few points percentage points for you but if you're got a 30 or something and you're a young person without cardiovascular disease without high blood pressure without a lot of anxiety you're sleeping well and getting rest from sleep then your HRV that's numerically low is actually just fine for you and what a sleep tracker picks up whoop or Aura I was wearing them all for a while and talking to all the CEOs of these companies and saying hey my clients have different reporting things and I'm seeing different things on this like you know armful of sleep trackers that I'm wearing can you please help me understand we talked a lot about what was going on and the thing that HRV the the sleep tracker is telling you what HRV is is not the same HRV we're talking about walking around reacting to stress you know the the assessed HRV when you're awake is not the same as the peak HRV when you're sleep is not the same as the HRV training you do with a heart math device and bio feedback they're all different hrvs it's not a reserved word and they all calculate a little bit differently and they're talking about a slightly different phenomena so as long as you're not experiencing disproportionate stress just look at the HRV and try to do things that don't tank it and maybe you know bring the Baseline up when you need to it's it's so funny so are you familiar with um wavy or wavy sure yeah so the for for people that listening to this I I got connected it was actually on the back of somebody else I interviewed on my on my podcast Chris Reynolds and um yeah we uh we we I I I then found somebody that was doing it in the UK and I went and had the testing and it gave me a whole idea for business business which I never went through but I end up having my performance assessments and I I I've just pulled it up cuz I was going to ask you if you you knew about it and um I I remember that there was a score that she looked at and she's obviously done thousands of these things and she said at the time well there was this particular score she said I've never seen I don't think I've ever seen anybody with it as high as what you've got it but in a positive way and I've just gone to see what that was now 300 yeah probably yourp for attention was high well it was actually enough me just looking it was my heart rate variability system balance my tracking heart rate variability score on that I haven't looked at this like two years since I've just I didn't know they picked up HRV it's interesting yeah she's she's given me a um yeah I thought that was really quite interesting but yeah I mean I um as a as a as a tool was um quite interesting just looking at this here that's great that's cool yeah the W sort of does a 4minute uh qeg with an evoke potential it's a very it's meant to be used by non skilled people for the brain so it's it's a very quick assessment that a chiropractor can do and redo and redo and redo when someone has a concussion or they're aging or something um it doesn't give you the same information that a full brain map would do a 20-minute recording a deep analysis but it's the same kind of tech it's giving you EEG and it's cool I didn't realize they picking up HRV but all EEG people kind of hate heartbeat because it's contaminates EEG it moves the scalp you can see it everywhere so they're going to be measuring and filtering out the the heartbeat so that's kind of cool to they added an HRV calculation off of that uh it's very elegant way to handle the noise so that that's what I was going go into because obviously a lot of people listen to this right now know well this is all interesting well this sounds fascinating but um Andrew's over in the states we probably haven't got something like this over in the UK what do we do but I'm writing saying that now this is something that the uh the peak brain Institute has the ability to do remotely as well we do we actually work pretty worldwide um I will say we have Peak brain Ltd in his Majesty's uh business uh whatever you guys call it the we have a peak brain UK company and with a local London person and we also have a sport Focus branch in in London as well uh so you guys have two of our uh really Prestige branches in in the UK itself but uh if you're not in the UK or Sweden or the US which is where our physical offices are you can still work with us and uh most of our clients even in the US don't come to our offices we have a half a dozen uh locations and in the US S cover the middle of the country the west of the country and the East Coast so you can come to LA or New York or St Louis but if you're not near one of those locations and you still want to work with us we just send you equipment and you can you can rent equipment if you're in one of our countries or can pick it up in our countries or you can purchase equipment otherwise and we run these U multi-month coaching programs where we assess your brain build neuro feedback and iterate with you you know teach you how to do it over a few weeks and then chat with you throughout the week get sleep reports day reports talk to you about how you're feeling about your different goals and start giving you new neuro feedback protocols and other biohacking to layer in to change and then reassess you and sort of be a skilled you know a mix between your gym your mechanic your scientist your lab kind of everything except your doctor you know you get access to the tools your psychologist or psychiatrist might use or neuros psychiatrist but they're not the expert you're becoming your own expert is our goal so have this uh uh you know one two kind of service offering where you can do brain mapping and you can also do brain training and all the brain training programs include brain mapping essentially that's part of the the assessment but yeah people can work with us remotely we have this 7 day a week worldwide coaching team who will hang out and bug you to fill out your sleep surveys if you haven't and we'll help you place a wire in your head if you need or kick your Windows machine because it decided to update right then because that happens um but yeah we try to get the technology out of the way and you can work with us really wherever you are but it becomes a bit less expensive if you're in the UK or the us or Sweden because we can just ship you rental systems and you know work with you pretty quickly there too so really interesting and and if people want to find out about that where can they go to find out more yeah so check us out at Peak brain institute.com or in the UK Peak brain. co.uk is our local office for direct people there if they want to talk to Chris in in London so um we're all over the web though at Peak brain uh I have a new uh an old podcast that's dropping new episodes shortly the head first with Dr Hill podcast you can find that other the podcast places but yeah come check us out at Peak brain Institute we'll put in the show notes a coupon for folks to cut the brain mapping membership in half so it's usually 500 bucks in the US um and it's 250 for unlimited mapping in our us offices and I think it ends up being uh about 300 pound for a pre-post brain map under this deal in the UK so you can use as a biohacker special and examine your neut Tropics or your fatigue or see how you're recovering from your concussion If You Wish by just working with Chris a little bit for some data so that's good and then we can put that in the and we'll put the the the code in the show notes then people can go and take advantage of that just just one final question before we leave the certain people in the world that are pressing forward obviously this last year since November last year with AI and and and chat gbt and all those things that are ding forward um then you people like Elon that are doing stuff with neuralink how how do you see Technologies like neuralink and equivalence yeah having an impact on us as somebody that's kind of in this world um how do you see that rolling out over the next five years or so yeah neuralink is not going to affect us it's nonsense um it's a bad company they're doing bad things they're getting in trouble left and right for how they doing research for how they doing animal research and human research is not going to be any different they haven't solved anything they're all like oh we're cutting holes in heads but they've solved the robotic surgery that's that's what neurolink is it's a robotic surgery uh uh to make it more reliable they haven't solved the problem of brain computer interface getting wires into the head is not really the problem yes it's a giant hassle but it's not really the problem the problem is what do you do when the brain changes what's underneath the wires which happens so it's a lot more complicated than just sticking wires and heads and I do not think that uh of all the things Elon Musk is doing that's the least real as far as I can tell um and and the most sci-fi and and the most waste of money and you know it sort of he's a mad scientist sort of fits that he's trying to experiment on humans okay but I think that's the most vapor worth thing he's putting out there and the people for whom it's not vaporware are those folks who are locked in with paralysis who need BCI and this is going to advance that landscape the folks that want surgical interventions but we can measure the EEG without cutting into your head pretty well at this point you put 64 wires or a full head cap on and you can get Precision of EEG that is equivalent to fmri in the brain you know one millimeter Precision pretty pretty close so I don't think BC the solution the knurling stuff is really that exciting I think AI is fairly exciting because we're going to get um you know I'm all about bringing expertise to the individual and this is going to accelerate that you know you'll be able to just like coders now we'll have ai co-pilot pilots and codebase assistants who will learn the codebase of their project and start helping them s you know build better code I think we're going to have ai agents who will learn our medical history and our genes and and and and the literature landscape that is proliferating aggressively in medicine and we'll start to surface individualized recommendations we'll start to test drugs on us in simulation we'll start to do that kind of thing where we have essentially Avatar Style Health uh uh representations that can be um a reflection of our health status or our Wellness or performance status and will let us essentially let computers become you or or phones become reflections of our knowledge base I think we're going have the same thing in our health and wellness landscape I mean think about you know 50 years ago we didn't check TR oh maybe 80 years ago didn't check triglycerides now you look at triglycerides and go oh crap back off on the back off on the ice cream you know and you learn or you can look at your brain and learn how this you know the singlets work and control your OCD or learn that your Alpha Speed is slow and your word finding is tanked from that and address it and I think that the number of uh places were demystifying physiology the way that we're figuring out individualized medicine and individualize health stuff AI is going to accelerate that and I believe within five years we will be doing a really good job of translational medicine and compression of morbidity meaning really good job at taking things that have just been discovered in supplements or meds and getting them into people who need them because we're going to be able to compress the the testing and Discovery phase a lot for some of this stuff through AI I also think that we're going to get the ability to take a lot of stuff we don't need to be dying from or sick from or suffering from and compress it into the last bit of life so illness doesn't have to be you know dying is about death not so much about dying for 30 years you know flatting that trajectory improving that trajectory my grandparents were way more frail than my parents with bone density with muscles with their diet my parents are like ridiculously powerful in their mid-70s compared to their parents their in their mid 70s and that's not really about the genes or better food in the 50s for them versus the 30s it's it's something different it's about the fact that they know how to do you know the the more advanced medicine in the past 20 years and that's kept them healthier it's kept that trajectory flatter and that's really I think a goal that we're going to start really being able to exploit you some benefit from where our speed of processing I think we're discovering more things about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's um there's been not that I care too much but there's been a big discovery on what's going on with gray and bald hair recently so it looks like few years from now baldness might be a thing in the past iron you know oddly um but so maybe other things where you end up getting deeply personalized uh attention from intelligent avatars and you have doctors steering training double-checking them and not you know how hard is it to get in front of a doctor I I I you know I see doctors and it's 15 20 minutes doctor talking full speed at me the whole time and I can't see them again for two months or three months and when I work with people you know they start the conversation trying to get all the information in because they're like afraid that they're not going to have much time to interact and then we start working with them every single day and it's real-time access and they're oh okay this is like a gym I have coaches and I can you know get some support I think that's going to be what happens is we're GNA not have to Silo the expertise of really sophisticated science and medicine into the doctors you know quite as much 50 60 70 years ago doctors were like God they said something you did it including bad stuff in in this country certainly uh many countries in the 40s and 50s were doing very bad things with our uh people that had problems and I think that the democratization the access the agency that is being brought by AI is actually the super exciting part um so cool lovely thank you very much very interesting answer well Dr Andrew Hil thank you so much for coming on and being a guest on the show for everybody that's been listening we will pop the link to the uh the websites below so you can access them and also the very kind uh discount code so that you can get access to that as well so Andrew thank you very much ah thanks for having me well nice to be here and for everybody that's been listening until next time make it happen thank you for listening to make it happen with Will polston I hope you've enjoyed this episode please feel free to share it with anybody that you think could benefit from it and also make sure that you hit subscribe so you get to get the new episodes as soon as they're released