☀️ The #1 Brain Hack to Reduce Stress (2024)

[Music] foreign welcome back to the energy blueprint podcast I am incredibly excited to share today's guests with you today's episodes two of them with you uh and that should give you a sense of how important I think this information is for you I did a total of about three hours of podcasting with today's guest uh neuroscientist Dr Andrew Hill because I think the content of this conversation and what he's talking about is literally and this is not an exaggeration one of the most powerful tools strategies technologies that we have available to us to enhance our brain I would say it's in the top three I would put the top three as meditation plant medicine assisted Psychotherapy or psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and neurofeedback and that is the subject of today's episodes neurofeedback Dr Andrew Hill is one of the world's top experts in neurofeedback and this is something that is at this point kind of near and dear to my heart because as you'll see in these two episodes which actually go over my personal brain map results [Music] um electroencephalography looking at my brain waves of my brain in different regions of my brain and correlating that comparing it basically to hundreds of or thousands of what they call Healthy controls people with uh healthy normal brain function and basically what they do is they compare your results on your brain map to those people to indicate certain things that might be going on in your brain and this is then linked up with your subjective experience so you sit down actually with the person who is interpreting your brain map results and they go over hey there's low activity here there's High activity in this part of the brain or this and this are paired together there's kind of a hot spot of high activity in this region which could indicate this for example could indicate attention deficit hyperactivity could indicate anxiety could indicate hyper vigilance could indicate depression and mood regulation issues could indicate brain fog right um any number of things like that and then they're matching this to your subjective experience and identifying areas of weakness areas of potential strength but areas of weakness and things that you want to work on so matching up what are your goals what do you feel like are your brains deficits with what the the brain map the actual measurements of your brain activity are showing about what's going on in your brain and so you're going to hear in these two episodes how that was done for me and you're going to hear in the second episode which was recorded several weeks after the first you're going to see the updated brain map so I did two one at the beginning prior to starting neurofeedback and then I did another one after about 20 sessions and you are actually going to see the real images of my brain activity and the results of those 20 sessions of neurofeedback from brain map number one to brain map number two after 20 sessions of doing the work the neurofeedback work to Target these specific areas of weakness in my brain and goals of mine of what I want to optimize further there's a lot of layers here that are really interesting but the big thing that I want you to get is number 1 this is truly one of the most powerful if not the single most powerful strategy tool for brain enhancement that we have available to us so I want to strongly encourage you all to do neurofeedback so this is something I am now a huge advocate of and uh not for no reason right this is I actually have the brain map results that have allowed me to see how profound the changes have been on my own brain in just 10 weeks of doing this work uh 20 sessions roughly of doing this neurofeedback training I've had absolutely profound results both in terms of the objective brain map EEG measurements where they can actually see objectively here's how your brain has changed and in terms of my own subjective experience in terms of focus in terms of motivation and drive in terms of Sleep Quality in terms of not being quite as distractible um and and many other areas enhance calmness and resilience less sort of excessive hyper vigilance um and you know the in particular for me that one of the things that I was I was struggling with is uh you know I'm I'm I work so much I work so hard I have so many projects going on right now that my brain has over the last few years kind of been wired into a state of constant go go I'm always thinking my wife uh you know often comments to me that you know my brain is always working the wheels are always turning I'm always sort of formulating ideas and thinking through certain things and analyzing things um and the the downside of that what there's lots of good side there's a lot of uh productivity and and great things that come from that but the downside of that way of being is sometimes it's hard to just relax it's hard to get my brain out of work mode and thinking mode and um and just let go of the work drop it all and allow my brain to just drop in to you know playing at the beach with my kids or playing in the house um you know just listening to some music and relaxing and reading a book for example it's it's hard for me to to do that historically it's become hard and this neurofeedback is one of the thing I should say is the main thing that has allowed me to do to do that much more effectively along with with again becoming much less distractible much more focused sleeping better feeling less stressed being more resilient and and so much more and you'll see in the objective results how my brain has actually changed objectively not just from my own subjective uh experience of it so um a little background kind of interesting aspect of neurofeedback here neurofeedback is actually something I did as a kid um I'm trying to think how many years ago 25 ish years ago I did as a kid and actually the reason um at that time was that my older brother was was diagnosed with ADD and um the doctor wanted to prescribe Ritalin and my parents didn't want to do that they they thought it was a bad idea to prescribe Ritalin and that there was likely going to be too many negative side effects and so they did something very unusual very Fringe at the time they signed him up for something which was then called bio feedback and uh and they thought well if you know Big Brothers going to that biofeedback training one even though little brother hasn't been diagnosed with ADD maybe we can send little brother Ari along with him and and so I started doing this training uh with my with my older brother Yoni who some of you may know he's he's also his name is Dr Yoni Whitton he runs a business called painfix protocol and he's a world-class chiropractor and pain expert and posture expert uh and one of my personal closest friends in addition to my big bro and um anyway so I did this for a brief stint maybe six months a year as a little kid basically forgot about it for 25 years and then recently I stumbled across Dr Andrew Hill a talk by him I started reading some research on neurofeedback and I was extremely impressed with it so I went to look for uh a neurofeedback clinic in my local area and in at the time I was in San Diego and so I went to San Diego I spent part of the Year there so I went to to see if there's any clinics nearby I found an amazing one in uh Solana Beach called brain Excel run by a guy who's now become a good friend of mine uh his name is Elia nicoleev and uh he's an amazing guy and the clinic is an amazing clinic and it turns out Peak uh brain excel in Solana Beach is an affiliate for uh Peak brain which is run by today's guest Dr Andrew Hill who is again a world-class expert on neurofeedback and um basically Dr Andrew Hill is actually an analyzing those brain map results coming up with the treatment protocol and figuring things out so he's actually sort of the Neuroscience expert behind the whole operation and um basically this has been transformative for me and I'm I'm deeply grateful uh to have rediscovered neurofeedback as an adult very recently 25 years after I did it as a kid and um I want to share all this with you guys and I think that this is something that can be profoundly beneficial for you if you're struggling with any brain related symptoms whether it's brain fog whether it's mood issues depression anxiety whether it's add issues whether it's sleep issues and racing thoughts hyper vigilance whether you you just don't have enough chill in your brain if you've got migraines there's so many different things that this can help with and I I encourage you all to explore it one of the other things that's interesting is this is not just for problems that's what drew me to it is you know I I have already a highly functional brain um and I perform very well and and really I don't want to say every area there's probably things I'm not very good at I'm sure there are there are but uh pretty much every area of my life I'm already very doing very well at and um this is something that appealed to me because a lot of you know high level CEOs uh entrepreneurs High uh High performing uh professional athletes are using this training to not just fix problems fix deficits but to go from normal you know well-functioning brain to better functioning brain you know we start to see things like for example focus on a spectrum from highly distractible something we might call add to the capacity for very high levels of focus that go beyond what's typical what's normal like that's a spectrum and so we can we if we conceptualize that in that way instead of sort of like an on off switch like you either are normal or your add then we can start to go oh well I wonder if I can grow my capacity for Focus right and we can look at every aspect of brain function in that sort of way these are traits that we can either be not so good at or very good at or somewhere in the middle and we have neuroplasticity we have the ability to train to get better so anyway with all of that said this is a long-winded intro because I feel this is so important I wanted to make sure to explain all of this to you and and talk about my own personal passion and excitement about this and and really recommend it to you all with all that said I want to First say I want to not first but I want to add to this you can do this at home uh Peak brain which is run by Dr Andrew Hill today's guest has the capacity to set you up for home neurofeedback training I actually didn't know that they had this capacity prior to doing in this podcast episode so that's wonderful news I asked them if they can offer a discount they were a little reluctant at first to be honest with you but they agreed to to set my listeners up with a discount so you get 250 off your initial brain map and then you can sign up to do this neurofeedback training at home and they will literally guide you through the whole process you'll have expert neuroscientists interpreting your brain map result and custom designing a protocol to to address your specific brain weaknesses or areas that you want to optimize along with your your goals you know what what are you actually trying to achieve what are you trying to make your brain better at so they can they can do that with you you can do this training from the comfort of your own home we will set up a link to that at theenergyblueprint.com forward slash neurofeedback and with that link you'll be able to get a discount of 250 dollars off your beginning your neurofeedback training starting with your brain map and you can just start with a brain map if you want to start there you can just do the brain map you can see what's going on in your brain and then from there you can figure out you know are there areas that you want to address you don't have to go any further though I highly recommend and and I would say pretty much everybody has areas that can be optimized if you so wish to and um you can start by just analyzing your brain having a neuroscientist say hey here's what's going on in your brain how does that match up with your subjective experience are there any areas that you want to work on and optimize so I would highly recommend basically everyone to do this this is incredibly powerful as far as what this can do for you and your life if you happen to be in the San Diego area I would highly recommend going to my friend elia's clinic in Solana Beach called brain Excel I've personally had an amazing experience uh at Elias clinic at brain Excel he's amazing he's uh really incredible at what he does and I've gotten amazing results by working with him so if you happen to be in the San Diego area reach out to him at brain Excel and otherwise if you're not in the San Diego area use this link to work with Peak brain and get set up with your brain map and hopefully get started with at-home neurofeedback training okay that's enough for me let's get into the episode so in part one this was recorded basically at the start of my neurofeedback training before I had done much I think I just done a few sessions at that point and we go over a bit of my initial pre-neurofeedback training brain map and uh in session two in in podcast part two I should say we go over the new brain map after 20-ish sessions of neurofeedback training and we we get to actually see the new results from all the same tests and how my brain changed from those 20 sessions of neurofeedback training check this out I think you're gonna really enjoy this I think you're going to get a lot of value from it and I again I really strongly encourage you to sign up for your own brain map again you can do that at the energy blueprint.com forward slash neuro feedback okay so let's get into the episode enjoy so welcome to the show Dr Hill such a pleasure to have you oh well thanks for having me I really appreciate it nice to be here yeah so I've been looking to forward to this interview for for a long time now uh for a number of reasons I've been wanting to do neurofeedback for many years um it's actually something that I did probably almost 30 years ago at this point as a child my older brother was diagnosed with ADHD and they wanted to put him on Ritalin and my parents were in probably among the first sort of generation of people to say no we're not going to put our our son on Ritalin we're gonna try this other new thing that seems very out there but it's called at that time it was just called bio feedback now they call it neurofeedback and they put my brother in that and they thought well you know if it's beneficial for him maybe we'll just put the younger brother in there too so I was doing this stuff when I was like 10 years old uh about 30 years ago and um I think I did it for maybe a year at that age and then in more recent years as I've seen presentations and podcasts with you and read up on the research on the topic I became more interested in doing it again and I'm now about 20 sessions into neurofeedback training uh with uh brain Excel down in San Diego with Elia Nikola who has been trained by you and um and works with Peak brain your your Institute uh and I'm really enjoying it and seeing benefits from it so um great to hear I wanted to do this podcast with you to help others learn about neurofeedback because it's one of those things where a lot of research exists but not that many people know about it so um can you tell people what neurofeedback is and how it works sure so um the thing we call neurofeedback today that was called more biofeedback or other things over the past 50 or 60 years was discovered in the late um 60s mid 60s at UCLA basically and it's a neurofeedback or biofeedback on the brain on the central nervous system basically is what is the distinction is a way of mostly involuntarily exercising brain waves or sometimes blood flow and in doing that you can go after different brain resources and sort of tune the brain the way you might tune or think of tune the body and that can be true from like a you know Physical Therapy occupational therapy perspective of your rehab and and helping functional uh resources or you can think of it as you know palliative for suffering or sometimes more Peak Performance so neurofeedback as we do it now the field of neurofeedback probably has about half the field still focused on things like ADHD and seizures actually which is how it was discovered by mistake uh a little over 50 years ago so the other you know explosion of technology in the 90s back in the when you were doing it as a kid I have to ask what was your experience you're you're watching stuff like Knight Rider on television you're seeing all this cool Sci-Fi show up on TV and you're going into an office and having wire stuck to your head and I assume you're watching a game move on the screen or a movie or something what was your thought as a as a 10 year old or whatever it was you know curious uh you know I didn't I didn't really know what to think of it it was kind of just I was just sort of going along for the ride with my brother yeah and it was easy enough it was kind of weird because at that time it's it was more cumbersome than it is now you had a full-on cap uh not not just a few spots of electrodes uh and and then we played very simple little video games mildly entertaining not nearly as fun as the video games I played at home but you know they were they were okay so there was nothing unpleasant about it and I don't know that I experienced anything subjectively because at that age I don't think you can be attuned enough to really notice things yourself about your own brain function and attention control and things of that nature but um yeah basically I would say the experience wasn't unpleasant and that's maybe beyond that I don't think I could say anything in in the short span of time I had as a kid sure I mean that sort of does reflect people's experience of it as rather innocuous to some extent I mean I would expect that even as an adult now when you started I would assume about you know 20 sessions and now maybe seven eight ten weeks ago or something you started up again um I would guess the first few weeks of that first two weeks at least you're like okay this was interesting and didn't actually feel too much and then something here and there started to creep in is that accurate yes I I would say it was more like the first three or four sessions okay and I actually so um apparently this is unusual but uh I I I was not convinced that it was really measuring my brain weight sure sure um because I was watching you know for example like playing a car racing game or the plane flying game it seemed more or less random to me and not linked with my subjective states of what I was experiencing internally as far as am I paying attention am I locked on you know or am I zoning out and you know doing something else it didn't seem to correlate to me right and so I started like I actually would do things I think at one point I even pulled the electrode off to see if it would change something uh and and the car stops you know you know and I was I was experimenting with just different things I could do subjectively and crash the car and yeah exactly to see if it would actually play out in the game um so I brought a lot of skepticism to the whole thing uh and then I would say after four or five sessions I I started to see the correlation between my subjective like internal state of okay I'm focused I'm paying attention okay now I'm I can feel myself zoning out and and then you know in the picture game for people listening it's like where where pictures you have a picture it's chopped up into let's say 20 pieces 50 pieces and the picture is slowly revealed to you as basically each each part of the picture is revealed as basically reward for your brain State being in the in in an optimal place and um and and so the pictures revealed and a little ding happens yes when that when that's revealed and then I could start to see like ding ding ding ding ding you know when I'm little runs on and in a good place and then I'm zoning out and then it goes silent for a while right and there's there's nothing happening and so I started to to experience that and and I would say I experience a lot of that now I can really my subjective state is strongly linked to what's happening so so what you've you've developed the ability to notice how the game reflects your subjective state which is a little unusual most people have very little sense of voluntary control and or internal experience shift related to the game because we can't feel our brain waves so the brain you know let's say you're measuring on the right hand side measuring some Theta brain waves which we often want to train down for better executive function or control over attention and the way you train the brain to do this is you measure the Theta moment to moment as the brain makes it and whenever the brain makes a bit less for half a second you applaud the brain with more cars driving faster or more puzzle pieces in the game filling in like you described and a couple seconds later your brain moves in the other direction the wrong direction for that workout that day and the game slows down or stops the car slows down and you hit fewer zombies I hope Elias turned on the zombie apocalypse level for you in the car game no it's not he hasn't you know actually I decided I played the plane game the car game a few others and I actually have been sticking with just the pictures a lot of people really enjoy the simple games actually they find them deeply satisfying somehow so and and I like the consistency of objective feedback I like I can see my scores from session to session and you know see if I'm improving and the picture game gives you discreet feedback beep beep like if things are happening at the same time you get a picture a square reveal you get a beep so it's discrete events I used that game that exact little picture game called formation I used that game and the software developer um who's a better in the field for many many years um got named Howard lightstone who used to build real-time operating systems for f-16s and like the 80s or something then he retired and went into neurofeedback and he developed the software called uh nautical eager and um I I called him up and I was doing my PhD and said hey I wanted to double-blind placebo-controlled neurofeedback and it wasn't possible at the time and so we worked together a little bit he designed a placebo control module uh and I did a 40 subject Placebo control double blind sham neurofeedback experiment with a 64 Channel cap you know a biosemite cap on top of the two or three wires we were training on and looked at the evoke potentials the the brain reacting to neurofeedback because I wanted to figure out well how is it working how does the brain know that the environment is reflecting it where's the control structure how is The Binding The yoking Happening where's the informed bit of information where's the associative learning reinforcement coming from yeah it's easy to say to a client your brain gets applauded you know audio and visual happens whenever your brain makes more or less of a brainwave but how is the brain actually figuring that out that discreetly yeah so I did some digging around questions I'm right I'm glad you brought that up well essentially it's it's parameterized meaning there's billions of things your brain is doing and if you're only applauding one of those things the brain's like oh hey wait that's weird and the big trick here is that we're moving the goal posts so every 30 seconds or so in the way that we set up we adjust what we're asking for so essentially Trends you're engaging in not events you're engaging in or what are really applauded reinforced so you can think Skinner's pigeons not Pavlov's dog here I promise we don't make you drool uh when someone turns a bell a light on or a bell or something but we do shape except that already exists Behavior already exists and you're just like maybe explain I'm sure people are familiar with child loves dogs but maybe not so Skinner's pigeon Skinner was the father of associate of learning the thought of conditioning in some ways and um while Pavlov took things learning you know learning that was already existing and sort of yolk stuff together it wouldn't normally be yoked together like drooling when a bell goes off or a light goes off because you associate it with giving some dog food you sort of like can transfer learning that was the cool pavlovian conditioning uh we also have skin area and conditioning um and Skinner uh just worked out some of the basic rules of how reinforcement learning works you know when something happens and you notice it and get some sort of uh reinforcer you tend to do those things more and this is the basic of basis of both intelligent cognitive aware learning and involuntary neurons that wire together fire together wire together basic heavy and plasticity or it's all this when a baby learns to go to crawl it's because the brain was excited at the random Association of muscles that made them look further that day oh wait I can see 10 feet oh I wasn't thinking about the muscles but the random Association activity was reinforced with more information and in neurofeedback we're doing we're taking something already exists shaping brain waves already exist the amount of theta is a thing you're making and it fluctuates and you applaud stuff that is moving in the right direction so Skinner would applaud pigeons when they pecked a certain way and he would teach them essentially over several days by successively rewarding Behavior to create little superstitious pigeons that would jump up and down and pack a bunch of times to get food essentially but the same technique this reinforcement learning this this uh shaping and and rewarding is also the basis for things like ABA and autism this applied Behavior Analysis token-based reinforcement learning stuff um so you can take things that are involuntary and shape them or do associative learning on them as well and that's what neurofeedback is in the brain when you train the EEG electricity or the blood flow you can't really feel those things nor can you really voluntarily voluntarily control them so you discovered a week or two in you kind of have to let it happen you can notice the association but you couldn't make it happen and that's probably what you were in some ways uh tripping over in the first week or two you're like come on I'm concentrating nothing's happening that's right because concentration does all kinds of things in your brain not just drop Theta and raise beta at one circuit that might be involved with executive function or sleep regulation whatever it is we're doing that day for your exercise okay so let me ask you a question related to that how how much does intentionality matter as far as what somebody is doing with their subjective State during the training session meaning and and maybe I'll interject something in into this which is SMR um and I've heard you describe that as like uh let's say a cat locked onto a Target like it's hunting something and the body is completely still but it's and its eyes are locked on yeah right and and one of the things I'm being trained in is SMR I'm getting a score of SMR so it made sense to me to have some intentionality of like that that visual of okay that's what I'm trying to achieve during this training session I'm going to bring you know intentionally sort of bring that kind of energy like locked onto my target body's calm but I'm I'm you know I'm locked in does that matter does it not matter is is there a proper sort of it's a great question subjective state to have during your training sessions I mean if you look at the way learning works and if you look at the literature and Science and all kinds of what we understand about the brain one would expect that expectation increases learning that's what one would expect however this process was discovered in cats not very good instruction followers this process works exceptionally well in people that are non-verbal that have no cognitive sort of language that are screaming and seizing this works on people that are unconscious reliably wow it works on teenagers want to be in your office and sit in their phone and ignore you the whole time so yes maybe sitting see more importantly perhaps practically you can get in the way of the process by tightening up and adding noise to the measurement EMG or muscle tension and we haven't experienced that too if I shift or clench my jaw I notice that it disrupts it yeah it's really classic the flying game there's a Target in the middle as you close the target folks go and tighten their forehead up and suddenly suddenly your little guy misses because you're controlling it with their body and that gets in the way of measuring your brain so it's a weird counter-intuitive process during the the EEG based neurofeedback we also do h-e-g or hemoencephalography I don't know if Elie has done that with you down there yet no but we use a infrared camera on the forehead and measure the brain's metabolic out flux basically the little waves of heat coming off your brain and you can learn a little bit it's semi-voluntary to sort of a concentrate in about two seconds later you get a surge of metabolism after effort in the brain and that you can develop a conscious awareness of you're actually controlling your psychology uh gradually a grad kind of guy right you're you're finishing up your your doctorate and stuff so you you probably come across the term bold response the blood oxygen level dependent response which is the MRI the fmri signal the metabolic activation signal you see that takes two seconds roughly to show up in the brain after effort unlike EEG which is instantaneous can't feel the EG but you can kind of feel the blood flow you can also make the blood flow happen by concentrating or by thinking happy thoughts so it's a way to do vascular tone pumping in the in the front as well as individual circuit tuning with the EEG and then we of course do multiple channels to train relationships between that stuff but those are the two flavors that that Peak brain tends to focus on is individual channels of training uh one two three channels at a time kind of stuff after doing a full hat assessment so we so we did a full head cap for you I would assume yeah we did I I looked at Delia at one point um we did a full-on cap as the qeeg the assessment part of it we also had to do a really boring attention test as part of that um we always put those things in contrast again good good scientific rigor is to look for what's called a double dissociation easiest way to find that is to look for physiology and performance moving against each other at least when looking at human stuff in this kind of you know person-to-person level thing so we put those things in contrast because we have an attention test which is a little flexible to how you're feeling but really straightforward to look at to interpret what's going on in your performance and then a brain map which is very straightforward interpret in terms of what kind of brain waves you have but not so meaningful in terms of what does it mean for you because people are a little bit unusual so we want to avoid using brain mapping as diagnostic use it as exploratory you know model what could be true and as that matches stuff you understand and know about yourself you probably found stuff you care about yeah but the performance testing can also like really break down performance in a nice granular way better in some ways than diagnostic language around attention for some folks so okay maybe we'll we'll dig into that in terms of having you look at my personal results and see what we found oh yeah we could pull those up sure sure but before we go there I actually want to jump back to something I think we should have covered earlier and forgive me because I'm sure this is something you've talked about thousands of times but I think it's important for uh people who are unfamiliar with neurofeedback to hear and so I would love for you to tell the origin story of how neurofeedback was discovered and sure and then I also want to talk about just some of the big picture benefits why would somebody do neurofeedback what benefits does it have sure sure um so there's a few different flavors and forms of neurofeedback and like many technologies that are sort of based on the natural world several people sort of discovered this stuff at once over about a decade or two and different flavors and we're more or less successful in understanding what it was and commercializing and Etc but the flavor of neurofeedback that is sort of dominating the clinical world and seems to have the most impact on regulatory stability so attention sleep stress seizure a bunch of those things have regulatory Dynamics as a core feature you know all of life all of energy flux any any system even things that aren't you know alive in terms of Consciousness weather systems planetary systems anything that is dynamic and somewhat stable and has has like a an exchange of energy throughout it has to have the features of um delay and feedback to create the oscillation that's what creates regulatory stability in systems be it weather planets or us and you can think about you know depression being cortisol goes up and stays up in the hippocampus dies you get depressed or insulin goes up and stays up and we get insulin resistant and diabetes you know regulatory uh Health requires dynamic range so Dr Barry Sturman UCLA uh in the late 60s was looking at a particular brain wave that cats make because he's a learning scientist Dr Sturman still up here in La America's faculty at UCLA still does lectures every so often but back in the 60s he was studying learning for its own sake basically and NASA approached him and said hey we have uh uh astronauts getting sick breathing in methylhydrazine or Rocket Fuel basically Vapors and getting nauseated and headaches and we have to figure out how dangerous this stuff is as we develop the space program so Sturman got a small Grant from them to study toxicity essentially of Rocket Fuel and back in the 60s before we were limiting animal research there were some destructive more destructive animal research and this was some of that and he was putting cats in Plexiglas cages with little beakers of hydrazine and starting a stopwatch and he ran about 32 cats through this experiment and three quarters of them had a perfect dose-dependent curve where minutes in the vapor meant increased symptoms and they had crying drooling uh stumbling or Ataxia seizure coma death basically it was a perfect curve for these 24 cats out of the 32 about 40 minutes in they were all having seizures the other eight cats two and a half hours in we're just starting to show some instability events in their gate and things we couldn't figure out why a quarter of the cats were so seizure resistant to toxins and then I remember that six months prior he'd done another experiment on operant conditioning reinforcement learning for cats for for brain waves and he taped a chicken broth sorry a a milk dropper inside their cheek or squirting chicken broth into them their mouths whenever they made SMR this brain wave that most mammals I believe make at a pretty high level for lots of reasons but cats and in all predators all mammal Predators use this thing to be alert and hold still at the same time so if you've seen the cat on the windowsill with a liquid body and laser-like focus you're seeing SMR at a high level and literally the opposite of SMR the movement stuff where you can't sit still the opposite of the comcat and the intention is being pulled by novelty and pulled by patterns not pulled by the thing you're sustained on and other ways that SMR fails so the Speaker gets weak produces difficulty in seat and resisting seizures all human brains can be put into seizure if you push them hard enough we have a threshold for that instability and that's threshold maintained by SMR and SMR also maintains uh staying asleep when you hear small random background sound the architecture stuff about maintenance of sleep we call SMR sleep spindles if we're asleep little bursts of 12 to 15 Hertz waves show up if we hear the dog barking from three houses the way that we're used to hearing so we don't wake up so SMR as a category of neurofeedback that's what you're seeing on your screen by the way SMR score it doesn't matter if we're doing an SMR wave or not it's the whole category of neurophy Max called that but SMR itself is the on the motor strip ear to ear the sensori motor strap is the sensory motor Rhythm and it's kind of like Alpha the idling Rhythm but for the motor and sensory system so when you sit still surges of it when you relax when you become calm self-controlled stay asleep Etc so SMR was obvious and Dr Sturman reinforced it and created this really strange effect and he had a lab assistant who was medication uncontrolled epileptic on huge doses of Tegretol and memberal and Dilantin and things like that and they did an audio based neurofeedback system for over about a year she trained her brain a bunch went off all of her meds and became seizure free for a couple of years wow so this was a big deal in the field but you know in in the in Psychology and Neuroscience and uh there's been a mix sort of adoption of this stuff that's remained very fringy and kind of in the in the edges of Science and neuroscience and psychology for a long time ever since really there's a bunch of reasons for that but one of the uh um more recent papers Dr Sturman did maybe 10 years ago uh there's a review article he did on seizure and he looked back at 20 30 years of history of papers that had examined seizure which is one of the better research things in neurofeedback and he found the average impact on humans is uh is about a 50 reduction in seizures and uh five percent of humans seem to get a total complete control of seizure activity for at least a year which was the length of the study now I've trained a bunch of people that have seizure epileptic difficulties historically you know probably more than a hundred and I've never seen a result as poor as 50 percent not even close it's usually a fairly dramatic effect like ADHD for instance I've trained I would say multiple thousands of people have some sort of executive function difficulty and without fail they have very very large effects multiple standard deviations on a bell curve of attention assessment for instance so you can do a lot with just SMR and the field ran for 30 40 years that way and then maybe 20 years ago it really started to Branch out into other techniques and other subtleties and elaborations and some of it's great and some of it's you know not necessarily uh elaboration for elaboration's sake doesn't help practitioners nor does it help people trying to change their brain sometimes so I tend to walk the line between the weird Cutting Edge Neuroscience stuff that no one's heard of and then drawing a line Beyond which I think stuff has turned into woo or is not not well supported or is too complex or causes side effects so I tend to have a mix of a biohacker's focus on pushing the envelope but doing so with low risk and with uh kind of improved regulatory stability and subjective experience I kind of stop not push people through you know changes uh that are uncomfortable generally so got it uh and on a practical level in terms of like one subjective States um how would they experience the benefits of neurofeedback in their daily life why why should they be compelled to go sign up for yeah you know a few thousand dollars worth of neurofeedback sessions sure sure um I haven't looked at your history of course I'm not your direct coach even though I do consult with your with your company that trains you is a peak for an affiliate so they work with us as for heavy lifting data analysis you know protocol development as they need it um but generally the average person across complaint will get improvements in executive function sleep regulation stress response and speed of processing so depending on what your complaints are or your goals are you know symptoms or Peak Performance you can do an awful lot with getting better control over how you respond to anxiety features let's say anxiety is a good one to talk about for a second because it's not a disease process most anxiety stuff is just a normal resource it's cramped up like a like a like a muscle almost and we have individual circuits that do things we enjoy all the time when they cramp up they become anxiety like posterior cingulate does the watch the road you know catch the Frisbee hey heads up Orient but when you've learned the world isn't safe you over resource the posterior thing you let nigh your bias towards threat sensitization rumination trauma response that kind of stuff so if you can learn your brain and look at it and see your perseveration rumination sensory issue the brain fog you had from covid the high Thea that's giving you ADHD kind of squirrel kinds of stuff the the mix of gifts and challenges the front midline anterior cingulate can have a failure mode if you will in Theta one or beta lubrication or gas that produces a Obsession perseverative stuff but it's not always it's almost never uh only bad when you have the front midline hot spot you tend to have the features of like OCD but you also tend to have the features of a CEO highly focused you know mind like a steel trap so part of neurofeedback part of qbeeg brain mapping and the neurofeedback tuning the brain becomes this process about understanding how your sleep your stress your mood your attention your executive function your sleep regulation how it actually works not putting it into a diagnostic context of oh what's wrong with me oh affects me but put in context of hey I I would like to optimize some things and I'm not feeling as as sharp or as clear or as focused as I want to or I'm drinking too much or I'm having seizures or I'm having migraines or you know big stuff can be addressed but once you look at your brain Maps I would imagine that you know Elia your your coach had a conversation with you that was sort of like here are some things that could be true and which of these things are most important to you and then he and I would have worked together to develop you know master plan so to speak to start pushing those resources around pending you experience them experiencing something yeah um but you know 50 years ago no one did a lipid panel on their blood and we all died of you know heart attacks and stuff and now lipid panel and go triglycerides and cut our Ben and Jerry's habit down for six weeks do it again and go nice I guess I can have two pints of ice cream a week you know without any risk or um you'll you'll appreciate this I use this thing religiously which is a ketone meter for the breath and it's to watch that energy flux to find that edge you know that I can I can handle the protein the carbohydrates the fats at a sufficient level so I don't have to listen to any keto gurus about how many grams of carbs and fiber and stuff I can just watch my metabolism does and scare the sucker uh and I I really really work to sort of not create transference like most neurofeedback people do um but our coaches instead sort of thrust agency Back Up On You by teaching you about what your data might mean helping to reinforce what you already experienced so that as we you probably haven't had a second map yet for maybe you have 20 sessions in uh soon if you haven't but I haven't no you haven't the second map's fun uh usually 90 of the time it's fun because you're you've made some changes and it reflects something you've experienced so now you go oh okay and then we can we usually do two rounds of that for folks that are wondering what the process is like it's usually three times a week um it takes a few usually a few sessions to feel anything then as you try new stuff it builds up briefly after a recession and it wears off unless you repeat it so you have an opportunity to sort of like iteratively push and then we tend to map the brain every other month and do two rounds of that to create sort of a permanent new Baseline as folks first in our feedback usually and some things take more neurofeedback big stuff you know developmental things autism uh major injuries that kind of stuff but someone's got some anxiety some trauma some ADHD drinking too much kind of anxious whatever three to four months is a huge amount of brain training I mean think about what your body could do in three months with a structured set of workouts and some discipline the brain changes extremely faster than the body does it's built to change in a way the body's not so people generally experience huge changes in attention stress sleep fog Clarity research is pretty good on showing uh huge you know long lasting changes and things like ADHD um you can see good research on creativity IQ amazing research on alcohol and drinking uh so there's all kinds of interesting resources and when I started to get into the field I moved out of this you know I started working in autism initially and then I moved into more broad mental health and I ended up doing work with neurofeedback and substance abuse for a while but now you know Peak brain my company and our Affiliates like like Elia who has brain excel in San Diego um we work on whatever you want to work on it's your brain it's it's you know we become your guides and your coaches and your support system to navigate tech and and approaches not to sort of tell you what you should do to yourself we don't want to have your goals you know this is not a clinical process of here's what you need it's a iterative process of trying to Marco Polo our way towards things you want to change so yeah I really enjoyed that aspect of it so maybe this is a good opportunity to segue into my personal results sure let me pull those up for you you're the only man in the world who is in who has uh mapped my brain so possession of my brain data and it's interesting there's um there was a lot that was surprising to me that was there there was some stuff that matched up well um but yeah I've enjoyed the the framing of it which I think elia's done a great job of of good to hear what what you just talked about as far as how some of these things may be a weakness or they may actually be serving you in some way they may be a strength in your life and yeah we're looking at unusual stuff not good or bad and navigating it and we don't find things you don't know about generally or not or not a lot of stuff anyways right um okay let me let me share my screen here you might need to enable that oh let's see okay you should do it yeah perfect um cool it's a little smaller so we have a couple things in the screen one is your attention test which is often the straightforward one that's the bar graphs and then we have your brain map that just shows unusual reactivity um and let me just show you quickly detention test because you're pretty good broadly but there is a specific challenge showing that's kind of interesting so you can see two sets of bar graphs here one's called attention one's called response control and what we did was I'm sure you remember had you click on a one or two as it popped up or or uh either on the screen or spoken you know one one two one for about 20 minutes or 15 minutes there's 440 trials on that test and the only instruction is to click on the one and don't click on the two but it runs at a speed that's designed to unload all your resources so very rapidly you'll start missing on the one or clicking my mistake on the two or drifting or something else or people will in general we call response control the ability to pump the brakes and not squirrel you know not click by mistake not be reactive or automatic or impulsive and we're doing age match sample stuff here and on a bell curve the average score is 100 so your response control or your impulsivity or reactivity stuff is very typical at 103. in the auditory visual are about the same which makes sense most things in the world are both so these systems tend to run together and then even though it's not that exciting we have resources below the impulsivity or response control we break down into Prudence which is carefulness you know can you correct and adjust stamina can you stick with it or do you get worse and consistency so minute to minute consistency and that's all typical it's not perfectly efficient in these maps you can see these little bars aren't level across the Clusters that means you're using your stamina more than your consistency for instance you're bearing down a little bit you know not perfectly efficient but it's fine score but the attention side grabbing that one when it comes up comes in at 79 which is about a standard deviation and a half off the average something's in the way suddenly if we break the auditory versus visual down the visual is 98 it's fine the auditories of 64 which is now two and a half standard deviations off the average and as we dig into the auditory we see your speeds 89 which is fine focus is 79 that's in the way focus is when things get non-dynamic and boring one one again and again same trial that's a focus check and you drift a little bit the first one of those series is called vigilance the alertness check for that you're about two and a half three standard deviations off the mean on that so there's something going on with the auditory system not operating with enough crisp alertness essentially can you repeat everything you just said I didn't hear any of that okay no I'm just kidding go ahead great great um you also can see the sustained scores below the bar graphs bar graphs are a one second probe sustained storage of the whole Trend across time and the same thing shows up where sustained visuals 98 no problem there sustained Auditors are 69. two standard deviations off the mean so something's in the way in the auditory function and when you dig into reaction times and things you can see it there as well reaction times for the visual system as I scroll down are pretty good 184 actually very good very very crisp very very performant faster than a lot of my professional athletes actually in the reaction times but your auditory is 80 milliseconds slower than your Visual and on this test they tend to be the same so some things in the way in the auditory right so you know we found a local bottleneck essentially that's within one person very unusual to have you know two and a half standard deviations of difference between auditory and visual I and I came home after this brain map and I told my wife about it and I said look you're going to be really happy to hear that it's not just that I'm not paying attention because it's not interesting to me it's my brain and not just that but you see that's that's my that's my excuse for absolutely it's always like how come you're never listening to me I'm like look it's we've seen I can't help your brain map I pulled your brain Maps up for those folks who are just listening but um we have a low amount of beta waves on the left auditory cortex behind the air which is the place we use for receptive language we have two auditory systems behind both of the ears and they're kind of like the legs you know designed to be used in pairs you can use one at a time but not super efficient plus the ears never stop working they never turn off unlike almost every other sensory tissue that you know moves stuff in and out of the brain the ears are always active so it's a very loaded heavy activated system and one of yours and not the other is running in slow motion a little bit or sluggish and this is kind of like having a hard plastic Tire on the front left wheel of your car at a stop sign you know you tap the gas and it spins for a second and the car moves and this is going to produce your wife walking up behind you or from the Next Room starting to talk to you and you go sorry sorry what we say something because you weren't in listening mode already if you're like doing this listening thing and you're being a good listener good husband you're probably fine but the orienting the alerting to the moment of change it's difficult yeah and she she could attest to that and I think also on the other side of that is when I am attending to something I'm locked on to it okay and I like I it's it's very difficult for me to let anything else in I don't have the squirrel thing going on where I'm like shifting my focus here and there all the time with every new thing I'm locked on to whatever whatever I'm doing in that moment and then so if she starts speaking to me for example during that I will almost completely block it out and then have to finish what I'm doing before I can attend to that and of course we see that on your stamina on the auditory systems above average you're able to lock in we see it right here in that dark blue bar 120 of typical so you're locking in and bearing down with effort in the auditory system and not being impulsive in the slightest your auditory input positivities 106 above average but the auditory attention for grabbing stuff is 64. so this is that moment of change so a couple things one is this probably already has changed a little bit in the first 20 sessions in neurofeedback if not more than a little bit and we can train we can Target it more for you in the second half of your first program probably but short term to help your relationship here's how you work around it please give me the hacks first of all honey it's not your fault I want to listen to you here's how you get me to listen to you better Dr Hill just said it's my brain there's nothing I can do about it well first part of that's true second part not so much we are changing your brain so sooner or later no excuse but in the short term here's how you work around it you get her to call your name or whatever and give you a two second lag a beat and then continue hey honey three two you want pizza maybe Thai is so much better for you then come on honey third time I'm asking what do you want for dinner you know I have the menus out here I'm looking because you'll come online at the moment of break and Orient and like roll the blast tape to kind of catch up and you might even develop a habit of like oh sorry what not because you didn't hear but because you're trying to get her to stop talking for a second so you can roll the tape and catch up and Orient to her so it's an auditory processing issue we see it in your brain and in your performance it's very likely to be a real thing you deal with yeah for sure okay and again trainable almost always something you can you feel a filter busy environments you know sit in rooms people talking pretty soon and have an easier time with that were there any other key insights that jumped out my brain a lot a lot of fade in the right front corner can produce a sense of overwhelm and Dread for some people I'm feeling kind of heavy and burnt out not sure if you experienced that or not I've had a couple years of covid stuff that's been pretty stressful ah okay yeah there's been I won't get into all the details but you know there's been some level of stress around that that matches up to some extents with that nothing yeah your brain's not making a lot of Delta you know Delta's the rest mode so your brain has no chill is a scientific term here um and the place where it has the least chill the alpha is acting like a beta wave it's taking over like a fast Alpha in the front middle of the head that's the anterior cingulate so I would guess you have a little bit of that like CEO meets OCD feature set where your mind latches on and you know hyper focus is a bit uncomfortably at times where it can't turn away from stuff you're thinking about most definitely yeah um let's see here one second okay uh what is interesting and and uh one of the reasons I love to do brain mapping and attention testing alongside each other is we can look at some features that often pick up classic stuff like ADHD for instance but for someone like you distinguish that it's not ADHD it's an auditory processing issue because ADHD is a very classic stuff anyways is is high amounts of theta relative to Beta and the inattentive Spacey stuff which is where the performance hit is for you shows up as large amounts of alpha everywhere but as you can see you have excess compared to the average guy your age you have access to those brain waves slightly you know just right next to the ear on the right on one side and ratio basically so the beta is weak on the right slow range or high on the left it's a mix of uh both sides but it's it's a it's a mild auditory processing issue that you have um and that's kind of the big takeaway and I bet it produces you know Touch of stress or deep sleep that kind of stuff um the other only other thing I would I would guess about is there's um there's a measure here of the speed of your alpha waves and the alpha waves are really a proxy for speeder processing and these can be dragged down into negative numbers and and spread out and yours are when we get sick or tired or stressed or angry or you know can cost a whole bunch of reasons but I would expect that you're experiencing some sort of internal speed of processing drag from this and that looks like word finding issues delayed recall um it kind of feels like you're driving your car with the emergency brake on too I would guess like it takes too much effort mentally to to you know drive through tasks sometimes or you have low stamina a little bit here and there for some of those tasks but are you experiencing that kind of delayed recall tip of the tongue word finding thing is that happening no okay so this is not a classic phenomena or it's not in the way enough for you um essentially uh well let me let me explain further what I mean by that yeah I'm having trouble finding the right words to no I'm just messing with you so um okay so very very insightful stuff I'm I'm curious to um to do round number two and uh and see how much change we've gotten so far maybe I'll do it around session 30 or something like that yeah I mean each each affiliate that's not a true Peak brain like like Elia has it's his own company he'll he'll decide usually somewhere based on what's happening but um somewhere between 20 25 30 will generally show a full standard deviation of change so depending what you're working on and working through you would generally experience some stuff for the first six or eight weeks remap and see your data is different like we should see those 60 points on the auditory stuff if we've changed the tissue you should see it come up yeah and how much it has and can refocus on it now so he uh he did tell me recently that some of my scores in the in the picture game or the the highest that he's seen so I've said some some records in his clinic and I asked him I asked him to get me a trophy that says number one neurofeedbacker in in San Diego okay all right well he he can make it so maybe that's time for brain map number maybe maybe it is maybe it is yeah yeah yeah okay so um another question and actually this was inspired by conversations with Elia he's also curious about this um given that we know that the brain is very much linked with the rest of the body and that there is for example a gut brain axis and we know that what's going on with overall metabolic Health if somebody has let's say a metabolic syndrome or or you know chronic inflammation or obesity and insulin resistance or um you know really Disturbed gut microbiome issues and intestinal permeability there's a number of things mitochondrial dysfunction um and we know of course mitochondrial function also relates very strongly to what's going on in the brain how much of what might show up on a brain map and what we're what we're seeing when we look at somebody's brain might be the result of these sort of bottom up body driven processes and is there a way to distinguish that or and and I guess to bundle one more question into that to what to what extent um would during doing neurofeedback as you know sort of a brain-driven practice address those issues if it's being driven by you know like this bottom-up process of or health in the body more broadly yeah good great great question um I would say that we can see things that are driven by more physiology and metabolism and less by the mind if you will um those things tend to be just regulations of slow brain waves deltas and alphas and thetas and things the Delta is the heartbeat of the brain and so when your Deltas is regulated we tend to get metabolic issues you know brain fog I see an awful lot unfortunately at post-covered brains and in my experience it's a fairly clear signature in a lot of people a few months it doesn't happen right away actually it's like a concussion but it looks just like a concussion for a lot of people and covet also seems to interact with old concussions and blow up field inflammation for some folks but that's one of the things you found on my brain map was that the possibility of brain fog or an old concussion and brain fog doesn't match up at all with me I don't have any issues there but it's certainly possible to that I had an old concussion um I also just had covet recently maybe and all three of those things could produce the exact same signature and you can hand wave and explain one it sounds reasonable but it could be the other and it doesn't really matter which of them has caused the difficulty unless it's still active so covid chemo mold lime apnea uh PTSD that causes sleep issues I also had mold poisoning a couple years ago as well those are all metabolic hits and I see them in the brain full stop generally not always but if they're in the way subjectively I almost always see them and they change they train really well with neurofeedback we tend to do a mix of EEG and blood flow training when there's more metabolism we bring in more flow generally um it can help and think a top down so to speak a couple ways one is if you're regulating sleep and it was thrown off that helps the whole system heal you also get a huge surge of plasticity in the brain and body after every neurofeedback session and you can also do some types of neurofeedback alpha training in the back midline to actually surge T cells if you have autoimmune inflammatory stuff you can do some things around that so you can regulate sleep you can regulate people's background stress from being L sick injured whatever you can hit the brain fog directly you can help some Central apnea not obstructive apnea But Central apnea stuff and that tends to help the whole system because you know if you're training the gut you can you know acute gut dysregulation generally has to be addressed or it can get in the way of neurofeedback I have a colleague in San Diego who's probably the world's leading expert on Parkinson's and neurofeedback um Dr Lisa tatarin she's does some work with uh the fox Foundation yeah she's wonderful well I'm sure she'd love to come in your show and talk about Parkinson's and you know our feedback but she has a lot to say on gut health because she works with Parkinson's both in a research and clinical context and has seen that unless she regulates the gut hard time making change I've worked with 20 or 30 people with parkinsonian phenomena and I've never really addressed the gut with them and I've made change every time maybe I got lucky so but potentially the change could be Amplified if somebody also addressed some nutrition and lifestyle factors as well would you maybe not Amplified but maybe made more permanent generally we get very large changes but some when things are fighting back that's when things don't stick or don't stabilize got it so yes but you know you also when you train the brain it trains the vagus nerve which of course affects the heart and the gut you know what happens in the Vegas doesn't stay in the Vegas ironically and you end up with this like flexible system so SMR training changes HRV HRV training changes SMR so you can which just goes to illustrate the the mind-body dichotomy is is not real and you can you can work in both directions because they are connected that's right that's right and the brain is part of the body and you can and there also are ways to hack the brain using the gut you know if you have severe anxiety like the kind of brain you have for instance with some of the front midline activation and if you have anything at all in your gut or if you were a teenage girl with you know PCOS you know abdominal sort of inflammatory stuff or you were insulin resistant then I'd be suggesting something like NAC because now you can go ahead and work on the serotoninergic cofactors in the gut that are gonna be thrown to the brain to produce more serotonin metabolism create more anxiety so you know there are some ways to go after hacking the brain through the bottom-up way as well got it top down very promotions in a vagus nerve 90 information ascens so it's a very gut driven the body drives emotions in some way but for intervening and from making huge changes top-down rules that's my is my experience great and biased but yeah okay so um what aspects of energy and fatigue can be affected by neurofeedback like if somebody's got chronic fatigue stress related exhaustion chronic fatigue syndrome how can neurofeedback help those kinds of situations well generally the chronic stress and chronic energy flux that's not happening dynamic range has been lost is reestablished you know if you train up in front you had some low bait on the left-hand side of your head which usually means you aren't waking up all the way or sleeping all the way two states are a little bit intertwined you aren't like all the way down or all the way up sleep has been a struggle lately because I'm I'm traveling for a few months in airbnbs and sleeping in a lot of non-optimal commission conditions and not my home bedroom and I'm not getting nearly as good asleep so you know it's we should be able to train your brain through that honestly but um there's things you can do to maintain the Circadian signaling every day to you know support that like don't eat before bed lock in your wake time seven days a week make it nice and early and do low intensity exercise in your first get up to burn off cortisol not high intensity makes your cortisol resistant insulin resistant if you have any issue so low intensity when you first wake up but generally you can get uh with neurofeedback you can hack these systems unless there's a new Epstein-Barr virus a new mold exposure a new whatever then the brain fog the fatigue the Sleep Quality Falls away in the presence of huge plasticity boosts better sleep regulation we get executive function improvements even if you're already fine as well like it's not night and day like oh my gosh that person's different but it keeps creeping up this is not a zero-sum system I have clients that come in as Peak performers fix some anxiety some Flow State some creativity keep trainings that love how it feels and every so often have breakthroughs in their music performance or their red carpet not being stressed out for the cameras or their football snap you know being perfectly aimed or whatever when you work on your brain things start to creep in you know the first time you went to the gym and really got in shape three weeks in you're like walking in the street like hey wait a minute my balance ooh I'm sexy oh I'm getting coffee my body feels good you know like it bleeds out into everything when the system changes and that's just your you know physical body imagine what it's your stress response how fast your mind works how self-controlled you are how many things you can hold in your mind at once without feeling stressed it it starts to affect everything so this is why I work with athletes and actors musicians as much as kids with autism and people that have seizures and you know who are drinking too much I don't really care what it is you want to work on as long as we can iterate towards some goals for you essentially yeah yeah it's it's actually that's the thing I've noticed the most in my life is uh I I can ha I can have an enormous amount of pressure from a variety of sources and I'm juggling juggling a lot in my life between um business and kids and dogs one of my dogs got pregnant recently before we right before we were about to spay her uh and she went into her first heat and got pregnant now we have puppies and uh so I've got four dogs at the moment and and I've got two kids and a business to run and um and and I'm doing uh school stuff as well continuing education as well always and uh also trying to give my kids a great life homeschooling my kids and um you know and then sometimes stressful situations come up on top of that and emergency situations and whatever else and um I've noticed that in recent weeks I've been remarkably cool and calm and collected under under Fire you know in the midst of chaos and emergencies of just like you know totally even keeled and and maintaining just I would say an optimal state of physiology and and mind function in those situations that's great that makes some sense that tends to resilience tends to be a thing that shows up when you do neurofeedback so it is like in this inhibitory tone this ability to sit on your automatic reactivity or to handle stress better I I joke if you walk into Equinox you see all the ABS hanging out on the staff but if you walk into a peak brain everyone's like good listening and kindness and you know balance is hanging out and they're all like 30 and 40 years old they aren't like you know some some magical ancient Zen monks but they kind of read like their Zen monks even though they're like 30. um because you work on your brain and tends to transform you so yeah absolutely it's fun to you know work yourself out I think so but I I am biased on that on that on that front yeah are there any uh supplements or neurotropics brain related herbs or other compounds that uh synergize with neurofeedback training there there are many um what I often do though is is dial in a nootropic strategy after a bunch of big basic resources are changed because I sort of have two different views on nootropics some are anti-aging and long-term supporting and some are more spot you know you want to either backfill problems you know difficulties you have in goals or use them occasionally depending so I tend to have some anti-aging and long-term strategy and tropics I recommend for people and to some extent they become more important in this you know post-pandemic world where in terms of immune function and things like that but no not really I mean I I helped create a nootropic company several years ago when I find that Peak brand I also founded true brain the same year which is a la-based nootropic and I'm a big fan of neutropics like in my mom nootropics but um I kind of want to change the whole system for folks and then the strategy of dialing what you might need in for boosting beyond that I find can be a little more subtle so unless you're you know you're just trying to like boost the whole system then I don't have a stock nootropic strategy anymore generally so okay I have a couple more questions for you sure I actually have to go to my neurofeedback appointment oh fun um in the same vein I'm sure you're familiar at this point with since you're kind of in the biohacking sphere with peptides and some of these brain related peptides like C-Max sea lank and cerebro lysine um and even to expand that a bit more to compounds which might enhance neuroplasticity and even psilocybin or or you know maybe micro dosing some of the other psychedelic compounds I'm curious if you have any thoughts on how those might pair with neurofeedback are you more likely to get a bigger change if you take some neuroplasticity enhancing compounds in tandem with that you might asking for a friend right right right swim someone who's not me uh uh um you might and I have had people who've done that themselves and Peak brain also operates in a gym membership in terms of brain mapping so once folks have one they have freedom to do multiple Maps throughout the years they often do like hey I'm doing my cmax and sealant my CJC net no DAC whatever and they come and they they do several Maps looking at nootropic strategies peptide strategies and learn from an empirically Adderall cannabis Ritalin whatever so we can answer some of those questions for you empirically and you care more about your own response to stuff than you do about the general you know perspective on it um I do think several of those peptides are not worth risking uh I think specifically almost almost all of them uh I I don't think that you should be mucking about with research chemicals unless you are trying to solve problems unless you have big suffering I think risky nootropics includes includes in my uh from my perspective peptides because of the sourcing being so squirrely essentially and some of them are also like all the ones that are promising for cognition seem to have been pulled off the shelves 10 years ago because they had weird cancer results in rats and things so I I don't know there are like the amazing peptide out there that will that will work really well and I think if you're trying to hack the system to improve it and you're not dealing with major difficulties then your your threshold for risking side effects should be extremely you know High uh or you know basically only go after things that are unlikely to cause trouble and I see people cause trouble with nootropics all the time with random peptides don't land well with you know things that aren't exactly nootropics but affect the dopamine system things like Kratom or tneptine or yeah whatever else you know um I'm so I it's too easy to read something on a website and think something is oh it's gabaergic oh I must have an imbalance no there's no such thing as an as an imbalance of neurotransmitters doesn't exist and people get after hacking their their brains not knowing what they're doing with random stuff they buy on random websites and they get in trouble you know with it I see it all the time so I don't think that you know depends who you are if you're dealing with degenerative brain issues and mysterious conditions and all the wear and tear in the world and you're throwing everything at it and you have all the resources and you're carefully monitoring maybe there's some conditions that it might make sense okay I have to ask you said there's no such thing as a neurotransmitter imbalance given that we've been indoctrinated for decades with the idea that everybody with depression has a neurotransmitter imbalance what what is your perspective on that well it's never been established that levels of neurotransmitter related to mood not once uh serotonin fact is related to anxiety and sexual function not really depression and ssris don't actually raise serotonin all serotonin neurons have autoreceptors so if you give someone Prozac or whatever five weeks after you start taking it your intra synaptic serotonin levels are lower than you were before you started taking it anything that causes depression to lift be it an SSRI or therapy or exercise or whatever does so as a final common way of raising plasticity in hippocampus the bdnf place Cell release so it's about plasticity loss thereof or enhancing that in terms of depression another example Parkinson's you don't develop any symptoms no cognitive symptoms or Tremor symptoms or anything in Parkinson's until you've lost 75 80 percent of your dopamine in the brain does that mean the first 80 is meaningless and the imbalance only occurs at 20 no the system is incredibly Dynamic and the absolute level of a chemical is meaningless receptor density phosphorylation sensitive sensitization increased receptors recurrent connections between neurons the systems really really smart and you know some guy woke up 10 years ago from a coma in the UK with 15 of his brain left intact cognitively because the brain remodel its density over 20 years the brain seems to work out work through almost anything in terms of information flow up to a certain point and by the time Things fall over you're not seeing mental illness you're seeing the systems fall over when Parkinson's is happening you're getting close to the system's dying essentially that's you're at the failure point of the whole system and so depression ADHD drug addiction well drug addiction might be chemical and balance you've created of course that may be the one exception but you don't have an addictive brain there's no such thing as a brain that is addicted because of your genetics yes you might have a mucopia receptor that makes alcohol 25 yummier for you okay but there's no such thing as an addictive brain kind of thing it's learning full stop so everything's learning including levels of neurotransmitters the brain can tune around any level of anything so that's why the level of neurotransmitter is somewhat meaningless we've all been lied to for 50 years about uh serotonin and stuff yeah indeed um and there was actually a big review that just came out I'm sure you saw that finding by Moncrief uh was the lead researcher on the study talking about how basically the body of evidence doesn't support the serotonin deficiency hypothesis of depression yeah the the one the month before about the fact that the Alzheimer's Theory doesn't seem to have anything to do with amyloid which makes sense because amyloid's a immune molecule turns out yeah and then and then they spent what however many I don't know hundreds of millions or billions of dollars developing these amyloid uh blockers and and that when they actually how many million Alzheimer's patients 50 years yeah yeah yeah that clearing mli doesn't doesn't improve symptoms at all exactly it actually accelerated the the development of symptoms well we knew something was wrong because Papua New Guinea people have AP 4 4 status that is like the whole population's apoe4 and all they just all they eat is starch you know tuber historically you know the more primitive people all it was tubers and stuff no atherosclerosis no Alzheimer's yeah because the microbial environment was harsh enough to make the amyloid act as an innate immune system not as an oxidizer of internal tissues say that one more time amyloid is an innate immune molecule that fights microbial environments oh wow I didn't know that it was dirty enough if you will and microbially in that primitive environment so this so the starch lobe was handled fine and the and the extra amyloid was used to fight off microbes the population doesn't develop oxidation of starches in the heart or in the brain which is essentially athero or Alzheimer's essentially or that's one of the glycation is one of those big features of all those neurodegeneration things of course so yeah my last question to you is about other neurofeedback devices there are some like at-home devices that have been popularized I'm curious how that differentiate or how you would differentiate that from what you're doing I'll tell you my personal experience of why I didn't go with that and I chose to do it in the clinic was largely because I I felt like the clinic was going to be much more robust and sophisticated as far as what they can actually determine about what's going on in my brain they can personalize the training to what's going on in my brain and um I also read a a huge amount of negative reviews about people having just poor experiences with the the at-home devices yeah the one size fits are semi you know tailored systems have that problem and they're also the technology is not great they're not really any cheaper ultimately a lot of them so there's really no gain um Peak brain you know my company we do home neurofeedback with the exact same software and Hardware as we do in the offices with live coaches teaching you everything how to do it and then giving you live support for setting up so we've actually closed the Gap and I would say about three quarters of our clients never visit our offices we do brain Maps remotely we do uh you know we we give people equipment like this and they plug wires into boxes and things and from home and coaches double check placements that they need so the hard part of neurofeedback is the basic setup the execution and so with somebody standing by to help you you can do tailored work essentially the other hard part of neurofeedback is telling us what happened to then fine-tune the process that doesn't matter if you're at home or you're in an office but if you're at home it's easy for that Loop of information to be broken or for your much with the metaphor is but you know when you buy a treadmill and use it to hang your laundry on there's probably some metaphor here and you're a feedback gear right um but that's the risk but if you're relatively structured if you're talking to your coaches we go give all of our clients a private slack channel it's open seven days a week for support live so we and they train more from home because it's convenient so we we get 50 sessions done in three months at home and it's it tends to stack the effect get huge effects and people learn what they're doing they try stuff they can do little short sessions because it wasn't their one session that day uh so I actually like home training better than Office training now but it's only because I'm doing it in with an equivalent attack with equivalent staff helping with equivalent software you know um up that maybe 10 years ago not even five years ago we were not using the same software we're doing brain mapping for remote clients had to come to the offices and it was not as good but as the Technology field was elaborated we have these like you know big consumer device systems you can rent and get but they have not solved the good neurofeedback piece of it it have solved the delivery of tech piece of it so it it's imperfect basically yeah hey there this is Arya again I hope you are enjoying these episodes I say these episodes because this is the end of part one in part two which you need to listen to we go over my new brain map the new one after 20-ish sessions of neurofeedback training and you get to see the contrast between the two you get to see how much my brain objectively improved pre-neurofeedback to 20 sessions in and 20 sessions isn't a lot this was just a couple months of training uh I'm now two months more into the training compared to when I did that uh Second brain map and this is something I plan to continue really for years probably for the rest of my life it's that powerful I'm that passionate about it uh and I'm that in favor of you doing it uh which is why I actually asked Peak brain Dr Andrew Hill's company to set you guys up with a discount so that you can get started with your own brain map and to get started with neural read neurofeedback training hopefully at home and if you're in the San Diego area by the way you can do it at the same Clinic the exact same one with the exact same person Elia that I did it with at brain excel in Solana Beach which I highly encourage you to do or you can go through Peak brain if you're not in the San Diego area go through Peak brain and get set up with your own brain map and your own at-home protocol you can get a 250 discount on your brain map by going to theenergyblueprint.com forward slash neurofeedback they set up a special discount code for all energy blueprint listeners podcast followers so I hope you guys are enjoying this so far definitely check out podcast number two so you can actually see the results in podcast two I also asked Dr Andrew Hill a whole bunch of other questions uh I actually kept them on it was supposed to be uh 10 minute 15 20 minute you know call where we sort of go over the results and it ended up uh becoming much longer than that we spent a lot more time going over my result and then we spent a lot of time he was gracious enough to answer the million questions that I had for him I thought of a whole bunch of questions uh more that I didn't get to ask him in podcast number one which you just heard so there's lots more good stuff lots more gold nuggets about brain enhancement in general and neurofeedback specifically in podcast number two so make sure to go check that out and again you can get started with your own brain map again in San Diego if you go to brain excel in Solana Beach or if you're not in the San Diego area most of you are not going to be you can go through Peak brain and you can get 250 off your own brain map by going to theenergyblueprint.com forward slash neurofeedback so I will see you in podcast number two with Dr Andrew Hill [Music] again thank you so much for listening to this episode I hope you enjoyed it if you did if you found it valuable please share it with your friends share it with your family help me get the word out there also if you're on YouTube make sure to hit the Subscribe button and hit that little bell to get notifications every time we release a new video or new episode of the podcast and if you're listening to this make sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or on your favorite podcast thanks so much for supporting my work at the energy blueprint I hope you enjoyed this episode I will see you in the next