The Real Reason You're Anxious All the Time

Most of us see huge amounts of suffering, huge amounts of anxiety and trauma, >> [music] >> disregulated sensory issues, alcohol, vast amounts of suffering. And then you see people change most of the time over a few months. And massively, you're unattached to the suffering, you're unattached to the miracles because they're happening all [music] the time around. >> Who are you? And more than 25,000 at this point, that uniqueness that makes us both gifted and tortured. >> opening up to a friend and he was just like, "Dude, everybody loves you." But like in my mind, it can be [music] like I feel like everyone probably hates me. Is everybody messing with me? >> There's a very fine line between being deeply empathetic and a little bit autistic. It's just like a little bit, you know, whoo. You don't have to be one of the other, either. Once you understand that you have these quirky regulatory bits and then you understand that many of them are tunable [music] and changeable and that's sexy. That gives you this powerful agency. If you want an answer, go to a doctor. You want questions? >> [laughter] >> Come to a scientist. We have questions for you. Who are you? I am uh Dr. Andrew Hill, uh founder of Peak Brain Institute. Uh I'm a uh scientist/coach who teaches people how to understand their brains and move through making changes. Uh I got a PhD from UCLA in cognitive neuroscience all about understanding how the brain produces aspects of the mind and attention. Uh I use tools including um something called brain mapping, which is a measurement of resting patterns of brain waves, uh to understand Initially, when I got into this work, I would help people understand their ADHD or their anxiety. And brain mapping or quantitative EEG is a measure of one person's brain compared to the average person. And so it's not a diagnostically precise experience of here's what's true for you, it's more like here's some stuff in your brain. That's true. And now here's what it often means, here's what it can mean. But people are [clears throat] weird, so good job. Like the the the goal is not to get people to the middle of the bell curve or worry too much about why they're weird, it's to figure out if there's stuff in data that jumps out. And so I do this population-level comparison looking for big features that are stable across time called phenotypes, biomarkers, trait features. And we also just to make sure that it's more valid, more grounded in in something that's easy to interpret, we always include an an attention test alongside it. Also population-compared. So I've been doing that thing, brain mapping, um as part of both the clinical sort of peak performance and, you know, therapy kind of focused biofeedback practice, neurofeedback, in a company called Peak Brain that's been around for uh coming up on 11 years. And I ran another company before that for several years that had um uh sort of a hybrid brain and addiction focus. And uh through that, through working at UCLA, um doing research for a while, um in and before that, the perspective on what is going on for people changed. Um you know, I used to work in really acute psychiatric environments inpatient before I was doing this work. Um and I've been doing this work for, you know, 20, 25 years, so a long time ago. And at that time, I would argue maybe even still, traditional allopathic psychiatric medicine doesn't really have a good handle on how to create change for people when they're dealing with acute stuff or developmental things. So severe anxiety, trauma, ADHD, autism, seizure, like we have some drugs, we have some therapies, but they're not that wonderful and working in acute environments, I would see people revolving door coming through, you know, getting stabilized, discharged into unstable environments, come back in. Yeah. And I was working in teen, you know, adolescent environments inpatient, which is pretty brutal seeing these kids get stabilized and then go back out into the the community uh or the home where things weren't as stable and come back and get stabilized again. And so that did show me the plasticity, the ability that the kids, especially, had to rebound. But I did a lot of work with autism, uh a lot of work with severe uh developmental stuff, um if you will. I worked in a uh I ran a residential facility for a company called Meridian in the Northeast for a couple of years um where we had multiple adults living in the house who had no language, um you know, no typical uh communication skills. They were all uh well, most of them were blind, they were all most of them were deaf, different assortments of communication challenges and cognitive challenges. So really severe developmental stacked disabilities, if you will. And working in that environment, working inpatient, I had this perspective on people as, you know, we're we're we're we're okay at managing some suffering, but not that great at making change. And then I got a job working at an autism center that used neurofeedback as its primary tool. We had a lot of autism and ADHD kids and some adults. And I started seeing people change. I was like, "Well, wait a minute. >> [laughter] >> This doesn't make a lot of sense based on what we know, based on what I've seen for 10 years. There's not a lot of change to be had as far as I knew with developmental things and basic aspects of regulation." And I was seeing change in weeks and months. And the tools we were using to see that were these attention testing, of course self-report, teacher report, home report, etc., but also the brain maps. And seeing these phenotype patterns, the patterns for ADHD, the patterns that might represent anxiety, sensory difficulties, etc., it starts to give you this lens on somebody that's not psychiatric and it's not medical, it's a lot closer to a coaching practice where you're like, here's some data, here's some goals and you have to kind of figure out what's going on for the person without being too tied into, you know, is this a diagnostic language? Is there a clinical label? And the field of neurofeedback is mostly clinicians, mostly therapists doing therapy. And they do some neurofeedback alongside it or with it or instead of therapy, but it's a therapy relationship where the container's there, they're treating you, they've diagnosed you. And I started to realize that the brain phenomena that we often pathologize and give diagnostic label labels to is is quirky and cramped up and different in people in in many similar ways across diagnostic labels, across complaints, across problems, across gifts. And so you'll see the same area, front midline for instance, will might get in the way of uh controlling your focus, might overfocus or obsess, perseverate, but you also might have the ability to hold things in your mind like it's your job. And so my my perspective on the brain shifted from one of diagnostic and pathology and developmental, you know, labels into where are people now with their regulatory and developmental resources. And can you make change in those? Because apparently, I was seeing people make change in executive function, sensory things, etc. So that started me down a long path and ended up uh studying how this neurofeedback stuff works in the brain, but the book that I've written that I asked to come back on your podcast to chat about is about this perspective we can we can all develop understanding our brains not from a diagnostic perspective per se, but understanding these dozen or so big cortical resources that might across complaints and across gifts might cramp up and uh provide a little bit of that uniqueness that makes us, you know, both gifted and tortured. So that's the title of the book, Gifted and Tortured. So, yeah. Yeah, and it's a I was just talking to you a little bit before this, but like it really is a I think a beautiful book and I think last time I had you on, made a lot of the focus on, you know, what makes a neurodivergent brain. Like is neurodivergence a real thing? And and to see that kind of like fully manifest in this, you know, in this book in a lot of ways and kind of piecemealed into like these different phenotypes, I think you referred to them as like these different characteristics, like the um the grumpy old man or the princess and the pea and these different archetypes that we can relate to. In some ways, it kind of reminds me of parts work to a little bit, but like almost tying those things to the brain in a very specific way and like, you know, the actual underlying patterns versus just the purely kind of psychodrama that we can have. And so I like the fact that it was connecting it to something a little bit more firmer in in the biology, I guess, as well. It's a little bit like an IFS meets the physiology that actually exists kind of landscape, but >> Yeah. I'm sort of using uh metaphors to describe the actual function of the of the tissue underneath an area. Yeah. That keeps me a little bit grounded, so I I I I really love IFS and I'm a huge fan of most people that do it. Um but there can be a little bit of a uh development of the model. Like you the model's nearly infinite for some people, how things operate, parts, etc. Can be really quite variable. Brains are weird, but if you got a part in your brain, generally it does the same thing at a high level as someone else. Right. So it I think gives people these touchstones that are that are real, they're true physiological resources that make sense to them, but give them another landscape beyond just like, "Oh, it's part of this diagnosis." Or "Oh, it's part of this clinical bit of brain tissue." And this is something I'm trying to give them a little expression of here's the personality that part of your brain, here's how it might operate for you Yeah. as one of your parts, yeah. Yeah, I'm curious because like that, you know, the focus of gifted and tortured, I think is something we, you know, think about with all of these different artists, whether it's Van Gogh or whoever it is. And you know, I can definitely feel very resonant with a lot of the different aspects you've talked about and I've seen that with various people. I'm curious like what was it for you that drew you to this work of all things in particular? Cuz there are there are so many I'm sure there's so many things you've seen with the brain waves and now you're doing the stuff with the psychics and like you know more recently with the acid for squares pod and like doing a lot of that kind of work too and high performance thing. So like why why neurodiversity? Why you know gifted but tortured? Like why is that kind of the focus or crux of your your work right now? So you know as I sat down again and again and again telling people about what brain mapping is, explaining what brains do, how their brain might work. Um a lot of that process is not here's what I know about you. It's more like here's what shows up in data. How much of this is valid? How much of this is important? And you know here's how brain waves work in in a part of the brain but how that feels I don't know but here's how it often cramps up or gets in the way. Oh that sounds relevant. Okay. We don't necessarily have diagnostic precision I eat truth. We have agency. And so in that process I mean I to give you some sense of scope I do well over usually well over a hundred of these a month. Reviews of data sitting down with people looking at data with them and they're almost all cold off of data without any real history. They're saying here's your brain. Here's your performance. Let's talk about what this can mean. And you know 99 out of a hundred of them people are like oh my gosh there's lots of things there that are true and I care about. That's really interesting. And so you can learn a lot from many people while looking at this data but it's not exhaustive. The map is not the territory here like anything. Um but in sitting people down and doing that being like oh here's this posterior cingulate that might be your lifeguard. She might be in high gear because she's learned the world isn't especially safe. And now you're looking for sharks in the indoor pool. Uh the princess and the pea behind the right ear that brings in the censoring the social world and understands the line between you and the world. It helps you manage that lines to not take things in as much and in more than you might want to. So you can stand under a jet engine if you prefer or you know listen to mosquitoes out in the forest. You can do both things. The ear has a cochlea that stiffens up to manage that gain but the censoring social tissue also has the ability to ramp up its sensitivity and ramp it down in in most of us. For some of us that's wide open floodgates coming in a firehose of social and sensory. That's when the princess and in the pea is bothered by the environment you know but the same resource behind the right ear the right temporoparietal junction that whole cluster of tissue as a censoring social junction box also gives us the ability to be uh sensitive to other people's emotions on their face and understand their tone of voice and you know get that sort of uh intrinsic outside world as it relates to the self as it relates to the social the sensory. So um knowing this take somebody with a sensory issue let's say or uh some threat sensitivity and it gives them a different mental framework that's not invalid. I'm not dumbing it down saying uh what's not in the way or you're beautiful the way you are. Don't worry about your suffering. I mean I love the idea of things like neurodivergence and ADHD as a as a gift as as having upside but that's a very complicated topic and it's not meant to you know understanding the nuance of it some of the upside some of the the the downsides is not meant to should not be meant in my in my opinion uh until sort of a swage the reality of some of those um bits of suffering and dysregulation. So but we don't have to pathologize you know if you have a quote unquote you know ADHD or some other big alphabet soup of things attached to you. I mean that might be useful if you're a kid and that helps you with an IEP or if you're you know somebody who needs a little extra time at work or something that that that might be useful as the accommodation but I think the labeling can disempower people and help them you know just kind of go with this oh I have anxiety. I have PTSD. I have OCD. I have ADHD. Well yeah your brain's regulating that way and a lot of that's built in and some of it's acquired or or developed against the world that's prickly or uncomfortable but it's changeable. You know we have tissue in our brain that is not meant to change. It's hard to change the visual tissue at our advanced age. Uh after age six months we can't converge vision. So if you don't have good vision visual convergence you won't ever get it or accents you know speech sounds. If you haven't heard a speech sound by age um nine or ten you won't hear it generally. It's your brain's like uh not important the world isn't changing enough. But attention, sleep, anxiety, social processing the world's changing constantly. That tissue is not locked down the same way that vision or you know other other tissues are. So once you understand that you have these quirky regulatory bits and then you understand that many of them are tunable and changeable man that's sexy. That gives you this like powerful agency and you start like oh what can I do? I can hack my sleep. I can meditate. I can take supplements. I can do neurofeedback. And the book this this book came out of that perspective of you know this is not about coming to a diagnostic precision. This is about teaching you how your brain works and out of that you'll understand you you know you'll understand it. That's the thing about brain mapping and what I try to what I've tried to bring up in the in the actual book here. I have a physical physical really exists. Congratulations. When did you get the the physical books finally? Pages and all. Um I have the final batch coming early next week but I don't this is a proof copy that I'm like double checking all the spacing [laughter] and all the little you know. Yeah yeah. Uh cuz I don't want to order um a bunch of those until uh you know I'm I'm sure it's right but we're releasing on April 14th so depending on the podcast comes out might be right around that time. And if I have a I have a few the the website for the book gifted tortured.com. Um I am doing a small run of author copies where we sign them and send them out. Um we've already sold a bunch of those so there'll be some left I think next week. Cool. Um and the week after but so grab one of those if you want. Otherwise Amazon will have paperbacks and ebooks and uh you know um if folks are curious about this this idea of these phenotypes. I've mentioned a few of them. The princess and the pea, the CEO, the lifeguard. >> going to say if you want to kind of walk us through what those are really quickly and just so people have a primer or maybe connect them to like the ways that people typically maybe associate with those things whether that's ADHD or how they might blend or not blend. I mean I mean I can run through them all. There's a lot. Uh I I encourage folks that are curious about the the top three for them that might drive it. Um go to the website. There's a quiz at gifted and tortured.com. You can run your own little phenotype quiz and see which of the top three are likely to be in the way or likely to be interesting for you. But you can I think about them regionally and imagine a plus sign on top of your head with one part of it going ear to ear one running down the middle front to back. And the front to back are involved with stabilizing um your attention under demand. The one in the front helps the inside self. Helps the thought stream at very high level what you're thinking about your cognitive appraisal what you care about. And I think of it as the CEO the part that's assembling the incoming and and and output information for a lot of the other parts of the brain. We call it the uh anterior cingulate more officially. The posterior cingulate in the back the back of the brain is the outside world. So the posterior cingulate acts a bit like a lifeguard going watch the road. Heads up heads up. And if we learn the world isn't especially safe or predictable your lifeguard starts getting activated because the cost of missing danger is high. You miss a tiger once if you're lucky. You can miss yummy berries three or four times not a big deal. You know this this there's more berries probably and the cost at least the opportunity of getting more berries is there. So we're very attuned to develop that threat sensitivity negativity bias. Um left and right on the plus sign. The left side is a stabilizer of resources and the right is a supervisor of resources. These are involved with executive function and sleep. The one on the left will help put you in gear and keep you in gear if you need to stay focused when you're bored cuz you're doing the thing. Don't wander off into the bushes if you're driving. That's the left side left precentral gyrus. The pre and postcentral gyrus the division between the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe right there. It's the most posterior part of the frontal lobe. It's also receiving all the ascending information from the body and descend and and sending down all the control information into the body. So is that like the mind body supervisor part of it? >> Supervisor and the stabilizer yeah the pre and postcentral gyri left and right. It's the mind body connection mind body control. Wow. And so they send information forward largely and we have in the front left corners. And so the CEO's in the middle but the CEO has to sort of reconcile incoming information from the corners and stabilizer and supervisor who want to hit the gas and the brakes essentially are sending information in. When there's difficulty with the stabilizer we become inattentive. Don't stay asleep at night. When there's difficulty with the supervisor we don't inhibit and go squirrel. >> [snorts] >> You know. Supervisor is supposed to read the map and say hey we're going to adjust up ahead and so we can like plan and adjust. And we it's gently inhibitory. In the front we have similar you know go versus stop but they're more about how we feel the cognitive appraisal the perspective on things. So the front left is like a happy little kid who sits in the porch and goes hi. Yay. Hey can I do that? That looks so cool. That's new. What's that? The approach system the engagement system. The front left is a system that's supposed to evaluate for the difficulty and annoyance of things and go ah this all sucks go away. Leave me alone. This is the happy the grumpy old man. The happy little kid, the grumpy old man. The ratio between them is kind of important. If they're both out there doing their job on the porch, they the world is dealt with as it needs to be. Basically I rested and interested and safe and whatever else you might feel. But if the world is not that um forgiving or too stressful or doesn't let you develop some resilience or some curiosity, the happy little kid in the left doesn't want to go outside and play. The grumpy old man's out there with no one to balance and starts, you know, finding things really negative at best. And at worst can start catastrophizing and being filled with dread, the fact that things are too much and they're overwhelming. So, the frontal asymmetry, the left versus right balance can be involved with things like mood and motivation and resilience under stress. Uh so, we have the happy kid and the grumpy old man, the stabilizers and the supervisors. We go back a little bit further. On the right, we have the princess and the P, the right TPJ. On the left, we have a lot of receptive language areas. I call the interpreter, who's like like listening for language, parsing out meaning. That'll help you parse out meaning in a busy room full of people talking to each other. So, if you can't do that super well without getting distracted, that's that area. It'll also help you understand what you are saying in real time. So, you can speak fluently and assemble words in sentences and spit them out. That uses a little area in the front, a sort of a secondary phenotype who only gets a mention in the book called the speaker. Cuz the this the interpreter, the the posterior language receptive language is most of language in us. It's the the concepts, the grammar, the constructions. Those are all posterior phenomena. Well, I always remember like when I was diving into like um you know, I was working for a neuroscience company and going into all of the different ways that like memory works and even just verbal memory, right? And processing where it's like, oh yeah, you have the thing that interprets it, the thing that stores it, the piece that like knows what you want to say, but then there's also the the thing that lets you actually be able to say it, right? So, there's like all of these these different little mechanisms that go through it where it's like there's so many different links in the chain where somebody might be have it interpreted. They know what they want to say, but for whatever reason they can't actually even just like verbalize that piece out because that part of it is jammed up or stuck or overstimulated or whatever it might be. >> Yeah, or not synchronizing. You know, on a QEEG, your alpha waves might not be the same speed in the left hemisphere. Might be slipping. And what that means is the idling speed of the different cars sitting at the start line are not all the same. So, you try to have the thought or produce a little bit of a sentence and all the cars start up at different speeds and don't hand back the information [clears throat] properly as you start to use language. So, you're like, what's that guy's name? I know I know that name. And it shows up 5 minutes later. That's an alpha speed. It's it's a tiredness of the mind, tiredness of the speed. People often think it's memory. And so again, phenotype phenomena. If your alpha speed is slow, this is the timekeeper. It's sort of sitting there just kind of chugging along in a neutral background idle like a car idling. Um and if that slows down, that's your speed of processing and that's your short-term memory for some people. If it gets really bad, it feels like you're driving the car with the handbrake on and it gets in the way of motivation and mood cuz who wants to drive? It's so much work. Leave me alone. Yeah. So, this just gives people as you know, a different way to you know, validly but but non-pathologically conceptualize some of these resources and there once they know how these are working. Um I think the next step is it gives people things to do, agency different medicine. And in the book I I cover some of that. There's practical outcomes. This is not like a pitch to go do neurofeedback, although you can and you can you can regulate these things with neurofeedback. But every every single thing that I talk about, I think, I give life hacks, I give meditation practices. Um I give some perspective on what's most important in terms of like modifiable behavior you can play with so that people can both understand themselves and then immediately have something they might want to do to regulate, you know, better, take control over the regulation. Yeah, I mean I think one of the things that I noticed in there and has popped up with a couple of different other neurofeedback clinicians I've spoken with and people within that space is something like the bedrock for just about everybody was sleep, right? That getting and knocking out sleep, especially in our current day and age. I forget which which one it was that came on, but she was talking about how almost if you look at like our SMR frequency need right now or like where it is for most people, it's like almost all people are fitting into like what used to be the ADHD kind of spectrum because of how our sleep is being affected or or maybe it's affecting our sleep. I don't you know, it can be either or, but yeah. There there was an old paper um one of the seminal papers in neurofeedback by Vince Monastra that came out that talked about the theta beta ratio being fairly predictive in an adolescent population for ADHD. Been really predictive, like 94% predictive in classic ADHD and 81% predictive uh alpha over beta is uh so, high alpha is inattentiveness, stuck in neutral. That's ADD {quote} {unquote}, although grossly oversimplified. High theta, disinhibition, squirrel. ADHD. You can have both. Um the theta beta ratio was super predictive in this population. And then every couple of years, someone would try to replicate it, a grad student or someone else, you know, someone at the conferences would come up with another theta beta ratio study of a similar size. And it like systematically eroded. Over about 5 or 6 years, you literally saw the predictive value of that statistic drop away into the place where it just vanished against the noise floor of everyone having high theta relative to beta in the population. So, the adolescents, the it was like a high school or college, I forget who was doing this. Probably a college at at UTK, I would guess, Vince Monastra. So, um they did this work and you saw that the sleep deprivation status of these young people just got worse over years. So, the theta beta ratio, the ADHD-ness of it all, climbed to eclipse. The sleep climbed to eclipse that same signature. So, this is why you can't diagnostically say, ah, high theta beta ratio, you have ADHD. Yeah. >> say, oh, your left side has lots of alpha and and theta. You know, the left side's a stabilizer of executive and sleep, often. People are inattentive. You know, I did an attention test for you. You were a space cadet. You're inattentive. That makes sense. Hey, often people can't stay asleep at night because this also turns off attention. So, you can stabilize the quality and architecture of sleep in the same region of the brain. Do you have trouble staying asleep? Oh, you do? Okay. Not sure it's related, but it's sure plausible. Okay, here's three tricks for sleep maintenance. Yeah. So, it brings you a place of action versus a place of like oh, here's my diagnosis. And that's what I really like about brain mapping and just the concepts involved. Again, I I've given you a little work around with the quiz to avoid doing QEEGs if you want, just to give you a few sentences of the big pieces, but the agency provided by this, I think, is really useful for us. I mean, go back 20 years. You're old enough, uh I think. Um >> [laughter] >> the word neurodivergence Yeah. neurodivergent doesn't exist. You know, now it's I mean, it's powerful and people identify with it. It has use. It has utility. Um it's not for perfect label. Not everyone likes it, but >> [clears throat] >> it gives people some sense of identity um that is different than I have autism. It's different than I have ADHD or I have depression. I have some anxiety. Yeah. Something's wrong with me. >> seizure disorder. Yeah, it means more it's more reflective of here, you're an unusual flavor of human. Yeah, and especially >> Humans are weird. So, you know, Yeah, no, I agree. And I think especially when you have like high-functioning people with these traits in one way, shape, or form. And like I remember when I was Yeah, I finally got went through an ADHD assessment with a therapist. And he was asking me all these questions. And I was just talking with another friend who went through a similar assessment. And they were like, oh, do you forget to make your keys all the time? And I was like, nobody used to, but I don't anymore because I have a a cool cloud keychain where they go every time. And so, I know where they are every single time, right? And it's like, oh, well like do you you know, do you have a hard time with things that >> you know, but what if I didn't have that that that combination, yeah, exactly. Right. Or it's like, oh, is like do you struggle with like staying attentive to things that are boring? I was like, kind of, but like I just kind of set up my life so I don't really do a lot of things that are boring. Like I I I outsource all of those things and my my life is very intentionally designed around that. >> trouble sitting still in your cube in your cubicle? I have a walking desk and I'm >> [laughter] >> I'm like talking to them on YouTube all the time, dudes. I have a walking desk. Like you're playing to your strengths. Right, right. So, it's like I I put my world together around my my ADHD-ness or around my neurodiversity, right? And then figured out how to do it. But then there are still those like those suffering pieces. And I think that that's something I I really appreciate about the book and about you and this work as a whole is there is the gifted and tortured part, right? And feeling sort of validated in both of those, right? That it is not just a Yeah, there are these really cool things, but I sometimes it's also hard to express like yeah, I can feel a lot of pain in a way that's like hard for me to describe or share with somebody. I mean, there's you know, I was I remember being recently at a a festival and I was opening up to a you know, a friend and he was just like, dude, like everybody loves you, but like in my mind it can be like I feel like everyone probably hates me. Or what if I'm you know, my three things just to kind of let you know about them and we can go wherever we want with that. We're like the the happy little kid, the lifeguard, and the princess and the P. Like those three were my three strongest ones. And like that ability to you know release I guess that was like the rejection sensitivity like really resonated with me on one hand and then also that sense of being able to be highly attuned on one hand to people's experiences but also if I don't know if it's something that gets lost or gets overwhelming all of a sudden I feel like is everybody messing with me did I miss some cue did I did I not see the right thing and I start to feel frozen and collapse and just like my whole world starts to collapse in on itself in a sense. Yeah that's your that's your princess in the pea on the back right the outside world is back of the brain. And you're probably extra sensitive right up until the moment that that tissue's saturated and then you can't process all the information you're probably picking up too much and it's a bit you know like there's a very fine line between deep between being deeply empathetic and a little bit autistic. Where you're not picking up the social and it's just like a little bit you know Yeah. But you can you you don't have to be one of the other either some people are both some people are deeply empathetic and they take things literally sometimes you know. [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. >> I'm just saying. Yeah. Uh but but like that's the right tempo parietal there's also a little structure that next to the grumpy old man there's the inferior frontal gyrus who I affectionately dubbed the uh problem child. Mhm. And the problem child wants to like be disruptive and oppositional for its own sake in some way. Like you know be disruptive [clears throat] push the thing be negative be oppositional it's like a like a more vulnerable version in some ways of the negativity bias and it's related to that stuff but it has a very uh reactive and attachment kind of stuff too because it's so young that you know it can it can yield uh behavior lead to behavior like blowing up your relationship by being a jerk just because you were bored. Or because you're a little uncomfortable so you're oppositional you know like so that kind of stuff can lead to uh some dysregulation but otherwise you [clears throat] know we we notice that we want to go and you know useful to know that stuff happens so. Yeah being like aware of when you want to push someone away and when that's going to serve you or not right and being able to have a level of relationship with that I think is huge. Um I'm curious for for you even like whether pieces of this that like really resonated with you in some way shape or form where you're like oh that that piece really like felt like me once you started kind of even identifying this stuff for yourself in the book. I mean you know this is not non-fiction this is definitely sorry this is not fiction definitely a non-fiction you know self-help style book. Right. But I think even then there's something where you know all the characters are the artist are the author in some ways so yes but no but sure absolutely all of these things. Um you you'll discover I mean you you you read the book but I talk about these things in a very different way I think than many people. Um even my other neurofeedback providers colleagues you know friends of mine who are psychologists and neurologists and things who you know have said to me things like you think about this stuff in an interesting way. >> [laughter] >> And you know I I think that's a compliment for for most of them. So If you're interested in that Right I think so I think [laughter] so well they're all therapists so you can't tell like if they're insulting you you you you might not be able to tell you know you might be like oh wow. [laughter] Um but there's a different way of interacting with our brains than just here's the giant label that sticks to us. And I think that's something I've identified with my whole life is not fitting into I mean I was born in the 70s and grew up you know teen years are most of the 80s. ADHD was a thing but it was like you know not a very big not a very widely applied diagnosis wasn't a lot of medication yet I'm not like the 90s where it became you know de rigueur and and everyone was on Ritalin and then Adderall a decade later and that's still happening now. But I ended up sort of you know getting through uh you know raw dogging life without any of the diagnostic language just being quirky having trouble with you know laundry and bills having trouble with social stuff um impulsivity um you know not fulfilling my my promise academically uh initially and it was you know quite challenging got a diagnosis of ADHD after undergrad and went okay great but I would love to do something different for you know more medicine psychology something nursing I don't know something and then I worked in psychiatric hospitals in acute environments cuz that's a great place to be dynamic changing environments if you have a lot of ADHD you know you can be super chill and walk around and see all the patterns and keep things safe. Perfect. Um but I kept bumping up against this thing about like well I can't go back and do low intensity grad school for a bunch of years or intense med school for three to five years I you know like I barely made it through boring undergrad and that last that last year was tough just kind of you know getting stuff done. Um the the perspective on that was was the perspective on on my own you know tortures and and gifts and things was pretty complicated where I knew that I was you know creative and quick and intelligent but also knew that I had a really hard time finishing up undergrad and you know the idea of taking on huge projects Yeah. as somebody in their mid-20s at that point you know was like okay well I don't know. And so I ended up working in those crisis environments for a while and toward the end of that I may have mentioned this on the on the last show but toward the end of that time I got injured. I couldn't keep working in the acute psychiatrics I went and did some high-tech work for a couple of years missed working in with people and since I had a lot of developmental psych autism etc. experience went and got a job at an autism center did neurofeedback saw amazing things and would hang out after hours and train my own brain. And after about month and a half of training my brain I was like well wait a minute I'm feeling very very different and I think I can do some something more. And that led me to going and getting a PhD studying neurofeedback to figure out how it works. Very meta you know that that's how you get through a grad program if you have ADHD. Right cuz the joke is a PhD is the process of learning more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. So you know you have to niche down you have to be driven be pulled be pushed by the thing you care about and I would say if you have ADHD or something else where you're a little distractible or have some executive function difficulties you need that even more you need the structure of the external pulling you through or you need other things helping you know drive you through it. And that can mean changing your brain with neurofeedback or meditation that could be supplementing with some nootropics or even medications there's lots of ways to take control this this life behavioral scaffolds you know there's Pomodoro techniques and at that time getting things done and super useful. Uh and I used them in in grad school but doing neurofeedback and and knocking my ADHD back from like 200% of average you know just ADHD down to like 20% where it became this mild thing that I could you know very easily not have to deal with in a lecture or a presentation or something you know or having to grade a whole bunch of student papers I could do that thing if I needed to because it gave me as much control over my executive function something like Adderall you know or Ritalin would have more actually I tried those things. So for me it was a changing relationship with this stuff understanding it and gradually getting a sense of it uh but it was also changing the ability to change this stuff that started to get out and so for the past 25 years a lot of my you know speaking from the the mountain top is about shift happens take yours get your brain you can do stuff and then it's been a very neurofeedback kind of focused process but this is to take it beyond that for folks who don't necessarily have access to an EEG or who aren't interested in doing neurofeedback and just want to understand their brains because the understanding may yield the change sometimes. Might be enough to to have that that pivot yeah. Um I'm curious for just your own experience when you said that when you're you know going through the ADHD stuff for yourself before neurofeedback you had you know tried Ritalin or different medications and then you you eventually find neurofeedback and like this thing is is working and shifting for you like what was that experience like I mean I know it was a long time ago I guess at this point but like what was that experience like? >> I remember no I remember. Because it's it's not that dissimilar from what happens I would say about two-thirds of the time with ADHD there's there's one of these quality moments that I'm going to describe and I've been training my brain for about 18 sessions I was at a camping trip in upstate Massachusetts and um was walking to go somewhere and I was like on a path you know in the in the woods and I and I remember walking it's a path I it's a camping trip I'd done with friends every year for like 10 years and you know there was a little annoying part of camp you have to walk to I was walking there I just remember being like wait a minute why is everything so quiet around me why can I pay attention to everything things are really clear and you know both crisper and more low-key at the same time. And it's very very similar to like putting on a new pair of glasses if somebody has some vision issues you're like, "Oh. Oh, yeah, edges. That's right. Leaves. They have They have edges." You know, you get this little extra clarity and it's it's kind of like if someone's taking Adderall, taking Ritalin, there is a quietness that creeps in if you're somebody who has classic ADHD, lots of theta. You take a stimulant, it will quiet your your mind generally. And it was it was very much that, but not a drug effect and in the field of neurofeedback, the SMR training, which is the core frequency that the field was built on, sensory motor rhythm. If you've seen a cat on a windowsill, you've seen SMR. It's this liquid body and laser-like focus, completely inhibited in the body, and still in the mind, poised. If you bring up your SMR, you will get more self-control. But if you're not used to having lots of SMR, if you have tons of theta taking over for it instead, and you're kind of fidgety and twitchy and ADHD, um the the first time your SMR comes up strongly for a few hours, it's like someone cleaned the windshield. You're like, "Oh. Oh, okay." And it's easier to think and it's quieter and you can, you know, and you're And here's the fun part. You You don't lose anything. You can still move into like playing the video game or being the best athlete on the court or being the artist. You don't You're not stuck in a mode the way that a stimulant might quiet the system, but like make you chew your lip and not want to eat and put you in one mode. This doesn't put you in a mode. It gives you access to the modes. You can kind of reach for that quietness when you wish. And you're suddenly more balanced. That's something that I've heard and even with the neurofeedback that I've done and like experienced as well. And I'm curious about that like what is it about what neurofeedback does that makes it more of like an adaptive trait that you can switch on and off versus like a a change, right? Cuz you're to your point, like I think most times we think about things it's like, "Oh, I'm going to get this thing, but I'm going to lose that." Like everything has its cost, everything has its benefit, da da da. But there is something similar where it seems like you're able to keep the core or the pieces that you want with this thing and not but get the benefits of focus without losing the creativity and the insight and the joy and the other parts that come with it. That's usually true. Um couple things on that. One, it's not a zero-sum game. You're making brain cells your whole life. Half the brain cells you make don't survive into into true uh cell. They get reabsorbed in part of the metabolic process. The other half differentiate into the cells they're going to become and create networks with friends and that's what saves them. That's what creates the the information flow or or the the new cell patterns. So, we have we have the ability to reshape our brains constantly. And that's sort of the uh probably one of the the the the more important aspects to this. But when it comes to neurofeedback giving you something without taking it away, most of the things that are complaints, suffering, deficits, anxiety, trauma, OCD, twitches, uh seeing patterns everywhere, um seeing emotions everywhere. Those are Those are gifts unless you can't turn them off. Unless you can't control them. You can have the strongest bicep in the world, but if you're walking around flexed and can't put your arm down, not useful, not regulated. And so, most of the phenotypes we see that are stuck in high gear or that are not relaxing or doing something really unusual and statistically that are in the way, they're not a disease process. They're a stuck mode that the tissue wants to be in sometimes, but not all the time. So, if someone's got some OCD, intrusive thoughts, and perseverating, or even the songs in their head all the time, or biting your nails, you'll have tons of theta, let's say, for songs or nail-biting, tons of theta brain waves, front midline usually. And if you bring that down, you'll still be able to summon a song up and, you know, hear a lyrics in your head if you can do that, you won't have to. So, it gives you the ability to control the tissue cuz it breaks it out of the stuck mode it's in, like cramp or the resource dysregulation. It builds resilience, builds some strength, you can tune it a little bit. The other piece of it is that neurofeedback, I think when done well, is an iterative process that is tuned by your feedback, no pun intended. Your own like, "Ooh, hey, I kind of noticed something. I was kind of chill after that. That was nice." Means something. As does, "Hey, I was kind of on edge. I didn't sleep as well after that session." That also means something. And you have to sort of iteratively, gently sort of coach someone's brain to move over many, many sessions. And so, it ends up being personal training with the person's experience validating what you're doing as you go. So, it's kind of an odd, you know, neurofeedback when done well, I think it's somewhere between fitness and psychology and medicine and being a mechanic. You know, you're helping shape change, but the person knows better than the therapist what's going on. The person knows what their goals are better. Even when you read a brain map, I teach people to look at their own QEEGs. By the second or third one, they are reading the nuanced changes that they have been feeling better than I could ever hope to. So, you know, that perspective gives people individually the choice, the agency to pursue pursue the change they're looking for. That gives you the ability to go, "Oh, I was more creative after that. Well, I want more of that. Well, I was super focused, but not as creative after that one. I don't like that. Okay." And since it's not permanent right away, you have the freedom to sort of build up effects and go, "Oh, that's a nice effect. Let's tune it. Well, that's a little pushy. Let's back off on that one." And the the the recipient, the person training their brain, is the person validating the reality of that. So, as long as they're like reporting and giving good feedback and the provider is integrating that feedback into the approaches, you can always, you know, you don't have to be perfect in your communication. You have You have to understand the diagnosis perfectly. You're You're steering phenomena and resources. So, yeah. It's a It's a fun process to work on people's brains that way. Yeah, now I I'm that circles to a question that I was really curious about and kind of as I was absorbing the the material for the book is like, you know, on one hand, we have all these different aspects like our you know, our happy little kid, our pissing in the pea, these you know, different parts of our brain that you have that parts where kind of approach and sensory with the different aspects. And then there is also this I want to call it an other thing cuz I don't know if it's an other thing, but like to your point, there's also like the person, right? And I think the self or whatever that is that you want to talk about where there's a part that's going like, "Yeah, go in that direction." Or, you know, the orchestrator of the whole thing that says like, "Yeah, I want it to go this way." Or even if we're not using neurofeedback, you you said like, "Oh, I want to I want to develop this." And so, it almost sounds like that that and maybe this is just a breakdown of of human language, but there's that like I. And I guess my question to you is is like, who is that like that is interacting with all the other ones, you know what I mean? That there is that >> I don't I I don't have an answer to that. It's a great question, though. I'm not sure how I feel about consciousness. I think the more we learn about it, the less we understand. Um you know, we're not just a bundle of drives, we're not just a bundle of uh individual resources. And yet, um you know, we're having a hard time understanding what could be beyond that. Uh you know, where there's there's some dark corners yet in the science and in the spirituality that we just haven't figured out. Um and I and I would argue not to push back in your question or be dismissive at all, but I would argue that it doesn't matter. Cuz what matters is it's kind of a Buddhist perspective. What matters is not the meaning of life, what matters is reduction of suffering. If you have ways to reduce suffering, does it matter if you're in line with the cosmos? I don't know. You're able to help somebody suffer less or yourself suffer less, great. And when it comes to the brain, my perspective is almost agnostic when it comes to lots of these things. I The diagnoses are not precise. They don't match people and their suffering and their goals don't match diagnostic labels half the time. And yet, there's real stuff there. They're really experiencing things. Or these psychics, you know, from Tyler Henry or Susan Glaow, you know, a handful of others, I don't know what's happening, but they're experiencing something. They're doing something. You can measure it. It's a thing. It's happening. It's a phenomena. And while doing that phenomena, they're interacting with people around them in a different way than is typical. To me, the the joy of that is not like, can I figure out what's happening when Tyler does his thing or Susan does her thing? It's Oh, look. I showed a person a phenomena happening inside themself that they didn't they didn't visualize before this that they will understand in some deep way. It'll It'll resonate. Showing Tyler the blob of theta or Susan the blob of delta that they make during the process, they were they were both like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, I I am a little bit like that. Wow, yeah, that is how I feel." And that was resonant. So, they got validation or some fun experience with it going, "Oh, that's kind of cool." And the first one with Dr. Drew, you know, Drew and Offin was like, "Oh, I think this means that we have this theory and then they therefore people are tied into other people this way." And that's great. That was how Drew wanted to run with the ideas. Tyler was like, "That's cool. I'm seeing something. I've been experiencing it for for 30 years." And I was like, "Data. Hey, you know, you kind of look like other psychics I've seen and other spiritualists who have the ability to go into altered states semi at will, which is unusual. You have that [clears throat] skill. We're seeing it. That's kind of cool. Not sure what it means. But the phenomenon is there, and that's really the the role that I serve is helping people unpack their phenomena. They make the meaning. So, I don't I don't want the diagnostic precision or responsibility. Yeah, you know, my my joke is if you want an answer, go to a doctor. You want questions, >> [laughter] >> come to a scientist. We have questions for you, for your data. You'll maybe know the answer, or you can ask questions of your doctor and get answers, or get medications, or get diagnoses. But if you walk into your doctor's visit knowing how your brain works, you're going to get better answers. I think that that's like, you know, it's it's interesting because interviewing so many of you, if you will, of the various neuroscientists who work in this space, it's it's so fascinating how many of you all have developed in some way a a Buddhist-esque perspective. And I don't want to put that language on your own, but like, you know, in some level of a meditative you know, I think um Jake Eagleman identifies as a uh um philosophical Daoist, right? And like these >> Okay, it makes sense for Jay. Yeah, sure. >> Yeah. And and and there's a quality to, I think, almost all of you where it's like you're engaging with this kind of material, and I think it was uh Dr. Othmer who was talking about just, you know, the mysteries of physics. And they're beginning the same thing with the brain. Like as you as you go deeper, you you to your point with the PhD, the more you realize how much you don't know, right? And there are we can see these patterns, and we start to say like, yeah, this thing this, and then we get to a point where we're like, okay, but there's still all of this vastness that there is still a an you know, there's still a turtle underneath that other turtle somewhere. We just don't know where it is yet. Yeah. And and what do you do with that? Do you worry about counting turtles all the way down, or do you worry about moving across the back in the direction you want, living the life you want, thriving, feeling joy? >> for me it's like it creates there is a sense of like I just wonder, like not so much a worry as much as it is like a like an awe, like a you know, a level of like humility that I think that comes with that, as well as there's there is also a question I think I have around like you know, in the same way where it's valuable to learn about these brain waves, which are part of that mystery 20 years ago, right? That that didn't exist. Like that if we were able to get closer to that thing, would that help us reduce suffering more? If whatever that unfully unknowable thing, but if we can get a little bit closer to identifying the elephant that we're all touching when we're blind and stuff, you know, if we can get a little bit closer. But again, map is not the territory. We don't necessarily need truth. Uh I mean, we've also known Here's the thing. We we we've been given the truths or the enough of the picture. Maybe we're all blind men and elephants, but we've been given enough of the picture to make massive changes in real people's lives for 5, 10, 15, 20,000 years we've had those skills, you know? We were teaching meditation at least 5, 10,000 years ago. Inhibitory tone, sleep regulation, trauma and resilience, like, you know, we've been doing this stuff for a very long time. And why don't we all have abs? Why aren't we all enlightened? Man, I want my enlightenment. Where's my enlightenment? You know? So, we have to be careful not to become Zen [ __ ] We have to be careful not to just pursue the phenomena for their own sake. Where is your suffering? Where is your resilience? Where is your growth? That I think, you know, these concepts, these tools that we're bringing to bear, those are useful because they give us that, not because they are magic boxes. And you'll see in our field, just to comment on what you said about people developing a little bit of a special vibe, there's really two types of people I see in our field that I think get a little bit of a maybe unique perspective on the brain because they see what happens. Now, most of us see huge amounts of suffering. Huge amounts of anxiety and trauma, autism, dysregulated sensory issues, huge amounts, alcohol, vast amounts of suffering. More, I would say, than uh uh well, it's it's an outpatient, you know, if you are external suffering that is often, you know, sort of full catastrophe living for people, and they've turned to everything else, and then they find this late. Um and then you see people change most of the time over a few months. And massively. And and you get a little blasé about all the miracles you're seeing, and you get this sort of like you're unattached to the suffering, you're unattached to the miracles because they're happening all the time around you. You're like, okay. Brain's suffering, brain's transformed. Okay. There's some of that. That's the healthy version of a of experience neurofeedback practitioner are developing. A deep And and practitioners develop deep understandings of the brain. Good ones. That iterate, that learn, that assess. They learn how the brain works as well as anyone else on the planet, I would argue. Then there's a small cadre, maybe 10% or 20% of the field, who are using one-size-fits-all automatic systems that auto-adjust, that don't do assessments, and that believe their tool is magical. Oh, neurofeedback works, it can't cause harm, and you can do as much of it as you want, and it works for all the things. And none of those statements are true. You can create side effects by building your brain in the wrong direction. There are people for whom different protocols have to be used, and not everything is one-size-fits. So, it's a heavily individualized form of personal training of your brain. And it can go awry the same way that personal training can, when you do the wrong thing or not what you need. So, there is a bit of like a People that see this transformation, even if you're using some of these one-size-fits systems, you'll still get amazing transformations some of the time. And it's really risky to believe you know what you're doing when it comes to the brain. It really is. You have to hold conclusions lightly. You have to not believe you know better than someone else what their experience is. You have to not believe your perspective on their brain map means you know better what they're experiencing when you start doing neurofeedback than what they're doing. But if you can hold that tension of not knowing what is true and having lots of possibilities, then you can watch what is real, which is their experiences day to day, what they're describing as their goals, and you can walk that line of change without having to attach to diagnostic precision. And the ability to see a lot of variability and not attach to it, I think that does create that Buddhist scientist a little bit. Yeah, cuz we see things and just we realize that we can't know them fully, and yet we can know them deeply. Yeah. That That is a really beautiful, I think, uh extrapolation of that. I It It And it makes a lot of sense, I think, when you're seeing all that, and I think holding I think one of my core beliefs is just, you know, ultimately that I don't know anything, right? And like that I mentioned like the intellectual humility that comes with that, but just like the reality of being able to say, well, like I'm experiencing this, but I don't know that especially in today's day and age, right? You could be an AI that's actually being made somewhere else, and you're just you're just on my screen right now. Like I've no idea that you're >> I'm I could be on a server right now, exactly. Right. Although if I was an AI, we would have had fewer audio problems. >> [laughter] >> Not if you were smart enough of an of an AI, an AI, right? Like if you're that level of ahead of us, like I can I can go down that rabbit hole where it's like um but, you know, I think I think there's something where you are able to hold that tension of the the not knowing that is what serves so many of your clients, right? When you were able to come back with that beginner's mind each time and say >> to, because you can't know. You can't know better than someone else what their experience is, and you can't know that a feature in someone's brain means X, Y, or Z. You can know it's plausible. You can know that the shapes of it, and if you draw a if you paint it out for somebody, here's some plausible ideas, they will know what's true. And and their knowledge Here's the thing, too. Their knowledge about what that actually means. Let's say I see a frontal asymmetry. Happy little kid is not as happy. Grandpa the old man's too activated with beta. I might describe something where their approach system's not online fully, and their avoid system's really strong. And that can lead to difficulty with motivation, mood, overwhelm. And someone's like, oh yeah, that's true. That's why I'm here. Oh yeah, that sucks. I'm like, oh yeah, it does suck. Man, I'm so sorry. And look at it. Your frontal system makes some sense. There it is. And that is very freeing for the person because they're like, great, what can I do about it? Okay, great. Well, your left side responds well to concentration practices with meditation. Classic asymmetry here with the front midline. This is a thing that psychiatrists might well give you SSRIs for. This might work well. Or your quirky brain might mean you want to do a methylation analysis, see what genes you have. Maybe MTHFR needs special B vitamins for you. Um you know, but the but the perspective of that is not I found your depression. You are depressed. It's more like, oh hey, your approach versus avoid system might not be in as you know, free of a gear as you prefer. Is that true? Not here's what's true for you, here's your brain. Is it true that you're suffering in X, Y, or Z direction, or would you like to change your brain in X, Y, and Z direction? That really does give people the the control, the agency. And so, that's true of all neurofeedback, whether or not somebody realizes it. No matter what provider you're working with, you can do almost infinite number of things. So, ask for what you want. Tell them what you're feeling. Yeah. It's really important. So. With that with all the brain data that you've said and you've mentioned that same idea of like being able to hold the the not knowing the tension approaching that every single time and I I think I when I Jay Gunkelman on he was talking about the the importance of reading the EEG almost like a blank slate every single time so that you're able to identify right the the the new patterns that might emerge and not just be locked into Oh yeah, there's those ones that I see those are the ones that I see those are the ones that I see cuz our our brain will ultimately filter out those other things and then be able to not identify the more nuanced or detailed or other components that come up there. And I'm curious like for you what do you do to be able to maintain that sense of I guess beginner's mind within your yourself and your work when you I mean even to a certain extent so you just wrote a book that's like oh yeah, there these different you know, types and like I'm sure that you you must have some sort of a a relationship with those. >> of them are are sort of well, you know, vetted out fully in the research but some of them are. Right. And this is what Jay did, too. Jay Gunkelman was working in hospitals or he's working for a data receiving company who did analysis for hospitals all over the country. They would send their EEGs, you know, recording epileptics and whatever else and send them in just constantly. And Jay was sitting there scoring data manually, you know, hours a day and was seeing these same patterns, these same phenotypes, these classic patterns and waveforms that show up. And Jay along with my more direct mentor in QEEG, a guy named Jack Jack Johnstone, who Jay and Jack had a company together called Qmetrics. Um Joy Lunt involved with that group and Jay, Jack, and Joy did a paper called uh characterization of EEG phenotypes. No, no, sorry. Characterization of clinical databases, I think, in EEG. Um 2005 paper. And that was the first paper that really talked about this idea of endophenotypes that there's these patterns that cross diagnostic boundaries and keep showing up across brains but we don't necessarily know what they mean and they're not always pathological. And at the time the paper was published in 2005, I think there was uh maybe eight or nine phenotypes that were identified in um that first paper, things like the slow and low phenotype. If you're old or have injuries or you're really metabolically depleted, your EEG drops in amplitude and slows down. That's, you know, low and slow. Low amplitude fast, low amplitude slow. These are variants of EEG that can show up. People have them. They can mean something. So, at the time that that Jay published that paper, only two of the nine or so phenotypes had been deterministic Here's the genes, here's the phenomena and the physiology that definitely corresponds to it. By the time of the 10 years have gone by, all of the rest of them had been validated. And that's all I'm doing is I'm looking at roughly 25,000 or more brain maps. It's more than 25 but that just sounds good. More than 25,000 at this point. Um you see the same patterns again and again and again. So, I'm just doing the same thing that Jay did and I look at raw data as well as patterns data, you know, QEEG patterns. And people tend to be quirky in similar ways again and again and again and again and again. Yeah. And not every person's experience of having the same resources in an unusual you know, pattern. Not every person's going to have the same In fact, I would argue that two people with similar unusual features in their brain will still have a very different experience. Um So, it's not about here's what is true for you at a deep level. It's more like here's some big features of regulation, stress, attention, sleep. And if you can describe regulatory aspects of yourself and go oh yeah. Oh yeah. The next step, if you understand that model that we're working with, is well that gives you things to try, gives you things to manage, gives you things to monitor, gives you things to change. Yeah. That I think is the important part, not so much being tied to the phenotype itself. So, I took Jack and Jay's idea about the endophenotypes and ran with it a little bit and said it's not just the raw signal, the little blip in the EEG. It's not just Mhm. these nine things that we have the genotype that match the phenotype. Instead, a phenotype is the expression as you see it. I mean, in classic biology, phenotype is like what you look like. Genotype are the genes that produce that. Your baldness, my baldness, phenotypes. You know, the thing that we're carrying from our maternal grandfather probably that's related to it, genotype. Right. And in EEG in the brain, the cortical brain the cortical stuff, they're more changeable just like you can change your body mass or, you know, muscle strength, whatever. The brain's way more changeable than the body but these are phenotypes the same way. They're largely heritable. You got two twins, two identical twins, they'll often have the exact same patterns of phenotypes. They're also acquirable. You people experience really strong adverse experiences and many of us will have the posterior cingulate cramp up into high gear. And is that a trauma response? Yes, for some people it's PTSD. For other people, they're actual lifeguards. And they're like, you know, have a head in a swivel and it feels really good or they're a gamer. It's not in the way. It's unusual. So, you have to both embrace the difference and not be too attached to it as being a pathological phenomena. Instead, it requires us to understand our brains. So, the way that I got there was by asking people about their brains. Does this pattern mean what it can mean? Oh, it doesn't. It means that. Interesting. Huh. And if you keep getting that from people again and again and again, they teach you what it means. I had a client who came to me for anxiety. She's she she would remote client called me and said, Okay, so I have a wedding to go to. It's a 10-hour road trip and it's a 4-day event and my college roommate invited me to be her maid of honor. Thing is, I haven't left the house in 6 years. I have extreme agoraphobia and major anxiety. Can't get in a car. Can't leave the can't go through the front door. And at the time I was doing still do a lot of remote neurofeedback, which is why she reached out. So, we, you know, sent her a brain map, did her a map program. And she did she was very successful. She went to the wedding. She had a great time. She didn't have crazy anxiety. And a couple weeks later I got like all of these people coming in from an agoraphobia support group that she was part of saying, Wait, wait, wait, wait, what? Huh? Can I have some? And so, over the next month I ended up doing brain maps on a dozen people with classic diagnosed agoraphobia. Wow. Nine of them had the exact same patterns of activation that were cramped up. I went, Oh. Okay. And then it's the anterior cingulate. I'll I'll, you know, I won't keep the information. The anterior anterior cingulate, which is selecting your thoughts, and the right temporal parietal, taking in the outside world, get [clears throat] cramped up together and they can produce, among other things, agoraphobia as well as, ironically, claustrophobia. You think it's the opposite but it's not. It's the environment pressing on you. Misophonia. Irritability and even rage when someone's chewing or small sounds or little background things. That's a tick. It's an it's a it's a mental tick. It's a it's a kind of a little obsessiveness mixed with a sensory and social. And you see this co-activation in people and you know there's something about the outside world or social things that are really really driving and they may be uncomfortable. It may be some social anxiety, maybe some misophonia, maybe some OCD, maybe agoraphobia, maybe your brain's quirky and this is just normal for you. Great. Good job. Be weird. But like seeing the quirkiness and saying, You know, this pattern often means that you're really frustrated when people are chewing and you hear their spouse start laughing hysterically in the background because like they're getting threatened nightly about their chewing. Um it's one of the very few ways that women can end up in prison for in in in mid years is by killing their husbands for chewing too loud. Misophonia literally creates creates prison sentences sometimes. It's it's among the very few things like the the OCD things that can get you in jail is because people, you know, they they literally assault their their partners because they cannot take the the sound. Wow. That's powerful. Nails on chalkboard. We all know what that that sensation is. Imagine that for any little small sound. Yeah. Wow. You know, and and often there's a rage, a disinhibition, an anger that comes with it. It's not just OCD features, a little obsessiveness and you can't ignore it. It becomes rage for some people. Well, that actually kind of >> Very uncomfortable. I know we're we're kind of running at at time right now but like I one question I kind of wanted to ask you about that's tied to rage was, you know, you talk a little bit about like the um you know, sensitivity to rejection in particular and you you talked about shame and I was curious about just from your perspective, like what is what is sort of shame or does shame have a a neurological signature or phenotype at all? Um and I'm somebody who was born and raised in, you know, religion and have a lot of shame from that regard and I know a lot of people who've overcome shame in a lot of different ways and I'm just curious about what what does that look like and what do you do with it from a neurological perspective? >> Yeah. Um short answer is you don't see shame per se. You you know, the experience High-level things like that I are not things that are visualizable in the tools that I use. I see trait features. Right. Um however, um there is a sort of social evolutionary I don't want to say benefit but there's a reason, there's a rationale for why we feel shame. Um the social unit has value. The non-genetically tied-in people in our group providing care back to the genes if you will. It's something we select for. There's genes for altruism, for being nice to and caring for other people. Mhm. Um and shame seems to be tied into that where social judgement about behavior that's not socially congruent seems to create that experience. Now, rejection uh which is that often a part of it is also has aspects of attachment and relational things. Mhm. Uh what you're I do not know you very deeply, but I assume >> um some of what you some of the shame that was engendered uh from growing up that way was about cosmology. Mhm. Better not masturbate. Better not have impure thoughts. Better not, you know, Yeah. And I better not be be mean to my yell at my parents cuz >> Yeah, it's almost like creating that inner life guard within my mind essentially about my behaviors or thoughts. >> that's there is something there, you know, we learn the social rules to keep us safe. And the back of the brain, those censoring social areas are going to get sensitized. Mhm. And that even with great, you know, therapy and moving through great growth and healing >> Yeah. that may still create for some of us that ease of that tissue being activated. >> Mhm. And that that sort of leads into that idea of uh rejection sensitivity and ADHD where you have that person who's been bullied about their impulsivity and interrupting and everything else for 20 years and then they have somebody you know, be mean again. And they haven't developed secure attachment necessarily in social environments without always being the person who's knocking something over or talking first. Mhm. And you have this sensitization also, you know, you don't just get ADHD phenomena. You get all kinds of unusual brain things when you have an unusual brain. So, you probably are seeing some of those emotions more deeply than they are trying to express. Mhm. You probably are noticing the frustration in their tone of voice. Now, it might not be about you. Mhm. But since they're not guarding it and you're picking it up, you may attach with that right temporoparietal tissue, the princess. And then if you're judging it as negative, if the grumpy old man, the problem child Mhm. are activated, suddenly you're shutting down. Well, screw them. Now it's a now it's like the splitting thing where you're like, I want to be my friend. I want to be my Well, screw you. Mhm. You know, you pull away and protect and resist. So, I I I think those are all related. Mhm. Um there's there's good research out of UCSD showing that the in-group versus out-group stuff. Um which is the basis of like all kinds of horrors in in the past million years. Yeah. But it's it you know, it leads to some of the racism that we experience, but also some of the classism that we that we deal with. Yeah. That has some similar aspects too. There's a a management of resources by groups of people. I think that's the core feature, but it taps into the social and the sensory. And to answer the last part of your question, how do you work with it? You work with the social and sensory tissue, I would say, or work with some of the attachment Mhm. and relational tissues. Um you can just work directly. Yeah. You can do things like IFS or or DBT or CBT. You can do neurofeedback. You can do all of them. Uh these are changeable tissues. That that I think is more important than how. Mhm. That that you that that you can make change is what you want to hold on to. >> Awesome. Well, thank you uh Andrew. I mean, you're always welcome back in my show. I can always talk to you for a thousand more hours and ask you more questions. Um I guess before we sign off uh one question I always ask my guests is just, you know, what's one question you might have for the audience or have them think about something in a different way or something that might shift their perspective. Yeah, so the all of the phenotypes that I have in the book really end up being related to core features in the brain. And I think of the foundation of that as stress, sleep, and attention. So, three legs of a stool. And I want you guys to think about those things not just operating on their own, but being interrelated. Sleep and attention. Attention and stress. Stress and sleep. These are all actually sharing resources. So, I would invite you just to observe if your sleep is thrown off how your attention is, how your stress response is, and vice versa. Look at how those things interact maybe a little bit. And if you do want to see more about the 12 phenotypes, come to the website giftedntortured.com. Fill out the quiz. I have a cute little quiz. I'll send you results. Um and you can check yourself out there at a deeper level if you wish. Perfect. Thanks, Andrew. And um yeah, anywhere else you want to send people to before we sign off? Yeah, maybe uh peakbraininstitute.com if you want to grab a brain map. Uh we have offices all over the place. Um New York City, West Palm Beach, uh St. Louis, Los Angeles, Orange County, London, Stockholm. There's a few others uh in the US you can do remote brain mapping anywhere in in the US you wish. We'll send you out equipment. But if you want to learn your brain, come check us out. Um on the peakbraininstitute website, I have free call links as well. So, if you want to talk about something deeply, just grab a 30-minute call. And part of a a peak brain doing something a bit different is we're scientists and coaches. We're not doctors in spite of some of us having PhDs. So, we remain accessible. We're there to talk to you. We're there, you know, to help you learn this stuff. So, if you're wondering about how your brain works, uh come talk to us. Love to teach you. Perfect. Thanks, Andrew. Well, happy to have you on again. Ciao. Definitely. Mhm.