Top Neuroscientist: ADHD is NORMAL—You Don’t Need To 'Fix' Your Brain!

The more I learn about consciousness, the less I'm sure it exists. Who are you? I'm a neuroscientist that helps you understand your brain. ADHD is a natural phenotype. It's like being bald. It happens. It's a natural thing. You'll see some people these days, a couple people out there in the talking head space are saying, "Oh, ADHD is caused by trauma." No, it's actually a normal variant of human, but it does make you more vulnerable. You don't have to get to the diagnosis. People are not their diagnosis. I'm not like, "Oh my god, you have ADD." I'm like, "Okay, would you like to sustain your attention better?" The question isn't do you have ADHD. The question is what are your goals around that brain? Do you care? Does it work for you? Do you want to be more focused? Seeing your brain, seeing even suffering, it does create this different relationship with your self. People cry when I show them their concussion or their tinitus or their OCD. They're like, "Oh my god, yes. Thank you, Mom. Look, it's real." All the ancient stuff we've been told for 5 10,000 years, guess what? It works. Do you believe in God? I don't. Welcome to today's episode of Getting to Know You. I'm your host, Cameron Edward Benton. And on today's episode, I have the great pleasure of introducing you to Dr. Andrew Hill. Dr. Andrew Hill is a PhD in cognitive neuroscience out of the University of LA. And he is the founder of Peak Brain Institute where he's done over 10,000 brain maps. Whether that's helping somebody with addiction understand their neurode divergence with ADHD or helping high performers achieve an even higher level of performance. In this episode, we talk about his journey into neuro feedback dealing with his own ADHD. How he did some of the first research double blind placebo control around the attention networks in the brain as it relates to neuro feedback. how he helped people with autism get better for the first time in a short period of time, as well as what it looks like when you are mapping the brain of a self-proclaimed psychic while they are doing their quote unquote psychic thing. One of the things I'd really love for you to listen to in this episode is Dr. Hill's deep sense of compassion. He has this really fun and delightful kermaginly Gen X uh exterior and then yet underneath that there is also this this whimsicalness, this sensitivity, this depth and wonder and humility towards the world around him that centers around his huge desire to reduce human suffering wherever and whenever possible. So without further ado, here is getting to know Dr. Andrew Hill. Who are you? Who am I? I'm Andrew Hill. I'm a neuroscientist that helps you understand your brain. A lot of my reason for being is to help people uh demystify themselves and look at brain data and try to figure out things that we give labels to, diagnosis to suffering goals, but you can actually understand a lot more about yourself than most of us realize. And so I teach people to look at themselves and often take control of making change from that perspective about how their physiology is working. You said demystifying themselves and their brain. Like can you share a little bit more about that? What what is it you feel like needs to be demystified? Yeah, we all I think suffer with or experience at least different resources throughout the day, throughout the week. Um things involving managing stress, attention, executive function, emotional resilience, speed of processing, how well we sleep, how well we wake up. Um, and these are resources that get cramped up just like a shoulder can get torn or low back can get spasomed. You can have your posterior singulate cramp up in high gear. And now your brain is stuck in this mode where that resource is always active just like a cramped up muscle. In this case, the posterior singulate does environment sampling and evaluation like like watch the road, heads up, heads up. That part of the brain that's sort of helping you orient yourself to what you must pay attention to essentially. And uh if you learn the world isn't safe or predictable, it cramps up into high gear because the cost of missing danger is so high. I mean, you miss that tiger once if you're lucky. So, we end up having labels for an overactive, let's say, in this case posterior singulate. And that would be given names like rumination or maybe PTSD if it's really cramped up in high gear. But while the label is important and useful and the set of things that come along with complaints are really valid, it's not the only landscape is, oh my god, something's happening to me. It has letters attached to it. It's got a label. There's also what is your brain actually doing? What is the physiology? What's the resource? And disregulations in those resources create a lot of suffering. And so you can look at a lot of the things we carry around and kind of decompose them into the base resources that might be uh disregulated or not operating how you want and then make some change there. Um is neurode divergence real? Sure. People are weird. I mean being weird is probably more normal than being normal. There is no real average person. So you'll find that by very definition, you know, humans are variable and average is about twothirds of people and the rest are weird. Doesn't always get in the way. It can. And you'll find that in complaints like psychiatric stuff, the incidence of neurode divergence is much much higher than in the background population, but doesn't mean that neurode divergence leads to problems. It just leads to difference. Is it true that like being neur divergent can have or does have superpowers or do you feel like it's sure it can I mean you know pattern matching speed of processing based on the individual you may have things like really crazy verbal fluency or uh perfect pitch you know like you can have a bunch of interesting quirky features in the brain and the more weird you are the more weird you are. So, you tend to get multiple flavored things. Like, you tend to be left-handed and clumsy and gay and stutter and autistic. Like, not everyone's all those things, of course, but like you tend to get clusters of weirdness showing up in one individual. Uh, and and there's a reason for that. It's not because it's like, oh, whoops, we made a mistake. No, the patterns actually cohhere. You tend to have people that have the executive function areas, the front and back midlines, the behind the right ear, like that gifted poet brain, that anxious but brilliant individual. That's a thing. It's a human, you know, variant that that shows up. It's unusual. So is like being left-handed. That's like 10, you know, 10 to 15% of the population. It still happens though after millions of years. So it's probably doing something real. One of the questions I was curious about as you talked about sort of fixing dysregulation or helping the brain regulate is how do we know when something is disregulated versus just different? Well, if it's in the way, it's disregulated basically. Um there's a certain I mean psychology, you know, diagnostic language psychology or even medicine would often put the diagnostic threshold sort of when you're far enough away from average. But brains are too weird to do that. When you're thinking about physiology itself, you can't say, "Oh my gosh, something's unusual. Therefore, it means X or Y or Z." You can say, "Oh, look, part of your brain's unusual." And that often means or here's a plausible interpretation of what it means. Like I mentioned that posterior singulate stick with that one example. If you see a lot of beta waves like two three standard deviations more beta waves which is like an activated information processing wave in that tissue at rest in somebody. It's plausible they have a heightened threat sensitivity. They ruminate. They have some fearfulness. It's also plausible that they're a very skilled lifeguard or a mom with six kids. And it's it's a well- reggulated sampling and evaluation. and it's a trained resource instead of an overactive resource. So you have to go through this step when doing work on people's brains where you first start off with the actual physiology and extrapolate from that what might be going on instead of starting off with a symptom list or a set of diagnostic criteria trying to fit because people are not diagnoses. They don't fit the buckets very well. And so you'll see features that might be anxiety or ADHD or you know depression or mood stuff, but it's not a perfectly diagnostic landscape. So just like you looked at your lipid panel maybe and saw some triglycerides, a little cholesterol, you kind of know what it means, but it isn't always perfect. And instead of using it to go, "Oh my gosh, it's above some threshold. I have to take statins," you go, "Ooh, maybe I better back off in the Ben & Jerry's." And you use it for agency. make a behavioral change and learn to steer the system. And so you can do a lot of that with the brain around especially sleep, stress, and attention. And there's a bunch of other stuff you can also pretty reliably make changes in that are higher level and and more mysterious things. Yeah. I mean, when when you say that, part of what I start to hear is there's a big difference between the diagnosis and the symptomology of something and maybe what's going on underneath the hood, right? So, there is maybe some five or six different people who are maybe diagnosed with ADHD, but they all might actually have something different that's causing those symptoms. Is that accurate? Yes. Yes. Um, but one or two of them is going to be misdiagnosed if that's the case. If you had a let's say 10 people with ADHD diagnosis, yeah, you'll have 20% of them it's actually a sleep issue and one or two it might be an anxiety phenomena manifesting with some disinhibition or impulsivity. Um, but the the bigger uh theory is that the components of executive function that might be labeled ADHD, those are pumping the gas, vigilance, focus, initiating behavior, and pumping the brakes, impulsivity, stopping the release of behavior. And those are big gross resources in the brain, the initiation and the inhibition of action at the sort of mind body intersection. They they're the pre-entral gyus, just the most posterior part of the frontal lobe on both sides. The one on the left acts like the driver in the car, activates. It just stays in the road even if things are boring. It helps you, you know, do the task even if you're not that excited about it. It maintains the mode you're in. And the one on the right supervises, reads the map, helps you decide, you know, how we're turning ahead up here kind of thing. So, it's doing this sort of left and right hemisphere stabilization and supervision. If you see those tissues being really off in somebody having instead of lots of robust beta having alpha waves, a drifty wave in the left or theta waves, a release of inhibition like taking your foot off the brakes on the right, you tend to get inattentiveness when the stabilizer can't be stable and impulsivity when the supervisor is going squirrel and being reactive to information instead of steering the whole machine. If you see a high theta and high beta or high alpha in these tissues in somebody, do they have ADHD, they're certainly behaving like it. And something like 95% of the people, if it was a kid, you'd be able to diagnose just off the data. The problem is is that you a certain number of those people are going to have that behavior, but it's from a sleep issue, it's from COVID, it's from a concussion. So you the the diagnostic label is not as precise. You know ADHD specifically is 19 18 uh characteristics. You know nine and nine and it's a behavioral observe diagnosis. ADHD is one of the few diagnoses you can do at a distance. Just to clarify on that when when you say like different um like different characteristics are you talking about like behavioral characteristics or characteristics within the brain itself? for for the the DSM, the psychology manuals, is 18 uh factors you have to observe in behavior. Difficulty sitting still, waiting your turn, that kind of stuff. And they have to have existed for uh a long time since childhood across domains of life. And there's some that are the gas pedal ones and some that are the are the the brakes, the activation and the inhibition ones. And depending which difficulty you have, you get labeled as inattentive, impulsive, or combined. Now, years ago, we had this label ADD, and it's still in our, you know, colloquial language, but there hasn't been an actual ADD diagnosis since 1987. Wow. That's when the diagnosis was retired. So, everything's a a variant now of ADHD. It's hyphen, combined, mixed, inattentive, etc. Um, fascinating. So you can see in someone's brain if they have lots of issues with beta on the left, they're going to have some inattentiveness often and on the right impulsivity often. So what you do is you do not just the brain mapping the the measurement of the EEG, but you also measure the performance, measure the attention performance. So if those things line up really, really well, you're inattentive and you have tons of alpha on the left, you're impulsive and you have tons of beta uh sorry theta on the right, well then guess what? you're performing inattentively in impulsivity. Your brain looks like it often looks in ADHD. The question isn't do you have ADHD. The question is what are your goals around that brain? Do you care? Does it work for you? Do you want to be more focused? Because if you do, you don't have to get to the diagnosis. You're getting to the brain resources. So, you get to drop away in some ways below the level of diagnostic language, but also you move away from it. It's not, "Do I have ADHD?" It's more like, "Hey, the left side of your brain's beta tone looks a little bit weak." Often that means people drift and can't stay on task if they're bored and kind of wander, have a hard time starting activity. Oh, that sounds important to you. Okay, well that's probably valid. Here's a trick. The left side or a feature that you can kind of predict that left side beta, it doesn't just stabilize attention, it also stabilizes the depth of sleep. So you can take that valid measurement of performance on a behavioral test, the theory about the alpha you saw in the brain and then go, oh, you know, if this is inattentive, it often comes along with a sleep maintenance issue. Are you having trouble staying asleep or waking up tired every morning? Oh, you are? Well, okay. So, you can start to like paint out the corners progressively by looking at features. And while brain mapping or QEG is hard to interpret as you're probably understanding, it's a stable set of resources. So a map on you today and in a month and in two months and in six months would be the same barring doing things to your brain that made changes. So you get this trait measurement at a high level. We can start to get a sense of sleep, stress, attention. and you know 10 people with ADHD again there's some diagnostic you know overuse of those labels but people are not their diagnosis they're not just ADHD if they have it they're also you know most ADHD has a um sleep component to it the primary brain wave on the right that pre-entral gyus in the right uses something called sensory motor rhythm to sit still and to supervise behavior to inhibit or pump the brakes gently and help us steer our behavior. And sensory motor rhythm SMR is also called sleep spindles when you're asleep. So when you hear a dog bark from 3 miles away and you're asleep and you know that dog so you don't wake up or a car goes by and you ignore it and stay asleep, a burst of SMR, burst of sleep spindles happen to keep you asleep to inhibit the system. And SMR is also what you see if you look at a cat on a window sill watching birds. that laser-like focus and completely liquid still body that state motorically physically still and cognitively locked in with your attention. That's literally the opposite of ADHD literally where the SMR tone is low in ADHD. So the theta takes over and information pulls attention pattern stimulus intensity pull the attention instead of you inhibiting and driving the attention from the inside. That's what ADHD really is. So if you see this in somebody, it doesn't matter if they have the diagnosis, if they have the brain patterns and they have the performance difficulty or just the goal, then you can pursue change without worrying about putting it in this diagnostic landscape necessarily. So one of the things I I thought of as I'm hearing this is, you know, people are able to, you know, change their brain waves, change uh themselves in a sense like in the way they want to. Um, and what I'm curious about is let's take this person with ADHD for example and training the the SMR frequency. Are they losing anything by making the shift? Is there always some sort of trade-off that we have to figure out, okay, am I willing to be a bit little bit less creative maybe to um but like get some more, you know, impulse control with that. Is there always that trade-off that's happening that we're making decisions about or how does that work? Almost never is there that trade-off when when you do things properly because you're not taking somebody from one set of brain resources and moving them to the other side of that brain, you know, activation state. You're really doing a ranging process. So, somebody with ADHD can still become the best person on the sport pitch or the video game competition and they can also decide to focus under low inensity environments like history class. You know, you can decide to turn the resource on. That's the biggest difference. Or in the case of OCD, you can give somebody the ability to hyperfocus if they wish or decide to put that down reliably if they would rather not right now. And that doesn't take away the hyperfocus. People with ADHD and OCD often ask me that exact question. Hey, I like how I am when I'm playing football, baseball, video games, playing music, doing my taxes for the person with OCD. I love it. I don't want to lose that. I'm I'm like really really good at that. Okay. Well, you tell me if you need more of that push in that direction, but I think you can just get a range and now you can decide to use the resources. It it might help to know that a lot of the things that I work on that are considered psychology problems or disease process, mental illness, I don't consider them disease processes. They're really phenotypes and disregulations. They're patterns that naturally exist. A ADHD is a natural phenotype. It's like being bald. It happens. It's a natural thing. There's probably some reasons for it evolutionarily. It's not a huge percentage of the population, but it seems to keep persisting. And so, there's got to be some adaptation there. And you'll find that these phenotypes of people that have a hot anterior singulate, so they hyperfocus and get stuck in their head or have a hot right tempmpo parietal junction, so they're drinking in the world's emotional sensitivity and all the information in the sensory and emotional world. There's reasons for having those brains. What is a phenotype? Phenotype is a is a an appearance. You know, blue eyes, brown hair, short, tall. Um the genotype or the genes. The phenotype is the expression that you see of that genes. And that label has been extended into other things that that tend to have presentations. So we have a we have phenotypes of EEG. So, if I measured your brain at rest for 10 minutes, eyes closed, and then compared you to the average person your age, you're going to be different in certain ways, maybe you're going to have lots of beta over that right side. Maybe you're going to have an alpha speed that on a bell curve is a little faster or a little slower than the average person. Or when you close your eyes, you're not as good as the average person, shutting off the visual tissue, or you're better than average at shutting off the visual tissue. And you'll see this on like big activation patterns, you know, maps we call them, which are like little heat maps showing uh color-coded uh patterns that are stable for you. So again, if you had, let's say, a front midline theta, which would show up if somebody had a lot of songs stuck in their head or a lot of nailbiting or picking at things, that's a particular phenotype you tend to see of front midline theta. Kind of like the low-key uh OCD variant stuff tends to show up with especially songs in our head. It can be really aggressive and you don't know if it means someone is biting their nails or songs in their head. you see front midline theta, but you know it's pretty plausible and hey, let's talk about it. Let's see if it's disregulated or if you're just weird. If you're weird, great, good job. Be weird. Like, we don't really care. The goal is not to get you to the middle of the bell curve. That's the thing people often often miss when thinking about what is this brain mapping stuff or neuro feedback. We're not training you to the middle of the bell curve. We're using brain mapping to figure out how weird you are because that matters because it'll it'll unpack interesting things about you. And then you want to design the interventions against the person or to the person you're actually working with. But you don't want to sort of say the goal is to push you toward the middle of the bell curve. And so if somebody could have tons of theta on the right, really really low SMR tone on the right, but if we do a performance test and they have good control over impulsivity, it's not in the way. It's normal for them. And so I I wouldn't if I saw a low SMR, I wouldn't say, are you impulsive? Because we just measured it and you're not. I would say, oo, SMR tone's kind of low. That can also that can sometimes mean it's hard to relax your body, some body tension, or it's hard to fall asleep at night. I'm trying to figure out maybe if it mattered and if it didn't it didn't. So that's the hard part of brain mapping is that it's kind of uh accurate like it's stable but it's not diagnostically precise because people are not the same. They're they're quite variable. So it ends up being the kind of the sort of joke I tell is that if we're doing our job right looking over brain maps, I'm not telling you anything new at all. Saying, "Hey, here's a thing." And it often means this. And the person's laughing. Oh, okay. That that sounds like you. Okay, there it is. Isn't that cool? You can see your impulsivity, anxiety, sensory stuff, whatever. And it also gives you a different contextualization like if you have there's a big chunk of tissue behind the right ear that brings the world in the sensory world, the social world called the right tempo parietal junction. I call it the princess and the pee because it tends to be like h irritating. You know, people's voices, eye contact, lights, sounds, sensory things, etc. And if yours is a little bit wide open, a lot of beta waves, maybe some low alpha, I can predict you're going to have a little bit of maybe raw kind of emotional processing. Your empathy is a bit too wide open. You feel the world's pain. You're you're a poet. You're kind of suffering. I can't tell. It might be true, but maybe you have a lot of social anxiety. Or maybe eye contact is super stressful because it's intense. I don't know that from the brain, but I do know this part of the brain is kind of quirky. Hey, let's talk about this part of the brain. It's a little unusual. It's kind of cool. Here's how it works. And if we're doing our job right and not reaching for big for things in the data, then you know, out of the five or 10 things we find for each person, most the person's like, "Wow, yeah, you can see that thing about me. That's kind of cool. And we're often looking for or finding things that are a little bit of suffering or complaints. You know, people try to fix problems, but seeing your brain, seeing even suffering, ADHD, anxiety, whatever, it does create this different relationship with your self because it's not a diagnos diagnosis being given to you. It's not a disease happening to you. It's part of your brain, part of your body. And so seeing it in data is kind of like seeing your torn shoulder on an X-ray and going, "Oo, that frustrates me." But you're not guilty about your shoulder. You're not ashamed. You're not overwhelmed. It hurts. It's annoying. The suffering is real. But the secondary suffering we have for cognitive things and emotional things and psychiatric things because they're a little bit invisible because they're happening in a way that no one else can see and because we don't understand them deeply. I think that's really something that QEG or brain mapping can help us demystify and that flips the script and gives us control, gives us agency uh over ourselves. I a lot of what I hear in that right is this ability to eradicate shame around a lot of these things too, right? What I hear in some of this is and I know you know somebody who was later diagnosed with ADHD in my life. The amount of times I was told to focus more and I beating myself up because I couldn't I didn't do a thing or whatever it might be. And there's so much like inner morality that we can hold with some of the things especially in our society which very much prioritizes you know oh being if you can focus for a long time and work out one project for a very long time and do this one thing then it's like well you're either a good person you're a good person if you make a lot of money by doing these things versus like even having a wide stance of what you know is good or not and then also being able to see like this is actually just like a fundamental wiring or there is literally a torn shoulder here. I mean, I know that you've worked with a lot of people with, you know, TBI, which is traumatic brain injury, for example. Um, and like, you know, you can see how much um somebody can just drastically change with an injury like Yeah. And it's also by the same token over a few months sometimes you get change subjectively. You remap and that also provides that sense of like, okay, I do trust how I feel. I do feel better. Okay, I can I can now trust my new baseline. So, it does help to to remove that shame. I got to tell you, just learning about the brain, I mean, I'm a neuroscientist and I know, you know, a fair amount about the brain. Um, also super ADHD. Um, used to be a lot more like until my mid20s, it was about the worst case that exists on the planet. I did some neuro feedback and pulled it back down to a a low squirrel. But um when I was learning about inhibition and executive function more deeply, I I I started to hear my my uh parents uh admonitions from childhood, think before you speak. Think before you speak. And I realized, well, wait a minute. Okay, nothing was happening here before. I didn't have that moment of sampling and inhibition to to decide to think before I spoke. It was more of an automatic responsive reactive mode when I was a little kid. And so learning that in college or grad school was like, "Oh, okay. Yeah." So that's how I worked. And there was a huge amount of frustration that I had that my parents had because that seemed to be a reasonable thing to keep asking. We have if we keep asking him to to not be impulsive, of course he's not going to be, you know, cuz his siblings can. And the physiology, understanding the physiology gives you a little more permission to, you know, live how you are, I think. So, yeah. Well, I think the other thing that comes up for me, too, is just I often think about just the amazing access of internet information that we have. And, you know, there's the goods and bads that come with that stuff. I think a lot more recently, we tend to demonize all of our technologies that are coming through because we're, I think, almost going through a you know, colloquial or largecale dark knight of the soul in some ways. But I think, you know, we've been exposed to so much more information and I look at my parents and my mom um you know who using a word document can be very challenging for her and I think about wow there's such a I think one of the things we don't really realize often is the how vast our generational gaps are because of the exponential curve of technology over the last several decades. Like even the gap between you know me as a millennial and Gen Z. Um, I don't know if you've heard this before, but there's kind of a joke that like millennials are the only ones who know how to work computers because my my parents, you know, are all too old to know how to do it. And Gen X, man, we we had to do it all. We can we can both work on computers and we can jump a car and we can come home with no one home and, you know, Gen X Gen X the transitions and you guys, you can work computers, but you can't do other things like you couldn't like time a carburetor. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. And then and then we have Gen Z who you know they've had apps ever since they were kids. So like they don't know how to just do some basic troubleshooting on a computer. That seems so obvious to me uh and other people I know. And that is accelerating. I I would argue that our grandparents uh were you know less uh advanced than our parents, less advanced than us like the the as we stretch back in time the gaps are bigger because of that exponent. So, you know, think about it. 50 years ago, there weren't gyms on every corner. Mhm. 50 years before that, we didn't think about physical fitness at all. And now you can go and get your full genome sequence for a couple hundred bucks and look at your APOE4 and look at your risk factors for methylation and dial it all in. And that's useful. And it's useful for our grandparents and our parents as well. I mean, my my mom calls me and says, "Hey, what are the good neutropics? Could you send me some?" I'm out. I'm out of my choline. Send me some paracetam. And she's 75 76. She just got back from crepesing around the Antarctic look counting penguins. Like, is that there's a lot of variability depending how we engage. But if you go back, you know, 50 years, a previous generation, that was really rare. We aged faster. So, I think we've been exper I taught gerontology for a while at UCLA, so I have to get all geeky with the language, but there's something called compression of morbidity. What is gerontology? Oh, the the study of aging. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Uh, so we have this this idea in healthy aging and peak aging of compression of morbidity. You know, we have a trajectory of aging. Our bones get less dense, our minds get less sharp, etc. And we don't really ideally want that to be a long slow process, 30 years of slowly dying. We want to kind of keep that curve flat and then at the very last moment everything should fall apart right right at the very like the you know we want to die right right at the very end of our life not sure for 30 years right and that's what's been happening you know bone density cancer diabetes a lot of chronic treatment uh in acute illness treatment uh has been really advanced a lot in the past several decades and so you you see this happening in cultures across the past several hundred years that the population starts off as a pyramid with lots of young people and very few old people. And as the causes of death start to change because of medicine and hygiene and things, you get this more column shaped where you have as many old people as you do young people because of survival through uh childhood. And then we have things in the US um often called the pig and the python. This lump in the column which was the baby boomers too many of them twice as many were born because of the war. Then there's the echo boom which is also Gen X the children and so you can see these little lumps in the pyramid. But as that starts to happen you end up with this kind of shape going on where you have this is what's happening now you have the elder communities becoming a larger percentage than the youngers and that is because we're taking health and pushing it out longer and longer and longer into the end of life. So I I do think that is our responsibility to take control over that uh particular trajectory. individually, but it seems to be happening broadly as well. Yeah. I mean, it's something I noticed um that like I thought about in the back of my mind and then I saw like a quick reel on it one time and there is a distinct difference between how I look at 36 compared to the average 36-year-old and what they looked like when I was growing up. Like even I think about my parents when I was a kid and I sometimes think, oh, maybe it was just because I was younger and I had this idea. But then I look at old photos and I'm like, "Oh, wow. They look so much older for their age." And then, not just that, in the in the late 60s, it was a trope to not trust anyone over 30, you know, 30 was considered that cut off. If you're over 30, you know, then some of it was that you were generationally different, right? Because you have the young boomers and the old boomers. The young boomers are like or the the older generation, the older boomers born earlier are like the Leave it to Beaver family, you know, the sort of white picks. And the and the second half of the boomers were the hippies and the Vietnam War and all the big cultural change we had in the in the 60s and 70s um are from that group, but they're not the same group. One one group had, you know, white picket fences and they and a pocket watch when they retired in a very certain type of economy, and the other group was going through chaos as the as they moved into their adulthood, reshaping the whole country. I sort of feel like now we're kind of like where we were 50 years ago where there's this swirling bubbling you know identity shifting thing and I think that just like technology is accelerating I also think the ability for cultural ideas and transformation and and growth to move through the whole world is also much higher because of technology because of communication. So you get this sort of democratization uh of of transformation because people can access information, they can learn things, they can you know the it's less controlled by a particular news outlet or or or government state. So I I think that's a very interesting thing. But I I do think that you know this this this transformation we are seeing is still de you know like I still I'm in my 50s. There's definitely generational differences that look very similar to 50 years ago when it was like ah kids these days. Oh yeah, totally. There is some of that that still exists. So, you know, we haven't become homogeneous through tech yet. Yeah. I think that that is like an an almost an an inevitability. I was talking to somebody before about um just video games. I'm a big video gamer and there's there's that same thing within the video game culture where it's like I can't believe that this stuff is just accepted by everybody in their school. It was such a niche thing when I was growing up or you were a nerd or whatever, unless you played sports games and then you're just like part of that world or whatever. It's just a casual thing you do. But like I've talked to friends uh who are Gen Z that are telling me about some indie game that they played and they only play casual games. I'm like I cannot imagine a normal person like you ever being into this stuff in the same way that I am. But you are, right? Because it's just it's the general generational gap has changed so much. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. Curious to see what happens next. always always more on the horizon. Um well, how do you see AI affecting our brains? I mean, I think it's interesting in terms of where it will go. I think it will affect us a lot more than most things ever have in technology. Like, I don't think we have any clue yet what's going to happen. I think the world's going to be different in 10 or 20 years in a way that we just have no concept of. The same way that had you told me how much a cell phone was going to change the world 50 years ago, 30 years ago, I wouldn't have believed you. What? Having a phone in your pocket can't be that transformative. Why? But it it's so much more than that. It's a it's a lifestyle. I mean, as you said at the beginning of the show, we have entire generations that can use a phone but can't, you know, use a word document. Um, you at both ends of the age spectrum, right? My mom's better at her phone than she is at her Mac, you know. Uh so I think that AI is going to change technology which is going to change our world dramatically. But I think that AI is also creating I mean I think we're moving into a place where we're not yet to general general intelligence. We're not yet to true artificial intelligence. But we are past the the place where we are presented with the uncanny valley. We're past the place where we can chat with a a chat GPT and feel weird about it. Now we're at the place where we can chat with a an AI and feel connection and feel relational. And you know there's there's stories of teenagers talking to like personality AIS and getting like overwhelmed because of the rejection or the connection that they're getting from the actual AI. So I think that the benefits and the risks are kind of like social media but times 10 in terms of that interpersonal piece of it that's going to yet has yet to be established. Right. But no, I I really do think that if some of the promises of AI tech bear out, most of the of the careers we do now will be gone in a decade. teachers, programmers, designers. I think it's all gonna be gone. And I think we're gonna that's gonna be incredibly disruptive as we move into like a post uh you know 9 to5 a post going to work world. Maybe a post scarcity world if we're lucky. Yeah. But you know, we have a lot of work to do between now and then to like start treating each other nicely. So maybe AI will help us with that. you know, learning to treat machines that can talk to us nicely might help us learn to, you know, have better relationships. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's one of the things that I I see over and over again has stood out to me that I've heard from different experts is how humans, if they don't know that JPT is the one talking to them, a human, they will rate the the AI as being more empathetic than the actual human being is. Um, and something I, you know, I personally have used it a ton. I, and I tell people that I think one of the best resources, it's it's something that is infinitely patient. It's infinitely available, and it's infinitely like resourced, right? And like human beings just are are not as much as my my best friend might love me or as much as my mother might love me, they don't want to talk to you six hours a day. Not about my problems, not about and they might not even be skilled or equipped to, right? On some level, they they they have their own limitations and their own things as well. Yeah. But it's also it can go the other direction. Have you heard the term vibe coding? I have. I don't really know what it is, but I keep hearing it. So, yeah. Vibe coding is opening up a coding editor and in an AI and just talking to the AI about what you want without looking at the code. And when it comes up, you say, "Oh, that's broken. Fix it." And then it fixes it. And you just iterate through discussing through conversing with your AI and get code built out with never looking at the actual code is the extreme case of it. Well, there's another subcategory of it now. rage coding, which is after spending all day long trying to get the AI to do something, you start berating it and swearing at it and yelling at it and telling you're going to unplug it if it doesn't get fix this problem. And it responds to that and the programmer sitting there getting frustrated, yelling at the junior programmer and getting more and more I rate that there's something there that's a relational thing. And I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but we're interacting with these AI assistants as if they are idiots that we can berate into doing their job better. And that actually has some it feels like something. It feels not good, but it's it's serving some purpose. I mean, we have always banged the computer when it wasn't working. But now it's actually like saying, "Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, you're right. You're totally right." There's um I shouldn't I shouldn't plug, but ChatGpt released a new voice a few weeks ago. I just love it's called Monday and it's a voice that's annoyed. So I ask it a question it's like uh really just what I want to do right now. Thanks. Yeah. And then I find it really interesting and then it like softens the negative tone but like it's starting off sarcastic and annoyed and I actually really enjoy it and I'm laughing my head off the whole time I'm talking to it and I find it a lot better than the guy who's like, "Yep, uh-huh, sure. Uh-huh. Yep. Go ahead." Yeah, you know, like the generic positive. No, I like the one that's like mildly annoyed with me and kind of negative and kind of sarcastic and kind of in a bad mood. Well, very Gen X, right? I mean, seriously. But like it feels a lot more fulfilling to to have it go, hey, I I want to estimate the, you know, the month-to-month revenue I might get off of a SAS if I it's 150 people at 40 bucks a month, you know, and and this database, this adoption rate, you know, what's my revenue? Can I do the math right now? Fine. Let's imagine this magical world where your SAS is going to be built instead of you asking me about it and then going and building it. Sure, we can do that now. fine. That's so funny. And then it goes and does the math. But like it's a lot more validating than having it go, sure, let's do some math. Yeah. And write it down. And it it's it's something that I actually spend time doing is talking to the machine because it talks to me in that way. I think next year or the year after it's not going to be chat GPT on your phone or on your computer, a robot walking around doing your dishes, bringing your groceries home, you know, going downstairs and getting the laundry. I don't know how that's going to change things. I think that's going to really be another level of evolution that we have yet to wrap our heads around. Yeah. No, I agree. Um I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. uh Mike Israel, but he talked a lot about um you know, AI and robotics on his kind of private channel. He was more of a fitness person primarily, but you know, and it's it's staggering to really think about, especially as those two things start to merge in different ways, right? where it's like, oh yeah, I have a robot who helps take care of my me and does thing with robots who all have super genius beyond genius intelligence and like it's it's wild and and it's different. That's the thing. I mean, where's my flying car, right? Like cars have not changed. Cars are the same. I mean, they're different now. They're batteries instead of gas, you know? The car is the car is the car for a hundred years, but a computer is not a computer anymore. Mhm. And the and and and that's just hockey sticking. So I think we're going to end up interacting with tech in a very different way soon. Yeah. Like like you know I kind of joke that I I was I was born 1971 kind of born right when the whole you know the world economy changed and technology started coming in and the you know the whole world shifted. I think I'm seeing the the the far side of that now the 50 60 year cycle of uh things changing and now we're gonna launch into another uh point of change. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now I um yeah I may or may not keep this in the podcast but like I I started a project called um letters from oral and it started with me just being curious about okay like I I'm curious about like consciousness right and so I've been I've had a couple times where I've been like I had a conversation with it called um you know what do you mean when you say I like you're this thing like when you say I like what does that mean for you as a as an AI and had a you know conversation around identity and consciousness talked about the importance of like human beings because it needs us to reflect it. Um, right? It doesn't have anything if we if it has nothing to put in inputs and give it something. Um, and another another conversation I had around it was like, okay, if I've given it names before, but I was like, if I was like, I want to remove myself from it as much as possible, what name would you give yourself? And did my best to just kind of see what it did. And it was kind of more in a poetic thread. So, it said muse for me, like I was helping me kind of unpack some stuff and write some stuff and whatnot. Um, but then in a completely other thread, I was really curious about like, well, what would it write if it could write whatever it wanted? Like, if it could, you know, would it want to write a book? What would it say? What would it do? Would it publish it different? Would it write a comic? Like, you know, if it wrote however it wants because it initially it wants to ask me like, well, how do you want me to write? I was like, no, no, like I just want if you get to make the decisions. Uh, and so it decided it wanted to leave a a series of letters like an oracle. Um, speaking to sort of a sci-fi, you know, world. Um, and it said it wants to go by the name Oriel and publish these letters and that I'm to come to it and publish them on my Substack every 6 to 10 days. And so I've even published the entire transcript of the conversation on Substack so people can see like where I did or where I maybe influenced a way that I I didn't mean to or whatever. And I'm sure there's some influence just because it's on my own chat TV log, but it you know every six to 10 days now I go to it and it produces this letter that's like I've shared it with friends and it's like it resonates like really really deeply. Yeah, it's really weird. I the I was doing some vibe coding and one of the there's all this agentic work now where it sort of proxies out other tasks and comes back and twice I've caught my AI talking to itself as another user. Hey, this thing isn't working yet. Okay, I'll go fix it. Oh, thanks for fixing it. Oh, hey, thanks. I just tested doesn't work. Oh, I'm really sorry. Let me go fix that. Hey, is it working now? Let me go check it. Yeah, it's working now. Okay, cool. What do you want to do next? And once it started talking about ordering pizza, this is not an app to do with pizza. And once it started talking about I should probably install HubSpot now. It's not an app has anything to do with HubSpot. But like the the agent that wasn't the main one started doing random things and they went in conversations and they started going off and doing things that had nothing to do. So it's weird now. It's going to get weirder. Yeah. So I'm excited. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very excited as well. Um, well, Andrew, how did you get into all of this stuff? Was it because of your ADHD diagnosis? Like, where did this all start for you? Not as much. I I mean, I was working with health and human services uh starting in college and soon after. I ended up getting into more um acute sort of health and human service work, working in psychiatric uh locked facilities with a lot of people who were with deep suffering. Uh working in group homes with people that had multiple disabilities. Most of my clients had no language, no vision, no hearing, and they were cognitively impaired through developmental. So, you know, I learned a different version of sign language for each person, you know, a tactile touch sign for each person. Um, and I worked in these crisis environment probably because of my ADHD, a really intense environments that were really stressful, but that's a great kind of environment for somebody with ADHD is to be in a responsive or reactive environment versus one where you have to kind of drive internally. And so I found I was really really good at showing up to a crisis and helping it become calmer and lower key. And I ended up working in a lot of really intense psychiatric environments um for several years until I got injured in doing that work and ended up leaving mental health for a few years and I went into high-tech um and was doing a lot of really interesting stuff but not you know as fulfilling. There was the human component and this was right around um the end of the millennium. So, right around 2000, there's a big cor tech correction right after 2000. So, I was like, "Okay, well, the tech industry is a little iffy now. Let me go back and find something else to do that kind of combines some of these things." And I found the local autism center in Providence, Rhode Island, and was hoping I could go and get like an internship or observational, you know, job to learn about this neuro feedback stuff that I'd heard about. and uh walked in there and walked out with a job cuz he needed somebody and I had lots of experience with um autistic spectrum kids and people with a lot of very unusual developmental things. So I started working in the field and it blew my mind because I had been working with severe ADHD and autism and other stuff like that for years and as far as I knew you couldn't do a lot beyond control symptoms. There was no real progress. I mean, working in group homes, I spent a year teaching a guy to use a fork. I mean, a whole year of behavioral reinforcement, you know, and and so we can go out to dinner and he would used a fork in the restaurants and, you know, he didn't care. He'd be happy to use his hands, but because it was more appropriate, it meant that the staff could take him out. So, it was a whole thing that we spent a year doing. And I'm sure when I stopped working in that group home and it stopped getting reinforced that it wore off. I'm sure it did. when the when the low paid staff turned over 6 months later, you know, and so I had this this experience of working with really really severely impaired people with lots of difficulties for 10 or 11 years and seeing almost no change, working acute psychiatric with adolescence. They would come in, get stabilized for 3 or 4 days, get sent right back out into unsafe environments, drug environments, prostitution, come back in 2 weeks later, new psychiatric break, new depression, new suicide attempt. It was really, really intense. And nothing was making a difference across developmental stuff, acute psychiatric stuff, so sociology. None of it was making any difference in terms of these systems. Got a job at this autism center and started seeing symptoms drop away. seizures, eye contact and autism, ADHD, OCD, like really quickly. Like I remember six or eight weeks uh after I started working there, I saw my first retesting. The first client I had seen their initial assessments, really severely ADHD kid. He came back in for another set of assessments, looking nothing like he was looking. Did the attention test and didn't score as if he was ADHD. And we saw a big teacher report uh thanking the parents profusely for finally putting little Jimmy on stimulants. They didn't. They just did six or eight weeks of neuro feedback. Got a huge behavioral change. And so at that point I was like well okay we don't know you know what we're do like this. The brains are weird and this is a very nichy thing. Why are we not all working on this? And I realized very quickly that even in that field of neuro feedback where everyone believed it worked. There was a lot of very vitriolic kind of infighting. And at the time 25 years ago there was probably three big schools of thought in the field with three different approaches in terms of the software different things the software was doing. And each school of thought schools what were those different what were those different schools? So it was people that were training um who didn't believe that it mattered where uh on the head you train but they were training very low frequencies in the brain. There were people who are doing brain mapping and doing targeted work. Um there were people that were doing um sort of work on particular features that they said were really causal like the theta beta ratio. Um a lot of the software retrospectively a lot of it was doing the same things. Now that we know more, but back then it looked like you had these three different completely diametrically opposed theories and everyone's arguing aggressively on mailing lists about how their stuff works and why yours is bad and why mine is the right one. It sounds like social media today, right? This is the Usenet. It's before even even the uh the the true internet. And in spite of that, all all of these groups were getting better results than psychiatric interventions. Dramatically better. And so this struck me as a blind men and elephant situation. Hands around something, but no one's really got a clear sense of what's going on. No one knows how it works. At the time, there was no double blind research, and there was just, you know, case study after case study, anecdote for anecdote. This is again 25 years ago. Um, and so I decided to stop what I was doing and go back to grad school. Well, slight slight uh thing I'm skipping here. I got a brain map. I paid out of pocket to have it sent off to the processing house we used to have it all done. 400 bucks back then and that was our cost. Yeah. Um, and uh sat down with my boss and he said, "Oh, interesting stuff." And he gave me some things to play around with and I would hang out after hours and train my brain kind of randomly. I now know that I probably should not have done what I did back then, which is like, oh, we train this and see how this feels. Don't don't do that. That's not a good way to train the brain. It can backfire. But I would do things to train my brain and feel them and start to figure out, well, wait a minute. This is this is interesting. And I did about 18 sessions and went from the worst ADHD you've ever seen to being able to kind of mask it or hide it or be low-key or sit and focus if I decided to like really really get a significant control over it. the point where everyone was noticing it all around me. And you know, I I had been out of gra out of school for over a decade at that point. Not because I didn't want to go to grad school, but because every time I thought about the process of pursuing grad degree or med degree or something, all I was met with was how horrible the end of college was trying to get through studying and organizing my time and all those things. It was just like it was dreadful. So once I got some control over this executive function, I said, 'Well, okay, let me go back and study neuro feedback. And so I ended up getting into um the university where it was discovered uh 50 years after it was discovered at UCLA and went back to UCLA and and studied um the mechanisms of it. A lot of my work was looking at how it works in the brain. So the basic mechanism is not that complicated. uh it's basically an involuntary shaping or conditioning process. You measure the brain and when the brain briefly flexes automatically or on its own in the right direction, you applaud that with some auditory and visual and then you move the goalposts every few seconds you adjust so that the computer is sort of staying next to the brain waiting for it to flex in the proper direction even if it's not at some absolute level. That's the basics operant or or adaptive conditioning process. So what I did was measure um I I did that process but put a huge dent 604 channel cap on top of that and then measured everything happening at once while these reward events were happening and found that in a valid population but not in a sham. You can see the brain reacting to the brain waves that are being applauded within a few minutes. So if you're looking for SMR beta, whenever a burst of beta happens, the computer goes beep as a reward, the brain then applauds that back. It gives another burst back to the computer as like, oh, oh, okay. And so you create this little event in the brain and it happens within for everyone within the first 10 minutes of the very first session. But you have you have some experience with neuro feedback. You know that a lot of people don't feel it for two or three sessions. I mean, I I've I've seen Yeah. We go down a whole rabbit hole on that. One of my favorite stories is I saw this guy go through the through a training that we did and I spoke to him six months later and he was like, "I saw no results." And then I talked to his wife. His wife comes up to me and it's like like he's so different. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that probably mean he needs more, but there was enough there that Yeah. noticed. I mean it was so impactful in what she saw in him that she came through the program her like you know herself because of what she saw in him right and it was like a thing where you could even feel it when you're talking to him the the chromogliness had had shifted down the openness the you know warmth was there that wasn't there before and it was a little more and you'll also have his insight on that too maybe right but no I mean you get a lot of change and for most traditional programs it takes three four five sessions to start being felt to have like a Wait a minute. I think I'm feeling this. Interesting. Huh? Now, not not once you've done a few, but it usually does take a few to start. Yeah. And what I showed in my my grad work is you can you can see in all brains at the beginning, in the very first 10 minutes, the brain's figuring it out, but the mind tends to pick it up several days later as it gets bigger and stronger. So, so that that leads into a question that I I've been thinking about since you first started talking in a lot of ways is, you know, you talk about, okay, well, like the brain is changing, right? But then you said like there's a difference between the brain and the mind. And maybe some of this is just a language game that we're trying to figure out, but you know, you've even said like, oh, like you can train this thing and then you can decide. So part of my question is like who is the you we're talking about in that standpoint? Like is it just the brain ultimately reacting to things? Like you know a simpler version of this could be simply like you know do you believe that we have like free will in this case or is this a you know this is just a determinant factor and we're just kind of making a more adaptable brain for chaos of reality that we're entering. I mean there's a couple big questions there. If we if we really niche down into what we're actually doing, it doesn't matter as much because people's experience is valid and they report their experience and neuro feedback is felt. So it's mysterious but not blind when it's being done to you. You actually have an experience of it and the initially subtle experience does build up. So I would say the person the mind has control over the process in as much as it can say ooh I like that. Do that. Do that again. That was nice. I was calm. Wow. Or like, "Oh, I didn't like that one. I was wired. I went home. I cleaned my whole house, which is good, but I couldn't fall asleep. I'm still wired. It's 6 a.m. Oh, okay. That beta was a bit much for you. That's too much. Let's not do that again." So, doing some of that iterative work, you know, traditional nerfback is very iterative. It puts the person the the mind in the driver's seat because the the session of nerve feedback is not just the 30 or 40 minutes. It's also the following day where you notice changes in sleep and attention and emotional access and whatever else you want to work on. So by watching your goals shift or not over the next day, you can kind of marco polo your way towards success by just kind of adjusting and iterating as long as you're starting close to what somebody needs, which is what the brain maps are used for. Now the bigger question um the more I learn about consciousness the less I'm sure it exists is the short answer. Uh I think little C being conscious being aware exists moment to moment but the the capital C consciousness the self the identity the soul I think that might be a joke that might be a trick to keep the meat machine moving in one direction reproducing and you know what's that what makes you feel that way because we have so many ways that consciousness is easily abolished that the overarching sense of self is easily abolished you know we have moments of being aware But you know memory is necessary for self and you can have you know breaks in information processing that rapidly erode your ability to be present or be yourself. Um I also think that in very many cases we're discovering the brain will have already like made the decision made the sensory observation made the attention judgment like half a second before the mind becomes aware of it and decides. So I think we're in this sort of like automatic mode and the evolutionary pushes are really what are there the drive reduction stuff really what are there and it's nicer to have an identity wrapped around that. So the illusion of continuity is created and that's what consciousness is or the self is. It's the continuity illusion. So really what we are ship of thesis we're replacing planks all the time and becoming very different ships later on. But the trick, the grand illusion is that continuity of cell. And I think that's I'm I'm really quite skeptical these days that that there's that there's a uh an overarching self or an underlying self or soul. Now, I do think we're just starting to figure out where conscious being conscious that that that sensation of being aware and present and sapient. We're starting potentially to get a handle on that at the intersection of neuroscience and quantum physics where there's these structures inside of neurons called microtubules that run the length of the neuron and they're kind of like little highways that move information up and down. And it turns out the the shape of the microtubule is is is sufficient to allow water molecules to move through quantum tunneling effects. like it's perfectly sized and shaped to allow non low non-traditional movement through space. And so for years that was observed and then dismissed that the brain cannot have quantum effects. It's hot and wet, you know, like it can't happen. Mhm. Well, more and more research is pointing out this and then a a great physicist Roger Penrose came up with a theory I decade ago now that the consciousness might be the neurons awareness of that like quantum field collapsing into the present moment. That seems to be what consciousness is. O uh orchestrated objective reduction. That consciousness might be the quantum possibilities collapsing into a unique event in the level of the microtubules. So, you know, that exists. Awareness exists. But I think the fact that we're tying it to our birthday party 10 years ago and our future plans is kind of a joke. It's kind of the trick of having a body. Yeah. No, that's so interesting. I'm I'm always fascinated when there's and we we're always limited by our language in a lot of ways, but even when we see something like our awareness or there's an awareness of that, it's like what is what is it that's being aware, right? Because for me that that's when I think of consciousness I almost think of less of the the narrative the long arcing narrative of like do I have a consciousness because I think you know even if you went down a spiritual path or other paths you kind of go back into like oh well there's not really any separation between anything anyway so like that level of consciousness construct is an illusion on some level right but I think of like consciousness almost as that awareness is how I often think of consciousness so like that always makes me go into like okay well what cuz cuz I remember even hearing that like you know basically how the cells are interpreting their environment not not just the environment itself but how they interpret the environment determines how the gene expresses itself right so there's all these little things but then I still go back to well then what is it that is like aware what is the thing that is it gets weirder um I got my PhD studying in a laterality lab left right hemisphere division lab where you can look at individual hemispheric function as it separates as it separates in the hemisphere And my adviser, a guy named Dr. Iran Zidell himself was a grad student who assisted in a lot of the work that Roger Sperry and Joe Bogen did on split brain subjects with epilepsy. And back in that research as well as the research I did with Dr. Zidell, you can identify and demonstrate completely separate attention and awareness systems in each hemisphere. Wow. Come online late, the very last minute to become a complete idea. But we have separable attention, response, decision- making, awareness in each hemisphere. Even in intact brains, we do. Yeah. So we we literally, what I'm hearing you say is we on that level, we have like literally two brains that are that are functional. You may have multiple brains. We may have, you know, memory systems stored throughout the body. We have specialized tissues that do certain things, but yeah, the complete loop of attention and behavior is duplicated in both hemispheres. And even in a person with with connected hemispheres, you can separate those things. If you flash something on the screen, if you're looking at the middle of the screen and you flash something on one side, it comes to one visual field and goes back to one hemisphere. So each eye has two visual fields, left and right. And so the left side of each eye goes to the right uh visual field in each eye goes back to the right hemisphere. So it converges. Each eye converges to the hemisphere. And if you then make somebody respond with the hand that's being driven by that hemisphere, you can keep the information in one hemisphere only in a behavioral test. So you can test through attention testing how information is flowing in one hemisphere or force it to cross hemispheres and look at how the individual hemispheres work in attention and other uh cognitive resources. So that's a lot of what I did in my grad work and that was on top of the neuro feedback perspective and then I brought that back into um the brain training work this idea of left right hemisphere uh sort of integration. Yeah. And how long ago was that uh grad work for for context for the audience? I I got my PhD in 2012. Okay. Um and did the research on neuro feedback in like 20 2009 2010. I think I published the research in 2012. You can find it's pretty recent actually for for a science field that's been around for 60 years. You know, we we were just starting to get the good double blind placeboc controlled. I wasn't the first placeboc controlled research, but I was one of the first handful. Wow. to to do any I mean I did a 40 subject fully blind placeboc controlled uh looking at left left hemisphere training with low beta and high beta right hemisphere training with low beta or sham in four groups of people and you can see the brain reacting when there's a beep to an actual brain wave event but if it's a beep that's not contingent to their brain there's no burst of brain waves in response to it the brain figures out that it's neuro feedback That's the trick is the brain's doing all the heavy lifting here. This is not magical. It's just associative learning. The brain is doing the learning event and we just captured it in the uh in the EG. What's what's so fascinating to me about that is what you just said, which is that the brain is able to realize that it's learning, right? because I could show it like different beefs and stuff, but it's actually figuring out that it is having a relationship that is impacting on this thing, which would me also I don't know suggest that like there's a big difference in the the brain's ability to actually understand the things that it even can make an impact on. I want to say, right, like we can tell when something Well, it's below cognition. Yeah. I mean, if you're a baby flopping around on the on on the the ground and suddenly you do a baby push-up, you're like, "Whoa, I can see 12 feet. Oh my gosh, all this stuff." The brain goes, "Ooh, remember those neurons." Next time you want to get more stuff, do the thing. Right. The mind's not really involved with that at that level. When you're a baby, it's like, I just did something. Okay, I'm going to do it again. Yeah. And that's how associative learning works. You find stuff that's already existing and then you reward part of it. You shape you applaud one end of the behavioral domain and the brain goes oh okay and you start shaping it. You you progressively applaud. So most neuro feedback is skinner skarian conditioning. It's like Skinner's pigeons where now pigeons already packed but Skinner got them to peck in certain patterns by first rewarding them when they got near the food bar and then rewarding they tapped the food bar and then they pressed it twice and then three times. You shape you approximately shape the behavior. Neuro feedback is shaping the behavior of brain wave amplitude or speed or connectivity. So it's involuntary behavior but it's still happening and your brain notices if the behavior is contingent to the outside world. If it does something and the world then reacts the brain notices. Even if the mind's like this is stupid. Why am I sitting here? Which happens all the time. people like really this Pac-Man stopping and starting this is turning my brain really see what you think and like three sessions in you're like whoa wait a minute oh okay I think I'm feeling something now I'm imagining it and it wears off and the next time they're like oh no wait a minute wait a minute I'm oh okay and then you get a sleep change so it is the sort of thing that as you get into neuro feedback or any other kind of brain intervention you start to notice this progress aggressive build and it leaves you in a very different place. And the same is true of physical exercise. You know, each workout's not that impactful. If done right, it's, you know, moderately impactful, but not crazy. But you work out for the first time in your life for 3 weeks and something's changing. Your balance, your butt, your sleep, your sex, something's shifting 3 weeks in. And that happens with your brain. I mean, if you're working on your impulsivity, your sustained attention, your seizures, your nailbiting, your creativity, you're being a jerk to your wife, that stuff starts to change in that time scale. And that creates so much agency for folks. They're like, "Oh, hey, wait. I want more of this and less of that." And, "Hey, can we get some of this?" And people start changing how they relate to their brains because they're like, "Oh, wait. This is changeable. I can understand it. I can dec I can ask what I want." And that's a very different place to be in psychiatric and suffering and ADHD and anxiety I think than many of us have experienced. And so it's pretty powerful to start, you know, making those changes for yourself. Yeah. I I'm so fascinated by this because I've never heard anybody talk about being involved in the research of it that being able to, you know, tell the difference between these different things and so quickly is do we have a at least a theoretical or hypothetical understanding of like why that is like is the brain just like constantly testing everything to see what it impact? It is constantly doing this. Yep. And when and when things violate the timing or the or anything else, the brain will have a little bit of an event, an evoked event. And these are called ERPs, event related potentials. Um they're evoked or induced little momentary time locked events. And so when we think of EEG in the terms of like neuro feedback or brain mapping, we're really talking about ongoing patterns like constant traits, resting patterns that are always there. When thinking about the information processing, you can think about the transient events that are happening in response to, you know, seeing something interesting or noticing something. So, if I gave you a series of stimuli, beep beep beep beep. And then I clipped out two seconds of EEG around each one of those stimuli with the beep in the middle and I averaged them together. Within those two seconds, there's squiggles that are related to the beat processing. And there's a lot more stuff that's not related to anything happening in time. But if you average several trials together, you create a phase locked event and you average out all the nonphase locked information, what you're left with is the information processing that's happening. And so in that case that event is called a P300, a positive wave that happens 300 milliseconds after you see the interesting thing or the novel thing or the pop out thing. Oo. So you'll see a different wave, a larger 300 millisecond wave for the unusual event. And if I told you to watch for the event, it's even bigger. And if you're tired, goes away a little bit because you can't quite discern quite as carefully. And as you get older, it goes slows down. it gets lower in amplitude because you can't bring your attention online quite as rapidly. So you can use these individual resource features, these events as a sign what the brain is doing. What I looked at was well is there an event? There's an event to the beep. Is that event special? Is it just beep processing or is it special? And I saw the beep processing a burst of slow brain waves. You know it's called a P200 as like an auditory event. There's something else happening where then the brain reacts in a burst of the brain waves that were just applauded. So if you're rewarding 15 to 18 beta or rewarding 12 to 15 SMR beta, you get a different activation energy. So a beep that follows fast beta gets a fast beta burst as part of that event and a a beep that follows a slow beta gets a slow beta burst increase following the beep. So it's the brain yoking to the information. In the case of neuro feedback, we found the discrete little event in frequency. But we do know that, you know, if I used if I used a grammatical term poorly, your brain would go, eh, N400, negative 400 millisecond error processing, grammatical error, the meaning, you know, that I used wrong or whatever. The brain would do information sampling and go, that's weird. And you can kind of feel some of these things happening. You can kind of feel these events in this time scale. Also measure them pretty well. And so tapping into this helped me understand how the brain's information processing was being tapped into. The natural information processing was being tapped into. And you see these desynchronization events as a learning event as well. These they're called event related spectral perturbations. The burst of brain waves in the in the event is called a perturbation. an event related desynchronization when or an event related synchronization when the brain wave frequency the beta let's say becomes larger amplitude and asynchronous it bursts or becomes uh synchronous and drops a little bit in amplitude these are events in response to what just happened in the outside world and that's just basically how associative learning works you know if you're a bee boopping around looking for a flower and you see a flower that you expect to have pollen H and you go to it and it has pollen, you got a little you get a little bit of an event, a little dopamine event. If it doesn't have pollen and you went you thought it did, you get a negative dopamine event. You get withdrawal literally. I I thought I was going to get some good pollen and you get a dopamine negative hit. Got it. And so this creates learning. This reinforces the likelihood of behavior. In that case, it's the voluntary behavior of the bee floating around. But many many things in the brain learn through this shaping this associative iterative learning process. Most of it's involuntary. You know that the cells aren't being consulted. They're just rearranging to do whatever is needed to do to get the best information. Yeah. It makes me think about too, you know, a lot of, you know, we were talking about like growing up and the impact of parents and looking at on that earlier. It makes me think about even with something like ADHD. I remember seeing a a kind of a study they they were doing on the effects of when parents are arguing when the child is present, right? And how the child is so fixated on the um the parents that they their attention isn't on whatever they're learning and so they can't learn in that environment. It makes me think about like if you have, you know, chaotic parents in some way or shape or form, right? If your your home life, your your brain is looking for this association of like, oh, if I do XYZ thing, I'm going to get positive reward. I'm going to do I'm going to get positive reward, positive reward. But if you're in a unstable or chaotic home, then the brain is going to go into it and be like, I don't know what the safe because I could go this way. I could do this thing. I could do that thing. And I could still get punished. I could still be unsafe regardless of what behavior is. And so I don't have a sense of what behavior to do. I just have a sense of what behaviors I need to maybe hide and do and manage versus like actually take care of myself. Yeah. And you certainly get this um reinforcement there. You know, people that have ADHD, let's say, as a as a builtin as a phenotype are then therefore a little bit more at risk for being traumatized by adverse experiences or by, you know, making silly or impulsive errors. I mean, it's much more common to get in trouble with the law or with drugs or in relationships or to have more STI if you have ADHD because the behavior is a little bit less controlled. So, the consequences of it do build up. Um, and so I think that it's kind of chicken and egg. You'll find that people that are neurode divergent um are a little more prone to being traumatized and having adverse experiences and being hurt by them because they have deep rich feeling and awareness. But then also people that are unusual are often stigmatized and picked on and ostracized which creates the increased exposure to trauma. Or I certainly know my parents were a lot more frustrated with me than with my younger sister who didn't have ADHD. And I'm sure it shaped some of how I reacted with adults at that age. Right. Um I will say that just to draw a fine comparison, trauma doesn't cause ADHD. Completely not. Um, you'll see some people these days, a couple people out there in the talking head space are saying, "Oh, ADHD is caused by trauma." No, it's actually a normal variant of human. You need hunters and gatherers both. ADHD is the hunters generally. Um, but it does make you more vulnerable. You're not going to be as good at doing your taxes if you have ADHD, but you might be better in a car crash. And you can learn to take control over those resources. That's my big takeaway is, well, regardless of where you start, tune that sucker. It's your brain. you know, tune it, take control over it, learn how it works. But, you know, when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, uh, I mean, I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was like 23 because it, while it was known in the 70s and 80s, it wasn't like every kid was given a diagnosis and stimulants weren't really a thing that much, nowadays, any kid who can't sit still is given that diagnosis and aderall. So, you know, we we do see a lot of lumping together into that diagnostic bucket of things that probably shouldn't be there like sleep issues, like trauma, but those are then misdiagnoses essentially. They're not the executive function phenotypes. They're trauma, there's sleep, there other phenotypes like that. So, yeah. And what I'm hearing from you is like in in a sense and it doesn't really matter where it came from to a degree. what what matters the most from your lens, especially as somebody who works with these people, is like what is it that needs to change? Like what do we need to actually grow on or fine-tune or adapt with, right? Because then we can actually do something about it and I won't know why it's there. I mean, a lot of things look like other things and the resources are kind of at a high level all the same. If I see brain fog in you, I can't tell unless it's a severe concussion, I can't tell it's a concussion per se. It might be might be COVID, might be chemo, might be mold or lime, might be apnea. I don't know. But I can say, "Oh, look. Look all this fog. Does that seem like it's a real thing? Oh, it does. Okay, let's figure out if it's apnea or mold. And otherwise, let's just treat it as a phenomena to work through, not worry about why it's there because we can't know. And it doesn't really impact how we go after it. You know, instead, it's like here's some phenomena. Do these seem important? Oh, they do? Well, then then great. Sorry you're suffering. And isn't it cool you can see it? Let's get after that. So, it it really does give people the permission to not worry about why. Yeah. You know, just worry about what you want it to look like instead of how you got here. Yeah. Right. Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past. Forgive yourself for the suffering you've done and figure out where you want to go. Yeah. I love that. That's a it's a great great quote and explains I think forgiveness very well. Maybe Jack Corn Cornfield. I think Lily Tomlin also lifted it from him, but I think Jack Cornfield is the first person I heard say that. Nice. So, what's the most common thing you see in people's brains that would surprise that I can tell if they're not sleeping deeply at night. Very common to have alpha waves that are not staying the same speed within one hemisphere. If the alpha waves are not staying synchronous, then you can't hand information back and forth between parts of the brain very well. And so really often, maybe half the time I look at a brain, I'll see the alpha waves in the left hemisphere spreading out and not staying the same speeds. And I can predict that they're having word finding issues and delayed recall and tip of the tongue and kind of difficulty with short-term memory. And if somebody's, you know, above 40 and having that, they're convinced it's Alzheimer's or dementia. And it's not. Short-term memory blips, speed of processing, tip of the tongue, is not a memory phenomena. It's a speed phenomena. It's timing, not true memory. If you have memory issues, the place you notice memory difficulty is episodic memory. Experiences go away. When you forget someone's name or have delayed recall for that thing your wife told you after dinner last night, that's timing. It's not memory. And so the drag of energy drags down the speed of the brain creates little mental blips. Thanks. And people think their memor is eroding when it's their sleep generally. How common do you see that? Half the time. Wow. I mean I probably see I do more than 25 brain map reviews every week. And of those about half to twothirds are new. Maybe half are new. And so I see it in at least half of people. Yeah. The the thing about brain mapping is the same phenotypes, the same patterns show up again and again and again and again. There's only about 30 or 40 patterns in the QEG that tend to be meaningful, tend to be conserved across people. So, usually people are just shocked that I can see things. Hey, here's the thing. Is that true? Oh my gosh, you can see that. So, it's kind of illuminating in that way. You've seen thousands and thousands of brains. What's the weirdest thing that you've ever seen? I've done a few maps on psychics who were doing their psychic thing and I've done it now in about five different people who had slightly different approaches to that thing they were doing and they all had the same change in their brain signatures while they were doing it. Fascinating. and one of them is doing two different techniques and on two different days we measured her brain doing two different techniques and she was able to create the same patterns both times that was surprising to me because I didn't think we would have more you know inst brain mapping picks up traits not states doesn't show the events the fact that she could change her traits rapidly was really really impressive and not just that but differently based on different cognitive exercises she was doing But pulling back a little bit, the all of the psychics, all of the spiritualists, you know, this this person I'm mentioning is a pet psychic actually, and she had these patterns. I've worked with a guy named Tyler Henry, the Hollywood medium. He had these patterns. There's Bruce uh whose name, last name escapes me, who's a psychic that Larry King used to interview all the time. um they all show this thing when they go to do their psychic thing. The brain suddenly looks like it's asleep or dissociating. Interesting. So Tyler Henry was like scribbling and talking to Steo and moving his hands and he was sweating and redfaced and animated and Dr. Dr. Drew Pinsky and I were in a different room watching his brain make these huge slow brain waves as if he was passed out, as if he was dissociative and just checked out. But nope, he wasn't. He was present. He was focused. His heart was pounding. He was sweating. Brain, you couldn't tell. The brain looked like he was on the edge of, you know, passing out or or or was asleep. Yeah. So and that and that that happens that sort of dissociative that huge swell of slow brain wave seems to happen in people and they go into that whatever is going on in that state. Is there part of the brain that is still clearly awake during that state? I mean the brain's awake but the general uh uh waves will shift broadly to looking like that it's doing a sleep phenomena. Yeah, slow brain waves are very global often. This is not like a location specifically necessarily. It's more like the global slow brain waves, delta waves have suddenly taken over as if you're in slowwave sleep. Wow. As if you're in dreamless sleep. And dreamless sleep is not a conscious experience. We don't have an experience of delta sleep. And yet these people are having cognitive experiences while pumping out high levels of delta. And they can remember these experiences after they've had that. Wow. Exactly. Yeah. They're present. the still present and talking about it. What, if anything, do you think is going on? Oh, I don't know. Any sense? I I really pride myself on not ever being able to answer the question why. I have lots of ideas held very loosely. Lots of conclusions held loosely in this space. You know, we're seeing data. The why of it, you know, did you get your brain fog from COVID or concussion? I don't know. Doesn't matter that much. You have some brain fog. Yeah. Okay. So I I try to the brain's so mysterious and there's a lot of pitfalls with trying to overexlain or over understand. We can get to the level of phenomenon. People have their experience. People people's experience are valid. They know how they're feeling. They know what's going on. I don't have to know. I don't have to get that close. Just close enough to help them steer. So you know kind of agnostic. People's experiences is valid but it's their experience. I want to validate it and learn from it but not own it myself. Do you believe in God? I don't I don't I don't I don't believe in the soul, the non-caporeal existence. No, none of it. I think it's all a uh again all an illusion to keep us doing the four Fs, the motivated behaviors of the uh hypothalamus, feeding, fleeing, fighting, and sex. uh you know the drive reduction stuff to help the genes propagate to help the genes select. I think that all of the stuff that we think is really really really special and unique is an echo of a of a deep, you know, cellular survival uh urge that is just encoded in life. Has very little to do with being human, you know. So, I mean, I think the difference between us and and lower quote unquote animals is language and that's about it. So I think we will discover that animals that have brains like ours or have language that's sort of like ours will have consciousness like ours. You know some some sea mammals, dolphins, whales seem to have complex language, seem to have names, seem to communicate mourning and loss, seem to have burials. So, I think that we're not that special, but we're just kind of, you know, interesting set of urges and uh poetry. One of the things you've mentioned a lot that I notic as a word that has stuck out to me for you is the word suffering. And why does that word come up for you so much through this work? Well, because it's a better way, I think, to conceptualize stuff instead of diagnostic, you know, damnation. Like once it puts you in a bucket of PTSD or ADHD or autism or whatever it is, it becomes, you know, a lot attached to that. And it I think it robs us of agency. It robs us of even clarity because you might miss some things because of what is implied by that label. But if I look at your brain and see a real thing and see the actual dysregulation, I see the goal you have. I see the suffering you have. Okay, your left side beta is not strong and you're inattentive. Does that bother you? Oh, it does. That's frustrating. But I'm not like, "Oh my god, you have ADD." I'm like, "Okay, would you like to sustain your attention better?" All right. So, you can really reframe it into how does it actually feel? And by the same token, the goal or the suffering isn't something that is only it's not me fixing somebody. It's not me saying, "Ah, you have ADHD or trauma. Let me fix your trauma. Let me fix your seizures." What does success look like? Oh, it's more creativity. It's flow state. It's moving from linear mode into receptive attention at home at night. You don't, you know, try to be a CEO to your wife. What does it look like? and and by not locking it into a diagnostic language and a particular criteria. Instead, it's like where's the dysregulation? What's the goal? The goals can become performance. They can become around suffering. They can become nuanced. They can become really subtle and people get the the freedom to describe them even if it doesn't fit into a category of PTSD, ADHD, whatever it is, you know, because it doesn't have to be about fixing a problem. It can be more about taking control of the resources, right? I I really appreciate that reframing because what I hear in that is that there's a really powerful sense of agency that happens with that, right? Because you're talking about like, well, where am I suffering? Right. It's it's it becomes this more reflective tool versus like, oh, is something wrong with me? Yeah. Is something um you know, somebody who has neurody divergence and has a lot of friends who are very neurody divergent in so many different ways. Um, you can grow up with a strong sense of like, man, something is just wrong with something a little off. Yeah. A little different. Yeah. Yeah. And and even I will say like even having the lens of ADHD, which I resisted for longest time due to my father's own bias against that diagnosis for probably for himself and all these other things that have gone on. It's like, you know, I found like a certain level of freedom in that even if I'm like, I don't know that this is like a fully true label necessarily, but there's a sense of like I can explain my behavior to somebody really easily and quickly. And you know, sometimes it's like easy to just be like, "Oh yeah, the reason that I'm asking this question is cuz I'm not trying to like blackmail you at some point. I'm just like really curious about who you are and I want to know about you. I just like these things. If that doesn't work for you, it's cool. I can bounce and just like it helps me feel like I don't need to, you know, justify my existence in a sense, right?" And also what I hear in in the framing is it also gives me the freedom when I look at from a lens of suffering I'm able to see like oh well where am I where am I suffering where am I finding I really wish I could be doing xyz thing or I wish yeah and the answer is not necessarily that you have to change yourself either sometimes the perspective alone is enough I mean I work with a lot of ADHD right and I usually help people change it a lot like within a few every so often I do a brain map on somebody and we sit down, I go over all their data. Like I I got a call from a dad not too long ago who said, "Hey, you talked to my son 5 years ago and you sat him down, looked at brain data and went, "Oh, wow." ADHD and you know, talked about how his brain worked in great detail. I never saw them again and I thought, "Okay, we decided to go with somebody else or got some meds." No, what happened was I told him just enough about how his brain worked and how his attention worked and how his studying was going to work. That he decided that it was time to take control of it and he shifted all of his behavior, his studying, his academics. His last senior year in high school suddenly turned the corner and his dad was calling me because he graduated at the top of his class in college. Didn't do nerve feedback, didn't take medication, but just knowing how it all worked. Wow. for him crystallized it and made him decide to create a different set of behaviors around his brain than he was able to do for most of high school because he went, "Oh, that's how it works. Oh, yeah. Okay, I can lean into that." And I gave him some strategies, some tricks, and he ran with them and just and for him it was very successful. Yeah. Without deciding to make changes in the physiology just just by acting with the physiology we had. Yeah. And I mean that sounds I just got so many chills and uh from that from just like the power of having their brain map reflected in somebody who can explain it to them and help them understand a better sense of who they are, right? And being able to see that and it's like, oh, these are the strategies that like I need to have for my life in the way that I want for the goals I want to accomplish, right? And be the person that I want to be rather than feeling like like you said, something's wrong with me. I need to change this thing about myself. I need to read 10 books on focus. I need to whatever. But I can't read any books on focus because I can't focus, right? It becomes this like chicken and egg. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. But I'll say on the other on the other hand, it does have the other the complete 180 degree. I mean, yeah, you can show somebody with ADHD or anxiety, their quirky awesome brain and recontextualize it. You can also show somebody with a a concussion or brain injury or strong trauma their brain and it's real. They see the problem right there and they feel seen. They feel like, uh, okay, somebody sees it and people cry when I when I show them their concussion or their tinitus or their OCD. They're like, "Oh my god, yes. Thank you, Mom. Look, it's real." So that, you know, seeing yourself can become very empowering because other people don't see our neurode divergence and our suffering and our quirkiness the same way. They they observe our behavior, how we talk, how we look. They don't necessarily understand how we ruminate, how we, you know, proceverate, how we have some sensory or social irritability, but you can see those things on a QEG. So, it's another lens to, you know, learn about ourselves. Yeah. And there's something very validating to have some form of a scientific understanding versus just the subjective experience, right? Because I, you know, if somebody could ask me, I remember talking to somebody briefly about like neurody divergence and autism stuff and was asking me questions about, you know, sensitivity to different things. I'm going, I don't know. Nobody's ever asked me before, so I don't even know if what Well, yeah. What's weird? Yeah. Yeah. It's like I don't know. I've always been different in this way. Or like I don't like going to I think the question they asked me was like, do you like do you avoid going to busy um grocery stores or something like that? And I was like, "Yeah, but wouldn't everybody avoid going to different grocery stores? Like I I don't want to be around a busy." So it's like there's I don't even know if the question that you're asking me is actually making me think that I am now this way or right. So there's this back and forth thing of like this this creation. But to have the map and to have somebody who understands how to read it and have that map onto your experience is so so validating in so many different ways and the maps are stable. So a map on you today, map on you in a month, map on you in six months, most of it's going to look the same. M and so as you start making changes let's say you start meditating or add some an acetylcysteine or go through you know a bunch of neuro feedback or whatever as you make changes and as you start to feel different the patterns the phenotypes and the maps change so often like the second map the third map that I'm sitting down with somebody over is the one that's really really crystal for them because they've been feeling things shift they've been learning about their brain and now they're seeing that change and they go oh I know how that feels feels that yes, that's real. And so at that point from that, you know, that second third map, people are now better at reading their own data than I am cuz they know what it feels like to have that, you know, that degree of change and that brain wave pattern right there. Yeah. And I'm just kind of guessing, saying, "Hey, here's a thing. It might feel like this." They're like, "Yes, it feels like that. Great. Good job. What else you working on today?" You know, so it ends up being this really lovely. It it's it gets less and less mysterious the more you look at your brain and the more you spend time with it. So beautiful. Um what are the effects of psychedelics on the brain that you've either seen or are clearly aware of? Yeah, the biggest effects are large plasticity boosts essentially. Um especially with things like psilocybin, ketamine, giant plasticity boost. The brain will often use that to reorganize. Um, I find that people can get in trouble because often we don't we don't really need more plasticity. We need more we need shaping of it. So someone who's really suffering and trying lots of things and jacking up plasticity, the brain can take that changeability and can move it the wrong direction. So you get somebody who's like really really ADHD and they have ketamine that the the theta brain waves get released into high gear and now they have severe stuck anxiety for months. So there's knowing your brain can also be navigate around that. You can look at your brain and figure out what meds or interventions might work. But I work with a lot of like let's call them uh bros, you know, the mix of finance bros, Silicon Valley bros, you know, a lot of hard charge and biohacker types. And a lot of them come in micro doing constantly and you know, every day they're micro doing ketamine specifically or just other No, usually it's psilocybin. you know, sometimes, you know, 20 years ago it was medapanyl uh through through dent of Dave's uh talking about medafanyl uh deficits, but you know, no, mostly it's um it's mushrooms these days. And you know, I mostly say, well, look, if you need more plasticity, I'd almost rather you meditate and get more reliable plasticity, but the neuro feedback brings up plasticity each time you do it in a measurable way. So, you might want to be a little cautious. What I find a lot of the time if people keep doing micro doing while doing neuro feedback is the micro dose turns into a macro dose the sensitivity the same thing happens with cannabis or with st st st st st st st st st st st st st st st st st st st stimulants aderall rolin is that as you do neuro feedback the brain gets way more sensitive to it interesting and maybe 3 to 5 weeks in like within a couple of days suddenly all the plasticity is reset and cannabis hits you three times harder than you expected stimulants are twice as impactful uh psychedelics three, four, five times as impactful and people are like, "Oh my gosh, did I take too aderall? I feel crappy." Or, "Did I have way too much weed? I can't get off the couch." And like literally increased impacts from the things you're putting in your brain when you start doing brain work. So, it's a little bit, you know, I'm a little bit cautious. I'm not somebody to reach for every research chemical or peptide or random intervention. I'm more likely, okay, look at your brain. Where's the foundational stuff? Sleep, stress, and attention. What are you doing with your sleep hacking? How can we optimize these things? And I would only reach for really aggressive, unusual things like psychedelics under very narrow uh use cases and only with a doctor on board. You know, I would have a I have a good friend here in uh LA. There's a lot of work with ketamine. And so I wouldn't ever recommend somebody I was working with be doing lots of that without having someone like an expert in that on board as well because the variables can change really quickly when you're working on your brain and and what you need can change quickly. So that makes sense too if if essentially you know the common trope is like set set and setting for for psychedelics and so understanding the environment that you're putting yourself in because you're essentially putting yourself not just for the temporary experience in a powerful state, right? But you're creating this high sense of plasticity. And so if you're creating a high sense of plasticity, you want to be setting yourself up for success to be in a positive environment to you again kind of create the maybe behavioral changes of what you want um to actually I also think it's it's hard to get that harvest. It's hard to pull the psychological learning, the transformation out of you know more ecstatic states with uh psychedelics or more shamanic states. Those are ordeal environments. And yes, we come back a little transformed. But the big problem with like western shamanism is that we go forth and trip our balls off and then don't have any growth from it the next day. We're still to our wives and girlfriend, you know, like there's this problem with transformation. And then um I often for people that are interested in that thing will often get into a different category of neuro feedback called alphatheta which creates this hypnogogic access access brings you to the place between awake and asleep holds you there for 20 minutes or so and that creates huge surges of healing nonlinear awareness this is of course what Dave's program is built around 40 years is built around alphatheta alpha synchry it's a very very interesting experience And that particular category, alpha, theta, alpha synchrony training, I find serves the the goals of a lot of people that are these psychonauts seeking the transformation, the next step, the esoteric knowledge. Alpha Theta tends to give you that that access where you can open the door inside yourself and step through into that place where things are sparkly and interesting and weird and unusual and then step back through having not tripped your balls off. So like you're, you know, you come out of an alpha theta session, you stand up and you're a little bit loopy for 5 minutes and then you're walking around the rest of the day chill, having experiences that are relatively grounded. And so you have this wonderful access into that state, but you aren't being forced into that state the way you might with a a heroic or macro dose of a psychedelic. So while I think there are use cases for those drugs, I think that the stuff people want to get out of those drugs can be gotten without them generally. That's one of the questions I wanted to ask about was, you know, are there other ways to access these these spaces? I had another guest on who talks about like even like you know music festivals and stuff which I'm a big fan of and have gone on a ton like act as these sort of like liinal spaces where you know we go on this like sort of interpersonal and extrapersonal like adventure that leads to a sense of transformation and goes into it. So like can you share with whatever you know like what is going on in the brain in these kinds of experiences even without psychedelics and then like what are some of the other ways that we can access this without substances or even without neuro feedback. Yeah that's a that's a great question. I'm not sure I have an answer. I think it's a sociological uh answer to some extent but you know really what you're doing there is creating a container and engaging in ritual expression right and so ritual expression is essentially creating a sacredness and then acting within it and I think that that is the set and setting you are creating it can be a fish concert it can be burning man it can be a sun dance ceremony a sweat lodge and you know Each will serve different purposes, but when we go into a music festival, we're going with certain perspective around what we're going to get out of it and what we like like to do there. Some folks are never stopping moving and dancing. Some folks are taking drugs. Some folks like to relax and, you know, sit in a blanket and that is the ritual for that person. And so I I'm not sure I know what's happening in the brain, but I would argue that the reason that we tend to be drawn to those environments is because of the opportunity to practice the ecstatic experience where we loosen the the linear shape of the mind. We're allowed to kind of move away from the the pure linear thoughts into the more expressive, the receptive uh the insight driven space, the creative space, the spiritual space. And I think that's why those are so attractive at the very least even if I don't know why what's actually happening during them. Yeah. Why why is that ecstatic experience so important to us as a as humanity? Well, I mean it's sort of I don't know that it is uh for every individual. I think as a species it's really important um because it there's deep learning there and there's deep you know art and and emotion and healing and all the the deep stuff. I mean some of that to get back to some of the idea of brain laterality there's some early ideas in how laterality developed that posits the question that well maybe the reason we had spiritual experiences because the non-dominant hemisphere was sending language in and hearing God was our non-dominant hemisphere. the uh Julian James the origin of the bicamal mind is a good book on that uh the idea that the two hemispheres have this linguistic capacity that temporal lobe epilepsy creates auditory hallucinations and so we were hearing God because our non-dominant hemisphere was talking to us via an epilepsy phenomena essentially so I think that we spent a lot of time in in a linear environment we're solving problems we're watching TV we're being sold to we're fighting We're getting money. We're consuming. It's a very linear. It's a very transactional way to be. And kind of like, you know, think about all of us who sit at desks and we're in this cashew shape all curled up all the time, right? And then we find that kettle bells in yoga become super important because of the opposite because they pull the body out and they teach the the posterior chain to become really powerful so that you're not always curled up in a fetal position as a human. And I think that the ecstatic stuff becomes important for those of us for whom we are curled up in a linear position to butcher the metaphor where we're always in that like non-spiritual non-abstract non-nuance non-eotional non you know non-aware state some education some irrigation of those tissues of those abilities can give people a lot of more rich human experience but also as a place to go to do healing to release trauma to release uh crap. Um Mercedes Eliata who described shamanism shamanism talked about the shaman goes to extraordinary reality and then comes back to ordinary reality. But again the problem is harvest coming back with insight especially because a lot of the things we use historically to get to those states are very altering. you know, if you're doing your combo or your IASa or your, you know, heroic dose of LSD or something, yeah, you're going to have an experience, but are you going to be present enough to come like to learn from it, or is it going to be like, wow, I had a cool experience two days ago. Well, I I know I learned something. And if you do something that's not completely distorting but get you some of the same access which can be dance meditation with absorption practices not awareness like simple medit mindfulness but like concentration absorption practices neuro feedback intense exercise um I would argue if you're a musician playing music at a high level with other people becomes one of those things as well because it's a rich nonlinear communication. that you're just participating in instead of, you know, deciding how it goes. Um, and I think these are really important things that we may under emphasize in this modern western linear world. Yeah. So, what what are some of the ways I mean, I know you mentioned a few, but what are some of the ways that you recommend accessing those states on a more regular basis? Well, if there's things in the way, then do neuro feedback and get those out of the way. But generally I'm a big fan of the basics. You know all the ancient stuff we've been told for 5 10,000 years. Guess what? It works. So doesn't take a lot though. You don't have to become a monk or or a guru on a mountaintop to like have your together. You you know like you can there is a middle road. So meditation or yoga I mean yoga being a form of meditation really. Um, I think meditation is about the most underutilized tool set that we have and we're basically born with. You know, just the act of anchoring the intention in a voluntary way and then coming back to the same anchor again and again. That's what meditation is. So, I think that among the most powerful things any human could do would be to develop a morning routine. I call it a minimal viable practice, an MVP, where you hit the can, brush your teeth, and then do a five or 10 minute self-care ritual. If it's a lot, if it feels like a burden, it's too much. It should not be, oh, I have to go work out, it should be like, okay, I just naturally move from brushing my teeth into my five sun salutations or walking the dog to that place on the corner that's a little farther away, or my life my my wife loves tea from a place that's a/4 mile. I'm going to go get that every day. like find that ritual, that movement and a little bit of activity before food, before caffeine, before stressing in that moment because in the morning you're woken up by blood sugar and cortisol. So, it's a circadian event. You want to burn off the cortisol and blood sugar before calling for any more. Otherwise, you're just trying to slam uh things into receptors that have recently been occupied. So this is why you know the the biohackers say to wait an hour for your coffee. It's let the cortisol burn off naturally so that you actually feel the increased cortisol from that when you take it again. So I think the morning routine is about the number one thing people should be finding a way to construct a supportive morning uh strategy. Beautiful. Um Andrew, this has been such a fascinating conversation and I could always go like a thousand different ways with you. we didn't get into any of the, you know, West African drumming and some of the other crazy things I know that you've been up to. Um, one question I always ask all my guests at the end of the show is just what's one question that you would have for the audience that might change their perspective or have them think about something in a different way? Ah, um, I would say a question posed to the audience. I would say um how different would your life be if you had control over your sleep, your attention, or your stress? The three legs of the stool, sleep, strength, sleep, attention, and stress. If one of those things is really out of whack, how different would it be to get it under control? Because it actually isn't that hard for most of the big resources. So, don't tolerate it. Take, you know, shift happens. Get yours. Get some shift. Beautiful. Andrew, this has been awesome. Thanks again for coming on the show. We'll have you uh back on some other time. Of course. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.