Top Neuroscientist Is Reprogramming Brains Like Computers | E53 Dr. Andrew Hill

[Music] You know what? Just everything. What have you seen here? >> I've seen an awful lot of stuff. I mean, things that are sort of unbelievable often. It's not common, but I've seen language show up in non-verbal autism. I've seen schizophrenia get addressed over a couple of years. Takes longer. I've seen people in comas come out of comas and neurop feedback. People with major 25-year drinking problems who can never stop drinking, never fall asleep. 30 days later, no cravings, no shakiness, falling asleep whenever they feel like it. No meds, no drugs. Take someone with severe OCD and show them their OCD and just knowing how it works can give somebody control. You know, this whole thing of looking at your brain, it does flip the perspective because you're not talking about the diagnostics, you're talking about brain resources. >> Roger. Please be there. [Music] [Music] Welcome to the Ask for Squares podcast. I'm your host Tanya Doll >> and I'm Cody Blue. And if you like what we're doing here, please like, subscribe, rate, comment, smash that notification button. It helps us out a lot. And on today's episode, we have my old friend who is the top neuroscientist in the field of biohacking and applied neuroscience. And he is also the founder of the Peak Brain Institute, Dr. Andrew Hill. Thank you, brother, for being on. We appreciate you. >> Hey, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys. >> This has been a long time coming. Cody has talked about you coming >> since I've known him. >> Wow. >> Yeah. Because he's his whole story of healing involves you. So he brings you up every time. >> And I'll I'll set the stage a little bit, but when I was on my healing journey, it was very like traditional alipathic pharmaceutical medication and then I just slowly drifted into the more I guess fringes of whatever is in the conventional orthodoxy around mental health and wellness. >> And part of that journey was I listened in 2015 to an interview with you on the Joe Rogan Experience. I learned about neuro feedback and bof feedback and I came to work with you in which you helped me and my family rewire our brains uh and which I can't thank you enough for. So on that note, >> can we I'd love us to open by can you explain what neuro feedback is and the history of it? >> Sure. So so neuro feedback is essentially bof feedback on the brain. In this case, it's an involuntary shaping process or an exercise on the brain tissue. So what you do is you measure the brain in real time moment to moment. And whenever the brain briefly shifts in the right direction, you sort of applaud the brain by making auditory and visual happen. And if you only measure one little region and one little set of brain waves and wait for it to flex itself sort of naturally, that is what gets applauded by the uh the feedback process. So, it's this involuntary exercise. You know, it's no different than other forms of learning. If you're a baby flopping around and you suddenly do a baby push-up and you can see 12 ft, your brain goes, "Oh, information." And it remembers how to create that unique confirmation of neurons. The same way when you're doing like half an hour neuro feedback session in our offices, you stick a couple wires to your head, measure the brain as it fluctuates on its own, and when it happens to move a little bit in the desired direction, you sort of give it this stimulus response. And the brain will over time start to create a shift. You know, this is basic learning stuff. So, usually about three or four sessions in people sort of go, "Wait a minute. Am I feeling something? I think I'm feeling something." And then it becomes this iterative process. So, the short framing is it's sort of personal training on the brain, but the exercise is an involuntary thing which makes it a little bit mysterious. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. There's would you could you talk a little bit about the history of of brain of I guess neuro feedback because I had never heard about it until I heard you speak. >> So in the mid 1960s in California um there was a couple different people doing work on BOF feedback on brain waves and up in Northern California there was a guy named Dr. Joe Kamiya and down here at UCLA uh Dr. Barry Sturman and Dr. Sturman was a a learning scientist looking at how learning works in the brain. And he had some grant money uh that got transferred from NASA for a project that wasn't finished. >> And the project was essentially how dangerous is rocket fuel. And so he would, this is kind of a brutal story, but he created these plexiglass cages and put a cat inside the plexiglass cage with a beaker of methyl hydroine, rocket fuel, that would vaporize and close the cage and start a stopwatch and watch the cat for behavioral events and other things. And so cats would cry and drool and stumble and have a seizure and coma and death. >> Oh, that's so sad. >> Right. Really dark. And it was, you know, animal research in the mid-60s, a little bit less regulated. The thing is, of the 32 cats that he used in this research, eight of them refued refused to have seizures. 24 cats 40 minutes in were having seizures and eight of the cats are sitting back going, "Yeah, so what?" And after about another 2 and 1/2 hours, these cats started to show some brain instability events. So Dr. Sturman thought, "Did I find a new breed of cat that's got a seizure resistant brain?" No. 6 months prior, he had done another experiment to see if he could condition brain waves in animals. So he stuck a an eyropper inside their cheek and squirted chicken broth into cat's mouths whenever they made a certain brain wave the cats make a lot of. So you ever see a cat on a window sill watching birds and that liquid body and laser-like focus. >> Yeah. >> Where they start going >> Yeah. Right. Exactly. >> So there's a certain um brain wave that we make when we need to sit still and focus or relax the body into stillness and focus and it's called sensory motor rhythm. So that cat on the window sill who can still the body and anchor the mind is literally the opposite of an unstable brain. And so he had rewarded this SMR frequency because cats as predators make a huge amount of it. So whenever they relax um when they see a prey animal, you you relax first. You can leap into action from a good relaxation state. >> That's like taking a shot. They do that. They take a deep breath and then on the final like exhale when they shoot. >> So that that deep physical relaxation toric relaxation and mental concentration. The combination requires making beta waves in a way that relaxes the body. And these predator animals, cats, make a huge amount of it. So Sturman picked it as the thing to exercise just because it was an obvious thing to measure. Turns out if you exercise FSMR waves, you make a brain seizure resistant. >> Wow. So he this was the theory and his lab manager was having tens of seizures every week and she was on dilantin meberol tegrl major like anti-convulsant drugs and they weren't working. She was still having tens of seizures every single week. So they built her a machine to do auditory feedback on her SMR brain waves and over the next 6 months she went off all of her meds and remained seizure free for over a year. >> Oh my god. Can you do that with animals? >> Animals? Humans? Sure. >> Our friend has a dog that has seizures. I wonder if that would work for them. >> It probably would. This people actually do neuro feedback on animals as their primary job and primary practice. Yeah. >> So what happened because that sounds like a cure for epilepsy and seizures. What happened when this tri was brought to the you know to trial? >> So some of this might be apocryphal. You know this is when I was a little baby so I wasn't there but the story goes that Dr. Sturman published initial results. He submitted them to Epilepsia the journal. And the next day all of his grant funding was pulled by NH. >> Wow. >> And I mean I I've been working in the field of neuro feedback for about 25 years. And the whole time we've been fighting the insurance companies actively poisoning the well. They used to send full-time doctors to the Chad meetings, ADHD meetings, full-time salaries of two doctors just to say it didn't work. And some of the biggest researchers in the field of ADHD take rin money to say neuropet doesn't work basically. and you know they're sort of compromised in their research uh quality. So we've been fighting against getting it sort of legitimized for about you know 50 years. >> Wow. >> And Dr. Sturman he died last year but before he died in 2014 I believe he did a metadata study looking at all of the seizure lit seizure literature over the previous 30 40 years. And the average reduction in seizure is 50%. And 5% of people get complete control of seizures. And I've never seen somebody get a result as poor as 50%. Not once. >> Wow. >> So, it's usually a really obvious effect. When you have somebody having lots of seizures, you can see them tamp down in intensity and and uh incidents pretty quickly. >> Who's sabotaging this? It's big pharma. >> Maybe. And maybe certainly the 70s. Yes. Um, now I think it's sabotaged by the same reason we don't all have great cardiovascular health and abs. Like we know how, but it takes work. It takes practice. It's kind of complex. And brains are a little more complicated than bodies. So when I first got involved with the field, you know, it cost $15,000 for a set of hardware to measure the brain to do bio feedback. Now I can do it for a couple of grand, but the knowledge required to do it is still somewhat complex. Like training your brain to do a certain thing isn't just sticking wires to the head and you know moving the brain. It's like going to the gym and seeing a pile of kettle bells and and bands and going great get in shape. So you have to kind of structure a workout of brain waves of blood flow other things you might do and you get a a residual effect or a lingering effect after you train the brain. And starting about three sessions in you can sort of feel these lingering 24-hour kind of post-training effects. And that becomes the thing we end up steering for people is their experience of it more than like a an outside world top down. And the fact that we're not doing sort of a diagnostic, a medical and alopathic perspective, you know, the the manual that has all the diagnoses in the DSM that says if you're ADHD or your PTSD or whatever based on a set of criteria, those don't track the brain very well. So you don't see the diagnosis when you go look at someone's brain. you see brain resources and so you end up in this different landscape where you can sort of teach people about how their brain works in general and move through what their brain is doing but because it's not tying really tightly to the diagnostic landscape this is why we don't have quite as good agreement as sort of traditional psychology and also the you know Dr. Sturman's first research on this was in 1966 or seven and I did a PhD dissertation studying neuro feedback. I did one of the first double blind placeboc controlled studies on about 40 people uh at UCLA and I did that research in 2009 2010. So really somewhat recent as these things go. I mean EEG itself you know brain waves were only discovered in uh 1924. >> Wow. >> So 100 years roughly. >> Yeah. And in half of that time, less than half of that time, we've known about how to manipulate them using BOF feedback. So, it's kind of a new thing as far as the body and brain goes. You know, we've known about the brain for a long time, but we're still figuring out, you know, what all this stuff means. You can look at brain activity, but it's hard to understand. And so neuro feedback ends up working in a little bit of a black art where you understand phenomena that are a little bit outside the scope of traditional diagnosis because you're working with someone's individual resources, not a diagnosis. You know, someone may have attention problems or stress problems, but you're not seeing the ADHD or the anxiety. You're seeing individual circuits that might be disregulated for uh or regions for executive function, for stress. So, you end up with a different relationship with your physiology. And it's a lot closer looking at your like lipid panel and going, "Oh, I better back off in the Ben & Jerry's. Whoops." You kind of learn from the physiology and it creates a behavioral change that you can lean into as well. If I showed you your brain, we might see that your sleep was really off and then I might give you a few hacks to, you know, move your sleep and that will change your brain. You can see it in the data and that teaches you how to work with different physiology resources. So we we're trying in the in the whole field of neuro feedback, we're really giving people different tools than the standard sort of let me fix you. It's a different relationship because even if I was a therapist or a psychologist doing this work, I would still be relying on my clients telling me what they're noticing, telling what their goals are. And so most neuro feedback ends up becoming a form of coaching, not a form of therapy because it's not a treatment top down. There's not a clinical container the same way. Instead, it's kind of a motivated interviewing thing. Well, how is your sleep and how do you want your sleep to be? How's your stress? How's your drinking? How's your seizure? And you iterate the neuro feedback protocols. You do different things the same way you might as a personal trainer. And that creates a lot of agency for somebody. Instead of like, let me fix your PTSD. It's more like, oh, let's look at your brain. Hey, this part of the brain is often kind of threat sensitive. It's active for you. This seems like the future of medicine honestly or the future of at least like mental disorders because it makes so much more sense that people would be individualized >> and not just like oh now you have ADHD now you have you know whatever it may be and >> it's like it's individual out instead of pathology out and we all know the problems with pathization and obviously it's a very profitable profitable way of treating people and it's also you get that quick fix But it's removing the human experience of evolution and growth which is really what any lack of wellness or sickness is really pushing us on towards a direction where we need to go and you know almost like you're using the brain to map progress and track >> and you can see change. Exactly. So if you make a change and that can be meditation or hacking your sleep or starting aderall, you'll see the change in the brain activity within within a couple of weeks and you can then track and use that to steer different interventions. So like you know you can figure out if a certain stimulant works for you or certain sleep hacks work for you or neutropics and you can see the brain change very quickly as you make different interventions. So to some extent we end up dropping below that diagnostic language and into the brain resources. But that gives people the freedom to think about their brain. So if I said, "Oh, you have ADHD." That's a very different label to take on than looking at the two pre-entral gyri sides of the head that stabilize the executive function on the left and supervise the executive function on the right. Those are the ADD and ADHD regions of the brain. But they're also involved with sleep. They're also involved with time perception. They're also involved with physical stillness. So, you're not saying to somebody, "Let me find your ADHD." We're saying, "Oh, look, the right side of your brain makes lots of theta." Often that makes it hard to supervise attention. And people go, "Squirrel. Oh, that's you. Do you care about that? Is that important to you? Oh, it is. Okay. Here's how you can exercise that tissue. You can make some changes over a few weeks or months with things like neuro feedback. >> That's so cool. I need neuro feedback. I know you've already done it. That's how you know. >> I need neuro feedback. So, what have you seen healed or improved, let's say, uh, as far as mood disorders? And have you mood? >> Yeah. Or, you know what, just everything. What have you seen heal? >> I've seen an awful lot of stuff. I mean, things that are sort of unbelievable often, like I've seen, it's not common, but I've seen language show up in non-verbal autism. >> I've seen schizophrenia get addressed over a couple a couple of years, takes longer. I've seen uh people in comas come out of comos of neuro feedback. People with major 25-year drinking problems who can never stop drinking, never fall asleep. 30 days later, no cravings, no shakiness, falling asleep whenever they feel like it, no meds, no drugs. Um take someone with severe OCD and show them their OCD. And just knowing how it works can give somebody control. you know this this whole thing of looking at your brain it does flip the perspective because you're not talking about the diagnostics you're talking about brain resources and most things to your point about mental health most things that we work with are not disease processes they're regulatory anxiety is not a disease process generally it's a cramped up resource we have four or five brain resources that create anxiety but they have natural jobs the anterior singulate holds things in your mind the posterior singulate goes walk the road behind the right ear. The tempo parietal junction maps the social world and the sensory world into the self. You close your eyes, you have this visual tissue that can scan the world even with your eyes closed kind of preparatory attention. So these are areas of the brain that get cramped up and create resource pinches, but they're not like a disease process. They're like having a a muscle got too strong. If your posterior singulate whose job it is to scan and orient to the world, if your brain learns the world is not safe or predictable, guess what? It's going to ramp up the resources because the cost of missing that tiger super high. You might miss a tiger once if you're lucky. So, it's going to overallocate and create this threat bias with the posterior singulate as a natural adaptation. Now, if it gets really stuck, someone might call that PTSD. And that might be valid, but it's also valid that it's just part of your body and you can look at it and see the cramped up resource. Tons of beta waves, no alpha. That's what you see in PTSD most of the time. in in classic PTSD, sudden PTSD, which operates very differently than developmental trauma or complex PTSD, those are very different uh features in the brain. But but actual the brain cramping up against novel threat and learning the world isn't safe. You can see in the brain as the posterior singulate, the lifeguard that's sort of evaluating for what you must pay attention to and orienting to that thing you have to f focus on that gets really activated when the world is not predictable. And so you look at a a brain map, a quantitative EEG, an amount of resting brain waves you have, and you say, "Oh, look, you're posterior singulate making lots of beta." Now, don't know if it's true for you, but many people it's plausible that you're kind of threatens and ruminating. Is that true? And usually people like, "Oh my gosh, yeah, I'm I have a PTSD diagnosis or I'm kind of a worrier." And then you go, "Well, there it is. Isn't it cool? I'm sorry you're suffering. Isn't it cool? You can see your brain." And that just that just that one little like, "Oh, there it is. in your brainh I'm not broken you know it's not happening to me somebody else isn't deciding what this label is oh yeah that makes total sense and so that relationship with the physiology before you start doing things to change it just knowing how it works can make huge change so you asked what I've seen I would actually argue that some of I mean I've seen crazy transformation again and again and again some of the best things I've seen I never did neuro feedback I had 17-year-old come to his dad about 5 years ago and he was super ADHD. We looked at his brain, looked at his attention performance, sat him down and said, "Yeah, so here's your strengths. Here's your weaknesses. Speed of processing amazing, out of control. Sustained focus actually pretty good, but impulsivity really, really strong. Sleep is probably in the way." And so we walked through all these features and I sort of said, "Hey, look, you know, your dad has brought you in because he's concerned about you, you know, not making it to college, but you got all this on the ball. Look at this crazy speed of processing. Look at this powerful focus. You know, it's not really exactly some big overarching label. It has this resource here like you're distractable for the visual system, but not for the auditory. You're, you know, so make sure you record your lectures, yada yada yada." So I gave him several strategies to sort of navigate the brain he had. And I sort of expected the next step was a week later they come in for neuro feedback. We do a few months before he goes to college. But I didn't hear from them. And I was like, "Oh, okay. Maybe they got some other support. Great. Um, hope they're doing well." And the dad reached out to me a few months ago and said, "Just had to tell you whatever you said to my son 5 years ago, it was whatever he needed." He after understanding his brain that last semester of high school, everything changed. He started applying himself. He started getting up early every morning. I don't know what happened, but he found that he could take control of his brain, and he kept doing that all through college, and he graduated top of his class last week. >> Whoa. It's that beautiful Einstein quote. Everyone's a genius, but if you judge a fish for its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it's stupid, >> right? >> I am very much a product of the medication generation. >> And so is Tanya in the degree that she was diagnosed in adulthood with ADHD. and OCD. >> Women are often underdiagnosed >> and they get late diagnosis. For me, I was stuck on that medication. And the thing that I can never explain really to people >> is the journey of that of of one how good it feels when you get a diagnosis. Oh, I know something's wrong with me. I know there is a relief, but then there's a prison >> of this is you start to identify with it. You start to lean on it like a crutch. uh you start to it starts to define you and it really stops progress because you're like well this is who I am this is what I am I am this thing >> and it's monolithic I mean when someone says you're ADHD you're depressed you're anxious it's a it's a giant label and it doesn't map to your individual experiences or suffering it's you're much more subtle than a label >> no and then you're being squeezed through this the label squeezed through this box that is the size of the prognosis and then the thing that is very difficult to explain to people about the pharmaceutical model, the medicalation model specifically for mood disorders. In my experience, it's an addiction model. >> I'm getting put on an amphetamine and I now believe I need this to be my best self. >> And you can never live up to what the medication does for you either. >> Yes. And I should be grateful and you know so now I am the model is I need this to be my best self and to fix this thing cuz I am broken and I need to take this thing. >> Let alone the that the fact that the more you take it the efficacy decreases and the side effects get worse and then you need to take another drug and another drug and another drug. That experience was so crazy to go through and because it's not talked about the culture, you have no idea that this is even happening to you. You're it's just more what's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? What's like I'm, you know, I'm I I I suck. Like, you know, that's the the feeling when you're having that problem because it's allegedly working for everyone else. When I stepped outside of the pharmaceutical model, when I found you, I I I became aware that psychiatry was the only field of medicine that didn't you use the organ they were treating and that the people that did try to you look at the brain were often attacked and ostracized. >> Yeah, we're we're kind of out there. I mean, everyone from me who's a bit more fringy or even people like Daniel Aean who's, you know, got a massive business in the US. >> He's I went to before I saw you. >> Yeah, Dr. Amos, he's a sweetheart. He's caring. He's rigorous. And yet Spect the the tool he uses which is a tool of assessment it's so far out in the weeds that only people that work for the aiming clinics use spec. And if you bring a spec scan to a psychiatrist like why am I looking at that? I don't want to look at your brain activity. And the same thing is for what I do q or brain mapping you you you'll find that psychiatrists and neurologists will sometimes be like ooh ooh yes please. I want to see it. especially neurologists because if someone has a seizure disorder or a sleep disorder, they've had EEGs. And so I do the brain mapping is based on an EEG. It's based on brain wave recording. So when I do an assessment on somebody, we do a map of their brain, but we also end up with traditional EEGs. So somebody that has a sleep issue or a seizure disorder can then take that right away to the neurologist and said, "Hey, I gathered some EEG and and I teach people to look at their EEG and understand it." So they don't require finding the best doctor or guru or healer. They can walk in with a lot more agency. And somebody with a seizure disorder, ADHD, PTSD, when they're talking to their doctor, their therapist, if they have the physiological perspective themselves about what's going on, that creates this relationship where they're able to move through getting care even in alipathic environments a lot more uh creatively. I mean you you described the sort of like morass of trying to select the right medication good effects versus side effects. Um for mood specifically you know there's no mood circuit in the brain. I mentioned these circuits or these these resources for attention stress sleep. There's actually not one for mood. Mood is a combination of things. It's really an experience we're having and it's got a kind of cognitive bias or perspective on what's happening. But you can see um that there's a an approach system on the left front corner of the brain like a little kid in the porch going, "Hi, yay. Things are awesome. Come here." And the right a similar character goes, "This all sucks. Go away. It's too hard. Leave me alone." And you want to balance that approach versus avoid system based on how safe you are, how rested you are, how excited you are, etc. And you won't know if someone's depressed if they have low activity in that left front corner, but they might be. You wouldn't know if someone's depressed if that right front corner is overactivated, but they might be. And so you show someone this approach versus avoid frontal asymmetry. It's called um first discovered by Richie Davidson, long-term meditator, showing uh the brain gets a left-sided approach thing. If you meditate a long time, the more you meditate, the more positive, the more left dominant your brain becomes. So on this kind of frontal asymmetry, you can see it in a brain map. And I don't know if someone's mood is off from frontal asymmetry, but it might be. And if you're like, "Oh, hey, your frontal loes are doing this." You know, often that leads to lack of get up and go on the left, lack of joy, lack of resilience on the left, and the right it's a sense of overwhelm, avoidance, things being too frustrating. And nine times out of 10 or better, people like, "Yeah, that's that's what I'm dealing with." I'm like, "Ah, that's frustrating." Hey, it's right here. It's just your brain. You have this relationship with it now. And what that does is a couple things. One, you can jump right into things like neuro feedback and you can make a change because if you see something in your brain activity, you can change it. And you can change it with neuro feedback progressively over a few months or you can do things where you make lifestyle changes and feel it change. So that frontal asymmetry thing, there's a a measurement in the EEG called cordance. um which is a relationship between the absolute power, you know, the the microvolts you're making in different brain waves and the percentage, the relative power you're making. And the um the chair of my dissertation committee at UCLA, a guy named Dr. Andy Lter, um he was the big scientist who ran all of the placebo studies and all of the anti-depressant studies looking at which anti-depressants worked across giant populations. So, he's known as like the placebo uh specialist in the world. And he found that you can measure the frontal asymmetry in a special measure 10 days after you start an SSRI. The QEG is changed enough to spot if the SSRI is going to work a month later. >> Wow. >> Oh wow. >> So you can get an advanced notice someone's in crisis and really depressed. You can do a rapid repetitive weekly scans and catch the drug starting to work or go, "Okay, we should probably change change drugs." That's amazing because especially something people don't talk about is when you're rotated from one drug to the next and you go on this long journey, it eventually you forget what normal feels like >> and you're you're just it you're a little spun. Yeah. >> From it. So is this what you do at the Peak Brain Institute? >> Yeah, we brain map. So someone comes in or we do it remotely. You know, a lot of our clients work fully virtually, but often if you're near an office, you come in, you sit down, you spend 20 minutes doing the world's most boring attention test. We flash a number on the screen, a one or a two, or we speak it over the speakers, and your job is to sit there and click for the ones and ignore the twos. But people click by mistake and space out. And we kind of tease apart the executive function or the attention performance on that test. And we also put a cap on the head, scored it full of gel, and had people sit still for about 10 minutes eyes closed and 10 minutes eyes open. And we gather baseline data essentially in all three of those, the performance and the two brain recordings. And in all of those data sets, we then compare your performance or your brain to the average person your age. So on a big giant database, we say, well, how weird are you? What's sticking out? In attention, it's obvious. You're impulsive. You're inattentive. An auditory issue, a reaction time issue. It's very straightforward. When it comes to the brain, you see what's real. Like I would see your features. We call them phenotypes or biomarkers. You would have a set of them that are stable. They're now and they're going to be there next week and two months and 3 months and 6 months, but I'm not sure what they mean for you cuz people are weird. So the goal is not to put you in the middle of the bell curve for a brain map. It's to say what sticks out and is that exciting? Is that interesting? Is it useful? And so I walk through the brain activity and say, "Hey, this feature of your brain, this part of the brain, these brain waves, here's an idea about what could be happening." And, you know, I'm pretty good at it. So, most time people are like, "Wow, yeah, that sounds just like me." And we kind of do this uh kind of cold prospecting. Often I walk through brains asking no history ahead of time and just saying, "Hey, do you experience this?" "Wow, I do. Oh my gosh, >> that's so cool." It's like divination with brain scans, right? >> I want to I want to know. So just so I'm fully getting the picture here. So say I went to you and so I have I've been diagnosed with ADD, right? >> And a lot of time ADD shows up as anxiety for women. Y >> and so if I came to you and I was like, "Hey, I want to deal with my anxiety." Now when you do these tests, it sounds like you're just kind of figuring out all of the things that are going on, not just like pinpointing one particular thing. like you're not pinpointing anxiety or pinpointing ADD. You're >> we're not testing for anxiety. We're looking at your whole brain and saying, "Hey, look your brain." >> People often get anxiety of a certain flavor when they have a brain like this. Is that real? >> Because the brain activity is real, but people are weird. So, I don't know if it's in the way or not. You know, like that posterior single I mentioned is super hot in some people that have trauma and they're kind of threat sensitive. It's also pretty activated in an actual lifeguard or a mom with lots of kids who's like always scanning or a teacher. You know, you can get natural normal activations of these tissues. But if we looked at your brain, we would see the difference between the attention and the stress because those are different resources. There's two big circuits in the brain that are involved with executive function. The one on the left, the left pre-entral gyus, which is the most posterior part of the frontal lobe and it sits above the um sort of uh motor system and sensory system. So it goes down to the body for sending out information, receives information from the body and it sends information out to the frontal lobe. So the pre-entral gyri both sides are the mind body connection between our experience and our mind, the body and the mind. And if you exercise the one on the left, you stabilize the attention. So you would probably have lower power beta waves, kind of weaker muscle in that side than the average person. You might not, but that's the average ADD kind of thing. >> And that circuit's job is to stabilize and keep the attention on things even if we're bored, even if it's low intensity. So you walk in a straight line on task and don't wander off into the bushes under boredom. The same circuit also keeps us asleep at night. So when I see a left side pre-entral gyus not making great bait, I'll say, "Oh, hey, this might mean some inattentiveness and we measure attention so we know if it's real. Also, we usually get sleep maintenance issues. People not getting enough sleep out of the hours, waking up tired, waking up often. Is that true for you?" And most time, wow, yeah, that's true for me. And so what we're doing is finding a thing that doesn't actually sit on the attention or sleep. And it's kind of this combination resource that overlaps both. So you can start to tease apart. A therapist will send their clients to me to tease apart does my 22-year-old client who's not, you know, very verbal about their emotions? Is it anxiety or is it ADHD? Or is it a sleep issue? Is it concussions? Is it apnea? Is it trauma? Those look different. Is it all of those things? Is it combinations of things? You can see these things on a brain map. And that would then give you, you know, what I what I do is um about an hour and a half of data gathering and then I go over the data with somebody a couple days later. So we would sit down over Zoom and I would say here's all the interesting weird things that might be true about you. Which of these things are most important? And um by doing that I'm teaching you to read data and you're teaching me what's important in that data. So I sort of tell people that when doing brain mapping reviews properly, you're not telling somebody anything new. You're finding the things they already know in their stress, their sleep, their attention. You know, mood as I mentioned has a very complex phenomena. It's a higher level experience. But a lot of things about six or eight things you can actually just see as brain resources. And those include executive function and all the attention stuff. Four or five flavors of anxiety, speed of processing, sensory processing, social processing, sleep architecture like how the brain regulates sleep at night is shown in the day by the brain waves and uh things like brain fog and other features like that. You can see these things at a just by looking at the brain. Most of us struggle with stress, sleep, attention, fog, whatever invisibly. So we struggle It's hard to figure out what's happening. People around us don't know. And when you show somebody their brain fog, their tinitus, their ADHD, I get people tearing up all the time being like, "Oh my god, I feel so seen. Oh my gosh, yes." You know, or like, "Hey, spouse, see see," you know, >> cuz we all gaslight ourselves, you know, we all, you know, what are you saying? >> Can you deal with sensory issues? Is that something that has to do with the brain? Like if you know you have over over sensitive like feel. >> Yeah. There's a part of the brain right now. >> Sensory integration difficulties. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. You can you can see them. Uh if somebody has sensory sensitivity, >> you don't know how it operates for them subjectively, but there's a part of the brain behind the right ear uh the right tempo parietal junction. I call it the princess and the P because it tends to be like, "Oh, that's intense. Leave me alone. I'm irritated." So, like if you're mad at Cody for chewing too loud, that's that area. Or if a truck goes by and you can't handle the noise, that's that area. Or if someone's tone of voice is harsh and it makes you feel really icky and awkward, that's that area. >> Like I have this thing where I drive down the freeway and you know that center divide that looks like uh cement or whatever, it feels like it's scraping my eyeballs and I have to get away from the the fast lane or if I see really sharp things, I feel like I'm being stabbed in the eyeballs. Oh, interesting. >> That's why I was just wondering it's a party. So, that's why I was just wondering if like sensory stuff if that I mean it has to be something with the brain. >> That's definitely something in the brain. Um, my hunch is we wouldn't see that as a thing, but we would see some interesting things about your uh your brain's attention and sensory things. Yeah. >> Okay. So one of the things I love about you your work peak brain institute is that it is what you said before somewhat of that coaching quality to the work. It's beyond bio feedback. So can you talk about like brainhealthy things that people can do to also address these uh this these maladies that you're setting forth? I would say a lot of the time, most of the time in a modern human, the the most bang for the buck is hacking your sleep. We all sleep poorly. We all don't know how poorly we sleep generally. And there's a bunch of things that are actual sleep issues that show up during the day that people think are normal, like word finding issues, tip of the tongue, hunting for names. >> Mhm. >> That's not a memory issue. It's a speed of processing thing which is dragged down by lack of deep sleep. So most of the time you're like, "Oh, wow. your speed of processing's tanked and maybe you have that same left side pre-entral gyus not being strong. You would say, "Oo, are you waking up throughout the night? Are you not sleeping, you know, deeply? Oh, you're not okay. Well, there it is." And you can go after with neuro feedback, but you can also give the brain or body circadian cues behaviorally and teach the body about time and it will snap into deeper sleep and being more awake if you can do it right. So um the strongest uh cue the strongest exogenous or outside world signal for circadian rhythm is actually when we eat. It's not when we sleep. It's not light. It's when we eat. So eat in the time zone you want to live in. It's really important. The if you eat too late at night, what'll happen is this is kind of complex. Let me break down the the why of this because once people understand why, they go, "Oh, okay. I'll not do that anymore." the uh melatonin release that's natural at the end of the day that climbs completely suppresses the release of insulin by the pancreas. So as melatonin rises, insulin falls. Falling insulin is an evolutionary signal to stuff food in your mouth because if there's food around, store it. You know, you don't want to let it not be stored. Someone else might eat it. And so at the end of the day, as we're getting tired, insulin's falling. There's a natural tendency to look around. And if there's food, which won't happen evolutionarily every night, if there's some, you better store it. What happens is because you can't release insulin very well, any food you eat means elevated blood sugar. And elevated blood sugar means no growth hormone once you're asleep. Can't release it. So if you eat before bed, you have elevated blood sugar and wake up fat and tired. You store all that sugar and you don't get good deep sleep. You fast before bed, you get a deep sleep growth hormone release 2 hours in. It sucks you into deep sleep. And then you release energy and cortisol first thing in the morning. You wake up lean and full of energy. >> How many hours do you need to >> Two? >> Okay. >> Will do it for most people. Three if you're insulin resistant. If you're pudgy or lethargic or super super craving at the end of the day, then maybe 3 hours >> before you go to bed. >> So, no calories. >> Yeah. So, the whole like intermittent fasting thing is dramatically more impactful if you put the fasting at the end of the day. >> So, skipping skipping breakfast, >> not that exciting. Skipping dinner, that's key. That's when I feel better is actually if I just do like breakfast and lunch and don't do dinner and I'm not even hungry. >> I've been intermittent fasting for years in the first half of the day. Are you saying and that goes against traditional medicine? You know, do you say it's so you're saying it's better to eat in the morning and >> it's better to eat a little bit later than the morning. So the the other piece of the circadian thing is what wakes you up in the morning is blood sugar and cortisol being released. So, what you don't want to do is grab more blood sugar and more cortisol first thing in the morning before you've cleared all that signaling from what woke you up. So, you don't want to shove lots of food in your mouth right away. You also don't want to go work out hard because that'll call for blood sugar and cortisol. You'll kind of bonk and then call for more. You don't want to drink coffee right away either because all of those things are kind of slamming energy into the system. And if the receptors have been full recently with sugar, with cortisol, you're not going to feel your coffee the same way. you know, blunt the system signaling. So, get up in the morning and develop a minimal viable practice. Move gently for 5 or 10 minutes after you hit the restroom. Don't go for a run. Don't do your hourlong CrossFit, but like do five sun salutations. Do some tai chi. Bring your wife tea from that place that's three blocks away every morning she loves. You know, like find the ritual that's self-care. And if it's a lot, if like, oh my god, I have to get my morning workout in. It's too much. You're not you're missing the point. It's about practicing a little tiny bit of timing information. So fast before bed, get up early and go for a walk. And those are my be my three big uh sleep hacks. The other thing that's important about sleep hacking, sleep is an oscilly phenomena, right? It it it varies dayto-day. And it's also responsive to the environment. It's me meant to flex. Systems that oscillate require two things. And this is true if they're living systems like brains and bodies or natural systems like weather, which oscillates. You need delay and you need negative feedback. You have to kind of tamp the system down at a delay. And this is why if you're tired or your sleep's thrown off, sleeping in in the same direction of the phenomena doesn't do much. Doesn't change the phenomena. Getting up early changes your circadian rhythm. So the time to sleep in is the start of the night, never the end of the night. Lock in your morning. Lock in a nice early. Um, there is something to light, but it's not that powerful or that important. And, uh, all the biohackers out there, here's a sacred cow you can kill. Evening light doesn't matter that much. Don't worry about your blue blockers. Don't worry about being on screens too late. Doesn't really do much, >> but the morning it's important. >> Morning is the only light that really matters. Yeah. The that that blue color of light is seen by the super kaismatic nucleus. this little set of tissues that sit on top of the optic uh kayazm, the optic nerve crossing, and watch for the color of light in the air. And they can only sense the color of blue light that is there for the first half an hour after dawn. From about half an hour before dawn, sunrise to half an hour after sunrise, the the air is a certain color, right? The light's a certain color. The brain is specially tuned to pick that up. If you don't pick that up in the first half of the day, you're not sensitive to it. So, blue light later in the day. There's research showing that if you like stare at your phone before bed, you end up with a 1 hour circadian push. That's it. The brain is able to handle one hour of slop every day and just kind of adjust for it, ignore it so fast before bed, but you can still be on screens. Get up early, go for a walk, and that morning sunlight, if you're trying to pick a time to get the light in, 1 half hour to 1 half hour before or after sunrise would be the way to go. So, 7 days a week, no sleeping in. super important. >> We never sleep in any way, but I like this. Okay, this is really interesting. >> Any other hacks outside of sleep for treating mood disorders, health. I know you hold meditation circles and you used to be a big proponent of coffee. >> Oh, yeah. I'm still I'm a big fan of coffee. I wake up too much with too much blood in my caffeine stream every day. >> Um, no, I'm a huge fan of coffee up till um, you know, three four cups a day. It seems to be prohealthy. This is not true of everyone. If you have a lot of anxiety or cardiac stuff or gut stuff, coffee might not be ideal for you. >> Gut stuff. >> Your dad's going to hear this. He's going to love it. He's like, "I just drunk coffee all the time." >> Yeah. D is like you just give him coffee all the time. >> That's all he wants. It's his drug of choice. >> He's so intense anyways, though. Like, how can you tell? He had this like rod iron quote over his desk when I was a kid. It just said, "Drink coffee, do stupid things faster with more energy." >> It's still in his office. >> It is. >> It's great. What is there any any other tips and hacks just because the sleep one is so fascinating? >> Yeah, I mean sleep's good, coffee is good. Meditation is key. And what I will say about meditation is everyone who hasn't done it before doesn't understand what it is. Everyone thinks it's a time of relaxing yourself or or forced relaxation or trying to relax. It's not. Meditation is anchoring your attention in a voluntary way and practicing the anchor. So, it's actually an executive function or an attention training, not a relaxation training. Just the same way you go to the gym and you're not like being strong at the gym, you actually feel kind of weak. Later on, you're strong because you went to the gym and were weak. And meditation is like being distracted on the cushion and frustrated and your knee hurts and she's cute and all the things. And you keep noticing the distraction and coming back to the anchor as the rep again and again. And eventually you get this peacefulness, stability of attention, you know, circadian stuff, body stuff, but it comes in as a function of meditating, not the actual practice of it. So if you're sitting on the cushion or doing a walking meditation and you're distractable and your mind's wandering, guess what? You you have one. And your opportunity is to anchor it again and again, not be worried about the fact that I got distracted. We learned TM and like transcendental meditation and they want you to meditate in the morning and the evening for 20 minutes. What do you think about that and what time is the best time to meditate? >> Yeah, there's an old joke on that, right? The if you have half an hour, you must meditate in the morning. If you have a full hour, you must meditate morning and evening. If you don't have an hour to meditate, you must meditate for two hours. >> Yeah. >> So, my short answer, you know, more seriously, is it's like exercise. the one you do and how you do it and what is what works for you is important. You know, some people really love sitting on cushions. Some people that's horrible, but doing sun salutations and anchoring your body to the movement and your breath and your attention, that's meditation or tai chi. So, I would say the best meditation is the one you do just like exercise and the regularity of it is the important part, not the style and not the amount. There's no there's nothing, you know, magical at sitting on a cushion for an hour. If all you want to do is 10 minutes, guess what? 10 minutes every day is probably enough. There's research by uh Lazar both when she was a um Dr. Lazar when she was a grad student and then in her lab since showing that this this cortical thinning that happens on the sides of the head um the insula which is involved with body awareness with feeding um other kinds of like you know consuming stuff and as you get older you lose tissue on the sides of the brain and you become less aware of your body and less aware of food and if you meditate the degree directly proportional with the amount of the thousands of hours you meditate in your life you're spared the thinning thinning. >> Wow. >> So, your brain doesn't thin out with age if you meditate. >> My gosh. >> And it might be 20 minutes a day sufficient, maybe less. So, it doesn't take a lot to rebuild those those uh those tissues. >> Now, outside of sitting and meditating, cuz like for me, something that is feels like meditating, like I feel like I get the same thing is if I'm out with my plants >> and I'm like, you know, pruning them or watering them or like seeing what kind of insects are on them or anything like that. But because it's like super super hyperfocused, is that kind of the same thing or is it not getting the full >> You're probably getting most of it. I mean, you're definitely in a contemplative mode and you're anchoring your attention. I think that could be meditation. Depends how you do it. >> Okay. >> Walking can be meditation. >> Mhm. >> You know, it really depends on what you're doing. Are you paying attention to something specific in the present moment on purpose >> with maybe some curiosity instead of judgment and noticing when you get distracted and pulling it back to the anchor? If you're doing that, it's meditation. >> Nice. Sweet. >> Keep So, keep keep planting. >> Great. >> Well, one of the things I've always loved about you is that you merge the worlds. Given you a lot of flowers. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. The you merge the worlds between shamanism and neuroscience and and altered states and it's >> it's so cool. Uh, we've watched you do something where you did brain scans of Tyler Henry. >> Oh, yeah. The Hollywood medium. >> Yeah. This this show deals a lot with altered states of consciousness, paranormal, psychedelics, that type of stuff. You know, shamanic, you know, things. >> We have a lot of mediums on here as well. >> Nice. >> What did you find with Tyler Henry on that show you did? >> So, Dr. Drew and I sat and watched Tyler do his channeling thing >> for Steo. for Steo and we put a cap a a real time EEG cap on Tyler's head and Dr. Drew and I were in a different room kind of doing playbyplay like sports casters. It was a little silly. >> Um and both of us saw, you know, we both had exclaimed in real time it looked like Tyler was falling asleep or dissociating like he was unconscious or he was passing out and he's like sweating and moving and you know talking constantly. was clearly not unconscious but parts of his brain were looking like he was going unconscious briefly and well he wasn't and um it was very kind of you know interesting and Dr. Drew had a bunch of ideas about what was likely happening and I didn't. I just had a phenomena. It's often where I stop for folks. Be it, you know, traditional experiences we all have or esoteric experiences. They're all the same to me. I don't understand them. It's your brain. You understand it, but I can spot the phenomena. So, for me, that was satisfying to go, "Oh, cool. Phenomena." And people can't usually change their EEG like this. The brain mapping, the the EEG across minutes, the stable EEG doesn't change rapidly. And so the fact that Tyler could create this change was really striking to me. It's like, wow, how is he able to create a state shift in data that's usually better at trait measurements? Huh, he's doing a very large change in real time to his brain. Thought that was interesting. I went back and looked at another channeler, a guy named Bruce, who's been on Larry King a bunch of times, um Bruce Gordon, I think, and looked at his brain from years ago. Same phenomena doing his thing. And then there's a a pet psychic here in Santa Monica who came in and she's like I I want to check out what my brain's doing when I'm doing my thing. And I when people every people say that I say interesting you're more than welcome to because I make you know mapping really accessible but you probably won't see much. Long-term meditators, psychics, spiritualists often don't see a change when they do their thing. It just looks like the brain has eyes closed. But every so often we see something. You're welcome to try it. Let's see. And so the psychic Liz, she did three different recordings. One was a baseline, regular EG, and then she has two different psychic techniques. And she's a pet psychic, and she helps you understand what your pet might want. And she does some of it off of pictures. And so, um, on two different days, like three months apart, she came into the office and did three separate recordings. And the first one was a baseline. The second one was a psychic technique that she employs to like get information about the pet she's looking at. And she was talking to my staff about their pet and you know a bunch of stuff. And I was in the background going interesting. And the third technique, the third recording was another different technique, some other type of channeling technique that she uses. Looking at the brain, I was like, "Wow, this is really interesting. We have a change on the the first intervention, the second intervention that are not that different from what we saw with Tyler and Bruce. Oh, that's interesting. I've never seen this particular set of changes for you, but you appear to have the ability to change your brain in minutes by concentrating. That's really cool. I'm, you know, a bit agnostic in terms of what was happening, but that's really cool because that's really not that common to change your brain by concentrating. And she came back three months later and repeated it and did the exact same thing. And the changes on the first and second intervention she did were not the same as each other. And she replicated the brain changes when she came back. >> Wow. >> Wow. >> Do you know what the technique was the between number two and number three? >> I don't actually. No, they they were both one was one was going like more at distance and one was talking to somebody about their pet I think. >> Wow. >> Um but she replicated the changes and even better she worked out a bunch of anxiety, fatigue, stress in her brain maps anyway. So the baseline map was improved through improved biohacking and brain health and that changed but the flex that she was able to bear down and do was the same anyways. So, she got rid of a lot of anxiety and attention stuff, but was still able to reach for that unusual stuff with no trouble. And she it may have actually been stronger for her after that. >> The altered states of consciousness that she achieved. >> Yeah. >> And same with Tyler Henry. Was that more in line with, let's say, healthy brain wave activity than the baseline? >> It was not. No. Um, when all of these people are doing their thing, it looks like they're either going unconscious or dissociating or they've just received a concussion. Like the brain shuts off in certain places. >> Well, they call it medium for a reason. You're the middle. >> Yeah. I have um a client uh a good friend of ours at Peak Brain. He's been with us now for about a year, little over a year doing neuro feedback, and he came in as a long-term lifelong meditator. Serious thing he pursues. He said, 'You know, I want to uh work on my brain, but I really want to pursue advanced meditation states. I want all the absorption states. I want the Janna. I want the ecstasy. I want to see things in my mind. Draw lights in the air. All >> that Janna. >> The Janna. These are absorption states that are that occur in classic meditation. There's like eight of them. The first one is like seeing like having warmth in your body. The second one is balls of light suffusing you. As you get up above four, you have moments where consciousness ceases or you have religious ecstatic experiences that occur. And the the Janna, JH, the Jas are sort of a classic ancient Buddhism thing that happens as you move through more and more advanced meditation. So my friend BJ said, "Hey, I really want to do this. Can you do that?" And I said, "I don't know. Probably something." and he started doing neuro feedback and he worked out a bunch of stress and he worked out a bunch of executive function stuff and we really leaned into his meditation and he started getting these absorption experiences and he went and did a Janna workshop series with some Janna experts who were like wow you're really getting this rapid I mean today he's actually at Harvard being tested because he's had made so much change in the past year that his that they're trying to figure out what he's done >> because he's like one of the most advanced meditators in the world now a year in he's having these absors absorption experiences. He has moments where he can sit for 2 hours and have like sessation of the mind where he just doesn't he's not present. He's just not part of the world anymore. And these are the more esoteric spiritual states that you come back from with change. And so he's able to now reliably a year in hit these really really really fine grain esoteric states that he he tells me every day, you know, I talk to my meditation teacher, my doctor, my this about the stuff I'm experiencing. I have to be careful cuz people, you know, it's crazy that I could be experiencing this stuff. But he'll like, you know, meditate and open his eyes and draw shapes in the air with his mind and rotate them and watch them and like >> these are these are these are not they sound like they're really crazy experiences. These are what has been happening for 2 or 3 or 4 thousand years documented is what happens when you meditate like it's your job. >> Where's he training? >> He's doing meditation at home in his bedroom. >> Amazing. And is there any scientific verification to the the genres? Are you calling them? >> Jas. >> The Jas do show. Yeah. Um, uh, Rick Hansen wrote a book called Buddha's brain, which is kind of a lightweight book, you know, a little like 100page book, but it talks about the absorption states and how, you know, Sid, uh, Sidartha Gutama may have experienced the states and some perspective on the brain that you go through. And so there is some, but I, you know, I I the tools that I use again are more sensitive to picking up the permanent changes, the traits. So this guy, I haven't seen his brain, you know, doing absorption states, but I have seen him having a different brain now than he had a year ago. >> Wow. And, you know, he's he's at ceiling on things like reaction time and vigilance, and he's not a stressed guy anymore. He's like super chill, but yet has way more stable attention than the average person these days. So, executive function, anxiety, a little bit of autism, a lot of trauma. Work that out. And the the Jas that he came for, he got. So that's amazing. He's a he's a he's a big proponent of ours, been a big booster of ours at this point. So >> that's wild. So meditation is kind of like neuro feedback after you do it for like a really really long time. But you're able to like speed up the process. You double, as far as I can tell, you double the impact of meditation and you double the impact of neuro feedback if you do them both because they both bring up plasticity, a measurable change in brain plasticity. And so if you combine them, they don't add. I think they multiply and you end with this really rapid change. I used to work in a lot of substance use environments where we did neuro feedback and also mindfulness was used and you could tell who was doing both, who was doing one and who was doing the other because the ones that did both would just take off in their transformation. >> Wow. Now with with neuro feedback, is this something that you can do like one not one session but a short amount of time and not have to do it again or is this something that you kind of have to come back and do? How does it work? It is uh permanent or long lasting once you get there. So it's not it's very gentle right away. So, usually three or four sessions in. Now, remember the brain, the way the way way it works is we're measuring the brain in real time under a couple locations and waiting for a certain pattern to show up or certain flex and going, "Yay, good job brain. Good job, brain. Good job, brain. Good job, brain." With a little gameplay, little audio or visuals start and stop and the brain happens to move in a certain direction. So, this is very subtle. You can't feel your brain waves. So, the mind is like, "Really, this Pac-Man stopping and starting? This is stupid. This is turning my brain really." But the brain's hearing, "Yay! Yay!" whenever the beta waves show up. And so two, three sessions in, the brain goes, "Oh, oh, oh, you want beta." And you get a lot of beta waves for a few hours. And you feel that and you're like, "Whoa, huh, I might be feeling different. Am I imagining this? I might be a ma." No. Well, maybe. No. And then it wears off and you're like, "Oh, hey, I might have noticed something." Okay. And then your sleep is great that night if it lands well. Remember that? >> Yeah. >> Get a subjective effect and then your sleep is good. And that tells us we worked you out the right way. >> Yeah. >> How was your sleep? Oh my god, I slept great. Okay, that protocol is landing well. Crack on. Try it again. And it's stronger the next time. >> Yeah. >> So, you can kind of iteratively build up the experience of pushing your brain around and learning how it feels as you push it around. >> You did it for 12 weeks, >> something like that. Yeah. >> Yeah. Dr. Hill. One of the one of the fascinating things is you're doing neuro feedback and the experience of it is you're sitting there, right? You're you're >> watching a game. >> Yeah. Well, for me there'd be either a game or a movie playing and essentially, you know, when your brain cuz your brain waves fluctuate when they're going in the direction we want them to go in. Let's say it's more alpha. >> The the brightness would increase on the TV and the volume would increase. It was feeding me stimulation. And after seeing the benefits and experiencing this, I walked away going, "Oh my god, is my brain waves being hacked and compromised sort of randomly by society and stimula, the stimulus I'm being fed all the time?" You know, this is just a very conscious way. But are my brain waves being determined by essentially this mad stimulus that's always coming my way and advertisements and billboards, social media, you know, is that true? Like >> not exactly. So why not? >> Because in neuro feedback, the stimulus is contingent on the change the brain has just made. >> Oh, so it's the it's like it's the pattern. >> So we're watching something. We're we're keeping the computer next to some some parameter. Let's say it's the amount of beta or the amount of alpha you're making. You're having the computer track the brain as the brain changes naturally and wait for the brain to flex in the certain direction against that natural variability. So as you sit there, you might get more tired and the slow brain waves climb. computer makes it easier to get applauded for the beta you make. Or if you're focusing, beta might come up, computer makes it harder. So, it's this adaptive system that's tracking your brain, watching one or two parameters. And when those parameters briefly move in the right direction, the computer goes, "Yay, good job." And the brain goes, "Whoa, okay, that got applauded. Interesting." And that happens, the brain reacting to the applause in the frequency range. Like let's say you're measuring 12 to 15 Hz beta under the right hand wire, the the right preentral gyus. Whenever the beep happens after a burst of that 12 to 15 Hz beta, the brain responds with another burst and goes, >> you know, yay, I I I got a little burst. >> That happens within the first 5 or 10 minutes. The very first time you do neuro feedback for everyone. >> Wow. >> That was what my my dissertation showed part of was like the brain's picking it up right away. Within the first 10 minutes, every single person who doesn't do sham or placebo control work shows the brain starting to go, "Oh, oh." Whenever the brain wave that you're rewarding starts to be applauded, the brain's kind of picking up this loop and then about three sessions in the brain goes, "Oh, okay. Beta," and you got a huge surge of it that lasts for a few hours. >> So, wow. you. Okay. So, with your institute, you I know you have physical places because Cody had went to a physical office, >> but now you're doing stuff where you're able to send equipment to somebody's home. Is it the same thing? Are you getting >> same exact equipment? Actually, yeah. Really? >> People often ask me when I'm talking, hey, are the programs in the office better or at home better? You know, or is it just as good at home? And I actually say we get better outcomes at home. They're more relaxed. >> We do more neuro feedback. >> Oh, >> if you're in the office, come in three times a week, do the thing. But if you're at home, you got the equipment, you got the gear. We have coaches on 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. >> We do live instruction for the first couple weeks helping you practice and get comfortable setting up. And then after that, you can selfrain. So, every client gets a Slack channel and we're like, "Hey, get a session in." All right. Or they're like, "Hey, can I do a session?" "Yeah, yeah, have fun." Or they're like, "Oh, my mother-in-law is being a jerk. Give me something new for that. Oh, yeah. Here's here's that protocol for when your mother-in-law is being a jerk. Um I'm not not your mother-in-law. That's amazing. One's mother-in-law. >> Um sorry, Cody. I got you. >> Uh thank you. Uh so but the point is you you have experiences that fluctuate dayto-day. Your stress, your sleep, your mood, your drinking, your cravings, your seizure, whatever. And as you notice fluctuating effects, you can say, "Hey, I'm kind of tired today." And a coach on your private chat will say, "Okay, I talked to Andrew. Try this protocol since you're tired. let's do something different. And you do something different and you feel different and you're like, oh, I chose something. I felt it. That's empowering. And that creates a lot of agency in someone with trauma, anxiety, ADHD to go, you know, I want to feel a little different. And they do half an hour of neur feedback and they're like, "Oh, I feel a little different." And that creates so much empowerment that people then want to keep making change. I worked with a guy who had really rapid effects overseas. Um he's been wearing this for like 10 sessions and he has a complaint that's actually kind of hard for neuro feedback to work on. Um I would say this is not one of our lowhanging fruits generally and it was this really severe um depersonalization and derealization. >> Wow. What is that? >> Depersonalization is when you don't feel real. >> Derealization is when the world doesn't feel real. >> Oo. >> So it's kind of like being in a dream. I >> feel like I'm dreaming right now >> all the time. And it's really disconcerting for people. They don't feel quite present. >> And he came in. This is a medical doctor who's like, "Hey, I've been dealing with this thing for years. Severe severe anxiety and a lot of DPDR." And I'm like, "Ah, wow. Well, I know we can help the anxiety. I do all the time. I'm so sorry with this, but I don't know about the DPDR. We can touch it sometimes, but I just don't know." And he, you know, he worked with us anyways. Uh, yeah. I think he actually went and found someone else for a while, didn't get effects, and then came back to see us. And he went to he went to hope to Sweden, got a brain map. He got some equipment. He's been working with us in Europe. We got like eight sessions in. He's like, "Oh my god, I recognize myself in the mirror again." >> Wow. >> Yesterday he said, you know, I actually been kind of depressed and suicidal for for years. And this is the first time in like I can remember in years that I my mood feels great. I feel light. And then the next day he's like, I had a cup of coffee. I haven't been able to drink coffee for 10 years. I had a cup of coffee and I'm a tiny bit on edge, but I don't feel like I had coffee. I feel good. Wow. >> And then the next day he had five cups of coffee. >> You're like, "All right, all right. We're going to slow down there." >> He did not trigger anxiety. Wow, >> that's amazing. That is amazing. >> Yeah, he's he's a very early response, but like the fact that we were listening to his goals, double-checking every day, giving him things to try and then I was able to catch the effect. Wait, you felt more present from that protocol? Okay. And so I iterated in a certain direction based on his subjective experience and we got to him to the place he needed to break up the DPDR really quickly and he got a mood lift along with it. And we trained that right avoid area. We trained a visual system area and another executive function area. And I didn't expect these areas to work on his big complaint. I thought we were going to work on some anxiety, some sleep, some mood, which were important, but I didn't think those were going to like unlock the core thing. and they did. So, people are in charge of their experience. I'm just along for the ride, helping them use tac, demystify their brain, understand it. But sometimes we get these really strong changes a couple weeks in. And uh, you know, >> it's kind of nice. >> Something we've always wondered is sort of the chicken of the egg with brain waves. You know, >> is the brain wave created because either an environmental thing or a conditioning or whatever. And also is it a sweater thread? So let's say if you're treating the brain wave the let's say the habit or the environmental thing or the trauma will almost come loose. So let's say there's an addiction all of a sudden they're not addiction addicted. You change the brain wave maybe there is a trauma like a PTSD. If you change that pattern in the brain you know have you ever had someone like relive the trauma or like have any no correlative events? >> It shouldn't it shouldn't. You can do that. You can bring up trauma if you if you do your job wrong. Yeah, >> you can definitely jump dump dynamite in the kitty pool for folks. And if you want to feel that way, sure, we can do that. We can speedrun some crap for you. We don't generally do that. We don't have to. >> Okay. >> And so, a couple things. One is the patterns in the brain activity that we're talking about, these phenotypes, they're stable. They're yours. They're always there. Day after day, week after week, month after month, a brain map looks the same unless you've done something to your brain to change it. And that can be neuro feedback or concussion or hacking your sleep or getting COVID. Like you'll see a huge shift in brain activity as your brain resources change. But generally you have the same brain at a 20,000 foot level. So you kind of see the same patterns as you move through experience. But if somebody has like a, you know, back midline, you know, threat sensitivity and rumination, I wouldn't know if it's from a traumatic experience or adverse experience. It created a trauma response or if they're naturally biased to have a lifeguard who's like looking around. I don't know the difference. I have to ask them and say, "Look, your brain little unusual. Are you experiencing threat sensitivity? Are you experiencing rumination? And is that in the way?" Oh, it is. There it is. So, I don't know if the patterns are endogenous, you know, built in, you're congenital, grown that way, or if they're acquired, but they're stable patterns. So, it doesn't really matter. I can't tell the difference between if you have a tendency to be a worrier or if you develop the PTSD phenomena. I can't tell the difference between um well, there's some things that are sort of built in, like you don't acquire ADHD. That's a built-in phenomena. It's a it's a natural phenotype. not many of the things we're talking about are like in the way anxiety etc. Uh ADHD I would argue doesn't really fit like many other things cuz there's a natural variant that's pretty common to have impulsivity or inattention. There's there's reasons that we have ADHD evolutionarily. You know, we need hunters as well as gatherers. >> Oh wow. So you think it's just it's just baked in. It's not an environmental thing. >> Exactly. There's a concept in evolutionary biology called um antagonistic pleotropy where you have a body thing that serves one purpose at one phase of life or one context in a different way later in life. So the common example is telomeres these little shoelace caps on chromosomes. Whenever the chromosome divides it shortens and you can only do about 30 divisions and then the cell stops dividing called the haylick limit or the scinsesscent cell sort of threshold. The reason we have telomeirs, the reason they developed and we evolved to have them is so we don't have unchecked cell growth cancer. It's an anti-cancer check. Basically, the problem is cells that can't divide develop these inflammatory byproducts and cytoines. And so skin cells develop fibroblasts after you um finish dividing them. And after you're 30 or 40, now the skin the fibroblasts become procancer because they can't divide. So the same mechanism that was protective in one stage of life is impairing another stage of life or in the brain. ApoE4 makes you actually smarter and having better cognition, better memory, faster reaction times as a young adult, but makes you much more likely to have Alzheimer's. >> What? >> As an elder. >> Wow. >> Or the cickle cell gene. If you're in an area of the world where malaria is common and you have one copy of cickle cell, you have amazing protection against malaria. two copies you got cickle cell anemia. So I believe ADHD the big four paradoxes are attention uh drive spontaneity and emotional sensitivity. And these can be double-edged swords and can get in the way. Sensitivity, empathy can mean that you're an amazing carer or an amazing healthare worker or a therapist. It's also why you have rejection sensitivity in ADHD. It's the same phenomena that you know that that that poet feeling. You feel too much and you can't get rid of it. So, or those two circuits, the precendental gyri for attentiveness and self-control, you know, when the left one isn't as solid, you're not as stressed or as driven. When the right one is not as solid, you're more receptive and aware and patterns present themselves, which can be positive. If you're trying to sit and do your taxes, not so much. But so, these things have a benefit in some instances and a drawback in others. And I believe that a lot of the brain is like that. And so it's not for a lot of the things we see, it's not like, oh, you have a diagnosis, you're broken. It's, hey, here's a resource we all have. Yours looks like it might be a little cramped or a little stuck in a mode. Let's stretch the range of the mode so you can now decide how it's operating internally and not be shoved over here to one side of how that tissue can act. So like your ADD is leftsided. You bring the beta up, it's not always turned on. You're not like, I'm now focused all the time, but you can decide to like flex it and focus in boring environments and things without drifting and without feeling like it's a challenge because you have more control over what the tissue does. Or somebody with OCD, the front midline, hyperfocused, latching on to things. That's a steel trap mind. It's a superpower. It's kryptonite, too, when you can't stop doing it. You take someone with ADHD and you train down the extra beta in the frontal uh front midline and you end up with somebody who can hyperfocus but doesn't have to. That's really powerful when someone comes in with like I have an anxiety disorder. I have a lifelong OCD diagnosis and you're like oh yeah I right there but this flavor is kind of a giftedness meets anxiety meets you know what do you want to do? Like I'm not diagnosis isn't that important. What does success feel like? Do you want to be a Zen monk? you want to still focus on stuff. Okay, great. Let's see how this evolves. And it creates a relationship with unusual brain resources that give you permission to go, I'm a special snowflake. I'm unusual and that's okay. And it is okay. And then you can think about the phenomena that are in the way and not think about like the diagnostic framework. So no, it's more about like are you having enough relaxation, concentration, stress response, etc. or are or is it in the way and not what is the overarching label with all of the you know the baggage that comes along with that. So >> we're coming full circle here cuz after you just talked about how essentially a return to the individuation of >> mental health and healing and a growth model as opposed to a path a pathological model. >> After I saw you I went to the jungle. I went to the Amazon >> and that was the last step to me realizing that it was not some something wasn't wrong with me. I was I was been on a 20-year journey trying to fix something wrong with me cuz a doctor told me when I was >> 10 that something was wrong with me. And you know understanding that every curse is a blessing. Every problem is also there's a benefit to it. There's there's they're connected and it's there's a paradox at play here and that paradox is the balance we find between our own individuation, our own personal journey and that's what you do. That's what you did for me. >> Um that's what you're doing and I know how exhausting it is to be expanding your company so much Peak Brain Institute and opening up new clinics. >> That's right. You can come see us in Europe, the UK, Canada, the US, or 100% virtual if you want. >> We We really need this right now. Great. >> And and and you know, I I I'm an old friend from the past coming back to remind you to keep going and uh and say thank you. >> I'll do my best. Thank you. I appreciate that. >> Okay. >> And I'm going to be getting some >> Yeah, we have to get your brain shortly. Yeah. Take a peek. Just so Cody knows what he's what he's signed up for. Seriously, please tell me. I'm very curious. Uh I I and also like we're so interested all the stuff you're doing with like altered states of consciousness and uh the mystical and scanning. So interesting. Like we're like so interesting. Like we hope to to to work with you and help uplift what you're doing in the future. But okay, let's wrap this [ __ ] up. >> Tanya, >> anyway. Oh yeah. How can they find you? >> How can we find you? >> So peakbrainstitute.com is our socials. You can find me uh all over the web. I do a YouTube which is Dr. Hill every week live streams. Uh but if people want to come to our physical offices, we'll give any listeners a special deal where they can get unlimited brain maps for a year for about 250 which gives you this tool to like test yourself a lot and learn without really ongoing cost. So we'll make that available to your your show. >> Hell yeah. That's so cool. Thank you. >> Thank you. Special biohackers. >> Thank you, doctor. Of course. >> Thank you. Okay. His information will be in the bile gang. Like, subscribe, rate, comment if you haven't already, smash that notification button, >> and go follow Dr. Hill and go get this brain mapping. >> Take care of those brains. >> Yeah, we could not recommend anything really more uh in terms of like if you know, this is this is the path and >> and I'm going to do it and I'm going to film myself. I'm going to see what the hell's going on cuz I have to. >> We'll we'll make a video about it. And I just have to You always see us drinking these orange pouches. This is a neutropic that Dr. Hill formulated that is is my favorite new of the day back in the day. >> We drink it all the time. >> It's true brain. Had to shout it out. Okay gang, we love you all. Take care of yourselves and each other. Until next time. Bye-bye. >> Bye. [Music]