Dr. Drew steps into "Hollywood Medium" Tyler Henry's world for the second time to evaluate Tyler's brain activity using an EEG test while he connects Steve-O to his late mother. Check out this classic clip of "Hollywood Medium With Tyler Henry." Full episodes available here: https://www.nbc.com/hollywood-medium-with-tyler-henry #TylerHenry #SteveO #HollywoodMedium #EEntertainment SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/Eentsub About Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry: Medium, clairvoyant, medical intuitive --Tyler Henry has an undeniable gift that he's ready to share with the world. Explore the life of this clairvoyant medium as he brings messages from the beyond to Hollywood celebrities, delivers jaw-dropping readings to celebrities looking for advice, connection and closure with loved ones who have passed on, all while balancing his unique abilities with trying to be a regular millennial. Tyler is the most sought after medium in Hollywood! Connect with the Hollywood Medium: Visit the Hollywood Medium WEBSITE: http://www.eonline.com/shows/hollywood_medium Watch the Hollywood Medium Full Episode: http://www.eonline.com/now/hollywood-medium-with-tyler-henry Like Hollywood Medium on FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/hollywoodmediumwithtylerhenry/ Follow Hollywood Medium on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/hollywoodmedium About E! Entertainment: E! is a pop culture destination where you can find great shows and romantic comedy movies. Fans can’t get enough of E!’s pop culture hits including “Celebrity Prank Wars,” “Celebrity Game Face” and “Botched.” And with new original programming on the way, there will be even more to love and talk about. Download The E! News App For The Latest Celebrity News and Trending Videos: https://eonline.onelink.me/yMtl/4ead5017 Your favorite shows, movies and more are here. Stream now on Peacock. https://bit.ly/PeacockEEnt Connect with E! Entertainment: Visit the E! WEBSITE: http://eonli.ne/1iX6d8n Like E! on FACEBOOK: http://eonli.ne/facebook Check out E! on INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/eentertainment Follow E! on TWITTER: https://twitter.com/eentertainment Follow E! on Spotify: http://eonli.ne/spotify Tyler Henry Unknowingly Connects to Carolyn Kennedy in Carole Radziwill Reading | Hollywood Medium http://www.youtube.com/user/Eentertainment
Episode Summary
This piece is drawn from a conversation that originally aired on E! Entertainment, where I recorded live brain data on a working medium during a session at Peak Brain Institute. You can watch the original conversation. What follows is my read on the data, in my own words. I have anonymized the people involved beyond what the show itself made public.
What were we actually measuring?
We ran a quantitative EEG, a QEEG brain map, on a young man who works as a medium. The setup is the same one I use clinically every week. A cap of electrodes sits on the scalp, conductive gel bridges each electrode to the skin, and we record the electrical rhythms the cortex generates. If you want the full picture of what this test captures and how it reads, I cover it in detail in the QEEG brain mapping guide.
The plan had two parts. First, a resting baseline with an attention test, the way I would profile anyone's brain before training. Then a second recording while he did his work, so we could compare the same brain in two states.
A resting QEEG is one of the most stable things we measure in a human being. Map someone today, map them next year, and the resting picture holds. It moves only when something acts on the brain: a head injury, a medication, a meditation practice, or a long course of neurofeedback. That stability is what made the comparison worth doing.
What did his resting brain look like?
His baseline carried some unusual features. I saw extra Delta activity, the very slow 1 to 4 Hz band, concentrated toward the back of the head. Extra Delta over a focal region at rest tells me a piece of cortex took an insult at some point, a bruise or an injury, and the tissue in that area is generating slower rhythms than its neighbors.
I asked him whether something had happened to the back of his head. He told me he had emergency brain surgery years earlier for an arachnoid cyst he was born with, located in the posterior brain. The Delta signature lined up with that history. This is well-established. Focal slowing on a QEEG points you toward structural events, and the location on the map usually tracks the location of the injury.
I want to be precise about what that does and does not explain. His abilities, by his account, predated the surgery. So I am not claiming the injury produced anything. The slow activity is a marker of where the tissue was disturbed, nothing more.
What changed when he started a reading?
This is where the data got genuinely interesting. The moment he settled into his process, I had to rescale the display. I had set the gain for the amplitudes he produced at rest earlier that day, and now his brain was generating waves so large the chart could not hold them. I doubled the scale just to see the shape.
Two things stood out.
First, surges of alpha. Alpha is the 8 to 12 Hz rhythm, the brain's idle and its brakes. It rises when the cortex is online but disengaged from external input, the resting hum behind closed eyes. I write about what this band signals and how it behaves in decoding alpha waves.
Second, and stranger, alpha was mixing with beta. Beta is faster, 13 to 30 Hz, the signature of active cognitive processing. Those two patterns do not usually share the floor. A brain producing big alpha is normally idling; a brain producing strong beta is normally working. Seeing them braided together told me parts of his cortex were not communicating in the ordinary way.
The picture that emerged was a kind of sleep-like, dream-like state running underneath an alert and verbal performance. He looked, on the screen, like he was drifting toward sleep or in and out of a daydream, while in the room he was animated and talking. He described the subjective side as a daydream that connects and disengages, comes up and drops down. The EEG matched that rhythm of in and out almost beat for beat.
Why did his visual areas appear to shut down?
The detail I keep coming back to is the visual system. As he reported seeing imagery, his occipital visual areas quieted rather than activated. He was, by his account, seeing something, and the part of the brain that handles sight was powering down.
That is consistent with the alpha surge. Strong alpha over the back of the head is the classic signature of visual cortex going offline, the same thing that happens when you close your eyes. So the subjective experience of vivid internal imagery, paired with reduced activity in the seeing-circuits, fits a brain generating internal content while the external visual pipeline goes idle. He also reported feeling lightheaded and getting cold during sessions, which fits a shift in autonomic state, the body following the brain into a different mode of operation.
Why are two brain maps that disagree so valuable?
Here is the line of evidence I find most compelling. We recorded the same person twice within an hour. By every rule of QEEG, those two maps should look nearly identical. They did not. Resting brain and reading brain were clearly different recordings.
That difference is the data point. It means he is doing something measurable to his own cortex, voluntarily, to enter the reading state. He is not sitting at rest narrating. He is shifting his brain into an altered configuration: high amplitude, alpha-beta mixing, visual shutdown, a sleep-like signature beneath wakeful speech.
I expected, going in, to see something like an ADHD picture, the browning-out and trance-like quality reading as a theta/beta ratio shift. That is not what showed up. What showed up was more specific and more unusual.
What can a brain map actually tell us, and what can't it?
The brain does not give you a narrative. A broken arm tells a clean story on an X-ray. The cortex does not work that way. You can read state, arousal, focal slowing, asymmetries, and band ratios, and you can build models about what might be true. You cannot point at a rhythm and extract the content of someone's experience.
So I will hold the interpretations honestly.
What the data supports, strongly: this man enters a distinct, reproducible altered brain state when he works, marked by large-amplitude alpha, unusual alpha-beta coupling, and visual-system downregulation. That is on the recordings.
What the data is consistent with, as a hypothesis: an open, receptive, empathic state. My own working position is that selfhood and consciousness are co-created between people, that we carry residual pieces of the people closest to us in our own neural patterns, and that someone in this kind of receptive state may access those remnants. This is extrapolation, not measurement. I want to be clear about that label.
What the data does not do: confirm any specific account of where the information comes from. Someone could take the same recordings and argue for an external explanation. The EEG does not adjudicate between those readings. It tells you the brain changed, and it tells you how.
Why does the state matter more than the explanation?
The subject of the reading, a longtime friend of mine and a self-described skeptic, arrived wanting to disbelieve. He has had his own head injuries, and his baseline carried its own focal Delta from a posterior impact, which the map flagged independently of his history. By the end he was moved by the accuracy of what he heard about his own family. Whatever you conclude about the source, the experience landed as meaningful, and that meaning stands on its own.
For my part, the value is mechanistic. I have watched people who do this kind of work for years and known they were doing something real at the level of state, without anyone quantifying it. These recordings are a first step toward quantifying it. The altered-state signature is genuine. The interpretation of the source remains open.
If you want to understand how trained, voluntary control of brain rhythms works in a clinical setting, where people learn to shift their own alpha and other bands on purpose, that is the everyday work of neurofeedback and brain training, and you can read the research overview in is neurofeedback legitimate. The capacity to move your own EEG into a different configuration is not exotic. What was unusual here was the magnitude and the specific pattern.
The honest summary is this. We recorded a brain at rest and the same brain during a reading, and they did not match. That mismatch is real, it is measurable, and it is the beginning of an explanation rather than the end of one.
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