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Episode Summary
I joined Steve Stavs on his show "Steve Stavs - Africa's Pro Biohacker" to talk about what actually happens when you train the brain. You can watch the original conversation. What follows is drawn from that discussion: how I read brains, what neurofeedback moves, and why I treat the brain as a set of resources rather than a list of diagnoses.
What does neurofeedback do for attention and executive function?
Attention and executive-function difficulties show up constantly in my office. Someone struggles to start tasks, drifts under low stimulus, then performs beautifully under pressure. That pattern is common, and it responds to training.
Here is the rough math from my clinical work. With executive-function presentations, the kind people label ADHD, impulsivity, or distractibility, you tend to see about one standard deviation of measurable change every other month of neurofeedback. That works out to roughly every 25 sessions. Over three months, somewhere around 40 to 50 sessions, training three or four times a week for about half an hour, you can often move someone a couple of standard deviations up the bell curve on the metrics you care about. I have run this with thousands of people, and the majority show strong, trackable change.
I want to be honest about what the label means. ADHD is not a diagnosis you can read straight off an EEG. The reason a person is inattentive or impulsive could be fatigue, stress, post-COVID brain fog, sleep disruption from trauma, or a hundred other things. When I measure executive function and then see classic executive-function patterns in the QEEG brain map, the picture lines up and we know where to train. If the cause is something else, the map tells us that too.
I worked recently with a hockey player who was out of play after an injury. His situation combined the kind of ADHD profile many athletes carry, exceptional under high pressure and less reliable in the low-stimulus stretches, with concussion-related changes. He is public about his neurofeedback (Connor Carrick), so I can name him, and we shared pre-post data showing how his brain shifted over the training course. For more on this specific frequency target, see my writeup on SMR neurofeedback and on neurofeedback for ADHD.
Can the brain rebuild after damage?
Built-in patterns like ADHD respond to training, and so does damage. One case I come back to often is a heavy drinker I worked with. He arrived at my office at 6'5", 300 pounds, bright orange, in liver failure. He was 45 days sober, medically chaperoned straight from a hospital. He could not relax, could not stop talking, could not stop moving. For 25-plus years he had been drinking a bottle and a half of wine every afternoon, more wine plus Ambien to get maybe two hours of sleep at night, then back on it the next morning.
His brain showed a textbook post-alcoholic pattern. He was hyper-coherent in beta, highly over-connected fast activity, with all his beta pushed up around 11 Hz, and his resting delta was almost gone. That is the signature of an over-aroused brain with no brake. You see this pattern persist even a decade after someone sobers up if they drank daily for years. It explained why a giant of a man looked like he was vibrating in his chair.
About six or seven weeks into training, I came in and found him asleep on the waiting-room couch. I assumed he had a session. He did not. He had discovered he could fall asleep at will, called that morning to ask when I arrived, came in early, and took a nap to prove it to me. In the hospital, sober, he had needed Thorazine or Haldol just to be knocked out, because without alcohol he was so overactivated. Now he could put himself down on a couch.
The mechanism is straightforward once you see the EEG. Chronic alcohol use leaves the cortex stuck in a high-arousal state, excess beta and tight beta coherence, with the slow-wave systems that govern rest suppressed. Train the brain to produce more of the slower, regulating rhythms and reduce the runaway fast activity, and the capacity to downshift comes back. Structural neuroimaging work backs this up: neurofeedback produces measurable gray and white matter changes (Ghaziri et al., 2013), so we are not just renting a state, we are shaping tissue over time.
Does neurofeedback help with seizures and developmental conditions?
I worked with a 10-year-old girl who had a protein-folding disorder that left her with significant developmental issues and drop seizures, sudden collapses happening more than once a minute. It took us two or three weeks to get any movement, which is normal for severe cases. Once we understood how her seizure activity was structured in the EEG, we got a thumb on the scale, and over about two weeks her seizures dropped from more than once a minute to less than once an hour.
That hour or two of seizure-free time changed her whole household. Her mother had not slept deeply in a decade. When a child is seizing that often, with breathing concerns and limited verbal ability, the parents are wrecked. The girl herself started developing more after the seizures eased, a little more language, a little more eye contact, which often follows when you free up cortical resources that seizure activity was consuming.
This is actually how I found my way back into this field. Watching kids with autism and severe developmental difficulties show changes in sensory processing and seizure frequency made me stop and ask whether this was even supposed to be possible. That question pulled me back into the work at an academic level. You can get real movement in conditions that conventional medicine treats as fixed.
Can neurofeedback improve performance in high functioners?
CEOs come to me wanting to perform better. Most of the time their brains tell the same story: high performers who are not sleeping, anxious, driven, brittle, a bit obsessive, the type-A signature. We work on the sleep and the over-arousal first. Once those move, they ask what else is possible, and I start building in flow state and creativity training.
A week or two into that phase, I reliably get a thank-you note or voicemail from a spouse asking what I am doing over here. Best therapy session they have had, he brought flowers, he talked about how he felt. This happens often enough that it is not an isolated case. When you calm an over-aroused frontal system and improve sleep, the emotional bandwidth that was eaten by vigilance comes back online.
I also had a physical therapist call me in 2021, irritated, asking what I had done to her client. The woman, in her 70s with a brain injury, had walked into therapy without her cane. When you lose part of the motor cortex, you lose inhibition of the muscle, so the arm pulls up tight and balance fails on that side. After training, her arm relaxed and her balance steadied enough to leave the cane behind. This does not happen every time. It happens often enough that people come to me precisely because these things rarely change in standard allopathic care.
Why does a brain map give you agency?
The thread through all of these cases is a shift in framing. When you take a personal-training, fitness-and-science perspective, you stop chasing diagnoses and start working on resources. You measure something, you train it, you measure again. That iteration gives you a hint of what is happening, and it breaks the spell where someone else is the expert who owns the label and knows your brain better than you do.
A father brought me his son four years ago, a kid heading to college who could not get out of his own way, barely passing high school, did not do his laundry. We looked at his brain and his performance. He carried some stress and fatigue, and he also had strong but poorly balanced resources for parts of executive function, the classic profile: exceptional under high stimulus, drifty under low stimulus, with some sleep-processing involvement. I explained how his version of ADHD worked, pointed out his actual strengths, and laid out the options, including neurofeedback.
I never heard back, which surprised me, because the reading had been clear. Two and a half years later his father called to thank me. The son had doubled down after that conversation, structured his time, built his own habits and hacks, and finished college in three years. The father was clear that I had not done anything to the boy's brain. I had given him a way to understand it. Once the kid saw which levers moved which outcomes, he learned to drive.
You can rebuild after serious damage. You can shape tissue and performance in conditions labeled incurable. And sometimes the most useful thing is the brain map itself, because seeing your own patterns hands you the controls. If you want a deeper read on how training translates to specific goals, my pieces on biohacking anxiety, brain fog, and sleep walk through the circuits and the protocols.
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References
- Ghaziri (2013). Neurofeedback Training Induces Changes in White and Gray Matter. doi:10.1177/1550059413476031