Unlock the Power of Your Autistic Brain through Neurofeedback with Dr Andrew Hill

Autism and neurofeedback. Is neurofeedback relevant for autistic people? Have you heard of neurofeedback? It's a cutting edge new treatment or therapy or something like that. We'll find out more in a minute as I speak to an expert in the field who is gonna fill us in on all the details. I know I personally was really excited when I first heard about this type of technology. It just sounded really cool and really high tech. So I'm really keen to learn more about it today. Welcome back to Autism from the Inside. In this video, we're chatting to Dr. Andrew Hill, founder of the Peak Brain Institute to learn about neurofeedback and some of the exciting possibilities it brings. So, hi, Andrew, great to have you with us today. Thanks, Paul. Thanks for having me. Nice to be here. So this sounds like a really fancy term, neurofeedback. What do you think of neurofeedback? Yeah, it really is somewhat fancy, but it taps into basic processes of learning, essentially, to help the brain. One of the things the brain doesn't do really well is understand its own real-time information, its partition, its information flow throughout the brain. So because of that, there's modules that are quite separated and the brain doesn't really monitor itself really well at a high level. So it's really easy to understand and the brain doesn't really monitor itself really well at a high level. And most of what happens to the brain, we can't feel. There's no sensory nerve endings in the brain. We can't feel electricity or blood flow or heat or any of this stuff that's happening, which is probably a mercy because it's pretty darn active up there. But neurofeedback is taking a basic process called associative learning, and it's providing some of that information back to the brain so it can steer the direction of that learning. So neurofeedback is a form of what's called biofeedback, more broadly, and biofeedback is taking something you're not generally aware of and boosting it a little bit. So you can notice some variable signal or when some body parameter happens to move in a certain direction, you can create something in the environment, like a sound or some little animation or something moving. And in the case of neurofeedback, we mean doing biofeedback on stuff inside the central nervous system, which is that area within bone, so to speak, is the CNS, the brain, the spinal column, et cetera. So when doing neurofeedback, we stick wires to the head, we measure the brain's activity with blood flow sensors and measure some variable parameter you're making moment to moment. And because we understand something about the modular nature of the cortex, that the top layer, the bark of the brain, we can sort of get a sense of some of the highest level human experience stuff because that's where that works. The things around attention, stress, speed of processing, sensory stuff, all kind of has regional mapping in the brain. So if you measure what your brain's doing moment to moment and then applaud when it happens to move in a certain direction, good job brain, good job brain, nope, good job, good job, good job, nope. In this case, you can make a little game in the screen run or something. The brain starts to go, hey, wait a minute, why is stuff happening when I'm raising beta waves there? Okay, interesting. And then the big trick is you move the goalposts every few seconds. And so the brain gets an applause sort of stream for the trends it engages in that happened to be in the direction you want to exercise. And it's mostly involuntary, yeah. So it sounds like you're measuring everything and showing the user in real time so that you can kind of gamify it a little bit. For those who have been watching my channel recently, I've been talking about my new biosensor that I've been using to track my heart rate and heart rate variability and especially my sleep. It's got a new thing where I can see the stress right now. So I guess it might be a little bit like monitoring your heart rate in real time and then actively trying to lower it or something like that. Yeah, that'd be a form of biofeedback. And you can do that on the heart rate. The beat-to-beat timing is called heart rate variability. And it gets kind of rigid and static, the timing. When you're stressed, we call this sympathetic arousal. You're getting ready to marshal resources to fight, to flee versus the timing, everything flexible, very, very soft between the beat timing. And that's a very parasympathetic, relaxed, rest and repair kind of mode. And we balance at the point between sympathetic and parasympathetic activated and restoring using the vagal tone, the vagus nerve, which goes from the brain to the heart to the gut and back, most of it back from the gut to the heart to the brain. Ironically, what happens in the vagus doesn't stay in the vagus. So it's communicating and moving everything around and the heart can be trained. You can put an ear clip on and measure the heartbeat moment to moment and have a computer calculate the variability in the timing. And when the timing gets greater, that's greater HRV and the computer chimes at you, makes some sounds and you learn voluntarily to kind of drop into the zone and relax and extend your exhale a little bit and kind of soften the machine, you're driving a little bit. And that's a form of biofeedback and you can do that progressively and it creates change in things like anxiety or stress response or being a little activated or things like that. When doing neurofeedback, you can't feel the amount of alpha waves or the speed of a brain wave very well at all usually. So the brain hears, oh, wait a minute, stuff's happening when my alpha goes up, okay. But the mind doesn't really. In fact, most neurofeedback is completely involuntary. And the process of neurofeedback, the technology landscape as we use it today, was discovered in the mid 60s on cats. Cats are really bad instruction followers. So it works the same whether or not you're trying to push your brain around or you're an animal or you're somebody just like over it and doesn't want to be there, like a teenager, that can happen, or somebody who's nonverbal, who doesn't have the ability to sort of necessarily check in with the cognitive landscape or who might be having a sensory flood and some seizures or something. You can still train that person's brain because they still experience stimulus from the outside world. So you're watching a TV show or something or watching a little car drive around. And when the brain moves in the wrong direction for some little bit of it you want to exercise, you slow the game down. And when the brain happens to move the little tissue up a little bit, you can exercise that resource. And the person gets a little transient effect for about 24 hours after you exercise it. And after two or three exercises, two or three neurofeedback sessions, you feel it. You don't feel it right away usually. And you get a little transient effect then each time you exercise. You can kind of build up different experiences. And we use something called brain mapping to examine the brain every other month or so. And after a few rounds of that, you've created a new set of resources because the brain's practicing this stuff sort of all the time. And it just sort of sinks in as your new mode. And again, the stuff you can see and stuff you can go after with both assessments and with biofeedback on the brain are the big kind of gross resources of many anxiety flavors or executive function things or sleep things or speed of processing stuff. You have some success on some visibility, some ability to go after resources and things like social or sensory integration or auditory visual function perhaps or attention or some other kind of features. So you can do a lot, but it's not a super well established landscape like medicine. It's a lot closer to personal training. So Peak Brain, my company, we are like the other 10,000 providers in the world who do neurofeedback. It's not very many, but we do it as if we are your coaches, not so much your doctors. So we're not really concerned about necessarily what the diagnostic label someone's applied to you is. We're much more concerned about, well, okay, here's your brain. Let's teach you how it works and show you stuff. And okay, what's important to you? What do you want to do with it? And so I get folks walking in who are super high performers with no problems who after they understand that they have a perseveration or rumination feature, oh, that's my little OCD. Oh yeah, huh? Oh, I do crave alcohol. I do have a hard time falling asleep. You can see things that are suboptimal without necessarily worrying if it has a diagnostic label. And you can then identify places you want to make change and take control over it. So that's really our focus there. Yeah, so I'm really interested. One of the phrases that's coming to mind that I use a lot in my emotional intelligence training is that we are constantly reacting to everything in our environment all the time. And most of that we are unaware of. So you're using this to help us, help train our awareness of that. So I guess I'm curious as I know for me personally, feedback really helps when I'm trying to learn anything. What are some of the common things that people might use neurofeedback to help with? Yeah, so I kind of alluded to some of this stuff, but again, I would always want to go sort of goal focused instead of symptom cluster focused. But people do understand symptom-driven language sometimes. You can often see that there are strong resources, maybe cramped up, maybe over-activated, maybe a little weak. It's hard to tell sometimes per person. Like for you, I could look at your brain map and say, oh, look, you're unusual in a bunch of ways. Great, good job, be weird. We don't care if you're weird. People aren't average. No one's normal. No one's typical, really. And everything I do is sort of this age match bell curve sample just to have a yardstick, just to maybe guys use meters in Australia. I forget. We use meters in quite a bit of the world, actually. Yeah, that's what I hear. I do have offices in other locations, but sadly, we're still on other forms of math. But brain mapping and attention testing, executive function testing, which we also do alongside it, it's age match, because that's sort of our perspective on how humans change. But when I look at your brain, it's sort of like, great, you're weird, wonderful. Oh, and your performance test, a little impulsivity, perhaps, or some inattention. That might get in the way. Yeah, all right, that's interesting. But the brain maps, OK, you're weird, good job. Here's a part of the brain that's weird, and sometimes it might mean this, for instance. Oh, that matters to you. Oh, OK, cool. I think we might have some agency now for you, not necessarily perfection of understanding or a clean diagnostic label, because people are variable. So just because there's an outlier or a quirk in your brain, A, doesn't mean it's in the way for you in the slightest. And B, if it is in the way for you, the amount that it's weird doesn't track how problematic it is. And sort of C, if you see it, you can then stretch it with neurofeedback and change it generally. And I think what you said before, there was a tiny little phrase that had a huge amount of meanings like, oh, that's important to you. So I know one of the biggest sensitive areas for autistic adults is that we've spent a lot of our lives people telling us how we should be or trying to help us be more normal. And it sounds like this doesn't necessarily need to result in a more normal brain. Well, no. I mean, the goal is not to make you average. The goal is to reduce suffering. The goal is to help you understand your brain. But I'm just as fine if the goals you have are performance goals or suffering goals, as long as you have some goals. To answer your question earlier, I didn't quite answer, which is what do you look at? We tend to see the big default mode network circuit. So the anterior cingulate gets stuck and we obsess. The posterior cingulate gets stuck and we ruminate. Watch the road. Behind the right ear might be relevant for folks who love this podcast. Where there's a big chunk of tissue called the tempo parietal junction and just above it the fusiform base area. And these little circuits get stuck often in beta waves, kind of cramped up and spasmed. And the experience typically is somebody, well, I call this, I affectionately dubbed this part of the brain the princess and the pea, because it kind of like gets irritated everything and can't quite filter. A lot comes in, it's a bit of a fire hose. And so I don't know looking at it, we've got a lot of beta waves there, like a cramped up resource. I don't know if you're experiencing difficulty with let's say sensory integration, maybe social processing, which can happen with that area or face recognition. It might, it's plausible. So I'll talk about those regions and talked about what they might mean. And if you're like, wow, yes, I don't recognize faces. I have prosopagnosia, which is what that's called. Or you're like, wow, yeah, I do actually miss sarcasm all the time. Or if I'm talking to you and you're not, you have no prosody. You're talking to me like this all the time? I'm like, I think you may have some difficulty with prosody with lilt in your speech. I think I'm hearing something. And that comes from back here. Is that important to you? Would you like to maybe have a different lilt in your speech? Oh yeah, actually I care about that. All right, great, check mark. Let's keep looking for stuff. And you can see, again, executive functions super clear. So if you're inattentive or impulsive, those are very visible. Rumination perseveration, social and sensory integration stuff. You can often see auditory processing issues. Or you can see if you're super stressed and burnt out and get really amotivated and overwhelmed. That tends to show up actually. There's a frontal lobe asymmetry when the frontal lobes get a little bit shifted. Handful things. More stuff is visible. And then a lot of brain fog. And especially these days in the post illness world a little bit, I used to just see it from things like concussion and mold and Lyme and chemotherapy and chronic stress. And now I also see it from post viral load and being ill with a pandemic exposure and stuff like that. So there's a lot of things that show up. I can't tell brain fog from a mold exposure apart from somebody who has apnea, from somebody that has some PTSD causing sleep difficulties. It all kind of looks the same. And I don't really care how it got here, what it's called. I want to try to find the phenomena for you to go after. So I guess talking to the person to get their experience of what actually is the key thing here. Because like you said, you can't diagnose it. It's more of a checking in. I model. I call it modeling. I say, here's some plausible ideas about this data. Which of these things seem to be valid and important to you? And there's like six or eight things, 10 things, 12 things, and go as we walk through data for half an hour together generally. And of those things, usually most of them, people are like, wow, yeah, you can see that? Oh yeah, I want to work on that. I do have songs in my head and bite my nails. Oh, I am kind of like loaded up by new social environments. Oh yeah, we can give me some control over that. And here's the thing about neurofeedback. Let's say you're obsessive as an example. That can happen with some spectrum stuff. You might not want to lose that. But you might want to have some control over it. And neurofeedback is a great tool for that. You can train the sort of stuck beta waves and the anterior cingulate that is keeping the thought stuck in your head or the obsessive interest really, really latched on. You can train down the stuck resource like it's a muscle that's cramped and now you can stretch it out. But you still have the ability to hyperfocus if you feel like it. You just don't have to only be in that mode. You can put down that mode a little bit more reliably. And that kind of leaves you with not just no need to diagnose or to kind of label this in buckets of symptoms, but you actually are able to sort of walk away with a lot of the gifts that you have but with control over them. So the superpowers don't stay stuck turned on into kryptonite. You know, Midas starving with gold food kind of resource allocation stuff. One of my favorite sayings is that every strength is a weakness. So if you can turn it off sometimes or at least tone it down sometimes, then suddenly you have control over your own self. Yeah, and you see that in brains that are not neurotypical. I mean, everything from ADHD to autistic spectrum stuff. I mean, you know that trope about the geek who's got allergies and kind of like is high powered and sniffily and a little bit clumsy? Well, histamine is a master neurotransmitter that drives up all neurotransmitters. And so that's literally a brain type. I mean, just like anxiety or ADHD, a lot of the spectrum stuff isn't disease process stuff. It's existing resources we've all got, but some of them have cramped up, often because they're very, very strong and they're hard to regulate. But that's kind of like a bodybuilder who got a shoulder that spasmed and now it's kind of getting in the way. It's not really about a disease process for many of the stuff that doesn't really get in the way beyond the sort of core features of social and sensory stuff, which also crosses that boundary into people that don't have sort of spectrum labels quite a lot too. So as you mentioned, this is an emerging field and we're understanding more and more about the brain every day. If someone's interested in neurofeedback, what are some resources that they might like to research? So there's a great trade organization for neurofeedback called ISNR, the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research. And they have meetings in North America. There's also a European version of that. I'm not sure what's down in Oceania, but we actually have some services. Peak Brain has some stuff in Wellington, not super close to you, but closer than I am right now. And my company works sort of globally and worldwide. We have a lot of physical branches in the US mostly. But neurofeedback is a emerging field, but it's not a new field. It's been around since the late 60s where it was sort of discovered in this form anyways and been practiced in a way that's been elaborating to some extent since then. So I would have folks just honestly in any big city, you can find people doing it these days, a few at least. And I would encourage folks, especially if you're not somebody with typical challenges, it's not just a little bit of anxiety or sleeping issues or some drinking or some post-COVID brain fog. If your brain's really quirky and unusual, I would suggest you work with somebody who can dig in deeply with you and teach you about your brain. Because I think there's a, especially when it comes to complex phenomena, not only can you get agency from understanding your brain, but there's a risk that the mystery gets reinforced and we create experts about us if we don't get the education. A psychologist gives us a label and oh my God, you go Google it or whatever and then you go, oh my God, all this stuff's true about me. Well, no, maybe not. Maybe not really. So I would encourage you to start with someone who does brain mapping or QEEGs and also somebody who maybe knows about your particular goals or complaints and perhaps somebody who says, yes, yes, we sit down with your data and your charts and your assessments and we dig through it with you and we teach you to use it. Because that's not, I mean, so half the field uses brain mapping, half the field does neurofeedback. But of the ones that actually teach you to do it, half again, as many, I would say. So that'd be my thought is for folks that are really forging their own path ahead and whose challenges are not like everyone else's, which is about a third of us, by the way, right? Only about two thirds of people are typical. The rest of us, we're weird, really weird. And I know I personally really love to learn about myself. A lot of our autistic adult population struggle with different self-awareness things. So it's really helpful to help learn about that. That's part of what I teach in emotional intelligence is sort of external ways that you can start to learn how to notice emotions and notice when you're getting burnt out or notice when you're getting hyper aroused or overstimulated. So anyway, we should probably leave it there. We've gone a little bit longer than I originally thought. But thanks so much for your time, Andrew, today. Of course. My pleasure, Paul. Thanks for having me. So I hope you found that really interesting. I'd love to hear what you thought in the comments. And thanks for watching and I'll see you again next week. Bye. Bye.