Unlock Your Brain's Powerful Potential With Neurofeedback featuring Dr. Andrew Hill

[Music] welcome Dr Andrew Hill to the podcast today I am so excited to talk to you about something that is so important and just is so applicable to so many lives so thank you so much for being here today of course my pleasure thanks for having me absolutely so I want to Dive Right In because I'm just fascinated with what you do and it's something that you don't see in mainstream but I think really needs to be in the mainstream and understanding our brain health so can you talk about what you do and how did get started in doing what you do sure so um I am a cognitive neuroscientist which sounds really you know Ivory Tower education focused and what it is is sort of the practice of using a mix of physiology or or or brain measurement and performance measurement things like attention or sleep and uh you can put those in contrast and and the field of cognitive Neuroscience we use those tools to start answering questions about basic science you know what is true What mechanisms how's the brain built how does attention work how to sleep work or learning and uh similar Fields when they're people focused like neuros pychology will use some of the same Tools in trying to localize difficulty or figure out uh you know a particular diagnostic uh uh sort of category to slot somebody in but what I do is sort of use those tools to teach people about their brain as it works so that people can then use what they know and learn about themselves to transform and we also do a technique uh which helps you change your brain quite a lot uh so these two things these two pieces are quantitative EEG or brain mapping and um neuro feedback or training the brain waves the EEG using a form of biof feedback and so the the big mission the big reason I do this is to really help people gain uh an understanding of themselves and and stop being quite so overwhelmed by perhaps the stuff that's you know happening to them or the label they received or the particular suffering or lack of access to goal or performance that they're experiencing um I I used to work I guess to answer your question how I get into it which will maybe unveil a little more about you know what it offers uh about brain mapping and and this this transformation sort of landscape I I I worked in Human Services mental health uh developmental disability uh all those fields for many many years um and probably had done 10 or 11 years working in that environment uh including a lot of acute impatient psychiatric work and I ran facility for um several adults with uh non-verbal developmental disabilities and often you know dramatic level of of of impairment and so I walked through you know a long time after undergrad going through different Allied Health kind of roles working in really acute uh Edge case suffering or performance difficulty and I didn't see a lot of change I didn't see a lot of people getting their needs met I saw a lot of paliative care um especially working in acute environments I saw a lot of people getting caught you know before things fell uh all the way apart so to speak but not always and we didn't have a lot of tools to help people move out of those environments we just sort of tried to stabilize and then relied on you know the person's resilience to reassert itself I did a lot of work with kids in those acute environments and that's what I saw mostly with kids is you take a really traumatized or anxious or drug abusing teen or somebody out of the environment sometimes for two or three days four days and you can see this this writing motion like a ship that is bouncing back up uh uh you know natural resilience especially in kids but less so an adult sometimes less so with these Progressive disregulation and things that we consider mental health things so I went through uh all this time doing that work and then was getting a little discouraged and ended up getting injured and couldn't keep doing the uh couldn't keep doing this the same work that I had been doing in the same environment so I left mental health for a while and went and did high-tech work and got you know geeky for a bit and then um after a few years in that environment ended up going back into mental health but I did it at the sort of intersection of tech and brains and found an Autism Center that mostly uh used this technique called neura feedback that I heard about and I was kind of curious so I walked in there trying to get an internship and managed to get a job and um worked in this environment for a few years seeing uh how these techniques brain mapping attention testing neuro feedback biof feedback all kinds of related phenomena uh and and techniques how these things can help people make change and I started to see within weeks of working there started to see actual change people coming in with really severe executive function difficulty or anxiety or sensory or seizures and then training their brains for a few weeks and seeing changes wait a minute what this is not what I expected and then reassessing people a couple months after for executive function changes and seeing actual you know multiple standard deviations of change against the population and this was in a mostly kid and Adolescent some adult but it was a more developmental population and uh now I know that's not that was not an outlier in fact those are somewhat harder populations to make big sweeping changes and when you're have a lot of really unusual developmental stuff going on um there's just a lot to do and there's a lot of tissues like language and things that aren't especially amable to be to be pushed around you know but what I discovered there showed me that there was enough here that we had to maybe figure out what this was and um this is a while ago to give you some perspective where probably around the year 2000 or so or soon after and uh at the time there were two or three or four different churches or schools of neura feedback that all had different techniques and they you know they did different things in terms of the basic neuro feedback approach uh with signal processing and how they approached you know frequencies and all kinds of things and they all had really different ideas about uh how it should work and you know crabs in a in a bucket lots of people arguing with each other about how things were working and it was very vitriolic infighting you know but but yet these three or four different schools of thought all had better outcomes in lots of things than anything in traditional medicine I was like okay Blind Men and elephants here where people are describing something they're seeing that's valid but they're not really concluding the big picture real well we don't know how it works we we're seeing being phenomena and that's of course how the brain work the brain is you know part and parcel of working with the brain is working with a phenomena and and big features and traits because people are weird and the brain's poorly understood so put those two things together and you actually end up working with brain a lot from the point of view of mind which is the person's experience and then we talk about limits and resources so I was working this environment and I ended up seeing so much that I had to go back and uh study this stuff uh at the grad level so um learned to do you know research level eg a bit more rigorously and went through a few years of learning uh you know the academics of the brain a lot more deeply and did some research looking at how the brain was actually yoking to the signal you know neur feedback the way it works is it's a way of uh shaping the brain for the Geeks in the room it's a operate conditioning it's a shaping process where you simply measure your brain for most most flavors of neur feedback you measure the brain moment to moment as it changes in some particular resource or region you just kind of measure it and whenever it happens to briefly shift in a a certain direction you think is worth working out or increasing you applaud the brain with auditory and visual feedback the brain's like oh hey stuff it's happening let me get an example so there's big circuits involved with um identifying the outside world what's necessary to focus on the orienting watch the road heads up heads up careful careful sharks that's the back midline the posterior singulate and we all have one we all use it pretty constantly but the back midline can get kind of cramped up can get kind of overactivated your lifeguard can become kind of freaked out about sharks in the indoor pool um if it learns the world is not especially safe or predictable the cost of missing that a second time is super high so you get a little a little cramped up a little resourced in that way where you can now evaluate be aware be threat sensitive perhaps and if it cramps up very hard we get into areas you know things we call PTSD or panic attacks or you know other phenomena so the posterior singulate it's a powerful little circuit and it's supposed to be doing lots of things and occasionally gets stuck so if you wanted to unstick yours if you had an overactive fear response you ruminated you had a threat sensitivity that was in the way you might decide to exercise that resource into more of a place where you wanted it kind of like having a really strong muscle that's cramped up you know you're not going to lose the strength by exercising it you're going to get a nice range of motion now may have another another mode it can go into so to do that practically you would stick a wire there uh on the scalp plus some ear clips and just measure the alpha waves the resting tone of that tissue moment to moment and measure its beta waves probably kind of a crampy activated mode which is you know more more uh aware and voluntary and whenever the brain happens to briefly shift so the alpha goes up and the beta goes down for half a second computer sees that and starts app plotting good job brain good job brain good job brain little games move you know Pac-Man eats dots or puzzle pieces fill in or all kinds of things can be you know made into gameplay and then a couple seconds later that beta surges again and the game slows down and the Brain says hey I don't I don't like no stuff where's my where's my stuff and then it happens to fluctuate in the right direction and the game resumes and the Brain goes oh okay and after about two or three sessions it's not usually the first session of Nur feed back after about two or three the brain goes oh wait a minute Alpha you want some Alpha okay here's some Alpha and it makes a larger Surge and you feel that and you're s of like whoa wait a minute huh I might be feeling a little different am I nah N I think I'm imagining it may maybe nah and then you do it again and you're like no hey guys um I uh I feel a calm I feel a little little bit you know still it's kind of weird then it wears off it's a little bit of a stretch and then it wears off transient and the more you do it the less it wears off but you tend to have this window of from an hour or two to a day or two of noticing shifts in the stuff you're training and the stuff you can train and the stuff you can reliably see in brain mapping are these big uh regulatory features stress sleep attention speed of processing sensory function social function you know these gross features are generally fairly um you can kind of spot them you can kind of get a sense of how your attention works Works in a in a map of your brain or your anxiety you know we mentioned perseveration rumination threat stuff which is the back of the the brain there's a similar singulate in the front which is more about selecting the internal environment you know what do you care about what's important what are you thinking about I call that that the CEO the anterior singulate who's walking around going think of this we care about this do this do this do this and when the anterior singulate cramps up we tend to get uh obsessive perseverative stuck in our head but being stuck in your head struck in your gut can be skills you can be a CEO and a lifeguard it can be powerful you know it doesn't necessarily mean these things are problematic so I tend to do attention testing and a brain map and then sit down with you and say hey look here's some unusual features of your brain let me teach you some of the resources how they're laying out in data let we teach you to read data why don't you teach me what's important what's ringing most true because people are weird we're looking at population level stuff good job be weird the point is not to say why aren't you average it's to say hey look is this useful do you care because it's not a diagnostic landscape where we must get to the diagnosis and the best like Frontline medical intervention we're trying to create agency and awareness of what's happening and you know you can do neur feedback to shape the EEG if you wish but let's say we see that your I know alpha waves are running slow and that's why you have word finding issues and delayed recall and you have some chronic high beta and I say hey look this is often a generalized you know stress response sleep maintenance issues kind of draggy tip of the tongue oh yeah I'm burnt out oh okay this this might be related um this is often from your sleeping is regulated so here's four sleep hacks oh you aren't doing two of those well at all oh try that for a month I bet you get deeper sleep less sleep start feeling sharper and smoother feel less like you have to keep your foot on the gas let's see what happens so once you have the sense of how your brain works it's not about which label it's not about doing feedback or any particular you know Hightech intervention necessarily it's about oh that's how my brain works okay and it might be some suffering it might be some gifts it might be a mix but even if it's suffering or pain or something the moment you sort of see it understand it get a sense it as a real phenomena you you're suffering your your complaint you're you're you know pushing towards goals and being frustrated isn't exactly shifted instantly but it's a lot harder to you know be be overwhelmed be be uh ashamed feel guilty about the fact that you're tired all the time or you're stressed all the time or you aren't feeling effective at your executive you know follow through on things because you're just doing too much and you know you're in full catastrophe mode like many of us are uh these days so long-winded answer but I got into this to provide agency and then use these tools and double down on these particular tools of of Neuroscience because I can teach you uh about your brain pretty well for a lot of stuff we tend to care about and I can give you tools biohacking tools as well as you know specifically neuro feedback for uh making the change if you have stuff that's in the way yeah what I love about this especially as you're speaking is that it's so empowering to hear because a lot of times people look outside thems to make these changes like oh when this happens then I'll be able to sleep when this happens then I I'll be able to focus more and what I love about this method is that you're really using what's within you to create changes outside yourself and and experience life differently and and I just love that approach that you have it within yourself and also another thing as you're speaking is like you talked about taking the shame and guilt away from that and when you're seeing the brain waves like oh my brain is just responding in a certain way and when you can take that away it almost feels like it's more actionable like you can move forward in this you can start making those changes rather than being paralyzed by there's quote something wrong with me so I I I love that approach and it's I think it's just so FAS and one other thing that I love about as you're speaking is that it's individualized and a lot of times treatments become so blanketed like oh you have depression here this is how we treat that but we are all individualized and why would you know we we have individualized medicine for like heart conditions why are we not doing that for the brain and so I I absolutely love this approach and I want um for someone who maybe doesn't understand the brain waves can you dive into that deeper because that that I think is really a big core piece of that of course is that like if we understand the brain waves what are we supposed to be looking for like if we want more Focus attention in our life and be able to really dive into something feel that flow State what are we looking for as far as the brain waves that's resemblance of that sure so you can think of brain waves as like little tunings that lots of machines can do so we've got about two billion they're called microc columns or mini columns and they're giant clusters of quartex the the cortex the bark of the brain is this giant sheet of tissue that's kind of wrinkled up and and and packed very densely on top of the brain the surface to create a lot of uh surface area and that's where most of the the neurons that produce brain waves little bursting patterns of electricity and the cortex is made up of columns that run through it that are six layers deep and those layers have you know 30,000 neurons and 100,000 support cells gal cells and other things in there and that whole little 30,000 column uh of computational units is like the city block party happening in that one corner of town and you've got a whole bunch of those You' got you know a couple billion of those and they happen to have clothes lines strung between local buildings so they can influence each other and they have like longdistance telegraphs strung to really far parts of the city that may have functional significance like the mail place or the sewer or wherever else they may have to you know be aware of and then you can regulate you can change the dance party happening in one block and it can affect somebody else the whole the whole system can start changing these are brain waves and tuning the sort of function of that part of the brain will create different experiences so you're you're not in a particular brain wave state overall there's not no such thing as like being in an alpha State you're always making Alpha somewhere lots of places in your brain the circuit will have gone into a neutral a rest between the modes that's alpha alpha is a quiescent uh frequency uh an idling frequency like your car in the driveway that's not necessarily running actively fully engaged straining burning fuel lot a lot but it's sort of in between it's balanced it's that thing you shift through and Alpha is also our speed of processing so the speed of your Alpha tracks very strongly with how rapidly you can shift your mind into gear and run things uh cognitively so that's the alpha but 10 Hertz 10 cycles per second 10 little oscillations per second and Below Alpha you have the slow brain waves and above them you have the Fast and the slow are things you live in and the fast are things you think and and feel and perceive so above Alpha mostly the beta waves uh into the teens and up uh to the 20s you have beta waves and that's really where the mind the perceptions the emotions the modular circuits of the cortex that do things we care about and feel mostly beta and then again below Alpha we have deltas and thetas Delta twice per second two Herz is the heartbeat of the brain it's the stuff of life it's the immune system it's the heart and lungs moving on their own it's the moving in and out of deep sleep at night and having surges of Delta uh the the deep sleep or Delta State at night is a fairly strong amount of Delta and it produces this memory consolidation signature where the the memories Ripple throughout the cortex and move into long-term storage Delta creates this literal mechanical wave of fluid like an agitation cycle in a in a washing machine at two hurts while we're sleeping to S of progressively pull out all the toxins around any residual tissues that need to be washed out in the brain it's pretty cool stuff Delta but the stuff of life you don't think in it and if it's excessive when you're awake you feel really tired or you feel brain fog if you're feeling like you can't think clearly you can't think smoothly enough you don't have your reserve you're feeling your tiredness you're making lots of extra Delta and or fast Delta um and that might be because of sleep deprivation stuff might be because you had covid might be because of concussion or mold or lime or chemo or so many reasons doesn't really matter why if you aren't continuing to insult the system you can see the phenomena oh hey your Delta is super fast you're not getting good deep rest huh yeah I'm not is it because my concussion or my co don't know but you're not experiencing either right now let's work on the phenomena and you can work the system out and get some changes so Delta Theta Alpha slower and then up into the betas and where the betas are operating in the cortex and um I sort of skipped a piece of it Theta is lubrication and release it takes the brain waves and lets things happen in the circuit so beta is the gas pedal in the circuit Alpha is the neutral in the circuit Theta is the release of that circuit Delta is more of a deep deep metabolic shut off or rest or healing mode of the tissue and you have things called gamma which are up above 40 Herz but gamma's sort of a thing you can't really measure um without getting into a ridiculously expensive of lab most of the stuff you know there are some exceptions but if you hear the word gamma in an EEG consumer perspective it's kind of like the word Quantum someone's trying to take your money you know it's not a real word in health the word Quantum sorry guys like yeah you know maybe in a computer environment maybe in like a nuclear medicine you know cancer treatment environment but the word Quantum is a you know it's a sign of somebody who's who's who's trying to push some snake oil usually um and the word gamma in in consumer EEG is kind of the same above 40 Hertz and there's something called the one over F or amplitude over frequency rule in all systems from be it weather or the body where anything that oscillates that is stable as you go up in speed or frequency of the oscillation you go down in amplitude so a Delta wave twice per second giant big two big giant waves 10 microvolts of Delta two big waves but 10 microvolts of gamma at 40 H Hertz these little tiny waves 40 of them packed into a into a second and electricity inside your head is really hard to measure and it passes through layers of tissue the the CSF the the fluid it absorbs some of it you get the skull the meninges the scalp everything just kind of attenuates whenever you pass through a layer of tissue you you dampen the the signal and gamma's too small to measure by the time it gets outside the head unless you're using very sophisticated stuff so ignore gamma as an aside but you can see Alpha Beta all the rest at rest and you will have a signature you'll have an amount of beta of theta of Delta of whatever at each part of the cortex that's just kind of hanging out there across many minutes as a as a trait resource or a signature it'll fluctuate briefly as you do stuff with the tissue but how it tends to hang out and and how it regulates in general you can kind of see that and it's stable across many minutes it's stable across months so a a measurement of your resting power or speed or connectivity patterns across many minutes would look the same month after month after month after month so it's kind of an interesting metric like looking at a blood a blood panel or something but we take the the EEG the resting patterns the quantitative uh measurement of these patterns and we compare them to age match samples so what you get out of this is a heat map that says hey look here's how you're weird cool here's some things you've got lots of beta here and you you make lots of theta there and hey your Alpha's interesting speed cool and then you start modeling and saying okay here's some plausible ideas your Alpha running a standard deviation faster than average you've got a really fast mind you're like you know Alpha correlates with uh IQ really strongly so if you fast Alpha you generally have super high IQ but if you're Alpha spreading out where it's not fast everywhere now it's handing off information between parts of your brain is hard and and you're having word finding issues so just from the speed just looking at how your Alpha speeds throughout the brain you can go hey wait are you having word finding issues is there delayed recall oh there is okay cool we're seeing something interesting for you or you can see the singlets other flavors of anxiety behind the right ear is this big chunk of tissue called the tempo parietal Junction and I call it the princess and the P because it kind of like gets irritated at all the stuff coming in uh the sensory stuff the you know when you're mad at your partner for chewing too loud or your kid screaming can't just go through you every time uh or the social information people's anger their faces their judgment their you know the noise they make when it's all little intense that's usually a sign you can't quite filter that back right real well and that might mean you're somebody who experienced you know a lot of a difficulty early in life and you're gifted it may be somebody who's you got to touch a social awkwardness and you're not always picking up all the information and it's flooding but you know you can be successful and Powerful with either of those complaints and you know it can be kind of a gift and kind of a complaint at the same time um or you can see aspects of sleep as I mentioned earlier and then executive function which we all care about the left side of the brain uh and the right side of the brain kind of between the ears and the mid mid cortex there are strongly involved with the mix of uh sleep and executive function so the left side sustains the spotlight or the mode uh uh that you're in essentially so the spotlight in the world when you're focusing when you're watching that boring person lecture when you're listening to that person present data and you know you should be focusing the ability to just stabilize and keep the mud off the off the headlight and keep yourself on the world left side uses beta and the right side um is kind of like the principal walking around the school saying hey are you sure you want to do that no there you go okay good job have fun okay are you sure no no no oh oh okay all right good job you know it's not negative it's a little bit steering it's inhibitory pulls back and they use beta essentially for these roles and the left one tends to make a lot of theta and Alpha sometimes and the right one tends to make a lot of theta so the left one gets kind of automatic and drifty and the right one gets automatic and we call this respectively ADD and ADHD so if you don't have a lot of beta tone in the left you will generally have issues with sustaining Focus unless things are intense but oddly enough you'll also usually have difficulty staying deeply asleep because the Sleep maintenance is also managed by that uh left side and the right side the principle if you're making too much data Rel to to Beta then your brain's like squirrel and it reacts to every little bit of outside stimulus and gets pulled by it and the beta that the right side uses is a special beta called uh sensory motor rithm 12 to 15 Herz in in humans and you've seen SMR sensory motor Rhythm if you've seen cats on a window cell watching Birds that's still laser-like focus and the body is totally you know ridiculously still except for the tail maybe twitching but this just motoric this physical inhibition and an intentional laser likee sustained attention Vigilant sustained Focus that's a special mode that bodies that animals go into including humans called SMR sensory motor Rhythm but it's also called things like sleep spindles it sustains your deep sleep so the cat on the window sill literally the opposite of ADHD but sleep issues almost always go along with ADHD but I can teach you about your SMR and your executive function never getting close to worrying about if it is it ADHD or not and it's often overdiagnosed and more working about hey look here's are you having some sleep maintenance issues or is there a focus difficulty and by measuring performance measuring brain starting to sketch out a landscape it's a lot closer to like going into a high-end gym and doing the dexas scan and the body you know Fitness screen and the bone density thing and coming up with a set of goals and mapping the exercises in and then we help you uh make changes if you wish so yeah so those are the brain waves Delta Theta Alpha low beta fast beta and then gamma but you know gamma is a bit more of a snark uh than anything else so be a little bit cautious interpreting that unless you're a grad student reading cool p papers and doing cool research you know so thank you so much for sharing that because I I'm sure people have maybe heard of those but maybe have not had such a clear you know clarification about that so thank you for sharing that so we can kind of understand like what are we looking for like when you talk about the thing and one thing as you're speaking so if when you have someone come in I know you um compare to the age uh data do you so if you have someone come in for their first session do you then compare where their brain mapping is the first session and then compare it to where they are the second session and looking for those progressions absolutely yeah we do uh mapping well there's two ways that might drrive or two two reasons that might drive the frequency or how often you map now if you just mapped your brain and measured your executive function performance every day or every month it would roughly be the same and it'll bit of fluctuation in Performance Based on fatigue and stress and if you're over it that day but the brain's kind of the same uh unless you're really thrown off you got a concussion you got some new covid you're you know you you've gone from day shift to night shift and you're not adjusting something then you see a quick change or medication change adderal no Aderall or 10 days after you start an SSRI you can tell if it's going to work in the brain Maps before you might feel it which is kind of cool you it can take a few weeks for that to build up frontally but you see it 10 days in so it's a tool of agency in that way and and Peak brain my company um we provide a u an unlimited membership for brain Maps it's a one-time fee um it's 500 bucks but podcast lessen is it's half price so 250 and you get access to brain mapping in all of our offices um without limit the idea is to teach you to use the tool to teach you to become your own expert not to become a doctor where we diagnose and write reports but where we get you close to the data and get you valid and get you understanding the real Neuroscience for you where it matters so you can then progressively move through so if you're somebody who's trying to figure things out that can be a reason to map and then maybe you go forth and do therapy meditation medication make sleep changes diet changes who knows and come back every several months and you would start to see the stuff you're doing make change um when we're doing neuro feedback uh we remap the brain every 20 or 25 sessions so every other month basically um my fairly standard uh initial course of Nur feedback for folks is three months generally and that's between like 40 and 50 sessions of neur feedback you know three to four times a week for half an hour and you map the beginning you map um at least you know 25 sessions later so at that 25 session Mark which is you know six seven weeks for folks in features of uh executive function uh anxiety and a lot of other stuff you'll see in data but for executive function it's both the performance we're testing and the Brain Maps you generally get more than a standard deviation of change against the average person in that first uh uh remapping and if you continue to do another you know six or eight weeks map again another standard deviation or two so when you have somebody come in with fairly extreme anxiety or ADHD or sleep disregulation or trauma response and there's a couple of standard deviations of change on the table right there it really is I mean I I used to work in traditional mental health this kind of feels like cheating sometimes it feels like I get to give people changes I get to provide this agency and people move through like not you know being able to sleep because they've been drinking for 25 years and they can be sleeping again in two months or somebody who's deeply traumatized with a recent PTSD trigger in six or eight weeks has the teeth pulled from it and now they're working through the more you know sophisticated aspects of it the the cognitive the relational aspects of it perhaps um ADHD you tend to make two to three standard deviations and almost everyone almost everyone and doesn't have to be quote unquote ADHD it just have to be executive function you know needs or demands or goals and it's not just about fixing problems you don't have to have a deficit to go after a goal so while you could bring up your performance and executive function with no deficits it wouldn't move quite that rapidly nerve feedback is great because the things that are worst or actually what moves the the best it's probably the brain doing that not not the nerve feedback but um ADHD when you have a real big deficit or a seizure disorder or lots of anxiety or something really in the way you get this just linear change for several months and you can take control of your suffering and make change but people may want to work on things like creativity Flow State access Consciousness uh talking about your emotions because you don't know how or can't those are actually reliable things with your feedback you can train it's a whole category one of the early uh corners of the field was this uh technique developed called um Alpha Theta neur feedback and Alpha Theta has grown into several different things but it's sort of behind a couple of big splashy uh things in the field now um and what it does is it brings you to the edge between awake and asleep that you go to and it holds you there for 20 minutes or so you know you usually go move through that moment in 30 seconds 20 seconds 60 seconds like you're moving through it and you're like oh I have this great idea or my story plot or like this I figured out how to solve world hunger and then you wake up the next morning you forgot it all because you know it was just as you had a Creator burst as you fell asleep but if you can hold yourself there for 20 minutes and then progressively educate your brain in ways to do that you start getting the access Consciousness stuff the experiences of it while doing the neur feedback but you also get more reliable Harvest from those stat you come out of this sort of dreamy state of doing the eyes closed or feedback and you don't just like leave the thing behind you actually get a little Harvest from it and some insight some awareness some emotional access some like gentle and run around a trauma response you aren't like digging in but you're kind of getting awareness um and then there's there's good research showing that you get creativity boosts that are dramatic there was some work at one of the big performance colleges in London I forget which it was but there a publish studies showing that they they broke students apart and did different interventions and the group that did neuro feedback had a whole grade level higher in final production for creativity and uniqueness and all kinds of things that just jumped right out uh some of the same techniques Alpha Theta were really developed on alcoholism initially the peniston protocol in the 60s and 70s you do alpha Theta and you give people the ability to downshift at will which if you're alcoholic or have been chronically drinking a you're hyperaroused you can't sooth or self settle or downshift B you're probably not super comfortable with your internal environment that probably is why you why you drank and see a lot of the drivers for disregulated substance use have nothing to do with substances they're about anxiety they're about executive and impulsivity they're about maladaptive soothing y y out of sleep you know especially alcohol can become a slippery slope um so these are all things that you can go after without having to come up with like the Identity or the overarching label of the phenomena and I think it's a valid way to go after yourself to say hey I don't care what we call the thing that I'm dealing with but I want to know how it works and I would like to know some ways to change it you know unless you're acutely disregulated I think you can really approach your brain from a fitness perspective the same way you go approach your body from it yeah you might need an OT or PT in the gym for some really some actual you know damage or inuries but you also might be able to become a sophisticated selft triner in the gym you know over time gradually so that's what Peak brain tries to do we give you the tools of understanding your brain we teach you to do ner feedback uh most of our clients do ner feedback from home so you don't need to be uh near any of our offices we do have four in the US and a couple overseas if you are near La Orange County St Louis New York or London or Stockholm you can come see us locally uh but if you're not okay too you know again you can can uh do most of the things we do from home although we don't have that unlimited homebased assessment sorry but you know you have to come to offices for that unlimited access thing but um the goal is not to become a doctor for you as I alluded to earlier and I I think there's this missing role for uh really coaches to play in brain health and you know doctors are wonderful but they have to be right and they have to have the knowledge to with which to be right and we don't really understand the brain all that well always often and you know go to doctors for answers come to scientists for questions then go to coaches for techniques iterate through techniques go back to your scientist go to the doctor if it's clinical psychiatric severe has needs that might require therapy meds you dovetail it you know blend your resources build your own transformation what I don't want folks to do is to be satisfied with their suffering and their lack of you know I I don't want you to be overwhelmed and think that that's where it has to stop for you you know shift happens get some get in there learn it so anyway there there's my soap box shift happens that's right I love that and what I love too is that it is an integrative approach and that you are the creator of your own destiny it's not just you know here fix me it's like how can I get all the right pieces in that to actually do that and just how profound like as you speaking what I love about the brain is just that how quickly it can adapt and excuse me when you're talking about things that maybe you've had for years and how quickly you can start seeing changes in your life I mean that is huge you know you're talking about a few weeks you're going to start noticing things and and I think that's just so empowering to somebody who maybe has been living their entire life you know maybe suppressing what they're feeling or just trying to put it to the side or trying to plow through it and now you can actually start seeing the changes within yourself in a short short period of time and I think that's just so empowering to somebody who is feeling stuck and I want to go back a little bit because um just to get more clarification on one thing so I know before you were talking about uh that like game so you see the brain waves and then you have that game and it says yes yes and then then the brain wave changes and then it it doesn't give you the kind of that reward when you go through it so you have that aspect of the training and then there's also aspects of like Behavior change like can you talk about in your program like if you when you're using that but also are people also like implementing like things like meditation mindfulness and when you have all those things going on how do you know exactly what's causing those changes or does that matter can you kind of dive into that a little bit more sure have Behavior yeah I mean it probably doesn't really matter for each individual you know what's doing what they're just happy that they're changing um but I kind of know because not everyone does everything so I can sort of see folks that only do mindfulness of meditation we we we have meditation teachers we have free groups online uh we have uh paid sort of short-term mentorship programs mindfulness teachers and short courses for topics that we're adding so we do a lot of meditation and mindfulness work and all of our neuro feedback clients are offered some privates with meditation teachers and access to groups now you may imagine not every person's interested in meditating I'm here for the Hightech stuff I'm here to just fix me you know there's there's some of that why do I meditate especially some of my CEO ah meditate doc now a few months in they're like what else you got oh mindfulness yeah you this yeah okay but like right away there's there this you know maybe not as much engagement sometimes or it may not be appropriate it's not appropriate or useful for somebody who's got severe non-verbal you know autism and seizures we're trying to help the seizures and the sensory not really caring about directed attention work right now or somebody who's got severe uh anxiety in trauma response meditation is not a good intervention for anxiety it's a good floss you know it keeps you healthy it builds resources over time and there's some things you can do that are mindful to help you handle stress but meditation is not relaxing you know you don't go to the gym and be strong you go to the gym and be weak and later on you have strength and resilience and resource you meditate and feel distracted and activated and you know really aware of what's going on internally and over time you develop resilience spaciousness less reactivity so I love meditation and mindfulness really important do it you know um but what we end up doing at Peak brain because we're not really trying to become the therapist there's this you know trick not not trick there's this useful thing that is is done in Psychology called transference where you create a container and a safety and then you work with aspects of relational identity to help people heal through transferring their work onto the therapist sort of classically that's a a reasonable Theory but I prefer agency instead of a container where we are the expert giving you information treating you I prefer to thrust agency upon you by teaching you how it works and the labels are less important than the things you understand about what's going on and that really is kind of like playing keto with with uh you know shame and and and feeling disempowered where you just completely throw them back uh with the you know the the knowledge is very empowering um the uh the there's definitely a role for therapy and most people in the field of neuro feedback who are professionals I think there's probably around 15,000 people worldwide who do this professionally um there's probably around 10,000 of them in North America of those 15 so it's it's a heavily North American and of those 10,000 like nine or in the US or something uh it's a pretty you know Central uh uh part of it's because it started here it started in Southern California um it was very nichy I started in the in the field uh academically in 2005 and the estimate at that point were like 3,000 people in the field 4,000 people in the field in the you know in the US so it's doubled in the past 20 years but you know there's there's more chiropractors in California than there are people in the world that do n feedback you know so um you can find you maybe should find somebody who is a therapist that does neur feedback because they're mostly therapists of those 15,000 they're almost all therapists who first became providers of care in some way and then discovered neuro feedback was a powerful tool for their population of interest for their Eden disorder population or athlete population or autistic population trauma population that they really care about Nerf really works well so they went and they learned some Nerf feedback and they're implementing it with that population in the whole therapeutic container with the skills with transference often if it's a relational you know kind of therapeutic environment so powerful and I think it's really useful but I wanted to provide something a bit different so we double down in the access and education for the brain mapping we provide meditation and mindfulness as the Mind piece of it you know I sort of view neuro feedback like the coach in the gym helping you build a resource and therapy or anything else like the coach in the field helping you learn to change the behavior the voluntary and mindfulness can be that for you I think for a lot of our goals so we offer it we provide it and it dovetails and I see people who you know the same you know population sometimes of people who do mindfulness only do Nur feedback only combine them and there is this multiplicative phenomena when you start stacking things that bring up plasticity nerfy back strong plasticity for 24 hours at least measurable mindfulness decent plasticity boost as well if you combine things you get faster change you also get faster change when you combine neuro feedback with anything else so you combine it with Hyperbaric medicine and it accelerat the changes you would get in your brain from Hyperbaric or you you combine it with medication there was a lot of the research in the 70s was looking at neuro feedback with stimulants and and just stimulants and show just dramatic changes sometimes um part of that's because FYI those of you who may be considering neur feedback if you have in your lifestyle things like psycho stimulant you Aderall rlin Etc or cannabis those two things are dramatically potentiated by neura feedback a few weeks in you will have zero tolerance to those things and they will be at their maximum potential for you which is a good sign in some ways you don't need your Aderall meds anymore or whatever but you have to prepare for it usually neur back has almost no sort of like quick side effects you have to work your brain out in the wrong direction repetitively feel crappy each time and ignore it and keep going before it becomes problematic it's like working up in the gym the wrong way you just have to kind of work at it with ner feedback and it's a bit self-correcting because of that but it abolishes tolerance to cannabis and stimulants which can mean you're suddenly angry at your mom or can't get off the couch and your girlfriend's mad at you because you smoked a joint like literally people get in trouble sometimes with those drug categories if they don't know that so if you're thinking of doing your feedback not just with us but in general the plasticity boost is so high that you wipe away acquired tolerance from years and years of Lifestyle especially dopam murgic things things that are highly stimulating um but you know I I I think that uh I would prefer if I could wave my magic wand and get people doing all the things I would have everyone doing meditation alongside Nur feedback a lot of sleep hacking you know circadian support in things like fasting before bed getting up early seven days a week having a morning practice of going for a walk or doing some yoga before you eat or become sedentary um I would you know have folks do other bioh hacks that are about you know depending where they are lifelong aging or maximum early life development uh I have all kinds of strategies and we tend to sneak these things in instead of saying okay we're going to now transform you and give you 17 things to try to accomplish each day we kind of what what is your goal ah seizures ah executive oh trauma response oh it's so annoying H sorry deal with that oh look we see it oh we see it okay cool Sorry dealing with that okay let's see if we can't get you to feel a little different with that resource is that that sounds good okay good and we start there and then as things start to unfold we say oh hey the Sleep reports you're sending in yeah yeah um we know your sleep depth is an issue it hasn't really changed yet maybe consider fasting before bed two hours or getting your kid a sleep tracker so we can watch deep sleep and we and we kind of sneak in the biohacking coaching for the behavioral stuff for Sleep um and then people tend to you know once we once they we help them create some change you know my my stuffy CEOs who don't want to talk about emotions are like hey what else you got oh meditation okay yeah yeah what's that how do we do that okay you know or you know someone's gotten through taking the edge off their acute trauma or anxiety or whatever and now they're like oh hey I'm feeling pretty good I got some program time left what else can we do oh hey you know now that your anxiety under control I think it's a great time to bring in creativity work and Flow State work if you're interested you know for obvious reasons you wouldn't want to do Flow State and creativity work before anxiety work if someone's really disregulated because you kind of dump dynamite in the kidy pool and drop them into their crap acutely if somebody's got an unresolved acute anxiety or trauma thing lurking and you make them Super Creative they just spend 20 minutes going you know so you don't you don't need to do that Nar feedback never needs to be uncomfortable folks don't believe anyone who says oh yeah that thing that felt weird afterwards yeah you can push through that generally that's not true you know a little tiny bit of fatigue a little tiny bit of After Effects you might feel wired or a little bit tired is is it for side effects that you should tolerate it's like the gym you go to the gym and feeling a bit tired afterwards is is good but two hours later it should be gone or you worked out wrong and you might feel a little bit pumped after the gym but two hours later that should be gone or your something's in your workout in your pre-workout you know um It's that kind of phenomena and and you tend to get this lingering effect with ner feedback about 24 hours where you can see your sleep onset your sleep depth the amount of you're dreaming how reactive you are how much stamina you have how focused you are will shift based on what you're doing to the brain you'll get a different effect and then you have this opportunity to say oh hey I like that new uh protocol that did this I I you we do more of it and it builds up that effect so narrow feedback is kind of mysterious but it's not blind I mean you're getting effects if it's working and then they're building up subjectively and you adjust the protocols like a personal trainer would and then after you built up enough change you go back and you see the stable changes so you can progressively demystify without ever having a label or diagnose in some ways for some of the these phenomena so yeah no I think that's absolutely fascinating and I just I love that like stepwise approach it's not like bombarding somebody but it's going where they are and just pushing them a little bit further towards where they want to go so I absolutely love that and one other question I just want to ask you because um so if someone's coming to you say they have anxiety but they also have like a seizure disorder can you address them both through that or do you address the one that is most impactful and then when that's in a better place you start to address the other one there are things for which you have to do sort of an order of operations you know I alluded to like creativity Works after anxiety resilience work essentially but uh seizure and anxiety would actually be addressed relatively at the same time because seizure uh that the that SMR frequency that I mentioned earlier that suppresses seizure that was actually uh that was the that was the discovery that launched the field of Nur feedback in the mid-60s uh Barry sterman UCLA was experimenting at NASA's behest on cats exposing exposing cats to uh rocket fueld methyl hydrazine and astronauts were getting sick breathing in Vapors and feeling nauseated and you know worse so they were testing the toxicity in the 60s animal research you know so there's some gruesome details here but sterman was putting cats in plexiglass cages with beakers of Rocket Fuel and starting a stopwatch and waiting for symptoms and they found uh after doing this research that of the 32 cats they had 2 24 of them had this perfect dose dependent curve where increased minutes in the exposure meant increased symptoms you know stumbling drooling crying seizure coma death perfect dose dependent curve and eight of the cats not So Much instead of the other catch the 24 having seizures at 40 minutes in these other cats were like two and a half hours in showing a little hint of symptoms here and there but like seemed oddly stable like meta stable they refused to be knocked over by strong irritant in the environment he's like whoa maybe I discovered some new cat gene or something some new subvariant nope turn turns out a different experiment have been done with these cats six months prior where he taped a milk dropper into their cheek and squirted chicken broth into their mouth whenever they made more SMR because cats make so much it was an obvious thing to see if you could do operant conditioning on or shaping on so okay cool can shape up the SMR put them back in their you know cat Playhouse until the another experiment and these cats were seizure resistant because of this SMR training so he took his lab manager who was medication uncontrolled having tens of teaches every month on meol tegral Dilantin big drugs and created an auditory reinforcement training system for her on her SMR and over the next year she trained up her SMR went off all of her meds and was seizure free for a year wow and that was the start of the field in the late 60s so SMR regulates sleep and sleep depth and seizure so if you like had goals of executive function and you know seizure seizure control great and some of the SMR stuff some of the inhibitory tone SMR works with Theta it shuts off Theta to make more SMR so you can control yourself it's also involved with controlling like the singlet or some other features it's not called SMR there because it's really about the the body the sensory motor strip but low power beta controlling the tissue gives you control over the tissue you can decide to hyperfocus or not or ruminate or not you know it doesn't rob you of these phenomena when you tune the brain so um depends on what you're working on but if you if you kind of work on the on on the the legs of the stool sleep stress and attention you would generally do all of those things together when there's an acute destabilization seizure migraine major trauma response it's active you may want to try to put your thumb in the scale as rapidly as possible and get after that because the person's having seizures like you know I had a a young woman come in for training when we first opened Peak brain who was 12 years old but looked five and had genetic protein folding disorder very very small physically and was having hundreds of drop seizures an hour wow like multiple times a minute she would just see you'd see EEG and she would come back up 10 seconds later and come out of it sort of and five minutes later have another drop seizure and had been doing this for 12 years and her parents wouldn't sleep because she would you know stop breathing sometimes and every everything was disregulated and you know they car about her motor coordination they cared about her language they cared about her sensory issues but you know what was most important was the fact this kid was having drop seizures hundreds of times a day and we really just focused on that for a couple of months and over the first four weeks she she dropped down to having about two seizures an hour wow from you know from like every several times a minute she was having seizures to a couple an hour and and that meant her parents for the first time in their you know little family were sleeping themselves at night now which started to change things now dad didn't have to sleep at work some nights be just to be sane he would now sleep at home you know now they weren't worrying all the time about their kiddo you know having a a respiratory event so you know was not a wasn't all of the things we wanted to get done but we really focused on that and the same is true of like a cute PTSD or something someone comes in with massive PTSD that's really recent trauma really activated you might just want to get in there and try to put your thumb in the scale but generally I would prefer to help you change your brain long term and then it's going to be a slow change a gradual change a change you aren't sure is happening but you look back every month and go oh wait a minute oh yeah yeah okay my sleep is way different oh I'm not craving alcohol I stop biting my nails oh good cool and you just kind of happens because the resources build up and this alludes to the question about you know where do you blend in different interventions yeah you can biohack with all kinds of cool tricks you can get all the awesome therapists you can get all the good the good drugs and they may all be what you need but if you also change the resources then you tend to drive the machine better you get better shocks and steering and brakes you enjoy driving you know people with learning difficulties ADHD uh you know issues with short-term memory oh my God doc my my kid's reading for pleasure what did you do he always wanted to read for pleasure but it was really hard to focus not hard to focus anymore apparently your kid loves reading I didn't do that you know just gave got the brain out of the way and the person wants to use the machine and we all want to not be disregulated with stress driven by substances reacting to our partner disproportional proportionate anger or shortness or whatever we all want those things we know our kid wants to be a high performer our spouse wants to be caring and good listener we want to not be a jerk and and not procras tonight we we all know this and if you bring the resources up it just kind of works you know if you go to the gym and do a bunch of curls you don't later on think when you see a heavy thing oh wait was it my left arm I should Li you just grab the thing and move it and when you work on your inhibitory tone and then your mother-in-law calls ranting you hang up having not yelled at her and go oh interesting not mad huh yeah cool and you have better resource integration so yes a therapist can be a big piece of that if this stuff you're working on is you know uh got some edges you know and some some stickiness and difficulty but otherwise it's your brain do what you want so yeah I think I mean it's absolutely incredible and it's exciting I mean it's super exciting because this is only going to be grow I'm sure you know you're always learning new things about the brain and just like having this tool where you can really get to the root cause of things I mean that's that's absolutely exciting for transforming people's life and well-being so I think that's fascinating and for someone who wanted to get into your programs learn more about it and how they can really dive in themselves where can they find you sure so our company's called Peak brain Institute and you can check us out at Peak brain institute.com but all of our socials are Peak brain LA because that was our first uh office and we've got uh again four in the US in uh Southern California we have Los Angeles and Orange County also St Louis also New York City and then for our folks across the pond we're in London and and Stockholm but if you're near one of our offices great you can come on in you can do some meditation work perhaps or join the discount brain mapping club and have have really good deep education on yourself but if you're not and you have needs just give us a shout you know come come talk to us on social media or uh email us in the website or chat list in the website and we can send you out equipment we can do remote brain mapping our coaches are on seven days a week around the world helping Hold Your Hand Place wires buggy for not filling out your sleep surveys because you know that happens um you know they're coaches and they're here to run over when the machine looks confusing and help you set yourself up like the coach might at the high-end gym uh and uh they really care about your you know your your brain experience so if you're interested come check us out but neuro feedback we're not the only game in town so you know if you have if you're thinking this might be something for you it might be and uh there are people in most big Metro areas that do neuro feedback I would say if you're looking for another provider um I'm biased but try to find one that does brain mapping or quantitative EEG it's an assessment tool where you will be in the process will now be individualized to you and most people that use Qs are good providers there are some providers who use more one-size fits-all systems that are magic boxes and that's only great if your magic Works which it might not if the person you're working on is an average so um I would encourage folks to stick to the more science end of the neuro feedback practice space I.E brain mapping as a uh as a criteria for selection so that's more about how to find neur feedback than how to find us but Peak brain LA on the socials come look at our memes and and and tell us your brain uh questions that's amazing I'll put everything in the show notes so if you're listening to this definitely check it out and connect with Dr Andrew Hill and thank you so much for everything everything you've shared today it's insightful It's amazing And it's like I said very exciting for what's possible for us to heal grow and evolve as as we are so thank you of course my pleasure thanks so much for having me it's been great to share a little bit with you today yes thank you and again if you're listening to this episode share it with someone who might benefit from it and you know don't hold it to yourself there's so many amazing points that were brought up here that if someone's struggling this really could be the answer to what they need so thank you again w [Music]