Unlocking The Power of Your Mind with Neurofeedback | Jess Arce

[Music] are you a parent navigating the challenges of your child's Learning Journey are you wondering how to make education more accessible and engaging if so you're in the right place welcome to the learning disability experts podcast where we delve into valuable insights and strategies to support your child's different learning needs I'm Jess your guide on this journey welcome everybody today we have an exciting interview with Dr Andrew Hill who is a neuro feedback and biohacker um and I'm excited to have Dr Hill share with us his company which is Peak brain Institute and what neuro feedback is and all of that so welcome Dr Hill thanks so much for having me appreciate being here so Andrew tell us um what led you to the journey of Neuroscience uh so I guess growing up I was always one of those kids that had to take things apart you know and had to figure out how things worked um and ultimately the brain became sort of the most mysterious thing that I came across uh but I got sort of object lessons in that uh growing up my my younger brother had a head injury was in a coma for a few months and he came out of it and he recovered most function over time but seeing the really dramatic change in Consciousness from a little tiny injury and seeing how his brain was able to sort of develop you know new new abilities and relearn things over a few months when he was younger was pretty impressive so I sort of uh started me thinking about this mysterious thing that we you know have inside our skulls and we didn't know much about then and we still don't know an awful lot about it in in many ways so uh as I got into you know years later into neuro feedback um I did that from working in other areas of Health and Human Services so I've done a lot of work in really acute environments impatient environments for folks who have um severe mental illness and psychosis folks that have uh substance abuse with mental illness you know dual diagnosis units they're called I worked in geriatric units that were mental health focused I worked in children latency age units that were locked facility for violent psychiatric kids and then I worked in group homes with adults with multiple disabilities for many years and across all this landscape you know Human Service sort of job you know moving from one thing to the next every few years I didn't see a lot of improvement I saw a lot of uh paliative care I saw a lot of people who really cared working with these individuals but I didn't see a lot of impact in people suffering be it anxiety or ADHD or substances or Autism I just didn't see huge changes I saw you know I I spent one year when I was working in this group home uh running a group home I spent a year teaching a guy to use a fork that was our big accomplishment that year was he could use a fork and you know so going out going out into restaurants and things wasn't quite so you know embarrassing for his caretaker because he was using a fork instead of just getting into all of his food you know um that was a big win and then the next year they didn't keep his education going and he devolved back to not using a fork again wow so seeing really severe suffering developmental issues injur injuries psychiatric problems uh really you know was kind of frustrating and um I actually got injured working in a psychiatric hospital and couldn't keep doing the Hands-On sort of semi violent work that I was uh exposed to and so I left Human Services for a few years and went into technology and did high-tech database work and some other stuff this is around like just before the 2000 Tech bubble uh corrected and then when that happened I sort of said well let me go back into Human Services you know I miss working with people I have a lot of experience with kids and developmental issues oh there's this place nearby that does This Thing Called neuro feedback i' heard about that's kind of exciting I wonder if they'll let me uh do an internship and do some observation and I walked in thinking I would have a part-time you know short-term kind of observation job and I walked out with a job an actual job because I had so much experience with autism and other developmental issues and that was their their big need and I worked there for a few years place in Providence Rhode Island called the neurod development center and within a few weeks of working there it was really shifting my perspective on what was possible so this this tool that I'm happy to unpack called neuro feedback actually changes the brain and it changes it relatively quickly at least compared to most of the other interventions I had seen you medication Psychotherapy structured behavioral interventions etc those can make change but it's kind of slow and you also have to take into account developmental time courses and things for both children and Elders is a is a long-term uh perspective on change for a lot of these areas of suffering and yet in the center I was working in I was seeing ADHD drop away in a couple of months I was seeing eye contact recover and autism I was seeing verbal procity that lilt sometimes autistic folks are more impaired won't be able to monitor the tone of voice they make so they talk like this you know it's it's the lack of monitoring your own procity or the lilt of your speech I was seeing that return I was seeing seizures go away I was seeing obsessions go away in like weeks and it was just shocking to me because I didn't think it was possible you know we do a lot of um in the field of neuro feedback we do a lot of executive function assessments uh CPT go noo style assessments which is a pretty good way of picking up like the ADHD landscape of things doesn't diagnose ADHD because you could have impulsivity from anxiety or you could have inattentiveness from a sleep issue or concussion but you can see the behavioral component of these executive function things and uh now I still do this but back then we would assess people with what's called a brain map or a quantitative EEG and a performance test that measures these executive function uh resources and pretty much without fail your first retest which is usually in the second month you've done 20 or 25 sessions of neuro feedback about three times a week pretty much without fail in exec to function complaints you can get more than a standard deviation of change against the average population in that kind of time frame in like six or eight weeks I started to see this with the first batch of clients I was working with and going wait a minute this doesn't make sense this isn't what I thought was possible for ADHD or anxiety or seizure or Autism what's going on and at the time this is to date myself this is 25 years ago or so and at the time the field was still pretty uh nichy I mean it is now there's only about 15,000 people in the world that do neuro feedback professionally but back then it was like a couple thousand and this is before the modern internet so we're all on the use net and mailing grip and mail which is like forums and mailing lists and things uh arguing about with each other about how it works and what the best way to do it is and why my version is better than your version and it was a really vitriolic little you know corner of the of the technology landscape a bunch of crabs and buckets climbing over each other trying to my way is the best no my way is the best and yet all of these schools of thought were getting better effects than traditional Psychotherapy medication and other interventions dramatically better effects so and they weren't in agreement with each other so I sort of decided we had a blind men and elephant situation going on you know everyone had a piece of something they were describing and they couldn't quite figure out the overarching so I went back to grad school and uh went went to UCLA and studied the brain studied cognitive Neuroscience which is the pr the the field that looks at how essentially the brain is producing the mind or aspects of the mind like learning and attention and things like that so I Dug Dug deeper into the brain and got some education and I did a bunch of research looking at Placebo control double blind manipulation of the brain using neur feedback and also get into this idea of laterality the idea of assessing different systems in each hemisphere and how those hemispheres might interact and and coordinate across different types of uh Behavior so um while I was in grad school I started to see the the mechanism of neur feedback that was something that had never been uh demonstrated my one of the things my dissertation work did was it showed how the brain was noticed missing the process of neuro feedback um if you could share what neuro feedback is and also you keep talking about how quickly progress is seen I'm really curious as to what that timeline looks like sure so the timeline I'll reverse the answers the timeline is quick you feel neuro feedback in three to five sessions uh I would say most people do about one person out of 15 or 20 feels it the first time about one person out of 15 or kind of never feels it but things start shifting anyways across their life their sleep their stress their mood their attention so let me give you a specific example that involves uh you know real circuits in the brain real resources um we've got a circuit on the left sort of between the crown and the ear whose job it is to stabilize to keep you in the mode you're in so it keeps you focused when things are boring keeps you on task even if you'd rather not be it actually keeps you asleep as well at night so it maintains you awake and focused when you're awake and as sleep when you're asleep and the circuit uses beta waves to do its job a similar circuit on the right knows if you're paying attention it's supervising the attention and that also uses beta waves to do its job and these two circuits on the left and the right these Central circuits will kind of go more automatic using alpha waves or theta waves Alpha is a neutral between the gears and Theta sort of takes the brakes off and lets things happen so often on a brain map or a quantitative EEG you can see one person's resting levels of these things being a little unusual and go okay a lot of alpha on the left inattentiveness you know it's hard to stabilize the motor in and things start to drift when they get boring the one on the right if we're not supervising the momentto moment executive anything that's higher stimulus good or bad pulls our attention squirrel and we look for that shiny object or the thing that's higher intensity than the the boring stuff in front of us so often people who have difficulties with executive function whether or not that's you know classic ADHD or something else that comes along you know with executive function complaints often you want to exercise or want to improve the beta and reduce the Theta or the alpha so the way you do that you might train the brain for half an hour about three times a week maybe four times a week and you typically feel neuro feedback for the first time about three or four sessions in and what you're actually doing is you put some wires on the head and put some ear Clips on and set the software up to measure the left side measure that beta also measure the alpha is your child strugling with school feeling overwhelmed introducing 3D learning experts your child's personal tutor our expert Educators provide personalized one-on-one support tailored specifically to teach to your child's learning style we specialize in helping students with dyslexia disg graphia disc calcula and similar learning challenges our tutors are trained to provide effective strategies for reading spelling writing and math with our Innovative virtual platform your child can learn from the comfort of their own home no more commuting or scheduling conflicts give your child the Boost they need to succeed experience the difference with 3D learning experts [Music] or the right side and the computer simply watches your brain moment to moment as you make a variable amount of brain waves and whenever the brain briefly shifts in the right direction for that workout the computer sees that and starts to plot it with auditory and visual feedback so the alpha goes down the beta beta goes up and a Pac-Man starts to move in the screen or puzzle pieces start to fill in and the Brain goes oh stuff I like stuff stuff's cool and then it happens to move in the wrong direction the alpha comes back up the beta dips and the game slows down or stops the brain says hey I don't like no stuff where's uh where's my stuff and it happens to move in the right direction again and the Applause continues the big trick is we're moving the go posts every few seconds we adjust the computer next to where the brain is so you're only getting applauded for the movement that we want to reinforce or exercise that day so it's Operate conditioning on Behavior but the behavior is involuntary you can't feel your brain waves you can't really control them so you're sort of being exercised and people train the brain from about half an hour at a time usually about three four sessions in uh in the session or right afterwards the brain says oh oh oh you want some beta here you go and you get a larger surge of those beta waves and you feel that sort of go wait a minute feeling calm and focused this is weird maybe imagining it no there's something there huh and then it wears off the next day you're like I might have noticed something and if you do it again it happens a little stronger so you have this opportunity to like stretch a brain resource look at the after effects on sleep stress mood attention those are the obvious and easy things to change the big gross features and you get some Chang typically that you feel I would say about 90 95% of people feel the session it's kind of subtle but it's not nothing and you kind of can tell something's happening in the background and then your sleep is different that night better sleep deeper sleep lots of interesting dreams or maybe you trained the brain the wrong way maybe work out too hard or use a protocol that's not well suited to the person now you feel kind of wiped out in the session kind of wired afterwards and you can't fall asleep that night and it wears off so the next day you say oh I didn't like that I felt kind of activated oh really your brain did oh okay try this version and typically get a better effect so it's very iterative it's not medicine where there's like a discret intervention for a particular diagnosis it's more like okay here's your brain here's your resources here's your executive function on testing on assessment data what's important what do you want to work on and the reliable stuff you can see on a brain map on a quantitative EEG are these regulatory features that all of us have but they tend to um the the regulatory features want to sort of adjust as you go to meet the demands of the world and cognitive challenges and stress challenges and things like that and I consider the regulatory stuff about eight things all of the features of executive function or control over attention fit into that category it's meant to change if you're in a high you know paced sports game or a car crash the way you use your executive function is very very different than if you're sitting weeding your garden but they're both executive function control over the progressive Behavior that's you know trying to get to some outcome so executive function is really obvious in these big gross circuits you can also see things like speed or processing how fast the mind works a lot of our kids with uh you know LD difficulties will have a processing speed internal language issue and some of that not for everyone but sometimes it's a pretty big drag in language access simply because the brain isn't handing off language between parts of the brain that well whenever it briefly shifts in the right direction and the person doesn't read as fast or absorb what the reading as rapidly or doesn't retrieve information as rapidly and if you have an LD kid who's got that kind of slow processing speed used to be called slow cognitive Tempo it's really just the alpha the the idol of the machine is kind of draggy that can be developmental can also be because somebody is uh disregulated in sleep it can be because of concussions and anyone who's in their mid years if you're noticing increased difficulty tip of the tongue word finding hunting for names that's the same thing happens to us in our mid years as we have crappy sleep and the Brain slows down a little bit we can notice uh speed of processing hitches now these aren't things you should worry about or tolerate you can change them but it's a natural process so if you're having that happen as a parent well now you know what your kid feels like when they're trying to read and the information isn't quite getting in reliably it feels sticky and slippery and not quite accessible that's the Alpha Speed other regulatory things that are probably relevant here include sensory processing social processing see that in the brain uh and then stability the brain is trying to maintain stability against seizures against migraines and that kind of stuff so you can see a lot of these gross features in resting brain wave patterns so like the ADHD brain has a high amount of theta compared to Beta lots of dis inhibition and for a while in the late 80s and 90s we were actually using brain mapping quantitative EEG to almost diagnose ADHD there's some Studies by uh Dr Vince manastra in the late 90s showing that you can sort blindly sort thousands of cases of kids into ADHD and non-adhd buckets with about a 94% accuracy rate simply on the ratio of theta brain waves disinhibition to beta brain waves activation now that research was really compelling and over the next several years I kept seeing you know conferences every year I'd go to conferences and some grad student would replicate Dr manastra research every year the strength of the findings kept getting weaker and weaker what's going on couldn't really figure it out was it flawed research probably not because we're still seeing the same thing but no one could quite get the same robust level of uh specificity that Dr manasra did and then somebody did an analysis of the populations they had used for the research and looked at sleep and they realized the reason we couldn't see we couldn't distinguish ADHD in the EEG anymore was because the population of adolescents that had been used the cohorts that had been used we're getting progressively more sleep deprived over that decade so sleep deprivation in a kid brain looks like ADHD and I'm sure all of you parents who have kids who don't sleep well know that when they don't sleep well they get more scattered more emotional less executively you know self-controlled so you can see sleep issues you can see if someone's got a dysomnia you don't know what it is but you know they're not managing energy really well so executive function anxiety sleep sensory social speed uh there's a handful of other things you can kind of see at a high level and if you combine that the the brain mapping assessment with actual performance a continuous performance task a go no go style task which is really common for looking at executive resources those two things together can kind of outline brain resources and so a lot of psychologists and doctors will use this as a tool set as part of an assessment you know landscape to go build your IEP or to write out your neuros report or something and while I do some of that for people mostly what I do is I sit down with your data and teach you how your brain works it's not about getting to the right diagnosis it's about finding the things you already know about in your executive function stress and sensory issues and whatever else it is and once I show somebody I've had this happen so many times again and again and again every week I show someone their brain and they're like oh yes it's real I'm not just imagining my anxiety my sleep issue my distractability it's right there I see it and so the moment you see your physiology in data and I'm explaining hey this uh brain pattern often means that uh you you're anxious or you're distractable and we see on your performance test that you're distractable or something once I start teaching the person about where that resource is that they kind of already know about it changes their perspective on their suffering you know if you understand yourself you can be super frustrated at your broken shoulder on the X-ray but you probably aren't ashamed of it or guilty or overwhelmed the same way and yet we are for our anxiety our inattentiveness our impulsivity our rumination we feel out of control of those things often and like they're happening to us and they're often given a label with all the stigma attached to whatever it is you know having a different type of brain but I'll tell you I look at thousands and thousands of brains every year people are weird good job be weird the goal is not to be a a looking at a brain map which is compared to the average person your age to see what sticks out the goal is not why aren't you average Let's Make You Average it's like okay some things are sticking out does this matter to you are we seeing things you care about and so often in executive function anxiety stress fatigue you can see these gross features or if as a kid with significant LD issues you'll see language tissue disregulated so when I work with kids I also compare them to a database of other kids that have learning disabilities and it's not again a diagnostically precise tool but I can tell one person how unusual their brain is is in left-sided language features compared to the average kid or often like not just in people that come in with LD complaints but often I find that someone has a little tiny hint of an auditory processing issue or a visual processing issue and it's being called ADHD and I look at their brain I'm like wow your visual attention's amazing you're super sharp you're super self-controlled actually way better than typical and most of your auditory is too but the alertness for new information in the auditory is horrible it looks like you're having specific like timing lag onset for the auditory tissue so you know your psychologist sits there and says do you have trouble paying attention and you go sorry what oh check mark ADHD no it's it's an auditory lag and you can see it in the data and often I'm working with adults as well and I'll say okay so tell your partner your wife your husband call your name give you a beat of time and then continue and they'll feel way less ignored and you'll feel way less talked at because all your brain needs for auditory is a half a second of orienting time to lock in or if I'm working with a kid you know maybe their parents and showing them this that one little feature the auditory lag suddenly gives the parents a perspective on what they already know and gives them advocacy sort of ammunition to go to the school and sayl we need the IEP modified our kid needs lectures recorded instructions written down because this is auditory lag and attention that's in the way so you can really get into the place where you're looking at your resources and starting to take a different kind of control over them kind of like doing a blood test and then going oh triglycerides better back off in the bed in Jerry's and you can learn to take control of those uh resources without being in this there's something wrong here's the label let me fix you it's more like going to a high-end gym and doing lots of cool analyses and then going oh yeah I do want denser bones and better muscles and I do some pain there yeah yeah yeah yeah that that that and so we're trying to really provide agency through the brain mapping and performance testing and then we do this thing called neuro feedback um most of our clients work from home in neur feedback which is a little unusual we've got uh a half a dozen offices throughout the world including La Orange County uh St Louis Manhattan uh London and Stockholm but I would say only about 20% of our clients visit offices and most of them we send the equipment out and the coaches I'm I'm also a coach in the company the coaches work with you live and teach you to put a cap on your head and squirt it full of gel for the assessments teach you to sit up some ear clips and put a wire or two in the right place when you're training your brain so we gradually teach people to do neuro feedback to to stick wires to their head run a session and then look at the after effects with uh some perspective on how do we adjust do we do we get the effect we're looking for do you want to you know push the brain harder back off so it's very iterative personal training and then uh most mostly involuntary you can't feel your brain waves so what you're doing a lot of is then the next day saying oo I kind of liked that I cleaned my house I felt calm I wasn't mad when my mother-in-law called that was weird so you have this like shift of regulatory resources in sure to notice it and also of course asking people to monitor this stuff dayto day your sleep your stress your mood your language your anxiety whatever it is as you monitor it you start to develop a different relationship with it and you start to think about how to change it so just the act of measuring something manages that thing per uh Peter Drucker in business context and in this case if you teach someone to like monitor their deep sleep and then drawing their attention to the things they're doing the day before they could be throwing it off or improving it you know neuro feedback or otherwise it creates this agency uh in people to start taking more and more control so I do work with an off lot of things that have diagnostic labels and people that have diagnosis but I'm not here to be another expert to give you a label and fix you I'm here to be an educator and a coach and a scientist and to teach you about yourself and about your regulatory resources so you can start becoming your own expert doctors are great but they have to be right you go to doctors for answers not for random information scientists you come to for questions and coaches you come to for techniques so we iterate we try we teach we explore we do new assessments and gradually help people move through making changes neuro feedback in a typically developed brain even ADHD and seizures and Trauma you know suffering is happens to humans but even in in even in those brains you get about a standard deviation of change every other month on like attention testing or big features of anxiety or something so a couple rounds of that like three to four months we'll typically take ADHD that's really severe you know on a bell curve it's two or three standard deviations off the mean and it will move it up to above the mean in four months you know 50 sessions or something or 60 sessions pretty reliably now not every single person has that rate of changed but most do for things like ADHD and there's other resources that are relatively tractable among the best among the most tractable things we go after aside from executive function would be sleep that's one of them anxiety features you can see the an serious singulate uh a lot of kids that have LD will have anxiety features as well you know having ADHD and anxiety at the same time is pretty common you're gifted and anxious and a lot of times you'll have the singulate the front and back midline will be kind of cramped up as well the one in the front helps hold things in your mind the one in the back helps Orient to the outside world when those are cramped up we tend to develop ticks and obsessiveness with the one in the front and rumination with the one in the back also see social and sensory stuff behind the right ear so if someone's autistic and doesn't have good verbal procity or isn't picking up social cues with uh you know face expressions then behind the right ear will be unusual it be kind of stuck and hard to take information in so if you teach somebody how their brain works a I'm not trying to reinforce the diagnosis instead I'm exploring things you probably already know and it starts to shift this uh perspective on our suffering and then as you report what's happening day today and start to feel a little different that creates more agency it's very sneaky what we do we thrust agency upon you by helping you transform and teaching you about it instead of becoming the guru we're teaching you how to think about your stress your fatigue your seizure your your ADHD and for things like ADHD at least there good literature showing that the effects are longlasting there's research showing 6 months 12 months 5 years and 10 years for uh both kids and Adolescence for ADHD um the seizure landscape is actually how neuro feedback was discovered and a lot of folks with differently developed brains will have some seizure difficulties they'll have some trouble resisting you know all brains all human brains are actually balanced on the edge of having a seizure you know life is the the balance between Chaos and Order too much order is death too much chaos is you know not working and we we we balance called the edge of criticality human brains are sort of about to have a seizure all the time and then resist it kind of like humans that are walking are about to fall down all the time and they somehow manage not to and it's really easy for a human brain to have that threshold to resist the seizure drop a little bit and have a seizure break through children happens all the time with a fever file seizures and that's not epilepsy that's just changing the chemistry electricity so much that a seizure is allowed to sneak through and if you have a kid who's had one seizure or two seizures with illness when they were five and six it's probably not really a big deal if it never shut up again it's probably just a febr ale seizure other kids with especially autism and other more significant developmental atypicality seizures come along with that often and so you'll see a tendency for seizure the field of nerfy back was uh sort of established in the mid-60s because of a serendipitous mistaken finding that neuro feedback reduces seizures dramatically ever since then that's been one of the uh areas of research and impact that we've been exploring you know quite a lot and the literature on seizure suggests that the average you know a metadata study across many many studies the average reduction was 50% and 5% of people get complete control of seizures I've never seen a result as poor as 50% not once not once and the and and here's a fun thing about nerb the warnings are the faster they change so if you have a really severe anxiety really severe seizures really severe ADHD see it more clearly in the brain maps and B you're actually going to get somewhere in a few weeks often start to see those effects start to build up quickly so personal training for brain waves but oddly involuntary that was a whole lot of information and hopefully I can remember all the questions that came up in my mind while you were sharing uh my first question is if someone has lots of neurod diversities can they work on them all at once or do they have to focus on one at a time you don't have to focus on one at a time you would often do more than one thing at a time but you know we are sort of full of system of resources so in the gym you know you wouldn't work out your bicep and your calf at the same time but you would work out your bicep and your shoulder at the same time potentially so in neuro feedback we often are balancing protocols trying to work on Executive function energy and sleep uh and then managing the stress you know and those can cramp up in many different ways for different complaints but you kind of have to always work on sleep stress and attention what whatever you're doing because that's kind of the the basic machine if you go and do a deadlift in the gym you've just worked about everything and sleep stress and attention almost always will Flex a little bit when you do neuro feedback classic neuro feedback and then you get these after effects on sleep stress and attention kind of like you can tell that you worked out and so how your sleep your mood your focus your stress response how they shift a little bit the day after or the or the few hours after you did your neur feedback that actually tells you about how the Nur feedback was Landing so you kind of get this Global you're train the person and you're targeting certain goals but you're also getting Global effects and then you can think about the those first big three sleep stress and attention is very much a foundational set of resources and as those stabilize is your child struggling with school feeling overwhelmed introducing 3D learning experts your child's personal tutor our expert Educators provide personalized one-on-one support tailored specifically to teach to your child's learning style we specialize in helping students with dyslexia dysgraphia disc calcula and similar learning challenges our tutors are trained to provide effective strategies for reading spelling writing and math with our Innovative virtual platform your child can learn from the comfort of their own home no more commuting or scheduling conflicts give your child the Boost they need to succeed experience the difference with 3D learning [Music] experts then you would want to do sort of like an order of operations thing where you bring other secondary goals that are a little more tricky in afterwards like trauma developmental trauma cptsd regular PTSD it responds exceptionally well to nerfy back you can help somebody pull the teeth of major PTSD in a few weeks developmental trauma is a bit more complicated and longer but you can have major impacts it's interesting because I never heard of CPS TP p ps I can't say it but I never heard of it before yesterday and then here you're talking about it today yeah cptsd is just developmental trauma it's a slow moving PTSD that's all it is all oh okay so then maybe that's not the same as what I just learned about yes which was um about childhood like sexual abuse and PT is that is that it is it's in the same ballpark cptsd now this is a psychological categorization but you can think of axis one versus axis two difficulties and AIS two difficulties are what are called personality disorders narcissism ocpd Etc borderline those are injuries of relational attack M because you weren't safe as you were developing attachment resources that is where cptsd is driven from it's the amydala it's the Parry aqueductal gray it's that posterior singular I mentioned but if you develop in a safe environment and then experience trauma you can see the brain cramping up against the trauma as a PTSD response but if you're life was very adversive and difficult as you developed you don't see the little signatures in the cortex sex as a cramped up resource because that's how the world was and you have to kind of you can still go after those things but some of them are subcortical which you can't see on the surface of the brain and some aren't the same kind of cramp as somebody who's an assault victim or a Warf fighter or something else those are much more visible and and actually easier to change in the brain Maps uh very quickly a couple of months done a lot of work with uh veterans and you can really pull the teeth of classic uh major you know PT SD in 6 seven weeks for some people like really thoroughly ramp it down um developmental trauma cptsd comes from all kinds of adverse experiences as you're growing up and sexual trauma definitely happens it's a large you know unfortunately a large percentage of people experience uh abuse from adults that creates it but it's not so much the particular nature of the event it's the relational stuff being abused that is what's causing the you know people are not developing secure attachment and safety around other people basically so then they have this different way of navigating those sticky and stressful and frustrating things as adults because their attachment system their relational system with regards to other people is insecure it's Push Pull it's avoidant you know isn't smooth and isn't isn't the same as everyone else is that's what cptsd is there's a really good book in the field of neuro feedback by an author named Seaburn Fischer and seber's book is neuro feedback in the treatment of Developmental trauma and it's all about using it for um PTSD and cptsd curn made a there was a paper not too long a couple years ago showing that one single session of neuro feedback on the back midline um in 85% of people with dissociated PTSD one single session changed the coupling of the back midline to the amydala just abolished it so it got rid of that over uh activated threat response essentially um most things in Nerf do not happen in one session you know it's a gradual workout but I use some of these techniques that I mentioned that that that sebr discovered I use it for different people different goals it's a very rapid experience you know it's you sort of speedrun your processing um if you if you work out the back midline and can really uh develop much more stability and security with those relational things do you meet for each of the sessions or do you just meet occasionally and they do most of them on their own independently the latter uh we we do initial guided training okay um so I work with people initially going over all their brain data and teaching them how to think about data and they teach me what's important in their data basically and then I build a workout plan uh which has six or 10 styles of neuro feedback that should hit their goals I'm not sure yet but makes some sense it seems plausible you know often has worked and then our coaches work with our clients to do live sessions for a couple of weeks and we give every client a private chat a slack channel it's always open 12 hours a day seven days a week so after the first couple weeks you know how to stick a wire to your head and get software running you might not know what to do next or if something happens you won might able to troubleshoot so then we're right there on slack every day and someone can jump on and ask for help we take over their computer or they have a new question we can answer it and we also have you fill out surveys twice a day so every morning one how you're sleeping end of every day you know how are the other goals shifting if they are and so as the surveys come in the coaches jump on your private chat and say hey thanks looks like we're on track let's do two more yay and the person has this like you know development or handheld kind of experience other times it's like Oho sorry you're in a really rough place right now let's try something new let's try this so we're both trying to help people make change they notice moving towards goals as well as sort of responding to the day-to-day complaints about suffering and stress I mean if you walked into the high-end gym with your clipboard full of complicated workouts and you had a really rough couple of days the coach might look at you and say steam room sauna you know it wouldn't make your workout super hard if you're rough and we do that too we're you know oh paliative today or boosting today or calming today so the coaches are always online and we're always right there seven days a week great and does insurance cover this type of service not real well is a short answer but you know we end up being like I'll give you some some pricing in our two-month program um it's like it's about five grand or so for two months in that time you do 30 sessions of neuro feedback and two brain Maps uh and if you went longer our prices Dro to half when you extend so it ends up being about a 100 bucks a session out of pocket when you work with Peak brain so at $5,000 for just a couple of months and I guess for the for the more lifechanging results you're talking like $7,500 yeah so it's 20 it's for our plan list price and all your listeners get F get 250 off by the way you guys can have a little little break and the 250 off comes off of either a full package or just brain mapping you know our brain mapping memberships which this is really disruptive in the field brain maps in the field run between 500 bucks in the low end up to about 2500 bucks for for a single assessment Peak brain charges 500 bucks once a year for unlimited Assessments in the offices and your listeners get that for half price most ADHD brains have a problem stabilizing sleep spindles this this thing called Sigma or a sleep spindle it's supposed to fire when you hear a sound in the world when when you're asleep to keep you asleep if you've ever seen a cat on a window sill watching birds that liquid body completely still and laser-like focus uh that's the same state sensory motor Rhythm when you're awake SMR is used to sit still and calm down and stay on task when you're asleep it prevents you from waking up it's also used to prevent seizures to like pump the break so the brain doesn't take off into a seizure point being the cat on the window cell the calm focused cat is literally literally literally the opposite of ADHD literally so if you train up SMR train up sleep spindles in humans that have ADHD you eliminate the ADHD and you optimize their sleep almost every time there some research by uh Martin ARS Arns in uh Holland showing that at least in some classic cases ADHD is a failure of the brain to stabilize this brain wave and when it's asleep we call it a sleep spindle or sign almost every single person it's very rare I mean one out of a thousand who has ADHD doesn't have some sleep disregulation so I must be one of those one in a thousand because I I've definitely got ADHD but up until um hitting menopause I never had any problem sleeping menopause will do it yeah it's done will do it I have tons of middle-aged women right now who've gotten their first ADHD diagnosis at age like 47 oh no I've been ADHD since I was a little kid but if you were like if you were just barely Subacute as a woman it would get missed because we don't pay the same attention to behavior I I didn't get missed I mean I'm telling you right ADHD I wasn't diagnosed with it officially but I mean I remember in fifth grade running from my locker to my desk singing screaming you know I mean you know most yeah do not behave like that right did that wasr a failure to make lots of SMR so it was harder to sit still so you were looking for stimulus you know and this is this is germine to folks that have kids with some executive function disability let me give you a really useful bit of information the ADHD brain under high stimulus and high intensity is able to shut off the Theta and bring up the low beta no problem and hyperfocus and into flow States better than the average brain actually but under low intensity there's almost no ability to do that voluntarily what this means is your kid will seek High stimulus things we know this if we have ADHD kids but here's something you might not have figured out it'll also train your kid to yell at you sorry train your kid to be yell so you yell at them take the trash out or clean their room because they'd rather have the conflict creating the higher intensity oh wow then the boredom of sitting there yeah I'll get to the trash mom watching TV yeah I'll get to it because it's a change of veent change of intensity to go down it's very painful in some ways so they'd rather be come on yell at you okay okay the intensity comes up and they'll train you to do that to yell at them because it creates this engagement of attention and they might not even be aware of it but all the time parents are like I don't know why I yell at my kid so much he's so frustrating it's this like little thing I've got into well yeah you're he's probably reinforcing it in you because that engagement is intense like a video game or a sporting match it's not positive appetitive engagement but it's high veence over low veence that's interesting and the ADHD brain is really wonderful at directing resources in response to the outside world and really poor at driving on the road by itself staying internally directed so op uh uh actionable stuff for the parents listening if you notice kid is Pok in the Box maybe that's why is your child struggling with school feeling overwhelmed introducing 3D learning experts your child's personal tutor our expert Educators provide personalized one-on-one support tailored specifically to teach to your child's learning style we specialize in helping students with dyslexia disg graphia disc calcula and similar learning challenges our tutors are trained to provide effective strategies for reading spelling writing and math with our Innovative virtual platform your child can learn from the comfort of their own home no more commuting or scheduling conflicts give your child the Boost they need to succeed experience the difference with 3D learning [Music] experts that's interesting yeah one because I homeschooled my my youngest two kids for the last 10 11 years of their career and my second youngest when asked what do you like least about homeschooling what answer was I hated my brother and my mother fighting all the time and so that was our you know that I guess the stimulant of getting my youngest son to do anything was me yelling at him I mean my daughter took a video of me chasing him around the kitchen once that was a common place to get him to cooperate and you felt you had to but he also probably reinforced that behavior oh definitely yeah didn't know why he reinforced it you didn't like it didn't like being yelled that emotionally cognitively but it was in more engaged mode than sitting quietly and trying to work well this has been an amazing interview I appreciate all of your um insight and expertise about the brain so what's the best way for people to reach out to you yeah so folks um I've got some socials of course my own social medias are Andrew Hill PhD Peak brain my company is Peak brain La is the are the socials but also check me out on YouTube Dr Hill drh l l and every Monday night I do a live stream where I am setting myself up doing neuro feedback answering random biohacking questions so you can come check me out on Monday if you want and you know eyeball it in real time and get into it with very very low risk what time did you say that 6m Mondays Pacific 6may 9 pm Eastern yep 9 P p.m. Eastern it is it is saved on the on the YouTube channel you can go back and watch old ones but if you want actually ask me questions in real time come hang out we call it neuro feedback and chill we like [Music]