☀️ Why Neurofeedback Therapy is the #1 Brain Hack (part 2) (2024)

[Music] foreign welcome back to podcast number two with Dr Andrew Hill uh to understand the context for this make sure you listen to podcast number one first in that episode we went over all my initial brain map results kind of a functional EEG mapping of what's going on in my brain strengths weaknesses areas I need to work on how that connects to my subjective experience and we sat down we did an analysis we identified sort of the target goals and areas that can be optimized and improved and in this podcast you get to hear all about the results and see the the results the objective results from my second brain map which was done about 20 sessions in so check this out again this is something uh has truly genuinely changed my own life and I strongly encourage you to do your own brain map and get started with this process if you're in the San Diego area contact brain excel in Solana Beach and you can do it at the very same Clinic that I did I did mine at and if you are not in the San Diego area which presumably most of you are not then you go through Peak brain and you can do that uh by using the link and you can get 250 off your initial brain map by using the special discount that Peak brain has graciously set up for energy blueprint listeners and you can get that at theenergyblueprint.com forward slash neurofeedback so with no further Ado enjoy that part two with Dr Andrew Hill all right nice to see you again it's great to see you Dr Hill thank you for doing this part too so for everybody listening uh I just want to create a little context for this so this is unusual I've never done this before we are recording on two separate occasions and we're gonna piece these two together because uh we recorded the last one when I was I think maybe 18 sessions into neurophy and I'd only done my original brain map and now after I think after session 20 or 22 or 24 or whatever it was we did another brain map and now we have objective data comparing my brain pre-neurofeedback to my brain 20 something sessions into neurofeedback and so we can actually share that data and show people the results so I asked if you would graciously extend some more of your time to go over the new results and explain to people what they mean sure yeah absolutely um I actually pulled off by I talked to your provider and I grabbed your uh training record from him so I was curious based on the changes we had seen exactly what because I don't follow the exact course when I'm advising other providers always which is what happened here I gave general advice and I was curious what we did and what changed in your brain so we have some interesting agreement which is cool okay let's look at some data here uh what we've done is prepare some attention test data which are the bar graphs and some brain resting brain activity data which are the circles and we think about these things differently the brain is just you know how different you are than average in most people's brains are different so we just want to look through the differences and model them say here's the difference from average here's some plausible stuff that it might mean and then we're good to go to sort of you know generate ideas about what is plausible we of course now have two sets of data so we also have the added luxury of doing contrast hypotheses if you will hey this change this way this might be experience this way what do you think and and you've got the the owner of the brain here to comment on it exactly so often when I'm doing neurofeedback directly you know our our teams are at Peak brain we're monitoring stuff day to day and I have a much better sense in your case I'm semi-blind because I have this like occasional sense helping consult on data with you so we have again brain map data to to help make hypotheses you can validate with us and then performance data which is this really boring ones and twos test where you just get boarded tears for 20 minutes and we have you click on one or not click on a two that pops up auditory or Visual and it's relatively easy but so boring there's nothing to push back against and we rapidly unload your resources and so there's no practice effect you can't get better at this by trying it it's a little variable day-to-day this performance test because it's picking up how you're how you're performing so if you're tired or stressed or over it or angry you'll see that on the performance you won't see it on the brain Maps brain maps are the same day after day picking up the traits of you at a high level where we also have some states if you will performance in real time so the scoring on this stuff is set up on a bell curve where 100 is about average for an age match sample plus or minus about 15 points two-thirds of people on a belt occur roughly typical and you're coming in roughly roughly typical for some of the resources and not others and there's two sides to this test one's called attention and one's called response control so that's clicking successfully on the one is attention or pumping the brakes and not clicking on the distractor which is the two that's called response control and if we start with response control what we call impulsivity or reactivity being automatic that kind of stuff you're in the typical range in both test Administrations you know around 100. and then there's a little bit of a change in the visual system dipped a little bit because you have reductions in this thing called stamina so your time it tired this day and you're burning out a little bit and so your performance is a tiny bit down that day in the visual a little more clicky on the two as it kept going it was it fatigued you a little bit that day but you're still not letting it pinch up the overall resources are roughly the same you can see at high level it's a few points difference and there's about a five point variability on the on the raw resources here day to day so this is roughly yeah you know it's about the same split some tiredness perhaps dragging you down uh we also of course have this thing on the left this is the interesting one for you and this is called attention how well can you activate and grab stuff and there was some difficulty initially you were coming in about one and a half standard deviations off the main for how on you could be for one one boring stuff you know the transient resource activation and when we dig in a little bit it gets more interesting because we see the visual systems fine right in the middle of the bell curve nothing's in the way you aren't fatiguing out um the auditory though was now showing two and a half standard deviations off the mean okay that's probably a bottleneck and when we dig down further we see this really specific little narrow thing where the thing called vigilance which is the moment of catching stuff as it changes the novel Dynamic information flow we also have Focus which is the boring background so the computer might say one one you know four or five times and those repetitive trials are a focus check but the first one of those as things change gears or a vigilance check to see how alert you are so again this is really quite fine in the visual system so the stuff in the screen the ones and twos when they're changing or persisting are just fine but up here the moment of grabbing the auditory when things were changing gears extra hard you also burned out a little bit when they got boring so that's in the way and as you look here now you've not only eliminated the bottleneck and brought it up to above average level so the vigilance went from 58 to 105. so that's uh 47 points more than three standard deviations change for we usually about one standard deviation change by the way every 20 25 sessions that's what I consider kind of like a round or a dose of neurofeedback 20 25 sessions and it's enough to create a big change a couple rounds of that usually is what is needed though to create this much change just for people not super familiar with Statistics three I'm sorry three standard deviations is an enormous change to see over 20 sessions yeah you went from this stuff really getting in the way probably at times at least when tired and not able to maintain it to you being above average at the top edge of average now at 113 for the gross auditory bringing the bottleneck itself from 56 up to 105 so from like corner of the bell curve in some ways you know all the way up to uh typical so the bottleneck itself got great Focus the boringness the burning out thing went from 79 to 97. this is up right to the middle of the curve and speed went from 89 to 123. folks understand what speed is same thing in visual you didn't need to bring it up but you did your speed went up a little bit um and your your vigilance data Rock style in the visual your focus is down a little bit because of fatigue focus and stamina both dip sometimes when you're tired so these little u-shapes here you're seeing in the attention system with your above average nice and Rock Solid now attention the overall gross attention score went from 79 to 107 that's basically two standard deviations grossly of how alert non you can be at a high level because of the specific bottleneck that was eased that's great but the U shapes that still exist suggest we have a new perspective on your attention resources now you are quick and you're alert but you're using those things a little bit more than average at the speed 123 it's a nice fast speed the alertness is great too above average but you're being quick and alert to catch the stuff you're about to miss is a compensatory strategy you know a little bit inefficient use of powerful but not quite efficient so we took some resources that were a little pinched up and and flagging cramping up and not performing well brought them up to typical and now you're like not efficient yet not perfectly strong at even though everything's out of the way in function so this is the story of my life this is like a microcross and Powerful but not efficient well now you're more efficient which is cool and the auditory system especially which used to be in the way but even the visual got a little better and once your this test picks up your fatigue that day so once you're not tired the focus will actually probably be a little better the impulsivity side again was pretty fine it was it didn't change that much but your stamina is both dipped which means you're a little tired um we also sustained scores what are the sustained auditory look at that the trend across time for sustained scores in the auditory was a 69 which is for mathematicians in the audience two standard deviations off the main off the middle and you went to 110 which is pushing one above average so that's a nice solid change you also flag the positive attention factor initially means you're kind of add in your performance at least auditorily as the driver here and that is now negative so you changed so much you went from inattentive in performance at a high level to it not showing up in a pattern which is great uh any Reaction Time differences and that there was impulsivity there that was positive on the first one as well let's see uh right so the the ability to click to to not click on the two is called impulsivity hyperactivity so you freeze up or release your behavior and that now is negative oh so you also change the uh what did you change enough interesting so everything leveled out just enough to to make you you were barely positive on the impulsivity before is what was happening and you're kind of barely negative now but it's crossed that threshold so essentially whatever's in the way it be it sleep or fatigue or stress or concussions or whatever it is or historical inefficiencies um it's in the way when I first met your brain data at least as much as like ADHD stuff it's at that level I don't know what causes it doesn't look like ADHD in your brain Maps exactly but whatever's in the way it looks a little like that from the outside and it gets in the way that much now you've brought all these things up so it does not get in the way and let's see this was 929 on 929 you've had done uh 24 sessions before this lot this session you did after the map um got a few cents interesting so this is a very large change you're changing about twice as fast as we usually get which is great um our man in Havana or San Diego as the case may be is wonderful and and very careful and has been doing some good work with you apparently now part of the reason we're able to get this done this way and I'm you know this is nice in the data but always check ourselves for a second you're experiencing something you're feeling a little different absolutely yeah I'm noticing big changes in resilience specifically um focus and extended concentration uh and the other thing actually I just noticed really in the last two weeks or three weeks my mood has really improved not that it was terrible by any means before but I I really feel like I'm in probably the best place as far as mood and motivation that I've been in in years I find that interesting because we did this map at the end of September and illy and I consulted about your map and stuff and I gave them some more directions it might make sense and to consult with you and say here's some menu items I think might be good to go after and ever since then the past two weeks well at least yeah two weeks he's been focusing on a different area for you that tends to bring up a little bit of flow we did some Alpha Theta with you the eyes closed water sounds one yeah I wanna I wanna ask you about that I actually just did a session Alpha Theta session a couple hours ago so that's an in that's a protocol that brings up immune function creativity dramatically it re-regulates cravings for alcohol dramatically it has some really interesting um really interesting uh impact across domains and I'll talk about it in a moment let's show some brain data um because that's some that's the sexy stuff visually at least so we have a map here early on and a map that is more recent on the right and again these are about 20 24 sessions and there's some consistency but there also are some changes now one of the first thing things we're looking at eyes closed data here you can tell because we have your your wrapper name here DJ are we and then your album eyes closed is right there yeah your first album yeah we had two recording sessions two albums each day eyes closed and eyes open so it'll either say e c or EO on these Pages folks but you want to look at EC data more carefully because I joke that eyes closed is the first album and eyes open as the Jazz album or the Christmas album or like the Techno project it's a little specific when you open your eyes um it's also noisier like jazz nothing it's Jazz but the forehead gets tight when you open the forehead when you open the eyes and the visual system for obvious reasons gets loaded when you open the eyes so it's hard to predict what's true across people when there's more stuff going on so you cool the brain down a little bit with eyes closed and you can look at some of the differences and wonder if they're true so we were seeing some interesting stuff here next to your ears and the reason to focus on that is because that's where the auditory system lives and we actually had this as a goal to work work on a couple areas involved with focus and sleep regulation and those areas are actually right here in the left side of the head generally the way that I work um you get a lot of sleep maintenance and increased sustained output when you bring train beta up in the left side of the head generally and you have this odd phenomenon on the Left Right Where I done done some training where you weren't making much Delta which suggests your brain was having trouble like shutting off there we sort of had no chill like always on but that would have meant like poor deep rest and not feeling really clear and Spidey being activated would have been non you know efficient in how you felt focused without any chill mode there and we also see other frequencies alphas and neutral frequency it's a little higher now because you're tired and beta is an activated frequency so you're seeing some of the same phenomena now but the big Delta change is why we're getting probably some a huge change in your performance you basically can wake the you can put the brain to sleep or wake it up now this is auditory tissue we have two of them and they're used together and the big issues not so much that you have low Delta you can't turn off this tissue you can't sleep it the issues that only one side is in this mode it's kind of like driving your car with a plastic Tire on one of the front wheels for a spare and you tap the gas and it spins for a second because it doesn't have the same traction one one side and not the other is activated the auditory system it's wanted to like activate together like your legs usually do let's say this bilateral you know paired systems when it's asked to activate one side and not the other this for you probably produced a little tiny hitch a little lag in auditory alerting which is the thing called vigilance on that test we just looked at so this is very plausibly a big outlier statistically that tracked initially when I was talking to your provider this tracked the initial phenomenon okay he's got an auditory thing this is very plausible here's some strategies top of his goals Etc and dig into it as you can see it was this dark blue medium blue color about two standard deviations off the average here's the bell curve again for folks that are watching when things are greenish they're typical when they're unusual they get blue or red so out here two two and a half is what this sucker is and it means this tissue is having trouble making Delta or compared to the average person making less is a more precise way to phrase it and then you would guess some hypotheses a auditory function things are cramped up not relaxing and we saw something there great now what I found really interesting I grabbed your chart earlier today um those are sites called t or temporalib sites there's the mid ones called three and four and there's the lateral ones called five and six T3 T4 T5 T6 and we have a protocol we use which we we measure them relative to each other put wires on both sides so you can see a protocol called T3 T4 there's the date it's a recent one but look at early on we did uh some work on that left side called C3 that's that blue spot right here a bunch of it actually a whole bunch of work at C3 and that helps with sleep maintenance and focus like I was describing I've been on the right side in the same session same C4 for executive function control just pretty you know basic good like you've never been to the gym before let's run you through some Basics and see how you respond some of it matches your data and then here we started getting into tailored stuff are we specials you know things were designed based on very plausibly unique to you needs goals stuff to change and you can see from the beginning of August all the way through in the t t all these temporal load protocols and then a central protocol following it for sleep and executive functions we tend to work this way so one two three four five six little more a little more forward as the numbers get lower Center the head three yeah that was it basically for in for that uh chunk about 10 and then we did some work in the back of the head a little more work on the executive function you mapped and now we're shifting into Alpha Theta so we did about a good solid 10 sessions targeting an outlier as well as the rest of your you know 2000 sessions targeting um some of the specifics in betas and Alphas but really about the regulatory features of sleep stress and attention broadly and bringing in the Target and you can see the change it's really lifted beautifully it's still there this almost reassures me your performance lifted so much this is this is what I expect to see a nice little shift about a standard deviation maybe two if we're lucky okay cool but this is clearly the same brain this is the thumb print or the fingerprint of you and it would have looked the same without neurofeedback that's the interesting thing two months later or whatever it would have been the same you know brain map here uh looks like 10 weeks otherwise um you know there's still some stuff to work on we still see your Alphas a bit low in those same tissues it's hard to relax them in terms of neutral we still see some beta probably still could bring up your sleep quality and focus a lot more but it went from behind the ear to just this this other feature so it's changing as we as we work things out you can also see some stuff happening down here in the the blue means things are low and and the second row is called relative power where stuff takes over for what's low and we're looking at beta waves and fast beta waves called high beta here and you can see these little structures a little little hot spot sticking out that probably represent structures in the brain called the cingulates on the front and the back midline the anterior and posterior cingulate are involved with switching our Focus around the front midline helps us remember what we're thinking about in the back midline helps us like Orient ourselves everything from you know watch the road to grab the Frisbee heads up you know kind of stuff so your cingulates appear to be a little bit hot so to speak a little cramped up in high gear before not much Alpha couldn't make neutral couldn't make Delta in sleep a little bit in the beta so like spasming because they couldn't relax essentially and the one in the front and the one in the back tend to produce common complaints when they cramp up one in the front anterior cingulate produces sort of a stuckness in the mind I call this perseveration songs play in the head you kind of OCD maybe bite your nails or tick or picket stuff it's that kind of like stuck cognitive State and then the back midline is a similar thing but kind of visceral kind of stuck in the gut where you're threat sensitive you're worried you're ruminating so perseverating and ruminating stuck in the head stuck in the gut so I looked at this data with your provider I was like oh okay he's probably stuck in his head and stuck in his gut you know precipitating ruminating those are goals let's do some midline protocols and those are FZ minus pz or FZ in the front p z in the back over these spots and for fun looking at your history we look at the protocols we used and wouldn't you know that we didn't start early on but starting about three weeks before the end of before we mapped you here we did a whole chunk of pz protocols trying to relax those extra fast betas and really bring up some like neutral Alpha and let those circuits unclench so you can bring some beta down naturally we didn't train it down aggressively we just brought up some neutrals you could learn to shut it off you know we don't want to tranquilize you and then a little more executive function we go back and forth this is cross training you can't do one workout every day uh but looking good overall and then a little more FCPS you write when you we mapped you you know last couple sessions as you were mapping so those are the midline structures the fcpzs and gosh if they didn't change by about one to two standard deviations and I would expect here's the here's the the check data's beautiful but like it doesn't matter if you don't feel some change I would expect from the front kind of letting go that you're more flexible you're less stuck in your head essentially and from the back letting go you're less you know back in your heels you're less evaluating for danger you're less ruminating you're less worried so the the biggest thing for me I think was the the posterior cingulative hyper vigilance evaluating for danger that's the thing that that resonates the most and um and that's the thing I I've no that's the thing that well I'll put it this way I'm very good about assessing for danger and keeping um my family my children safe for example but I I also pay a big price for it um because there is my brain is always perceiving the world through that lens and it makes it difficult to relax and not be in that state where I'm trying to make sure they don't hurt themselves or you know um get injured by going into the street or whatever I've been living in Costa Rica the last couple years and there are many many sources of uh lack of safety or things you have to watch out for down there different from living in the states that I think has really exacerbated this for me um theft is a is a huge issue and and home break-ins are extremely common in the area that I'm that I'm living in uh sometimes violent home break-ins um car thefts leaving your stuff on the beach potentially might not be there when you get back um every night that's a concern you know that's in my head when I go to bed setting the alarm system sometimes there's false alarms which set that off in the middle of the night and then I've got to go out of my room with the potential for someone to be in my home and those are all things I don't worry about in the states at all even more so than that simple things that you would never like to an American these will seem totally trivial and they would have seemed that way to me prior to being in Costa Rica but inventions it's made me realize that inventions like sidewalks and bike lanes are amazing brilliant inventions because when you don't have them walking and biking on the side of a road can be extremely dangerous particularly in a place where people drive horrifically bad I've been nearly killed riding my bicycle multiple times in the last couple years and we've had just in the couple Mile Stretch near our house we've seen dozens of accidents and many many fatalities of people right riding motorcycles and ATVs so the dangers there is is very real uh and I'm also surfing almost every day in big waves and strong rip currents and so that that's also a very real danger if your leash breaks you can you know almost every Surfer down there has a near-death experience to tell um so you know this is to say that part of the reason my brain has been trained this way is actually due to real dangers but yeah I I uh pay a price for it to be in that state of hyper vigilance all the time and uh and that's one of the things I really came to neurofeedback wanting to work on so I mean your brain learned the world was not especially safe or predictable and over-resourced you and these things that were already strong probably cramped up and spasmed and got hard to shift out of that yeah especially the complaint um do you feel less stuck in those modes yeah thank you for allowing me to to complete that 100 I've noticed a big difference in My overall relaxation and I went I went surfing this morning here in San Diego and in in a crowded conditions and good-sized waves and um and I went rock climbing this morning with my family and both of those I've always had a fear of heights part of why I enjoy rock climbing is I enjoy kind of challenging that um and I'm so much calmer and more relaxed as I'm doing these things now like my I don't have that adrenaline surge that would normally accompany this um and and I could do it before I would still do those activities it's just now it's a matter of it doesn't stress me or cause a lot of tension and anxiety I can stay in a relaxed playful space while I go do these kinds of activities I I think we'll take that that's that's great me too great yeah that's great I'm glad I'm glad that uh you're experiencing some of this stuff that's wonderful yeah um now also brain maps are the same all the time so you know the degree to what your experience reflects change in you know so I don't know what you're experiencing that's always real but I have hypotheses and my blind hypotheses kind of match your experience you've changed your brain which is kind of cool you're seeing the new resting States typically I would guess people would need another chunk of training to really push them where they want I think that might be true for you we still see those low power beta areas um we still see some residual Tendencies to get stuck um one of the the things that I wanted to folks haven't experienced neurofeedback you're not changed like personality wise you know you if you if somebody if you had to deal with danger that was significant or you do deal with danger rock climbing and surfing you're not dulled or like a Zen monk or tranquilized in the slightest I would assume but there's a different relationship with stress right yes absolutely and and I'm still aware of the danger that's present uh I'm just not responding to it so aggressively um I'll give you an example actually this morning something a bit scary happened which was my wife was surfing with me she's pretty new to surfing I taught her to Surf just almost exactly a year ago so she's one year into it she's very good for only being a year into it but this morning she had her first experience with nearly getting run over by somebody so as she was paddling out there was a guy who did something he shouldn't he dropped in on a on a big wave very late and basically was going right at her and his board didn't the fins didn't um basically sort of grip the wave so he was out of control and basically going right at her she Dove off her board and went underwater to avoid him running into her head and I was just to the side of it I was also paddling out and I so I witnessed it and I was actually I remarked at how calm I was you know I I was I was trusting what I've taught her as to how to protect herself in that situation and I stayed calm throughout the whole thing they came up the two of them you know sort of had a collision he fell off his board and then you know I I was it was actually remarkable to me to observe myself at how calm I stayed during the whole thing and that's for sure is a big difference and right afterwards still calm yes 100 I just went over to her I made she was sure she was okay she was fine and we paddled back out and smiled and she caught a wave five seconds later and and had a good one great that's wonderful I'm I'm so glad to hear that uh all right let's look at a little more one or two things to show you more we have speeds of brain waves here which track a bunch of things like how fast you think and how tired you are generally um so we see Alpha Waves as the speed of processing and this tracks a bunch of subjective experiences it actually correlates pretty highly with things like IQ once it's like in your natural range yours is still pinched by fatigue pretty hard but it used to be a lot worse so the alpha here is running negative numbers from negative you know two roughly down to like negative seven or eight point seven you know sorry 0.2 and 0.7 um it's not hugely slow plus or minus one is considered problematic you know or unusual at least statistically but it's spreading out which means the gears aren't meshing fully subjectively the the neutral modes between different parts of the brain aren't always lining up and synchronizing well when they relax for a moment which makes it hard for them to coordinate so the experience from having the alpha spreading out like this and slowing down like this has a couple of complaints that usually come along with it the most common one is going to be for someone who's an adult is going to be things like word finding issues and delayed recall this is literally your speed of processing handing off hey brain give me the idea the thing I just heard or the person's name here it is great but when you're running draggy you like reach slowly and the information decays there's a timing mismatch and your tip of the tongue with stuff I would guess that used to be in the way a fair amount and Has Lifted a fair amount now is that true yeah you know you you mentioned this to me in the in the first podcast that we did that I might struggle with word finding or that wasn't a valid something to that effect and I I don't resonate with that I mean I've I've always felt that I've struggled with that since I was a young kid I felt I've had difficulty with that I actually feel at this point in my life that I'm white I'm probably the best that I've ever been in that regard so and I'm often told by people that I'm a very good speaker um I I told somebody some family friends the other day that I've that I personally perceived myself to not be a great speaker and they started laughing at my face because they they thought that was absurd that I would suggest something like that so anyway um the the well now I'm struggling now I'm on the spot struggling to find right but um live demo that doesn't you know the hyper vigilance of the posterior stingulate activity that certainly resonates very strongly this one doesn't resonate that well but great well you know what I was doing was a cold hypothesis not a history based symptom matching thing right I was saying here's a hypothesis and we just like we did once before I had forgotten that conversation that difficulty with word finding was a thing and addiction was the thing you'd work through and now you're above average you don't feel as a problem had forgotten that explanation it's still invalid but the other thing that comes with Alpha being draggy is you get a motivated and your move gets low and it's hard to find joy and hard to summon the yeah I want some of that let me check it out cool what's that let me play and as you see the alphas all come up so I'm wondering I would assume a little bit of this improve of this Alpha Speed goes along with feeling more fluid feeling more joy feeling more engaged and motivated yeah so that that part resonates for sure and as I mentioned before the last couple weeks I've certainly been feeling the most joyful playful motivated that I have in really years I would guess this is related to the stuff you've been doing in your life that's not nerve feedback plus some of the neurofeedback you've been doing because that the stuff you've been doing is focused on access Consciousness honestly the protocols recently we thought those might be a good ones for you oh he's going to want to do some Flow State work yeah let's give him the holistic work and that's what it seems like that's real unlock something for you sure which is which is great yeah um but you know earlier on when I first talked I I wasn't totally sure this was like I wouldn't have guessed a mood thing necessarily but the change you're coming in half a standard deviation above average when you're rested you're still dragging here and there but you can see that you went from negative 0.5 roughly up to positive 0.5 roughly you're you're you're you're moving your internal speeds up a lot not 100 some of the the stuff that drags Alpha down is your Delta and the Delta being negative here which is in both Maps suggests the quality of deep sleep is still not great there's still a a sleep architecture thing that's not great it's also related to some of your stress you're kind of so on your brain doesn't like let go all the way and you bounce off deep sleep a little bit so your sleep tracker is going to lie to you and say oh two hours deep sleep but like it was light deep sleep that makes any sense yeah and actually this this room that I'm in right now is in an Airbnb and this is my bedroom um and as you can see here to my right a whole bunch of big blast Windows glass doors and on this side of me it's all glass doors and on the other side there's a whole bunch of Windows and none of them have blackout curtains so I've actually been sleeping quite poorly in this okay home now I have a beautiful ocean view but I do not sleep well in this bedroom at all I encourage you to think about other sleep hacks especially the the one about fasting before bed to let your insulin drop which allows more growth hormone release once you are asleep I eat deeper sleep and the one way you don't worry about your bedtime is you lock in your wake time nice and early seven days a week and you get up and be active in a low-key way for a bit Yeah the biggest thing is the light and I got it I got a new iMac I got a new eye mask that blocks the light completely the one I was using before didn't it was the light was getting in there and disturbing me this one does block it but the other aspect of that is I hate sleeping with an eye mask and the eye mask now disturbs me so kind of the best I can do for the time being yeah and that's all we can ever do right um you've made some nice changes though I bet your brain's more resilient against disruption now this is eyes open data now and again it's your Jazz album somebody's being careful interpreting it as like how you always are but you see all the stuff next to the right ear now so we had low power Delta behind the left with eyes closed the brain couldn't shut off all the way try to open the brain uh sorry Open the eyes and wake the brain up a little bit with sensory stuff it can't activate all the way on the right hand side it's the other side for some reason not sure why and that was high in the amount of like Theta which is like lubrication you can't stop tissue from doing its job with Theta or Alpha which is neutral on the right and then beta was still low on the left or initially and all of that not all of it but a lot of it's lifted you're still seeing that same phenomena because that's the like a fatigue phenomena for you um but these are the areas T3 T4 and fcpz that we trained we also worked on some of the connectivity between those areas and this is hyper connectivity in Theta that's what you have here this is usually not comfortable it doesn't always get in the way it can be just like a bit of a giftedness where your mind's a bit of a steel trap but usually this Theta hyper coupling front to back between the cingulates I mean the part of the brain deciding what to think about and the part of the brain evaluating the world around you are playing ping pong with stuff that bothers you did you hear I heard you worry I I heard I'm not letting things settle once they get up there they're like volleying for a minute and then the alpha phase lag low phase lag means High you know sorry it's a coherent so it's low coherence it's chaotic so the neutral frequency is rather chaotic it's unable to like quell and subtle things and the lubrication is very like legging things bounce back and forth these are usually uncomfortable stuff just just to be clear for people listening this this is in reference to the original brain map I did pre neurofeedback yes the first one we're looking at now has thick lines red or blue lines that suggest again about three standard deviations on the bell curve or more really big outliers very stuck brain waves that aren't differentiating or changing as much as they typically do and now in the current brain Maps we do see little tiny hints of the same regions having tiny little hints of the same connectivity but there's been multiple standard deviations of change in a bunch of places where you just let go of all the hyper coupling and you've rested the brain so it can wake up so your brain's still not resting super well but gosh so much better honestly than I would guess at the beginning so what I heard a minute ago was that your recent sleep's been disrupted and maybe disrupted more and some of the Delta suggests that but this suggests the consequence of that is not as extreme somehow yeah yeah no I I actually feel great I'm I'm uh I have great energy levels I'm doing tons of exercise every day and I mean I I'm the complaint I have from those who live with me my wife and my nanny is that I have too much energy and want to do too much stuff and I I wear peop I wear everybody else out it's great because I'm always trying to go out and take my kids on Adventures and go have fun grad that's wonderful that's wonderful um I took it as a compliment when my 26 year old Nanny was she asked me she's like how do you have so much energy to do all this stuff so I guess I I despite not great sleep I'm still uh functioning like that so we see her sleep eroding in quality and architecture across the past few weeks a little bit but we also see somehow all the things that would normally come from not being rested like hyper focusing feeling Hollow feeling chaotic feeling burnt out those have lifted as your sleeper road so it's pretty nice interesting combination effect you're seeing things to work on which is quality deep sleep and you're seeing that a lot of the stuff that was probably more acute more in the way more specific because actually mostly changed uh towards typical so at this stage you've done a little more feedback since this map about you know five successions and mostly what you've done you can see here uh before I explain what you've done recently this is Theta and Alpha initially theta's High Alpha's high with your eyes open initially so that's too much lubrication too much spaceiness you can't get out of neutral or out of like reactive mode sometimes when Theta or Alpha are high those can be ADHD things or brittleness and fatigue and reactivity they're not usually good self-control stuff and now you don't show any outliers little fatigue here and there low power but no giant like stuck amounts in the Raw brain waves so now without extra Theta and Alpha we've switched to a technique for you more recently called Alpha Theta and Alpha Theta is eyes closed hypnogic State training it brings you right to the edge of a sleep and awake and it lets the monkey mind drop away and lets the Theta the Insight awareness release stuff bubbling up it lets that surge um and so what happens is you end up like doing Insight work visualization awareness it tends to drop away some deep stress from people somehow sometimes not always it can be it can be exacerbate stress sometimes had we gotten there earlier on you would not have enjoyed it you would have been less Spacey and stressed basically I I'm I have to say I'm really enjoying it now I enjoy it more as a regular neurofeedback I'm in fact it scares me that Elia that who runs the clinic that I go to in in San Diego in Solana Beach he's saying oh we're only going to do you know six or nine sessions of it I'm like oh I really want to keep doing this so yeah you can do more he he uh he would probably check with me if you want to do a whole bunch but yeah you can do more okay absolutely more um and let me see uh you've only done with the one channel variant right in the back midline there's a couple other variants we can do which are there's one I want to do with you which is on the side of the head and that will not just bring you into the state of being aware letting the you know busy mind drop away and they wear a mind Surge and the Insight stuff surge it'll also then make both hemispheres talk to each other at the same time which creates this literally internal communication kind of experience not always in language often not in language but it's a deeper level not always a better level but it's worth trying given how your brain looks a bit low power Theta back there you know in Alpha too definitely worth playing with so I'll talk to Ilya and give him a few more things to play with for you um what I would suggest though is you don't do alpha Theta every session you wouldn't wouldn't do deadlifts every day at the gym okay pretty aggressive Alpha that can be um this time we mixed it the past couple actually one of these times you mixed it with SMR but I kind of like pushing hard in One Direction and then letting it settle so what I'd recommend is doing two sessions or three in a row and then shifting you can plan and say hey how about this week we do alpha Theta but next week we do something else okay you can plan based on your goals with Ilia and I'll crank up a higher level version of alpha Theta for you great um I will also uh um help build another protocol which I think is more temporal lobe training well let me ask you do you need more support with executive function and drive and motivation or do you need more support with like relaxing and dropping into that still point being more even keeled can I choose both you can you can but but Alpha Theta is going to get you some of that last one anyway it's going to keep massaging your ability to downshift deeply I'm I'm really enjoying the motivation aspect I feel like I'm on fire with business right now I'm I'm super creative I'm accomplishing a ton of work I'm very excited about a new project I'm working on and I'm really enjoying being in that space and I feel like the most motivated to to work on business that I felt in years so I can if I can crank that up even more that'd be amazing yeah and a little a little more sure yeah and and deepen your sleep at the same time yeah and then I I do struggle to sometimes turn off my brain and and go into to relaxation mode so but I'm you know I'm fine prioritizing using one and then we can work on the next one well you can prioritize the Deep Flow State Alpha Theta creativity deep relaxation stuff and something else in Cross train great and and then choose two three in a row to build an effect switch gears two three in a row that's how you would go deeper at this stage as you would kind of pick hey I want to be in this mode for a minute but you've done four already in a row in that direction probably should shift into a non-alpha Theta this is this is one one useful perspective on neurofeedback is it's personal training for the brain not medicine it's not like a solution for you or a a fix it's exercise and you get an effect you get some shift in the resources afterwards and we have to evaluate that validate that think about training the whole system not push too hard it's a bunch of factors that go in yeah but but uh I'll I'll talk to Ilia later this week and we'll get a little bit of a extra plan for you for some more things to play with great I I do have I've a few other questions for you that I'd hoping I was hoping you'd answer but are there okay so not specific to me but uh in general I was listening to uh an interview you did I think a few years ago with my my good friend Ben pukulski and there was a few things that you said in that that interview that I really liked and and would love to get you to talk about here um so one of them is you talked about Alpha training and you know kind of I think there's these ideas out there there's different brain entrainment types of things out there even for free on YouTube that will say things like you know you know these These are binaural beats or these are isochronic tones or something like that that entrain more alpha or in train more Theta or these are Delta you know trainings um what do you what do you think of those and what do you think of the idea that everybody needs to sort of train to be better at let's say alpha or Theta I mean there's a couple things in there one is we're making all brain waves all the time so you don't want to be in a mode particularly when control over your modes you don't want to just have big clench biceps you want to be able to pick up heavy stuff whenever you need and then relax after that you know so resource management and resilience and staying in a Range of resilience and and sustained output no matter what kind of challenges coming at you that's really the what you're trying to do with the whole system and there's a bunch of resources that I think about blending to build inner feedback but people also think about the idea that you're in Theta you're in Alpha and they often misattribute the the the the particular state that is a little more dominant with the brainwave first of all and like you don't want to be in that brain wave you'll become psychotic no no don't do that um and the other problem here is that a lot of the tools prosumer consumer tools out there that claim to do stuff don't like at all um there are some recent since I did that podcast there are some recent work looking at light sensitive neurons and some special you know things that can be done that don't don't have to be engineered in and mammals seem to be present but for the most part the ability to drive the system with Beats of light or sound require that something exists called The Frequency following response the brain picks it up and starts to resonate it it doesn't exist in humans as far as we can tell so in my grad school at UCLA where I was getting my PhD as a side project because everyone's talking about bitter all Beats on my all my Tas are like hey uh I heard I'm using this software it's really cool and I'm like okay sounds a little suspicious and I had used mineral beats like in in clinics before and found them very wanting in terms of what they actually did the watching brains change under them or not change under them being a little concerned about like what's going on here or not and it always seemed like a bit of a waste of time so I took some time and did a double-blind placebo-controlled study on several different binaural beats where I match the audio characteristics but drop them into a mono to lose the bin oral character thing so I didn't make them isochronic but I made the monos I lost the magic I did double blind stuff compared to Ben oral versus placebo binarals and looked at attention testing looked at resting brain looked at evoke potentials looked at every possible cognitive Neuroscience measure that would be done normally to see some State some some resource shifts not a darn thing uh wasted a whole great you know 10 week research project got some you know look what what has my data you know uh processing uh chops which was the reason for the project but well not necessarily a waste if you're determining that it doesn't it doesn't work it's important to know if it doesn't work since given the prevalence of of how widespread those things are being sold and marketed there's a lot of stuff in the biohacking world on that end of the pool that's a bit you know in the more spectrum and uh I tend to be very forthcoming with my disdain for certain things out there um I I would say folks should be very careful anything making claims because it tends to be a little bit you know bunk also I want to encourage anyone who's biohacking with any uh sophistication or like Risk think about the fact that you know you might want to use true nootropics things that don't have any downsides not research chemicals not some random biohack you heard about on a forum but true nootropics well tested years and years of human experience that show adaptogenic properties boosting certain neurotransmitter sensitivities as a way to dial up long-term performance and or help your aging make yourself resistant to cancer or injuries or whatever there's enough out there you can do that if you're already performing adequately to well you don't want to risk any of this like random side effect nonsense that happens when you're out there in the bleeding edge the blood's going to come from somewhere yeah you know okay so don't do it yourself yeah so with that in mind what are some of your favorite neurotropics race attempts are harder to get now worldwide and in the US and they're also wooden Ras attempts kind of be in that category that you were just referring to though they are they are the true nootropic essentially the first real nootropic but but no in the category of like more research chemicals that I mean they're not I would say they're not FDA approved but they are the first nootropic okay so that and they are approved drugs in most countries okay got it there's no an orphan drug they're not FDA approved but they're an orphan drug in the U.S and so they're unregulated and kind of gray market and you shouldn't use them you know when designing my mom's stock or my friend's stack or whatever I tend to unless there's a big need not go after a race of time anymore or something else like that and I tend to find a choline source that supports them either CDP choline or Alpha GPC usually the former because it's less pushy on mood and fatigue and stuff um you know less cholinergics uh flooding if you will or dominance when you do GPC versions and then I like to throw in uh omega-3 fatty acids ideally DHA to some decent quantity you build up to I like to focus on uh in these days I I tend to tell folks I'm I'm coaching to take a lot of D3 because of the pandemic and the background levels if you're it doesn't screw with your stomach also zinc for the same reasons it has some nootropic or some adaptive properties but it's really more about keeping the Cilia in your lungs beating much much faster so zinc levels are positive correlated with the Celia clearance rate for for bacteria and viruses and your lungs as you breathe them in hey we're in a respiratory pandemic maybe we should keep our little cilia fluttering at their best that's zinc levels and both zinc and D take take weeks to build up appropriately you can't just take them when you get sick so I like to recommend those as background things and then depending on your goals there might be other nootropic strategies but um magnesium tends to be the only other like big category one I think we probably should all take most people most westerners are deficient relatively in magnesium uh and it's it's participatory in so many body structures and processes that it's kind of a thing that if you add more to it you'll you'll figure out if you overdo it but it will support most people better with cognitive Health with brain health with aging Health that kind of stuff so got it um can you briefly uh just reopen the brain map sure the the just any image of uh the ones that are showing like coherence with the the zigzag yeah um I want to ask you something so a couple days ago I was at an event in Arizona uh Health conference and Joe dispenza was a speaker I'm curious to get your thoughts on him um and he was showing actually this these exact images of uh he showed a few slides from a few individuals of this exact sort of brain map um and he showed the coherence one um as just com the whole area was just lit up with red everything and and then he said this is 150 250 400 standard deviations above normal kind of like this guy here it's locked up everywhere yeah and I think he showed a couple images of even uh greater the solid yeah yeah it definitely gets nothing gets more solid than this yeah sometimes that's just noise in the data by the way but if it's not it's a hyper coherence it's over activation over arousal anxiety fatigue stress you know so so just just so for con so this is interesting because he was presenting this as this is 150 250 standard deviations above normal for people listening all this whole discussion that we had was three to negative three standard deviation which is a massive change subjectively for you right at this level of change right but but just forgetting about me for a second so he was presenting this this data um as a higher level of change yeah as basically saying this is 150 300 standard deviations above normal for coherence and therefore this is this amazing brain state that has all these benefits so the latter the latter statement is not true and I would have to look at the data but my my hunch is if you sing hypercoherence everywhere in beta the best way to create that is to clench your jaw and cause muscle tension to flood in and look the same everywhere on the data set so having a head that's flooded in beta does not suggest a relaxed brain or a high performance brain I don't know if it was beta or Theta or Delta I don't I don't remember but I know any of the brain waves hyper-coupled everywhere is an unhealthy adaptation to something extreme generally or it's noise in your data okay I think he was never high performance I think he was presenting it as if it's like some uh very highly unusual highly beneficial meditative State of Consciousness well he may have been looking at the real-time change while meditating and he may have been looking at things like gamma coherence maybe it was gamma coherence he was looking yeah it might have been um meditators especially long-term meditators can produce increased gamma coherence it's not like hundreds of standard deviations but it's also not like it's a thing that happens over time also gamma is extremely hard to measure outside of like billion dollar a million dollar research Labs Joe dispenser may have access to like that he does a lot of sophisticated neurofeedback he does brain mapping so he's maybe you know he may know what he's doing we've we've conversed about neurofeedback here and there as well like I'm I'm someone familiar with what he does my perspective on him initially was more as a meditation teacher and a you know wellness and spiritualist kind of thing and I'm not sure uh I don't have as much expertise let's say in those areas or uh as as he may but the there's good research showing that you get hypercoherence in places in long-term meditators across decades but you also get dramatically altered coherence in gamma in schizophrenics so like it's not necessarily always a good thing and also States shifting a state in real time and showing a change in the brain map is not something you can sort of say it means X even even you at rest is not X it's like here's some plausible ideas so you couldn't do a conclusion like that from one person first of all you'd need like a lot of people you'd need a lot of sophisticated I'm a little I'm a little bit I'm gonna hold my judgment at Bay but part of my My Chosen role here as one of the few neuroscientists in the biohacker world is to be a little bit of a suspicious curmudgeon yeah and to poke holes and ideas and as much as I respect what Dr dispenz is doing with regards to you know meditation teaching and informing and huge Transformations across huge amounts of people um and I and I do believe he does good neurofeedback as well from what I understand in his centers um in spite of all that I'm a little suspicious of somebody making conclusions like that without me getting a lot closer to the data uh because hypercoherence hyper anything in our brain generally means things are falling over it's almost never exceptionally good when brains are that far out of range you can be gifted and look average on a brain map nothing sticks up means you can regulate how you need to in real time this is not the brain in real time this is the brain at rest and thousand foot few the the traits so I I'm a little suspicious but that's just me being you know claim it versus a little bit yeah yeah because because I want to sell people agency not a solution well what it made me suspicious too because he presented it without any context like he see that's what I'm saying it he presented it as if like the the implication was that the mower the most extreme deviation in that represented the the most beneficial uh changes possible which is something we would typically assume against like it's it's dramatically more likely than extreme outlier compared to human average is getting in the way almost always extreme outliers I mean being weird is not a problem stuff that gets in the way is usually weird yeah not always you can have lots of problems I have nothing to show up on a brain map it's rare like really rare uh usually you see quirky stuff that doesn't matter but if but you understand the person a tiny bit and often you see quirky stuff that does matter does get in the way and we saw some of that for you but we took it we we took two data points we throw physiology and performance at it caught the auditory went auditory is a real feature in your EEG and then talked about your phenomena with it and you were you validated some hypotheses gave us stuff to go after so we're we're being scientific and iterative and testing stuff we're not saying here's the answer uh hopefully uh you felt asked about the changes not told your changes today yes absolutely you know okay so uh I have another uh question this is an important question that's been on my mind for a while and I would love to get a good explanation for this and I think you're the man to do it so the the very simple version of the question is how does neurofeedback differ from let's say meditation and let me give um a couple of examples to illustrate kind of my my thinking around this so let's say I spend half an hour in a state of meditation let's say I'm doing um Insight you know vipassana meditation or let's say I'm doing um loving kindness you know Buddhist Meditation how how does something like that and maybe I'll give one more example let's say with Alpha Theta training it feels quite similar to me subjectively to Yoga Nidra session if you know what that is it's like sometimes called a state of non-sleep deep rest um and it it feels like it's putting me into that very deep very deep state of relaxation that's almost bordering sleep it almost feels deeper to me more relaxing than sleep but you're still awake um so if I spend half an hour doing um yeah Yoga Nidra session versus if I spend half an hour doing Alpha Theta training am I accomplishing the same things in my brain or are they different they are a little different um a couple I mean in that case where the technique may elicit similar effects some of the similarity may be your practice of Yoga Nidra historically allows you to go to that place with this tool um but you could be unconscious and trying nothing and the alpha Theta would still push your brain around interesting so meditation of All Sorts is to quote uh Jack cornfield you know uh or paraphrase probably paying attention in a particular way on purpose to the present moment and ideally you replace things like judgment with curiosity and evaluation with observation noting and stuff like that right that's the vapassana approach right so yeah with that with that a bit of it you're selecting an anchor it's an executive function training it's not relaxation training that's what people get wrong often about classic meditation you know all the forms of classic vapassana's present time awareness and Matt does uh heart mind awareness and uh samatha you know Mahayana style Buddhism is is concentration single point awareness so it's it's you're deciding how to attend and then you're choosing it and of course you get distracted and then you reattend to the Anchor that's the rap of meditation but it's an executive function chosen type of anchor so all the forms of meditation have this executive function thing and they tend to work a little bit on different aspects of the brain The Temper the the dorsolateral PFC the people cortex has really impacted the insulin's impacted a lot good work by uh Lazar she did some work as a grad student then as a as a lab Runner PhD she's done some great work showing changes in brains lifelong with aging that basically let's just sidestep the brain Aging in a lot of ways it's really cool uh with with a particular type with meditation now it seems to be the act of anchoring is what matters not so much the flavor you do it's like working out the flavor you exercise the flavor that matters not not the best flavor honestly yes there's differences but um a lot works a lot of different flavors work but the idea is 20 minutes a day is enough essentially for a lot of these classic effects and you know you have to learn to Anchor your resources anchor your attention so that's a great thing to do and you can build certain specific circuits but you a you can build those same circuits involuntarily no anchor no trying no meditation required do some Alpha Theta you're in that nearly dissociative hypnagogic edge of edge of Consciousness State basically but you're not falling asleep for some reason because there's other things we're doing and that's keeping you like like the you know Wiley Coyote painting a little door on the thing and then Roadrunner comes up and actually opens the door you're opening that little wait this door there kind of thing and we're giving you some flow it's it's kind of an interesting thing so the neurofeedback is involuntary exercise in one of the directions you can go in but it's also plotting your brain for having gone there as opposed to you trying to go there so what this does over several sessions is it teaches your brain to go there uh okay so that that seems to be the critical distinction that's what I came up with so to some extent I was asking myself the question is is the benefit of this purely based on heavy and law sort of neurons that fire together wire together and all I'm doing is practicing a certain State and therefore by practicing it more it's getting stronger in the same way if I lift a weight and use a muscle it gets stronger and does it really matter that I have electrodes hooked up to my brain measuring it or I don't is it the same effect not the same because a the loop is different you're being applaud it for stuff you did versus trying to do stuff so it's a bit of a leading if you will b um you can train a billion things you can't feel or try uh-huh so executive function relaxing heart rate variability stuff you can sort of feel you can sort of train with some other techniques that humans do with their minds that's that train stuff but the billions of things you can't feel which is most of your experience in your brain you can still train those your concussion your migraines your PTSD from the singulate being cramped up in high gear your whatever it is and while you might be able to to meditate your way out of ADHD over many years thetas and betas being sorry thetas and Alpha is being brought down systematically through meditating through anchored attention you can do it in 20 or 30 or 40 sessions with neurofeedback involuntarily when the kid doesn't want to doesn't want to sit still and can't like focus and doesn't want to meditate as an alternative strategy so it gives you a different tool set to go after some of the same stuff and then it gives you the ability to do I mean the alpha Theta technique you're doing and the guy I showed you briefly on the screen with that super high coherence that's an alcoholic who had been drinking for 25 years and was 45 days medically chaperoned in that brain map he was clean a month and a half but a bottle and a half a wine a day Ambien and an Ativan and more wine at night for 25 years means he was hyper coherent in beta it tends to be a big problem when you're that locked up so we did a bunch of SMR training other stuff and then a bunch of alpha Theta training and within 10 weeks he could fall asleep at will no meds no drugs felt super chill um and uh just to give any of the people that have are actually watching this I'll give you a little visual I had that data set open here open it up again so this is a few pre-posts but the one I wanted to show you is this guy who was a serious Drinker um as soon as my let me just do this and then we open it there it is um so this gentleman at the top uh for 25 years was drinking heavily and this is him 45 days sober on the left so hypercoherent in beta making tons of beta so I you know this is the amount of beta basically and could not make Delta couldn't she his brain had no chill basically at all um and this is shaky nervous can't relax can't fall asleep and we saw him 45 days medically shop around here I've driven to our office from the hospital where he had been cleaned up um and still over activated in a month and a half sober basically this is him on the right and for folks that aren't watching we took red beta and Hyper coherent beta and made it typical so three plus standard deviations out of range locked up anxious sprain the Delta's still a bit low here 10 weeks in but we were getting there around the time of the second map I walked into our office and he was asleep on the couch oh is he here for a visit no no he discovered he could nap at will and wanted to prove it to you when you walked in let him sleep you know but this is a lot of alpha Theta this is about three quarters maybe half to three quarters of those protocols were Alpha Theta it gives people that have gotten have robbed themselves of Gaba have been drinking too much releasing Gaba and can't produce it yeah uh they're going to make a tie in the absence they're shaky basically you can do alpha Theta and re-educate the brain's ability to downshift deeply and produce this kind of settling chronic burnt out damage if you will uh or you know classic kind of phenomena anyways just to give you a little visual Taste of fun things you can do yeah thank you for that okay so how would you going back to the meditation versus neuro feedback question or the sort of conscious brain training um how would you quantify the difference in the kinds of the sort of the magnitude of the effect size of neurofeedback versus some of the more conscious brain trainings like like meditation or Yoga Nidra yeah I don't know um I do know that neurofeedback causes major plasticity changes across the whole brain for a period of time after every session I tend to not be focused on finding out the answer to like discrete science problems the past decade I tend to be focusing on on combining the most stuff elegantly to get the person changed as fast and as large as possible so if someone's interested or willing to meditate you know or has a practice what I have noticed I would say pretty clearly is if you meditate do neurofeedback or do both when you do both there's a multiplicative effect it's pretty magical you tend to get this like it's at least three times as as good as as both I mean there's some literature on this in human transformation when you stack interventions as you hit three and above the chance of discontinuous insight and change and major lifestyle stuff it just goes off the chart it starts to asymptote so you know it's hard to do too much transformation without disrupting yourself but if you can and neurofeedback helps other neurotr and other transformation because it boosts plasticity at a background level while you're doing it so I get physical therapists calling me saying why is my client walking in without a cane you know or whatever or you know people the speech and language stuff starts to work better in Autism Center sometimes because you work out the plasticity just generally and the the exercise they're doing on that circuit starts to land better so it's a broad tool in that way you can also focus on stuff you can't feel stuff that's not part of the thinking structures of the brain you know you can work on deeper things even subcortical stuff sometimes parkinsonian Tremor or you know wear and tear from concussions that are below the brain and stuff can be can be somehow ameliorated but we're working a systems approach here this is really a personal training kind of thing and then since the brain's so good at learning if you put it through functional Paces it tends to this is this is the secret in our feedback we're mostly not going in very precisely and going hey low brain you should do this little tiny thing out of a billion things we know what you should do we're saying hey regulate this way and it kind of organizes itself to go okay I'll regulate whatever way makes the car and the screen move more that's cool and after several sessions it's going hey I'm liking regulating this way all right and there's some stability of the phenomena and then it regulates differently so and you can you can you can as the conscious person decide oh yeah more of that one or yeah let's I don't know I didn't sleep as well or whatever so that's the phenomena is this more voluntary but systematic like let me build a workout let me let it land let me evaluate it and it's not so it's not so momentary I mean most most meditation has a single point and present time kind of awareness phenomena where you're trying not to do much more beyond the present moment and most neurofeedback is has very little to do with the conscious mind the present moment it was discovered on cats something like 60 years ago cats are not very good instruction followers and it works on people who are unconscious or kids who are you know don't want to be there or people in comas uh one of the greats of the field Margaret Ayers who died five ten years ago a lot of her practice was doing Nursery back on people who were in coma beds and producing brain changes and Consciousness changes sometimes so it's this really bizarre involuntary basic learning phenomena that all brains know how to do all all neurons know how to do so it is heavy in plasticity why aren't any other firing together so it does work a little bit like heavy and plasticity and as you you know do this reinforcement thing the brain learn instrument and then Associates new States but it's not voluntary so if you're a little baby flopping around you suddenly do the unique Association of neurons that makes you stand up a little a little more with your arms and you can see six feet instead of two feet you're like whoa that's interesting that's rewarding the brain goes oh okay remember these neurons and then later on the baby is crawling not thinking about left arm right arm is it right arm left arm they're just doing the thing and the thing works out and that's what neurofeedback is if you applaud little micro things the brain's already doing and ignore the other billion things it's doing it goes wait what why is my Theta making the world change right now okay I'll drop my Theta because it's doing stuff the big trick is we move the goal post so it's operant conditioning just what we're rewarding based on what your brain is doing and applaud the trends it's engaging in so you end up with this like involuntary extra completely involuntary almost involuntary exercise phenomena going on got it okay I think this I I would love to keep you longer and ask you a bunch more questions but I'm sensitive to chatting here I appreciate it but probably should wrap up any other questions I can answer for you the last one is just to talk about um the you know I I've heard you say that you you don't look at this as a therapist so there are a lot of people out there doing neurofeedback and saying you know like for specific medical problems and one of the things that Drew me to you is you uh are looking at this from the perspective of fitness and through from the lens of optimization and looking at things as um on a spectrum it's not just okay you either have ADD or you're normal you're on a spectrum of your ability to to focus and concentrate and you can even if you're in normal you can train that up further or you know the spectrum of mood or a spectrum of executive performance or inspection of a spectrum of many other aspects of brain performance and you're not just trying to fix problems you're trying to also optimize and improve Fitness so can you can you talk about that and can you talk about just some of the Key conditions that you would say neurofeedback gets amazing results for or the key aspects of performance sure sure so so yes performance focused um but the way that I do that is through science first you know for Science and then coaching kind of combined um we take this like a personal trainer approach for your brain waves or your blood flow in your brain but um it's a fairly straightforward process if you take the label and drop below it to the physiology you're talking about real things without pathologizing it and we all have natural resources for anxiety attention sleep stress and there's a line between as you're saying a spectrum between what's typical what's really in the way the line might be important if things are acute or really really extreme but if if not or even if you tried other stuff then maybe it's more about the resources and so we teach you to think about how your executive function Works how your stress Works um the cingulates the the Sleep structures executive function pumping the brakes whatever is going on for you and teach about brain mapping uh and and reading your brain uh your attention testing um and then people know what they want to do you know they know what they want to work on they know what they want to optimize it's not me being oh I know what I'm not a doctor saying oh I have the optimal plan I'll make you Captain America you know it's not that it's me saying hey let me show you how your brain works and teach you some of the quirks and peculiarities of your performance and then let's establish some goals goals can be performance goals they can be suffering goals to ameliorate or whatever but if there's a goal we can Marco Polo our way towards then I can I say this the day after Christopher Columbus I should be careful Columbus Day um I'm in California I grew up in Massachusetts where it's observed I feel better now in California where it's not you know yeah uh but um uh you can be iterative you have to be iterative because brains are so different you're if I took two two of you similar brains similar complaints similar maps similar goals the same workout will be a little different how it landed and we have to listen to that and believe that so we start off with the physiology and move the labels to some extent and measure the performance measure the stress of sleep the attention the gross stuff the big stuff at a high level we can't see subtle things it wasn't a clear like hey wait that's a high level human thing you're experiencing there's no like motivation thermostat I was looking at but I could see you were stuck in your head and stuck in your gut because you have little circuits his job is to switch and they were cramped the anxiety stuff has brain circuits the attention stuff has brain circuits the sleep stuff has brain signatures you can see those those are foundational so if you take the lay table of the thing you're suffering from the goal you have and you drop it down to a resource because I taught you about your resources in a brain map the next step is oh wait a minute yeah I want to do some of this and so this is analogous to like look at your lipid panel and knowing that you should probably cut your Ben and Jerry's down for a few weeks and you know get the triglycerides under control and then still know that you can still have some because you know you know what what your body does in this case you can look at your office speed let's say and know that your sleep hacking is not yet working because the office speed isn't yet coming all the way up the Delta speed isn't yet coming up to zero so this is like dragging the phenomena we're going to hint of you you know it's true you told me you weren't sleeping great the past a month or two so this helps validate you can produce models you can then yourself vouch against what you know to be true it doesn't tell you things you don't know it's not Diagnostic in that way foreign but it tends to pick up the stuff we care about and sleep stress attention brain fog speeder processing you know and that can Encompass a lot of things that we give diagnostic labels to all of those gross resources are the things we change really reliably by usually about a standard deviation on a bell curve every other month and you're an overachiever so you just doubled that apparently um but that means that we work on things with labels we're not diagnosticians we're not therapists but people come to us a lot with diagnoses of lots of flavors of anxiety lots of flavors of ADHD lots of phase with a brain fog including the sort of postcode stuff post-concussions um autistic Spectrum complaints social and sensory issues in that area and Landscape respond very well migraines seizures this was discovered because it reduces seizures discovered by mistake because it reduces seizures so we tend to work on a broad range of things and Peak brain's kind of weird in that we're not a therapist shop we don't have a population of Interest we don't just work on eating disorders or Autism or whatever we work on brains and what do you want to do with your brain kind of perspective so a third of our clients have that classic complaint structure in neurofeedback field of autism ADHD seizures migraines addiction trauma very impactful for PTSD usually pull the teeth of it usually it's really lovely to be able to offer that um so and and can maybe so you gave a good list there of of yeah uh things complaints yeah and um and so there's also this element of optimization for performance but but just can you maybe complete the thought that you're on by saying sure um how fast or how much improvement one would someone expect if they have ADHD or PTSD or sleep difficulties or anxiety or things things like that how big of an improvement can you actually get and how quickly sure well how quickly it can happen you're a good case of doesn't usually happen quite this quickly but this is usually more like a 10-week program the kind of change you had or 12 weeks or something or 16 weeks it's in that neighborhood um but you went from performing like somebody with pretty significant ADHD whatever the cause of it it was in that people know what that word means so we can use it um to somebody who's actually above average in those attention resources that's how much you changed in two months of neurofeedback that's about how fast it can happen um tends to happen on average about half that fast which is still really fast so generally severe ADHD severe PTSD Majors difficulties with brain fog these things tend to change on the data by about two standard deviations maybe more in three months what that means is we take significant suffering and typically make it hard to diagnose so to speak at the end of that time frame and relatively stable if you train train your attention sleep and stress circuits they are now practicing those modes every day they stay relatively stable so for those big resources all the things that underpin anxiety be it Obsession or trauma or social or sensory stuff or emotional instability and temporal lobes those things train and change or executive function areas the motivation areas those things all train so to speak and love to change the brain here's a here's a secret too brain changes faster than the body you experienced that but for folks that haven't done a lot of neurofeedback think about what you could do in three months in the gym with the right trainer this is usually more in terms of the how it feels the impact the regulation of your sleep your stress your attention your being short with your wife you're being angry with your husband you're drinking too much you're you're falling over into low resilience and issues with reactivity and fatigue and having word finding issues in the afternoon these are not diseases these are what happens with the organ system we're carrying around and we call some of them flavors of anxiety or ADHD or whatever and some of them are you know have big labels attached to them and they're really severe and we should get big help but a lot of it is not a disease ADHD is not a disease it's a natural set of circuits and anxiety is like resources that have spasmed not a disease they stretch back out almost always so and and and does one need to do this forever to maintain that or if not generally if one has ADHD or PTSD yeah do those benefits go away if let's say they do three months four months of training get a huge effect and then they stop they say is it okay for them to stop at that point or it is it is yeah especially for ADHD there's usually fairly permanent change as you get 40 sessions and above for PTSD and stuff it's very complicated right the individual is more than their suffering we usually pull the teeth of the cingulate being over activated fairly permanently in that kind of time frame but it doesn't mean that you've dealt with your PTSD 100 just means you're not activated the same way and you're sleeping well and you move back home with your wife um for years I did a lot of work with veterans who were coming back from war zones fairly traumatized and we would we would want them to do full 40 session programs which were three-month programs and they were often taking a bus to the office or you know managing Logistics to get there and usually six or seven weeks in the first you know 20 session brain map that we did a repeat on they're like hey Doc I'm great I'm done right this feels amazing and they're ready they're moving back home with their wives they're getting jobs again now you know they're integrating back with a a less activated mode of life their brain Maps didn't look done to me but it felt like we pulled the teeth of it so far down they could suck it up and drive on you know they had the skills then at least to to be tough guys sometimes not not all men you know and I've seen the same thing in especially the past two three years I've done a lot of work with people that are traumatized through primary care or urgent care or urgent care a lot of you know uh people that are fairly high level running emergency departments and major crisis centers and things like that and they have to deal with an awful lot and it's been unending at the top of their game top of their output under staff under resourced for years now and that was before the pandemic where everything just fell over in terms of resource management so it looks like PTSD when you're at that high level output and your brain knows the world is not safe it it cramps up the cingulates and of course it does because the cost of missing danger so high you don't miss it twice but humans can make anything dangerous we have plenty of resources you know with which uh catastrophize but no generally you get about a solid color shade or standard deviation in the data every other month every 20 25 sessions two rounds of that will usually make a relatively long lasting change people often do neurofeedback for four months six months a year a couple of years but those people generally are in two categories with ongoing neurofeedback or a lot of neurofeedback peak performers who are squeezing out every little bit of juice and continuing to make gains you can it's not a zero-sum game your brain keeps moving and people that have very large changes very large difficulties developmental issues autism seizures whatever like a lot of things at once and then you're often gradually moving things over time and working with them for more for more years right is there any final message you want to leave people who are maybe struggling with brain related issues and who are on the fence about trying neurofeedback yeah I mean uh nerve feedback is a great tool I I'd be happy I would love if you tried it it'd be great but I would rather everyone listening just understand the fact that your brain's a changeable thing and even if neurophyback isn't your tool of choice or you have access to it and we can get you access to it we can send you equipment and work remotely but but even without that or you can go see uh Ari's uh guy in San Diego runs a great little practice Yeah named Elia at brain Excel so um all that being said there's lots of ways to change our brains and I think that there's lots of accessible things we should and could be and maybe want to be doing including some sleep regulations sleep hacking I'm a big fan of doing macronutrient hacking through partitioning time calories or macros systematically to create stressor signals to cause changes and that's a again in line the Circadian stuff as well that's stuff we can all do you know we can all play with better food quality and we can all play with um uh when we get up in the morning and and that kind of stuff it's not all going to fix major difficulties and that's maybe when you want to bring in the big guns you know or you've exhausted the foundation and now you're ready to level up that's when you want to bring in something like neurofeedback I think unless you're somebody who loves to throw great resources at all your problems this is a this is a it's hard to move the brain faster and and more thoroughly than with neurofeedback um to get in this kind of massive change in just a few months is is you know is this in your opinion the most powerful brain hack in existence it is yeah for stuff that works it is but it's not the it's not the most used or the most powerful I would say it's probably meditation historically millions or thousands of years you know but humans have been sort of both meditating and altering our brains since before we've kind of had them really I'm sure you know so that we've kind of evolved co-evolved with psychedelics co-evolved with the ability to meditate you know the ability to Anchor probably came before language language probably came from movement like there's a bunch of interesting ways that the anchoring of our executive function was the first human thing in some ways even before language yeah tool use ties to the anchoring of it executive function because you have to Anchor to the tool you then map it to your brains if it's part of you that's a thing humans and other tool users do in a really weird way but it requires sustained Focus frontal lobes that kind of stuff so hmm so I think meditation probably happened before we had language because we had the sustained attention we dropped into the Zone we felt it we enjoyed it some of us got really deep into it you know um got more mates and then had more babies who meditated more eventually language came up dance came up through language maybe the embodied language thing that's why we talk with our hands um anyways there's lots of things you can do uh sleep hacking very important uh managing sugar managing insulin resistance hyper insulin insulin anemia especially today in this world we're in looks like almost all I see a huge amount of postcode brain huge amount of it it is a big deal it looks like a concussion it feels like a concussion a bad one for most people eventually and it it happens I think half the time essentially and even in low symptomatic covid which is concerning but it seems to happen correlated with a few phenomena around inflammation and oxidation of the tissues one of the biggest ones is hyperinsulinemia or high blood sugar high glucose High insulin so if you're somebody who's insulin resistant I would actually rather you focus on that hack your sleep to get seven hours of quality sleep focus on some low-key activity those will make a bigger difference than dropping you know four or five 10K and a bunch of brain training over a year or something you know if you have big if you want to try to reduce your seizures by half or get rid of the ADHD or get control of your drinking problem or quickly remediate some trauma in combination with a therapist you love is going to help you navigate the path through change Murphy back can work but it's just a tool the perspective of using tools whatever they are is what I want people to take away beautiful Dr Hill thank you so much for all of your time uh your brilliant guy I really enjoyed having this conversation with you I would love to talk to you for five more hours um so the last thing is just mention again your your company and and where people can reach out to you sure so I'm Peak brain Institute that's our large company we have physical offices in New York City St Louis Los Angeles and Orange County California and we have a partner in San Diego which is brain Excel uh uh and uh we all do sort of peak brain neurofeedback but we also do neurofeedback about three quarters of our clients work from home and we send them hardware and software and give them live coaches to teach them how to do stuff and support them and Bug them to fill their sleep surveys um but uh Peak brightness Institute is a place you can come check us out Peak brain La is most of our socials because that is the first Branch so we started off in Los Angeles um and if you want to look at lots of baked goods and like you know seared roasts and meats and things you can watch look at my my socials but they're less exciting it's mostly cooking um and occasionally guitar is showing up it's just not you know my marketing guy wants me to consolidate the channels but nope I'm going to keep the peak brain one is the brain one and just keep posting random cooking stuff whenever I want on mine cool thank you so much Dr Hill I hope to talk to you again in the near future my pleasure Ari take care take care of that brain thank you hey this is Ari again one more last thing before you go I hope you enjoyed this I hope you have been thoroughly impressed and intrigued and excited at the prospect of improving your brain with neurofeedback technology again this is something that has been truly life transformative for me personally and I strongly encourage you to get started with this and you can do this wherever you are you can do it at home and you can get set up with at-home neurofeedback they will guide you expertly in real time how to actually do this they will train you how to get set up they will they will analyze your individual brain map and and custom design a protocol a training protocol like for brain Fitness to train your brain to optimize it to enhance areas that you need to work on further or that you want to work on further maybe you don't even need to maybe you want to go from normal to extraordinary performance in certain areas of brain function so I highly encourage you to do this again regardless of whether you're looking to correct dysfunction or problems or brain related issues or non-optimal brain function weaknesses in certain areas of your brain capacity or you're looking to go from normal healthy brain function to extraordinary levels of brain function and performance so check it out this is seriously something that I I think can change millions of lives and I strongly encourage you to do your own brain map and figure out what's going on in your brain and if there are opportunities to improve to optimize to correct weaknesses get started I think that this truly can change a lot of lives and probably yours if it's changed mine I I really believe that it can change almost everybody's life everybody's got opportunities to train brain Fitness and enhance their brain capacities so get started with this again you can do that with a 250 dollar discount uh on your initial brain map by going to theenergyblueprint.com forward slash neurofeedback so hope you enjoyed these two episodes and I will talk to you again very soon [Music] hey there this is Ari again thank you so much for listening to this episode I hope you enjoyed it if you did if you found it valuable please share it with your friends share it with your family help me get the word out there also if you're on YouTube make sure to hit the Subscribe button and hit that little bell to get notifications every time we release a new video or new episode of the podcast and if you're listening to this make sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or on your favorite podcast thanks so much for supporting my work at the energy blueprint I hope you enjoyed this episode I will see you in the next