Your Brain, Your Questions, Answered! 🧠 | Mental Health Q&A

man it's show time baby there we go well you know John and I were looking at the same story this week uh incidentally we were looking at the microplastics and I I think it'd be good to field it to the pl the panel and we can talk about it you know other time as well John um so to our esteem panel I know Jay mentioned that that microplastics I guess I think what I heard Jay said is that oil is an organic molecule and as such it it may have a tendency to react and I just wondered is there any uh starting with Jay and maybe others too is there any um knowledge about what those might be doing to our brains perhaps our EEG so I have a an advocation but I have a vocation in Neuroscience my advocation is environmental and microplastics end up being um reactive enough when they're small enough especially and if if your community has chlorinated water you're basically going to also have Chloroform now you can't quit chlorinating the water because you're going to end up with cior not chloroform uh chloroform ends up forming when uh you get any organic in the in the water stream and the chlorine ends up being a very reactive molecule it's there to kill off organic live Critters uh but it forms chloroform when exposed to anything methane uh basically uh anything that's organic is going to end up breaking down and uh you end up with with interactions with chlorine and chlorinated hydrocarbons uh name one that's safe there aren't any DDT well I don't think that went over very well did it you know so um and where do you find microplastics everywhere and you find them in Rain uh you you find them everywhere uh and uh your polyester when you wash it sheds microplastics so we are surrounded by it you're full of it um and it's it's not necessarily a safe thing to have so okay all right can I jump in real quick on the plastic side of things the problems with with uh plastic it's the petroleum and doesn't petroleum mess up the brain Jay haven't we talked about that h well P petroleum ends up being the the source of the hydrocarbon in Plastics however plastic material can be formed from other organic material as well but it's so easy to make with with uh oils basically that that's polyesters and um yeah and uh oil companies are old uh uh across the table from me negotiating uh not Partners but on the other side of the table negotiating for benefits for the community and uh uh the the oil company in the town next in next to the town I lived in uh less than a mile and a half away uh ended up dumping 250s plus tons of toxic waste on the town I lived in and although it's how we found my brain tumor so I owe my life to that toxic waste um they still made th you know a thousand person in a 3,000 person Town quite ill and um they they saved me but they made a lot of people quite ill and uh it was a $300 million settlement but it was essentially negotiated total and they ended up having to go uh through um a judge panel to end up seeing who got how much of it uh so it was it was an interesting negotiation hi Kelsey hi Craig welcome back welcome back to the party Joy what did you have in your laundry list there I thought you had a couple things that you wanted to uh cross off are you just noodling oh no I'm I'm fairly purposeful one of the things that I'd like to tell spend some time with to be helpful to new people who are questioning it is to suggest questions that they would ask the providers when they're calling them and say feedback what would it do for me love it it's something that I get all the time I'm sure we all do we get phone calls and saying and it's very clear that people don't know what to ask you know one of the common questions what kind of equipment do you use and I'm like what do you care yeah oh I'm with you I let's just youring statement in so so I have I have nine questions that I've sort of vetted I suggest people say how long have you been doing neuro feedback yeah right and when they say well you know they said one year I'm like okay we all had to start someplace but if you've only been doing it for a year do you have a mentor that you contact frequently and you can run your cases by so that's fair right um do you do neura feedback full-time or part-time what percentage of your time is doing neura feedback because if I've been doing this for 10 years and I only see five people a week that's a different experience level right I mean all I do is Nur feedback so until recently I was working six days a week full-time neur feedback that experience Falls a little differently um what age groups do you usually work with right um do you use qeg findings um do you use a symptom based process to create protocols or do you blend Q results with the symptom and behavioral how much experience you have doing Nur a feedback with whatever I have wrong with me right because if I'm calling somebody and all they have experience in 10 years of experience is ADD and I've got other problems you're probably not my practitioner so I tell people ask them what kind of success have you had with people who present with similar difficulties um are you comfort are you going to be comfortable working with my therapist if you're not a therapist if you're not you combining those two can Arrangements be made for you two to share what you're doing along with me you know people tend to benefit from collaborative efforts um can you talk a little bit about what you would consider a successful outcome you know I talked to a lot of providers and the answer to this question I thought was going to be pretty obvious and it was anything but uh the answers ranged anywhere from well if anything is even a little bit better than when they came into my office that's a success yeah I was kind of surprised by that one um up until well until we can get a normal queue and you know and all the symptoms are gone it's like there's a huge spectrum of possible answers on that so I'd like to know what you think is successful um and can you give me any reason why you like choosing the equipment that you're choosing you know is there is there something to do with the methods that M meets well why have you chosen that that's that's what I have to start with you know they don't Jo can we can we jump in a little bit on like the difference between methods uh equipment programs because that one's really confusing because I just realized I went yeah but then um you know the some of the push button programs maybe you kind of do want to know uh what quote unquote equipment is so does anybody want to take that on the difference between methods equipment and and programs well the one thing I you'll notice I gave two questions there right about the equipment to start with but then this question I think kind of address this set Mar it's like can you explain yeah why you're using the equipment you're using which kind of does come into your method and so and the answer should not be because I don't know how to read raw EEG well and maybe that's part of it too it's like and if you get these kind of answers you should be alarmed and say thank you very much goodbye right yeah yeah hey it's been it's back to school season and we talked about this on the Regular Show last week is everybody's business picking up uh with the kids coming in or we're not there yet it takes a little bit of time it takes a few weeks for the teachers to get just past the startup of the the school year but they start to notice staring spells and they'll refer for that now the teachers have been kind of sensitized to staring spells maybe being epilepsy um and then behavioral uh difficulties add U Get referred out uh when you're told you can't your kid has to be on methen in order to have them back in school that's actually practicing medicine without a license but nevertheless uh they they basically said go get a doctor's prescription for something to get the behavior better and uh that that sort of thing happens again a few weeks into the school year and um uh unfortunately um uh the uh number of people referred uh aren't as large as uh the there there actually is uh potential referrals uh the the number of kids uh in the school that need an EG are far less than the ones that get an EG I would prefer seeing any child in a contact sport get an EG ahead of time you don't necessarily have to get it analyzed you just have to have it looked at enough to make sure there's not a paroxysm and then set it aside if there's a head injury now you've got a Baseline and the it's it's an important uh uh concept to have a baseline the EG uh when you've had a head injury because head injuries come in a wide variety of severity uh gray matter white matter uh change of the spectral content and if you've got a baseline EG you can end up identifying you know where and how the brain has been altered so and you can provide a a pathway back to better function using neur feedback and other approaches that are used for that Hyperbaric fantastic topic Jay for teacher in Services my experience in my own life as well as the parents that I talk to and hear from none of the teachers know any of that none of the school staff even the psychologist knows that and sadly none of the pediatricians that are are prescribing all this stuff take the EEG the cardiac status none of it into account before they write the prescription you know they're looking at the behavioral stuff for you know I I for one traditionally don't see a big bump in my practice until the first parent teacher conference has happened yes the first report cards yeah that that's really good um but I mean some good news in this as well though because um I mean Canada might be different than the US Vancouver might be a little different than other cities as well but you know we're seeing more and more individuals refer to uh to neurotherapist now um a lot of parents really really do not are not excited about the med route um and and the buzz is out which is really really good so I think that's that's positive and it's kind of like okay who who are you taking your child to you know if you take your child to a massage therapist when their back is sore they're going to recommend massage if you take them to a chiropractor they're going to recommend chiropracty surgery etc etc uh but to loop on I love and I high recommend and I love you know people's opinion well I love seeing kids anywhere between the fourth and sixth week after school has started because um the you know new friends no friends behavior issues getting the brain you know polished up again for learning figuring out whether your teacher is a good match with you all of these things will have kind of settled around that around that time and and joy as you said that might just be a little bit before the the first parent teacher meeting so you get a lot better information um you're not you're not going to have you're not going to be dealing with adjustment or short adjustment issues or you you'll have a really good idea whether somebody's missing their friends from a previous school um and have had chance you know a chance to kind of move into another social group or whether there are behavioral social problems so I that for me is a really really good time to bring a child in because this not too late to cash things um but you're going to you know weed out the unnecessaries as well I have a cool story a friend just went through with her schoolage daughter for ADHD and uh Psychiatry and EEG so they took the daughter to local psychiatrist and she was prescribed rlin and uh unfortunately it did not address her ADHD or if it did it also uh worsened her behavior so behavioral Outburst became more common well this psychiatrist is the only one I'm aware of in our town who also provides EEG and they seem to have somebody I don't know him but he seems competent and he uh wrote the the report suggests he says um low generalized 7 to 12 Hertz the stimulate the stimulant medication might remediate the Theta and Alpha but it may have aggravated the beta component and caused anxiety and so I don't know where she is on her treatment but I felt like the story is like a pretty good oh he also said that they they had elevated activity from 23 to 30 Hertz and that she may be they may want to look at her for something called binocular vision dysfunction which I looked up and apparently something like 7even to n% of ADHD cases may be Mis diagnosed uh BVD or binocular vision so if anybody on the panel is familiar or wants to jump in I'll add to it Anthony another piece that's often misdiagnosed is auditory processing so the kid raises his hand and gives them the wrong answer and the teachers go oh you did that because you weren't paying attention when the reality is the kid heard something completely different than what the teacher said so that gets misdiagnosed as well and it will not respond to the stimulant either there we go but you can let's not just forget nothing fancy about the vision just needing a pair of glasses but you can see those things you know if as long as you don't just do an EEG if you always do a CPT alongside it then you can teach apart the auditory processing the visual attention versus General attention it it kind of shows up and so a lot of people a lot of people kids especially come in with auditory processing issues and the parents know they have one but they got an ADHD diagnosis and you don't see the ADHD you see the kid going so sorry what you know as the primary mode of reacting to verbal instructions because they have a mismatch in the two auditory sides and there's a little half-second delay in turning both on ready for a bad joke un unless they're 14 that's a whole other condition that I don't claim to do anything that's what I mean yeah for for everybody out there really fun adolescence yeah ad ADHD is largely executive function frontal as a a primary I mean there's other parts of the brain that can be involved on individual but the frontal loes is also where the frontal eye fields are and it's it's not what direction the E is pointing in the doctor's office that that's Acuity it's accommodation and convergence the ability to focus the eyes and direct the eyes and uh if if the person's frontal lobe is not working well they're going to have difficulty pointing their eyes at the page and working their way across the page to read um they're going to have uh visual processing difficulties because of the frontal eye Fields uh difficulty and uh the the frontal eye Fields if you stimulate in a certain location in the frontal eye Fields you get visual deviation to look at so this the interaction between uh attention and accommodation convergence is that when something catches your attention also can catch your vision so you can you know uh spot and track uh threats um so it's it's adaptive um if your attention is working and if it's not working you may have frontal eye field difficulties I I think cpts are great but I think a CPT with the EG recorded is called an event related potential and that's a very uh much better thing that than just getting the CPT itself Iva or Tova give you the behaviors Omission errors commission errors Reaction Time variability but you give that behavioral observation with the vcpt or any uh of um Erp uh the good thing that you get in addition is that you can break down the event related potential with a component analysis and literally see step by step by step the brain processing that information did you actually see it at an appropriate time did it hit the visual cortex at an appropriate time was it early and large if it's early and large you probably have an amydala that's triggered uh with an emotion like anxiety or py or something so you get an early p100 and large p100 so you can see that not in the number of omission and commission errors but by the arrival and size size of the original signal in the in the the cortex but you also see the processing so you can get auditory and visual processing disorders seen in the next component the processing of that information then you see motor engagement obviously the Omission errors would be missing the motor engagement component uh you get a a stop component the ability to actually inhibit response and then you get the anterior singulate did my behavior match my model of what I think I should have been doing and you you can spot OCD people they've they have a perfect CPT I mean no emissions no commissions great Reaction Time Low variability but every time their anterior singular is saying oops oops oops uh so you lock the lock you know you lock the lock but you've got to check the lock you know so your your OCD handwashing is an error signal from the anterior singulate so if you get the CPT task and you only get the behavioral output you may miss a lot of very meaningful pieces of the Erp which can clue you into you know what's really going on with the brain not just the overt Behavior the CPT is a step up from just the behavioral diagnosis but it's not quite there with the you know biomarker or physiological measurement it it is a it is a step up from the uh classic uh your hyperactive or inattentive and you have add the CPT task ends up being a big step up from that but having the Erp recorded ends up giving you really fine detail that that can end up cluing you in on other things I think the CPT is useful as well because it picks up um daily State variability in a way that the EEG should when you do a qeg properly you should get a pretty stable you know Q dayto day but the ER but the uh performance testing is variable based on fatigue and stress you can tease apart resources from States a little bit when you contrast the EEG and the CPT too I think so well the Erp to the Erp the EG is is a is a signal that disappears uh yeah but I don't think the Erp I mean everything you described I can see in in endogenous waves and flat Maps everything so I hear you it's a useful tool for exploring but it doesn't get me any better neur feedback yeah I can spot auditory processing visual processing with you know ongoing traces and or flat Maps an OCD mostly yeah I can't tell what flavor of OCD is or the experience but that's sort of One Step Beyond my job just trying to get to the phenomena and then try to push it around for people not really get to the answer for for the the quantitative analysis of the RP has been done uh Yuri katov received the Russian prize for science for uh decomposing the Erp and its linkage to behavior and he has a very nice book on biomarkers and um Psychiatry focusing on the Erp mle here I mean Andrew I think you're speaking to your knowledge and your experience but I would say for the average person seeing all that on the flat map would would not be the case so I think we need a nice qualifier going back to Joy's questions well I I was just going to say the last five or six eight minutes of this conversation if I were a casual parent tuning into this I would probably have no idea what you guys are talking about yet I think the takeaway for the for the average parent let's say you got your child you know is having some struggles in school you can see by this conversation just how complicated it is your pediatrician is going to go oh oh they have ADD here's some Ridin that's God that is such an insufficient approach to an incredibly complicated conversation now I'm not saying that anybody has to go out and do 15 million tests to help it but more than just talking to a guy in an office who has limited skill set in all of the things we're talking about I don't expect your pediatrician to understand the EEG how could they most most psychiatrists don't but they hand out this medication as if it's some solution it's only a part it can be valuable absolutely well I I would like to help us think of ways we as neura feedback clinicians could help the parents and one of the ways I have found to be tremendously helpful is um you know after that first parent teacher conference um my personal learning was I was told from the schools that they don't really report a lot of the stuff until towards the end of second grade and that's when the teachers start going yeah this is consistently a problem and so in third grade they start referring them for the schools testing and stuff like that um and then the parents get introduced for the first time to something called an I plan different the individual plan okay uh I went through that it was how I discovered that this was not going to be a team effort that the end result was going to be tug OFW with them holding one of my son's arms and me holding the other yeah and they tried very hard to discombobulate me with their knowledge and their words and everything else and I often do not use my five syllable words in those circumstances because I want everybody to understand but by the time they did hear some of them the school principal came to me and said what do you do for a living so let me share what I discovered to be something that was incredibly helpful these poor parents have G no clue for any of it they the school the doctor the this they're just wanting to help can I interrupt um and just add something before you continue um I have a term that I use and I call it it it it's it's it's heavy weighted I call it manufacturing disability okay when when you have noticed that a child has a uh a learning difficulty it's not a deficit yet and what you do then is scrape away and provide them with a new set of rules of everything they don't need to do and everything they don't need to learn you go from learning difficulties to learning um uh disabilities very very frequently and I think that's where we all hop in and yet don't be a participant in the manufacturing of disability because it assists with classroom management I just want to interject that because Joy you were moving on is something else so please pop back on the train I'll get off I I 100 100% Mari 100% so so yeah so the IEP it's where they explain to the parents what they see their child's problems are and what degree of improvement they need to see by a certain date I got to the point where I R told these women you would have flunked out of Nur nursing school none of you would have made it you can't write a care plan like this not telling me what you're going to do and that's that's an IEP but what I discovered was first of all they get scared to death when they find out I'm GNA come to the meeting they don't even know who I am okay so there's that they don't want you there because it it disrupts them so I learned you listen to every one of the team members what they contribute first take a notepad with you and have the child's qeg with you in bright colorful print I have discovered it takes anywhere from five to seven minutes to give a group of teachers the most rudimentary understanding see the colors these are the kinds of things that are associated with those things you don't insult them because the kids going to be in their class and the parents are worried about that but perfect example I listen to this situation I'm already working near a feedback with this child and the parents come in in tears one day because the child has come home from school and they're said get her on medication get her on medication like okay well they didn't listen the child had tried medication it was a failure it was a mess okay so one of the things I knew from her qeg and backed up with symptoms she had real auditory processing difficulties and they are by value of their testing saying she has poor memory problems so so I very politely pointed out the area of the auditory cortex auditory processing center is over here and you see her findings over here they're abnormal okay so may I ask you a question when you were giving her the test did she seem to remember the wrong things or did she just have no memory at all oh no all of her answers were wrong I said but she answered every time oh yes I said is there any chance that she thought she heard you say a different word she never put your word into her memory and then you think she's got a well the end of these things usually ends up helping the group of teachers discover a new set of modifications to work with these children and everybody leaves happy the teachers want to do a good job they want their students to succeed the parents want everybody off their back and everybody leaves happy when you can help point out to them what modification might be worth their time it's it's an inval I think you know I don't know if anybody else comes from a teaching uh background I mean I have my teacher certification blah blah blah but I mean in all honesty this goes back a long long time maybe 25 years but you know I was appalled at the time I mean I already had to be um a little bit of a foot in Neurotherapy that you know the way teachers are taught to look at um learning disability again there's this Chasm between difficulties and disabilities um and I I just I do not see enough of a focus on difficulties and how to help with with difficulties but uh piggybacking what Joy said is you know how to pull the teachers along it's not their fault I mean most people do not get into the field of Education like most people do not get into the field of medicine because they don't want to help people right it's just in terms of the tools uh that people have been taught uh educators are not taught about Neurotherapy okay um most um medical schools do not teach about Neurotherapy right um and so this is where the pharmaceutical comes in um my question of course is where do teachers get their information is as Jay was saying uh yeah it's you're yes you are practicing out of scope if you recommend methylphenidate as a teacher um but you know what's happening in the teacher education nowadays to to to Really help them be bridg makers to facilitate the help that children actually need and I think that's where we really really need to insert ourselves uh ourselves in one of the things I used to do not so much now Co kind of screwed up everything and it hasn't been picked back up but um you know the the the parent advisory groups go out and talk to them you know um and you know the the um teacher um of what of the um professional uh development days you know I've done some from colleges I've done some for for schools um and and they're they're hungry they're really really hungry to learn so when I have a positive uh captive audience meaning that people are there because they want to be there for anywhere from 45 minutes to a whole afternoon uh people are eager eager to learn so we've got to get our message out there it's Mari could some of this be due and I'm not a parent so I've had Parents tell me though that if you can get certain diagnoses or certain I don't know if it's a learning disability what have you there's special privileges you can get I even had a parent tell me that in Florida you can get like a $110,000 grand a year if you can get certain diagnoses and so could there be an incentive maybe and maybe from a teacher perspective uh if they have you labeled a certain way maybe you extra help somehow I'm just curious of how that unfortunately you are 100% correct and and this is a discussion that that I have far too frequently um as a psychologist I can diagnose and I say like what do you need the diagnosis for if you want me to work with your child and essentially train their brain is sufficient enough away that the quote unquote symptoms and disabilities are are not negative or debilitating you do not need a diagnosis in fact I highly recommend you don't have one because once it's in a school's uh sorry a child's a School record it's public knowledge you don't you don't own that uh anymore but yeah you know when a class can get anywhere from a thousand uh to you know in in Canada early autism diagnosis you get $20,000 okay um and and many of the schools are vying for um these uh diagnosis because the school gets the money now you know you have to be really careful about who's the bad guy here and who's the good guy here or the Bad Gal or the good gal uh in terms of like if you do get a certain diagnosis and the school gets $1,000 or $2,000 where does that money go okay does it go for that child to have an aid does it go for the the classroom to have a teaching assistant or does it just go into the pot of the school these are all questions parents need to ask why is my child getting this diagnosis what is the purpose of this diagnosis or are they getting their individual education plan quote unquote only now somebody want to read some of these questions starting with you don't want me to finish my rent there Pete you can I just you know the these the customers are waiting for drinks you just I like I like Craigs I like Craig's comment about the IAP and special ed class my personal story is my own daughter who I fought I fought with the LA School District innumerable times went to innumerable IEP meetings we sued them twice and I ke all I kept saying was you're you're going to provide what I am asking for to this isn't an IP meeting why are why are you forcing me to hire a lawyer who now you are going to have to pay I would rather not hire the lawyer let's just work this out I'll just give you this a sidebar you gonna pay her 30 grand she's she's driving a Mercedes I'm not because you're paying her to defend me from your lunacy and you know at the end of the day I will take this all the way out and I did and of course I won and they paid to the lawyer you could have taking that 30 grand and put it in the classroom what's wrong with you people the construct around IEP is and the way we manage our educational system it's a factory and these kids have to fit into a factory model of performance you know you're you're seven years old you got to sit on a square for 30 minutes it's not realistic it's stupid there's no room for flexibility around and the poor teachers Craig is commenting on there's three kids in a classroom what did you expect these people to do of course they're looking for Behavioral control and management of course their their their knowledge base around it is going to be recommended medication I get it but can't we change that Paradigm and can come up something a little more interesting I refused to send my daughter to a special ed class I just flat out refused I said I'll see you in court it's not going to happen and that's that was their answer because she didn't fit their little tiny frame of of performance that they were asking of her and a special ed class I went and visited I was courteous I let me go look I said this is not the environment for my daughter there's there's nonverbal children in here there's children with you know all kinds of physical challenges great place for them they're going to get the attention that they need in that environment my daughter is capable of fitting into a system you have to change the system to accommodate her I don't have to accommodate your system and that's the net result of I Craig I'm sure is gonna agree with what I just said you you've actually hit the nail on the head John the system is so far behind yeah so far behind we talk about going in and giving in services and stuff their heads are going to spin if we start talking about the we talk about they don't even have a foundation for this stuff I had similar experience with my son and IEPs and the frustration level and and the stuff that they'll do my son had a horrible monster for a teacher in fourth grade and I went to the school fairly soon I said he needs a different teacher he needs a different teacher he needs a different teacher and you know these meetings happen during the daytime when moms go so I took it certain and I said that's it my husband you're going with the next one and on the drive over there I picked and picked and picked all the source spots that I knew would make him angry had nothing to do with my son it was very deliberate I wanted him good and worked up and angry when he walked into it was extremely useful very successful outcome but why did I have to resort to that instead of talking to these people and saying let's work as a that's brilliant that's I never heard that story from you before that's somebody answer Grace's question guys TBO and Grace have a question um well tbos is more towards what we've been talking about and then we we'll do Grace um Tabo says if a child has adhdautism and needs mind ey visual Rehabilitation does NF help with that sure quite a lot from specifically and it'll bring up plasticity broadly so the work you're doing with speech and language and vision will actually land harder and change more and you can then regulate the brain on top of that in all the other ways because with just with that complaint you're going to have more than just that phenomena there all kinds of subtle things so you can regulate broadly while bringing up plasticity so everyone else working with your kid goes wow things are changing so fast yeah yeah yeah yeah I think the big thing to recognize is Neurotherapy potenti Ates everything because essentially you're conditioning the brain to facilitate change it's as simple as that do you want to take that down into lay language it's even simpler than that Dr SW it's it's even simpler the one single session of Nur feedback has a measurable change in plasticity as measured by a moor Rog potential but you can measure one session causing a change in cortical plasticity it makes it more likely to change yeah so very interesting well Grace had a question here too oh if Jay has an answer please continue so we we spoke about uh Alpha suppression training uh which is used uh commonly now Ruth lenus uh uses Alpha suppression training for PTSD and an and uh trauma cases and uh somebody was wondering about uh Alpha doesn't actually go away they suppress it but it doesn't end going away uh what's the deal well they're training control so you when you're done with a training you have control now the question here is that if you have control does it matter whether you go you know you leave it up or down uh in in what position you're in uh in in fact in Germany uh when they train slow cortical potentials they trained control make it go higher and lower and higher and lower and higher and lower and when you were done showing good control they would tell you what polarity was therapeutic for you uh in for epilepsy going electropositive uh turning off the cortex to stop the seizure uh ends up being what you wanted to learn but for add up front you need to turn it on so Electro negative would be what you needed so uh they would Train control and uh once you learn control they would tell you the therapeutic and point for you would be one polarity or the other and um so um it it does matter uh if you're training slow cortical potentials up or down positive and negative are very different states uh once you've learned control of your Alpha you're going to have some how much of it you want to make is up to you at that point Alpha special you can't do that with other brain waves you can't do that with Theta or beta you can do it with Alpha you can do with SCP or infr slow even but they're regulatory phenomena that have so much pressure to keep them in a narrow range when you push on them they push back Theta and beta are much more localized and create a change in the direction you CH you train them and they do not rebound so you cannot get away with exercising Theta in the wrong direction or beta the wrong direction it'll stick so a big piece of what you said Jay I think boils down to well where in what tissue in what circuit because it because it's really different across different frequencies and parts of the brain and quite honestly Alpha up and down is less often the problem than Alpha faster and slower the tuning of alpha being wrong is more commonly the error than the size uh you know size is easy to train but teaching somebody to speed up or slow down the alpha changes their entire arousal level and uh and it's an important thing to gain control over Craig has a real practical question I see here about being touchy and sensitive about the sensors and everything else okay Craig I I would consider myself something of an expert of this um are you using the staple gun like I am that was a joke that was a joke anybody [Laughter] listen an empty One Hand by where they can see it you know um also a joke but but okay so in 1996 a family came to me with a severely severely autistic child 8 years old and they said does Nur feedback do anything for this I immediately called My Mentor Sooper and I said does Nur feedback help with this I don't know she goes maybe sort of some stuff I'm like okay it's worth a shot and at that moment in time I'm still learning a lot and I told these family look I don't know if this is going to help or not but I really don't think it'll hurt him uh so by method of learning I'm going to do your sessions for free you know I felt like we're not working in known territory here Sue couldn't direct me to anybody who was working with autism at the time and I went let's try it Craig okay first of all do not expect someone who has sensory integration and tactile sensitivity all this stuff to just be willing to have paste and sensors put on their head ridiculous okay but most of us if we do know I have a P of old electrodes if anybody wants them I'm happy to mail them to you um you send those home ear Clips sensors and you don't go anywhere near the child with them mom and dad wear them around the house for a while or the EG cap a broken cap is great to send home so so Dad gets to wear it for a few days and then suddenly is it my turn right yeah yeah yeah so that's it's for you introduce it to their house where they're familiar and it's like Dad why right so buy a simple package of Q-tips if you don't have them um and and put stuff on the Q-tips I mean a really fun one it could get a bit gooey is just do it with Jam okay you know it can be kind of funny um you know other toothpaste also has a little bit of this the um if you don't want to give them any of the new prep or whatnot it has that mild abrasive and you can just kind of play with putting toothpaste on their their ears and and and have a few uh Giggles I also recommend goll store and get a little um uh you know the um clip on earrings U and and play um you know obviously I'm talking about jam and toothpaste depends on the personality of the child and how quickly this can get out of hand but they're very familiar substances that are cold and fun and uh yeah Ju Just goof around with all of those uh Sensations um the other thing that we used to do is we would um you know use a little bit of um a pressure acupuncture okay so that you know the tapping Point here to just quiet a a child can be very helpful um and sometimes also I mean the glasses trying to put uh glasses on a on a child with a a quieting uh light protocol um you know you can also get lamps that will flash a little bit so it's not on the child so there there are a lot of things that you can do to kind of complement um but yeah one electrode at a time your broken equipment yeah so we've all been there I I often don't do neuro feedback too when the person's really extreme I I was trained uh by Larry herberg who's really autistic uh Spectrum focused initiated that's all my work really sometimes quite severe autism non-verbal people screaming and stemming and you're just not gonna get a brain map done ever on this person and you know if someone's got seizures or obvious phenomena you may need to or want to try to jump in with some training what I found this is one of the reasons I do this now is techniques is that I have other bile feedback techniques are much more uh uh achievable with movement with sensory so you can do HRV you can do H um f near style you know or passive infrared and and movement isn't a big deal because you're not creating a an artifact in the signal and you can get somebody used to sort of being manipulated and poked and prodded come to the office look at the game of the screen with a simple ear clip with no paste for HRV or a simple headband with no paste for H and another big trick for folks that have some significant challenges is find the thing they care about if they want I can't tell you the number of times I've watched the first 25 minutes of Shrek because of of when the HG system was produced we had those movies and everyone watched the first 25 minutes in their session so you can you can funnel the rewards into something that's going to capture the attention of people that have a little bit of quirky brains that can work around it and then avoid doing the the really adversive work until they've eased into it work with what you've got I mean again I'm I'm talking about 25 27 years ago but I mean in that day we would just you know we would get only the information off of CZ or C4 you know and then just do some quieting uh protocols as simple as that the other thing is I you know anybody who works with with children like that what I Fally call the wiggly pigges like the real ADHD kids underline H okay and um as was being said individuals with um you know the the the strong rocking and and flapping with autism I work with dirty data okay um and essentially your artifact is a variable okay and you notice when you know your artifact starts to to come down when your data starts to get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner as long as you acknowledge that I don't have an issue what I have an issue with is is if you're training quote unquote the the artifact training EMG that's that's different but training the artifact but in some there's so so much that can be done with people who have the experience I think that's the big one talibo reminded me to do our disclaimer that she has a question or was it wait hold on where did she put it listen to you guys I'm Terri ified of sending my Kido to public school we are homeschooling now till next year talibo just a reminder this is for informational entertainment purposes only please check with your primary care physician first continue well you know I want to give a shout out to teachers before I mean it's really really to easy to criticize it's really easy to see the you know the the bigger picture that isn't working um but I mean there there are jewels of people out there and we do get a lot of referrals also from teachers and parent to parent and then the teacher will inquire hey what's going on with this child so I I think it's also just a matter of larger education and also recognizing what the heck do you expect one person in front of 30 children trying to get them all to focus on the same lesson in the same way yeah people need a lot of not just sympathy empathy uh and support and and just kind of looping around I don't think we need AIDS we need more teachers in smaller classrooms and I'd say that's kind of international problem now well to that point Mari I I had the Good Fortune here in Los Angeles I don't know if it exists anywhere else there's a school out in Woodland Hills it's an inclusion model uh K K through 8 there are 20% of the children in the school have an IEP 80% neurotypical there are two teachers in every classroom one is a tra is a general ed teacher the other is a special ed teacher they Pride themselves on including people with I I'm talking severe challenges nonverbal wheelchair bound I mean kids with with some very very difficult issues all in the same classroom it makes me uh it makes me emotional think about it because it was such a beautiful experience I had one daughter on the Spectrum who knows anymore and the other daughter is a gifted kid they both went to the same school different obviously different grades but they went to the same school and it accommodated both of them they had highly gifted kids they had kids who had you know Assist of technology to communicate and everybody was in the same classroom being taught by the same teachers it was brilliant please tbu look in your local community see if something that can exist it may not be in a public school environment maybe it's private but maybe there's something where you can find because homeschooling in my opinion has its limitations the social construct the social construct around engagement with other peers is really really not your family is really important and I think a lot of homeschooled kids miss that they try to make up with it with various strategies I understand but there is something about the experience of going to school that I think is valuable for a lot of folks there was another great question that came up here earlier and I wanted to talk about oh microcurrent neuro feedback microcurrent is not neuro feedback that's all I have to say well let's let's say one more thing because people you know people are always wondering about equipment this is the common question we get which we don't love that question about what equipment but it is important to know that this particular product is one of five or six products that are all essentially identical and they have different brand names but they're all versions of something called lens LNS so iasis direct Clarity hpn and there's at least one more yeah but if it's if it's microcurrent it's a version of lens so go look at all the literature and people practicing and education around lens and see if that makes you satisfied if it does then I assis will be fine but you're not operating in a Traditional landscape of of neur feedback is I think John pointed out yet they have co-opted the phrase to my consternation lens neuro feedback I'm sorry it's inherent in the word lens but consumers don't don't know the difference yeah I did Nur feedback what' you do what did I don't know this thing and whatever they describe it I go it sounds like a stimulation technology what you're describing you did a you did a 12 minute session that's not I don't think that's neural feedback G be honest with you but they don't know consumers do not know yeah there's no feedback there's got to be feedback somewhere as a as a parent Tabo I think the main thing you need to start your search with is those techniques put current into the head yeah neuro feedback or claim to I think that's still an open question well well seriously like like the the electronics electricity the physics involved don't make sense and it does there is some suggestion that we're not actually doing current like the way that it's described cribed it doesn't it shouldn't work to get current into the brain the way they described the the technology so I I there's a few fe uh a few Technologies on our field of elaborate this is one of them and that I'm just like really that wait the kind of breaks down when I think about how it should work I'm kind of confused about how it could work so the small currents are not sufficient to create an action potential you you they can potentiate activity but they don't initi iate activity if you create a gigantic Bell the normal way to ring a bell is to have a big clanger that hits it and that will ring the bell if you have a little tiny padded Mallet that the drummer would normally use if you hit the bell with that it doesn't ring the bell you might hear a little thump but it doesn't ring the bell but if you tap the bell at the right frequency the Bell will become a ringing Bell so the frequency of the super small currents end up being important uh you can entrain again facilitate uh content but you can't create content so it's it's uh the currents are so small that the government approve the device thinking it couldn't have an effect but they're looking for the effect of a clim want to pause on that comment it does have an effect I get people every week that have side effects from microcurrent St every week some comes in and says oh my God I'm chronically anxious I can't sleep again this called frequency at the right spot in order to have it work and a lot of times people working with it don't even understand that yeah anyway the the microcurrent can have an effect it's just not the classic effect like a clanger will ring a bell uh this is more like the soft Mallet had hitting the right frequency to create the ring you can potentiate the out but you can't create it John we want to jump in and have our little combo here in terms of who should be doing this because this is definitely experimental who should be and who shouldn't be and how transparent they need to be if you're in New York lens restricted for a long time just a medic if you're in New York and you do microcurrent stimulation you need to be a medical doctor because they will arrest you as a psychologist for practicing medicine without a license well they'll charge you they won't come in you know arresting but uh you you're going to get busted for it and they've they've uh they've legally challenged people's uh ability to use lens uh in the state of New York uh there may be other locations that have restrictions on who can pass currents into the client uh but uh New York saw it as uh not the role of a psychologist to be passing currents into a person and as such they they ruled It Outside The Lure of a psychologist to do such a thing and um it it you know it's not part of a psychology licensed to do neur feedback either uh you it's a technique that you need to have expertise in uh like a medical doctor you have a license to be a medical doctor but you need to have competency in the techniques that you're using and uh NE feedback is a technique you're going to have to have competency in and if you got the right license passing currens into somebody may be a permissible thing as well joy John geez Jay that I had no idea about that in New York because it's a different landscape here in La my goodness I met somebody a practitioner doing client work with somebody at a lens Facility Who had no training at all yeah same up here same up here wow I mean it makes it makes sense and right exactly but if you're if you're exogenously doing something to someone you think that would have a higher level of scrutiny than a training exercise look what we do you know is a behavioral training you know I yeah it should be done by a doctor well I mean all to this we got hug huge loophole uh in in all of the systems which means if you have the proper license or proper qualifications in one other category you are going to get your head chopped off if you do something in another classification or with equipment that isn't equipment etc etc but if your name is Suzie Q and you uh sell shoes uh you can buy whatever piece of equipment and do whatever and nobody's going to come after you I mean it's a major major issue up here if you do dentistry and you're not a dentist they're going to come get you but if you do Neurotherapy and you have no training or you do lens and you have no training they're not gonna come get you well okay Mar I'm gonna I'm gonna offer some more thoughts on that um first of all there is no such thing as a license and neura feedback yeah we have to attempt to establish that in every State I don't see anybody ever taking that one on okay yeah well you you have a history you know the battles yeah well what we what we STI California has some kind of a something or other um Jay probably knows it because uh what's his face used to rely on all the time in fact there there's a non-licensed practitioner for alternative healthc care right in California ab3 you have to openly State what your qualifications are but if you're an alternative health care practitioner you can practice your Alternative Health Care practice in California now they if you pretend you're a doctor you're going to get busted there there's no way around that uh but if if you state who you are what you are and everything you can practice in California doing neuro feedback there's there's no uh uh there's no lure required uh but you have to end up being a uh you know you have to State your presence as an alternative health care practitioner and again you can't Mis State your qualifications yeah I would love to take a moment and talk about alternative sorry you cannot in the United States you cannot buy Neuro feedback equipment that's FDA clear the the class 2 medical device you cannot buy that's the issue we have all these wellness products now there are only a few that are actually have the that that's the issue but can I just um actually we have two really important points at the top of the hour but what I would love to just interject is the difference between alternative and experimental okay alternative is a term I despise um I think it came out of a good place but it's just so bastardized I would say to anybody run as fast as you can away from anything alternative experimental is extremely positive because in order to get anything evidence-based well hello you have to do some experimental but you want to do your experimental with people who are properly trained know the risks and benefits can communicate them to people so you have what we call informed Choice nobody wants to be a guineapig but to to participate in things that are experim mental I think is fantastic because chances are you could be on the Forefront of some incredible things but you got to know your stuff um Joy do you want to loop back to what you were saying about the uh the equipment there because it's this it's the same stuff everybody is using wellness products now I mean generally speaking I mean I would say up until just a few years ago everything we had was Health Canada approved or FDA but a lot of like stuff that I would never touch doesn't have that but there are also some reputable people that are not bothering to get the stamps on the equipment now which I find a bit concerning but it's so expensive and it takes so much time um and we're going into a soup Market again H how's everybody doing on time uh again Irish goodbye you can split anytime I'll Stick Around whatever I'm meeting John and Anthony later so uh yeah I've got around five minutes but um I I think this this is a really important topic I would love somebody else to support me contradict me what have you because I think we're at the meat of the issue in our discipline I I Mar to your point I think the simple thing comes down to this this is what our public needs to get educated about yeah if you're gonna go out and spend $300 and you can train your own brain you are not working with a Class 2 medical device I can guarantee it okay so that alone should stand out to them now you know that this is you know not for first of all it's not for diagnosable conditions let me Advocate some devils here Joy just for a second so most people could not do this they would they would have many many problems getting this done but they you can buy an open EEG Open Source Hardware device for about a 100 bucks you can get open EEG softare Ware for free you can roll your own neuro feedback program with that's scary part it is really hard and and here's the thing doesn't matter doing neuro feedback learning how to do neuro feedback is not hard knowing what to do in neuro feedback is really hard so I don't really care that I'm using a non FDA approved pocket amp or a neurobics a neobit amp from in my European offices because the amp is is not the important part it's what we're doing with the stuff I mean the software I use is you know 510k certified an FDA it's you know it's a medical software but I could do any I could do really good Nur feedback with really bizarre tools if they measured signals did filtering had parameters you know did rewards and I wouldn't care too too much because I know lots of people using FDA cleared high-end tools who don't do good neuro feedback and Andrew I'm just just injecting and that is exactly the problem right you have people who really know their stuff that can use other non- checked or non-approved equipment because they know what they're doing and that gets transferred to the individuals who don't so we are at the Crux of the issue in our discipline information well out though Mary it's we're never going to move backwards we're always going to have cheaper Tech more accessive measurement easier stuff you we're always going to have more access in this landscape we're never going to you know our parents didn't look at their blood lipids when they were in their 20s you know it never happened now we like oh crap better back off in the bed and Jerry's like it's agency we're giving people and and I will fight tooth and nail I'll die in this hill we always want the software and Hardware to be more accessible always because right now that's the big problem Hill is gonna die on The Hill die on the hill Andrew would you consider it fair then would you consider fair to say because I mean I agree with you it's it's knowing how to put it to use and in that in that little kernel also contains your ability to interpret the quality of the data that you're working with but no hardare softare gives me that not familiar with what a good EEG signal looks like I mean I say it all the time in here it's like that's an EEG right I'm like uh no but that see but they don't know so here's the problem yeah the the public as such you know I mean you and I are both doing our best on Reddit but the deal is these people like oh I'm gonna do this and I bought this and I got this for 300 bucks and they're all proud of that yeah and then they get to the part where they go I but I don't know what to choose yeah so and I I would also bring forward the what to choose is a very small part of it as well I can tell you I it doesn't take me more than five minutes to teach somebody put the electron at C3 can we have a zoom call I can show you how to do it okay but I can't tell you how to set the thresholds so that the learning is maximize I I can't not in all fairness or more importantly what to do next after you get a certain impact from a protocol that is the hardest thing in nerfy back is the what to do next question or what to do when you aren't getting the effects you're looking for it fits the ideas it's what I was taught by my mentor it fits the brain mops and the person's reporting something completely different right yeah you know that is a that is an art in reconciling someone's physiology to their goals in some way science and an art combined like like like anything you know a good medical practitioner is a scientist and an artist I'd say we all are anybody who knows their their stuff it's an art right everybody have their say go ahead Joy Public it's that it isn't as simple as knowing where to stick the sensors and how to plug it in sorry yeah if if I had to have FDA approval for protocols uh when I started there wouldn't have been anything um well that's what we're talking about experimental though right yeah exactly and oh let's the tail on the head and see what Happ we had informed consent uh and we had information release forms and uh the informed consent form and the research release form are two separate forms or they're coercive uh so you have to offer uh the treatment and then ask for their consent to release if if they deny the consent to release you still have to treat them so but uh uh we there there was no efficacy for anything in 1972 there was people doing Alpha and some Alpha Theta stuff and there was some SMR uh there there wasn't really uh uh any real efficacy proof of anything at that point so everything we were doing was really experimental and um the work we did with Alpha training in Alcoholics in 1972 to 75 uh predated peniston by over a decade and uh we actually wrote a grant to NIH for uh um Alpha training in Alcoholics in 1974 but it was denied they didn't they they in 1972 after very bad piece of research um they quit funding anything in neuro feedback uh but the uh the the bad piece of research was basically uh they said they did Alpha training they could show no learning curve and then they concluded uh that Alpha training uh had no effect but if you train something ineffectively and it doesn't have an effect it's your training that the problem not the not the uh the use of Alpha so anyway we didn't get anything covered out on yeah I think that that I love that it's not if you're not doing something right it doesn't mean it it didn't work it means you weren't doing something right yeah did everybody get out of their system now we feel cleansed are we good y okay all right so just to make sure everybody send me your contact information we got a predominantly West Coast uh contingency and some some Canada here uh so I get people asking me all all the time you know where can I find find somebody and uh on the west coast I know a few people uh and in Canada I know a few people so Joy I work anywhere in the world oh yeah that's right something so yeah yeah y Andrew Anthony Dr Marie swingle hey thanks and all the uh talibo and Craig and all our friends that popped up hey thanks for showing up and uh see you next week and uh I'm GNA go work on my interior singulate over in Vegas take care all okay byebye