Well, hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, Keto savage.com.
Today I've got special guest Doctor Andrew Hill on the line
and we dive deep into the wonderful world of brain mapping
and neurofeedback and how to analyze one's brain waves and
then subjected to certain stimuli internally to elicit a
certain response over time. Very, very interesting stuff.
I've I've not ever recorded a podcast with a guest like this.
I learned a ton about what the brain is telling you.
What's what Brain waves like gamma, delta, Theta, alpha,
beta. You are producing more of less
of where you may be deficient. How manipulating those through
non intrusive means can elicit a certain response to your favor.
Whether that be athletic seizure related OCD which was a
particular interest to me because I've had OCD my whole
life. Just kind of diving deeper into
looking at the brain from a feedback standpoint similar to
how you would use ACGM or a leukometer or a ketone tester,
something like that. But then taking actionable data
from the brain and then you know adjusting course as needed.
So very interesting conversation.
I learned a ton, I've got no doubt that you will as well.
So that for the delay, sit back, relax, enjoy the conversation
with Doctor Andrew Hill and we are live.
Andrew Hill, how are you Sir? I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me today, Robert.
Hey, I'm excited to chat with you.
So you are an expert in all things brain health and
optimization. And I, you know, I talk a lot
about nutrition, fitness training and all of that can be
dialed in perfectly, but it's all for not if you're not in the
right headspace and just functioning on all 8 cylinders
from a neurological standpoint. So I'm excited to chat with you
about proper brain health today. But out of curiosity, man, what
got you interested in the brain in the first place?
Oh wow. So, you know, I think of course
a lot of our experience probably is our brain.
So, you know, maybe that had something to do with it when I
was growing up, but or fairly early.
I think I was in probably in high school or something.
One of my siblings had a a an accident where to get hit by a
car and had a brain injury and had a, you know, pretty dramatic
change in consciousness sort of status for a few months.
You know, he was in a coma for a month or two and then took some
time to recover from that. And he and I watched both the
the strong change that he experienced sort of happened and
then him rebuilding that. Both were, you know, pretty
dramatic things and that got me working in this in this
direction. Eventually, you know, a decade
later, I started working with the brain and I was doing work
with mostly residential population.
So working with group homes for with folks that had multiple
disabilities and mental and developmental issues and sensory
issues and communication issues, and working in this environment
for a while, you know, wasn't seeing a lot of change.
And then I ended up working in inpatient psych in really
critical environments for a while and didn't see a lot of
change and ended up getting injured working in inpatient
environments and had to sort of shift gears for a while.
And when I went back into mental health, I went back into an area
that I had some experience with, you know, developmental psych
and kids sort of autism and and other related phenomena.
And but I was doing it in an in a new place that used this
technique called neurofeedback and suddenly I was seeing kids
and some adults with developmental differences get
control over their their brain phenomena pretty well.
And it was it was really sort of jumping out against the
landscape of me thinking nothing could really be done for a lot
of phenomena. You know more than a decade of
seeing people with sensory communication, executive
anxiety, trauma, you know kind of psychiatric phenomena as well
as developmental really not getting an awful lot of support
in in inpatient, outpatient, etcetera.
And then I saw this neurofeedback center, you know,
training brains for a few months and over time, you know, with
like ADHD and executive function things, we're seeing a couple of
standard deviations of change in just a few months.
And with autistic spectrum stuff, we're seeing sensory and
social and seizure phenomena change quite a bit.
And this just really flew in the face of what I thought was
possible. And at the time, this is now
more than 20 years ago, at the time, the field of neurofeedback
was still somewhat new. I would say it's still pretty
new. I mean this year in, in 2024,
EEG the, the measurement of brain waves, which is a big part
of what neurofeedback uses, EEG is 100 years old, 100 years this
year. So it's not that old.
The technology, it's not that new obviously.
We're still figuring out like air travel perhaps and
neurofeedback, the practice of measuring the brain and then
changing the EEG often, although you can do neurofeedback on many
things. But often when we say the word
neurofeedback, we mean biofeedback on brain waves or
shaping the EEG. And that was discovered in the
late 60s essentially and how it's used today, the sort of
form it's used today. So it's a somewhat new practice.
And 20 years ago there was, I don't know, two or three schools
of thought. And they were essentially all
arguing about what was going on within the functional sort of
landscapes. You had these two or three
different pieces of software and they all worked somewhat
differently. And proponents of how to use
them and what was going on and how we were seeing all these
changes happen in the early field because it was dramatic.
I mean, I mean you'd start training someone with seizures
and within a few weeks their seizures would be a fraction of
what they were before or someone with acute anxiety or trauma or
executive function stuff. You'd see change start showing
up subjectively and and from the outside in as little as a couple
of weeks sometimes. So we were all all busy arguing
in the field about what was going on in these different sort
of churches or schools of of neurofeedback really disagreed
with each other about how this stuff worked and what it meant
and the best way to go about it. And and everyone's busy sort of
arguing with each other And yet all of these approaches, these
three or or four maybe big approaches in the field that
theoretically didn't have any, you know, agreement, they
weren't reconcilable. A lot of vitriol was being
thrown around and very nichy circles about, you know, the
right way to do this stuff. And yet all of them, all of the
people doing neurofeedback were getting better results on the
stuff that it worked for than traditional medicine.
All like dramatically better results.
I mean very few things 20 years ago and and more.
And still even I would say very few things can take somebody
who's profoundly challenged with like ADHD or anxiety and give
them tools to move their brain to a different place in just a
few months. So that power really jumped out
and we didn't know how it worked at all.
And so after working in the field and seeing this phenomena,
you know, again and again and again and helping, you know,
move people through some transformation again and again
and seeing lots of data, I I went back to grad school and
studied essentially how well I I I want to know how neurofeedback
worked. Because with these different
schools of thought, arguing about what was happening and yet
amazing results from my perspective, it really struck me
as a blind men and elephant kind of situation.
You know, describing something interesting and maybe valid at
the detail level, but no one really knew what was going on.
And those basic questions about doesn't matter where on the head
you train which frequencies you train, like what is actually
happening and people were not in agreement about it.
So I I went back to grad school and studied EEG and brain
organization and learning and a bunch of other stuff, including
doing a lot of work on neurofeedback.
And I did one of the earliest double-blind, placebo-controlled
studies of neurofeedback, looking at exercising beta waves
in the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere and beta
waves versus slower beta waves and then beta waves versus sham.
And helped work for one of the software developers in the in
the commercial space to develop a sham module.
So you could do placebo-controlled work.
And over the next, you know, month or two developed data and
then analyzed it for a year or two, which is sort of what
happens with the EEG. But what came out of it is sort
of an understanding of how the brain knows when neurofeedback
is happening. So to back up for a second,
neurofeedback is a process of shaping the brain waves or
exercising the brain waves. But unlike body based exercise
of muscles, let's say where you're doing and you're very
intentional. In fact the more intentional you
are with moving the body in a skill or a or a exercise, the
faster your body adapts the better you change.
If you put your mind into the muscle while moving through your
compound workout, you change faster and and you develop the
skill faster. When you're putting your mind
into the, you know, you observe the person doing the golf swing
properly and then really attentionally, mindfully anchor
to it while you try it, You learn faster.
So you know the mind is a driver of learning to some extent.
But body based biofeedback, people hear biofeedback, they
think relaxation therapy and you know, maybe the word alpha waves
comes up from the 60s. But a lot of that stuff, a lot
of the, the voluntary stuff around biofeedback is using
peripheral nervous system, your heart rate, your, you know, hand
warming, blood pressure, that kind of stuff, the peripheral
nervous system, you can feel it and it's to some extent under
your control. You change your breathing rate
and your heart rate variability speeds up or slows down.
So you can learn to kind of control the activation levels
and sensations and phenomena in the peripheral nervous system
and that has a lot of value for a lot of different goals.
But most neurofeedback is central biofeedback, it's
central nervous system. So the line between peripheral
and central is all the stuff inside of the bone is central
nervous system. If it's got nerves and
information flow, it's central. So the spine and the brain
mostly, and those tissues, the central tissues don't have any
sensory nerve endings. You cannot feel inside your
brain. There's nothing to feel.
You feel up to you. You can feel inside your skull,
there's the meninges, the scalp, the skull, there's blood vessels
in a kind of a a, a folded layer of several layers that wrap the
brain. But once you get to the brain
itself, there's nothing to feel. The brain has can't, can't
actually feel itself ironically, even though it's doing all the
feeling. So if you measure what the brain
is doing moment to moment, if you stick a wire on top of the
head and and measure a specific area of the brain that has a
job, let's say there's the front midline of the brain, the
anterior cingulate. And its job is to be a little
CEO and kind of help you direct the activity and the focus and
the value of the focus. He sort of walks around going
think of this, focus on this. We care about this, think of
this, think of this, care about this.
We, you know, it's through that, that direction of the internal
environment almost. And it uses beta waves to do
that. And it also uses something
called alpha waves to go into more of a relaxed mode and not
focus on things and uses Theta waves to shift gears like kind
of like a lubrication. So the the beta's, the gas
pedal, the alpha's, the neutral. And the Theta is like taking the
brakes off or or lubricating things.
They work better or react faster.
And if you look at someone's brain at rest, you can see a
certain amount of beta or amount of of alpha compared to the
average person. And that'll predict some things.
These are called phenotypes or or biomarkers or trait markers.
And if I saw yours, you know, oh, look, you got a lot of beta
on the front midline. I might guess some things about
you. Now, brain mapping.
This is what we're talking about now, the the measurement of
resting EEG, Brain mapping is not a deterministic kind of
diagnostic landscape. You can't say, oh, look, you
have this brain pattern, therefore you have this
experience because people are really unusual.
So when you look at a a, a data, human data through a lens of
population variability, yeah, people are weird.
Good job, be weird. A lot of data that you come out
of, it doesn't actually, you know, give you all that much
discreet meaning. But it does sort sort of paint
out sort of a landscape of what could be true.
Because often, let's say you have a front, you know, midline
beta. Often that beta excess means
your interior cingulate tends to cramp up into high gear.
And the experience of that is somebody getting stuck on things
so perseverating kind of getting obsessive or having a, you know,
a thought stuck in the head or an idea stuck in the head that's
that's a beta waves being stuck essentially.
And the alpha can't come up to replace it.
And sometimes people have a Theta wave stuck there and
instead of having a an intrusive thought or something or
obsessiveness, they'll have like a song stuck in their head.
Or someone who bites their nails or has a tick will have lots of
Theta brain waves because that CEO is a bit disinhibited and is
rushing around, shifting from task to task to task.
So we're sort of getting this perspective now that you can use
the tools of looking at your resting brain to figure out how
some of these circuits work. And then the big technique that
I do, a lot of this thing called neurofeedback, is measuring
those brain waves in real time. If you wanted to change your how
your anterior cingulate worked, you'd stick a wire on top of it,
plus some ear clips, and you'd measure that beta wave amount
moment to moment. And whenever it briefly shifted
in the right direction, Meta relaxes.
The alpha comes up to replace it briefly.
The computer sees that and sort of applauds your brain.
You know, a little bit of audio happens or a visual.
So a little game starts to move on the screen, or some music
starts playing and the brain goes, oh, hey, stuff.
I like stuff. Stuff's cool.
That's interesting, huh? Wow, stuff's happening in the
outside world. And then a couple seconds later
your brain happens to move in the wrong direction, especially
if you have a lot of, you know, obsessiveness or something.
Your beta is pretty hot. Comes right back up and the game
slows down or stops. The brain says, hey, I don't, I
don't like no stuff. Where's my stuff?
And a couple seconds later it happens to fluctuate in the
right direction. The alpha comes back up, let's
say, and the game resumes. And we're sort of shaping the
activity. We're plotting the brain
briefly, whenever it happens, to move in the right direction.
And then every so often we move the goal posts, you know, put
the computer right next to where the brain is in measurement.
And then when the brain again fluctuates in the right
direction, little burst of information happens in the
outside world. And a lot of my initial
dissertation work at UCLA was to look at what was happening at
that moment. How does the brain know that
you're applauding certain frequencies?
And I sort of figured out that the brain is producing a burst
of those same frequencies in response to them being
applauded. It sort of notices within a few
minutes. The brain is reacting to the
whichever frequencies are being applauded by the software.
Now, because you can't feel your brain waves, you can't really
voluntarily push them around, concentrate, relax, etcetera.
You can't really control them that way in terms of following a
neurofeedback protocol. But the brain notices.
The brain knows. If you know, you only get
applause when you bring up some alpha, Relax the beta on that
front midline. And that happens for 20 minutes.
After two or three sessions of that, the brain goes oh, oh, oh,
oh, Alpha coming up. OK.
Relaxing beta. Oh, gotcha, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'll. I'll do some of that.
And it does it strongly. And you feel that for the next
few hours, after maybe the second or third session, you're
kind of like, wait a minute, I I feel kind of different.
I might feel kind of relaxed. That's interesting, huh?
Wow. And then it kind of wears off
and you're like, Nah, I was imagining it.
Nah. I'd say Nah, I I kind of wanted
to feel it or whatever. And then you do it again and it
happens more strongly. And you have this opportunity to
start essentially stretching your brain resources a little
tip a little bit transiently by doing operant conditioning,
doing shaping of the circuits activity and it flexes a little
bit, it responds and after a couple of sessions of it you
feel the the direction of that response.
And by checking back in with your coaches and trainers, you
sort of can create this relationship with your brain.
Kind of like you're you're training any other goal, you
know, or or suffering. Where the stuff we're training
the brain ends up being these big features of things like
attention or stress or anxiety or speed of processing, brain
fog, sleep, seizure. And the the big gross features
of the brain become quantifiable and trainable.
Just like you're looking at your bone density or you're looking
at your, you know, maximum, you know, one Rep lift on a on a
deadlift. Or you're looking at your
triglycerides and trying to figure out how to steer some of
these values. When you look at your speed of
alpha, it's your speed of your mind.
You know how well you can access words and language and absorb
information and retrieve information.
When you see how much Theta and alpha you have at rest in the
motor tissue, that's how well you can sustain your focus and
not become distractible. It's also how well you can sleep
at night, sustain your sleep. When the cingulates are hot in
the front, you might be obsessive.
When it's hot in the back, you might ruminate.
That's your lifeguard back there going watch the road, watch the
road. So all of these things don't
become diagnostic again, but become features.
Like you're kind of learning to read your body fat scale,
changing the right direction or learning to, you know, dig
through the the data at your high end gym with your coach and
figure out which of the features you're seeing in data align with
the goals or the suffering you want to chase.
And so when I got out of grad school, I I started a company
essentially whose job it is, is to sit in that place between
what your doctor does and what your gym does.
And sort of my company, Peak Brain, does a lot of education.
We teach you to read your brain maps.
We teach you to sort of, you know, develop plans to navigate
through making changes in these resources of stress, sleep,
attention, etcetera. So so, you know, 20 years in
now, I'm gotten deeply into not just the technique of this one
thing, neurofeedback, but more about the perspective of, oh,
hey, you've got a brain, why don't you learn how it works?
Because just knowing how it works can actually create a lot
of perspective and transformation.
If you know that you're eating before bed is screwing up your
sleep quality, which is screwing up your word finding issues,
well, it gives you some strategies to change your
behavior and modify the environment, modify yourself and
deal with your brain. You know your your, your
resources, your suffering, whatever it is in a very
different place or very different perspective than a
label that's been applied and being in a treatment role.
So not that there was a role for that, but we decided that the
the real value we could provide was to sort of help you
demystify yourself a little bit using some of these tools 1st
and then often you know help build some plans for change so.
I love it. There's lots to unpack here.
So from a from a medical setting standpoint, this is
predominantly used for those that have been diagnosed with
some form of ADHDOCD depression that's typically the setting.
Seizure seizures. Yeah, the first neurofeedback
was seizure as a treatment. The average drop of seizure in
the literature is about 50%. But I I I've never seen a result
as poor as 50%. It's always a big effect.
Seizure was the first thing in the 70s and then sleep and ADHD
became a big feature, set, a big, big target for it.
The other big things that happened in the 70s and 80s that
really became huge effects in both people's lives, you know,
all over the place. But plus the the literature
backs it up quite strongly. Is it alcohol?
Alcohol cravings, alcohol relapse, sleep issues,
creativity issues, emotional issues, seizure issues?
It's used heavily in alcohol. There's really good research on
it these days. I would say it's, you know,
probably up until about 20 years ago it was still mostly kid
focused. That's why you get both like
autism and ADHD and seizure and you know, and anxiety and bed
wetting and sensory issues as the targets in your feedback.
Because to some extent you see the targets of how brains cramp
up a lot in all the classic ways in a in a developmentally, you
know, either disadvantaged population or developmentally
stressed, you know, kid populations experiencing trauma
or something. You see how the brain cramps up
in the edge cases of human suffering either through being
developed that way or things that are required.
So a lot of the, a lot of the populations were kid focused.
Now I would say in the landscape of neurofeedback, which is
something like 15,000 people worldwide that do this
professionally in the US, we probably have more than half of
those. I would say almost all of them
are therapists working with ADHD.
Anxiety, especially trauma and OCD features respond very well.
Autism is a huge target and then you have sleep seizure.
Migraine responds really well, although that's a different
technique. You do blood flow training, you
use infrared cameras, at least I do infrared cameras and then
train the blood flow as well as the EEG to get a different kind
of response in migraines. But those are the kind of I
think you know post concussion post COVID little secret that
brain fog looks the same no matter why you have it.
So if it's from mold or Lyme or chemo or apnea or post COVID,
brain fog looks the same. So brain fog writ large is is a
good is a strong target and these days the the field is also
breaking out in a non medical quite strongly.
There's an awful lot of use of neurofeedback in sport.
You know, certain high level pro sports, NFL and and European
football as well. We're seeing that happen more
and more. Peak Brain, my my company, about
a third of our business has always been optimization.
You know, not necessarily chasing a particular bit of
suffering for you, but helping the peak performers perform
better. You know people come in saying,
you know, I I have no problems but I want to work on XY or Z
and they're often very high performers.
So I have a the luxury, the the the wonderful experience of
having exceptionally high performers, an awful lot of them
over the past 20 years where you know, it's it it it stops
looking all that different. When you have a super high end
athlete or a super high end creative or ACEO, they all kind
of look the same to to some extent when they have brains
that are very, very powerful. But some of the natural
strengths can really easily cramp up.
I mean there's a very fine line between an effective CEO and
somebody with OCD. It's the same tissue for hyper
focusing and holding things in your mind is that anterior
cingulate And if your thoughts are having you, we call that
OCD. And if you're able to hold that
like a steel trap when you want to and hold your vision, that's
that's the CEO perspective, the the clear valuing, the clear
importance, the clear focus internally.
But if you can't turn that off at when you get home and you're
still trying to solve your partner's problems instead of be
a good listener and you can't power down for the night and
you, you know you're requiring sort of assistive substances to
get there, OK, then it's in the way.
Then you may not be OCD, but it's probably a little bit stuck
if you're inflexible and rigid in this way.
So you tend to find that even people that have peak
performance, quote UN quote goals or categories will have
all the same cramps in their brain and dysregulated resources
as folks with giant, big scary labels.
I mean, someone comes in who's a creative and they're trying to
breakthrough some creative blocks and turns out they've got
crazy stage fright one on the red carpet.
You know, when they're, when they're unscripted and we can do
a lot of work on anxiety and creativity.
And I get a lot of, you know, clients from that, that person's
acting coach because suddenly they're acting.
You know, exercises start just changing, going through the roof
when they get more creative. But we worked on actually, you
know, classic anxiety features to some extent and classic sleep
regulation features. You know, because those were the
goals, or rather those were the things in the way of the goal.
So the goals can be symptoms. The goals can be suffering,
diagnostic, medical, psychological, but the resources
are just resources. So if you drop below the
diagnostic level, we're all in neurofeedback.
We're all working on regulatory features, about six or seven of
them, that respond really well. There's stress, sleep,
attention, sensory social speed and then stability, which is
like migraines and seizures and things.
That's the kind of the landscape.
And then within the brain's cortex, the surface of the
brain, you can kind of see the big tissues, the big machinery
involved with executive function, sleep, stress, all the
anxiety flavors, essentially all kind of visualized because
they're based around resources. We've got a resource that cramps
up for most flavors of anxiety, got a resource that's a little
bit off and most flavors of executive or memory that's not
acute, you know, very severe stuff is, is different tissue.
But you know, word finding for instance, or delayed recall is
just a tuning thing in, in terms of speed of the brain.
So the the, the label starts to break down.
And over the years I've kind of stopped caring if somebody's
screaming and stimming and having seizures or if they're,
you know, a high-powered CEO who can't put the phone down long
enough to like sit and relax and you know, do a session and give
me good feedback on how he's sleeping.
It's the same approach. It's like OK, what are the goals
here and and what are you noticing and what does your
brain look like at rest? And OK, now we know your goals,
now we know your brain. And that suggests a bunch of
things that might be able to shift you both, you know,
behaviorally and neurofeedback wise.
And now it's iterative. Now it's about creating the
experience for folks and the changes they're looking for more
than the the particular label. But label dodging aside, it's
mostly executive function, anxiety and sleep as the big
three categories that neurofeedback tends to work on
as a bread and butter thing, you know?
It is certainly seems like a more holistic approach than
simply throwing the kitchen sink of medication at a given ailment
like sleep or anxiety or stress, which seems to be the standard
of care across the board currently.
Yeah, and. And there are some good meds for
some good things. Sleep's not one of them,
unfortunately. I mean, there's no Med, no
medication that really creates sleep.
Most sleep aids or hypnotics that shut off the mind but don't
create sleep. And the hope is that the sleep
sleep reflex kicks in then but it's often not that great sleep
in this a vicious cycle of course with with sleep stuff but
you know neurofeedback as a technique is is is pretty
wonderful. I mean I'm I'm I'm biased a
little bit perhaps but it can make a lot of change in a really
QuickTime for for some classic stuff but I don't think the
value is even once you've done some neurofeedback.
I think it's really once you map your brain and once you see
what's going on, it gives you that perspective.
Once you know how your anterior cingulate works, or you know
whatever it is you care about, it clicks in.
The stuff that you see in a brain map that's most valid and
most interesting is the stuff you already know, but now you
know how it shows up. And you can also use the brain
mapping alongside medication to inform what's going on further.
So you can you know look at your brain on and off your ADHD meds
or your caffeine or cannabis or Adderall whatever it is and it's
a night and day difference, stark difference.
And you see gross obvious features in both the brain maps
and in executive function performance.
We always doing a performance test alongside the brain kind of
hold them in contrast to sort of tease apart what's going on.
But it is night and day difference when someone does it
with and without caffeine or Adderall or something.
And you can use that as an exploratory tool to figure out,
well, how much is my pre workout affecting my concentration or my
Adderall supporting my studies or my cannabis impacting my, you
know, anxiety features that I'm using it for.
You can do, you can actually do empirical work and look at the
data and correlate it with how you feel and really start to
paint out a deeper understanding of what's going on internally
that you kind of already know. And you can also use it in a bit
more prospective way. There's decent research that
actually the head of my dissertation committee, a guy
named Doctor Andy Lookhter at UCLA.
You did a bunch of research looking at a feature in the
brain called cordance which there's an EEG signature in the
frontal lobes that seems to change about 10 days after you
start. Well, within 10 days, you know
you can see it at least by by ten days after you start an
antidepressant like a classic SSRI or something.
But often those classic drugs for depression you don't feel
for three, 4-5 weeks and acute psychiatric environment.
You're set up as you know stabilization mills for 2-3
days. Then you're back out and you
know in in in in you're you're you're suffering your life your
stressors again so often well before meds are even starting to
work. So you can use EEG to predict
Med responses or to show Med responses and to get to go, OK,
yeah, I I think I'm feeling something.
OK, yes. And my brain's shifting that
direction. I'll give it another, you know,
week or two and look again because I think maybe
something's happening because your brain activity might shift
in advance of your experience of it often does a little bit.
Just like your blood pressure might shift a little bit in
response to working out before you notice that your body is,
you know maybe more relaxed or something.
So it just becomes a tool set the just the brain mapping, just
the analysis of your brain at rest, held up alongside
executive function and figuring out where the big gross models
of stress, sleep, attention, jump out.
Just that piece of it can give you strategies for sleep
hacking, meditation, supplements, medication, and
then you have empirical tools to start, you know, digging through
again. So that's my big soapbox is,
well, you know, hey, it's your brain and there's a lot of
suffering, a lot of gifts, a lot of power, a lot of, you know,
things we don't understand. But you can take a look and
you'd be often very surprised. People are always saying, I had
no idea you could see this stuff in my brain.
I kind of joke like I'm an old school tailor with the tape
measure out going, oh, and I see your waist is this big first.
No, no, no, it's not. Oh, I'm looking at the
information right here. You know, I often see if
someone's executive function, for instance, and I'm sitting
down looking at attention testing alongside a brain map
and I show like, their auditory performance is fine, but not for
the first trial of information ever.
There's a vigilance for auditory.
And their brain map has a big BLOB of delta on one side behind
the ear and they had a concussion there.
They report or something and, oh, OK well, there's this
auditory lag. Oh, look at that.
Your simple reaction time is 1/2 a second for auditory but a
quarter second, which is typical for visual.
Oh, look, one side of your brain is not lifting off quickly.
And that's why there's a hitch of a lag.
Oh, this means when you when your partner starts talking and
you say oh sorry, what and and they and they're like
frustrated, it's not your fault. Look at this.
Your auditory system is lifting off slowly.
So here's, you know, 3 strategies to work around that
in the short term. And people start laughing.
You know, I give marital advice and brain map reviews because
you see stuff around communication and sensory input.
You have a little hint, a little, you know, description of
the phenomena and you hear the wife or husband start laughing
in the background because, you know, they suddenly feel
validated as as their partner's brain is laid out a little bit.
So it's a nice tool. Yeah.
Are there any reliable methods like for home use of these Eegs
and brain mapping? Like, is there anything that's
on the market currently that allows people to do this from
the come for their own home? Sure, yeah.
The hard part of neurofeedback and brain mapping isn't so much
doing the technique, but it's like how you use it for the
brain mapping. It's how you analyze it,
interpret it and then for the neurofeedback it's what you do
with the the tools like you can get kettle bells or you can get
a Nautilus machine from home. But how you design the workout
really creates the the transformation, not so much the
tools you have, yes you can get. There's there's many different
systems out there at this point that will do facilitated home
based work. What I've done is taken a
traditional neurofeedback approach, which involves mapping
your brain, measuring executive function, and then working with
you to figure out where the suffering and goals are.
And then we do systematic sort of traditional neurofeedback on
the EEG band. And all this is from home.
So we send you neurofeedback equipment, we send you brain
mapping equipment, and our coaches work with you.
We have people on seven days a week, more than 12 hours a day,
helping teach you stuff, set you up, troubleshoot, maybe
reminding you to fill out your sleep surveys because we haven't
seen one of those in three days. You know, that might happen.
And we have physical offices, PEAK has offices, a PEAK brain
in New York City, Saint Louis, couple in Southern California.
We're opening in Miami shortly. We're in London, we're in
Stockholm. Those offices are probably
serving fewer, you know, under 20% of our client base and most
of our clients never see offices.
And we make it pretty smooth. We, you know, send gear out and
coaches are super awesome and work live with you and teach you
stuff and troubleshoot and they're super low key and
patient as they move through stuff.
It's kind of like kind of like the Soul Cycle model.
You know, some equipment shows up and there's someone on the
other end of a small screen helping motivate, guide,
troubleshoot and get you through the process a little bit.
So it's a little more complicated than Soul Cycle, but
you know, it's a metaphor for business.
So how how does the? How is the data actually
collectively, how does this work so that you're able to see the
different brain waves? Like I've done a polygraph test
where they hooked me up to a polygraph and I can see the the
graphical illustration of what my body's doing, but how does
that work from a neurological standpoint?
Sure, sure. So polygraph was picking up
three or four things. One of them is the chest strap
is the the breathing, the oscillations of your breathing.
Another is like the connectivity of your skin, the galvanic skin
response. You start sweating when you're
nervous, etcetera. You know, one of them is
probably your EKG, your heartbeat, you know, looking at
how if if the beat to beat changes or speeding up or or
getting rigid sign that you're getting tight.
So same thing in the brain. The brain's producing
electricity, lots of electricity.
It's kind of a a, a blessing. We can't feel our brains because
they would hurt. They're full of all kinds of
stuff going on, like way more active than you might imagine.
But really, the EKG in the heart and the neurons firing the brain
are not all that different. They're both electrical
discharges. The real difference is that the
heart is meant to have coherent discharges.
There's a certain pattern of nodes.
The big electrical wave zips around the heart and creates
sort of a standing or similar frequency, a similar shape, you
know, morphology wave, like we all know what an EKG looks like.
Everyone's seeing Grey's Anatomy or whatever and seeing the EKG
on the screen has a special shape and each of those little
change points in that shape are meant to represent, you know,
it's going to represent each different node in the heart as
it pushes the blood around. It's the signal of the heartbeat
you're looking at essentially. The brain's not meant to be
coherent that way. It's actually meant to carry a
lot more information on each individual encoder of
information. And so essentially the brain
looks much more chaotic. If you if you ever seen EEGA set
of brain waves that look like a coherent EKG like like a
heartbeat that's basically a seizure event or a slow spike
which can lead to seizures. But if the heart, if the EKG
looks like an EEG, more chaotic waves that's basically some sort
of heart attack or or cardiac event.
You know these these are the same kind of neurons but they're
in different regulatory modes. One's synchronized and coherent,
one's more chaotic and carrying a lot more information at the
edge of that chaos in the in the brain.
But you just stick wires to the skin.
When doing an eega quantitative EEG or full head EEG, which is
our assessment tool, we just put a cap on the head like a lycra
cap. We send you like a swim cap kind
of thing. And it's got about 22 holes in
the cap with little metal rings around the holes.
And we also give you some ear clips, and you put the ear clips
on, put the cap on and then spend about 20 minutes feeling
awkward squirting gel into the holes of the ear clips and all
the cap. Maybe you have a friend who can
stand behind you and help get the cap gelled up, but it's a
little awkward. And during that our team or
your, your, your coach will be sitting on the other end of
their computer watching signals. You know, having you
troubleshoot quality of data, making sure you're getting good
signals, reading off your scalp on 21 locations, that that's a
full head EEG basically. And once we have good signals,
once we know that we're reading from all the proper locations,
would have you sit still and relax and close your eyes, relax
your jaw and sit still for about 10 minutes.
And our coaches will watch to make sure we're getting really
good data. You aren't like tightening up
your forehead or chewing your tongue or falling asleep.
And if so they'll gently OK, relax your forehead you know.
So there's someone getting good data streaming in and and oh and
I I skipped a step. The cap is actually plugged into
an EG amplifier that's not much bigger than a deck of cards and
it just stores the data on that little device and then it
buffers it off to a computer where we're watching the quality
come in and and we gather 10 minutes of eyes closed data.
We gather about 10 minutes of eyes open data.
The brain's in a very different mode, often for eyes closed
versus eyes open, especially in some visual tissue as you might
imagine. So once we have these baselines
then the actual EEG is done. That will turn into the
population comparisons, called a quantitative EEG.
We also have you do for 20 minutes the world's most boring
executive function test, where you sit and look at your
computer and you click the mouse for some things and don't click
the mouse for other things. But of course people get tired
and bored and space out and we sort of figure out how their
executive function works by making people perform at their
worst, You know, unloading everything and seeing how they
can perform voluntarily to, you know, activate and and and pump
the brakes both and all that takes about 90 minutes and it's
kind of, you know, a little mildly annoying, but it doesn't
hurt or anything. And we would then take that
data, compare it to a bunch of population based analysis and
take a couple days. But we would generate, you know,
a dozen pages of outputs. And I then go through data with
clients and teach them to understand their data.
So it's not really like we write you a diagnostic report and say,
oh, you have ADHD, you have a concussion.
It's more like I say, hey look, here's this left side of your
brain. When it makes lots of alpha,
that makes it hard to stay focused.
Oh look, your focus is not that great on this performance test.
Oh, these things often come along with sleep maintenance
issue. Is that true for you?
Oh, it is. OK, Well then this low power
beta is also about maintenance of your vigilance, meaning that
you can't. Turn it on when you're focused
and can't turn it off when you're asleep.
Therefore you're a space cadet who can't sleep and is anxious,
you know, or something. And I'm not telling them
anything they don't know. But the tool set is really just,
you know, get gathering the resting stuff that's coming off
the head, the the patterns of all these different machinery
bits, these, these, it's a primary and associated cortex,
all the communication you can sort of see a lot of it.
So that's the EEG for the brain mapping and then for brain
training or neurofeedback. We use a bit of a simpler system
because it's easier to replicate across people and got the same
effects and it's, you know easy to troubleshoot.
But we use a couple of channels of data for training, where you
put some ear clips on and one or two wires attached to the head,
bit of pace to stick it on the scalp.
And we spend a couple weeks working with clients.
The first two weeks, you know all your sessions, about 3
sessions a week, working with you and teaching you the basics,
teaching you to stick wires to your head, teaching you to get
software up and running to see if you have a good signal of
your EEG on the screen. And we're also developing a
fitness log, so to speak, of like, here's your workouts and
here's some ideas about your goals, and here's some things
that we should be trying for you in terms of neurofeedback.
And then as you move through them 2-3 sessions in, you start
getting these effects. So wait a minute, I might be
feeling, huh, OK. And then as you report changes,
sleep, stress, attention or specific goals, cravings, you
know, frustration, anger, creativity, brain fog, whatever
it is, as we start gently pushing on your brain, you get
these transient effects after a session or the next day, a
little subtle, like, wait a minute, huh, That felt a little
bit different, interesting. And then your sleep is different
that night or your calmness is or something and hey guys I
might have noticed something. So we have you felt surveys
every day, twice a day. If you can every morning, how's
your sleep every day? Well how's your day?
And then we give all the clients their own private chat that's
set up and sort of open all the time.
We we use Slack and every client is a private Slack channel.
So after the first couple of weeks, they can, you know, self
train and push the account up a little bit and work on more
stuff. But then we have this live
communication. So whenever someone's setting
up, if it's a new location on the head, they can take a quick
photograph and say, hey, is this wire in the right place?
Or we can jump on their chat and say, hey, thanks for that
afternoon survey, Oh, sorry, your mother in law's a jerk.
Would you like to try a protocol for when someone's being a jerk
and you're feeling betrayed, 'cause we have one for that or
whatever. So there's this relationship we
develop with people where we're developing protocols for their
big goals, but also watching how things fluctuate day-to-day.
And that keeps us from being too attached to ideas about who they
are from the data up front. You know, it's an exploratory
exercise. We sort of get to the place of
where I'm teaching people how to read data and they're teaching
me what's important, and then I build neurofeedback.
And our coaches help you execute.
And as things start to shift, you report what you're noticing
and we iterate, kind of like personal training where we
adjust based on what you notice. And then the way that peak brain
works is we go back and map the brain again every 20 or 25
sessions. So we do at least two brain maps
in all of our programs. Most of our programs are over a
few months and in like a three month program, we usually do the
first sort of repeat map about 6 or 8 weeks in, you know you've
done 25 sessions or so. And that's enough neurofeedback
guided by the stuff you've been saying, but that that's enough
neurofeedback to usually see a standard deviation of change in
the resting brain data and performance data.
So when someone comes in with brain fog from COVID or ADHD, or
they're not sleeping at night and you know, they're spacing
out, 'cause you see huge changes in their performance in just six
or eight weeks, and the brain matches those changes.
And if you do 2 rounds of that, you know, maybe three months
total, that's when you're getting into session counts and
the amount of change where things have stopped wearing off
and the resources you've been working on at this point are
sort of now being practiced all the time.
And when you stop doing neurofeedback, the effects do
not go away for the for the big things, for the executive, the
stress or anxiety, the sleep, the fatigue, really good
stability for those regulatory features, Once they've changed
enough and even things like brain injuries and seizures and
things, you can still get them become permanent changes.
You just have to often do a little more work because
there's, you know there's there's more to be done And the
injury, the seizure focus might push back initially, you know,
here and there until you finally get it done.
But for the most part neurofeedback re regulates your
brain. The brain's really good at at
staying regulated once it has a sense of where that you know,
lowest energy, maximum gain, best stability, kind of mode is
it likes to stay there, so. So, so you go through this, this
brain networking, EEG diagnostics, figure out where
people are deficient, where they may be overcompensating, what
kind of their brain mapping looks like as an individual.
And then with the the treatment, kind of like the training you're
subjecting the brain to, is it like a like a binaural audible
thing? That's.
No, we're just measuring the brain as it changes and then
we're applauding it with either auditory or visual.
So benoral beats. The theory is that benoral beats
will drive the brain, although mineral beats the the science is
basically non existent to quite damning that they do anything.
So the human brain, as far as you know has no frequency
following response. It doesn't pick up a a binaural
beat. In the case of neurofeedback,
we're not stimulating or imposing something.
We're watching what's happening, and when it happens to move in
the right direction, we applaud it.
And the brain notices that the mind is not because we can't
feel our brain waves. It's kinda like you're a
participant as the mind. You're a participant in the
Symphony watching the music going, wow, this sounds awesome,
but the neurofeedback is like running over to one string
player on one corner of one row saying hey, tune up your D
string or whatever. And the conductor, the brain
goes, oh, that sounds great, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And leans into it a little bit and the and the person in the
audience goes, wow, I enjoy this music but doesn't know exactly
why it sounded sweeter for that moment.
They just kind of go, huh, interesting.
So there's a bit of a mind brain disconnect here because you
can't feel your brain waves. The brain likes input over no
input. That's the big trick.
So if we measure 1 little tiny thing it's doing of a billion
things it's doing and yoke some contingent stimulus to it, you
know, only applaud. When it does that, the brain
goes, whoa, whoa, Why is that? Oh, OK.
Wow. Bring an alpha up.
Make stuff happen. Nice.
OK, cool. And then it spends the next 20
minutes watching. Oh, whenever I bring my alpha
up, stuff's happening. Nice.
Oh, OK. I like stuff.
I I don't like no stuff. Where's my nose?
OK, there's there's my stuff. More alpha.
OK, cool. But the brain is the part that's
learning. The mind can't can't really feel
the brain waves fluctuating at that level.
A couple sessions of that and the brain goes, oh hey, alpha
was actually doing stuff yesterday, I'm going to bring my
alpha up today and the mind feels that.
So you get this next day effect or later effect when the
learning question is answered by the brain.
This is no different than any other kind of associative
learning. The the trick is we're bypassing
a lot of the mind by measuring the brain in real time.
But this is very similar to the kind of learning that happens
when you're a baby flopping around and suddenly you do a
baby push up and you're like, oh, I can see 12 feet.
And the brain was super excited to see 12 feet instead of two
feet, get all that extra rich information.
And so it kind of remembers the different neurons that had to
fire to do that baby push up. And 5 minutes later the baby
goes what's over there and it wants to see further.
It doesn't think left arm, right arm, which neuron.
It just reaches for information and the brain goes, oh, OK, here
you go. Here's that thing you were
trying to do. Here's that more information.
Here's the direction it lives in.
It lives in the direction of you moving your muscles this way.
Try it. And and then if it works, if the
body moves how you wish, the brick goes, yeah, yeah, cool,
cool, cool. And remembers how to do that.
So the more you wire together then over time.
So the more you fire together, the more you wire together.
So over time you develop this, his ability to do a baby push up
or crawl or walk. But in the case of an adult or a
child or an animal, you can't feel your brain waves.
So they get shaped and then the mind gets to say the next day
often oh, hey, wait, I didn't notice anything.
Or hey, wait, hey, wait, hey, oh, I I noticed this.
And it's kind of mysterious but not blind because you're feeling
stuff. So if it's in the ballpark, you
do it again and you feel that again.
And so you can learn from that. And it stops becoming as subtle
and it stops becoming transient as you repeat it.
See, as you repeat the same 20-30 minute workout, you know,
every other day or so, 34568 times the effect of that
particular neurofeedback protocol origins built up and up
and up and up and up and you go, whoa, this is, this is affecting
my creativity or my focus or whatever we're going after.
We can learn from that and adjust it as we go.
Dial the workout in and then you can build those workout paths
that produce the subjective experiences you're looking at.
You're looking for and a bunch of different directions, but
it's really just your brain learning how it always learns.
We're just bypassing the mind by measuring the brain in real
time. It's super interesting.
So we're not bringing in any external.
No, No zapping and no imposing of no driving of information
even. It's just a simple stimulus, a
beep or a computer game reacting or a chime reacting whenever the
brain moves the To get a sense of how it's working, maybe I
should explain how it was discovered in the late 60s,
early 60s. I think the research was first
published in late 60s, but Doctor Barry Sturman was doing
research on cats. He's a learning scientist and
looking at how cats could learn. And NASA came to him and said,
hey, our astronauts are getting sick breathing in rocket fuel
vapors. Can you please figure out how
dangerous this stuff is in the 60s?
We're doing a lot more sort of destructive animal research.
So the methodology for this experiment to figure out the the
toxicity curve for methyl hydrazine was to put cats in a
airtight cage with a beaker of methyl hydrazine and start a
stopwatch. And Doctor Sturman did this
study on 32 cats and other 32 cats. 24 of them had a perfect
dose dependent curve where increased minutes meant
increased symptoms and they started off at about 20 minutes
drooling and stumbling and then they got progressively worse.
And many of those cats of those first 24 were having seizures at
about the the the 40 minute mark they were starting to show
instability events in the brain and that was sort of you know,
what was expected when toxins often create seizures.
So that was essentially the the the core of what NASA wanted to
know. However, there was another 8
cats. He did a total of 32 and 24 of
them had this perfect like on the same curve.
Eight of them were in a very different place, they showed
very few early symptoms and they needed to get like 2 1/2 hours
in before they showed any brain instability instead of 40
minutes. And well what what is this?
Are these super cats some other cat gene or super variant or
something else? Or maybe maybe cats are seizure
resistant. We didn't know it.
Well, no, actually. Turns out that he'd done another
experiment with those particular cats.
He's a learning scientist. He wondered if he could do
operant conditioning or shaping of the EEG.
So six months prior, he'd taken 8 cats out of the subject pool
and he'd taped a milk dropper inside their cheek and an EEG on
top of their head. An EEG wire.
And whenever they made a particular brain wave, the cats
make an awful lot of he'd squirted a little bit of chicken
broth into their mouth as a reward, and found that over a
couple of days he could shape up, he could reward up the
amount of this particular brain wave.
And you, you've seen this brain wave in action.
You've felt it too probably when you see a cat lying on a window
sill completely still. But watching a bird that like
frame response of deeply stealing and focusing at the
same time, that's called sensory motor rhythm.
And we all have it all mammals use it to do things like sit
still and not be distracted. So literally the comcat on the
windowsill is the opposite of ADHD, full stop, literally.
But SMR is also involved in things like sleep and seizure
suppressant. It's it's called sleep spindles
when you're sleeping or Sigma. So it helps you like not wake up
for every little sound you heard.
Also triggers some of the memory consolidation process when
you're asleep, and Sturman found that it suppresses seizures
quite strongly in this population of cats, even well
after it was done. And his lab manager was
epileptic and uncontrolled on all kinds of crazy medication in
the late 60s. Tegretol, Meberol and Dilantin.
All kinds of things that were major, major drugs and not
controlling her seizures. She was still having 10s of
seizures every month and they built an auditory feedback
system where it beeped whenever her SMR went up and they trained
it off and on for a few months and she tapered all of her crazy
drugs and became seizure free for a year and he published that
and that was the start of the field and that's why a lot of
the epilepsy work and seizure work sort of blew up from there.
But EEG is a sleep science in general and so we found that it
actually affected sleep quality quite profoundly.
And so EEG sorry, epilepsy sleep and then executive function
because that inhibitory tone that sitting still thing that
you can't do when you're super ADHD that's also SMR sensory
motor rhythm, the ability to sit still and inhibit to pump the
brakes. So it was kind of a three Fer
where one discovery produced not only the whole new technique in
the field of manipulating the brain, but produced the same
stabilization effect that would impact really powerfully things
like seizure, sleep and ADHD. So that is to some extent why
the field just blew up in the 70s and 80s because you actually
create changes in all of those areas.
But it's also kind of a little mysterious, you know, black art
a little bit. So it remained really kind of
fringy. I mean 15,000 people in the
whole world doing this professionally or you know, half
that in the US there's probably more than that in terms of
chiropractors in Los Angeles, you know, like it's just still
really, really nichy. And I mean, I've got a PhD in
neuroscience and of the field, there may be one or two others
in the whole field who are at my level in terms of, like,
academic prep. The vast majority of people
become clinicians, you know, therapists, psychologists,
something, you know, social workers in a specific area.
They care about trauma, autism, ADHD, eating disorders,
concussions, sport performance, something.
And then they're like, well, wait a minute, what's this
neurofeedback stuff being used with my population of interest?
That looks interesting. And they discovered that the
technique is crazy powerful in the thing they care about.
And they become primarily neurofeedback providers who do
therapy on the side. That's most of the field, but
they learn their neurofeedback from a vendor or in a three day
workshop or. And so a lot of the field, the
quality issue is about, well, is the person you're working with
good. This is why I balked a little
bit earlier at like you know, other tools out there.
Oh yeah, sure. There's all kinds of tools that
you can purchase. I could do any neurofeedback
with any of the tools though. And somebody who's, you know,
not great couldn't do, couldn't do good neurofeedback with any
of the tools. The one concern on that I would
say to add in a little bit is if the tool is so magical it does
all the work. It doesn't.
You know, the more magical the tools are that someone's trying
to sell you, the less you should believe them.
Neurofeedback's pretty awesome. But if the tool doesn't do
assessments, if the person doesn't talk about your unique
needs, if it's a black box that supposedly works for everyone
and finds your unique thing you need and does it all
automatically, it's it's a sham and you probably should find
somebody else to work with, but it's not deeply mysterious.
You can learn yourself what's going on and get deeper into it
so you know. Again, that's a lot of what we
do is teach you. But any therapist who works with
a Q, e.g. Can sit you down with your QEG
and say look, here's some unusual features and they alpha
mean XY and Z. Yeah, and that'll make sense to
you. So I encourage you, if you're
already working with somebody and you've done a brain map but
haven't actually dug through it with them, ask them to.
And if you are doing, thinking of doing neurofeedback, that's a
great criteria for selecting if the person you're working with
is likely on the evidence based careful data-driven side.
You know if they do brain mapping mostly because it's kind
of complicated and hard to do so no one bothers to do it.
If they're looking for those quick fix magic boxes and trying
to sell you AI mean there's a couple software packages and
power packages out there that are sold into the neurofeedback
space. Kind of like their multi level
marketing where you buy a territory and you know it's a
you can tell because their language around what they're
selling is kind of weird. Like they both say it's not
neurofeedback but also say that it's better neurofeedback than
anyone else at the same time. So.
If it's a, you know, slight, slightly off topic question, but
if if they're if the brain training is performed as a
result of applauding certain brain waves that are happening,
you know, as they happen natively.
Is there any situation in which a person does not produce enough
of those brain waves for there to be a measurable impact over
time? Like a psychopath for instance?
Like are they totally devoid of a certain brain wave and
therefore not able to train up that brain wave?
For the most part, no. It almost always works.
However, you can have a brain that's so compromised,
especially with deep metabolic compromise, where there's just
not enough to lift off. And sometimes also the brain is
so hot, so reactive because of that, that it's really hard to
work with. Like if you have an active Lyme
exposure and lots of Co infections and there's tons of
neuro inflammation, you have to take care of that first before
doing something like neurofeedback generally.
And it any anything where you're so acute that the hormetic
stressors, you know, sauna, hyperbaric hot and cold, all
that stuff, If those things would be too taxing, the
neurofeedback might be as well. But barring that, it works as as
long as there's brain to work on.
And you know, if you're very advanced with dementias, for
instance, you've lost a lot of brain tissue, it's going to be
really hard to make much change with neurofeedback.
But barring that, it's more about what it works for and and
what it doesn't. And it works for shockingly
large amount of things we would not think.
I mean, I mentioned the big regulatory, you know, sleep,
stress, attention, sensory, social speed, stability.
But it also works reliably on creativity, boosting reliably on
being able to put. Language sorry, emotions in a
language reliably on bringing up your T cells, believe it or not.
So it's not just about deciding you want to work on like
relaxation or my anxiety. It's kind of like, well, if it's
a brain thing and you can measure it happening and see it
in data. The one of the things about
brain mapping or or QEG is we're looking at resting EEG patterns
that are stable across minutes. So while they're hard to
understand, a quantitative EEG is a fingerprint of sort of
resources traits for you, so everyone's got them.
The only time you wouldn't see patterns in an EEG there is a
certain variant called low and slow.
If someone's experienced a very severe, you know, drowning,
accelerated aging, then the EEG gets very, very low amplitude
and you might not see a lot. But that's very, very rare.
Usually when you don't see a lot, which can happen, maybe one
person out of, like 102 hundred, you just won't see a lot.
Everyone else, you're like, oh wow, here's a bunch of weird
stuff. Cool, good, you're you're weird.
Let's figure out what if this matters to you, 'cause, you
know, there's a bunch of things that could be true, and it turns
out that most of them are usually true, you know?
But like, of this, of the eight we see, seven are true, usually
or something. But the other variant, which
people should be aware of is every so often you do an EEG and
a brain map and it comes back and you don't don't see
anything. And this is because some people
have a thick skull and if your ethnicity, your genetics are
such that your skull is 10 percent, 20% thicker, you might
get a dampening of the entire EEG from the outside of the head
in a way that makes it hard to use tools that are population
compared, you know, resting patterns.
But that's kind of rare, and generally it's a deeply
revealing experience to look at a brain.
And generally you can then, I mean, I've worked with well over
8000 people. Last time I counted it was 8000.
That was a couple years ago. And I can count.
It wouldn't even fill one hand to count the number of people
who don't like get the experience of having their brain
changed. After several sessions of
neurofeedback, we feel it happening.
Report on changes, have those progress as they report stuff
it. It's kind of like exercise.
It almost always works. It does the thing you want it to
do, but you have to do the right exercise.
You go into the gym for a blown out low back and all you do is
calf raises. It's probably not going to work
on you for the goal you walked in for.
It might even make things worse depending on how the machine's
set up. So that's the that's the real
concern, the real nuance if you about neurofeedback.
And This is why I encourage folks to not just use people
that do brain mapping. Learn.
Learn to read your own maps. Look at your resting patterns,
Figure out what they might mean. Figure out where the stuff you
know about are frustrated about. Want to change?
Figure out where and how it shows up in your resting data.
Just like you know it's all the rage the past few years for
everyone to wear sleep trackers. I mean, everyone's looking at
their deep sleep and total sleep and that's awesome.
And everyone looks at their blood panels and triglycerides.
But like 20-30 forty years ago no one looked at triglycerides
and you know, thought of it the same way.
Maybe your doctor did, but you sure didn't yourself.
And and this these days people were in CGMS and blowing into
keto ketone meters. And you know you can also look
at your alpha speed for how rapidly you can absorb and
retrieve information. You can look at your Theta power
for how well you can shift gears and see patterns.
So it's just another tool, but. Not so, Yeah, we.
We we think it's underutilized. So, so, so for me, I'm gonna ask
a selfish question here. I've always struggled with
pretty incredible OCD. Like, not just.
Oh, I gotta check the doors, make sure they're locked three
times. Yeah, that's the front midline.
We'll see that in your brain maps.
Yeah, like, I'm talking like legitimate Howard Hughes OCD.
Yeah, and it'll it'll jump right out in your brain maps.
It's it'll be a powerful brain that's stuck, basically.
Yeah, and like I I've found ways to leverage that to my
advantage. Like, I've been able to use that
within the sport of bodybuilding.
Like, I've been able to really hone in on that.
But there are times where it is nearly debilitating.
So that is likely a result of what?
Brain wave? Probably beta if it's classic
OCD type stuff. You know, like ritual behavior,
intrusive, you know DO, and the C, so to speak.
It's usually beta, the gas pedals turned on super high in
the front midline. Sometimes it's not that,
sometimes it's lack of alpha you can't find the neutral.
Sometimes less common for your flavor, it's a extra Theta where
you're disinhibited and the mind's latching on to the very
next thing to get obsessed about.
That's more like nail biting in a tick or a song in your head.
But ticks are Theta excess. Classic intrusive repetitive
stuff or obsessive compulsive stuff is beta excess.
The gas pedals turned up too high in the CEO, but you know.
Remediation for that would be a down regulation of beta and an
up regulation of alpha. Yeah, think of this like a
range. Like like a like a range of
motion exercise. You walk in with a with a tight
shoulder that's powerful but locked up.
You're going to want to start stretching it and then do some
range of motion. And in this case, you'd
probably, you wouldn't just do one thing, you know, you'd just
go to the gym and do one exercise.
You know, you want to mix it up and balance the system.
But we do a couple things. You know, maybe 15 minutes of
one of those would be sticking wires to the front and back
midline over the anterior and posterior cingulate because
they're connected. And both of yours will probably
have something interesting in your data, plus an ear clip, so
three wires for the first half of your workout.
Computer simply sits back and watches your alpha, which is the
relaxation tone on those singlets and probably watches
both the Theta, which is disinhibition, and beta, which
is over activation for you. One would guess in this example,
but it's not a static level of beta you're making or alpha
you're making. It's fluctuating moment to
moment, up and down, you know, back and forth, reacting to all
kinds of things. And so it's this variable thing.
Computer starts watching it and watches the momentary micro
volts. You're making an alpha moment to
moment. You know 10/11/15, 8:10, four.
You know up and down, up and down.
Moment to moment. Also the beta, also the Theta.
And then every so often, every few seconds, the Theta and the
beta happened to go down at the same time, the alpha comes up.
And when the brain spends half a second trending in that
direction, the computer goes, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding starts to
happen and your little car starts to move on the screen or
your puzzle pieces start to fill in.
Your Pac-Man starts to eat dots. Stuff starts to happen, and the
mind notices it, sure. But the brain's going, oh wait,
cool. There's some new stuff.
And a couple seconds later, that alpha wave cluster that was that
was a bit more robust for a couple seconds and may dip
again. The beta might come up to
replace it again and the game slows down, but it's this
passive applause. The brain's like, watching, and
essentially the computer's applauding what just happened in
the past? You aren't in control of
steering it because it's applauding things that happened
and you can't feel those things. Really.
So you're some noticing. Oh wait, the game's stopping
again. Really.
This is training my brain. OK, But the third time you you,
you finish a session, you stand up and you're like, oh, wait a
minute, I feel a little bit calm.
I have a friend with pretty intrusive OCD and and I was
opening my office 8 1/2 years ago, the the main office in Los
Angeles. You know, she was doing some
training in there. I was having her check out some
new software. There's one particular game she
really enjoyed, that flying dragon on the screen.
And she came in for a session. I set her up and I was making
some coffee in the background and I heard giggling coming out
of the training Room 0. OK, So I walked to him like,
hey, what's up? You know, enjoying the dragon,
enjoying the games. Like, yeah, yeah, but.
But I noticed something. I spent all of my life pushing
back against the OCD, holding it at Bay, and I just noticed it
wasn't there. So I I I reached for it.
I tried to find it. I tried to reach for the
obsessiveness, and I couldn't find it.
I can't find it right now. I'm not obsessed at all.
I'm not resisting it. I'm looking for it.
My mind is so calm. And she was giggling because it
was like just a one experience to have a mind that like not
only wasn't pushing back, but was just like calm under
control. And we were doing midline
training of the cingulates, bringing down that beta.
And her brain was like, oh, alpha, yeah, And it just
unclenched that resource and she felt it.
She felt herself unclenched. And it was just the most
enjoyable, almost silly experience for her that way.
So like if I was wanting to or one of the listeners wanted to
move forward on this and try and do the brain mapping, figure out
where their brain is, understand how to read that data and then
you know go to this protocol, what what does that look like?
Do they just go to your site and have this this shipped to them
and have the trainer walk them through it?
Or what is that process like? Yeah, yeah.
You, you, you. You can.
Yeah, a couple different ways you can work with us.
We have two different sort of price points.
One is if you just want to do brain mapping in our offices
because it's a lot more accessible and if you're near,
you know, LA or Orange County, Saint Louis, New York, Miami,
London, Stockholm, then you can buy a membership.
The list on that is 500 bucks in the US and about £300 in the UK.
Podcast listeners get that for half price, so it's a 250 once a
year membership at at a peak brain office and Brain maps are
unlimited. It's this exploratory tool for
you to use to understand yourself.
Now I can't give you unlimited time of mind.
I'll give you at least two instructional consults working
with you directly. But we give us very low cost
access. If you're near one of the
offices and want to pop in because you aren't sure you know
if this is worth getting into more deeply.
And that's sort of the the best deal in the world for brain
mapping access from our perspective.
So that's one thing people can do this sort of peak brain
membership and the other thing we do is things that combine
both brain mapping and the brain training, the neurofeedback.
And those programs are, you know our shortest one is 6 weeks,
they got three months, we have six months.
Those can be done fully virtually and you can again take
250 off the list price of one of those packages.
Those a little bit more, but those always include remote
brain maps as well as remote neurofeedback.
So if you know you want to get in and change yourself then you
can take a discount off a fully remote program.
But if you're like, oh hey, I want to dig my toe in and figure
out what this is and try to understand myself, you can pop
into one of our cities and give us some, you know, advance
notice and then I'll spend a couple days looking over data
with you and. What?
What is that virtual package cost?
So the the standard one we do is 3 months because that's enough
neurofeedback for your to change your brain like get couple
standard deviations for ADHD for instance of executive function,
you know real solid change. And in that program we do at
least 2 remote brain maps and we try to have you do 55 sessions
of neurofeedback. So it's you know pretty intense,
worked four times a week and we charge about 6K total for that
when it's an undiscounted program.
So it's -250 for your listeners. So it ends up being about 100
bucks a session at the three month level in our big programs.
We have a shorter program which a little more expensive.
It's I think 3500 US before the discount and that lets you get
again two brain maps done remotely.
But now we're probably only getting about 20 sessions of
neurofeedback in, which is more than enough to feel it and
probably feel a lot of your goals change.
But 20 sessions is sort of the minimum where you'd be seeing
the changes built up. And usually it's sort of takes
about twice that much training to lock in the permanent changes
And enough of the change. You know, like it doesn't.
There's nothing wrong with doing it in chunks either, though.
This is not bodybuilding where you take a week off from
physical exercise and every week you lose 9% of your strength or
something, you know, as you as you backslide because the
pressure is not kept on. The brain is not like that.
Once you do enough neurofeedback, which is only a
few weeks, then whenever you resume it, the brain's like, Oh
yeah, this stuff. And it just kind of picks up
where it left off. So it's more about can you get
some sessions in, in a week to start in the movement, the
process of shaping change. But you don't have to do it in
one, you know, giant months and months and months.
But we do encourage you to do, you know, a few weeks at a time,
so to speak. And our shortest remote program
is a six week program because that's really going to get you a
nice amount of data change. You're going to feel stuff.
We're going to do a couple of brain maps and that's I would
say about 1/2 of a a standard program.
Like if you came in with a, you know, PTSD or drinking too much
or post COVID brain fog or ADHD or creativity goals or athletic
performance goals, you almost always want to do at least 40
sessions. And in our three month program,
we can do 40 in one of our offices, which is like just
three times a week, which is honestly plenty.
But if you're home, we encourage you to crank it up 'cause you
know, you got the gear, you got the brain, you have coaches on,
So why don't you get 4 sessions in a week and we charge the same
office and home. We just encourage the session
count to be a little higher at home because that's that's the
trade off. You come into offices and get
taken care of a few times a week or you learn and have us
remotely jumping in whenever you need, but you learn deeper and
therefore you can try more things and get, you know, get
deeper into it. So sort of a trade off for us to
facilitate a part of it you know?
This is super intriguing though, 'cause I'm all about
quantifiable data and I've, you know, figured out how to improve
the OCD for me specifically over time for sure.
But to be able to actually map that out and see it illustrated
and then figure out a way to, you know, shift things one way
or the other based off of that neurofeedback would be really
interesting. You can certainly change it with
neurofeedback, but you know, you also if you look at your brain
and you have a classic front midline signature, well then
that actually suggests 3 or 4 different interventions that you
might not have tried. For instance, you know an acetyl
cysteine works really well on medication resistant OCD.
So if you've tried SSRIs, they don't work, and you have a front
midline hotspot in beta, well then try an acetyl cysteine
because it's probably gonna work.
I've never, I've never tried to medicate it, imagine able to.
I've learned to work with it and leverage it.
But. But yeah.
Yeah, it's a bit of a strength you know OCD and CEO kind of
brain it's, it's kind of a hybrid.
It doesn't always get in the way and and people often do learn,
but people also mature, especially kids with OCD, they
start off with ticks, really severe OCD, and over time they
get better inhibitory tone, better pumping the brakes and
the brain. So they often it moves from a
tick into a sense of nervousness, you know, for a kid
to an adolescent or an adolescent moves from, you know,
picking and ticking into having like songs in their head in
their 20s. So the brain does regulate these
features. But yeah, this stuff is some of
the most visible, some of the most visible patterns we can see
in a brain map. So you know, we could definitely
capture this for you and show you your your your quirky brain.
Yeah. No, I I would love to do that.
I'd love to do that. And then get you back on to kind
of go over the analysis, you know, like on a podcast.
That'd be intriguing for sure. Yeah, we can.
We can send you out a remote system and just do a map.
I bet we we don't do a lot of a la carte maps, but we can do one
for you. I would definitely.
I mean, I've I've never like, I've had a lot of people in the
podcast. This is like episode 650 or
something crazy. But I've not really dove into
this with any of my guests. So this is this is very
interesting to me. Yeah, well, certainly if you
have any reason to be near any of our locations, you can just
grab a quick set of data or two, you know, look at how, look at
how it's flared on caffeine for instance, or pre workout 'cause
it 'cause it would be, you know, for instance, but you're more
than welcome to do that. But also, you know, let me know
and we'll we'll shoot you off a remote system.
I'll have one of the senior coaches do a recording and teach
a little bit more directly. Yeah, and then you can.
You know, you can do a review with me after and both of those
things can be content is if you want them to be, you know, yeah,
that's fine. They don't have to be.
We won't make you share if you don't feel comfortable later.
No, no, I think, you know, I think simply just driving more
awareness to this and empowering people because like with the
CGMS, for instance, you know, like you said, people were not
doing this 20-30 years ago, but so many people have become
enlightened as to what they're eating, how that's impacting
blood sugar regulation, how to, you know, actively control for
it. And it only makes sense that the
same would be true for what the brain is illustrating.
So I think this is certainly viable and most definitely
actionable once you have the right tools.
Well, I think so, but I'm a little bit maybe biased, so you
know. No, I think it's super
interesting. So very cool.
Where where do people go? Like what?
What's the website that people wanna go?
Dive deeper into your world. So Peak Brain Institute is the
company, and you can just go to peakbraininstitute.com on the
socials. We're at Peak Brain LA I I think
mine's Andrew Hill, PhD everywhere.
But you know, you'll see some brain health stuff.
You'll mostly see like my baking habit and things like that in
the personal website and the personal socials.
But Peek Brain LA is the socials everywhere and Peek Brain
Institute is the website. So hit us up and let us know
where you heard about neurofeedback and we will give
all podcast listeners A-250 discount which gets you a a half
price in person membership for mapping or you can take the 250
off of any larger program as well.
So it keeps it super competitive in the USI think we're among the
the most accessible pricing out there, so.
Awesome. Well I can't thank you enough
for the time, Andrew. Your wealth of knowledge.
I will certainly link out, make it easy for people to find you,
and I will definitely be following up with you because
I'm very intrigued about diving into this for my own personal
use for sure. Great.
Well, thanks for having me, Sir. I really appreciate it.
Nice talking to you. Today.
You bet. Have a good one.