Getting on the Same Wavelength with Dr. Andrew Hill

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.