Episode 278: Brain Optimization and Neurofeedback, Part 2
with Dr. Andrew Hill
Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Hill is back, and this time we’re bringing you on-location as my son Simon gets his brain mapped at the Peak Brain Institute. Dr. Hill will walk us through this neurofeedback technique, and we will be going into greater detail about Quantitative Electroencephalography (or QEEG), which Dr. Hill introduced to us on episode #249. Neurofeedback can identify neurological issues like ADD, Depression, Autism, Anxiety, PTSD, addiction and more. You’ll be amazed when you watch this process!
More about Dr. Andrew Hill:
Dr. Andrew Hill is one of the top peak performance coaches in the country. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA’s department of Psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance. Dr. Hill is the founder of Peak Brain Institute, host of the Head First Podcast with Dr. Hill, and lectures at UCLA, teaching courses in psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology.
Additional Information:
Show notes:
http://peakbraininstitute.com/chtv – 50% off Brain Mapping with our link
CytoDetox: total detoxification support where it matters most – at the cellular level.
HCF’s Live it to Lead it event – Newport Beach – November 14-17, 2019
Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
Episode 249, we interviewed a neuroscience about something that is a craze right now, and that is this neurotherapy of the brain, biohacking the brain. Look, in this episode, you’re going to want to see this. I literally took my son, Simon, to one of their brain mapping locations, and we mapped his brain. You’re going to get to see that. What’s really cool is they hook him up, his brain up to a computer, and you’re going to get to see the training that, basically, all of you can get at home once you get your brain map. Literally, when I was in there, I expected to see all these ADHD kids and seizure and autistic children because it’s amazing for that, but I saw CEOs and salespeople biohacking their brains with neurofeedback to, basically, perform better.
Wow! Wait ‘til you see this episode. It’s going to bring this neurofeedback to a whole other level for most of you. If it’s ADHD, if it’s OCD, if it’s a brain condition, if it’s seizures, and if it’s just performance, you’re going to want to stay tuned to this episode.
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we are welcoming back one of the top peak performance brain coaches in the country, Dr. Andrew Hill. Dr. Hill holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA’s Department of Psychology and continues to do research on attention and cognitive performance. Dr. Hill is the founder of Peak Brain Institute. He’s host of the Head First podcast with Dr. Hill and lectures at UCLA teaching courses in psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology. You can revisit Dr. Hill’s previous interview with Dr. Pompa on Episode 249. I’ll turn this over to you both. Welcome, Dr. Pompa and Dr. Hill.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Hill:
Thanks for having me back.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, we had to have you back. We had so many questions about it that I was out there doing another interview. I said, okay, we have to do a Part 2, and I’m going to bring my son, Simon, who’s ADD, ADHD, some OCD qualities in there, all of which I believe are part of his gifting. However, I wanted to bring him in for a brain mapping. Therefore, film that that we could actually share that video, which we’re going to in this episode, and then, also, the unique treatment, how that actually works and looks at it. In the first episode—you all should watch Episode 249 because we’ll probably talk about some different things there than we will here. I feel like it was hard to bring out exactly what we were talking about, and that’s why I did those videos. Then you could see exactly what we mean, how you train the brain. There’s Simon training the brain in one of the videos that we’re going to share with you today, so stay tuned, great episode.
Let’s remind them, doc. This is becoming a more popular topic, neurofeedback and how we do this. As a matter of fact, when I was at the clinic, I mean, I expected a room full of ADD kids, and I got a couple CEOs that were just biohacking their brain for better performance and another guy in sales who was biohacking his brain for better performance. I was a little shocked about that, so let’s recap. What is neurofeedback, and who’s it for? Obviously, it’s more than I thought.
Dr. Hill:
Sure, so neurofeedback broadly is biofeedback on your brain. Biofeedback is this process of measuring physiological processes and training them or exercising them in some way. When we use the word biofeedback, we think of people relaxing and using meditative type things, and there is a lot of biofeedback that is very relaxing. When we think of that style of biofeedback, including things like hand warming and heart rate variability and stuff like that, we’re training to some extent, the peripheral nervous system, to a large extent, and what we’re talking about in neurofeedback is central or central nervous system biofeedback. That’s why we call it neurofeedback. That includes training the EEG or brainwaves, as well as the HEG or the blood flow, the hemoencephalography, the dynamics of blood flow.
By training, I mean we measure what the systems are doing on their own moment to the moment. Whenever the brain happens to shift a little more in the right direction that we think it should exercise in, we go good job, brain, with an audio/visual stream, and when the brain does the wrong thing or moves away from the resource shifting in that direction, we withhold the input. Since the brain likes input, it starts to trend itself, if you will, towards whatever produces more information. Then we move the goalposts, so it can’t ever learn. We gently shape it or exercise it up in a certain direction or down in a certain direction for about half an hour. It’s involuntary. As people will see, it’s also effortless, which is—it’s a fun process. Usually, people will sit in front of a computer screen and watch some sort of video game or animation change. After a few sessions, the brain has started to figure out, oh, whenever I change a brainwave or a resource in a certain direction, the world changes, so it starts to exercise itself more and more over time until the resource becomes a little more permanent.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, yeah, so I mean, obviously, like I said, I mean we focused on ADD. I mean, I know you do this for seizures. Here we saw people who just wanted better outcomes from their own brain, better performance. Obviously, this is for anybody but I mean—I guess, review. I mean, what other types of conditions do you see great results?
Dr. Hill:
The field started 52 years ago on seizure because we discovered serendipitously that it raises the seizure threshold. It makes the brain seizure resistant. This special frequency called SMR, which is a very calm body and alert mind. Predators use it to physically relax their body. Humans use it to keep us deeply asleep and for some learning things. It’s called sigma by neurologists or sleep spindles. If you train up the sleep spindles, you produce a stabilization of the brain, which is an interesting finding in the late 60s, and that meant that from there we were working on seizure. It really dramatically reduced seizure. I think the average metadata study recently showed that it was more than 50% reduction in seizures average, and 5% of people have complete control. It’s a very large effect size.
Then, from there, because the EEG world largely is bound by sleep studies and sleep literature and sleep science, most of what we have been doing for 80 years in EEG is really in that space. For instance, in brain—in neurofeedback, we use a sleep style EEG cap to do the assessment. We record 19 channels of the head, and the database that we compare you to to see how unusual your brain is is a population level comparison. The reason we use that style of cap and those number of channels in the head and the reason the databases are all constructed that way is because of sleep literature for years. We found we could change seizure conditions really quickly, and from there, the sleep literature seems to really unfold. Anxiety and ADHD become very tractable. The low-hanging fruit are sleep, stress, and attention seizures. Those change for almost everyone reliably and over time.
Then the things that we found since then in the past 30, 40, 50 years include pretty much everything else your brain does to be broad, which is unfortunate from a business development perspective but great for anyone’s goals. We can work on—I mean, you saw in my office a lot of CEOs and peak performers, and that’s I think probably more true of peak brain than other neurofeedback places. We have about a third peak performers. I also have about a third what I would call neurological clients who’s—it’s a brain problem. Injuries, concussions, seizures, migraines, even ADHD is a brain bound problem, not a psychology problem. Then you have a psychology class of people, and I’m not a psychologist. I’m a neuroscientist, so I work on the resources, not your experience of them, largely. That includes things like anxiety, sleep issues, PTSD, OCD, developmental trauma, often very significant things.
Now, when it’s a psychological thing, I often work alongside someone who’s—other team members, but it works on the regulatory things, sleep, stress, mode, attention. That can be a symptom. Oh, attention needs to be improved because you have ADHD, or it can be a performance goal. I want to have more vigilance and be a little more on because I’m not on as much as I might want to be, and so that’s probably the big difference in how peak brain works is we frame this as fitness. Like a coach asks an athlete what their goals are and then architects a program for them, the coaches aren’t really trying to fit what they’re doing to the goals, not selecting those goals, and sometimes, in medicine and psychology, there’s a bit of a top down. Here’s what’s wrong. Here’s what you need. We really want to flip that and give people access and agency, so we do the brain mapping and say here’s what your resources look like. What do you want to do with them? Then the neurofeedback process is the exercise on those resources.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we have video on both of those. Let’s talk about the mapping because that’s where it starts. You map the brain, and then we’re able to look at, okay, here’s what we’re dealing with. When you went over with us Simon’s mapping, you saw some classic ADHD.
Dr. Hill:
Sure.
Dr. Pompa:
You also said things like do you have any head trauma, which I answered I don’t think so. He says, well, actually, one time I did hit my head. You were able to sense that there might’ve been some head trauma and other things just by looking at that, so explain that. We’ll actually break away and look at the video after you’re done explaining that. Show him getting his brain map.
Dr. Hill:
Sure, so the process of gathering data is pretty low key for brain mapping. You just sit still for about 15 minutes, so it takes a few minutes to put a cap on your head. We use a cap with gel. We squirt it full of gel. It’s little messy. Then you sit still for five minutes or so eyes closed, five minutes or so eyes opened. The brain’s very, very different in eyes open versus eyes closed modes, and so we want to do a reference database check essentially against both states. We pick up all the gross activity, the baselines your brain is doing, compare that to a normative database in a few thousand people, and age match the comparison.
We’re looking at your son relative to other people his age, and age is the biggest thing that changes the EEG. It changes with early development. It speeds up. Then late in development, it slows down in aging. Between ages 20 and 60 roughly, there’s no change in the EEG across age, and so by using age as our comparison, we really get this almost rock solid comparison of one person compared to the average population at their rough age. The brain maps because of this are stable year after year. That’s what’s nice about them. You change a little bit day to day based on your variability, but not so much compared to the population’s mean or average. The brain maps are really rock solid stable. They give us this nice 10,000 foot view.
The unfortunate part is they aren’t necessarily diagnostically valid. I mean, there’s certain patterns that show up, for instance, high theta relative to beta, high theta/beta ratio. That pattern when it shows up is diagnostic for ADHD. Ninety-four percent accurate to sort people into ADHD and non-ADHD buckets. That’s by far the best statistic we have in this kind of data. The injury marker, for instance, is a population comparison, injury versus non-injured activity changes. That’s a very weak statistic. It doesn’t pick up injuries all the time. For instance, for you son, it was negative, didn’t show an injury. Yet, I saw little hotspots of slow brainwaves, so I guessed their might be an injury in spite of the statistic not finding one.
We looked through a dozen pages of his data for his brain and some of the attention testing results, and his attention tests showed he has some executive function difficulties, probably ADHD like performance. The brain maps didn’t look classically ADHD. They looked a lot more like rumination, some perseveration, getting stuck on things. I mean, what you mentioned about being a little ruminative or obsessive, that tracks perfectly with my guesses, but it’s that direction I’m hypothesizing. Is it possible that he ruminates? Is it possible he perseverates? He gets a little obsessive or songs are stuck in his head.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Hill:
You were like, oh, yeah. Then I believe my data. If you were like, no, that isn’t true for him, then I wouldn’t believe my data. That little marker, the little hotspot of [beta] on the front midline or sometimes it’s a little bit further back is the rumination marker. This is the switching system. The cingulates switch your attention; decide what’s important to pay attention to. If they get a little bit overactive, it might mean that you have a song stuck in your head, or you’re a bit ruminative, or bite your nails. It also might mean you’re Steve Jobs and very particular and really organized. Maybe you’re kind of a jerk and it doesn’t work for people around you but maybe works really, really well for you to be hyper-focused, a little bit rigid and really organized.
Again, to frame this, my job isn’t necessarily here is what’s wrong because it’s unusual. I say here’s what’s unusual. Let’s talk about what that might mean, how that might operate for you. Let’s figure out if this is a bottleneck for you, if it’s a gift, if it’s a quirk, if it’s nothing we should pay attention to, etc.
Dr. Pompa:
Then more importantly, say okay, let’s take this data, and then let’s accomplish the goal that you desire.
Dr. Hill:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
You have my son’s information there.
Dr. Hill:
I do, yeah. I can pop it up if you want.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so we can do that. We’ll do that, but let’s actually show the piece of video. Your technician, who was great, by the way, explains what this looks like, so our viewers can have a really good explanation or visually see what this actually looks like getting your brain map. Then we’ll talk more about what we could actually do with the data. Here, we’ll watch that here in one second.
Dr. Pompa:
…Brain Institute and here with Andre.
Andre:
Nice to meet you all.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, one of Dr. Andrew Hill’s technicians and Simon. How do you feel Simon? Don’t move. Okay, so anyways, Simon, why did you want to get this done?
Simon:
I struggle with focus, ADD, everything.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, actually, I’m going to be honest with you. He saw Part 1 of my interview with Dr. Hill. He watched it, and he said, dad, I want this done. When he knew I was coming to California, we made it happen for him, and I knew this would be a great Part 2. Andre, tell us what’s going on here. What are we doing?
Andre:
We have this. Essentially, it looks like a swimmer’s cap, and it’s full of a bunch of different electrodes, all of different places. What we’re doing is we’re measuring all the electricity that his brain produces that goes to the scalp, and essentially, brings that signal [00:15:59] right here. What you’re seeing on the screen over here is his live brainwaves, and so each trace line is representative of each location on the actual scalp. Again, we’re going to do two recordings. One will be with his eyes closed. One will be with his eyes open. Essentially, when he closes his eyes, your brain tends to shift a little bit in regards to the type of brainwaves it’s producing, typically. Whenever you close your eyes, typically, a lot of slower brainwaves come in as your occipital lobe shuts down a little bit.
Typically, on a normal brain, that comes in when we find—where we find issues is when you close your eyes. Typically, with anxiety or OCD, you close your eyes, and the signal stayed the same, or there’s very little slow brainwaves. That’s typically a red flag. It gives us an idea as to what’s going on. Right now, when I’m recording this, though, what I’m looking for is things like this too. During the editing process, I want to edit stuff like this out. This is all noise that it’s going to get liberated.
Dr. Pompa:
With this information, it’ll take you how long to edit this and just clear out all of the noise?
Andre:
A day or so, typically.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow! That’s impressive, so from this information—now, when we were filling out the forms, Simon and I, he literally was able to put down what he wanted out of this, meaning that he wanted more focus so he could—school was easier. Reading was easier. He wanted this anxiety and OCD thing to chill out, right? You were able to actually dial in what we want to train the brain on.
Andre:
Correct, yeah, based on what we find in overall goals. The overall goals give us, okay, this is where we want to go and a starting point, but the brain map is the overall roadmap here. These are things we should work on. As we fix this, this will come in line. Typically, with focus, a lot of times sleep is an issue. They may not perceive it as an issue. They’re like I sleep fine. I sleep five hours. Recommended sleep is 7 to 8, or maybe they’re sleeping eight hours, but they’re getting 30 minutes of deep sleep, which is…
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, totally, we’re big on sleep. That’s why sleep is a big deal here as well as focus and attention. I know people that just want stronger brain in specific areas do this too, and obviously, we’re talking about that. Okay, so with this information then, you’ll clean up the information, the data. Then Dr. Hill will take it, and basically, design a program for Simon as he’s able to increase those parts of the brain.
Andre:
Correct.
Dr. Pompa:
This gives us the roadmap on how to exactly do that.
Andre:
Exactly, once this data gets processed, I send that out to him, and then he’ll go over that with you guys, whatever you guys [00:18:44]. He’ll tell you this is what we found. This is what this looks like. We got to submit the anxiety stuff. Although if it popped up, this is where it’s at, and give you an idea as to where his brain’s at relative to people his age. It’s what I call—we generate those images. It is averaging the statistics, so it’s comparing his brain to other people relative to his age range. I can’t compare him to an elderly person because those two brains would vastly differ. Typically, with age as well, there’s more—even if it’s not traumatic brain injury, there’s more just wear and tear damage.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, oh, no, that’s unfortunate. With this data and then with the goals that Simon desire, then Dr. Hill produces the program.
Andre:
Correct.
Dr. Pompa:
Then we’re going to show in a moment is then what he is able to do at home with this other device called a [00:19:41] , right?
Andre:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Then that’s going to be him training it, and then he’ll create that and, in a month, considerable results.
Andre:
Typically so, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s awesome. In a moment, we’ll be able to show what that looks like.
Andre:
Correct, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ll actually be able to train once this data is all brought together.
Andre:
Correct, and I’ll explain what’s going on there because it’s a lot of—it’d be just like—it’s got a lot of beeps saying, okay, what’s going on?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, awesome. All right, Simon, what do you feel?
Simon:
Nothing.
Dr. Pompa:
Good, that’s what we want, nothing. One of the things is I scared Simon. I said, okay, so we’re going to be injecting this into your neck, but it won’t hurt, honestly. The needles aren’t that big. All right, so in a minute, you’ll share that. Okay, so hang on a second.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, cool. Okay, so what does that mean? You got to see it, and like I said, your technician, you could see he was great. Okay, so from that, what you just saw with the—we were making fun of him because he had that little cap on there. I was sending pictures to his brothers and sisters. By the way, the hardest thing for him was sitting still. He kept having to correct him. Okay, so from that, you gathered this data. You can show some of the data. I mean, our viewers, just extrapolate from it the most important points but some of the significant points. One of which you said, gosh, sleeping deeper I recall is a big—and eating before bed. He already made some of those changes, which I know affect him greatly.
Dr. Hill:
Great, that’s wonderful. Yeah, so here’s some of his brain map data on the right. These colored circles are his brainwaves, delta, theta, alpha, beta, high beta, slow through fast brainwaves. Essentially, we’re looking how unusual he is compared to the average guy his age. What we’re seeing is in the back of his head he’s got these little orange spots, and those are about two to three standard deviations, about two, two and a half, actually. This little marker is that posterior cingulate. I mentioned the cingulates a minute ago. The cingulate’s job at the posterior is to evaluate the environment and make sure that what we’re doing is going to stay safe. If you’re driving a car and you don’t look at the road, there’s a sense of watch the road by the cingulate. If you learn the world isn’t always predictable or if you learn to be a little fear driven, the evaluator ramps itself up a little bit, and you typically see this. That’s why I was guessing some sort of rumination, worry, or chewing on things for him.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, he’s a worrier. That was something was very, very accurate. He’s worried about his health all the time. He’s extra worried.
Dr. Hill:
Yeah, so he’s evaluating. He’s constantly evaluating. That’s that contact back midline guy. In this little visualization here, this is actually eyes closed data, and so usually, when you close your eyes, the back of the head will relax. The visual system drops in activity, so with your eyes closed, if the back is really lit up and it’s lit up on the cingulate right there but also broadly against the back of the head in beta, that means that the visual system is staying lit up just in case. It’s this hypervigilant and ruminative combination I’m seeing for him in this one map, one page we’re seeing.
Then we also saw—you mentioned sleep, so here’s some frequencies of his brain. Some of these alpha waves, which are his processing speed, his resting speed, are running a little slow at a standard deviation some places. Usually, people’s alpha runs slow when they’re having trouble focusing, having some afternoon short-term memory and some word finding. That can drag down the beta frequencies, the thinking frequencies here, and it can affect the delta, which is a deeply rested frequency. For him, his delta is a little fast. It’s half to almost a full standard deviation above average some places. It’s not dramatically fast, but it’s right in the edge of what I was guessing. If you don’t get enough deep sleep at night, dreamless sleep, then when you’re awake your brain pushes back a little bit. It micro sleeps or browns out, and often, that produces fatigue and almost always poor performance and things like short-term memory and maintaining focus.
Dr. Pompa:
One of the things is that you asked him and it was right on was do you get a little fatigued in school? He says, oh, yeah, I can only do an hour at a time, and after that, I’m fatigued. He’s done. I mean, he just [00:24:03] down.
Dr. Hill:
Yeah, the cognitive fatigue is really a big deal. I was guessing that from the delta, and then when he opened his eyes—here’s the eyes open maps. The slow brainwaves went up when you open your eyes. That’s the opposite of what should happen. This, basically, literally means is brain his browning out in energy. It’s just going a little bit of a sleep when he opened his eyes. The slow brainwaves faded when they’re excessive, meaning the brakes are off. Squirrel, it’s hard to focus.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s it, man.
Dr. Hill:
He’s got a really hard hit to the left side of his head, so his vigilance or sustained focus is a big deal too. You see coherence or connectivity here at the bottom, the red cluster. Delta waves are stuck together. They aren’t changing moment to moment, and the delta’s at sleepiness. He’s foggy, fatigued, irritable, anxious, impulsive. It looks like he’s struggling a little bit. However, I mentioned that the most valid marker in the data is these data/beta ratios. In spite of performing very ADHD like on the test here which I’ll mention in a minute, he doesn’t show the classic ADHD markers, which means it’s more driven—atypical ADHD, this is more driven by stress and sleep or reactivity. Those markers are pretty clear, the rumination, fear driven stuff, the hypervigilance. The brain fog markers are very clear, and so I can guess about those. I wouldn’t guess ADHD purely on the maps because he doesn’t have high theta/beta ratios here.
Now, if you look at his performance—I always do these things together because they’re useful this way. His attention, which is not missing things, is soft. This test is scored where 100 is the middle of a bell curve and 15 points off either side is roughly typical and beyond that isn’t. For him, he’s scoring very low in what’s called vigilance and focus or being alert and staying on when things aren’t changing for both auditory and visual. These scores are getting in his way, and these are suggesting ADHD-like performance. On this side, it’s impulsivity, same thing as prudence. He’s not being very careful. We can’t monitor what he’s doing very well, and that does trip positive for population level checks for inattention and impulsivity.
On the behavior, he looks impulsive and inattentive and looks like he’s performing an ADHD way. Then when you dig into his brain, he looks burnt out and brain foggy, and he’s not focusing very well. He’s ruminating a little bit, and he’s perseverating, stuck on things and anxious. I’m not surprised he’s impulsive, but I wonder if some of it isn’t being reactive, not impulsive. It’s more about an anxiety and less of a disinhibition. ADHD is often the brakes are off with high theta, or you can’t shift into gear with high alpha. He’s got too much accelerator in the extreme, and he’s got too much of the really very slow brainwaves, the delta. It’s the extremes for him that are more—and infrequencies that are more excessive, and that suggests something that isn’t exactly ADHD from my perspective.
Again, as you said earlier, my goal isn’t just get to the right label. It’s to help make a change. I’m often dropping one level below the label people are using anyway. You came in with some sense, attention problems, some stress problems, and I look at his brain and go whoa. Look at these rumination and perseveration markers. Look at this poor deep sleep marker. Wow! This guy’s probably struggling and foggy. I was able to describe his experience looking at his physiology, but not necessarily talking about capital letters of OCD and ADHD.
Dr. Pompa:
I mean, we didn’t have any major head traumas that I knew about. He had mentioned skiing once, hitting his head. What about emotional traumas? Could emotional traumas have put him into this state in his brain because that we had a lot of?
Dr. Hill:
The fast frequencies.
Dr. Pompa:
We had a lot go on.
Dr. Hill:
Did you? Yeah, possibly, as a short answer. I can never tell when things developed in a brain map. I can tell they’re stable traits at this point, not a snapshot state. They won’t change year after year at this point unless you do something significant to the brain. The switchers, the anterior cingulate and posterior cingulate being a little hot in betas is a very common thing to show up when there’s trauma. When the back one’s active, people are very threat sensitive, evaluative, PTSD things. When the front is active, it’s OCD type things, or being a high-powered CEO, that can be very similar. It’s those switching systems get really ramped up when the brain figures out it better darn well keep its attention on what is important and threatening.
Yes, a lot of the things I’m seeing on the right-hand side of a document, if you will, the faster frequencies that are really blown up could be from emotional, psychological trauma, wear and tear in that way. The really slow brainwaves, the delta brainwaves being excessive are usually either a quirky brain. He just happens to show up in the world with this brain, or they’re an impact. Usually, you have an impact. If the brain gets pushed on, all the connections into that area aren’t informing the area anymore. It’s smushed. That’s the technical term. It tends to default back to the brain stem frequency, which is delta, like the heartbeat of the brain. If you see the little hotspot of delta that goes up when you open your eyes, it usually means it already has low circulation. You open your eyes to metabolically activate it, and it actually shuts down further, which we can see here. I’ll show you again.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s why you thought he might’ve head a head blow on that.
Dr. Hill:
I wondered. Yeah, I’m not sure. I can never tell for sure, and I shouldn’t tell for sure. This isn’t medicine. I can go is this brain fog? That sounds valid.
Here’s his delta. Let’s look at it, actually, in different visualizations. Barely there in this visualization, linked ears, and then when he opens his eyes, here’s the same delta. It goes up by three standard deviations over the left ear, and the back of the head, it was up by two. There’s almost this line of force showing up in some of the maps left to right, front to back, and so I wondered about a line of force at some point. Hitting his head either back there or hitting the front and causing a coup contrecoup, the rocking a little bit.
It doesn’t make sense to me the delta wouldn’t show up with eyes closed where delta’s actually higher in amplitude. It’s there a little bit but not dramatic, and when he opens his eyes, it blows way, way up. That was a little concerning to me in terms of, okay, this is unusual. The coherent, the connectivity being stuck in the high delta amplitude, I know those two things likely mean that he is brain fog. That’s a phenomenon. He’s experiencing the phenomenon of brain fog, lack of stamina, short term. Hits the afternoon, oh, leave me alone. No more decision making. No more homework.
It’s a resource. He’s running out of gas. It’s not a willful thing. I see the brain fog. Yes, the brain fog, that makes sense, and my response is to get excited because now we have things to go after for him. I don’t know why it’s there. I don’t know if he had a head injury from skiing five years ago. I don’t know if he happened to show up in the world with a quirky brain that has a tendency to sleep poorly and get anxious. I don’t know if an old injury caused a disruption in his sleep, and he’s ramped his stress response up in compensation for that or if old trauma produced stress response. Things were a big dysregulated and then threw off his sleep. It’s all chicken and egg from my perspective at this point.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, yeah, well, one of the things that you had mentioned is monitoring his sleep, and I gave him my aura ring a few times. He definitely wasn’t very good deep sleep, which you predicted that. You gave him some suggestions to not eat before bed, which I keep reminding him not to do that, but he is developing new habits. We’re working on that. Just from looking at that data, you made some recommendations.
Then the second part was right there on the spot and we’ll show the video is now you’re able to take that, and you’re able to develop a protocol for him. Your technician then said, okay, well—he was obviously asking the question that many people who watched the first episode asked. What does that mean? We can train the brain. What does that look like? He sat him down at the computer, hooked his brain up differently to a new device, and there he sat in front of the computer. He was able to, basically, look at the computer screen and, basically, adjust things based on his brain, his own thinking.
Let’s just show the video so people can watch him do this, and then I’m going to have you explain it. Let them get the visual first because it’s very confusing otherwise. Hang on here, and we’ll take a look at what that looks like.
[Video Starts]Dr. Pompa:
Here we are in the training portion. This can be done, obviously, here or at home, actually, which is really cool. That’s that little device. Where is it? Oh, it’s back here. It’s right here in this little device here that he’s connected—his brain’s connected to this. Okay, this is cool, man. I’m telling you, this is really—his brain is actually running this video game. Explain it from there.
Andre:
With that little device you mentioned, we actually have electrode—one electrode on his head and one on each ear, and we’re recording signals into his brainwave from that location. On the computer here, this is his raw brainwave. I mean, there’s some noise right there. That’s just a little bit. We’re recording his raw brainwave, and then we’re filtering out three different bands from that brain, from essentially this raw data. Every two minutes it’s being sent to this [00:33:35], slow brainwaves, medium brainwaves, fast brainwaves. Typically, muscle tension, noise, things like that. Will you clench your jaw for me, Simon?
Dr. Pompa:
Clench your jaw.
Andre:
There you go. That’s on the next. Then you let go of that. You can look at it. Now it’s going back, so give him a second to breathe. All right, so these bands that we separated essentially from the raw data are represented over here.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, yeah, so these are like fast brainwaves.
Andre:
Yeah, make one little adjustment here like this. Yeah, so this is the brainwave we’re rewarding and the two we’re inhibiting. We’re asking his brain to produce more of a particular brainwave. In this case, it’s that medium-fast brainwave we call [AS-1]. The other two brainwaves are—essentially, this pink one is associated—essentially, you can write it to data now, but it’s just the end of data and then [00:34:41]. Essentially, what we call high beta is released. He’s clenching up, and with that, we’re clicking that data out. You could technically train someone to transmit anything, so we’re clipping it out.
Dr. Pompa:
Basically, his brain, this is what we want.
Andre:
Actually, we want a few things. One, you want this green bar to be extended like this. You want these two bars on the side to go down, minimize. Just because this green bar’s expanded doesn’t necessarily mean [00:35:12]. It’s more of this particular brainwave can be reduced less than these other two.
Dr. Pompa:
Explain why we’re doing this. In other words, why do we want this—more of this particular brainwave and less of these?
Andre:
With the [mock test] order that we have right now it’s geared more towards focusing.
Dr. Pompa:
This is like an ADD thing so more towards focus.
Andre:
Typically, the smaller brainwaves tend to be associated more with either tiredness, distractibility, spacing out, daydreaming, things like that, so we want to limit that. We want to limit any anxiety or [00:35:53]. Then by doing that along with the actual brain rewarding, essentially, we train it long enough to get more focus. The longer his brain is in that state, so whether his brain’s producing more of that particular brainwave or less of the other two, his performance meter will be up like that. As that performance meter goes up, it should show up. The car would perform better.
Dr. Pompa:
[00:36:18].
Andre:
It will go.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s rewarding the brain.
Andre:
Exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
His brain knows it’s going better.
Andre:
A, the car will go faster. B, you’ll hear those beeps, ding, ding, ding.
Dr. Pompa:
Those are all rewards.
Andre:
They’re rewards.
Dr. Pompa:
He’s staying in that focus.
Andre:
Exactly, so as his brain is in that range a lot of the time, giving the rewards as it keeps up. Every about 2 minutes, 30 seconds, it takes several 10 second breaks.
Dr. Pompa:
It pauses to rest.
Andre:
Exactly, it rests, so once it resumes—one thing to note too and I mentioned this a little earlier is it may never feel like it’s getting easier. That’s because we have, essentially, a sliding window or adjustment. We want to push the brain as much as we can but not too hard, essentially. If it’s getting too difficult, we’ll be making it a little easier.
Dr. Pompa:
You said that people could literally leave exhausted. They pushed it too hard.
Andre:
Exactly, yeah. That means you [00:37:12]. It’s hard to go to the gym for the first time. I want to do everything.
Dr. Pompa:
Do too much, yeah.
Andre:
Exactly, the next day you can feel that. Essentially, all he needs to do is sit back and watch. His brain does all the work.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s amazing.
Andre:
As long as he’s not on YouTube or something else that’s more engaging. The training still works, but it’s not as effective as him just sitting there and watching that.
Dr. Pompa:
You said, literally, instead of doing this, you could also be connected while he’s reading.
Andre:
Reading, homework.
Dr. Pompa:
As long as it’s something he doesn’t actually like, it works.
Andre:
Exactly, well, it works [00:37:48], but it’s more effective if…
Dr. Pompa:
Homework, doing his homework.
Andre:
Yeah, we [00:37:54]. We use these to simply auditory stimulus, so it’d just be [00:38:00].
Dr. Pompa:
It rewards it. When he’s in that focus, it rewards it, and his brain knows it’s being rewarded.
Andre:
Over time, it gets a little—right now, it’s like weird patterns going on in here, like big beeps in the pattern. His brain begins to figure it out, what it needs to so that it will work.
Dr. Pompa:
The bottom line is it’s working on the basic way we train a dog, a human.
Andre:
To a certain extent, yes.
Dr. Pompa:
I mean, meaning that we’re rewarding the brain for—rewarding a certain wavelength. Then we’ll create focus, calm.
Andre:
Exactly, yes.
Dr. Pompa:
It was interesting because there was a gentleman just here. He didn’t have ADD, ADHD, OCD, or a sleep problem. He did say it improved his sleep a lot. He was doing it for what? He was doing it for performance, literally, just to be better or worse.
Andre:
Yes, absolutely. We get all sorts of people in here. It ranges from just kids with this type of ADD, focus. CEO types just want performance [00:39:00]. Also, traumatic brain injury, it’s a big one that we usually get. Every client I’ve at least worked personally has had great benefit from the training in regards to the symptoms from traumatic brain injury.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you’ve been here six years doing this.
Andre:
I’ve been working here about six years, yeah, so it’s been a long time but, yeah, all sorts of ailments, even if it’s just sleep issues. Typically, when you have sleep issues, it’s always tied to something else, whether it’s a [00:39:27]. They usually go hand in hand. Yeah, so all he needs to do is sit back and watch. His brain does all the work.
Dr. Pompa:
Simon, his brain is being trained, rewarded to get—and then, eventually, his brain knows how to stay in…
Andre:
Exactly, and that’s probably with difficulty. We’re going to keep pushing the brain a little harder and harder and harder. Then if it gets—we get a little too far, then we can dial it back.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, cool. All right, Simon.
Simon:
How do I know when I’m training [00:39:58]?
Andre:
Like I mentioned before…
Dr. Pompa:
He asked what is his brain training on? What’s his brain working on?
Andre:
Calm focus, essentially. We want you to be able to focus, but not to the point where you’re anxious. There is where you can train someone to actually be more anxious.
Simon:
Yeah, it happened a lot.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, one of the things you said too is his feedback is important. If he’s anxious doing this, you literally can train his brain to be anxious, and so him communicating saying, no, I’m feeling better, or if he says…
Andre:
I’m not feeling anything right now.
Dr. Pompa:
If he says I’m not—if he doesn’t communicate that he’s not sleeping as well, that could be an issue. We could actually be training the brain. It’s important that you communicate with us how you’re feeling.
Andre:
In the brain map we did earlier, like I mentioned, it’s a good roadmap, and it’s statistic based. It gives us our starting point of where we want our goals and what we want to work on. It also [00:40:53]. Unfortunately and fortunately, the brain’s—everyone’s brain is different. Just because we train it a specific way based on what his brain shows, it may not necessarily be the best [00:41:05].
Dr. Pompa:
It’s a combination of the map that we get. It gives feedback, and eventually, we train his brain.
Andre:
Yes, exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s so cool, isn’t it? All right, let’s go back and hear from Dr. Andrew so awesome stuff. I appreciate it.
Andre:
No problem.
Dr. Pompa:
Thank you for helping.
Andre:
No problem.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, you got it.
Andre:
Take care.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, so there’s him doing—you could see him, basically, thinking and the technician saying, basically, just watch the screen. Your brain will do the rest. Explain that to people. What the heck is going on?
Dr. Hill:
The hardest part of neurofeedback from the client point of view is, often, what do you mean it’s involuntary? They don’t understand how they could be exercising their brain without trying. They don’t understand how a bunch of animations could be changing their brain. What’s often missed in the explanation is that there’s a loop created between the brain and the computer. Just like you picked up a tool and hit some buttons, you have to learn to use the tool or even before you pick up a tool. When you’re a baby and you’re flopping around and the random firings happen to move your left arm up and you go whoa. Hey, that was cool. [00:42:17] anything I want to do. We really do more of that. The brain’s always watching the variable signals and the input, the output and always wants to take control of them.
Your son was sitting there watching a game, an animation, and we had two ear clips on his ears and one wire in his head. It’s not very involved in terms of the training days. It’s pretty quick to set it up, and we just simply measured what his brain was doing moment to moment. We measured his calm focus beta so the low beta, and we also measured his distractible theta brainwaves, impulsivity and things. Whenever the impulsivity brainwaves dipped down a little bit for half a second on their own and the beta climb for half a second on its own, the software would go good job, brain, by making the trolley car run faster and steer better and go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Stimuli will always increase in these games when the brain happens to do a little more of the right thing and will decrease when the brain does more of the wrong thing.
The only trick that’s not obvious sometimes is that every few seconds I move the goalposts. We say, brain, do that. Yeah, good job, brain. Then do that, and just gradually shape it up or down. The person’s experience is having the game stop and start. That’s it. There’s really not much of a voluntary experience to the process. You can get in the way of it by moving too much and tightening your jaw and things, but you can’t really make it work any better. I mean, it’s really an involuntary process. This is, of course, illustrated by the fact that many teenagers don’t want to be in my office, and they still have great results after they start getting their brain changed.
Also, it works on nonverbal people. It was discovered 52 years ago on cats. I usually tell the joke now that cats are very bad instruction followers. This is not a voluntary process. Dr. Sterman trained cats by squirting chicken broth into their mouth whenever a certain brainwave increased. Months later, these cats had brains that had a change, as a seizure resistant brain from their signal increase.
It’s a gentle process of exercise. You don’t’ feel too much. I’m guessing your son didn’t notice much at all right afterwards, maybe a touch of fatigue if he’s very sensitive or a touch of maybe better sleep that night if he’s very sensitive. Usually, it’s about a few sessions in, three, four, or five half hour sessions of training, and then your brain starts to go, hey, wait a minute. Oh, when I drop my theta and raise my calm beta or my alpha, stuff happens in the world, and it starts to build that resource. Then you get about a day effect after ever training session.
The voluntary part of the process from Simon’s perspective isn’t what he’s doing in the chair. It’s to say upfront here’s what I want to work on, and then the next day, ooh, here’s what I noticed. My sleep changed this way, my alertness, my stamina. I’m noticing this stuff. If he’s a teen and can’t record it, we rely on the parent sometimes a little bit more to report what’s changing. Three or four weeks in with ADHD we hear things like I asked him to take the trash out, and he did it with one request. That was weird or things like that. The executive function starts to shift or sleep shifts, and you start to see things show up. Based on what shows up we iterate. It’s like a personal trainer that has to build a plan for you because your muscles are so unique that no one’s had them before, so you have to build up a workout and try things.
Dr. Pompa:
In that plan, I mean, you build the protocol based on what you see, obviously, in the brain mapping, what the person wants. The guy that was there doing—he was doing the same thing. He was there in front of the same game Simon was. Maybe that was a little different game. There was men running around. No, he sat there the whole time doing it, doing it, and I asked him questions afterwards.
He’s like, oh, yeah, I mean, I notice a major difference. Again, he was doing it, basically, to basically perform better at work. I mean, that’s why he was doing it, this particular gentleman. I said, well, how’s it working? He said it’s working amazing well, actually. I said, well, how did you notice the game? Is the game getting easier? He said, oh, yeah, it is.
I mean, obviously, I was asking him some hard questions. I’m like really? I was pushing him. I didn’t want to film him. I should’ve, but it was telling that, obviously, it works. It works step by step. Matter of fact, you’re sending us—the cool thing about it is we had our brain map that we could—that you have different places around the country to do that. You’re sending us, actually, the stuff to hook him up, so we can do it at home.
Dr. Hill:
Yeah, about a third of my clients are more trained themselves at home. Once I have your brain in the can, I can talk to you about your goals and get some starting places. Then I can really teach you to stick wires to your head and run software pretty easily. The hard part is learning what to do next. My home trainers will do an intensive one in the office, and then a three month period of supervision where they get support, fine-tuning, and adjusting and building out—building this workout planning for them. Then they’re given complimentary brain maps in the future without charge as long as they want, and they’re given the equipment that they get trained up on. It doesn’t ever expire.
A lot of my home trainers want to do it because they have long-term goals, these biohacker types, as you mentioned, or maybe they have a problem to work on that doesn’t get fixed rapidly. Some things take longer. Concussions and brain injuries, autism, you have to train for at least six months. ADHD, anxiety, and sleep issues, usually three months is good to get a really big chunk. I usually do 40 sessions in 3 months of training, Dr. Pompa, and I often get about two standard deviations or close to it in that amount of time. In terms of objective change in the brain maps and subjective change or, if you will, performance change on the attention tests, they converge. They change together, and they change with the person’s experience, which is obviously the most important thing.
We can almost mathematically say, oh, okay, 25 sessions or so. That’s about a standard deviation change in performance. For instance, if you look at Simon’s attention test, you see that, his performance metrics here, his overall attention’s a 55 roughly. That’ three standard deviations off of where he wants to be. I would guess that he will need something like 40, 50, 60 sessions to really get these up. It may not take as many because it’s a couple specific bottlenecks for him. It’s vigilance and focus that are really low but speed’s great. He’s using his quickness because he can’t stay alert enough, essentially. If the focus and vigilance come up, we might see them change a lot faster. We might not.
I can look at this and go, okay, that’s the sort of degree of magnitude of bottleneck he has. If he identifies or you identify this is a necessary thing to work on, we then target the specific resources, and it’s not really about getting the effects. It works for pretty much everyone. It’s like dialing in the exact effects you’re looking for.
Dr. Pompa:
I ask the question, well, can you do it without the game? He said, actually, you can almost do it even when you sleep, but it works better or—did he say it works better if it’s a game that they don’t love too much?
Dr. Hill:
It can, actually. Yeah, it works better if it’s immersive and a lot of stimuli is coming back. A lot of the video games we use we’ll have several streams of information coming back. I did my dissertation work on a simple audio beep with a picture, filling in a picture square and doing a puzzle piece thing, very simple, and I do a lot of training with my clients with audio only. Sleeping, you can train when people are sleeping. It does work, but you’re right, not quite as well. I generally don’t train people who are sleeping unless they have problems staying awake and have developmental issues and falling asleep all the time. It happens sometimes. Just auditory only training works great. You can sit and work on things, your licensing exam, your taxes, your Great American Novel, and just work on it. Whenever that your brain’s in the zone, the audio swells in volume and continues, and then when it drops…
Dr. Pompa:
Your brain picks up these rewards no matter what. When theta goes up or whatever you’re trying to accomplish based on the mapping, you reward the brain. That’s why it’s a very specific protocol that you develop, right? You’re rewarding the brain where you want, and that could be many different activities. Okay, we got the brain to do what we want in that particular focus, and then it’s rewarded. Eventually, without you knowing it, your brain is picking up on the rewards. Go back to that because this was discovered—there is a story with the cats, right?
Dr. Hill:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Was it you or their technician that told me that story? Retell that because it’s compelling how this works.
Dr. Hill:
In 1967, NASA went to a scientist at UCLA who was learning scientist and said, hey, could you please figure out how dangerous rocket fuel is because our astronauts are getting sick breathing in vapors? They’re hallucinating, getting nauseated. Dr. Barry Sterman, at the time, his test subject was cats. He did a lot of work with cats. He had big rooms full of cats everywhere at UCLA. He took the 32 cats or so that were in his current subject pool, and he did an experiment on them. He built Plexiglas cages that were airtight. He put a beaker of rocket fuel in the cage. Put a cat in the cage and started a timer. Rocket fuel, methylhydrazine is very destabilizing to the brain.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, there you are.
Dr. Hill:
Within moments, the cats would show irritation, if you will, from the methylhydrazine, some crying and then, after a view minutes, some drooling, stumbling, and then seizures, then coma, and then death, a perfect dose-dependent curve for most of the cats. Of the 32 cats or so he had, 24 I think had perfect dose-dependent curves, and around 40 minutes in were showing instability events, pre-seizure events. At 60 minutes, were having major, major brain, life threatening seizures and things. A handful of the cats, about 8 of them did not have seizures and needed a 160 minutes of exposure before they showed these instability events to the brain. He couldn’t figure out why one group got into like this and one group was like that in terms of time exposure until he remembered he had done another experiment on the other group six months before to train up a certain brainwave. Whenever they made more SMR, this relaxing brainwave that I mentioned earlier, he squirted chicken broth into their mouths just to see if he could—and train it using operant conditioning because he’s a learning scientist, and he could, wonderful. It looks like this is a proof of concept. Put the cats back in the subject pool, and months later, they were seizure resistant.
His lab [00:52:53] and uncontrolled on meds, so they built her a machine and trained her. Over the next couple of years, she went off all of her meds and remained seizure free. This was 1967, 8, 9 and ‘70. That was the start of the field, and from there, we discovered the same frequency that stabilizes the brain also eliminates ADHD, this SMR, sensorimotor rhythm. There’s a strip of tissue that runs ear to ear. Just in front of central divide is the descending control, the motor control. Just posterior to the divide is the ascending control to sensory information. If you train a relaxing rhythm kind of like an alpha rhythm but not really on that strip, it’s the equivalent of—if you produce the rhythm, rather, it’s relaxation. It’s a calming. It’s inhibition of the body.
If you’ve seen a cat lying on a windowsill with a liquid body and laser like focus, what you’re looking at is the opposite of ADHD, a high SMR state. The body’s physically inhibited and the mind is not. The mind’s ready to go. It’s poised. In ADHD, the body’s often physically disinhibited and so is the attention system and mind. SMR literally is the opposite of ADHD, so
SMR training in neurofeedback works even better on ADHD than it does on seizure. It’s the term dramatic—it’s among the most reliable things we do. It works for almost everyone.
It works on improving executive function, that inhibitory tone of not reacting too much, of not having—you control your working memory, what you’re thinking about, what you’re focusing on, what you’re doing. It gives you that inhibitory tone, and most of our executive function is about saying no to the other modules. The CEO has to say no to the mailroom so they don’t decide what to process for the CEO. Inhibitory tone gives the ability to stay on task.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s why people biohack their brains. They become better at work, or brighter CEOs, or salespeople, whatever it is, so what about an—or I’m sorry. We know it works for that. What about an autistic child where it’s [00:55:07]? Do you have good results with that?
Dr. Hill:
I do. I was actually trained initially working with autism in a place in Providence, Rhode Island. A lovely neurofeedback center called The NeuroDevelopment Center. It’s probably one of the best in the world for autism. It’s a very specific population, and it’s a very heterogeneous population. There’s many, many things we call autism so a couple things to say about neurofeedback analysis of autism. One, we don’t usually treat or train the autism. We usually train the sensory integration, the perseveration, the sleep issues, the eye contact, the language production, etc., etc., etc., and those things are all tractable. Now, the autistic brain is often quite a bit different than a typical brain, and so it takes a little longer to make change. Almost every person I’ve worked with in the spectrum has an irritability to their nervous system, have a hard time settling and inhibiting, and again, SMR works magic for most people to settle, voluntary settling.
You get somebody who’s got sensory integration issues and high pitch whining and is rocking, that’s really a flooding of the sensory system, and they can’t inhibit. You get a little bit of training, and they’re able to settle and sit. They have eye contact. A little more training, you might get lucky and get some language with the profound. I’ve seen some of the most amazing results in high-functioning autistic people and Asperger’s where I had one guy come into the Providence Center every few months. Every six months or so he’d come and say—this is a high functioning autistic guy who’s obsessive interest was in jokes. He would memorize thousands of jokes, and his entire life was walking around Providence, up to people in bus stops, and telling jokes. It was favorite thing in the whole world to do was find some stranger and see if he could make him laugh.
He actually liked the social contact but wasn’t necessarily good at it. He would train up, using infrared blood flow training, HEG training, which makes your frontal very, very crisp, and gets your sense of humor, actually, many people, to be very on and helps with eye contact and social cuing. We were doing a lot of this with him, and his humor got really, really on. He would come back every few months, every six months or so and say, “People are not laughing at my jokes anymore. I need some more HEG, please.” He would use it as, oh, I’m not funny, huh. Not everything lasts in autistic spectrum people always, but it’s also one of the few things you can do to make a change that is like, wow. In a week, things are changing. In two weeks, things are changing. Often, people in the spectrum have comorbidities. They have seizures or other developmental issues, and it works on those too.
I mean, I often find that we work globally on a brain, and lots of things change, and I don’t necessarily know how or why they change. A personal trainer gets your whole body to change. They don’t necessarily know—they’re working the whole body out sometimes. Oh, that pain you had, oh, that resolved? That’s great. Sometimes I’m doing that. Oh, great, I’m so happy that thing that you care about changed. I don’t know how it changed. Usually, I can target the big things, the regulatory features, the sleep, stress, mood, and attention.
Autism, we can find the face recognition area and the obsessions and some sensory issues and go after them, but in terms of the autism, there’s another great scientist doing some work on this, Rob Coben, who’s a practitioner as well, a neurofeedback doctor. Rob has found a way to train some of the connectivity issues in autism and how profound effects rapidly. I use some of his techniques in our centers as well. The field is always at this cutting edge, unfortunately, of science where we’ve outstripped the research literature by decades now and the clinical—so even the research understanding, the science understanding sometimes is not caught up to the effects that we can get. I’m a neuroscientist primarily. My training is a cognitive neuroscience. I’m an EEG scientist, and I have a really pretty good neuroscience and neurophysiology background.
I feel that brings the level of neurofeedback with your peak brain up a lot because the—it’s all bounded in science, the science then doing something that’s very different than everyone else in the field, just also typically a therapist. We’re doubling down on the science side of it and almost making this about access to the technology for the client and not about a relationship of treatment, which we try to work a way—which is why it works so well for home trainers who can learn and take agency and get the benefits.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about that. I mean, where can they go to get mapped? I don’t know, Ashley, if we have a link here to put in. Then let’s talk about that. Right now, people are like, okay, I want to get this. What can we do?
Dr. Hill:
Yeah, sure. You can go to a few locations currently that are permanent locations. We have big offices in Los Angeles and in St. Louis. Those are our two big flagships. We also have some satellite offices, one in Orange County, which is Costa Mesa. We have one in Malmö, Sweden, so if you’re in Copenhagen or southern Sweden, you can head over and get a map done in Malmö. Then we’re opening up mapping stations in London, probably a full office in London later this summer.
I also tend to do workshops, these biohacking conferences, and typically bring assessment gear with me so if folks want to see us at one of these big conferences like The Health Optimisation Summit in London in the fall I’ll be at, doing a big workshop on brain mapping. People can just come into one of our big offices just for a day or two and get an assessment done, and everything else can be done fully remotely. Come see us in St. Louis. It’s a lovely city. It’s low-key. It’s a cheap airport. It’s ten minutes away from the airport, no traffic, great barbecue, lovely people.
Dr. Pompa:
Ashley will put up some type of link to make it easier for you all. We’ll do something special for our viewers to get them there. That’s for sure. Also, I have my seminar coming up here in November, and it’s right there in Newport Beach. Maybe we can get you there doing mapping.
Dr. Hill:
We should do that. Yeah, Andre’s right there in Costa Mesa, right there. We can send him over for the day or two, and just churn through maps to acquire data. I think it’d be wonderful.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’m going to put Ashley on that here. Actually, Saturday we’re even opening up our seminar to the public, so we can be doing some mapping. Yeah, I mean, this is fascinating. I mean, this goes right with what people need today. We don’t have time in this show to talk about the things that are destabilizing the very thing we’re talking about, from over medication just to overstimulation. I mean, what kids are exposed to today, it’s amazing, but there’s a greater need for this, I mean, honestly. I think that’s why the average people are reaching out to this and biohacking the brain just for better performance. Even the overstimulation of electromagnetic frequencies and toxins, all of this plays in to why I think we need this today.
Dr. Hill:
You’ll appreciate this. I’m coming up on hour 72 right now of a fast.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, man, that’s good for you. That’s right. I haven’t eaten today yet. I’m approaching hour 24 is all.
Dr. Hill:
Oh, wow! That’s great. Yeah, I’ve been in three months of alternately fasting with a longer fast once a week. I do a lot of autophagy and re-hacking. I knew you would appreciate that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, my book’s coming out. You have to get it, Beyond Fasting.
Dr. Hill:
I can’t wait.
Dr. Pompa:
How to maximize the results doing a lot of those little tricks like that.
Dr. Hill:
Awesome.
Dr. Pompa:
Andrew, thank you for being on and doing a second show and what you’re doing with Simon.
Dr. Hill:
Of course.
Dr. Pompa:
This is needed. Like I said, I think it’s more greater today than ever. Anyways, we’ll put some links down below for everyone watching. Absolutely, get your brain mapped, and you’re making it easier for people, that’s for sure, to get this technology. Thank you.
Dr. Hill:
I appreciate it, and thanks so much for having me back.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
277: Wholistic Wisdom with Elena Bensonoff
