How To Rewire Your Brain For Better Sleep, Reset Your Brain's Tolerance To Marijuana & Alcohol, Fly Spaceships With Your Mind & Much More.

Hey, what's up, you guys? It's me, Ben Greenfield. And this is a really interesting follow up to an episode I did a few months ago where I went down to LA and got my brain treated to rewire my brain and to reset my brain's tolerance to things like marijuana and alcohol. Not that I use either of those ever. And even to learn how to do things like fly spaceships with my mind. Not actual spaceships over your house, but spaceships on a TV screen or a computer screen to allow me to do things like increase my alpha brainwaves and decrease my beta brainwaves. We're gonna jump into all of that in this show. It's fascinating stuff. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Over many days, weeks, months and years, your brain becomes this regulatory master at handling all of the internal and external things it needs to do. Sensory, cognitive, emotional, deep body processes. The brain's doing millions and millions of things every day. And most of these, the vast majority of these are not things we're aware of, these secondary ripples of activity, I think in the hippocampus, which is one of the things causing memory consolidation or moving memories from the sort of short term to long term storage.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And it was, I guess almost six months ago now that I visited a place called the Peak Brain Institute in LA for this special kind of brain scan and brain mapping called a quantified electroencephalography, or qeeg. And I was pretty shocked at what they discovered in my brain. Now, Dr. Andrew Hill was the guy who oversaw that test. And Dr. Hill is a. He's really one of the country's leading neurofeedback practitioners. He's a brain performance coach, He's a UCLA trained cognitive neuroscientist, lecturer, biohacker, and he analyzed my brain when I went down there and, and actually wound up writing an article that I'll link to in the show notes for this episode, you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com AndrewHill that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com andrewhill and in that article he highlighted how there was a whole bunch of built up areas where there were deficits of attention and increased distractibility and limited sleep potential and less than optimal cognitive performance going on in my brain based on this eeg, probably from life and travel and toxins and my history of concussions and traumatic brain injury and beyond. And so he wrote that article. And then after that initial scan, I actually a few weeks later I hopped on a plane back to LA and I went back to Andrew's Peak Brain Institute and I did three days of pretty intensive training with Andrew to learn how to use his special neurofeedback equipment to fix my brain. And then I flew back to Spokane from LA with this little black suitcase full of every tiny little piece of neurofeedback technology that I needed to rewire my brain in the comfort of my own home, along with many text messages back and forth between Dr. Hill and I. So I did over four months, over 60 sessions of basically flying spaceships with my mind and listening to special little tones and playing around with this neurofeedback software. And then finally I went back down to LA and I got re scanned. And in today's episode you're not only going to discover what we found on my follow up brain scan after all this neurofeedback, but how this stuff actually works, how you can use some of these concepts yourself to do things like decrease distractibility or increase sleep or even, God forbid, reset your tolerance to marijuana and alcohol and all sorts of things that you can do with neurofeedback. So this is going to be a fun episode. Dr. Hill, welcome to the show, man.

Hey Ben, thanks for having me back.

Yeah, yeah, no problem. You're turning into a frequent guest here because I know you've also been. You were on my episode can weed really shrink your brain? And also we did an episode also on the difference between something called Smart drugs and something called Nootropics. So this I guess will be your. This is your third appearance. I know you've been. I'll link to these appearances in the show notes. But I know you've been on the Joe Rogan show. You've been on the Smart Drug Smarts podcast so all over in case those of you listening and want even more of Andrew after listening to this.

So I appreciate that, appreciate that. Well, it's been great work with you and yes, there have been a lot back and forth and just to clear Your listeners in. You've not just been training from the comfort of your own home. I have this image of you, like, pausing in your bow, hunting on a mountaintop somewhere, pulling out gear and training.

No, I actually did, because basically it's like a laptop and a little handheld piece of EEG or neurofeedback training equipment with a few little cables. And then I've got some Q tips, I've got my conducting gel, and that's pretty much it. It all fits in my little book bag. So, yeah, over the summer, when I was hunting from my little tent, when I was hunting, I was doing neurofeedback sessions because my goal was, over the several months, we did it based on your instructions to try and shoot for 30 minutes every other day approximately. So, yeah, this stuff's been all over the world and back. It's like the little gnome in those travel commercials.

That's great. Well, you know, we of course, mapped your brain with QEEG back in, like, August and then again in January. And there's been some change, and I think you've experienced some change subjectively. Right. So, yeah. Did you have more questions about the process? What would you like me to start with?

Let's start here on my initial brain scan, just to give people the basic overview. What did you discover when you hooked up my brain and did an EEG of what my brain was doing? In the beginning?

Yeah, your brain looked pretty typical. No dramatic. No seizures or any bizarre eeg. But there were a lot of excesses in different frequencies. And a lot of those frequencies suggested that basic regulation in energy and attention and stress were all kind of like wide open. And so to break that down a little bit, you made a lot of delta waves. Delta is a regulatory frequency. It helps you sleep, it helps you keep the autonomic system working. But you don't think in delta. Typically, it's not a cognitive frequency. And you were making broad delta when you were wide awake with your eyes open across the cortex, you're also making a lot of theta in the same way. And eyes open. Broad theta suggests basically lack of inhibitory tone, distractibility, impulsivity, lots of thoughts competing for your attention, so to speak. And those are a couple of the big sort of excess slow frequencies. And then we saw some excess fast frequencies, some betas that suggested your mind was getting stuck on things a lot, ruminating a lot, and probably having both a little sleep onset and sleep maintenance difficulty, meaning you probably weren't the architecture of your sleep transitioning in and out of sleep Maintaining good deep sleep. Those two things didn't look like they were optimal based on a couple of stress response patterns that I usually get reports from people that often represent both sleep and stress response kind of patterns. So we saw a nice smorgasbord of things initially, really across every sort of major band in the brain that we look at typically.

And I'll link to both my pre scan for those of you smart cookies that know how to actually read EEG based, kind of like visual maps. But I'll link to my pre scan and also my post scan in the show notes for those of you who want to actually delve in and see what my brain actually looked like. But what's the idea behind how neurofeedback. I realize this is kind of an involved question, but what's the idea behind how neurofeedback is supposed to fix that?

Yeah, so neurofeedback is biofeedback on the brain, on the central nervous system, and broadly EEG based neurofeedback, which is mostly what we did, I believe. I don't think we did any heg. So mostly all eeg. EEG is a chaotic phenomena, to put it mildly. So you've got millions, billions of cells in your brain, all produce electricity. And there are groups of coherent assemblies, essentially little CPUs in the brain. And there are about 30,000 neurons. And the ones that are pointing at right angles to the skull. When they burst in, these rhythmic patterns produce a signal, a signal of the brain's operation, specifically of the cortex. And that's influenced by all kinds of things, including connectivity between regions of the brain and interactions with parts of the brain that are below the cortex, that are deep inside the brain. And so you have EEG chaotically oscillating all over the head. And those little generators that are right angles to the skull can be pretty easily picked up with a passive electrode pasted to the outside of your head, to your scalp. And so this gives us a lens into what is happening in this very informationally dense space in the brain. And we don't pretend to understand all of it, but we've identified, using things like qeg, some patterns that often show up when things are awry in function. And so we pick something to manipulate. In your case, let's say, I think we almost always brought down theta. For most of your protocols, we included a theta inhibit. And what I mean by that is we measured the amount of electricity your brain was pumping out in theta under some location on your head. And theta is a Frequency between about four and seven cycles per second, or hertz. Four to seven hertz. And so as your brain's pumping out lots of theta. It's not some static amount of electricity. It's not some fixed amount. It's always fluctuating a little bit, trending up, trending down. And so we take advantage of that and measure it. And whenever it happens to trend or stay in the right direction, we sort of give the brain some applause, if you will, with an audio or visual stimulus. So we make music play or I think you had a spaceship game. So the spaceship flies faster and its.

Music track at a spaceship game to where when I watch the screen, the spaceship will go down the tunnel a little bit more quickly. The other cool thing that you showed me is I could actually take the software that was on this laptop that you sent me back with, and I can, like, watch Shark Tank on Hulu. And every time my brain strays out of the of. Of the waves that you're trying to train it to be in, or every time it goes into the waves that it's not supposed to be in, the, like, Barbara Corcoran's voice and face will start to fade a little bit, or I won't be able to see Mark Cuban making a comment. So it's almost like a little slap on the wrist, so to speak.

Very obvious feedback. And then I think you also use some audio training, right? You continue to work, and whenever your brain's in range, you hear some tones or chimes get generated. All those things are essentially driven by operant conditioning or instrumental conditioning, which is a flavor of operant conditioning for the psychologists in your audience, think Skinner, not Pavlov. This is. This is not classical conditioning where you're associating new things. This is operant conditioning where you're encouraging more or less of existing things. And so you've got some behavior your brain is making, the amount of theta moment to moment. When that goes down briefly, we would applaud your brain. And the spaceship flies faster, or you get a clearer screen to watch Barbara and Mark fight it out, or you hear more tones. And so typically, the way that I train, I often three frequencies at once. This is a pretty classic way of doing neurofeedback. It's sort of the core approach in the field, I would say, for most people at this point. And it usually involves training down or inhibiting or essentially allowing stimuli, visual audio stimuli. Whenever a slow band like theta drops, and whenever a very, very fast band like high frequency beta, which can be influenced by things like muscle tension. So it's a catch on that whenever that drops, we allow the rewards to happen. And then when a middle frequency, typically a beta, a lower beta or an alpha frequency, when those go up briefly, when all three things happen, we reward or we provide the stimuli. So your experience is sitting there watching or playing or even just kind of doing something else. And there are trains of stimuli. You hear a bunch of beeps and then they stop. Or the spaceship flies. Well, for a few moments and then it peters out and then it resumes. So it's this changing signal of the feedback of the stimulus coming back to the brain. And the brain's trying to parse the information in the signal about what's going on. And very quickly the brain realizes that, hey, wait, that's actually something I'm in some way controlling. Now, I say brain specifically because mentally, the mind, the cognitive aspect of the brain, is actually not really involved here. This is not training a voluntary behavior. It's training involuntary fluctuations in the brain. Usually we're.

Which I think confuses a lot of people because, like, for me, when I first started doing the Spaceship game, I would scrunch my eyebrows and purse my lips and try to like, look at the screen and make it change and all that. Really, really does. It messes up the brain wave patterns and causes your. Yeah, it makes like your forehead muscles contract and adds. Yeah, like, like what you call. Adds noise to the frequency. When in fact, and this kind of shocked me, actually I could be like replying to, to an email, you know, assuming that, that I was staying relatively relaxed, not tensing up, or I, I could be, you know, looking at something on my phone, and my brain would still be kind of like passively doing the neurofeedback in the background, like picking up the tones or picking up the sounds all on its own without me even doing anything.

Yeah, largely, you know, the brain's doing all kinds of things all the time. And it's sort of core job of the cortex is to change and tune and remap these connections, the strength of connections, which waves are dominant, under which conditions. And just like any other form of learning, it takes some time to occur. And over many days, weeks, months and years, your brain becomes this regulatory master at handling all of the, you know, the internal and external things it needs to do. Sensory, cognitive, emotional, deep, you know, body processes. The brain's doing millions and millions of things every day. And most of these, the vast majority of these are not things we're aware of. We are aware of a fraction of what is going on physiologically. And, you know, I sort of have begun defining the mind as the part of the brain that we're sort of aware of, or the function of the brain that we're aware of.

Yeah.

And you're training the brain, though, in neurofeedbacks. You're measuring these bursting patterns that do shift and fluctuate and trend up and trend down in a short time course in minutes. And so you simply set a point that you want this brainwave to be at. And when it fluctuates down towards that range or up towards that range, we applaud the brain. And this is basic learning. When you were a baby flopping around and you just happened to line up some muscle fibers properly, and suddenly you were pushed up on your little baby arms and you could see twice as far the brain went. Oh, yeah. Remember this unique connection of muscles and to turn this on, because it means we get more input, we can see more of the environment. It's a cool thing. That's all we're doing is we're applauding when your brain gets a subtle, almost a random shift. But this is not some special feature. The brain does this just by doing this. Anything you do, it tries to improve and make more efficient.

All you're doing is giving you little doggy biscuits along the way.

Exactly, yeah, exactly. And so we can do this on involuntary, if you will, frequencies. And the whole process was decided, discovered essentially in the late 60s, because Barry Sturman found that cats could be easily conditioned to have these metastable brains. And, you know, cats are notoriously bad instruction followers. Right. So this is not a placebo response. This is not cats wheeling up their brainwaves in any specific way. The process also works on kids who are non verbal. Margaret Ayers, who passed away a few years, one of the greats in the field, she, at the end of her career was almost exclusively going around working with people in coma, trying to change consciousness states. This tends to happen in the field that individuals become a little specialized about certain types of neurofeedback. It's a fairly deep and broad field, unfortunately, in terms of the knowledge you really need to do a good job at anything beyond the basics. And the basics aren't that difficult. And to be honest, the basics work really well for many things. A lot of what we did with your brain was pretty basic stuff in terms of how we approached which frequencies to train up or train down and what things to approach. But we also went after your brain broadly. So I Sort of have two things I think about when designing a training plan for somebody. And one is what in terms of goals, both clinical and peak performance do they have? Where on that spectrum are they? And how much of what they want to work on is supra, awesome physiology or limitless potential kind of stuff and how much of it is, ooh, here's a bottleneck in performance, a deficit, something that's getting away. And you had a little bit of both. But I consider you a peak performance client more than I do a remediate, a specific problem client. Even though there were some pretty broad frequency excesses in some of these things in your brain, I didn't get the sense that you had this deep deficit. You're very incredibly prolific athlete, media creator, thought leader. That takes an awful lot of cognitive resources and organization and putting things together. So instantly. You coming in as somebody like that meant I was going after a certain class of approaches and then tailor it to your brain maps, of course. And so.

So basically what you're saying is I wasn't a drooling psychopathic murderer when I came in. I had.

You weren't? Yeah. And it's just that. It's just that when people come in with specific goals, sometimes those goals are really obvious. Like somebody's got, you know, stuttering or migraines or profound ADHD or seizures. I mean, you know, they have a very specific goal.

Right.

The lovely thing about working with anything though, is no matter what it is we're doing, at least the way that I tend to work, which is using one of these frequencies called smr, it's one of the core frequencies in the field and in the brain. Using SMR training and variants of that training, you end up getting broad regulatory benefits no matter what you go after. So yes, you can reduce seizures, but you also get better sleep, for instance. And yes, you can work on anxiety, but you also can then work on creativity. So there's some. The way that I approach the brain is very much like a personal trainer.

Yeah.

And that's really actually different than most people in the field. Of the five plus thousand people in the us, I don't know more than a couple people like me who are more on the science side, less on the clinical side. A consequence of me being more data driven and a little bit on the science side and also not being a licensed clinician. I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist or anything, I'm a neuroscientist, is that I approach this stuff from a regulatory lens. So I'm not So much thinking about ADHD as I'm thinking about sustained attention or impulsivity. I'm not thinking about anxiety so much as I am is this person's stress response where it could be? I'm not thinking about sleep disorders as much as I'm thinking about the architecture of their sleep and what it looks like.

Right.

So because of that, I often approach people from a broad brain training perspective as well as a focal tune these protocols for them perspective, that means starting broad on the whole brain, seeing how that person responds as they respond, dialing in different things to work on secondary features, secondary goals, things that took a little longer to work on. And also there's often an iterative approach to neurofeedback where you're trying a few different protocols and based on the response you're getting, you're adjusting the frequencies.

And that's actually what I wanted to talk to you about, was that adjustment of the frequencies. And I, of course, in the show Notes, will link to a few previous episodes that we've done where we talked about some of the Neurofeedback 101 stuff. And again, for those of you listening in, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com AndrewHill for any of those podcasts, which will be a perfect accompaniment to this one. But. But there are kind of like, there's almost like this special language associated with neurofeedback that I had to learn. You know, not only the brain map of the head that you sent me that showed me where I needed to place the specific electrodes, but also phrases like C4A1 and CZA2, you know, all these different acronyms that are used when deciding how you're going to set up what you call the channels. So I want to kind of delve into a few of the things that you gave me. So, for example, the very first thing that we started doing was what are called one channel designs instead of what we progressed to later on, which was two channel designs. What's the difference between a one channel and a two channel design?

Yeah, the short answer is A. Fewer asks of your brain, fewer things we're asking it to do to meet the criteria. And therefore it's a little more discreet, it's a little more focused. And so we started doing, I believe, a class of SMR and beta protocols on your brain using one channel, one channel meaning one location on your scalp or at least one channel of eeg. To create a channel or a signal of eeg, you have to subtract electricity measurements at Two places, you know, a positive and a negative. So we were using initially a spot on the right sort of middle of your head called C4, even numbers in these coordinate systems on the right side of your head. C is the central motor strip that runs from ear to ear. So this right middle part of your head and electricity is a little broad. You know, it's not this discrete, well behaved thing that hangs out where it's generated. It spreads throughout the blobby jelly bit of the brain. And you pick up electricity that's generated in one place from other places on the scalp quite a lot often. And so there's lots of different schemes involved to subtract certain regions and certain electrode placements to get the signal you're trying to get. And we initially started with an electrode in the right scalp minus an electrode in the left ear. C4 minus A1. A is auricular. So this produced to some extent a broad signal across your head.

A is auricular, meaning that was on my ear. And then C stands for what?

Central motor strip, I believe.

Central motor strip. Okay.

Or central cortex.

Okay.

And that's the cortex strip that runs ear to ear. It's the sensorimotor cortex, these two strips of cortex. One is where you sense that's behind the central sulcus, and one is where you control motor output that's anterior.

So for something like that, for like a C4, A1, I take the little electrodes and I dip it in the paste and I put one over the location on the little scalp map that you send me that says C4 and the other one over the little one that says A one. And then you have to ground. You have to ground yourself too. Right. What's, what's the reasoning behind that?

Well, the amps don't know, I mean amplifiers, and that's what an EEG system is, an amplifier. It's taking these incredibly tiny little signals that are being generated from inside the head and attenuate dramatically as they pass through layers of meninges and skull and scalp. And it's having to magnify them so they can be read by a computer. The ground wire on an EEG amp essentially sets where your body is. It tells the amp where your zero, where your resting potential is essentially in your body, so that the other two electrodes, when they're subtracted from each other, are doing so in the range that your body's in. Now, some EEG level is what's called a driven right leg, an old fashioned term from like the 60s in electrical engineering. Where there's a tiny, tiny, tiny little current sent down the ground to essentially zero out. Where that actually is to force a specific reference point. And I don't know, I don't believe the amp you had actually does that. But most of them at this point do actually do have the. Do you have the little box or the little stick? The Qwiz or the Uwiz? I forget.

I have the little red box.

Okay, so that probably does have a slight driven right leg then. So there's this incredibly tiny little loading of the amp essentially with the ground wire. And depending on how amps work, they either set a frequency point, sorry, a resistance point electrically, or they measure the zero point of your own body. And that just gives us literally the ground, the zero point. And then you have two other wires in your head that are subtracted from each other to produce a signal.

Okay.

And that's one channel. And sometimes we had you measure the difference between one pair of wires, you know, C4 minus A1. Sometimes we had you measure the difference between two sets of wires, for instance, C3 minus A1 and C4 minus A2, which is a very different montage. We call it a set of electrodes set in a certain arrangement.

What it comes down to is you're choosing each of these, whether it's a one channel design where you're asking a little bit less of my brain, or a two channel design where I'm using more electrodes and we're asking more of my brain. What you choose are specific programs, so to speak, that address the areas of deficiency or excess that you noted on my initial brain map.

Yeah, I decide with a channel set up what part I want to measure and try to train. And a lot of the way that I set the channels up on your head gives me an emphasis in certain physical regions or certain frequencies, so I can capture them in the software and capture them changing moment to moment. Once I have the variable signal in the software, then we sort of parameterize it. And the software that you were using, Bio Explorer, is really quite flexible and you can get really creative and tie lots of interesting stimuli and lots of cool things to the back end. Right.

That's the one where I could, like, listen to a podcast and the podcast will start to fade when my brain goes out of the zone. I want it to be in or. Or watch Shark Tank or fly the spaceship. With my mind, I can kind of pick my poison. As long as I'm running the specific frequencies that you send over to me, I can use any different Kind of modality to run those frequencies.

Exactly. And as far as I know, there's not a lot of difference between audio only feedback and visual and audio feedback. I think you asked me that at one point and I think that the unimodal, if you will, just auditory or things like that are a little bit weaker, but not appreciably so. And for the point of brain, that's what I found.

That's what I found was, for example, you don't realize how much glucose that your brain uses. And so I would do the spaceship one, which is vision plus auditory. And I would find myself a little bit more hungry after I'd done a session like that. And also frankly, a little bit depending on the session that we ran, like a little bit sleepier, a little bit more tired because I was asking so much of my brain. And I noticed that to a greater extent when I do those type of 30 minute sessions versus just like the more passive, like listen to audio as the audio fades in and out type of sessions. So I noticed a little bit of a difference. And one that we ran quite a bit. Andrew, that I wanted to ask you about, why you're such a fan of was you sent me this C3A1 and that was like channel one. And then you also had me at the same time doing channel two, which was C4A2. So C3A1, C4A2, which means I had an electrode on the C3 part of my head, the C4 part of my head, and then the A1 which is the left ear and the A2 which is the right ear. So I had myself all hooked up like that and you had me running that protocol many, many times over the course of the training. Why are you such a fan of that particular protocol? Like, let's use that as an example. What's that protocol doing?

Yeah, I quite love that protocol when people tolerate it and when it makes sense for their brain. So I like that one. I call it my fully asymmetric, essentially. Let me break down what's happening. So C3 minus A1 is the first channel, C3 is left sort of motor strip, A1 is left ear. And by subtracting the two of them, the signal. The closer two electrodes are to each other in the head, the more shared information there is in the signal under each electrode because electricity mixes together. And so when you have a set of electrodes that are closer together, two things happen. One is the resulting signal is a little bit smaller in amplitude. You're kind of measuring less of the cortex and two, it's more spatially precise. So initially we were doing C4 minus A1, broad, if you will. And then we switched to C3 minus A1 and C4 minus A2. So we actually sort of got this lateralized going from the middle out kind of measurement of your brain. And that allows me to some extent to measure the differences of the two hemispheres. It's not perfect, but it does emphasize the separateness, if you will, left side versus right side of your brain. About half the signal comes from right under the electrode when you measure a spot in the scalp, and about half comes from everywhere else mixed together. So it's not perfect, but again, it's pretty good. Especially in contrast, by having the references A one and A two being split apart, you get this sort of really nice parsing of the gross amount of electricity the brain's throwing off. So with these two protocols, the next question is why those frequencies, the first inhibit the first slow training to say no, make fewer bursts of these slow activity waves. On the left side, we inhibited or trained down 4 to 10. Now, 4 to 10 is two different frequency ranges. Essentially it's 4 to 7, which is theta, and it's 7 to 10, which is actually a slow variant of alpha. Eyes open alpha sometimes is related to inattention, essentially, can also be left side Alpha can also be related to poor mood. So by inhibiting alpha on the left in the center part of the brain, it often boosts both mood and sustained attention. The sort of ability to be attending without browning out, without just getting distracted. On the right side, I was inhibiting 4 to 7 and I left 7 to 10 alone. And that's because right front alpha, high right front alpha is actually usually a positive mood thing. And so I left a window in your signal. I didn't touch anything above seven. And then for some fast frequency inhibits. It was kind of the opposite. On the left, we inhibited 24 to 36, which is just very, very fast beta, which can be anxiety or it can be muscle tension. So we usually inhibit a very fast beta. On the right, we inhibited 18 to 32, I think, or 34. And that gets us some of the 18 to 24. That's actually more cognitive frequencies. And when there's a lot of beta right front, that can also be stress response stuff or mood stuff. So when I use this fully asymmetric protocol, I inhibit more alpha on the left front and I inhibit more beta, more fast beta on the right sort of biases the brain towards positive Mood and positive sustained attention. And then in terms of the reward frequency, those are also, so to speak, asymmetric. On the left we rewarded a faster beta at 15 to 18, and on the right we rewarded a slower beta. It's called 12 to 15. That 12 to 15 beta is this SMR frequency that we think is sort of magical in neurofeedback. It makes you less seizure prone, it improves sleep, improves attention. It's pretty amazing. For lots of things we did this core regulatory attention, good self control, good inhibitory tone. On the right SMR frequency 12 to 15. And the left we did 15 to 18. And when you train up beta 15 to 18 on the left, you tend to get really good alerting responses. Essentially you don't miss anything. When you train SMR up on the right, you tend to be better at inhibiting impulsive behavior or acting before you want to or reacting. So by training SMR on the right, beta on the left up, turning alpha on the right, sorry, turning alpha on the left up and beta on the right down, it gives us this really sort of strong, broad shift of a couple of core frequencies and it allows your brain to shift its laterality towards left foot activity, which is more approach behavior, less avoid behavior, it's more positive attention. And then by focusing the left beta versus smr, it gives you this crisp laser like attention. And Then both those 15, 18 and 12 to 15 beta and SMR, both of those are pro sleep protocols or frequencies in different ways. That 18 tends to improve depth of sleep and the 12 to 15 tends to improve onset of sleep. So it's to some extent this beautiful kitchen sink protocol that works for all sorts of things at once.

Yeah, the kitchen sink neurofeedback protocol.

It really is.

And that's one because now I have all this software and hardware from my training that's kind of like. And I've reduced my frequency since our final brain map, which we'll go into here in a sec. I reduced my frequency of training to just once or twice per week, but that's still one of my go tos because I feel so freaking good after I do it and I sleep really well. And yeah, it's a really cool kind of kitchen sink protocol that I realize if you were just listening, sounded like a slightly different language that Andrew was speaking. But it really is pretty easy. It took me a few weeks before I was able to literally set up my head within about three minutes and simply open up the computer, run the protocol. It's just like anything else. Once you Learn how to do it. It's pretty simple. Now, there are a few other protocols that we ran before we delve into what happened to my brain and what you found out on that second scan. There are a few other protocols that we ran. For example, I texted you at one point and asked you about resetting marijuana tolerance. Like, if I, if I wanted to kind of like reset my brain's tolerance to weed. Not that I endorse heavy utilization of marijuana, but I have been known to enjoy it every now and again. And I'm curious how that works. Like, you gave me a specific protocol. You actually texted me right back, and you said, and I have it written down right here. You said, do cz A1 and C4 A2 at the same time with the frequencies 4 to 712 to 15 and 22 to 34. And so I did that and it worked. I mean, I, I, I literally took my little, I've got this little, like, magic flight box that I can use to take a few puffs, you know, super.

He's a buddy of mine.

Yeah, super safe infrared method of vaporizing. And it went straight to my head after sucking on it, like one time. Now, how does that work exactly? What's going on in my brain to be able to do something like that?

It's a great question, and I have some ideas, but no hard science to back them up. There's a few things we know are happening in neurofeedback. And one great thing about neurofeedback is, at least for this class of SMR and beta frequencies, is there's really good evidence that we upregulate plasticity very quickly after training. Even after a single session of training, there's a measurable plasticity increase in the brain. There's some good experiments using motor evoked potentials and transcranial magnetic stimulation, where they do tms, motor evoked potentials and see how much juice it takes to cause a muscle to jump in the hand by stimulating the hand area in the brain. And after a session of neurofeedback, it takes much less of a stimulation to cause the muscle to jump. So the brain's much more flexible, wants to react a little more, wants to change a little faster. So there's lots of interesting, intriguing things about plasticity that are happening. And that's probably one of the big things. Now, you'd already been training regularly by that point, so this wasn't just giving you the training effect period, because that does happen when everyone starts to train. The vast majority of people Experience sensitization if they are cannabis users, if they have stimulants in their system. So you'd been training for a while by the time we gave you this protocol. So it wasn't simply giving you the training effect most people experience at the beginning of training. A sensitization to things like cannabis or even stimulants, Adderall, Ritalin. There's sort of this unwinding of some tolerance that shows up just in general with neurofeedback. But over the past few years, working a lot in neurofeedback and I worked for a while in an addiction center I helped found called Alternatives in Beverly Hills. We found, you know, throughout working there and at peak brain and even in other settings that SMR seems to do something a little more deep than simply causing plasticity change. And so when I had you do cza1c4a2 Again, I was bracketing left and right hemisphere. Cz is the vertex. Essentially, for reasons that are a little complicated, the left hemisphere often runs a little faster in frequencies in the right hemisphere. So that asymmetric one 15 on the left and 12 on the right isn't all that asymmetric. But having to do the vertex CZ at 12 to 15 gives you a strong SMR effect on the left side. I had to do at the same time C4A2 giving the right side. So essentially I was bathing your brain in an increased production of SMR was the idea. And as your brain produces this frequency, there's all kinds of learning things that are associated with smr, including a. This plasticity thing that we've seen in motor rogue potentials getting upregulated after a single session of neurofeedback, including SMR seems to trigger. Let me back up for one second. I probably said this in a different podcast of yours, but SMR is not some mysterious thing in the human brain. It shows up as sleep spindles and a few other sort of deep regulatory processes show this SMR signal. So when running 12 to 15 rewards, we're not saying the brain, hey, do this weird thing. We're saying, oh yeah, this thing you already do, do a little bit more of it. And then when we sleep, SMR in its natural function causes these secondary ripples of activity. I think about 0.9 Hz in the hippocampus, which is one of the things causing memory consolidation or moving memories from the sort of short term to long term storage. So SMR has a few of these deep regulatory qualities. It also seems to affect the corticothalamic communication. We have neurons that run from the cortex, the outer bark of the brain, if you will, down to the thalamus, deep switchboard of sensory processes. We also have neurons that run from the thalamus back up to the cortex. These are corticothalamic and thalamocortical neurons. They pass through a sheet of tissue called the nrt, the reticular nucleus of the thalamus. And the reticular nucleus of the thalamus is related to all kinds of interesting things, but among other things, it inhibits this communication, this traffic in both directions. And so you can almost think of it like tuning the gain of a system. So there's something going on with SMR training. As you enhance SMR briefly, it probably allows the cortex and the thalamus to reset their relative gain, which is a pretty basic function in terms of how the brain regulates its stability. So when you talk about disrupting stability through things like cannabis, because it does make you, you know, makes you high, then one of the things that I've started to emphasize in trying to reset tolerance is going after that gain, going after that deep hemispheric, intra and interhemispheric communication as mediated by the thalamus to some extent, which I have a hunch dramatically increases the plasticity that we see show up in neurofeedback period. It's a specific type of plasticity enhancement that I think is probably where most of the tolerance effect is coming from. So I wanted to go after that more directly.

That's interesting. That area between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. I know that that's. That's, for example, what they'll affect when they do something like a prefrontal or frontal lobotomy to vastly change your personality. And I know that they do that in some cases or used to do that, I should say, in mental institutions, et cetera. So it's really interesting. You can kind of hit the same area to a little bit more therapeutic effect with something like neurofeedback. It's super interesting. And I just thought it was crazy how it just. It worked right off the bat after I did it, and how you had just a reply right away to me that showed me the exact protocol to do. Now, we did a second scan, like I mentioned. So we found all these things in the first scan, which, if you go to the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com AndrewHill I will link to the first scan so you can see what that one looked like. Andrew, already kind of went over some of the things that he found there, like, like the increased distractibility and the reduced sleep onset and some of the areas of excessive delta production, excessive theta production, and some areas like in the back where there was high stressful beta brain waves. So I did all the training based off of the protocols that you sent to me, and then we did a second scan. Can you go over what we found on this second scan, which I'll also link to in the show notes?

Yeah, sure. So the second scan looks a lot like the first one, which is reassuring when some of the same patterns, you know, obtained in both, both data. Usually QEEG is a very robust phenomena where it's stable year after year unless you do something like neurofeedback to your brain or, you know, change meds. And so we see some of the same rough shapes, but what's kind of nice is all of the sort of outliers and in high amplitudes have dropped and they've really shrunk down to often a half or even less of the coverage. So starting with some slow frequencies, the delta and the theta, which I was guessing were related to poor energy regulation, poor sleep, some issues with concentration, some issues with cognitive fatigue and impulsivity, those have dropped really dramatically. In fact, the delta, which was probably related to poor sleep and getting burnt out a little bit, is dropped significantly. The theta, which is impulsivity, is also dropped not quite as significantly. And then there was some high beta. Let me spend a moment unpacking the difference in beta and high beta. So beta frequencies and high beta frequencies are cognitive, you think in them generally, and you often see in stress response problems that certain regions of the brain that are involved with switching attention or maintaining attention are a little overactive. And so we found a little hot spot initially in your brain on the anterior cingulate. We did some source analysis and confirmed that's where it was coming from. But on these 2D maps, it's the sort of front midline spot in the brain we call fz F for frontal, Z for sort of zenith, the midline that runs front to back. So this front midline spot in your head was really kind of pumping out a lot of beta initially and high beta as well, faster beta. And this usually means like a ruminative getting stuck on things and being a little bit hyper focused and worrying a little bit. And that's dropped down beautifully. The patterns are still there, but they're only about half as much coverage. They really shrunk. More importantly, the back of your head which is beta and high beta excesses as well. Initially, the back of the head is more sensory. And so this looked a little bit like your visual system, your attention system was scanning the environment a little bit sort of hyper vigilantly, if you will. I mean, to some extent this is because you're a fitness warrior, I'm sure, and you're somebody who scans the environment and uses that. But it was also a pattern that.

Was a little bit very aware of the environment. Like as in. And like at a cocktail party, I would be having a hard time trying to listen to 10 conversations at once rather than just focusing on the person right in front of me.

And that's fine if you're out in the forest listening for the crack of a twig as a deer tries to not be noticed by you or something not so useful in a busy business meeting or cocktail party. Right. And so I saw a big sort of blob of beta and high beta, well over three standard deviations above average in the back of the head. And is this sort of said to me, okay, Ben's sensory system is wide open. He's scanning the environment, he's evaluating the environment, some hypervigilance. There's some kind of like almost ruminative again, scanning going on where it didn't seem to be a very comfortable, if you will, pattern. It looked like it was a little bit pushy in your brain. And so that came down profoundly. Well, that's almost gone now, still a little hint of it, but that's not that unusual that things remain to some extent, but it was spread out over most of the back half of your brain. And now it's just a little tiny spot, sort of the same thing, Delta that was broad over the back half of your brain also shrunk down. And those two things may be related because when you make tons of Delta, you might be sleep deprived, resources might be at their limit, and that allows other frequencies to become dysregulated. And so sometimes when you clean up Delta, you also clean up other frequencies along the way because they're related, they're sort of the same. Cortex is dysregulated in a couple different ways. So from my perspective, it looks like you are better rested, more alert, and also much more able to screen and filter in your attention and probably more flexible, able to put things down, able to pick things back up mentally with a lot more ease, quickness and flexibility.

Well, the interesting thing too, and I've noted this when I've taken different nootropics and Even something as simple as coffee or coffee mixed with theanine, for example, or green tea. I've noticed increased waking lucidity and increased ability to be able to engage in conversation with less distractions or even with more focus on what it is I'm talking about or who I'm talking to. But in the absence of nootropic compounds, which is important especially for me, because in many cases I would do my training sessions, my neurofeedback training sessions, at 6 or 7pm in the evening, when frankly taking in coffee and other neurotropic compounds can interfere with my sleep later on at night. What I would find is that I could do something like one of these neurofeedback sessions, go out to dinner or engage in conversation, be very lucid with decreased distractibility, come back home and be able to actually still fall asleep, because I wasn't relying upon chemicals for the enhanced cognitive ability, but rather simply the neurofeedback.

The other thing to point out is that's a wonderful difference in terms of how nootropics versus neurofeedback can be used. The other big difference is that with this training, I mean, you've trained 60 successions and you'll probably do some more training. There's change. Your brain map now is different and your brain map now would not have been different if we just done a six month wait period instead of measuring it. Again, with this degree of intervention on your brain, there's all kinds of big statistical change showing that you have moved away from sort of the edge of the bell curve and some of these dysregulations much more towards the middle in many of these frequencies, the subjective experience that we really care about. But from a data point of view, this is rather compelling that, yeah, your brain is now different. QEEG is generally an unchanging measurement as long as you have a relatively clean brain in terms of drugs and alcohol and stimulants and things when you get recorded.

Yeah. Now in terms of what I did going down, going through all the training with you, coming back with all the equipment, et cetera, Am I a special snowflake or is this something that other people are able to like? Can other people go and do what I did?

Yeah, well, a. Yes, you're a special snowflake and people can do what you did? Yeah, we probably at this point have, I don't know, 20 or 30 people doing this home training program since we started peak brain.

Is that what it's called, the home training program?

Yeah, home training or self training program, internally we call it the three plus three because you do three half days in the office and then three months of supervision typically. But yeah, we have some people doing it. It's not the right way to train neurofeedback for everyone, but it can work for a lot of people. Now if you have severe stuff going on that could be made worse and get in the way of performance or safety, then it's not ideal. Meaning, let's say if you're dramatically bipolar or have some suicidal depression or something. Probably not. You know, self training isn't the best idea because it could exacerbate things before you figure out what's working for your, for your brain. And also if you're profoundly ADHD or something, you might have a hard time getting out of your own way enough to get the training done enough to get the results to start getting out of your own way. So it's sort of a catch 22 for some people. And I would say clinical management of the process is tight. Clinical management is much better. But for many people peak performance goals or simple stress sleep, ADHD stuff, or people that really want to work on their own peak performance goals long term, who aren't just looking to fix a couple of small problems in a few months, but who want this tool set to use over many, many months or years, then it makes a lot of sense. We have some centers, we have some peak brain centers in St. Louis and in Los Angeles. We're now in downtown Los Angeles as well as Culver City where our big flagship is. So we have these centers you can come and train.

So it's not just in LA anymore. People can go to different spots.

They can, yeah, we have some concierge trainers too, some home based traveling trainers who will come in and hook you up in a few cities as well. But the big offices are St. Louis and Los Angeles and then we have some concierge techs in like broadly Orange County, San Diego, Portland, Oregon, a couple other places. So we're gradually learning how to manage the process of multiple people training and training themselves as well as running physical training centers. So we're truly trying, as I mentioned earlier, we treat the process more like personal training and less like therapy. So we're really trying to deliver on that by instantiating neurofeedback in more of a gym sort of setting where you come in and you, you get help hooking up and we monitor your training program.

Yeah, your LA facility is kind of freaky like that because you walk in there and there's just like random people, like CEOs and even like there's kids hooked up to it too, who are just in there. You know, you walk in, it's like bleep, bleep, bloop, bloop, bloop. And people training everywhere. It's kind of cool. You have all these little cubicles where folks are nerve feedback.

Totally. When I assigned that office, I sort of decided to make it to try to go for like an Apple Store meets a gym kind of vibe.

Yeah, it's really cool. Apple Store meets like a brain training gym. So if you're listening in and you haven't visited one of these facilities, I'd highly recommend it again. I went to the one in la, down in. It's Culver City, right, Andrew?

Yeah, yeah. Culver City's our main office. We also are now in the financial district in the Gas Tower building in downtown.

Cool.

We're trying to spread out, we're trying to learn to do this process in the most efficient and the, the most replicable way, which there's an immense amount of skilled clinicians out there, thousands of them who have incredibly deep skills, who have incredibly good domain expertise with a certain population, who know neurofeedback really well. But the field has been stagnated a little bit because it's hard to scale that deep domain expertise that is required in every person's head to do this job really well. And so this remote training program is an attempt to. I basically taught you to be a technician in a few days. It took you a few weeks to become comfortable setting up, but you left knowing roughly what to do, just not why you were doing it or how to do it perfectly. And so then you relied on us to scaffold you the rest of the way until you were comfortable. That's one way we can make this more accessible. And, and it's not any cheaper, at least in the short term. If you're doing a three month ADHD training program, you don't save any money doing it on your own because we have to get you equipment. But if you're someone like Ben Greenfield, who's got lofty peak performance goals, who's continually improving, then getting your own system was absolutely the right call.

Or if you just like to constantly have things hooked up to your head or your gonads, there's that. That's right, there's that. I know that you've got a 10% discount for people who mention this podcast. And so if you're listening in and you Go to the Peak Brain Institute website or you just check out my link in the show notes. Over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com AndrewHill you can hop on the phone with Andrew and figure out what's gonna work for you. You can also get a 10% discount on any of the protocols that they offer at, as Andrew has alluded to their Apple store for your brain. Hopefully we don't get sued by Apple.

I know, I know.

And check it out because honestly it is. And I was recently at a mastermind with a whole bunch of other guys who I'm in like a business mastermind with. And one of the questions that one of the guys asked was what is one of the most, I think the way he phrased was one of the biggest game changers that you've done for your business this year. And my reply was neurofeedback. Just because it's helped me so much with my sleep, with my attention, with my ability to just sit down and write, with my ability to do my big hairy audacious goal each morning without getting distracted by emails and Facebook and Twitter and everything else. And so this is cool stuff and I highly, highly recommend it to you if you A want A better brain, B, want to sleep better, or C just want to be able to smoke less marijuana and save a little bit of money on your weed habit. All sorts of different reasons to use it. So Andrew, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this stuff with us, man. This is super fascinating.

Hey, my pleasure, Ben. It's great to hear about your experience and you know, over the past few months. So I'm glad that we have another satisfied brain.

Awesome. Satisfied brain. So again, BenGreenfieldFitness.com Andrew Hill is where all the shownotes are as well as all the previous episodes that I did with Dr. Hill. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Andrew Hill from the Peak Brain Institute signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.