The Science of Neurofeedback, ADHD & Flow, and How to Get Your Brain Back to Optimal Cognition After COVID | Flow Research Collective Radio

ADHD folks make lots of theta so they can move, they can see the solution or the elegant thing or jump over the linear into the insightful, the creative. And they're very good at that. Not so good at sort of sinking into the sweet spot where the arousal level, the creativity level, the focus level, the activation level are all dialed in perfectly and you have control over a present set of resources because that requires internal maintenance in some way. You have to sort of keep yourself in a zone, in a mode. That's hard to do.

Hey there. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an entrepreneur for 23 years. It never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline. Like, it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scale and through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio, and welcome to today's episode with Dr. Andrew Hill, who is a UCLA neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA, and his research methodology has been focused on attention and cognition, and he's one of the world's leading experts on neurofeedback. He's also looked deeply at EEG, QEEG, and ERP. And in addition to founding Peak Brain Institute, Dr. Hill is the host of the Head First podcast. He used to lecture at UCLA and he's a very well-known thought leader and expert neuroscientist within the peak performance space. And within this episode, you're going to see why. It is just incredible. How his depth of expertise spans a breadth and also converges in really practical actionable things that you can actually do within your life day to day to increase your access to flow and peak performance. And in today's episode, we talked about neurofeedback and biofeedback. We defined those terms clearly and simply. We talked about sleep and how to optimize it. We talked about long-haul COVID and the neurological issues that are occurring with people who are suffering from long-haul COVID and how to solve it and lots more. So you're going to absolutely love today's episode. It was incredibly energizing and one of my favorite in a long time. I think you're going to love it. Dr. Andrew Hill, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's absolutely great to have you here at long last.

Thanks for having me. Nice to see you again.

We first met in, I think it was 2018 here in LA. You were incredibly generous and kind setting me up with brain training and neurofeedback at your office in Peak Brain in LA, and we've been meaning to do this for a while. So I'm really glad we're getting the chance to drop in here. So I wanted to start, Andrew, with your PhD, which you did in cognitive neuroscience in UCLA. And I wanted to just ask you what the core focus of your PhD was on and how it led you to where you are present day and what you're currently working on.

When you think about a PhD, of course, the old joke is that you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. The more practical way of thinking about a PhD is you end up developing sort of domain expertise in a certain population of interest or a complaint or area of science or question. And you develop some toolsets and methodology to explore that question. And those two things will frame a lot of how you think about science and the stuff you're doing. And for me, the area of cogneuro— so cognitive neuroscience is the overlap of mind and brain, essentially. And for me, the area of cogneuro I was interested in was how the mind produces the aspects effects of attention, essentially. And I ended up working in a lab at UCLA with a professor named Dr. Aron Zaidel, who died last year. Dr. Zaidel was one of the last great scientists who did the split brain research with Sperry and Bogen years ago. I think Aron was a grad student at Caltech and was not doing psychology, and they were like, "Go work for this guy, Roger Sperry." "Okay." He's like a physics grad student or something. And then ended up becoming a laterality researcher and becoming famous for doing lots of interhemispheric stuff, Dr. Zaidel did.

Can you give a quick breakdown for people on Sperry's work and that research?

Years ago, I'm really bad at numbers, so I'm guessing it was the late '50s, early '60s when this happened, but it could be later. There was a bunch of neuroscientific research done looking at how to work on intractable seizures, essentially. And these two neurosurgeons were finding they could arrest medication intractable seizures by cutting the corpus callosum, this fiber bundle that connects the two cortices, the top parts of the brain, and left to right, kind of like a little— if you held your hands like this, the corpus callosum, or the biggest commissure or bundle that crosses laterally, it's like a Nike swoosh. If you cut the brain this way, you see a little Nike swoosh in the middle, big white matter tract. And it's a giant highway of connecting different hemispheric laterality pieces. And when a seizure happens, one of the ways is a little bit of the brain, bit of the cortex, will create a little coherent spike, a little delta or discharge spike. And when it's strong, when it's too organized, when it looks like a heartbeat basically, when it's too specific, then it can recruit neighbors into doing the same thing. And that can bounce back and forth across those white matter tracks of the wiring left to right. And the intensity builds up as it goes back and forth and the whole system destabilizes. And that's called a seizure. In this case, a grand mal or tonic-clonic seizure. These scientists found that if you cut that corpus callosum, initially they were doing complete called commissurotomies, or complete severing of the left and right fiber bundles, the cortices away from each other by cutting the fiber bundle completely, then the seizure couldn't build up. And you eliminated dramatic seizure issues in most people. And oddly enough, there was very little evidence you'd cut the largest information highway in the brain. It was very subtle in terms of effect. The person after recovering from the surgery didn't seem to have much noticed effect. Then they started discovering some strange things where if you did specific things where you presented information to essentially to one hemisphere at a time, you could discover that the hemispheres were actually in some ways independent attention systems. The classic example of this is if you put your hands under a table so you couldn't see it, and so we put objects in your hands. If an object was in your, for most people, your right hand, you could name it. But if it was in your left hand, you couldn't name it, but you might be able to point to something on the screen like, "It does this." You could understand what it was, but you couldn't find the word for it because language production often lives in the left hemisphere. And so this leads to weird things that have been captured in— I'm sure Oliver Sacks wrote a book on it or other popular psych, but there's the alien hand or foreign hand syndrome. Again, because language is largely left hemisphere, especially for men, in the front for production, in the back for reception of language, Because of the way the visual fields and hemispheres work, you get sorting of information to one hemisphere. And if you were holding a book, let's say, with your left hand, your left hand might put the book down because your right hemisphere couldn't read. No interest in holding a book. Or extreme cases have been reported of folks like one hand buttons up the pajamas, other hand unbuttons the pajamas because they disagree about what we're doing right now. So little creepy things like that. But Dr. Zaidel was a grad student watching all this research happen, and then he ended up working with other researchers later in Italy and other places, in Israel. In the '80s and '90s and 2000s, a lot of the research that was still being done on seizure found that you could do partial resections of that big tract and still get the dramatic reduction of seizure, especially if you took the fibers that were going to the areas and just resected the anterior part or the middle or the back. And so Dr. Zettel's research was all about probing the hemispheres of the brain by flashing things very quickly into one visual field or the other on the screen, and then having folks respond with a mouse with one hand or the other. And by doing that, you can route the informational ask on the task and the screen through one hemisphere or the other. You can demand. So he developed a system of how the brain works by using split brain subjects and then took that research testing how information works in each hemisphere into non-split brain subjects and found the same kind of information flow and attention management. So that was the lab that I worked in at UCLA, Dr. Zaidel's Hemispheric Laterality Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. And we tested how attention works in the hemispheres. And I went in there with some neurofeedback or brain training experience. So often as what happens in grad school is your mentor has certain skills and interests, your grad student comes in, you kind of mesh those things. So I ended up doing a lot of work around the laterality or left-right hemisphere impacts and effects of things like neurofeedback and how to get attention to change by manipulating attention in different hemispheres separately. And I ended up doing some cool research with the Navy a little bit, looking at attention systems in the brain in real-time, you know, high-demand situations. And my dissertation work, what they gave me a PhD for, the thing that I learned more and more about until I knew the tiniest details was essentially neurofeedback I created one of the first double-blind placebo-controlled studies of neurofeedback where I ran 40 people through 5 days in a row of neurofeedback with a full head 64-channel cap on top of the neurofeedback wires and had a double-blind sham kind of condition built in for a quarter of them and looked at how the brain reacted to being rewarded for making different brainwaves, the passive biofeedback loop which I can break down further if you want. But I was trying to figure out how the brain was noticing neurofeedback, what was actually happening in the learning experience of the brain, and watch across 5 days how the brain's reacting to neurofeedback changed based on if it was sham, if it was left hemisphere training of low beta called SMR, if it was left hemisphere fast beta, if it was right hemisphere training of beta. So I examined the hemispheric specificity, the frequency specificity, and some of the attention effects on attention testing as it changed in a single 5-day course of neurofeedback, which is just enough neurofeedback to start things moving, not enough to really make much change. But people start feeling it about 3 or 4 sessions in. So I wanted to capture that little, well, what's happening? How is the brain binding to the information?

Thank you for that breakdown. Fantastic. Thanks for bringing us up to speed. I actually just want to start by getting your simple or generic breakdown of what biofeedback is, what neurofeedback is. When I mention neurofeedback around people who are not that familiar with it, they often struggle to understand sort of how it actually happens as well. So I would love also a breakdown and maybe an example of what it actually looks like to do neurofeedback training as well.

I'll say, Ryan, it took me 6 months of being a neurofeedback technician before I could conceptualize what was happening. It's a little mysterious. Once you get it, it's not that hard, but it's a little mysterious with all the technology hooked up. So my guess is in about 5 minutes, your listeners will understand more than I did 5 and a half months in. So that's— I could save some pain for you guys. Biofeedback is a form of modifying the body essentially by taking things that are not normally appreciable, like your heartbeat, your body temperature, and making them under your voluntary awareness. So you can then learn to change them. And this is something like HRV biofeedback, like the HeartMath devices, or old school stuff like hand warming to drop headaches is biofeedback. You can look at your activation level and stress level and some breathwork and change that as a way of doing some biofeedback. But generally, when we say the word biofeedback, what we mean is peripheral nervous system control, things that are outside the skeletal system, controlling your heart, maybe your skin, your parasympathetic to sympathetic activation is biofeedback in the body. Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback that has to be unique properties, by definition, it's just stuff that's on the central nervous system. So stuff inside the bone, the skull and the spine, that's the CNS. And because it's the CNS, you're not really aware of it the same way you are in the peripheral body. So neurofeedback is measuring the brain usually and training it to change, but the process of change becomes involuntary operant conditioning or involuntary shaping. So, this is how it actually works. And I'll give you a concrete example. Let's say you wanted better executive function. You wanted to control your distractibility better, which we all— many of us want to do. Some of us have ADHD, some of us don't, but many of us could benefit from some resource building in the distractibility way. There's a brainwave called SMR, Sensory Motor Rhythm, which is a low beta brainwave. And if any of you have seen a cat lying on a windowsill watching a bird, you've seen SMR. It's this liquid, still body and laser-like focus. That cat seeing a prey animal outside, maybe its little tail is twitching, but the body is just still. Mostly because you can leap into action from relaxation much, much better than from tension. So that mixed state of still body and focused mind is a high SMR state. And mammals, most animals make SMR as a way to inhibit, if you will, or stop things from happening. If you have poor SMR tone, your brain tends to make seizures. And neurofeedback was discovered by mistake in the late '60s by Dr. Barry Sterman. So Dr. Barry Sterman was at UCLA in the '50s and '60s. He was exposing cats to rocket fuel vapors on request of NASA to figure out how dangerous this stuff was, this methylhydrazine, because the astronauts were not enjoying breathing in vapors when they were exposed to it. So there was a research study, now in the '60s we had much more lax animal research. So this is the part of the story that's hard, but Dr. Sturman found that minutes exposed to the vapor would create increased symptoms where they would have vocalizations, they would pant, they would drool, become unsteady in their gait and ataxic, have seizure, then coma, then death. And it was a perfect dose-dependent curve where minutes equaled symptoms. More and more symptoms. For 24 of the 32 cats he had in his little subject pool, 8 of them, super cats, refused to have seizures. While the other cats were falling over and having major problems at about 40, 50 minutes in, the other cats were showing mild instability events in the brain 2.5 hours exposed. Couldn't figure out why one group of cats seemed very different than the others. And then he remembered that these cats had been used in a prior experiment 6 months before. To see if he could get them to raise this brainwave the cats make a lot of whenever he squirted chicken broth into their mouth to applaud it happening. He could. They raised it. Great. Back in the subject pool. Well, this brainwave makes your brain resistant to being destabilized, it turns out. And later on, he stumbled across this by mistake. And then his lab manager was a medication-uncontrolled epileptic. They built her an auditory feedback machine, beeped whenever her SMR went up. Over the next few months, they trained her SMR up and she was on huge meds and having lots of seizures. They eventually went off all her meds, remained seizure-free for a year. So this was the start of the field of neurofeedback clinically, so to speak, in the late '60s. We still train this SMR frequency, and now we often train it for things like ADHD as well as seizures. But the cat on the windowsill, still body and laser-like focus is the opposite of ADHD. Literally, high SMR, low theta is anti-ADHD state. When that reverses, high theta means like air in the brake lines and low SMR support inhibitory tone. You're moving a lot, distractible, your brain's like squirrel. It's very outside world reactive and it's not focused on the goal. So literally that calm cat is the opposite of an ADHD state. If you stick a wire in the part of the brain, which is involved with monitoring if you're paying attention and measure SMR and measure theta, which is a release state in some ways, as they change moment to moment, as your SMR happens to go up and theta happens to go down, you applaud the brain and say, "Yeah, good job brain," and make a little game on the screen move. So your Pac-Man eats some more dots or your puzzle pieces start to fill in or your spaceship starts to fly better. And a couple seconds later, your brain moves in the wrong direction for the workout. Your SMR goes down, your theta goes back up, and the software slows down. The Pac-Man stalls, the beeps go away, and the brain's like, "Hey! I was watching stuff. I don't like no stuff. Where's the stuff?" And then a couple seconds later, it happens to move in the right direction and the software resumes. Good job, brain. Good job, brain.

Nope.

Good job. Good job. Good job. Nope. Again and again. And the big trick here is every few seconds we move the goalposts. So over half an hour sitting there, your brain gets little bursts of applause for runs or trends it engages in of reducing its theta and raising its SMR. And the mind can't feel its brainwaves. That's why it's so mysterious and no one knows how it works as they do it because the mind can't tell that the computer game was happening only when a certain— if you always moved your arm and the game always moved, you'd know what it was doing. But it's moving— whenever your theta moves, it moves or something or beta moves, it moves. So, your brain, however, likes the information and has no idea it's not a real thing in the world like a musical instrument or a car you're trying to drive. And you're changing the rules. So, it's trying to adapt a little bit as you go in that half an hour session. And usually after about 3 sessions or 4 sessions, later on that day or the next day, your brain reaches for the state and says, hey, wait, I want information, low theta, high SMR. And the person goes, oh, I feel calm. And if you ask your kid to take the trash out, when that happens, they get up and do it. And I get frantic calls, my kid took the trash out. I asked once, it was weird or whatever. You know, like you get weird subtle effects showing up and The process of getting the change in neurofeedback becomes one like personal training where you sort of look at your brain on an assessment, pick some goals, start gently working the resources out in this involuntary exercise way, but then you report the next day or later that day, how was your sleep? How was your stress? How was your attention? How was your drinking? How's your trauma? And you get effects. So it's mysterious but not a blind process for you. And after, as you try different things, you feel different things, beta on this side, produces more self-control. Beta on this side produces more alertness. So if you come in and say, "Oh, I was super charged up and I could focus all night, but couldn't fall asleep." I might do some different beta wave for you and say, "How was that?" "Oh, it was great. I could focus and I could fall asleep." "Okay, great. That's your workout there. Let's do that a few times." And then it builds up and becomes more stable as you experience it again. So it's involuntary exercise on brainwaves using operant conditioning. Or shaping like Skinner's pigeons. I promise this is not Pavlov's dog. I will not make you drool. But we take things that already exist, brainwaves, and we shape them a little bit like Pavlov did with his pigeons.

Yeah. When I first did neurofeedback with you, Andrew, that was one of the things I was so struck by is how it feels passive because it's happening. The responses that are neurological are happening sort of outside conscious awareness. As you said, there's not a perfect map between your brainwave state and your subjective experience.

Yeah, and we're measuring one little, two little, three little things you're doing out of a billion things moment to moment. So while we can pick up some things, like I probably had you look at your theta wave number, like here's your microvolts, here's the amount of theta. Okay, concentrate. When you concentrate, you shut down theta in your, in your brain. So you can see it happen if you focus, you can see theta drop usually. But most brainwaves are subtle and myriad and billions of things happening. And you as the person You're kind of like the conductor of the symphony where you might notice the out-of-tune guy in the corner, but you're kind of trying to— you're more like the audience actually. The conductor's the brain. You're more like the audience who's just kind of taking in the giant composition and doesn't really notice that second chair oboe has a flat reed or whatever the term would be. We're not very good at feeling our brain. There's no sensory nerve endings in our brain. There's very little accurate perception of our brain. A lot of it's the brain deciding sort of symbolically and metaphorically what it's experiencing and making meaning of it. It's very imprecise and indirect against the real world.

Hey there, just going to interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them. Which is an, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do What do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball. Ball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com. Pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. I want to ask you about ADHD. One of the questions we get most frequently is about the relationship between ADHD and flow. And you mentioned attention earlier on being one of the core focuses of your PhD. And I know ADHD is a big focus within that for you. And interestingly, when I did the brain map with you guys as well, what was mentioned was that I had— I can't remember how it was phrased, but either a disposition or a certain sort of orientation toward a kind of ADHD that results in difficulty channeling attention, but higher attention once it is sort of challenged or engaged. And so I'm curious, there's a few questions in there, but first off, if you can just talk about ADHD and attention, and then whether there are different sort of strains of ADHD, so to speak, or different ways that it manifests.

There's a lot there. Let me unpack a little bit. Yeah, ADHD is many things. The classic ADHD brain is one that has difficulty directing its powerful resources. You can think of this as a hunter versus a gatherer. The hunter is really good under high stress circumstances, but don't put them weeding the garden. They're going to be bored or don't have that person do your taxes. Don't have your MMA fighter doing your taxes. They're going to be bored and not enjoy it. So there's a certain amount of playing to our strengths and humans are built in many different ways and ADHD is sort of a natural variant. We need hunters as well as the new gatherers. But problematic ADHD in a modern sense is people getting stuck too far in one mode or the other and not being able to change out of it. To some extent, when it's diagnosable or classic problematic ADHD, the person usually has a hard time directing how their brain is responding to demands of the environment. Or rather, they only respond to the environment. They don't self-direct their attention. So if things are intense, they're on. And if things are boring, they're chill, but they can't necessarily be focused if things are boring. So that's sort of one of the difficulties is voluntary selection over the mode, suppressing theta, bringing up beta so you can focus on the boring teacher talking because you should, is something most people can do. But in the hunter mind or the ADHD classic distractible pattern matching novelty seeking mind that's high stimulus seeking, it's going to not engage with the relatively low-value information because it's a brain that's biased towards better switching in some ways and better dynamic task management. I have a little bit of a different perspective on flow, I think perhaps, than some of the folks in your corner of the literature. But I really— I mean, someone's informed by you and other folks, but I sort of view it as two things. One is the ability to enter that highly focused effortless, what I think the conventional flow state is. I also think of it as the nonlinear access state, the hypnagogic state. I forget if you've done any alpha theta neurofeedback with us, but that sort of nonlinear, the moment you fall asleep or about to and the ideas pop into your head or the solution or the important thing pop, that's an access moment. And I believe that is the doorway into a true flow state where you're sort of being ridden by your higher and lower impulses at the same time. You get out of your own way and just act. That's one type of flow. And it can be done almost associatively and it can be done lying with your eyes closed and it can be done when you're in the middle of your sport. Then there's the other type where you're highly focused or highly present and highly engaged. I think that's more the executive flow and the high performer flow, the sports person flow.

There's almost a divergent convergent kind of difference there. The hypnagogic sort of flow tends to be very tightly coupled with spikes in creativity and the kind of aha insights. And then yeah, I definitely hear you on that.

ADHD has some gifts in some of those areas and some deficits, if you will, or some difficulties accessing others because they'll be very able to access the switch from linear into nonlinear, to be creative, to be abstract, to see outside the box or to think of the fluid application of an old idea, the fluid intelligence thing. We take something you've learned and apply it in a novel way. That's an ADHD skill that comes from things like theta, from having the ability to almost put things together no one else would or have your mind move, skip from one idea associatively to the other. That's a wonderful thing for theta. In fact, we use theta for this bubbling up memory experience. Around 6.5 Hz in the brain is receptive memory or they have stuff bubbling up. So if you can break that open, that's why you get this access to old stuff sometimes doing alpha theta neurofeedback because you kind of crack yourself open a little bit for memory. But ADHD folks make lots of theta so they can move, they can see the solution or the elegant thing or jump over the linear into the insightful, the creative, and they're very good at that. Not so good at sort of sinking into the sweet spot where the arousal level, the creativity level, the focus level, the activation level are all dialed in perfectly and you have control over a present set of resources because that requires internal maintenance in some way. You have to sort of keep yourself in a zone, in a mode. That's hard to do. That is not a skillset of the ADHD person who's in some ways there to be responding to the highest stimulus and highest dynamic level of threat when it's classic ADHD. There's some gifts in that, but it's going to be like a powerful sports car with lousy shocks and brakes in the ADHD person. So I think if you can teach them to meditate, you can blunt the distractibility impulsivity and give that particular gifted/difficult brain all the gifts. Or you can do things like neurofeedback and train out the stuckness of the ADHD in a few months. We can create multiple standard deviations of change in a few months usually on attention tests. But without robbing you of any of your ADHD-ness when you go to play your video game or hit the sports field or look at the abstract stock trading patterns. You'll still have the ability to do the high stimulus nonlinear thing, but you can also sit and focus in a classroom or a boardroom or to your boring partner drone on about their boring day. Not that your partners are boring, but the idea is that selection over our attention is a big issue in ADHD. Classic in the way ADHD, but it does give us the gift. I mean, there's certain overrepresentation of people with a sort of ADHD brain in the arts and creative things. We may get similar overrepresentation in mental illness as well. Genius and mental illness both come higher in people that have those kinds of brains. So yes, that flow implication, if you will, it's both a benefit and it has some difficulty with management.

I want to ask you, Andrew, in a moment about functional neuroscience, which you mentioned before we jumped on. But before we switch gears there a little bit, what is your general recommendation to someone who's listening to this, who's hearing you talk about neurofeedback, who wants to do it or benefit from it? What does the protocol look like? I think a lot of people have heard of things like 40 Years of Zen or different neurofeedback mechanisms. And feel free to, by the way, touch on Peak Brain specifically and what you guys do. But I'm curious, How someone takes this knowledge about neurofeedback and does it and gets benefits from it.

So, of course, you came into the office a couple of years ago here and there until we pushed your brain around and had some little hands-on experience. That was in the before times where the world's a bit different. We then and now do an awful lot of work with remote neurofeedback. So how you do it in terms of where and how you execute for us has become a little bit irrelevant. Because we tend to work with clients virtually and with remote gear and we send equipment out. But the general process, I think, in a best case, in a best practices way, is to think of neurofeedback like sophisticated personal training where you might want to do your DEXA scan, your strength assessment, your bone density assessment, and then work with your personal trainer who's got an ortho perspective to help you rebuild your skeleton. Very, very targeted work. And neurofeedback's the same way. You look at your brain at rest, what's called a brain map or a quantitative EEG. And we then look at your performance of your attention skills. Those things are compared to a database of people your age essentially. So we can see where there's some bottlenecks in performance and maybe you have some classic theta or some other likely things to work on. And the process of neurofeedback is usually training your brain for about half an hour, about 3, 4 times a week. And we like to recommend about 40 to 50 sessions minimum for a permanent change. And when I say change, I alluded to it, but you can usually make a couple of standard deviations against the average population on executive function testing. So, if you're really distractible and you have ADHD on a bell curve, you're a couple of standard deviations off the mean and you do 40 or 50 sessions of neurofeedback and now you're above average, above the mean, likely permanently. And there's no upper limit. So, we move out of a fix into a fitness and optimization. So yes, you can do things to help you with an injury or some concussions or post-COVID brain or whatever. Or if you aren't creative enough, you can crack yourself wide open or you can do some old trauma work or remediate your ADHD that's kind of out in the way or whatever. So it takes the things that used to be mysterious and used to be diagnosable and used to be in some ways the realm of a therapist and your doctor and your counselor, and it gives you the agency over it. So you can look at your brain and go, oh, I am distractible. Yeah, that's something that I want to work on. And then as I was saying earlier, you gradually iterate with your neurofeedback and Peak Brain works completely virtually these days as well as in our offices. We have several in the US and you can come to our offices. I think we're going to give all your listeners a nice discount, so a half price on the brain map fee. And once you know what you want to work on, you can then get this iterative process going. And we generally do about 3 to 4 months with clients and will make very large changes and put a floor under somebody for resources of stress, sleep, attention, pretty broadly. So I would say there's lots of different technologies out there in the neurofeedback space and they're starting to get kind of fractured and divergent. And I would encourage folks to always use a form of neurofeedback that is tailored to you, that looks at your brain and helps you identify iterative, targeted approaches. A lot of the one-size-fits-all systems are either somewhat weak if they do work, or they're poorly suited to you and actually cause trouble. I tend to work with folks every week that come to see me because they've rented a one-size-fits-all system and exacerbated a brain injury or PTSD or something because they weren't like everyone else when they started and it got worse. So you can get some benefit from some general approaches. But I'd rather everyone start by doing tailored work if they can and do a brain map or a quantitative EEG to guide the process. So yes, you can come see Peak Brains in different places in the US. We can send you out gear. We have some overseas offices, but there's 5,000 or 10,000 practitioners in the US that do this work. My guess is you can find a local person to work with you. And if you can't, Peak Brain will certainly send you out some gear and get you some brain training if you guys need.

Super. And that's peakbraininstitute.com. That's the best place to go for people who are interested in working with you guys directly.

It is. Yep. Yeah. peakbrainla.com is a shorter— that was our first domain, but Peak Brain Institute's our main website. And we have offices in LA, Orange County, New York City, St. Louis, some partners in London. You can get brain maps done with a few other places in the world as well. And even if you aren't near one of our offices, most of our clients actually do brain mapping in the comfort of their own kitchen. And then we have fun with it. 'Cause you know, let's do two maps. Let's map it on caffeine or cannabis or Adderall. And you can learn today. I did a map. I'll spoil, he's gonna publish on his blog soon, a guy named Quantified Bob who you might know. And we just did a caffeine map. He's doing a big writeup on pre and post caffeine. So maybe you wanna see if your racetam or your methylene blue or your sleep deprivation from Burning Man has any impact. And then you can just do empirical research. So we like to offer that. That biohacker special where you can just, you know, keep learning about your brain over time without the ongoing cost.

Nice, love that. That's great. Thanks for that breakdown. So you mentioned post-COVID brain. Before we dive into functional neuroscience, what have you been seeing with respect to post-COVID brain, with respect to long-haul COVID, and some of the issues that people are surfacing, and then some of the solutions that, you know, you've seen, whether neurofeedback or just more broadly?

We now have 2 years plus of post-COVID brains, and unfortunately I see it a lot, and it looks an awful lot like brains that used to come in with complaints about mold, Lyme, and concussion. It looks the same. It's a nonspecific, often nonspecific kind of inflammatory, neuroinflammatory strain. Sometimes it's more specific on the sides of the brain, the back of the brain, but that's usually because it tends to interact with old scar tissue. I think that's what's happening. So if you have a little bit of old, like, low-key wear and tear that isn't causing you trouble from an old concussion or something that you've mostly recovered from, and you get a neuroinflammatory state, it anchors itself to the old scar tissue, I think, and tends to get really stuck. So a lot of people come to see me. There's a window, just like concussions don't show up right away often in the brain, they kind of bloom. COVID seems to do the same thing. Where you seem to get brain fog, slow processing, irritability, can't think clearly, you're kind of burnt out. It's just like a post-concussion state for many people, but it's often 3, even as much as 6 months after you get COVID is when it shows up. And it seems to show up regardless of the severity of the COVID It seems to be about underlying other inflammatory stuff, other, you know, concussions you've had. Maybe if you have the conditions that seem to cause more exacerbated COVID, insulin resistance, things like that seem to cause more likelihood of Long COVID as well. But it's not that simple either, because I get lots of young, healthy people with mild or no symptoms in COVID and they still get Long COVID 3 months later. One of the earliest articles on Long COVID and neuro stuff came out, I think, in The Lancet about maybe 9, 10 months into the pandemic. And they showed that about 50% of people develop some sort of neuro symptom from long COVID about 6 months after they get infected. And that really does match with what I'm saying. I think it's almost a roll of the dice. If you get COVID, even asymptomatically, I think the chances are about half that you develop kind of like a wear and tear phenomenon later on where you're just kind of burnt out and suddenly you can't think as clearly and you're kind of moody and you have no stamina and you're kind of irritable and it feels like sleep deprivation and it feels like concussion and it feels like chronic stress, but it also responds just like those things, just like concussions do and chronic stress do. Responds very well to the same kinds of interventions. I've done lots of work just with neurofeedback and had great success, just like a concussion tends to get resolved in several months of neurofeedback. I've generally brought more things to bear when there's been post-COVID stuff for clients. I've done other coaching. So most of what I do, the heaviest lifter I have is neurofeedback. But even before the pandemic, I was getting more into the sense of biohacking or functional neuroscience. What you can do outside of the scope of specific target interventions, what we can do is modifiable behaviors. What can you do with small lifestyle things? What can you do with minimal viable practices that will give you that biofeedback, that regulatory loop where you're watching things change, doing things, and then having them change some more and then doing some things? You're steering the process of transformation or recovery or healing or optimization. So we call it biohacking, of course, because we're kind of geeky in that way and we know what that means. But our grandmothers and our moms, my mom calls me every couple of years and says, "I'm out of piracetam, send more." And I give her some piracetam and she's been on it for years, loves it. But she was interested in piracetam and CDP-choline 15 years ago because we have Alzheimer's in the family and she has a neuroscientist son. So she's like, "Hey, what's this TruBrain stuff?" And I'm like, "Oh yeah, let me build you your custom stack, Mom." So she got into it that way and she's a rare grandma who uses nootropics, I think. I think I mapped her brain at one point as well and she had fun with that. But I want folks to think about, we know what we need to do for health and for wellness in many ways. We often don't know why. We know we should get good sleep, probably shouldn't eat lots of sugar, probably shouldn't carry lots of stress, but why? So I've been working on this coaching system in some ways I call functional neuroscience where I help people break down the aspects of sleep hacking or metabolic hacking around partitioning nutrients into time, macros, calories as a way of bumping up ketones essentially. Circadian rhythm timing, not just sleep hacking, but the circadian rhythm aspects of it. When to exercise to maximize insulin sensitivity and cortisol sensitivity and moving glycogen in and out. And then the neurofeedback becomes a piece of that. Often a big piece of it for our clients, but there's a lot of things you can do with just an Oura Ring or just a Whoop strap or just a Biostrap and a good log and a sense of what you want to do or a body fat scale or a BioSense ketone meter or something. And you get a lot. And what the modern set of tools, accessible neuroscience tools in some ways, is letting us do is become our own neuroscientists. Like I can map your brain, teach you about your brain. Now you have the agency. It's not about me being your expert. You know what your brain looks like. You you can map it again. And we could do a lipid panel and realize that our sugar habit last month was causing some trouble and change it or whatever else we felt like. You know, we kind of have that agency. And if you are chronically stressed or have long COVID and are burnt out, you might love that to know that doing a round of hyperbaric medicine and dropping carbs and jacking protein up to cause a massive anti-inflammatory effect and moving your high-intensity workout to the afternoon to avoid cortisol resistance and do some low-intensity exercise in a fasted state to create some circadian signals, not about fat loss. These things will all support steering the system we are carrying around. So call it fitness, call it wellness, call it whatever. But because I'm a neuroscientist, a lot of the coaching I do on the body is to support high brain performance and sleep regulation, stress regulation, attention regulation. There's an awful lot you can do within the body to create the conditions for change in the brain and for improved performance and decreased suffering in the brain. So I've been teaching folks a lot about this aspect of it, and we tend to do that coaching alongside our neurofeedback. But I'll have a series of articles out later on this year, maybe even an ebook on the basics of functional neuroscience for folks that want to get into this sort of biohacking the body for brain performance reasons.

That's a super breakdown. Thanks for that, Andrew. What are some of the— if you had to, I don't know, distill it down to 3 to 5 sort of functional neuroscience habits or behavior changes, what's your hit list?

The number one thing tends to be sleep hacking and circadian aspects of that, not just the sleep aspects, but the circadian aspects. And then biggest thing, and I'm a bit of an iconoclast in the biohacker world, I don't care about light. Or blue blocker glasses. I don't think they're that impactful or meaningful for most people. What I really care about is when you eat. That's the number one exogenous or outside world cue for circadian. It's a stronger cue than light, but dramatically. When you eat is more impactful than when you sleep for what time of day your brain thinks it is. So controlling the times of food is a big deal for me. And I like to give people a set of basic rules to play with in sort of order of importance and see how they unfold in terms of better sleep, Compressed sleep, deeper sleep, more energy, more regulation, more resilience, faster speed of processing. And they— the rules are sort of like in order of importance. Fast before bed. So adults like you and I would need about 2, 3 hours. Children can do it in 2. If you're really insulin resistant, you might need 4, maybe longer. But give yourself a window of no calories at the end of the day, a pretty chunky window. And what that will let happen is your insulin will drop low. And in the absence of insulin, you'll be able to release growth hormone once you fall asleep. If you have higher insulin, you'll kind of just have this counter-regulatory cortisol spike. It'll suppress growth hormone. So basically, if you go to bed full, you'll wake up tired and hungry and fat. But if you go to bed hungry, you wake up full of energy and lean. So It's a little counterintuitive, but the idea is to sort of lean into that cortisol spot, the cortisol dropping instead of rising as you fall asleep. And we also shouldn't eat before bed because melatonin shuts off the pancreas release of insulin. So if you're, if you're shoving food in your mouth into the day, you're doing so in a very difficult insulin state where the cells can't handle. So you're basically creating a high blood sugar state anyways, if you eat before bed for most people. So first rule, fast before bed. Second rule, get up early. I don't care when you go to bed. If you do care about light, the light you should care about is the light that happens within 1 hour of sunrise. That's the only light that really matters for circadian rhythm entrainment. There's a set of nuclei on top of the optic chiasm or the optic nerve crossing called the suprachiasmatic nucleus that watches the color of light in the sky, essentially in the air. And it only notices color in the first hour of the day for a morning signal. So go to bed, fasted, get up early and get some low-intensity exercise in first thing in the morning. Cortisol wakes you up, squeezes your liver, feeds you breakfast. You should be wide awake and be able to run around and hunt things first thing in the morning. That's the idea. So go ahead and do it. Do some sun salutations, do a walk, something before you eat. It only takes about 15 minutes of like a full-body exercise, like a vinyasa flow or a sun salutation. Or 30 minutes of low-key things like walking to actually contribute to an autophagy state, to trigger intracellular autophagy and exhaust resources. But if you woke up in the morning and you reach for the weights and you slam a hardcore workout or something, you're calling for— you're going to bonk. You're going to drop all your blood sugar and you're going to call for more cortisol. But your body's used to having high blood sugar and high cortisol first thing in the morning. If you call for more, all you're doing is creating resistance. For blood sugar and cortisol. So you're kind of working against the fitness stuff in some ways. So go to bed fasted, get up early, low-intensity exercise before you eat in the morning, even 15 minutes. And then move your high-intensity exercise, like your kettlebells, your resistance bands, your weightlifting, your hardcore steady state, you know, HIIT, whatever, move that to the afternoon when your cardiac output is at its highest and resting cortisol is at its lowest. So the spike you create through intense exercise does something instead of just cranking up your sympathetic tone.

Love that. I know it's a fantastic breakdown. It's a nice reminder as well that, you know, the don't eat before bed means 3+ hours. It's not just, you know, an hour or so, which is easy to slip on. So I love that breakdown. I want to close with a question we ask everyone on Flow Research Collective Radio. It's a question about a question. We call it the Research Genie question. And the question is If you could click your fingers and instantly have all of the research done, the randomized controlled trials, whatever it is, to answer any question that you've been pondering in your academic life or your personal life, what would that question be?

Wow, I have so many questions that I would want to answer in the area of neurofeedback and the EEG tools that I use. There's just so much basic low-hanging fruit that can be, you know, picked up and published. So it's not just a genie. There's like a whole bunch of genie grad students just getting their PhDs doing this, but probably something in the neighborhood of consciousness, honestly, because I have this— I'm suspicious of consciousness, honestly. The more I get into neuroscience and the more I get into Buddhism, which kind of converge, the less I believe in consciousness and the more I believe in sort of a moment-to-moment illusion of self as the evolutionary imperative to keep us doing things that start with F. So feeding and things like that and fighting and other stuff that starts with that driven behaviors. The illusion of self, the attachment to the things we care about and our in-group, out-group stuff and resource management, there's some evolutionary benefit for that. But I've seen consciousness interrupted so many times and so interestingly that I'd be interested to know if we could really do some of that deep research that would be hard to do on humans I'm fairly convinced there is no self beyond the manifestation moment to moment of the meat suit. And I would love to find that answer essentially. I think it'll change. I think if we had a deep sense of consciousness from a scientific perspective, it would advance us even further out of the dark ages, so to speak. A couple hundred years ago, we killed each other for our beliefs because of a different random saint or God we believed in or something. And I have a hunch that if we could sort out some of the consciousness stuff, it would sort of create that Buddhist promise of moving beyond suffering because you move beyond attachment and reactive selves. So that's not a scientific reason for it, but I think that that'd be the research I would want a genie to invest their time in because it's a lot of work.

I love that. There's an amazing book, which you may have read, by Robert Wright called Why Buddhism Is True that talks about the convergence between neuroscience and Buddhism. And he talks a lot about the illusory nature of self from both perspectives.

It's very frustrating. I want to be a spiritual guy, but I can't be because I believe in science. I want to be a scientific guy, but the harder I get in the science, the less I believe in some of the deepest underpinnings there. So it all kind of breaks down. It's turtles all the way down.

Yeah, exactly. That's it. Well, Dr. Andrew Hill, thank you so much. This was incredible, by the way. I appreciate it a ton. Amazing information for everyone, beautifully articulated and really practical and actionable as well. So thank you so much.

My pleasure.

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