Scales Of Success Podcast

#32 - Clear the Noise, Find Your Focus with Dr. Andrew Hill

• Marcus Arredondo

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What if the chaos in your mind was actually a signal, not a sentence? In this episode, Marcus connects with Dr. Andrew Hill, founder of Peak Brain Institute, to explore how brain mapping and neurofeedback can unlock focus, heal trauma, and boost performance. From improving sleep to regulating emotions and accessing flow states, Dr. Hill explains how measurable brain activity translates into everyday breakthroughs. Learn how to move from helplessness to agency by training your brain like a muscle. If you’ve ever felt stuck in your head, this conversation reveals the science of getting unstuck.

Dr. Andrew Hill is a UCLA-trained cognitive neuroscientist. With expertise in QEEG brain mapping and neurofeedback, he helps people enhance focus, sleep, and emotional regulation through personalized brain training. Dr. Hill believes that most mental challenges are not disorders, but patterns that can be changed. His work blends science, practical tools, and real-world results to empower people to take control of their brain health.

Connect with Dr. Andrew Hill:
Website: https://peakbraininstitute.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrewhillphd/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/drhill

🎁 Special Offer: Listeners can get $250 off the $499 QEEG plan by mentioning the podcast or by visiting 👉 https://peakbraininstitute.com/special/  

Episode highlights:
(2:06) Defining agency through brain mapping
(7:33) Why sleep, stress, and focus are connected
(13:06) How to improve deep sleep naturally
(16:46) What a brain map shows
(24:50) Neurofeedback: How brain training works
(32:56) Linking brain patterns to physical symptoms
(37:46) Unlocking creativity and healing with alpha-theta
(44:38) The neuroscience behind flow states
(54:45) Willpower, resistance, and ADHD explained
(56:58) Dr. Hill’s journey and breakthrough
(1:02:38) From diagnosis to control
(1:06:00) Outro

Connect with Marcus


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Note: The transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 0:00

This is why you can't get the kid to come from the TV to dinner because it's stepping down that and the theta is going to surge and I feel like you're wrenching stimulus away from the brain. So you teach a teenager or a 45-year-old that that is happening. This is why you're frustrated and don't want to get up and do your work, because you're high stimulus. You have to go to a lower activation state and then decide you know that's hard, high stimulus. You have to go to a lower activation state and then decide you know that's hard.

Marcus Arredondo: 0:25

I'm excited to share my conversation with today's guest, dr Andrew Hill, introduced to me by AJ Wilder our guest on episode 24, who's explored the benefits of Dr Hill's work as an aerobatic pilot. Dr Andrew Hill is a cognitive neuroscientist, peak performance coach and founder of Peak Brain Institute, where brain mapping and neurofeedback replace guesswork with data. His own early struggles with attention and anxiety sparked a lifelong curiosity what happens when we can actually see what the brain's doing and train it to do better? Dr Hill walks us through how this approach reshapes everything from focus and sleep to stress and mood. We also dive into the limits of diagnostic labels, the science of plasticity and how everyday tools like real-time feedback and habit shifts can unlock meaningful change. This is a conversation about science, awareness and adaptation to take greater control of your mind's potential. Let's start the show, dr Hill. Thank you so much for coming on. I'm excited to talk.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:16

Hey, thanks for having me. Nice to be here.

Marcus Arredondo: 1:18

So there's a lot of different directions. I want to go here, but you run Peak Brain and that's going to be the anchor behind where we're going and for the benefit of the audience, you have a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, so I want to go in a lot of different directions because I think there's an undercurrent in your field of study as it relates to many, if not all, the high performers that have come on to scales of success and what I'm most interested in sort of breaking down, which is the science of recreating resilience In your work. I want to start with one specific thing which you had highlighted why we should all get QEEG brain mapping as it relates to agency. So I want to start at how do you define agency?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 2:06

So when it comes to the brain, there's lots of things that are hard to see. If you break your arm, it's pretty obvious, but if you have a cramped up threat, sensitivity or something it's hard to spot from the outside and because of that we tend to carry this idea that psychiatric or suffering or other cognitive things are happening to us. We have diagnostic labels, we have disease processes, and a lot of things in the brain are not actually disease process. They are phenotypes or dysregulations, you know, variants on human versions or a normal resource that's stuck in a certain mode, and that's a very different mindset than I have a giant set of labels in this scary thing happening to me. So a lot of what I do is help people look at the actual brain and instead of worrying about the diagnostic label or what the assumptions are about what's happening, let's just look at brain function and performance in attention and other things like that. And so it's sort of like looking at your lipid panel and going, ooh, I better back off in the Ben and Jerry's Like you see your triglycerides off the chart, you're going to. You know, lay off the sugar if you're smart. And the data gave you agency, gave you the ability to take control gave you perspective, actionable perspective, actionable insight. You know change is happening, shift happens all the time and if you know what you're working with then you know why it could be important to do something. So if I show you that your alpha waves are all spreading out in speed and say, you know this often means difficulty with word finding and tip of the tongue and verbal fluency and internal speed of thought, are you having? You know? Oh, you are Okay. Well, it might be because your Delta here is excessive. I don't think you're getting good deep sleep. Stop eating before bed, get up early seven days a week, go for a walk when you first get up.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 4:01

And those are circadian tricks that you are able to decide are important because you know how your brain works. It's not a rule. The doctor says don't eat before bed. We know we don't eat before bed. If I show you what it's doing and then explain, hey, the normal circadian rhythm as the end of the day happened, the natural melatonin gets released, completely, shuts off pancreatic insulin.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 4:26

The falling insulin makes us snacky, which is an evolutionary trick, because you eat the food if you have it. Don't let the other guy eat the food. Eat the food yourself. But the problem is we have fridges and, like you know, 24-7 grocery stores now. So you want to resist that. And having any blood sugar after you fall asleep suppresses growth hormone release once you're asleep. Basically, so great way to rob yourself of deep sleep, of dreamless, restorative sleep, is to eat before bed. So, you know, go to bed full and wake up. Fat and tired, go to bed empty and wake up, you know, full of energy and raring to go. But it's circadian reason and knowing the reason, knowing how it impacts your life, your choices, your brain, gives you a different path you can start to decide to navigate.

Marcus Arredondo: 5:10

So I want to go into sleep because I think that that is a really critical component to all of this. But starting with you talk about, I mean, all of this is being measured. You can never manage, in my opinion, what you cannot measure.

Marcus Arredondo: 5:24

Drucker right, what is measured is managed Right, and I feel really fortunate that we're in a state of the world in time where there is a democratization of information. Everybody, from the Peter Attias to the Andrew Hubermans, just as examples you've got a YouTube channel that's highly informative. Any lay person can get really up to speed foundationally on what's going on. Coupling that with, I've started to experiment a little bit with concierge medicine and biomarkers, increasingly taking biomarkers, which has if I can just pause there for a second I have found it to be remarkably beneficial in. You know, we're pulling whack-a-mole with our body. You know, if I stop doing this or I stop doing that, what effect does it work? Does it have on my overall well-being, is it?

Marcus Arredondo: 6:16

And what this was rooted for me was sleep. Sleep started to go south and it was exacerbated when I had a child two and a half years ago and I just realized that that was such a critical component to my overall day. If I didn't have good sleep, I couldn't function as well during the day and it was a downward cycle. If I could turn it, it became an upward, compounding benefit cycle. And so I say all of this because, relative to the democratization of information, having access to being measured is.

Marcus Arredondo: 6:52

This idea of agency for me has a lot to do with the removal of victimhood, right? It's the idea of being able to take action to improve those neural pathways, that neural plasticity that allows you to interpret your external stimuli in a better way. So I'm laying all this groundwork for you obviously to shoot holes in if you think that there's any flaws in my line of thinking. But how do you see the chicken and the egg relationship between neural development in improving certain interpretations of your external stimuli and sleep, because I think they seem to be sort of a yin and yang to each other.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 7:33

Oh yeah, it's hugely foundational. I kind of consider three legs of a stool in a lot of human experience and human performance day to day as sleep, stress and attention and each of those things, two of those overlap. As you go down below the stool you'll find they share resources. So executive function, or attention and sleep, have a very strong component. There's a brainwave we make a lot of to keep us asleep at night, called sensory motor rhythm or low beta waves, and you've seen this brainwave, if you've seen a cat on a windowsill watching birds, that laser-like focus in the liquid body. It's a very inhibited body but stabilized attention. That state is used for sitting, still staying asleep. It's also used to not be impulsive, if you're a human. So. Or to suppress seizures, if your brain is prone to seizures, you pump that beta brainwave up a little bit and it suppresses the seizure phenomena. So this to suppress seizures if your brain is prone to seizures, you pump that beta brainwave up a little bit and it suppresses the seizure phenomena. So this inhibitory beta, this beta way that's used to kind of gently steer everything happening in the brain, ends up showing up across a lot of different areas of brain performance and sleep. We call it sleep spindles. That's what this low beta frequency is. It's called sleep spindles. That's what the that's what this low beta frequency is. It's called sleep spindles.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 8:46

When you're asleep, so a car goes by and blares the horn, you don't need to wake up if you're used to that. So your brain goes nope and it bursts this frequency and keeps you asleep. So the dog barking, your wife kicking you doesn't wake you up every two seconds and we use this thing to inhibit. To inhibit waking up, to inhibit getting distracted, to inhibit being fidgety. And beta waves who kind of pump the gas on a system and it stabilizes, it stills and it focuses. That is hard to maintain if you don't have good sleep.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 9:17

So as the quality of sleep, especially deep sleep, in terms of measuring, managing, you know a lot of us have wearables and things these days, even the smart beds out there now, yeah, the measurement of sleep is a little bit fraught with guesswork in the devices. It's kind of like a lipid panel. Again, you know where a lot of the estimates up until the past 10 years were estimates, were algorithms about how this works. Here's the total panel. Everything else is, you know, an estimate off of one fraction. It's kind of how sleep tracking works as well, where they can get movement and total sleep and then deep sleep is a pretty reliable thing to get off those infrared wearables with the green light things, so you can get deep sleep and what you can't get is rem off those devices and it's magical. You know unicorn numbers pulled out of thin air, as far far as I can tell.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 10:05

Also, here's the thing REM is not really amenable to lifestyle change. It's kind of like blood pH. You can't really muck with it. It holds itself stable and if you get thrown off too much all hell breaks loose and you die. It's that. It's that specific. So if REM is off, by the time rem has gotten dysregulated. You've been hallucinating for a few months. You know you're really distorted, like you got a lot bigger problems than do I have enough rem.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 10:31

So what you can control and you can measure is deep, slow wave sleep, deep sleep, restorative sleep, the release of growth hormone, you know, learning, memory repair, all that deep dreamless state. That is slow, slow wave sleep or deep sleep on the trackers and it's relatively a valid number and it responds to lifestyle interventions. So if you fast before bed, let your blood sugar drop, you'll get more of it If you work out between three and 7pm and burn off the cortisol, when the cortisol is nice and low already. So you feel it, it burns off and moves. Heart's really big and powerful in that afternoon time. So you move a lot of resources, you get a good workout, you feel nice afterwards, gently depleted. That's the post-cortisol burn off state. It's great for sleep, it's good for circadian support.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 11:19

So the agency thing is you learn how the sleep works. You start dialing in sleep phenomena and your sleep tracker will show you that you're getting more deep as a function of the total hours. And then, as you get really, really good at it, you'll find that you can screw around with your sleep and your brain still prioritizes those two hours of deep in the first half of the night. If you get four hours or five hours you get the two, and if you get seven hours you get the two, and if you get seven hours you get the two. And the brain is healthy enough to insist on that amount of deep sleep for rest and repair. So that's a measurable thing.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 11:53

But you don't have to invest hundreds in a wearable or thousands in a smart bed. There's good research showing that after a couple of weeks of tracking the quality of your sleep every morning, how do I feel? How much did I sleep? What was the quality After a couple of weeks of that? Humans are as accurate as sleep labs, but more accurate than wearables. The pinnacle of a wearable is called an actigraphy. It's a watch, it's very, very sensitive to movement and it's more sensitive than the wearables we have in the consumer space. But they load you up in a sleep lab with EEG and actigraphy, and the actigraphy is generally better at staging the sleep than the EEG is actually. So it's the gold standard is that movement and humans are as good or better than actigraphy it looks like. So you don't need a device, but you do need to get in the habit of measuring, evaluating, seeing what has affected it the day before, and then you can play around with stuff and you'll feel more rested.

Marcus Arredondo: 12:55

So two questions. One is what percentage of your overall sleep is the sweet spot for deep sleep? And then the second is there's a hundred variables that contribute to quality sleep, but what do you think are among the larger ones we can focus on during the waking hours?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 13:06

Yeah. So in terms of amount of deep, it depends a little bit on age. So if you are younger, you're going to need both a lot more hours and a lot greater percentages deep. So if you're like a nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 12-year-old, you should probably be getting nine or 10 hours of sleep a night and like three hours of deep. You know more, three and a half, a lot more, you know ideally, and you'll go through spurts.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 13:29

To little kids, as you go through huge growth spurts, have these like unusual shifts in the sleeping pattern, which is normal. But for someone who's finished most of their development, who gets in, you know a nominal eight hours, probably more like seven, seven and a half a night, like most of us, getting those two hours of deep. As for an adult who's post-development, post-25 years old, two hours of deep should be the target, regardless of how much sleep you get, because there's a lot of normal variability. You might be a six-hour sleep you know a night person and that's normal for you. It might be an eight-hour only and that's normal for you. Both those people, when they feel good, are getting north of two hours probably.

Marcus Arredondo: 14:03

So is that? I mean, I'm roughing it here, but a third for a younger person and then for a fully developed, maybe a quarter to a third.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 14:11

Yeah, if your sleep's average. But people have a lot of different sleep styles, a lot of different sleep habits, so there's a lot we can get away with. Humans are pretty resilient. The important pieces about sleep are giving your brain circadian information when you're awake so it knows what time it is. If your brain knows what time it is, it can put up with slightly iffy sleep habits, sleep hours, sleep schedules. But if it doesn't know what time it is, then the brain starts to move all of the body processes, it slides past the Earth's clock and you end up with the circadian rhythm making you awake with cortisol in the middle of the night. You end up burning out at 11 am because that's when your body thinks you should be sleeping. The human circadian rhythm is longer than the Earth's photo period, longer than the 24-hour cycle, so generally. So you end up sliding slowly past the Earth.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 15:02

Unless you get these resets and the brain is very good at picking up resets the strongest one from the outside world, the strongest exogenous cue for sleep or for circadian, is when you eat. When you eat really eat in the time zone you want to live in is my number one hack for sleep. It's not when you sleep. It's not how you wind down, it's not about evening light, which has almost no impact as far as I can. I can tell it's when you eat is the number one thing to pay attention to, and it's also the number one thing that people tend to screw up like it's really common to not do that one well. And so if you just pull back, two hours for somebody who's insulin sensitive, or maybe three or four hours if you're a little bit insulin resistant, so have a fasting window.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 15:46

Yeah, literature shows in intermittent fasting, the version called ETRF, early time restricted feeding, where you put the fasting hour at the end of the day has superior health benefit than regular TRF, regular intermittent fasting where you're like 16, 8. So allow your blood sugar to drop at the end of the day. Go to bed hungry and you'll wake up taller, stronger, repaired, lean, you know. Go to bed full of food and you wake up fat and tired, having not slept that great suppressed your deep sleep and kind of, you know, feeling low-key in the morning. So it's counterintuitive, but you can play with that first rule.

Marcus Arredondo: 16:23

I think we could talk for hours about this because I think it's there's so many variables, but I want to transition a little bit to peak brain what you're doing, how is this being measured and what just maybe lay the groundwork for those who are unfamiliar what does it look like for a patient of yours to be a part of this program and how are those metrics being measured?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 16:47

Yeah. So we do some assessments and we do some interventions and the assessments collectively we call it a brain map and it's really two pieces. One is a quantitative EEG and you'll often see those terms brain map and QEEG equated. What that is is a measurement of your brain at rest. So you put a cap on the head, squirt it full of gel. About 24 locations are picked up and the brain you measure across minutes, 10 minutes or so, eyes closed, 10 minutes, eyes open. And the patterns you pick up are not the momentary events of thought or running the physiology, it's the standing patterns, the features that are traits. So these are things that are always there.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 17:28

So I measured your brain and did a resting set of maps. You take that recording and compare it to an average database of people your age and, on a mathematical bell curve, look at how unusual you are in a bunch of heat maps and say, okay, you're weird. Great People are weird. Don't worry about it. The goal is not to make you average. The goal is to use this and see what sticks out, see if it makes sense. So you'll see patterns in the brain of little resting features, lots of beta brainwaves, low amounts of alpha. The speeds are unusual and those have meaning.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 18:00

Often not always, they aren't perfectly precise to diagnosis because people are weird. So instead you say, oh look, this part of your brain is unusual in this way. It often means X or Y, and the person starts laughing, or their wife does in the next room because it's a thing, and you sort of paint out the blind corners by learning how your brain works. It's not here's your diagnosis, it's hey, here's your brain. Yeah, does this make sense? Oh it does. Is it important? Oh it is. Well then, you can change it. It's sort of that.

Marcus Arredondo: 18:27

The cascade Real quick. So how is all this being measured? You have nodes, the patient has nodes.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 18:32

Yeah, you put a cap on your head, little Lycra swim cap type thing with holes in it and each hole has a silver or tin electrode, little round disc of metal and we squirt gel in all the little holes and it picks up your scalp electricity in a grid throughout your whole head and also your ear clips or ear lobes, and you sit there for 10 minutes and just get sort of everything at once and the same thing. Eyes open, the brain's in kind of a different mode eyes open and eyes closed, because the visual tissue wakes up and a bunch of things happen that look very different. So the baselines are kind of two flavors of how the brain can baseline Eyes closed and eyes open. And the map, the QEEG, is the same for you today, tomorrow, a month, six months, a year, five years. It'll change a little bit. It'll flex a little bit day to day if you don't do something to your brain. If you do things to your brain, it'll change.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 19:30

Get a concussion, get COVID, stop sleeping, go on night shift, develop a drug habit It'll shift. Meditate for six months.

Marcus Arredondo: 19:40

Well, I was just going to ask that can you give us like an example as a baseline, somebody who's suffered from adhd for 45 years and a tibetan monk who's been meditating for 45 years?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 19:52

yeah, they'll have different brains dramatically. Uh, adhd. Someone sits down, puts a cap on. Oh, we also do an attention test before the qeg. So we have the person do the world's most boring 20 minute computerized go. No ghost, I'll click when one stimulus pops up and don't click when something else pops up.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 20:09

So activation versus inhibition, add versus ADHD, essentially. So we measure that against the population as well and say your performance. Look at this, you're inattentive a little bit, you're impulsive, or it's auditory, or it's visual, or it's fatigue, and that's the performance piece and it's a layer below the diagnosis of ADHD. It's all the individual resources of performance that kind of you can measure, like stamina, reaction time, auditory, performance, visual, separately than just activation versus inhibition. So we do that piece of it with performance cap on the head, sit still for 10 minutes or so, eyes closed, eyes open, and on that map, if someone had ADHD or something that looked like ADHD, because there's other things that can mimic it you'll have.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 20:54

There's two areas of the brain between the top of the head and the ear on both sides. Come in the middle the precentral gyrus or gyri for both of them, and the one on the left is a stabilizer of executive function Starts action. It stays on task even if you're bored. It follows through, it alerts you to things as they're changing. The one on the right supervises, it reads the map and says hey, we're going to slow down up ahead to that right-hand turn, helps adjust what's happening moment to moment. And these precentral gyri are the most posterior part of the frontal lobe and because of that they're situated right over the mid strip and so they touch all of the body descending information and receive all of the sensory information up from the body and then they send it out into the frontal lobe. So they are the mind body overlap. And the one on the left activates like the driver in the car. The one on the right supervises like the passenger in the car, and they use beta waves to do their job. The one on the right uses that smr, that sensory motor brainwave I mentioned earlier. So good, robust smr tone on the right hand side. You know if you're paying attention, you can sit still, you aren't going squirrel because you can resist information and stick to pattern, stick to plan. The one on the left makes a faster beta to do its job 15 to 18 hertz roughly and that stabilizes the mojarin, keeps you on task, keeps you locked in, keeps you vigilant, keeps you focused, keeps you aware. It also turns off all those things and keeps you asleep at night.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 22:30

So the left side if the beta is weak and the performance is inattentive, I'd be like oh, look, this left side, lots of alpha kind of drifty tissue, not a lot of beta. Oh, and your performance? You were kind of spacing out. This is inattentive. Um, it often means a sleep maintenance issue, not staying asleep. Well, is that also happening? Oh, it is like, maybe three quarters of the time person's like yeah.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 22:52

And then the right hand side oh, lots of theta, not as much beta, lots of theta, brain waves, which is like taking your foot off the brakes when theta happens. So a surge of release. Essentially on the right hand side, lots of theta means impulsivity and you can measure how well someone can stop themselves when that stimulus pops up, which is inhibition. So you can measure the performance and the brain and say, wow, look at this, you're a couple of standard deviations off the mean for performance and for brain. On that right hand tissue this usually means like an ADHD type of thing. Does that make sense? Is that important? Okay, cool, so you kind of walk through.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 23:29

There's maybe 20 or 30 phenotypes or patterns that show up in the brain maps and the raw eeg that mean certain things stress, sleep, attention. There's about 10 or so regulatory features in the brain you can spot. They're not subtle but they're also not, um, easy to understand. They're kind of like gross human things. So one would be attention, those two sides I mentioned. We also have a lot of anxiety-based flavored things, the anterior and posterior cingulate for holding stuff in your mind or for evaluating the outside world.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 24:00

You've got a big sensory and social tissue chunk behind the right ear for mapping everything in some speed of processing stuff with the alpha speed you can see. So you get these gross resources sensory, social speed, attention, stress and sleep. You can see brain fog. You can see other things sometimes motivation and mood sometimes, but they're not as reliable as you get up to higher level human things. So you go over someone's brain with them like a fitness coach sitting down at Equinox going ah, distribution of body fat, strength, performance, hey, what's really important to you here? And based on that I build a plan to make a change, which is where some of the magic actually comes in. People think the magic is looking at their brain and it's fun. But the change is where it really gets fun.

Marcus Arredondo: 24:46

So talk to us about how the change happens. What's the process at Peak Brain?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 24:50

So there's this thing called neurofeedback that we do, which is biofeedback on the brain, and unlike body-based forms of biofeedback, this one's mostly involuntary. So I I described those two pre-central gyrus areas, left and right, gyri, and if you wanted to train your executive function and your sleep quality together, you would probably want to train the left one for 15 minutes and then the right one for 15 minutes in a classic workout. And so we would have you put ear clips on and stick a wire on those regions and then set the computer up to measure the beta you're making on your own moment to moment and also maybe measure the alpha on the left and the theta on the right that you're making on your own moment to moment. And your brain's making these brain waves and whenever they briefly flex in the right direction. So the beta comes up briefly and the alpha goes down on the left, the computer game goes yay, good job brain, good job brain. With some audio, some visual. The brain's like, whoa, hey, I kind of like stuff, there's some stuff. And then the brain moves in the wrong direction. A couple seconds later the beta goes back down, the game slows down or stops. The brain says, um, where's my stuff? I don't like no stuff. And then it happens to flex the right direction and the applause continues. The brain starts to notice hey, wait a minute, I'm making beta. Stuff starts happening and it starts making little bursts of beta waves. And the trick here is that we adjust and move the goalposts so as it starts to to move, we also move. So we have, we keep a threshold adjusting, and so we're waiting, essentially, for the brain to always move in one direction. If it's really strong, make it harder, if it's tired, at the end of a session it's fairly easy. But we're still catching the movement of those little beta waves, you know, flexing briefly in that tissue. And I say the brain is doing this because it's mostly involuntary. You can't feel your brain waves, brain has no sensory nerve endings.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 26:40

So two, three sessions in, typically the brain is starting to react at the very first session. But typically about three sessions in the brain goes oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you wanted beta, here's some beta. And you get three or four hours of like, increased tone of that tissue and you, you know, stand up and you're like oh, oh, oh, you wanted beta, here's some beta. And you get three or four hours of like, increased tone of that tissue. And you, you know, stand up and you're like, whoa, huh, I might be more clear. Am I focused? I might be calm. Wait, is this real? This might not be real. I might be a mat. You think it's that quick? Yeah, a few sessions in and then it wears off and you're like, wait a minute, was I really feeling something? I don't know, hey guys, I might have felt something. Okay, try it again the next day, do it again A little stronger. And you're like, well, wait a minute. No, no, no. I actually think I'm feeling something.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 27:25

I had a guy yesterday who trained for the first Romania or Croatia or somewhere. He's been struggling in such a hard time for years with strong anxiety. He's tried lots of stuff, he's a sophisticated consumer of health and medicine and he happens to be an early responder. So we did a session, a guided session, yesterday with him and he left a note in his private chat saying, okay, too soon to tell, but I might've felt something like, yeah, great, great, great. And then this morning he made a note in his sleep survey saying, okay, yeah, that was different, I slept different. And then he did another session this morning and two hours later came on his channel and said, okay, I mean, I didn't want to think it was possible, but I'm definitely feeling something.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 28:09

That's not the average person. Usually it's three, four or five sessions and you're like, hey, wait, okay, yeah, maybe. And then your sleep is a little different, or your focus is a little different and it's not that dramatic and it wears off. And so you sort of iterate, you try to stretch the different resources and go okay, your goals might be met by bringing up those beta waves. You know, making those resources stronger, executive function, sleep cool, let's do a bunch of sessions, exercise in that tissue, watch how you feel over the next day.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 28:38

And after a few sessions you start to notice after effects starting to build up and linger and then wear off.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 28:42

And you're like, ooh, I had a really productive day in my house. I was a good listener, my wife, I was just listening, I wasn't soft, it was great. You know like, so you got these phenomena happening. Or parents call me and say, about three weeks in, I asked my kid to take the trash out. I asked him one time he got up and did it. What is going on? You know so like you see a shift in resources a few weeks in and you start to lean into them. You know, the first time you get in shape when you haven't met in a long time. Three, four weeks in you're going feel it. So you're like wait a minute. Hey, I like this brain training stuff and that gives the client. You know, really it's a personal training metaphor where you're sort of iterating and trying stuff, seeing how it lands, adjusting, and then we go back and map the brain again and measure the executive function again toward the end of a two-month period.

Marcus Arredondo: 29:38

And how many sessions are going on in that two-month period 25 to 35.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 29:43

Okay. So three to four times a week for about half an hour, and that is right on the edge of where things start to stick, start to become more permanent. Usually it's more like 40 50 sessions. You can trust that whatever you've gotten done is your new baseline, because your brain is now practicing attention, stress, sleep, etc even if you fall off the training yeah, yeah, generally most people get permanent if you will long lasting changes for, uh, you know, for a long time.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 30:12

After doing three or four months of neurofeedback, which is like 30 or 40 sessions, that's the classic amount. I mean there's literature showing with ADHD kids, you follow up six months, 12 months, five years and 10 years with stable effects, and the seizure literature, all of the metadata studies stop at a year and they show stable effects up to a year. That's when they stop looking. So I mean it's a pretty robust effect. It's not permanent right away, though. So you have this opportunity to go oh, I didn't like that and let it wear off. Or it's not permanent right away, so you're still suffering with your stress, your anxiety, your OCD, your drinking while you're working through it. But because you're working through it and starting to feel different it is this sort of self-perpetuating thing. You know you feel the effects of you putting the effort in. You're like, okay, no, I want to do this, like teenagers. You know parents like, oh, my 14-year-old won't do this four or five sessions and like what is going on, he asked to do it. Yeah, it feels pretty good.

Marcus Arredondo: 31:09

What is that attributable to? Is it just that the neural pathways have started to create, or there are newer neural pathways that are more?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 31:18

effective. There's new ones and every cell has probably moved around. I mean, plasticity is fairly robust in brains. Just in general we have a lot more than we think we do. Even if you're 70 years old, you're still making 600 or 700 new neurons a day. New neurons, not plasticity, not moving around existing ones. And existing neurons can move pretty much forever, make new processes, make new friends, make new connections. So if I sent you to a piano lesson you don't play piano in one single day. Trying to play piano for half an hour, the hand area on that motor strip would move all its little cells around. Trying to optimize One day, one session and neurofeedback.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 31:59

One session of neurofeedback creates a measurable plasticity effect. Over 24 hours you have this enhanced plasticity. So if you add things like meditation and sleep hacking and you're doing some psychotherapy with your therapist and you're working out in the gym, the neurofeedback starts to lubricate all those things. So I get calls from physical therapists saying what are you doing with my client? She walked in without a cane. Today. I've been working with her for 10 years. Who are you? Oh, okay, great, glad her balance is better, glad her brain injury is shifting. So you get these shifts in brain.

Marcus Arredondo: 32:32

Can we stop on that for a second, because I am curious how does this translate to physicality improvement? I mean, because we're talking more attention, emotion, focus, executive control, but how does that apply to somebody who might be partially paralyzed in a part of their body? Is there any correlation here?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 32:57

Partial paralysis is hard because you probably lost the tissue and it's hard to, you know, rebuild things. But I have had clients, lots of clients brain injuries who have some spasticity or a leg that won't relax, and you train the area and after a couple of sessions the hand relaxes, the leg stops trying to get up and move on its own, so you can get effects there. But generally, once there's significant tissue damage it's a lot harder to make change. So we have reliable changes in things like attention, anxiety, and when I say anxiety I mean PTSD, ocd, social anxiety, sensory anxiety, hypervigilance, rumination All flavors are fairly tractable and you can see them in the brain maps and this is the answer to your question.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 33:40

The reason that it's kind of the same while we get body effects is because your brain is your body, your attention is part, is the way your body's operating like think about how your bicep can flex, your attention is doing something kind of like a resource management where it has abilities to move and it can kind of like tire out and it has certain regulatory ways it tends to operate in best and you have 20, 30, 40 of these cortical areas that have big jobs, big, stable jobs, and if you learn how they work. You can start to stretch them and move them lots of ways, but neurofeedback is pretty quick.

Marcus Arredondo: 34:16

It seems like it would be involuntary how you start to stretch that right. I mean your brain just starts to adapt.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 34:21

Yeah, the training process I mentioned, the neurofeedback, is mostly involuntary shaping.

Marcus Arredondo: 34:26

Yeah, Because what I find so fascinating about this, too, is that, you know, I read a study recently about the. Have you ever seen that magic trick where they put a mirror against somebody's arm and then they put a plastic hand in front of you and then you hit?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 34:43

it with the hammer and you feel the pain.

Marcus Arredondo: 34:45

And so I'm really interested in how this impacts perception, because it seems to me that, you know, how we perceive the world is how we approach everything right, and so two people can see the same environment and have entirely different reactions to it, and I'm going to places like PTSD, for example. How does this work cooperate with how we perceive the world?

Marcus Arredondo: 35:12

And let's say is there an artistry here? Is there something you know? I don't want to say it's like lucid dreaming, but is there a way to say I want to get better in this particular area and sort of focus on that?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 35:26

Yeah, and those areas are all over the place. They're in suffering areas or goal or high performance areas. There's lots of things you can do, so let's break down those two. You know two of those examples you just gave on PTSD type phenomena. We've got a circuit in the back midline of the brain, the posterior cingulate, whose job it is to orient your attention to the outside world, watch the road, heads up, heads up careful, and if it learns the world is not safe. If there's tigers, you live in a jungle and there's tigers, tigers you miss the tiger one time and the brain's like let's allocate some resources, because the cost of missing that twice I'm not going to miss it twice right, let me allocate.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 36:00

And the problem is we get stuck in that mode and then when the posterior cingulate's high in beta, often low in alpha, you'll get a lot of rumination, threat sensitivity, easily activated panic attacks. So it can be pts might just be you ruminate and you're a worrier. Or maybe on a brain map, your posterior cingulate is super hot, but you're an actual lifeguard and it's trained. Or you're a mom with 17 kids and you're fine with all the chaos. It's just strong. I can't tell if it's good or bad. But if I look at your posterior cingulate and say, wow, this is really strong, this tends to be this evaluator and scanner and when it gets like this, we often have a lot of difficulty putting down worries and not being threat sensitive, not ruminating Is that something you're dealing with? And the person most of the time says, yeah, I have a PTSD diagnosis. And we would say, oh, okay, that kind of sucks, sorry, dealing with that, that's so frustrating. But and we would say, oh okay, that kind of sucks, sorry, dealing with that, that's so frustrating. But look it, it's right there. Just that moment, before we do anything, before we've thought about intervention, that moment of like, oh, that real thing that sucks for you, that people can't see. Oh, yeah, right there, there's this incredible relief because people suddenly they're just as in pain, the suffering hasn't changed. But what's really hard to do is be as overwhelmed, as ashamed, as frustrated by it, because you're like, there's the thing, okay, all right, and suddenly it's shifting. It's not happening to you. A doctor didn't give you a label, it's a process. Your posterior cingulate, of course it's strong. You were in a car crash and the brain learned the world isn't especially predictable. Wow, that sucks. Okay, what would success feel like? Relaxing that? Is that in the way? Oh, that's in the way. So then you'd train that down. In six or eight weeks you'd pull the teeth of most of the classic acute PTSD.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 37:46

Or the other example someone comes in and says I'm shut down, I can't find my creative spark, I can't find my juice, I feel kind of wooden and dull and burnt out in my 50s. I don't have any joy. I love my wife, I think, but haven't felt it in a while. You know, all I do when I get home is drink alcohol and watch TV. I don't do anything like you know I want to do. Where's my joy?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 38:08

And then you take people like that and, after working out sleep and stress and attention basics, then you do something called alpha theta neurofeedback which brings you to the moment of the edge of sleep, before you fall asleep. That moment when you have the world's best idea you solve world hunger, you plot your book, you've, you know, solved that problem, and then you fall asleep, so it's gone. But you hold you there for 20 minutes at a time and so ideas start to bubble up and the monkey mind drops away and awareness and insight and this powerful resilience starts to creep in and that technique brings up creativity reliably. It takes the alcoholic who can't fall asleep without a drink and it re-educates the gaba in the brains. The person can decide to fall asleep with no alcohol again. It gives you that deep, soothing, soft, nonlinear awareness and it's a fairly for some people fairly spiritual and ecstatic state as well, like a lot of deep insight.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 39:02

It's kind of a gentle way to release trauma for some people as well, like developmental trauma. It's the core of Dave Asprey's 40 Years of Zen program. It's an alpha theta. That's what he's doing. Mostly is this alpha theta plus a mindfulness kind of instruction around it. Alpha theta is really powerful. It's been used for decades since before the field of neurofeedback really existed. It's been used for alcohol, recidivism and relapse. It's been used for creativity, for trauma. It's a really powerful set. So somebody who wanted to get into that end of things, you'd want to lean into that technique set a bit more.

Marcus Arredondo: 39:37

When you say alpha theta.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 39:38

Well, first of all, can you just define the different the waves when what they mean, sure? So alpha theta is a category of nerve feedback named after two waves alpha and theta. Alpha is a neutral it's the car running in the driveway between the gears and theta is a release. It's like turning the tissue off or letting it move into its automatic mode. Briefly, so it can. Things can happen, like the moment you have a sudden memory aha, that's a burst of theta, a little little release. It opens a floodgate and the thing pops up into your mind. Oh, oh, yeah, there's that thing. That's a theta burst, but so is like squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. I can't sit still and you don't want tonic high levels of it, you want to turn it on and turn it off. I can't sit still and you don't want tonic high levels of it, you want to turn it on and turn it off.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 40:15

Open the floodgate, turn off the floodgate of information, of ideas and alpha theta neurofeedback. You close your eyes, you sit back and both the alpha waves in the visual tissue back here, which you're measuring, they rise with the theta waves as you relax. And then there's that moment when you start to turn off your mind, you start to fall asleep a little bit and at that stage the relaxing alpha actually goes down, goes down into like a more, a low mode and your mind gets clear again, the theta takes off and you're basically on the edge of a dissociative state, but still aware. And it's that hypnagogic access moment that you can get to when falling asleep in prayer and some aspects of meditation. It's that access consciousness, that like you're receiving your mind instead of having your mind, kind of experience and it's really interesting for people to have that, uh, that experience and it can really be powerful. I mean, dave's program is kind of like a shamanic.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 41:11

You know sweat lodge using alpha theta as the core technique and you get the experience. You come back with that like, wow, I can feel that way, I can have emotions, oh, my God, I love my wife. So you have this like, you know, progressive. But you can also take somebody and work through, you know, months of it and take the actor who's no longer funny because they're so stressed and burnt out, who's no longer funny because they're so stressed and burnt out, yeah, the person whose immune system is trashed because of infections, and bring up the t-cells. Uh, you can do you know flow of people that are shut down creatively the same technique alpha theta was used in a microsurgery in 20 30 years ago.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 41:48

Robotic microsurgery was starting to show up and that was. It was still fairly complex back then where, like, you had to like put your hands in gloves and do the surgery. Basically, one single session of neurofeedback in a group of I think 12 surgeons improved their microsurgery techniques. One session, for some reason, probably wasn't a durable change, but you can measure things like this in the literature fairly quickly when you do the technique and in terms of measuring change I mentioned, I do like a two-month program initially.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 42:17

I usually do two rounds of that to get people through what they need, but the first one makes enough change for us to measure. So we go back and do another brain map and a performance test 25 to 35 sessions in for the end of a two-month period. And in things like ADHD on the performance and on the brain those areas I mentioned we see about a standard deviation of change across people. Wow, most of the time in one two-month chunk of time and another one does it again. So if you get two standard deviations of change on a bell curve and you're super, super ADHD, guess what? You can hide it. You can sit quietly in class and listen and you can still be the fastest guy on the pitch or the video game uh competition, because you still have the ability to turn on high theta and be super receptive. But you can also pump the brakes and be like I should sit in history class and listen, or my wife you know what's that regulation it's regulated gives you control over those tissues.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 43:15

Exactly so. Adhd is not a disease process, it's a phenotype. You're stuck in that mode of high theta, maybe high alpha, and if you can learn, literally learn, teach the brain to take more of a range in control. It's kind of like taking a circuit that's a bit cramped and isn't working properly and giving it a range of motion well you.

Marcus Arredondo: 43:34

It seems like you're breaking the default network that we've either learned through conditioning or has been embedded in our own DNA. But there's a breaking of in the conditioning world. You're talking about not having a drink before you go to bed because you've always had that. There is a breaking of that process.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 43:54

Sure, you're directly changing the brain. I mean, you're taking the traits that exist, the tendencies that exist, and you're tuning them. So you can tune them a lot more than you might expect. Yeah.

Marcus Arredondo: 44:06

I want to talk about a couple of other things before we do so. You mentioned alpha and theta.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 44:12

What about beta and gamma? So delta is the slowest one. Delta is down to about, between you know, like two hertz, two cycles per second. Delta is the heartbeat of the brain. Delta runs the background, keeps things moving your heart and lungs, your immune system, your growth, your repair, your deep sleep. Uh, you don't think in delta, you live in delta. Is that the?

Marcus Arredondo: 44:33

only brain wave you might see in somebody who's brain dead or comatose?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 44:38

oh good question. Um, you will see a lot of reduced beta waves and a lot of low amplitude brain waves in general and you might see delta. If the brain stem is still intact and pretty healthy and the cortex is somewhat intact, you might still see Delta. Big, slow Delta, yeah. But when someone's deeply asleep and in that deepest of sleeps you're going to see Delta being strongest right then. But you're also going to see other brainwaves still happening, yeah. So you're not only in Delta, so to speak. In fact, delta is a really cool frequency.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 45:09

When you're deeply asleep it surges hugely and it's a two Hertz wave. It when you're deeply asleep, it surges hugely and it's a two hertz wave. It's twice per second and it literally creates a mechanical fluid wave in the brain, like an agitation cycle of a washing machine and the CSF, the fluid all gets pushed around in a two hertz wave and it pulls out all the toxins, metabolic byproducts, and drains them out into the spine, essentially for flushing. But like a washing machine, you know, you hear a little agitation cycle kick up. The brain does that during delta sleep. That's crazy. So you have these little surges at night and then when you're awake it hangs out in the background and keeps the body moving, the lungs moving the heart, the immune system et cetera happening. So you'll see a little bit of it when you're awake. But if someone has a major concussion, if they have major apnea and they're not sleeping, if they've been exposed to mold or Lyme or had a lot of COVID, you'll see huge amounts of persistent delta or concussion. You know tissue damage. You'll see a persistent blob of delta where the crush happened, because the brain isn't sure what to do so it defaults back into the background frequencies. Or if you shear the brain away from a surrounding part of brain, it runs super fast and really fast.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 46:16

Beta, because there's nothing coming into it to slow it down, no inhibitory interneurons, so delta slow. And then you have theta four to seven, which is like taking your foot off the brake and letting things happen. Um, you have alpha between eight and twelve and that's two things. Eight to ten is slow alpha, which is like the idling, and 10 to 12 is the starting to ramp up before you kick it into gear. Then you have beta from 12 or 13, all the way up to 40, roughly, and that's where your mind lives, mostly Experiences, the thoughts, the sensations, focus, but also sleep is a beta phenomena, largely Like I was saying, the SM smr is somebody with a big monkey mind or, uh, heavy in add higher in the beta waves they can be, but usually they're much, much higher in theta.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 47:03

They're disinhibited, so things kind of bounce around and run really quickly, but the beta is normal or typical. Okay, sometimes you'll see low amounts of beta and average amounts of theta. That also produces impulsivity. So it's either high theta and average beta or average uh theta and low amounts of beta. It's the ratio between them, the ratio of activation tone versus inhibition. Tone is how well you can control the tissue. Essentially, yeah, and that can get in the way. I mean you can have an adhd like thing because you're super tired and you're impulsive, because the debate is too weak to like pump the brakes, or you can have it because your theta is just high all the time, because you're built that way. That's called adhd. And then gamma waves.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 47:48

Gamma is above 38 all the way up to several hundred, and gamma is one of these things in the health and wellness world that you should be suspicious of. Okay, you should put gamma in the same category as the word quantum. You hear it in a health context. Chances are the person's full of it and chances are they don't really understand what they're talking about. At best you know, at best it's stupidity, at worst they're evil. Gamma is really hard to measure in a in a prosumer, even a professional context. Gamma is really really tough, okay, and we know that gamma is also an emergent property of organizing the brain at long distances instantly. Gamma does not seem to be like the generation you know of one little bit of tissue. Instead, gamma emerges from the whole network to talk to other parts of the brain instantaneously, faster than the neural transmission could get there. Hmm, and we know that the relationship of gamma, which is let's call it 40 hertz, which is the gamma that we have some measurement of, and theta, 4 hertz. They nest, they ring together Interesting 10 cycles of theta for one cycle of gamma. And when they're nested we call that consciousness.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 49:05

You give somebody anesthesia and they become unconscious. You break the time relationships of theta and gamma because you change the timing of the microtubules in the neurons. So then you lose consciousness. You can measure the phase relationship of gamma and theta on the forehead in surgery and tell if someone's conscious or not. There's a device called the bispectral index that does this. That used to be all the rage for 20 years in this country. It's got a little bit out of favor, but it's a single forehead with a number on a screen. Anesthesiologist watches it and tells if you're conscious or not. Really really reduced the amount of awake during surgery experiences when that device came in.

Marcus Arredondo: 49:44

So what? What is the definition of consciousness in that regard?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 49:47

awareness, just awareness, momentary awareness. Yeah, yeah, a low c, a little c consciousness, not overarching momentary awareness. Yeah, yeah, low c, little c, consciousness, not overarching identity or conscious.

Marcus Arredondo: 49:55

Yeah yeah, that's interesting. So what about flow? And I'll sort of give a little bit of uh groundwork from where I'm coming from. But I had we we met through aj wilder, who was a guest on the show, who's uh anobatic trick pilot. I mean, that's doing him a huge disservice by describing it, but he is in extraordinary circumstances.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 50:16

He's an athlete. He straps small equipment to himself and throws himself to the end.

Marcus Arredondo: 50:20

Yeah, I had another guest who was an explosive ordnance disposal technician, of disabled roadside bombs. But there was one common thread among both of them, which was when faced with life or death, their heart rates were not at 180. They were at 120. Their focus was supreme. It was almost as though the way they were describing it is, there's really nothing else going on and everything's a little bit slow motion. So there is a moment of zen that they are achieving and I keep going back to that because that to me is maybe the closest representation there a way to achieve some level approaching that level of comfort in certain circumstances, without having to endure life and death circumstances.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 51:21

So I'm dumping a lot on you, but I think it relates to flow.

Marcus Arredondo: 51:23

So I'm just curious your perspective on this.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 51:26

I mean for those. That type of flow is an intensity driven flow and I would say that you know you don't have to be an ultra marathon or diving off of lifts to experience it. You might experience it playing a video game, because it's super intense and you're like feeling it. You just know when that guy's going to move. You know the pattern. You're in the zone. Yeah, doesn't take a lot of conscious thought to direct and push it. It feels somewhat effortlessless, but it's also a little bit creative. It has an awareness.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 51:58

Without a strong focus right, all of these people that are in those intense experiences, what they're doing is shutting off theta. The mind is now apprehending the world very powerfully. It's locking into the world very, very powerfully. So those flow states are actually not dissolved attention states. Those are actually, fairly, those are absorbed attention states. Attention can be an awareness state, watching things flow by a single point awareness, where you're absorbed, where you're concentrated. Those ones you mentioned, those flow states are much more of an absorbed state.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 52:29

Stockbroker, who's crushing it? The video game guy who's in a competition yeah, the guy's hurtling down a mountainside on a mountain bike trying to keep himself from dying as he tries to beat everyone else behind him. That's a high activation state, very fast brainwaves, very fast, beta, large amounts of beta, shutting off beta and it actually feels very slow inside. Yeah, of beta shutting off beta and it actually feels very slow inside. Yeah, because you know, think about if you're driving a 12 cylinder ferrari down the highway versus a you know four cylinder, you know honda, your foot's in a different place on the floor, yeah, like you're, you're sat back in that ferrari and you're and you're powerful, but you're chill doing it, you're blown by all the other cars versus like you know. Know, right now the latter state is not flow. Yes, the former one is to bring up the power and to answer your question, how to get there? It's a mix of executive function and creativity work.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 53:22

So those, those beta wave areas, the precentral gyri and the alpha theta, the awareness, the visualization, the creativity, because as you do more and more of those creativity protocols, you get more reliable access to shift into that mode where you kind of reach and pull out of that nonlinear state or allow the wellspring to start bubbling up ideas, then turn it off, go back to doing your taxes, whatever.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 53:44

So you have this ability to shift in and out. I would argue that's more important than can you get absorbed. Can you find the thing to put you in that state important than can you get absorbed? Can you find the thing right to put you in that state? Well, can you get there when you need to, when you're having a rough day, or your partner was a jerk, you didn't sleep that well, you didn't have your coffee. Can you still go to work and be a leader in that mode, because that's you know, like, where's the, where's the utility of it? Not just can we get access to states, but can you get reliable control like you said, regulatory control over what you're doing?

Marcus Arredondo: 54:16

Well, and I'm curious if you have a take on this, but I'm glad that you mentioned this comparison between the Ferrari and the Honda to me, because a lot of this actually seems to contribute to willpower. And hear me out here for a second, which is that, in order to do certain actions, you mentioned a teenager who didn't want to take out the trash, who now is willing to do so, because that, to me, is less resistance in taking an action, and when there's less resistance, you don't use as much willpower to achieve that outcome.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 54:45

Yeah, I think it was activation energy in ADHD. Adhd is a high theta state and the brain really, really wants stimulus and when the stimulus is high that brain is sort of operating in its sweet spot. Like somebody who has severe adhd is going to be a horrible accountant and an amazing crisis worker. Right, you know, I put them in the case where the patterns are changing all the time and they have to be on and it's intense and it's, you know, life or death or super fun. And that's when you get the highest performance out of somebody's adhd, because the environment can direct the executive function when you're required to direct it yourself from inside with low activation.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 55:25

This is why you can't get the kid to come from the tv to dinner, because it's stepping down that and the theta is going to surge. It's going to feel like you're wrenching stimulus away from the brain. So you teach a teenager or a 45 year old that that is happening. This is why you're frustrated, don't want to get up and do your work because, because you're high stimulus, you have to go to a lower activation state and then decide. You know that's hard but if you give the brain the ability, oh, I should do the trash your mom. You know, mom says do the trash and the theta. Just on the ask from the mom, the theta goes down. The person anchors to the thought and goes oh, that's interesting. Not, it's going to take me away from the absorption I have right now.

Marcus Arredondo: 56:09

Right, well, the taking away to me is the resistance right, the resistance to do something, and I think that I suffer from small tasks that I just don't want to do. But, and though I can't, I haven't gone through your program, but the closest thing I can sort of liken it to is meditation for weeks and months and months where I don't find it myself resisting, doing some of those smaller things that took a lot of energy for me to do before, but maybe less so.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 56:40

And meditation brings up the beta on that left side. It helps you learn to initiate, sustain follow through tasks.

Marcus Arredondo: 56:48

What has all of this? You have such a wealth of information on the brain. How has this influenced you on yourself as a patient of your own?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 56:58

Well, I mean, the reason I'm doing neurofeedback now and the reason I probably have a PhD in neuroscience was because I would hang out after hours in a neurofeedback center I worked at 25 years ago. It was an autism center that did mostly neurodevelopmental and autistic spectrum work with some, you know, pretty impaired people and I had done a lot of very acute work in psychiatric hospitals and residential facilities with autism and other developmental things, working with really, really deep suffering across human experiences. And I got this job working in an autism center those outpatient doing neurofeedback. I was kind of curious about what this stuff was. So I ended up getting a job there and within about three or four weeks my mind was blown because I was seeing changes and I had I had a decade of experience working with people like this and, as far as I knew, couldn't really make change. It managed suffering. I mean couldn't really make change, it managed suffering. I mean I ran a group home for folks that had no language. I think everyone in the group home was both blind and deaf and developmentally disabled and like I learned four different versions of tactile sign for that house and I spent a year teaching a guy to use a fork. That was. Our big accomplishment was, you know, behavioral training so we can go out to the restaurant and not make a mess. But he didn't care and I'm sure when I left that house they didn't reinforce the use of the fork and he probably stopped and it was, like you know, very small change.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 58:21

I had like a decade of working with huge suffering and almost no change, and I was good at it. So I was good at going in and soothing suffering and calming down people that were violent and, you know, help people understand how what they're dealing with. This is before my neuro degree. But I was super ADHD, like the worst you've ever seen. Take the most hyperactive 10 year old and multiply it, you know. And that's me and it was and I was, you know, in the seventies and eighties, before it was kind of a thing. So it wasn't medicated and it wasn't labeled. I was just this wild man and I got through college and then this is after college that I'm doing this job. I started seeing people change. I'm like this doesn't make sense. This is amazing. I'm intrigued.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 59:06

So I paid the fee to have my own brain data analyzed by the service we used. It was 400 bucks back then and my boss gave me some you know some orientation around things that might be interesting to work on and I would just hang out after hours and do random things to my brain, which I don't recommend, by the way. It's good to have some like more guidance than that. But I managed to do about 18 sessions in a row of ADHD types of things, and I remember like a month and a half after I started I was like whoa, okay, it's kind of quiet in my head and things are. I can wow, I slept great last night and then from then on essentially kind of built up the point where I finally noticed it and a bunch of other weird things happen, like I trained down some of some the, the selector, the anterior cingulate uh, mine had tons of theta, front midline theta, which happens in all kinds of things that are like tick things like ocd or songs in your head or nail biting. I bit my nails for the time I was like six months old up until my mid-20s, and I trained down the theta and six weeks later noticed that I had fingernails and had to go buy clippers because I was getting in the way of typing. Like what the heck, when did I stop doing what? Yeah, that's incredible, after years of never being able to stop, and you know, growing up, being, you know, told not to it changed my brain. It just kind of shifted and the ADHD change, the executive function change, was so significant that I sort of felt like I could finally go back and do grad school and I could decide what to do.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:00:37

And so at the time, in the field of neurofeedback, there was these three schools of thought about how this stuff worked that did not agree with each other at all. And this is back before the internet and the use net, you know, forums and things and really, really vitriolic scientists yelling at each other in these little tiny forums, you know, really aggressive. And yet all the schools of thought were getting better effects than most traditional psychiatry and this really struck me as a blind man and elephant situation. So I went back to grad school and studied how neurofeedback worked and did a placebo, controlled, double blind study looking at how the brain was in real time reacting to the neurofeedback, to figure out. Well, it proved that it worked. But be to figure out how it actually worked, because it was all theoretical up until that point. Yeah, and so I demonstrated the brain actually knows when you're plotting certain brain waves. Look at that. There it is in a blinded uh, placebo-controlled context, and that was, I mean, I did one of the first double blind studies in neurofeedback and I did the research in 2010, I think, so the field is still pretty new. Yeah, we discovered it in the mid 60s on cats. It was used in humans throughout the 70s and 80s and it probably started to really get big in the mid 60s on cats. It was used in humans throughout the 70s and 80s and it probably started to really get big in the 2000s.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:01:55

When I was applying to grad school in the 90s, I had to be careful using the word neurofeedback or biofeedback, where the eyes started to roll, you know, yeah, and nowadays you know, when I was at UCLA, I had this experience where my first couple of years, I was that weird guy doing biofeedback. I had this experience where my first couple of years, I was that weird guy doing biofeedback and then the next couple of years, all the senior scientists at UCLA's psychology department were like, hey, your research is pretty cool. Can you use my instrument when doing your research? Yeah, yeah, so these really, really high in cognitive neuroscience were getting into my geekery, which was pretty awesome, and there's been a sea change. We know that it works a little bit now, even if it's somewhat, you know, mysterious still to most people what are some of the biggest changes you've seen in yourself?

Marcus Arredondo: 1:02:36

and I know we're coming up on time, so we'll bring this into a close I mean I've for myself.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:02:40

I had a huge change in executive function. Um, I see changes in people. I mean all the time. I do at least 20 brain map reviews every week with people, yeah, and at least half of those are brand new and half of them are repeats. I reliably see, in a couple months, in reliably see huge changes in ocd, ptsd, adhd, sleep issues, seizures, migraines, bedwetting, sensory. You know just so many things. So it ends up being more.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:03:09

For me, it's not about the change anymore, it's about the perspective. It's about well, hey, I saw you're suffering, but it's just your brain, don't worry about it, it's just in your head. It's also in your head Like you can figure it out. Right, the brain's not as mysterious as we think it is. You can see your ADHD. You can see your anxiety in your brain maps. You can see your dysregulated sleep. It's jumping out there. It is Okay, it's yours. What do you want to do with it? So that's the real soapbox is don't just let the suffering happen to you. Figure out more deeply what's going on, because there's always things you can do. Shift happens Back to agency. That's right, shift happens. Get some agency, get yours.

Marcus Arredondo: 1:03:49

What do you think is the one thing that is misrepresented or misunderstood about this field?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:03:58

The literature is a bit weak. The research literature, yeah, and if you read, there's over a thousand papers, 1,200, 1,500 papers out there on neurofeedback, and if you read them all you'll be confused, because about half to two thirds are like this stuff's amazing, it eliminates ADHD, it drops seizures, it makes people not want to drink. And the other half are like meh. And so then you'll find a couple of people that are like ADHD experts, getting on a soapbox saying this stuff doesn't work. But they're not neurofeedback people and they've made a big, big mistake when they say that the neurofeedback in the literature is not the neurofeedback that's done in the clinics.

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:04:37

It's iterative, it's personal training. You do a little bit, check it out, you shift and the place you end up for somebody could be really, really different than where you started, because you're adjusting as you go and you don't do that in the literature. Also, all the studies are short courses, small groups, small numbers of people. So like, if you're already believing it and you read the literature, you're like oh my god, why is no one else doing this? Why are we all doing this?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:05:03

but if you're skeptical and you read the literature, you're like see, I told you yeah yeah, so, but I'll tell you, give me 10 skeptics who completely don't believe that brain mapping is a thing and nerve doesn't work. 10 skeptics I will map their brains, I will cold read, with no history, stress, sleep, attention, moods, whatever else is going on, and I will be right like 90 percent of the time or better. Yeah, for all of my guesses. So I challenge any deep skeptic out there to reach out and you know, we'll, we'll, we'll tell you about yourself without you telling me.

Marcus Arredondo: 1:05:35

Well, we could. I could talk to you for hours, hopefully, uh, maybe someday we can have you back, because this has been hyper illuminating. Uh, I love the work that you're doing. Any um last thoughts or things you think I might've missed?

Dr. Andrew Hill: 1:05:47

No, no, I think we got we covered a lot, of, a lot of good stuff. Yeah, my message is about taking control and learning yourself, so thanks for giving me the opportunity to stand in that soapbox a little bit.

Marcus Arredondo: 1:05:58

Well, really grateful to have you on. Thanks for coming. My pleasure, my pleasure, thanks. Thanks for listening. For a detailed list of episodes and show notes, visit scalesofsuccesspodcastcom. If you found this conversation engaging, consider signing up for our newsletter, where we go even deeper on a weekly basis, sharing exclusive insights and actionable strategies that can help you in your own journey. We'd also appreciate if you subscribed, rated or shared today's episode. It helps us to attract more illuminating guests, adding to the list of enlightening conversations we've had with New York Times bestsellers, producers, founders, ceos, congressmen and other independent thinkers who are challenging the status quo. You can also follow us for updates, extra content and more insights from our guests. We hope to have you back again next week for another episode of Scales of Success. Scales of Success is an Edge West Capital Production.