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Episode 20- Rhythmic attention with Andrew Haigh
416 Plays1 month ago
How can squiggly lines on a page reveal the secrets of attention, consciousness and ADHD?
Follow Andrew Haigh, psychologist, and his willing sidekicks Max and Tess on a mindbending journey!
Here's Andrew's paper: Rhythmic Attention and ADHD: A Narrative and Systematic Review - PubMed
And one about information integration and consciousness: An information integration theory of consciousness | BMC Neuroscience | Full Text
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Growth of Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello. Hello. Welcome to the ADHD Science Podcast. Oh, welcome back if you've been listening to our other episodes. Yes, indeed. We have some recurring listeners. In fact, quite a lot of recurring listeners and the listenership, I don't obsess about it, but it is, you know, creeping up quite nice. We've got, you know, thousands of downloads. No need to flex. We do, well, we do want people to listen and we want people, I mean, the most important thing you can do is to tell people about it if you like it. What a mouth.
00:00:36
Speaker
ah Word of mouth is the most powerful thing. We don't advertise particularly. Also, like who would trust us? We're the people who make the podcast. like we If someone came up to you and went, I make the best podcast in the world, you'd be like, yeah, okay. If someone said to you, these people make the best podcast in the world, which we do, you'd be more likely to take their word for that.
Interview with Andrew Haig
00:00:55
Speaker
I think that's true anyway so please do tell your friends if you have spread the word yeah if you would like to spread the word about ADHD science and how important it is we'll be going global like this person very good Australian Yes, Andrew Haig from Australia. um Andrew talked to lot of to us about attention and what he really did was dive into what attention actually is yeah and in doing so sort of talked a bit about what consciousness is which is kind of where he came into the subject. It's just a really fascinating chat.
00:01:30
Speaker
a lot of great time A lot of the chats we have are kind of practically based on how how we treat things and how we prevent stuff um but this was very much more kind of well what does it mean to be attention and that was fascinating and that's definitely got its place so um I don't think there's anything else we need to particularly say no let's get on with listening to mainly listening to Andrew and also some of us go ahead Andrew bye
00:01:58
Speaker
OK, welcome. Welcome. um We're welcome. We're welcomed. We are joined by Andrew Haig. Andrew did his masters at Townsville University in Queensland. And Townsville, by the way, looks lovely. But he also lives in Queensland, which looks even lovelier and works in rehabilitation as a psychologist. Welcome, Andrew.
00:02:17
Speaker
Thank you. Lovely to be here. ah So we're just going to crack on and go. We've been, we've been chatting offline quite a bit, so we're going to crack on and ask about your research. Okay. Okay. Let's dive right in. So in your research, what question were you answering?
00:02:34
Speaker
um Well i was I was looking at links between um ADHD obviously and this particular type of attention called rhythmic attention which is quite a new idea so a lot of people probably haven't ever heard about it before but it's um it's looking at attention on a micro temporal scale so on really small timescales of about 200 milliseconds which is about a fifth of a second and seeing how does attention move on those really fine scales and over the last couple of decades there's been a fair bit of interest in this and um some researchers have done some really well designed experiments and they've found that actually our attention does vary on those timescales so there's actually ah a definite sort of rhythm to attention that runs out about that one fifth of a second kind of pulse.
EEG Studies on Rhythmic Attention
00:03:28
Speaker
um Where you can see variability in people's you know the sort of stuff that they'll notice or how much information they'll take in the kind of peaks about you know 200 milliseconds and peaks again about 400 and peaks again like that ah we saw discussions about this before but how do you measure attention.
00:03:48
Speaker
yeah Well that's the really tricky thing and um it gets into a field called psychophysics which um is a branch of psychology which looks at perceptual um kind of thresholds. So it's ah it's the field of psychophysics that tells us things like ah ah how much how how much colour variation will will will be needed before you all decide that a colour is red as opposed to orange, for example, you know, just by creeping it up slowly, doing it hundreds and hundreds of times and then the person reports it's orange, or a sound, you know, with ah
00:04:25
Speaker
You're just playing a sound really, really quietly and they don't report anything. And then all of a sudden they report they heard a sound. So you're sort of finding out what their perceptual thresholds are. So that's psychophysics. It gets much more complicated than that. And in in that field of psychophysics, um we found or some researchers found ways that they can actually look at um attention on that on that time scale with really well designed um perceptual ah experiments. It's amazing this to think that you can tell the difference between different millisecond phases of how
Andrew's Research Journey
00:05:06
Speaker
well you're perceiving things. It's kind of astonishing, isn't it?
00:05:09
Speaker
It is, yeah. I think there's some really brilliant work has been done in this area. um I actually did my and undergraduate, um my honors um thesis on on another field of psychophysics, time perception. um So I was sort of familiar with you know how difficult it is to do psychophysical research. And really, really you know this is sort of next level in terms of how sophisticated these research paradigms are.
00:05:38
Speaker
and And so just to be clear, you were looking at ah rhythmic attention. What was your actual quest? What was the thing that you were trying to find out? Well, that's a bit of a long story.
Types of Scientific Reviews
00:05:48
Speaker
I don't want to end up still here in an hour, sort of just telling you this much. But I i was originally interested in um consciousness.
00:06:00
Speaker
um So I came to kind of consciousness and attention like how are those two things kind of connected um and that's what I wanted to do for my undergraduate um ah thesis but luckily um I kind of got talked out of that and e a career right there yeah yeah yeah and then um after I did my undergraduate degree here in Australia you do ah um an honors and then you do your actual training to become a psychologist as a master's degree and I could have gone you know down the research and
00:06:33
Speaker
sort of rabbit hole and become you know a researcher and um or or I could have gone off and trained as a psychologist and those two things sort of tossed up in my mind for a while and I ended up going down the psychologist training route so I never got to sort of follow that kind of question um to where I wanted to take it. um So then this was when when I got to the end of my psychology training we also have to do a slightly shorter thesis and I thought well this is probably a good opportunity for me to at least you know answer a little bit of this question that I had. Maybe pick a a low-hanging fruit and in the area of rhythmic attention research and just find out what are the sort of the overlaps between rhythmic attention and ADHD. Do they kind of speak to each other in any way? So it was a very broad question that I really wanted to keep as open as possible so that I would capture um any any connection at all. um And what you did was a review of existing papers, just to be clear.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's correct. Initially I did a narrative review and then unfortunately my supervisors told me you actually have to do a systematic review as well. You can't get away with just doing a narrative review, which I was very annoyed about because I was very busy at the time. So then I had to actually set up a systematic review as a fair bit more intensive than a narrative review and I had to set up a specific question.
00:08:03
Speaker
go through the um research. And so the paper that you have read is a combination of those two, the the narrative and the systematic. I enjoyed the narrative review much more than I enjoyed the systematic review, as you can probably guess. Yeah, I'm just briefly pausing. maybe say Effectively, a narrative review, just to be really simplistic for kind of lay audience is basically you you will go through and you'll find things just instinctive that almost instinctively are useful and interesting to your question and your look through in that way. And you follow links and rabbit holes to kind of find you know what's actually interesting to you but a systematic review you have to be systematic you have to you know write a question find everything in the entire literature which is pertains to that question so it's a much more labor intensive way of going about reviewing the literature and but it's
00:09:00
Speaker
Considered more robust is fair to say, isn't it? Much more robust, yeah. Because you have to demonstrate that you've actually covered all of the literature and that there isn't any anything you know that's been hidden in in a corner that you didn't see that might maybe disprove your thesis. Yeah. Yeah.
00:09:18
Speaker
e OK. So our next question is, what did you find in your ah multiple analyses?
Theta Waves and ADHD
00:09:28
Speaker
if Well, the most interesting thing for me that I found was actually came out of the narrative review. And that was um ah or probably should backtrack. And there's the element of electrophysiology um as well that I probably should explain where um a lot of the research that had been done on um on ne rhythmic attention was actually EEG studies. So, you know, where you're connecting all those electrodes, people's brains. and yeah measuring the brainwave patterns um and sort of correlating that with the psychophysical um paradigms that I was talking about before to try and find out is is that brainwave activity varying on ah on a similar scale to the way that the um the person's performance on the perceptual task is performing, um is varying.
00:10:21
Speaker
and they did find very good correlations between that and the um a lot of the ADHD research as well has looked at um brainwave pens. There's a a lot of research there and looking at EEG and um so I thought well probably a ah way into looking at this So finding a link between these two is actually looking at these EEG um studies and trying to find out whether, ah um you know, the either of them or they they're sort of describing similar things. So in the narrative review, I looked at um three three different types of EEG study and I've
00:10:57
Speaker
i found there that there was this trend in both of um theta range variations. So in in the um rhythmic attention literature as I've mentioned before it's it's at about a 200 200 hertz, sorry, 200 millisecond kind of peak, so every 200 milliseconds. And that comes out to about what they call a theta range in EEG. So that's about seven cycles a second, seven to 10 cycles a second. Sorry, four to eight.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yes, it's probably was just briefly pausing and that there's a lot to be said about ah EEG interpretation. But broadly speaking, there's a number of different. If you look at the wiggly lines on the on an EEG, if you probably most people have seen it. And if you can't see it, if you haven't seen it, just Google it very quickly. There's a number of different wiggly lines. And what they do is they pick out The frequency and amplitude, i.e. the depth of all of the different lines that are going on that are almost like patterns superimposed upon each other to make this picture, in a sense. I mean, I know I'm simplifying things. And so the speeds of waves are patterns that can be extracted from the noise of waves which are around the same frequency as we're talking about with attention. So, yes.
00:12:25
Speaker
go carry on. Yeah and that that was the the key finding in in the EEG ADHD literature, um we have to be careful we don't drown in acronyms, is that ADHD is associated with this stronger theta signal, ah especially ah in the front of the brain and what the rhythmic attention research found is that rhythmic attention is also associated with a theta sort of level variation or the theta rate variation in attentional acuity and um that theta rhythm when they looked at the whole brain they were finding it's more in the front of the brain where they're seeing that theta rhythm that's associated and that tends to be time locked to that variation in perceptual acuity.
00:13:15
Speaker
yes okay i mean there's a lot of big words and there's this rhythm there's a brain wave rhythm in the brain called the theta which seems to lock with when your attention is up or down over the course of that if you think about one second of experience your theta wave that is in your brain seems to be reflecting the how how high or low your attention is at that particular millisecond.
Rhythmic Attention in ADHD
00:13:45
Speaker
Yes. Okay. Okay. And then when you're looking at the, you're finding the same correlations on a much smaller scale and that's the rhythmic.
00:13:58
Speaker
Well, that's that's the rhythmic attention is basically the up and down of attention. And we're saying that the theta waves are the same as rhythmic attention, that that they are ah that that that they're a graphical representation and an electrical representation. Yeah, but that's what I'm saying is that the distinction. I don't know if I've got this wrong, but the distinction I thought was that the time scale that you were looking at it on.
00:14:22
Speaker
um The timescales are always at the sort of second level, as in the less than a second or yeah several times a second, these things are happening. Yeah. Okay. And are you all right? The distinction between the different waves yeah is the timescales. Well, that's what I was saying. Okay. Sorry. My mistake. Okay, good. Excellent. It's good to flesh that out because it's it's a really tricky point and it's really easy to get confused because there's a lot of variables there and a lot of difficult concepts as well. yeah Yes. So you guys are doing a good job. what i mean So the you've said that time theta variability is is it's higher or you know there's more theta variability or there's some some distinctive features of theta waves in ADHD. Can you just
00:15:15
Speaker
kind of can you just drill into that a little bit and just say well what is it that's different about the the activity in ADHD people and what does that mean for their attention? Yeah um so what what you said before was really good Max where we we were sort of describing all of these different waves that are happening in the brain and there's mathematical processes that they do where they kind of extract um from From all these jiggly lines um they kind of extract what waveforms are the strongest in there um and and then they can sort of give a percentage to each kind of frequency of of um oscillation.
00:15:56
Speaker
um so and the And there's um software that does that um for you so you don't, luckily you don't have to do it yourself. So you you wire someone up to an EEG headset and you record EEG for a while and then it'll tell you, okay, theta is maybe stronger than, or at this location in the brain, theta's maybe stronger, alpha's a little bit weaker, um delta's maybe weaker, and then gamma's the weakest, you know, something like that. so
00:16:27
Speaker
the theta waves are the strongest in this particular part of the brain um and so when you do that to someone with ADHD um you find that their theta signal tends to be stronger whereas when you do that um or or when you when you do that with ADHD and compare it with someone who doesn't have ADHD the person with ADHD will tend to have a stronger theta signal statistically on average so it's not so overwhelming that you know it really jumps out on an individual basis but when you study lots of people you see this trend and that that was what I found in the narrative review was
00:17:05
Speaker
um And it's it's pretty well known um that the theta does tend to dominate in ADHD in the EEG. So the idea is that people with ADHD, sorry, the rhythmic attention of people with ADHD is more pronounced. So our attention is more rhythmic than other people's attention. The variability is greater.
00:17:32
Speaker
that's no not the variability just the but more pronounced so that's the that's the conclusion that I drew from that as well that somehow these peaks are kind of deeper um so um in terms of you know like your actual perceptual experience you can imagine that um I don't know if you've ever noticed or watched your um um, saccades, visual saccades happening. They, that's your, your eyes kind of tend to sort of search around. Um, if you walk into a new room, um, so one nice way of describing what saccades is if you watch somebody watching a train go by that their eyes will go flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. Right. Retrack onto, onto the, whatever they're looking at. Yeah.
00:18:19
Speaker
Or um you know if you sit someone down in front of a and a novel image that they haven't seen before, their eyes will search around that. And those those visual saccades tend to happen at about um that same kind of theater rate. um So you can actually notice um by watching those saccades how deeply, how much information you take in with each little snapshot that you take from that picture.
00:18:49
Speaker
So um later on in the paper I sort of got, you know, stuck into that idea where, also linking it with the idea of um something called, oh dear, that's dropped out of my brain, thinking about where um people are um really like getting really super hyper focused that's the word that i'm trying to find um so um in hyper focus the whole world sort of tunnels in yeah you're not really aware of what's going on around you so you can think of that as being like a really that those peaks are really really high and there's not really a lot of space for other stuff to kind of be coming into the into the picture um and that's definitely something that we
00:19:41
Speaker
Anecdotally, and and the research does tell us that is strong. Yeah, because again, and anecdotally, there is sort of the idea that people with ADHD can extract a lot of information visually very quickly. Yeah. From a map or from a diagram or something, just going boom, boom, boom, boom, okay, got it. Move on. Do you think that that is could be related to this greater depth of the peaks and troughs of rhythmic attention? Yeah, that was that was what ah where I was kind of heading in terms of um my the way I was kind of understanding the results of this narrative review. But I didn't i didn't really draw that out. Actually, in the and the actual, um the one that I submitted and got marked, I really drew that out. um But through the process of submission, a lot of that stuff kind of got taken out of the paper just to
00:20:37
Speaker
make it a bit more readable and a little bit less um kind of um theoretical. But that wasn't your implication in a sense. Yeah. when my My original kind of question was sort of looking at, I don't know if you've heard of a theory of consciousness called um information integrated information theory, um which is the idea that um consciousness and information are somehow ah two so two sides of the same coin. So the the the way that the brain actually creates consciousness is through this thing that they call integrated information. It's one of the sort of of of all the different theories of consciousness and what makes consciousness. That's one of the ah most commonly kind of um discussed ones. And I was sort of interested in how that um that information that becomes consciousness is actually shaped across the perceptual field.
00:21:32
Speaker
in terms of describing attention, you know, like the density of that information. So yeah attention sort of describes a kind of ah a dense area in the center of your whole perceptual field where you've got a lot of information concentrated in a small amount of space. um And to me, those, those kind of theta peaks were sort of telling me something about that, but I, yeah, it would be a PhD, attention rather than deficit, which is really interesting in a way. Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:01
Speaker
Because it's completely opposite to how we think of ADHD as a kind of deficit of sustained attention. But what you're saying is that, in a sense, potentially, the attention is more intense, just just kind of, I don't know, um which is, why is that good move now one which is why it's a superpower. Yeah, but I suppose the question is, therefore, if is there anything, because we can kind of explain the ability of ADHD people to really take in information really quickly on the basis of these theta waves, in a sense, we can connect to that. Can we connect to the problems with attention? I mean, because if we're not deny I can't deny that there are problems with attention in ADHD. So is there any connection between what you found and in around the theta waves and the and the depth the increased depth of those and the problems with attention in ADHD?
Implications for ADHD Management
00:22:55
Speaker
I mean, that might be a step too far, but
00:22:59
Speaker
Well I think it's a really good question. This was outside of the scope of this paper just because all I was really looking for was you know what are the connections that just so a very early scoping review kind of thing and then um forced it you know get back into the nitty-gritty and really dig into a ah few papers that in the narrative review doesn't really give a very um conclusive answer that there isn't really a very clear picture. but Just a big problem is that a lot of the research on ADHD has been conducted on children.
00:23:33
Speaker
um Whereas all of the research on rhythmic attention has been conducted on adults. So there wasn't really a lot of research that I could sort of draw where I was actually looking at specific overlaps there. So um the narrative review didn't really give me a very clear picture. But that's definitely a question that I would i would like to answer myself. I think, you know, when when you're thinking about, you know, like,
00:23:58
Speaker
ri a lot more information being contained and in attention. You're also thinking that that's probably going to be much harder to control. It's it's going to require a lot more skill yeah to to control that. And um that's where possibly some of the problems come in for folks. That's a really good point, isn't it? Because it's not it's almost an overwhelm and the overwhelmers have It's almost too much because there's too much going into your brain that you're not necessarily able to pay attention to any one thing any one thing or a particularly something that's less stimulating. Because there's so much else there and you've got this, I know I could go going on about the hungry brain, but it kind of fits with the hungry brain, doesn't it? They're kind of the more intense attention
00:24:51
Speaker
fluctuations may lead to more intense need for that to be fed in some sense. Um, I don't know. It's very speculative, but it just it's interesting how I think that might be why I when I read, you know, when I read the paper and saw the paper, I was like, Oh, yeah, yeah, we're going to talk about this. Thanks. I think that might be part of it is is it's is it kind of it's tantalizing, isn't it sort of goes to potentially one of the fundamental things about the condition, but we're not we're not quite there yet.
00:25:23
Speaker
and And it is a very speculative paper so um you can be forgiven for speculating good because I think the whole idea is of it is to really feed speculation and get people thinking about you know something that not many people have thought about before. Yeah, I think that leads on to our third question. exactly What does this mean for people um looking after ADHD people so that can be, you know t you talked about the research a lot of research being conducted on children.
00:25:52
Speaker
That can be teachers during school. That can be therapists. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think specular speculating what might differences in rhythmic attention mean for teachers and clinicians. Well, I think I'm understanding how how detailed the problem of attention actually is like the that we often will talk of attention as if it's this kind of continuous thing that works over minutes or hours. you know That person just didn't pay much attention to my whatever it was that I said you know that took maybe a minute. There was maybe a sentence that I said, and they didn't pay any attention to it. um But actually, that person might have jumped in and out of that sentence 20 times. And during that time, they might have jumped in and out of like five other different things.
00:26:47
Speaker
ah I don't know what mean yeah you It's a familiar picture, isn't it? And so for the person listening you know or the for the person talking, they they're seeing your eyes shooting around all over the place and seeing how you've only picked up certain pieces of the information they've told you. And they'll say, you're not listening to me, but really, you're you're listening very intently, but you're only getting snapshots. And so if you can maybe repeat that a few more times, I'll get more of it.
00:27:18
Speaker
um which is, you know, what what the recommendations are, but also um if that person can learn to just keep like, you know, take a little few of those other things out of the picture that they're also processing at the same time, and you know, just like all these things happen sort of, they're not outside of our awareness, but we don't actually have the language to explain what's going on.
00:27:46
Speaker
So we we we can't sort of it intuit you know exactly what's going on to that sort of level. But once you actually start watching these processes happening, then you can get a little bit more control over them and maybe pull pull a couple of the things that you're trying to process at the same time out of the picture so that you've got maybe 60% of your resources going into what the person's telling you rather than only 20 or 30, which you you often can get away with.
00:28:14
Speaker
And also specifically in like a teaching environment, it might be good to just like have the information like written up on a board somewhere so that it's constant. Because I know it's happened to me many times where I've zoned out while the teacher has been giving a conversation has been giving like instructions. And maybe I've you know, I've been zoning in and out I've caught ah a little bit but not enough and then I'm too embarrassed to ask what I'm supposed to be doing because they just told us. and You just need one piece of information but if you ask a question they explain the whole thing again and you look like an idiot. Exactly and then I might not even get it that second time you know. Yeah I mean i in my job I've done hundreds of so ah classroom observations diagonally and I'm not there to examine the teacher obviously.
00:29:00
Speaker
But the thing that always strikes me is how long teachers require quite young children to listen to because these the instructions need to be quite long because they're quite precise. So do this and then do this and then do this and don't do that. And remember to do that. And but and think you know these are like six year olds kind of looking at them going. um Yeah, there's no I don't just just don't think it's a massive surprise that people struggle to to retain long pieces of verbal information. Just don't know.
00:29:34
Speaker
and And everybody's attention is scattered um to a certain extent. And when you're talking about, you know, young people, that's even more more the case. So, you know, we're not only talking about ADHD here, it's something that probably everybody experiences to some certain degree. Yeah, of course, it's just this question of degree and and and and it becoming, ah well, pathological is the wrong word, maladaptive for some people becomes a problem.
00:30:04
Speaker
I mean, we've already had some sort of like speculation already about you talking about um how this can impact, you know, your lack of attention. um But how would you say that? What would you say that this means for ADHD people themselves? Well, it's it's pretty similar. But luckily for the ADHD person themselves, they can actually watch these processes happening in real time. um So Once you get ah once he hit an insight into how much processing you're doing and how quickly you're doing it, that can really help you to get in there and really start you know working with the mechanisms in a direct more direct way.
Controversial Treatments: Biofeedback
00:30:49
Speaker
um Also, um there are some quite um kind of controversial treatments that claim to be able to change these sort of brainwave patterns. i haven't
00:31:02
Speaker
had a chance to look at them enough to be able to um you know say yay or nay. and I know that. Are people doing biofeedback? Yeah, biofeedback, neurofeedback, that that whole kind of field. um Do you want to explain what what that is? I feel like I've talked a lot. Well, I have to be careful because I don't really know that much about it. um but But basically the idea is that you're you're connected to an EEG.
00:31:31
Speaker
um machine and you're given tasks that help to teach your brain to reduce certain brainwave frequencies and increase others. So it's it's because um ADHD, the association between ADHD and theta is pretty well established.
00:31:52
Speaker
um A lot of these will target theta and try and bring down um bring down the strength of the theta. So it's basically you you might hear and not some nice music um and when your brain starts producing you know over a certain threshold of theta,
00:32:10
Speaker
um the music turns into a nasty noise and and then I'm completely making this up by the way so anyone who actually goes near a feedback is probably... or maybe they're playing a computer game you know and when your brain starts generating too much theater it it doesn't work or something. your your Your rocket starts to fall apart or something? Something like that, yes. Then the brain slowly learns, oh I get i get rewarded if I bring theta down a little bit. um Anecdotally these have people people have told me before that they've found these kinds of treatments really effective.
EEG and Consciousness Research
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah um and I think we need to go back, we probably need to do an episode with something about neurofeedback because it's something that
00:32:58
Speaker
has had its day in the sun in ADHD terms a few years ago. And I think one of the problems was when they did, so anecdotally, as you say, on an individual basis, some people find it really helpful. But I think if you apply it broadly without personalising it to the individual, then the and in in ah in a study, then the studies lose their ability to show benefit because they're almost too robust they're too robust and too ah uniform in their intervention. and and And there's some emerging stuff, which I've read some on, about how actually personalizing neurofeedback is a way potentially to make it more effective. So I think it's ah something we're still, I mean, obviously, this is not a podcast for clinic thread that is anyway in any way trying to give any sort of clinical advice. But I think it's still the jury, the jury is definitely out on neurofeedback. But there are some new, there are some new approaches that are quite
00:33:57
Speaker
promising. I think we can say that.
00:34:01
Speaker
Yeah, there's where I think we've still got a lot to learn. and And we've still got a lot to learn about EEG in general, you know like um the so yeah what the signals are actually telling us and um whether whether we can actually localize a signal is also quite quite controversial.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, specifically with an EEG. I mean, obviously, I have a very primitive understanding of this. so But I remember when I was doing my psychology A level, one of the um You know, it it wasn't listed as a ah benefit of the EEG that you could localise any sort of brain signals to any specific area of the brain. Yes, I think it's not generic. You get the different electrodes in different parts of the brain. so But is that, is that something that you can do to ah like a scientific level, localize with an EU? Which is a really controversial question, I think. And that's why you're in some from some people tell you you can, some people will tell you you can't. I think just to be just to be clear from a sort of clinical pediatric point of view, yes, you can. If you have a, ah you know, a seizure,
00:35:10
Speaker
sick, you know, because that that's what they really, you know, really, therefore, well, they originally for detecting seizure activities. So yeah if you're having fits, and you want to know what part of the brain those are coming from, where the signals coming from, so is it temporal lobe epilepsy? Is it partial epilepsy? Is it generalized epilepsy? It is really good for that. That, you know, that is broad brush, where's the really, you know, if you look at seizure activity on on an EEG, it looks completely different to the normal resting EEG. So for that that, that broad brush really big stuff it is really localization. It's your type of localization for more subtle, maybe more psychologically relevant things rather than the seizure. Just to be clear.
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah, like can can you actually um pinpoint a particular structure in the brain and say this particular frequency is coming from that structure yeah deep in the brain? some Some people say you can and some people say there's there's no way that's going to be possible because of conduction effects. And there's all sorts of really sophisticated mathematics that are way too complex for me to understand that um yeah you have to sort of wade through to sort of clarify that whole kind of question.
00:36:25
Speaker
Were you going to say something? I thought you were. No, I was i was going to ask you about um the electrical signals that seizures produce, but I feel like we've moved on from that now. Yeah, I mean, they're just basically yeah and huge and jagged, essentially. Yeah, it's a sudden spread of strong electrical signals. Yeah, and they're chaotic. Yeah. theieizure Rather than having these nice, smooth waveforms, seizure activity typically is quite chaotic, which goes along with what you see in person when they're having the seizure. But that came in at the whole epilepsy thing, so we just, you know I mean, I'm actually not much of an effort not much of an expert on epilepsy anyway, so.
00:37:04
Speaker
we should probably move on before I embarrass myself. But then your colleague is going, how are you talking about Max? It is interesting from from the point of view of of consciousness because seizure is often associated with loss of consciousness. And interestingly, ah this one of the characteristics of of the EEG g and seizure is that you get widespread coherence through the brain where all of the parts of the different different parts of the brain actually go into lockstep.
00:37:32
Speaker
Yeah. Um, and for some reason that just wipes out all activity and which, which really makes sense. And in terms of, you know, the, the kind of current sort of understanding of what these oscillations are doing is that it's, it's the brain is different parts of the brain that actually communicating with each other.
Future Research Directions
00:37:49
Speaker
And so that they can't all be saying exactly the same thing. Otherwise you're not, you haven't actually got any information. awesome And that supports the whole consciousness being about information integration.
00:38:01
Speaker
That's kind of weird yeah it's consistent with that. Yeah, that's that's definitely one of the pieces of evidence that they bring to the table. Oh, that's interesting. it is okay So um I'm going to jump in with the last question because I know that you're not currently engaged in in in research Andrew because you're doing proper work, actual clinical work with rehab and massage.
00:38:25
Speaker
um What do you think, if you were to, or what would you advise somebody who's coming after you? what what What do you think people should be looking at next in this field? Yeah, I definitely um found a few really interesting things. um And I still kind of am very curious about this field, and I do kind of actively follow um kind of research in in the field of consciousness, um and particularly, so that's that's more my my area of interest. And I imagine, you know, I've been interested in that since I was a kid, so I will probably be interested in that till the day I die. But the question, the few things that kind of came out of this particular research was um
00:39:18
Speaker
There was one thing that actually didn't really make it into the into the paper where um ah there was quite a lot of really interesting research into into peak alpha rhythm.
00:39:32
Speaker
um and And sort of when I started looking into it I i found there wasn't really a lot a lot of research in the ADHD field. so i um And there was a lot a lot of controversy and a lot of different questions and I started trying to explain it and that just, you know, my word count blew out and I ended up having to take all of that um out of the paper. But I would probably, if I was going to dive back into this again, I would probably dive back in there because I'm, to me like the this, if this sort of, if if attention
00:40:08
Speaker
is sort of does work in these sort of rhythmic pulses um and and attention is actually something has something to do with consciousness and you know obviously a big part of what the brain does is generate consciousness um if if you believe consciousness is a thing that exists which some people don't um so if if you're sort of in that camp then you've you've got to ask the question okay so if attention and consciousness is so um sort of deeply intermingled then we should when we look at the the brain and the the rhythmic activity of the brain we should be seeing a really clear signal and that's that's the question that I or the the reason I actually went to this research in the first place was expecting to find a really clear signal um and there wasn't really a really clear signal
00:40:55
Speaker
But having come away from it now um and sort of thought about it for a few years, um that the idea of the alpha peak frequency seems to me to be the most sort of promising area to sort of look in, because that is actually the the peak signal that's when um when the um when the brain was sort of first looked at, the electrophysiology of the brain was first looked at at the beginning, I think, of the 20th century.
00:41:24
Speaker
and the um The first thing they found was alpha, and that's why they called it alpha. um this the The alpha peak is the strongest signal that the brain produces. And when I did wade into that, you know there's lots of different ideas about why that is and what that what function that plays in the brain. um And I think if I had you know a few years to wade back into this topic again, I'd probably try and wade into that area.
Conclusion and Community Engagement
00:41:53
Speaker
not a specific ADHD question, but a question of consciousness and how that relates to different waveforms within the EEG. So the alpha being a different a different form. yeah The alpha is just a little bit faster. um So i think um no I think we're looking at sort of between eight and 14 Hertz. So that's a little bit faster than what most of the um rhythmic attention has found.
00:42:21
Speaker
where the attention research is found, but it's possible that, um you know, that that might actually be um kind of something else that we've missed as well, that actually we're not getting all of the the pulses in these psychophysics um paradigms because the brain is just doing so much else, you know, it's doing self-awareness and intraception as well as attending to whatever task is being given about there.
00:42:49
Speaker
So it might have to be dream that there's extra pulses that we don't see in a psychophysics experiment that would, you know, bring it up into the alpha range. But that's very speculative. Yeah. run out so looking into us so we go That's just where I'd go if I was looking and and into it again. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing because actually, in a way, EEG is quite not primitive, but it's quite a simple technology, isn't it? You're just literally measuring electrical activity. do you't mean It's not yeah so fascinating. You can really dig into it in this in this in this sort of world of dynamic brain activity. I think it's quite underrated. um I have to say it's not a diagnostic tool. we come't We haven't been able to use it as a diagnostic tool, but it's a ah tool for probing the brain. I think it's massively underrated compared to other kind of more fancy things.
00:43:43
Speaker
And it's so useful on this field because it gives you really detailed information at really small timescales, which not many of the other ways of looking at the brain actually give you that detail. So that's very good for your time stamping, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Okay. Well, I think that's a good, for us in the morning, kind of good, you know, morning, Sunday morning, wake up.
00:44:09
Speaker
with a bit of consciousness philosophy. Consciousness chat. I hope it hasn't been too speculative for your audience. Sorry. so I think for you, wind down for your evening. Yes, yes, definitely. ah it It was a very interesting chat and I appreciate your very insightful questions. and um i'm I'm going to go off and have my dinner while you guys go off and have your breakfast, I imagine.
00:44:34
Speaker
Yeah basically that's literally what's going to happen now. Andrew thank you very much for joining us and bye-bye. It's been great to meet you both, bye-bye. Bye-bye. Okay so that's it for the episode for today. Thank you Andrew. Tess you're going to go back to having a day off. You're watching YouTube and sitting down because right now I'm standing up.
00:44:57
Speaker
That's right, which is basically what you do most of your time now. Yeah, my full-time job, bartender. Yeah. You know, finally ready to reveal that to you guys, my bartender. Which is why we're not necessarily doing a huge amount of episodes at the moment. That's one reason anyway, because you are super busy. Because I'm not awake in the mornings and I'm working in the evenings. Yeah, exactly. So there will be a few before Christmas. um I'm hoping to get a few more out. and I've got a couple of recorded.
00:45:23
Speaker
and then um it will be christmas and then we'll have to see but um We hope everyone's well out there in the internet. Yes. um Please do join our Facebook group, and HD Science Podcast. And if you're in the UK, I hope that it snowed at your house. Yes, it was really quite lovely. And I hope that that was nice for you. All right. That's enough waffle. We will see you next time. Not too very much not very long, because I have got another one in the but in the bag, and we just need to put it out. Yeah, get ready. All right. Bye bye. Bye.