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Optimizing Your Brain with Neurofeedback /w Dr. Andrew Hill
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PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA and has extensive experience in the field of neurofeedback and QEEG.
Dr. Hill is an expert in functional brain health and performance optimization, and has lectured on Neuroscience, Gerontology, & Psychology at UCLA.
Website: https://peakbraininstitute.com/
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guests
00:00:01
chrisyzen
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Christian Jordonov here. Today's guest is Dr. Andrew Hill, PhD. He is the founder and CEO of the Peak Brain Institute. And he holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA and has extensive experience in the field of neurofeedback and QEEG. And that's part of what we'll discuss today. So Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:00:26
Andrew Hill_ PhD
ah Thanks so much for having me, Christian. Appreciate it.
00:00:29
chrisyzen
Yeah, it's a great pleasure.
Dr. Hill's Career Journey
00:00:30
chrisyzen
So can you start with just a little bit of your background and what actually got you into this field that you're in?
00:00:38
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah, so this nerve feedback stuff is a little bit nichey. Before I was working in it, I worked in pretty much every area of health and human services, you can imagine, with some emphasis on um mental illness and crisis work. And then I ended up working in a combination of inpatient psychiatric facilities with really acute clients, and also working with childhood developmental stuff, including a lot of autism,
00:01:05
Andrew Hill_ PhD
and language development and seizure development in children. So I ended up with this really acute experience across different sort of edge cases of human suffering, you know both developmental and acute psychiatric. And I was working in these really intense environments at the time and I got injured.
00:01:24
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And I could not continue to do the work I was doing in a psychiatric hospital because of physical injuries sustained on the job. And so I end up leaving ah ah mental health for a couple of years and ended up going to high tech. I did high tech for a couple of years. And to give you some sense of time, this is just before the the year 2000, tech bubble correction. so i was In that landscape and the tech bubble corrected and i thought well i can i miss this human services stuff i wonder if i can do something that.
00:01:55
Andrew Hill_ PhD
taps into my experience, but also has some tech. And I looked around and saw this thing called neurofeedback was starting to get more accessible. I've seen more places pop up doing it. And so I called a place that wasn't too far away and I said, Hey, I have some autism experience.
Neurofeedback Mechanisms and Debates
00:02:10
Andrew Hill_ PhD
It was an autism center. Can I come and do some observation? I'm curious what you guys are doing. I'd love to maybe get involved a little bit.
00:02:17
Andrew Hill_ PhD
um Can I maybe come in for some observation? And I was angling for essentially a little short-term internship to get myself oriented, but I walked out with a job and ended up spending a couple of years working with this pretty acute autistic spectrum population and a mix of ADHD, autism, nonverbal learning issues, et cetera. And I had a lot of experience with that population, you know, more than a decade at that point. And I was shocked at what I was seeing.
00:02:43
Andrew Hill_ PhD
um just a huge amount of change happening in a relatively uh short amount of time and for things like anxiety and ADHD and seizures it was impressive but what really got my attention was seeing features change in autism you know eye contact some language changes sensory changes and my experience had been these things were not really changeable that you kind of manage suffering or manage some you know very slow learning But it didn't really change strong features of you know seizure or autism. And yet I was seeing it change often in a matter of weeks and was just blown away by what was happening at the individual level. And this was back in now, you know more than 25 years ago.
00:03:27
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And at the time there was about three different big schools of thought in the neurofeedback landscape now it's pretty much still but back then it was a tiny little group of people who would. Spend all evening long arguing with each other on the use nets even before the modern you know internet and.
00:03:40
chrisyzen
Mm hmm. Mm.
00:03:44
Andrew Hill_ PhD
ah just vitriolic you know fighting in the industry about what was happening, and you're wrong, and I'm right, and here's how it works, and no, it doesn't work that way. And there's about three, again, you know schools of thought that could not be reconciled, that did not have theories that made sense if you tried to combine them. And yet, all three of those approaches were getting better results than traditional allopathic medicine on the things they worked on.
00:04:08
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So this struck me as what I call a blind men and elephant situation. You know, everyone has a piece of something they're describing and no one really has the overall.
00:04:13
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:04:17
Andrew Hill_ PhD
ah picture. So I ended up um going back to to school, to to grad school, to study this thing called neurofeedback and I studied how ah features of attention and control over the attention work in each hemisphere separately and did some work on the mechanisms of neurofeedback. This this thing that we we exercise the brain, and I can get into the technique in a second if you like, but at the time There hadn't been a huge amount of research and there's some reasons why the research lags behind the clinical work, ah mostly because it's heavily individualized work and you don't do research that way. But at the time, it was really hard to do placebo control blinding as well. So there wasn't a huge amount of research.
00:04:59
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And I went back to grad school to figure out, well, how does it working? you know what are we you know What are we doing here? Because at the time, people were still arguing about, does it matter where in the head you place a wire? Does it matter which frequencies you exercise? And it does, turns out.
Neurofeedback Applications in Autism
00:05:13
Andrew Hill_ PhD
um And we kind of knew that back then, but no one had actually demonstrated that. And that was one of the arguments that would go back and forth in these forums. And so i did a for my PhD dissertation, I did did an experiment where we did neurofeedback on the left hemisphere or the right hemisphere.
00:05:28
Andrew Hill_ PhD
or a sham placebo-controlled feedback and looked at how the brain was reacting to the process of neurofeedback on days one through five, looking at how the learning events were lifting off and looking how the brain was actually sort of binding to this this process, how the brain knew that neurofeedback was happening.
00:05:37
chrisyzen
Mm hmm.
00:05:47
chrisyzen
amazing yeah yeah that would be adult and by the way ah my first book was an autism so we can we could even touch a little bit on
00:05:47
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Maybe I should stop and explain what this stuff is though.
00:05:55
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Ah.
00:05:58
chrisyzen
So if you could to yeah give us some um an idea of what neurofeedback is first as ah as a background. And then i I'd love to actually touch on both of those things. So what what is it doing in in autistic, I guess, children or or folks?
00:06:12
chrisyzen
old I'm sure it will work for older folks as well. And then in terms of acute psychiatric type stuff, I'd love to maybe touch on that for a few minutes. So yeah.
00:06:21
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Sure. So so the ah process of neurofeedback, the mechanism, is basically shaping of brain waves. It's operant conditioning on brain waves. And we can't feel our brain waves. We have no experience of them. We can't feel our brain in general. The brain has no sensory nerve endings. It does all the feeling, but it can't feel itself.
00:06:42
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And so all the billions of things that are happening moment to moment are a little mysterious to the mind. So in neurofeedback, you essentially measure some parameter. So let me give you an example. Let me tie into the next question about autism in a spectrum brains. There can be a variable amount of things that go on. You know, one spectrum person is not like the next often.
00:07:06
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But you tend to have the same big circuits in typical brains and in people that have some spectrum needs. But in the spectrum brains, those individual circuits might be cramped up harder or less well connected. And a couple of them that tend to show up in people with autistic spectrum features, there's one big chunk of tissue behind the right ear called the tempo parietal junction, the TPJ.
00:07:30
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And I call it the princess and the P, because it tends to find the world kind of intense and have a hard time integrating incoming information. So if you're right, TPJ is not making much alpha wave phenomena, so a rest phenomena. and Instead, it's stuck in a high gear, stuck in beta waves.
00:07:48
Andrew Hill_ PhD
This can look like sensory irritability or sensory integration issues. It can also look like difficulty with eye contact or not recognizing faces or not having a verbal prosody, you know, some not true of of of every person with spectrum complaints. But when it gets certain a certain degree of severity, you get language impacted.
00:08:08
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And in the right hemisphere, the nonverbal information of language is what you're talking about. So if you ever know have you ever met an autistic person who talks like this and has a high-pitched voice and they never vary the tone, they're they're lacking prosody or the lilt that carries emotion and inflection. And we monitor the prosody with the right ah sort of language areas. On the left-hand side, we do meaning. The right-hand side is that more non-meaning information, the the emotional stuff.
00:08:38
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So you tend to see this area really activated in somebody on a brain map on a QEG if they have autistic spectrum complaints, but you might also see the same area struggling if somebody has intact social function, but a lot of anxiety around social.
00:08:54
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So you don't you can't tell, you can't diagnose autism from a brain map, but you can say, oh, look, this part of your brain is a little unusual. Does it matter?
Impact of Neurofeedback on Brain Function
00:09:02
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Do you care? Is it important to you that your social and sensory is flooded? Oh, it does care. OK. It does matter. So the way you might change that is um you might stick some wires on those areas right behind the ears and measure the brainwaves that aren't that robust, the alpha waves.
00:09:20
Andrew Hill_ PhD
also measure the beta waves, the ones that are maybe stuck in high gear. And then just watch the brain moment to moment. And whenever the brain briefly shifts in the right direction, whenever that those beta waves come up, and or sorry, of the alpha waves come up, the beta waves drop.
00:09:34
Andrew Hill_ PhD
A computer sees that and sort of applauds the brain by making stuff start to move. So the person sitting watching a screen and a Pac-Man starts to move whenever the brain makes a little more of the alpha. The brain's like, ooh, stuff. Cool. I like stuff. And then it moves in the wrong direction. You know, the alpha goes down.
00:09:52
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And the game slows down or stops the brains like hey i don't like this where is my information that happens to move again in the game resumes in the big trick is that. Every few seconds we just the goal posts so we're always moving the computer to be next to where the person's brain is so we can capture the flexing natural movement it's gonna make in the desired direction.
00:10:13
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And so as we do this over 20, 30 minutes, the brain starts to notice, oh wait, raising my alpha is making stuff happen. Okay. And it starts to lean into a little more alpha and you get this sort of trend of change. It's very subtle. And typically in neurofeedback, it takes about three, maybe four sessions to feel. I mean, people do feel it sometimes the first session, but maybe, you know, 5% of people or something.
00:10:38
Andrew Hill_ PhD
but most people will feel it around session three or four. They'll be kind of like, Hey, wait a minute, huh? I think I'm feeling something different and it's pretty subtle, but that alpha comes up and the brain's starting to make big surges of it and drop the beta. Let's say it feels like something and you get a couple of hours potentially of impact where you're like, I might be feeling a tiny bit different. And then it wears off and you're like, nah, I was imagining that.
00:11:04
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And then the next time you do it, it happens a little more strongly. So you have this opportunity to sort of build up resource activations or relaxations throughout the whole brain. um And you can really go after um executive function features, sensory and social features, ah speed of processing, which is often thrown off both in developmental childhood stuff like autism as well as with aging. We have a speed of processing dip that is the thing that's behind um word finding and tip of the tongue and short term memory issues. That's not really a memory issue. It's a speed, a speed of processing complaint.
00:11:38
chrisyzen
Mm.
00:11:39
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So you can see these things in a brain map in a QEG at rest. You can say, hey, look, client, your alpha waves are running kind of slower than the average person. And if they're a young person, that might mean it's hard to absorb information. They don't read that well. They have a slowed cognitive tempo. It's hard to absorb.
00:11:57
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Maybe they're being called ADD or PDDNOS or some other kind of like, ah, slowed slowed brain, we're not sure why. And then in an elder, you'll see this as the alpha wave slowing down and they complain about word finding issues and they're concerned about memory because they think it's aging. It's not really, but you'll see these two features. And these become things that people can take control over. so if you're ah somebody who is younger and you're having trouble absorbing information, you can train up the speed, the resting speed of the brain. Or if you're you flooded with that social and sensory, you you have a hard time with eye contact and you can't ignore bright lights and loud sounds and things, you can train down the overactivation of those tissues and you feel the change in a few sessions.
00:12:45
Andrew Hill_ PhD
ah We generally do about um three or even four times a week for half an hour and the changes build up and they stop becoming transient as you do a few weeks worth. And we tend to map the brain with this thing called quantitative EEG or resting EEG. And we do it at the beginning alongside executive function testing. So we do sort of standard go-no-go style ADHD testing alongside um the brain mapping.
00:13:14
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And that gives us a sense of which executive function sensory and social and speed kind of phenomena might be interesting. The person decides what to go after or their parents do if it's a you little kid.
00:13:25
chrisyzen
Mm hmm. Yeah.
00:13:26
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And we iterate through these workouts and the change builds up and we go back and map the brain again toward the end of the second month. And for things like autism and significant ah challenges with maybe trauma or major ADHD, you kind of have to do maybe four months of training, you know, maybe 50, 60, 70, 80 sessions of neurofeedback, but it starts moving in a few sessions and it builds up and you can see the change after a while. So we remap and reassess the executive function at about 25 sessions.
Myths and Facts about Neurotransmitters
00:14:01
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And that's enough neurofeedback to usually create a full standard deviation of change on a bell curve, an age-matched sample, maybe more if the deficits are or greater. One of the secrets of neurofeedback is the worse things are, the faster things change.
00:14:17
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So it's kind of a nice, you see more obvious change when people are really struggling. So you can measure that ah pretty reliably across people. So it's brain training. It's personal training for brain activity towards whatever goals you happen to have.
00:14:32
chrisyzen
Yeah, sounds so cool. I remember back in 2018, I got this thing, I think this was from Amazon. I think it was like like one or two points or maybe three points on your skull and you have the you download the app.
00:14:42
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah.
00:14:43
chrisyzen
But obviously that's like kindergarten level stuff, but it I did use it for a while. I lost interest very quickly because I knew it wasn't like the real deal. It was like two, 300 bucks.
00:14:55
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Mm.
00:14:55
chrisyzen
But I did at one point when it is sort of such a profound change when you realize with your mind, almost like Neo in the matrix, you can make this thing go on the screen. It's pretty insane. You know, you can change the background or, you know, the birds can start flapping, whatever the, tim um you know, the feedback thing is there. But ah in terms of testing this in real world applications, have you ever done anything beyond, you know, these assessments that you do, ah like the executive function stuff, have you done in terms of any sort of
00:15:29
chrisyzen
blood markers, maybe neurotransmitter, um proxy metabolites, this kind of stuff. Have you seen any changes on that front from from this?
00:15:36
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I've not. um I have a real I don't believe in neurotransmitter testing.
00:15:41
chrisyzen
Okay.
00:15:42
Andrew Hill_ PhD
um I think I think neurotransmitter testing is one of those things in the health space that is misleading. um The brain does not care about the levels of neurotransmitters.
00:15:52
Andrew Hill_ PhD
There is no such thing as a neurotransmitter imbalance and mental illness doesn't exist. No such thing. Never been demonstrated. It's all marketing from drug companies. You do not have a serotonin deficit if you're depressed.
00:16:03
Andrew Hill_ PhD
You don't have too little dopamine with ADHD. It's not true. It's not how it works. It's a lot more complicated than that. You know, one example that I like to give that sort of demonstrates, you know, put the nail in the coffin of the chemical imbalance theory in Parkinson's, which is dopamine or a dopamine disease, um you lose 75 to 80% of your dopamine generating neurons before any symptoms show up.
00:16:30
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So for ten or fifteen or twenty years you're losing all your dopamine and it drops to extremely low level and only then do symptoms show up does that mean the first seventy five percent of the dopamine is irrelevant kinda the brain can tune itself around an absolute level of neurotransmitter.
00:16:47
Andrew Hill_ PhD
by changing the sensitivity of receptors, by adding or subtracting receptors in the synapse. So neurotransmitters themselves, the level doesn't matter and yours and mine might be very, very different, but our brains have tuned around whatever level we're producing. So I don't think that metabolites in the bloodstream or the urine um are meaningful because you don't have levels, you don't know what it means, and we know it's a variable phenomena.
00:17:10
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:17:13
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Also, those are downstream, so you might be able to get some data off of CSF for certain metabolites, you know, cereals, phytofluid, you know, lumbar punctures and things, but that's pretty invasive.
00:17:24
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:17:24
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So I love the opinion that you don't need to ever worry about neurotransmitters because
00:17:24
chrisyzen
yeah
00:17:30
Andrew Hill_ PhD
By the time they're going to be off enough to measure, you got bigger problems and you're in major crisis. So you find things out ahead of time. They're not neurotransmitter bound.
00:17:38
chrisyzen
yeah And what about
00:17:39
Andrew Hill_ PhD
It's like looking at blood pH or looking at REM in a sleep tracker.
00:17:41
chrisyzen
yeah yeah
00:17:44
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Those are not things that can change. I don't care how much alkaline water you drink. The only alkalinity you're affecting is out of your toilet. Like your blood does not change pH by that much within a fractional degree on the scale can change, but it's a really, it's a regulated phenomenon.
00:17:51
chrisyzen
Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:01
Andrew Hill_ PhD
If your blood pH swings by more than one degree, you die. I mean, just die. And if your REM goes away, You go full bore crazy and hallucinate and become major depressed within within a few days.
00:18:10
chrisyzen
yeah
00:18:13
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So REM is not a thing you have to worry about. So don't look at your sleep trackers because they're not valid on REM. They just aren't.
00:18:19
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:18:19
Andrew Hill_ PhD
It's complete nonsense. There's a handful of things in the wellness space, the alternate wellness space that I find you know mildly misleading. And REM on sleep trackers, neurotransmitter testing, and anything with the word quantum attached to it.
00:18:28
chrisyzen
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:35
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I find a little bit ah problematic in in our in our space.
00:18:38
chrisyzen
And ah you just while we're on the topic, okay, understand. So obviously the a lot of the the dopamine serotonin stuff has been mischaracterized in order to sell drugs. I think you you you understand understand that very well. mike I suppose my my question is, what about if there's a buildup of a potentially excitatory neurotransmitter like glutamate or um perhaps there could be like a deficiency maybe in a B vitamin or a mineral that does not allow, does's not does's not let's say for example, copper deficiency does not allow dopamine to be um you know to to become ah no noradrenaline.
00:19:07
Andrew Hill_ PhD
from methylation, yeah, yeah.
00:19:17
chrisyzen
Do you, or maybe B6 deficiency maybe can allow, that or some B vitamin deficiencies can allow glutamate to build up and that's not metabolized quickly enough. Do you think those could could be affecting behavior?
00:19:29
Andrew Hill_ PhD
They could be, could be true. We don't have any evidence that it's true. we don't We don't know that it's true.
00:19:33
chrisyzen
Right.
00:19:35
Andrew Hill_ PhD
There's no evidence that dopamine doesn't convert if you don't have copper. like It's a theory, it's it's been demonstrated in animals, but we don't know if it's true. It's all just theory.
00:19:46
chrisyzen
Gotcha.
00:19:46
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So while it might be important, I think i think the the rate limiting nutrition is probably more valid than the levels of neurotransmitters, copper, magnesium, those are really important.
00:19:57
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Essential fatty acid balance, glutathione, methionone balance for oxidative stress capacity. Those are real phenomena that we have. We have good sense of how they vary.
00:20:05
chrisyzen
Good.
00:20:09
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And the same is true of copper. The same is true of B6. We actually understand what happens when you have a level that's not sufficient. But we don't actually have that. It breaks down when you start to project that into the brain. We don't know if that's true usually.
Diet and Brain Health
00:20:25
Andrew Hill_ PhD
It's more like some some theories we have. So I think that nutrition is hugely important and minerals and and ah micronutrients are hugely important and can matter. But I mean, I think doing genetic analysis to figure out your MTHFR, your comped, so you can figure out what kind of
00:20:48
Andrew Hill_ PhD
uh, nutritive support you might need that can help a lot. I mean, I think that if you give somebody methyl B12 or NAC or something, you lubricate the neural processes. Uh, and that might be you know useful, but I don't think that people need to go, Oh my gosh, I have,
00:21:06
Andrew Hill_ PhD
this level in my blood, therefore I must take some more. I think we're we're not always aware of why of of what creates an effect in and the brain and body.
00:21:10
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:21:15
chrisyzen
Sure.
00:21:16
Andrew Hill_ PhD
We have tons of theories. So I think there can be some things that are super super important in that landscape, but I don't think it matters unless you're really, really acute. Like most humans are magnesium deficient, most dramatically.
00:21:31
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And yet, it doesn't seem to cause massive issues and um in many people. There are some people for whom it probably causes major problems, muscle cramping, they can't think clearly. And same thing is true of copper. You know you'd have people that couldn't learn. But I think that's an edge case. I don't think that's a normal case. I think we can manage a huge range of natural things.
00:21:54
Andrew Hill_ PhD
The brain's super adaptable. It's also why I don't really believe in the idea that we have a ah chronotype, you know, the larks versus the owls.
00:22:00
chrisyzen
yeah
00:22:01
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I don't really think that's true. We have the ability to entrain and and adapt to many things. Humans can do just as well eating diets that restrict ah fat or restrict carbs.
00:22:17
Andrew Hill_ PhD
You can't, yeah you can do adequately well for health with being a vegan or being a carnivore. both at both work to some extent. You can't do well eating carbs, protein, and fat all at once.
00:22:30
Andrew Hill_ PhD
you know But you know we're adaptable. If our environment is mostly starchy, we can actually handle it pretty well. In in Papua New Guinea, which all of the natives have APOE44, which is the pro Alzheimer's, pro oxidative stress,
00:22:36
chrisyzen
yeah
00:22:44
Andrew Hill_ PhD
APOE, extremely low incidence of Alzheimer's and atherosclerosis in Papua New Guinea, in spite of the APOE 4-4, in spite of the heavy, heavy starch diets that are full of tubers, you know forest tubers, basically.
00:22:58
chrisyzen
They need more soybean oil shipped in.
00:23:00
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah, it's it's just horrible diets. It's oxidative stress. It's all this crap that if Westerns ate, we would just fall over with Alzheimer's theoretically. And yet, Papua New Guinean seemed to handle starch differently. And some of the theories are that the APOE acts as an ah and innate immune system in the brain. And in a more microbially dirty environment, and the amyloids and the APOEs have things to do. And you can manage that level of oxidative stress, but in a sort of Western world. you know I sort of view Alzheimer's and those phenomena kind of like gout was viewed 100 years ago. you know If you're the wealthy person who eats all this stuff you shouldn't be eating, your system falls over into dysregulation. Back then it was gout.
00:23:46
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Now it's sugar driving you know diabetes and Alzheimer's largely, I think. So the point being that I think people are very nuanced and we're also really adaptable.
00:23:58
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So for yourself, it becomes a little bit challenging, but I think we have to find out what works individually and test things and look for functional impacts more than
00:24:03
chrisyzen
Mm.
00:24:09
Andrew Hill_ PhD
more than just believing the next guru. um I'm a big fan when it comes to the brain of teaching people about their brain, not giving them a diagnosis or telling them I know what's happening, but saying, look, here's your brain.
00:24:11
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:24:19
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Here's some resources. Here's some circuits. Here's how they often are experienced. Does this seem valid? Does this seem important to you? And where it rings true, people become their own experts and they have agency.
00:24:32
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I think in our modern landscape of health, there's a bit of and ah a rush to elaboration, a rush to, oh, I have the secret. I have the intervention. I have the testing. I have the magic. And I think that's tricky. I think people that are struggling with health or performance complaints are often looking for that solution. And I think are our functional alternative health landscape is full of people who are packaging solutions that are all sizzle and no steak, unfortunately. so
00:25:03
chrisyzen
So in terms of the applications for neurofeedback, what what do you think is happening in acute psychiatric episodes? how How is it benefiting the person so that they can kind of snap out of it or kind of equilibrate the brain so that they can feel and function normally?
00:25:22
Andrew Hill_ PhD
You know, so of course psychiatric stuff can dysregulate in all kinds of directions. um Neurofeedback does have some low hanging fruit resources that it tends to regulate in everyone regardless of why they're thrown off. um These are the really acute phenomena around sleep, around anxiety and around executive function. So I don't think executive function goes or is an acute psychiatric phenomenon. It can be impacted by a psychiatric. It doesn't, I don't think we have like ah an acute ADHD type phenomena in our diagnostic books these days. But we do have acute anxiety phenomena. If anxiety gets intense, it creates thought disturbance. So mood disorders, you know depression, thought disorders, psychosis, um they look like each other as they get stronger. If you're schizophrenic, you become depressed as you get more schizophrenic. if you're
00:26:17
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Really anxious, if you get very, very anxious, you start having intrusive thoughts and sort disordered thinking. And so you can see this on a brain map. Someone has OCD or a lot of trauma. You can see the circuits involved with anxiety cramping up in response to their experience. you know maybe you're Maybe you're built like this and you tend to have an obsessive, hyper-focused mind. That's the front midline. The anterior cingulate really locks up. It holds things in your mind generally, but it can get stuck holding too much or holding things too firmly.
00:26:46
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And that circuit, when it gets really cramped up, produces ah repetitive behavior, ticks, obsessions, everything from Tourette's to full-blown OCD, hallucinations. um So anxiety cramping up super hard can just regulate into this thought disorder landscape. Or the back midline, you have the posterior cingulate, which is the outside world evaluator. you Watch the road, heads up, heads up, careful.
00:27:11
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And when that one cramps up into high gear, we become threat sensitive. We ruminate. We get panic attacks and PTSD. So I would say that the first thing that happens when you're working with somebody with an acute difficulty is you show them these resources. You say, look, oh, brother, your front midline is super hot. Your back midline is super hot. That often means you're stuck in your head and stuck in your gut, kind of obsessive and ruminating. Does that sound real? Oh, it does? Oh, that's that's frustrating.
00:27:41
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But just seeing it, just literally seeing a pattern on ah on a picture of your brain that shows extra activity and usually strong activity, it gives people this different relationship with their suffering. If I can show you your acute trauma response, anxiety, in data right there and say, hey look, is it true you experienced this or this or this? And the person's like, oh my gosh, yes.
00:28:04
Andrew Hill_ PhD
How did you know you can see that? Oh my gosh, wow. Just that, before we do anything with neurofeedback, just showing them their brain creates this agency, creates this sense of like, oh, I can do something about that. And it becomes sort of instantly harder to feel overwhelmed, guilty, ashamed of the thing happening to your mind. I mean, cognitive stuff, psychiatric stuff, largely invisible,
00:28:30
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Because of that, we often feel like it's our fault or things we're doing. If we're anxious or ADHD or having seizures, we kind of feel responsible. When I show someone they're suffering, they're cramped up resource in data. They're like, Oh, Oh yeah, that's me. And they're kind of happy that we're finding the thing they care about. And so once you find something in a cute EEG and in a brain map, one of the great things about your feedback is, well, you can change it.
00:28:57
Andrew Hill_ PhD
You know, if you do, yeah I never know what a brain map means per se. People are weird. Good job. Be weird. And this is population comparison. So we're not getting good or bad out of a brain map. We're getting unusual. And the question becomes, Hey, are the ways in which you're unusual.
00:29:12
Andrew Hill_ PhD
things that often get in the way, and if so, do they get in the way for you and do you care? And following that kind of outlier logic, I can find most of the features of attention, anxiety, sleep, stress, social, sensory speed. And these are big features. When I say to some 70-year-old, hey,
00:29:35
Andrew Hill_ PhD
your alpha waves are running kind of slower than the average 70 year old. That can often produce difficulty with tip of the tongue and word finding and hunting for names. Is that true for you? And his wife starts to laugh or something. Oh, okay, that's true. um One great thing when talking to elders about these phenomena as well, that isn't your memory. Cause they're always like, yeah, I'm getting old, having trouble remembering my neighbor's name. Well, wait a minute. It's just your alpha speed. That's not your memory. That's your handoff speed between circuits.
00:30:03
Andrew Hill_ PhD
ah you Have you forgotten your wedding or your wife's birthday or your kid's graduation? Oh, no, no, no, that stuff's pretty crisp. Well, that's an episodic memory. If you have age-related cognitive decline or age-related memory issues, the first type of memory you lose is episodic, is experiences. You don't lose semantic information, words, names until you're really, really, really late in aging. So if you are having issues with the tip of the tongue and retrieval, short-term memory blips,
00:30:31
Andrew Hill_ PhD
It's the load time. It's reaching for stuff in the brain. The stuff pops up. And then as you reach for it to load it in, it decays. You can't quite hand off the information as reliably into parts of your brain. So you'll see this in kids with developmental issues and slow processing. You'll see it in elders that are slowing down. You'll see it in post-COVID. Someone has a concussion or post-COVID or mold or Lyme hit, kind of a metabolic hit. Boom, the brain slows down. And you can see this as the idle, the alpha waves slowing down and the Delta, the rest and repair brainwaves, the background of metabolism will push into the foreground and the brain is now resting you when you're awake and that feels like brain fog and you know, poor cognitive clarity and stuff like that. But you can see these things on a QEG and that really does provide this
00:31:23
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Eye opening perspective of all that is going on okay and it can be a cute me psychiatric developmental can also be subacute hey high level actor or executive or ceo. Yeah your office slowing down kind of a lot your delta is climbing ah looks like you might be having some speeder processing issues because you aren't sleeping deeply.
00:31:44
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Oh yeah, that's right. I don't get much sleep. I stay up super late. and I get up super early. And well, look at this. It's actually having an impact. So here's three tricks to regulate your circadian rhythm. You know, go to bed early. Sorry, go to bed fast, then get up early, go for a walk.
00:31:57
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And just giving people a perspective on the actual data they're looking at and some strategies, it's kind of like looking at your lipid panel and going, ooh, I better back off on the ice cream.
00:31:58
chrisyzen
Hmm.
00:32:07
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And it's just data. You learn how the impacts are building up from the things you're doing day to day. And the brain mapping will give you a little bit of a through line of like, okay, yeah, understand some resources. Now I can take my behavior and make some changes and feel different knowing why. I mean, I rattle off some circadian tricks a minute ago. The biggest one is don't eat but don't eat before bed. We all know not to eat before bed, sleep quality. Everyone knows that.
00:32:38
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But I teach people that trick, and I'm, oh, here's why. Well, as you get tired late in the day, the release of melatonin suppresses pancreatic insulin. So insulin falls, which creates this snacky kind of, you know, urge because you can release insulin more. But if you give into it and fill your body with blood sugar, that suppresses growth hormone while you're asleep.
00:33:00
Andrew Hill_ PhD
and If you're above thirty thirty five years old you get one pulse of growth hormone once per day and that's it so if you go to bed with a full stomach you get no growth hormone and you skim the surface of sleep and wake up fat and tired. But if you go to bed with an empty stomach you wake up full of energy and ready to go having slept deeply.
00:33:18
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So I can't tell you the number of people I've talked to about sleep, like, yeah, I know I shouldn't eat before bed. And then tell them why it's impacting. Oh, oh, oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. I will do that. So just knowing why these things work or that your alpha speed is not your memory. It's your speed causing short term memory issues, those kinds of just little bits of information.
00:33:41
Andrew Hill_ PhD
will anchor things people already understand, will help them lean into better habits, help them make better choices. So you can do a lot of that just from seeing your own data. And then if things are acute or there's a lot of suffering or some goals for performance being different, well, then you can shape those things using biofeedback or neurofeedback and and make active changes or look at the impacts of meds or look at the impacts of you know months of
Regulating Blood Sugar and Metabolism
00:34:06
Andrew Hill_ PhD
meditation. So a lot of what I do is teach people to become their own experts over time in their own brains.
00:34:13
chrisyzen
Amazing. Yeah, so let's delve a bit deeper into, so I suppose you already kind of alluded to some things like not sleeping well, that I think we all feel the drop in mental performance. ah and It builds up over time and then I've been sleeping so well the last four months.
00:34:34
chrisyzen
that I had four days in a row where I slept six to seven hours. Not even that bad right for compared to a lot of people that function on six hours for most of their adult life right so not even that bad but I felt an acute sort of drop in my performance and I feel i didn't feel as nice right that was a bit more irritable but I'm very good at using new tropics to mask that and I'm sure a lot of biohacker type guys out there, gals are are masking this not sleeping well, right? So that's one thing but we we can mask it for a while, but there's definitely something going on in the brain that's not as functioning as well when you don't sleep well. So obviously diet is another one, stress levels. What other things have you found to to be detrimental and cause this sort of what we would associate as age-related decline, which could just be suboptimal health?
00:35:32
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah, I mean, certainly circadian rhythm and sleep quality is a big one. I think it's harder to maintain your sleep as you get ah older. you know we tend to have a ah more We sleep as late elders, very similar to how we slept as very young babies. where We go into multiple fractured sleeps and it's hard to maintain.
00:35:49
Andrew Hill_ PhD
ah the deep and um if that degrades faster, it can accelerate aging ah pretty quickly. um I would say the number one thing you sort of alluded to it is diet. I do believe that sugar, and refined sugar is about the worst thing for aging that exists um and it accelerates aging quite aggressively.
00:36:00
chrisyzen
What is that?
00:36:09
chrisyzen
what what what what ah What are the mechanisms of that, would you say?
00:36:09
Andrew Hill_ PhD
so
00:36:12
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Just the oxidative stress. I mean, we have a certain amount of ability to handle um insulin. But if we have chronically high insulin, we get resistant to insulin. Sugar gets higher in the bloodstream. And then the sugar oxidizes tissue. It rusts ah tissue glycates. It's called tissue. And tissue glycation is a big piece of what we consider ah aging.
00:36:36
Andrew Hill_ PhD
um You have ah glycated amyloid in Alzheimer's. You have glycated Lewy bodies in Lewy body dementia. Glycation accelerates Parkinsonian phenomena. Glycation is involved with the degradation of tissue in arthrosclerosis arteriosclerosis phenomena. So you end up with, and then cell division and in aging if there's a oxidative rich environment, you end up with what's called AGEs, advanced glycation end products. So from metabolic smoke pouring out of the internal systems based on less than clean burning of fuels, essentially, and and replication of en energy. so
00:37:17
Andrew Hill_ PhD
the the presence of free blood sugars that is not being well maintained and stored and partitioned into ah storage is a huge issue with regards to aging.
00:37:25
chrisyzen
Mm hmm.
00:37:28
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So if we all as a planet decided to avoid refined sugars um and sort of free carbs, you know things that were not bound into a food matrix, things that didn't come with micronutrients,
00:37:41
Andrew Hill_ PhD
ah that I believe would be transformative. I think the whole world would suddenly be living and in healthy ways like the best parts of the world do now. we just vote if we just
00:37:51
chrisyzen
But you think honey is okay, I assume, right? Honey, natural foods, would you say are okay?
00:37:56
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Honey's better probably than refined table sugar, but not that much better, no. I mean, carbs aren't that bad in moderation, and we can handle a certain amount of carbohydrate.
00:38:00
chrisyzen
Really.
00:38:06
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But we can handle way less than we tend to consume, as Westerners, certainly. So honey is OK. But honey is not magical. It's still sugar.
00:38:17
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So it depends. I mean, I have a couple of friends that are carnivore. They're like, oh, I've started adding honey. It's an animal product. I'm like, that's cool. But the amount they're using you know You can get in trouble with honey, just yeah not quite as easily as sugar, probably because of the cost involved. But um I don't think that adding a bunch of micronutrients, ah even if they're present by you know by default, let's say, I don't think that it's universally good. i mean i'm I'm also of the ah of the opinion that we have to
00:38:49
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Uh, make careful choices about things that are rewarding, things that are yummy, things that are sugary, things that are exciting. And I don't think people necessarily should avoid reinforcers, but I think we should be very selective, very careful, very choice driven. I have a phrase that I teach my clients. It's harm reduction through snobbery.
00:39:13
Andrew Hill_ PhD
You know, like don't go after all the really crappy coffee with milk and sugar. Have the super high in coffee and have it black. Don't smoke all the weed in the world. Find the nice organic place that does, you know, farm to bud, whatever, you know, in in the US you have this like like high end weed now.
00:39:27
chrisyzen
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
00:39:28
Andrew Hill_ PhD
If you're into alcohol, don't drink it every night. have a Have a scotch tasting with your friends once a week or something. Like find that refined way of engaging with a high stimulus reinforcer
00:39:35
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:39:38
chrisyzen
Get the good crack, not not the stuff from, oh,
00:39:41
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Well, some some things you can't some things are hard to find the reduced harm and some things don't have much in the way of range.
00:39:45
chrisyzen
Yeah, yeah, of course. No, absolutely.
00:39:50
Andrew Hill_ PhD
ah Things that hijacked dopamine aggressively, you know strong stimulants like that are generally hard to ah moderate. And ah moderation with reinforcers requires tolerance to remain low.
00:40:05
Andrew Hill_ PhD
This is why we get in trouble with ah things that are addictive like alcohol um is because it drives up our tolerance and we end up with tolerance and dependence and now we're in addiction.
00:40:19
chrisyzen
yeah
00:40:19
Andrew Hill_ PhD
and so
00:40:20
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I think if we instead focus on quality, not quantity, if we make the perspective around the thing, part of the thing, like I make, I make bread, you know, as a biohacker, I eat carbs, but I'm making my own bread every couple of days.
00:40:36
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And it's a whole process of like, I'm going to feed the starter. I can put in the fridge now. I've got to wait two days.
00:40:40
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:40:40
Andrew Hill_ PhD
let You know, it's a whole thing.
00:40:40
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:40:42
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And that thing actually serves for me. some of the same value of, Oh, I want to have carbs. um You know, like it serves that same thing. I've sublimated that immediate reinforcer into more, a more ritual and a ah process around that reinforcer. And I focused on bringing the quality up.
00:41:03
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And the amount of it down while I do that. And so now I have amazing bread every couple of days that I make that has lower glycemic index and digest better. It has some resistant starch because I'm using the, the, the, the quality as something that I'm chasing, not just the appetitive nature of that reinforcer.
00:41:24
chrisyzen
Hmm So you probably will fall off your chair when I tell you that I eat up to half a pound of honey a day some days Up to up to a pound.
00:41:30
Andrew Hill_ PhD
You have a pound of honey a day. Yeah. That's a lot.
00:41:33
chrisyzen
Yeah
00:41:33
Andrew Hill_ PhD
That's ah it's a lot. That's a lot of, no, honey's a mix of, is it mostly fructose? I forget.
00:41:38
chrisyzen
it's It depends on the honey, but it it's close to 50-50. It can be like 40-60, this kind of thing.
00:41:42
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Oh, it is. Okay.
00:41:43
chrisyzen
so um I and i write about have a whole chapter in my book about the the low-carb keto stuff, and I write about how how is it that you know all of this chronic disease didn't really exist, even though we've had sugar for a thousand years, and we've had
00:41:44
Andrew Hill_ PhD
okay
00:42:01
chrisyzen
carbohydrates in the form of grains for like 10,000, 12,000 years. So we didn't really, until the the seed oils permeated the food supply, we didn't really have like the first recorded heart attack was in 1912.
00:42:12
chrisyzen
So even heart disease didn't really exist some 110, 20, 30 years ago, right? But if you look at PubMed, if you look at the records that date back for diabetes that did exist, ah we have records I think from the 1800s for cancer, I think even earlier.
00:42:27
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah. Mm hmm.
00:42:29
chrisyzen
but So these things, First of all, heart disease doesn't really exist, right? And there was a great paper by James Dickal Antonio, where he really gives all like a ton of evidence about how um atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, a lot of these things are driven by the oxidation of linoleic acid or these polyunsaturated fats. And even some researchers I've listened to are saying that This glycations or the ages, you know the hemoglobin A1C, glycated proteins and all this stuff, it happens at a much more accelerated rate in the presence of polyunsaturated fats because they are so fragile and peroxidizable.
00:43:01
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah.
00:43:05
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Because unstable. Yeah.
00:43:07
chrisyzen
So this is what I preach to my clients is I have a sentence in my book.
00:43:07
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah.
00:43:11
chrisyzen
I don't care if you drink shots of Jager and go sniff of lines of Coke off a dirty toilet seat in your local club, just please stay away from polyunsaturated fats and if you get these things out of your body safely I think at that point especially because another driver of insulin resistance is the fat the increase like policies in your bloodstream so because you have extra fat that like policies ah through the Randall cycle, it actually inhibits glucose uptake and oxidation into the cell.
00:43:41
chrisyzen
So if you stop that lipolysis, you will be able to oxidize ah glucose very well, very safely without all of this sort of um collateral damage.
00:43:53
chrisyzen
But in these metabolically unhealthy people, which is a big chunk of the US population, it could be like 60% or more, that's a big problem. So adding sugar, and adding anything in that mix is going to be a problem anyway.
00:44:03
Andrew Hill_ PhD
yeah
00:44:03
chrisyzen
But I think in these more sort of metabolically healthy conditions, I don't think there's any issue whatsoever with even like 400 grams of carbohydrates a day. You know, if you're metabolically healthy and you don't have this insulin resistance.
00:44:15
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Well, it's also different. 400 grams of refined white table sugar is going to be delivered in a matrix of chemical crap you know as you buy it in a package.
00:44:26
chrisyzen
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
00:44:29
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But honey comes out of a honey you know a hive and and a bee, and it's relatively untampered.
00:44:34
chrisyzen
Yeah, exactly.
00:44:36
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I mean i know there's a lot of ah fraud in the honey marketplace, but it's theoretically, it's it's a relatively unprocessed food.
00:44:41
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:44:42
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So, and I think that's fine. I think if you're choosing honey in a more paleo or carnivore keto diet, that's that's maybe great. um Several people who are the big carnivore folks in the in our community have stopped being strict carnivores and have reintroduced honey and other things.
00:44:55
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:44:58
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And the main reason, at least the way that I understand it, is it's sort of two things. One is in the absence of carb, in the aggressive absence of carb, we tend to waste all of our minerals.
00:45:09
Andrew Hill_ PhD
We strip out magnesium and calcium, potassium, phosphorus, without the carb to hold, that water to hold the minerals. And so I think that some of our you know more aggressive carnivore or keto folks will get a lot of muscle cramping, heart palpitations, gut clenching, because of lack of electrolytes.
00:45:28
chrisyzen
And hypothyroidism eventually. Because the yeah the removing carbs from the diet signals very similar ah gives a very similar signal to the body as as fasting.
00:45:31
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And that as well, exactly, drive up to all that all that cortisol.
00:45:41
chrisyzen
yeah
00:45:41
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Interesting.
00:45:42
chrisyzen
Yeah, I mean, that's why the keto diet causes ketosis and because that's what happens when you're fasting in a deep fast, you're in ketosis.
00:45:42
Andrew Hill_ PhD
and And you may...
00:45:46
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yep.
00:45:50
chrisyzen
And that's how the keto diet was designed to figure it out to remove the carbs. and keep the protein low so to reduce gluconeogenesis. But what's interesting is that one high protein meal kicks a person out of ketosis often, which indicates that the body does not want to remain in ketosis. You would rather waste protein, precious protein, which is also toxic due to the ammonia buildup. It's a burden on the kidneys. So to me, at least the way I see it,
00:46:18
chrisyzen
If the body wanted to be in ketosis so much in such an optimal state, like a lot of these folks are saying, then why does even one higher protein meal kick us out of ketosis? Why would the body choose to make via gluconeogenesis, glucose as opposed to continuing the the ketosis, you know?
00:46:32
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah.
00:46:36
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Well, because it means demand, right? Leukinogenesis is a demand driven process. And so you would not be kicked out of ketosis unless you're not well adapted is the theory.
00:46:46
chrisyzen
You think?
00:46:47
Andrew Hill_ PhD
If if you're, you know, very deeply trained in creating and burning ketones, then protein doesn't get turned into blood sugar.
00:46:57
chrisyzen
Okay.
00:46:58
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But if you are full of the counter regulatory hormones because you're fasting and restricting calories and you aren't used to creating ketones yet, then when you eat protein, it'll go through that gluconeogenesis pathway because your body is still looking for blood sugar.
00:47:14
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Um, so I think it can it can it can vary a little bit person to the next in terms of where you are and how educated in some ways your body is. I would also argue that many of us who are doing keto focused measurement are doing it wrong. i i I think there's very limited utility in measuring the bloodstream if you're a keto hacker.
00:47:38
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I think the bloodstream is picking up the impact of your digestion. It's a very short time course. It's early in the process, obviously.
00:47:47
chrisyzen
Mm-hmm.
00:47:47
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I'm a big fan of measuring the breath for ketones, for acetone, actually, because the breath is way downstream.
00:47:52
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:47:55
Andrew Hill_ PhD
It's measuring the burn off of the ketones. I mean, this is kind of the same theory as as urine. that You can't measure urine as somebody getting into ketosis because it'll first show strong ketones.
00:48:05
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But once you get good at burning them, They go away in the urine because you weren't letting any past.
00:48:07
chrisyzen
Yeah, yeah.
00:48:10
chrisyzen
Sure, yeah, yeah.
00:48:11
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But the breath's not like that. You're getting the acetone as a blow-by effect of burning ketones all the time, and it reacts to a time course that's two or three days.
00:48:22
Andrew Hill_ PhD
It's the upregulation, the downregulation of all these different metabolic pathways that cause the change in the breath. So for example, I use a device to measure my acetone in the morning and before meals and I was, you know, overweight, eating carbs and feeling crappy. And so I went, you know, hardcore for a while and got, got nice and insulin sensitive and making ketones again. And I figured out that I could do stupid things like suck down a pint of ice cream in the evening and the next morning be back in ketosis.
00:48:50
chrisyzen
Wow.
00:48:52
Andrew Hill_ PhD
because I figured out where that threshold was. What can I dispose of over what time? And I would not have figured that out had I been looking at my bloodstream. Any carbs at all in the mouth, boom, you crash the ketones in the bloodstream, but you don't crash the ketone metabolism. All the processes involved with creating and burning the ketones. So also people often are focused on this idea of ketones being magical or blood sugar being a thing to avoid. Big piece of metabolism people often don't ah emphasize is that That sugar burning versus fat burning ratio accounts for 15% of our energy, roughly.
00:49:30
Andrew Hill_ PhD
85% of our energy is just burning free floating fatty acids that are always there. That last 15% is a trade off between burning carbs or burning fats into ketones. So you're always burning free fatty acids. You might be making ketones out of out of them, but you are actually always oxidizing fats. So I think that that last 15%, if it's being dominatant dominated by glucose and carbohydrates, it can be and cause a lot of trouble.
00:50:03
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But I don't think that we have to worry about stripping out carbohydrates from our diet because it's not actually a huge amount of our energy source.
00:50:08
chrisyzen
Mm.
00:50:11
Andrew Hill_ PhD
You just have to manage the the the signaling from that diet ah essentially to not tell your body it needs to. ah oxidize all these carbohydrates and and store.
00:50:23
Andrew Hill_ PhD
I mean, we don't have a mechanism for storing protein. You know, protein is either used structurally, it's used for fuel, or you pee it out.
00:50:27
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:50:30
chrisyzen
Mm.
00:50:33
Andrew Hill_ PhD
That's it. Don't store it. But carbohydrates, you can store an infinite number, pretty much, as fat. and And fat directly, you can store pretty much forever.
00:50:41
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:50:43
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So I think this starts to give us a perspective on what kinds of metabolic compounds or macros we can handle. you know And in carbohydrates, we don't you know we don't handle but don't keep them in the bloodstream.
00:50:55
Andrew Hill_ PhD
We shove them into storage if we can. And protein, we pee out.
00:50:57
chrisyzen
Yeah,
00:50:58
Andrew Hill_ PhD
know So there's this there's this perspective on you know, where's the energy coming from? And I think many of us are too focused on the idea that, oh my God, I had some carbs.
00:51:10
chrisyzen
yeah
00:51:10
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And it's not really the whole picture, so.
00:51:10
chrisyzen
yeah. carb fovea man it's it's we we we were fat phobic for a while then we're I think there's this societal cycles that I think the as I matured a little bit I realized not that you have to be moderate and use moderation because that's really not ah not ah that's that's just really very lazy but it's we do we do need the back like you said already you know we have a
00:51:16
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yep.
00:51:37
chrisyzen
We have a need for all of these things. We have an ability to store them turn interconvert them. So We know that the brain can use you know in a day, 100, 120 grams of carbohydrates or or glucose. The red blood cells need some 30 grams per day. So I just tell my clients, smaller people, you need at least a couple of hundred grams a day because obviously you' are not you are going to be doing other stuff other than you know operating your central nervous system and and your red blood cells creating energy.
00:52:08
chrisyzen
And then for larger guys, very active folks, you know, you could easily go 300. And and what like you said, 300 grams of carbohydrate for a large person, that could be a half to, you know, 33% to a quarter of their entire caloric demand in a day.
00:52:19
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah.
00:52:23
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah. You haven't filled your liver up with 300. If you're a big person who's active, you know, your liver can probably hold 400 and your muscles will hold another 200 at that point, let's say. So, but that doesn't mean you consider in a couch and your ice cream, even if you're full of muscle, cause it'll just go into your bloodstream, but you can probably have,
00:52:35
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:52:38
chrisyzen
yeah yeah
00:52:43
Andrew Hill_ PhD
100 grams of carbs for lunch and then go for a short walk, which will partition the the blood sugar into muscles without the release of insulin, ah which is huge. So I think just like we talked about earlier about neurotransmitters, it's the range within which signaling is heard that's important, not the absolute level.
00:53:01
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:53:01
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And the brain's great at tuning around neurotransmitter levels. The body's not so good at tuning around blood sugar levels.
00:53:07
chrisyzen
Mm-hmm.
00:53:08
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So we we have to behaviorally, cognitively control some of that ranging of of sugar um to avoid sort of dysregulating
Getting Started with Neurofeedback
00:53:19
Andrew Hill_ PhD
the system, I think.
00:53:19
Andrew Hill_ PhD
But blood sugar is not supposed to be a stable static thing. I mean, I'm, I'm noticing a lot of my biohacker friends get their first CGM and they're like, Oh my God, I got a blood sugar spike when I ate some food.
00:53:32
Andrew Hill_ PhD
well Great. Okay. That's great.
00:53:33
chrisyzen
Yeah, that's what's what's happened.
00:53:34
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And then what happened? Oh, and then it went away.
00:53:35
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:53:37
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Great. That's what that's good good for you.
00:53:38
chrisyzen
That's what that's supposed to happen.
00:53:39
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Go insulin.
00:53:40
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:53:40
Andrew Hill_ PhD
That's what's supposed to happen.
00:53:41
chrisyzen
Yeah. yeah
00:53:42
Andrew Hill_ PhD
It's when it goes up and stays up and you're not managing the high levels of insulin or sugar. That's when the concern happens.
00:53:47
chrisyzen
Yeah.
00:53:47
Andrew Hill_ PhD
So I think we, I think we, we vilify, uh, insulin a little bit these days and even blood sugar because we're thinking about it as, uh, the problem instead of the regulatory environment being potentially the problem.
00:53:52
chrisyzen
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
00:54:00
chrisyzen
Yeah, yeah. And also, ah I think this like policies. It's like, and i obviously, I might be stepping on people's sort of theories and tools here, but ah One of my clients was telling me, um somebody told him XYZ is good because it increases lipolysis. So I just went to chat GPT and I typed in what are some health conditions and and states and diseases in which lipolysis is elevated. And it started listing off, you know, like diabetes, cancer, you know, people and on their deathbed are in an increased fat burning state. So I think we have this baseline lipolysis that the body
00:54:39
chrisyzen
is already like your muscles are burning fat at rest you know certain other organs I think even the heart so there's no need to probably push you know, for more fat oxidation, because you're already oxidizing fat constantly, right? So I think a slightly more measured approach, because at the end of the day, what what drives lipolysis? Adrenaline, right? and And some of these, like you said, counter regulatory hormones and cascades. And we know that actually, when um adrenaline is elevated, for whatever reason, that can cause insulin resistance in the periphery for several hours. I think I saw it up to nine hours.
00:55:17
chrisyzen
afterwards. And that insulin resistance is kind of ah what can cause this buildup of blood sugar and and this inability to clear the blood sugar out of the the way and it's caused by stress. So if you if you stress your body, but whether that's with too much exercise, too much fasting, too much whatever,
00:55:35
chrisyzen
it will, you can actually become insulin resistant. And that's why we have steroid induced diabetes because some of these glucocorticoids, they, they have a recognized condition where the steroids for the condition that they were treating cause diabetes or stress induced diabetes.
00:55:50
chrisyzen
So it's got nothing to do with the diet. So it's the, yeah.
00:55:52
Andrew Hill_ PhD
and And I've seen it the other way around, I've seen, you know, I mentioned that back midline that posterior cingulate, which is very threat sensitive and and drives PTSD. I know clients of mine for whom spiking activity, you know, an anxiety attack will cause a major blood sugar event.
00:56:07
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Cause it releases dumps cortisol, huge amounts of cortisol in their system, which cause it calls for a blood sugar spike and they get essentially reactive hyperglycemia because of anxiety.
00:56:09
chrisyzen
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely so we kind of went off on a bit of a tangent but it's always good so let's talk about you
00:56:18
Andrew Hill_ PhD
because it goes up and then gets shut back down with insulin. So this seems to be a phenomena of the body and brain with regards to blood sugar. It's somewhat tightly related. so
00:56:31
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah.
00:56:35
chrisyzen
how How does one get started? I'm sure you've you've worked hard, Andrew, to make this stuff accessible. You don't have to necessarily go to a center. So talk talk to us. where Where is your service available in the world? And what are the ah some of the logistics around that?
00:56:51
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah, thanks. um So Peak Brain Institute, my company, has six physical offices. ah We have four in the US in New York City, in Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Orange County, California. um And we also have an office in Stockholm and one in London.
00:57:09
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And ah in the u.s we see clients both in person and virtually and then throughout europe and the u k and other places we see people mostly virtually. And ah you gotta come to one of our offices for an assessment called the brain map which takes about an hour and a half i'll give listeners of the show a discount it's two fifty once a year for unlimited access to brain maps in one of the offices.
00:57:31
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And um you don't have to come to an office many of our clients work with us fully virtually. And we send equipment out. And we do brain mapping and neurofeedback education with you so we send you off a set of kit.
00:57:46
Andrew Hill_ PhD
We work with you to pull a cap on your head, squirt it full of gel, sit there for 20 minutes. We do the world's most boring attention test alongside it. And then the coaches work with you to teach you to do neurofeedback, teach you to find locations on your head and set up some software.
00:57:54
chrisyzen
Nice.
00:58:00
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And we start building this workout plan and we iterate through a few sessions a week and if effects start to build up. We give every client a live chat a slack channel that set up so they can get real time help seven days a week and we really help them solve the technical challenges so they can think about well how did i feel did i get any impacts which is some way something only they can do um and so we tend to work on this.
00:58:26
Andrew Hill_ PhD
distributed way where I have coaches all over the world who will be hopping on and supporting clients. You can kind of think of us like the SoulCycle model, which is a company in the US that they send exercise bikes home and little coaches and screens cheer you on as you It's kind of our model for neurofeedback.
00:58:42
chrisyzen
yeah
00:58:43
Andrew Hill_ PhD
We send equipment home and coaches are like, great, now put more gel in this hole in the cap. Yay. Why are you getting your assessment done? And neurofeedback doesn't require a full head cap. It's just ear clips and a couple of wires where you're training.
00:58:56
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And so we can teach you how to do neurofeedback. It's not that hard to do it. It's hard to know what to do and what to do next when things start to move. That's the real trick in some ways, the real hard part of neurofeedback is, well, how does the brain work?
00:59:09
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And what do we do to encourage it to to move? But it's easy to stick wires on the head, find a location, get a good signal, put some things in the software. That isn't that tricky. And so we get people doing this over a couple of weeks and the subjective effects start to emerge in that time. And then every day we're touching base. How was your sleep? How was your day? And giving them a new workout every couple of days to try.
00:59:34
Andrew Hill_ PhD
And so you can come to one of our offices, but generally we work for a few months, and often it's fully virtual. So if you're in one of our countries, come check us out. If you're not, we work with people all over the world. You can just get involved by either a trip to one of our countries or just by purchasing hardware and software. It's a little more expensive if you're not in one of our countries, but we do work with folks really all over the world. so
00:59:59
chrisyzen
Sounds really awesome. Well, we're going to have the link in there for the listeners to check out and maybe, maybe if I go to London at some point, I'll definitely pop into one of your offices for sure.
01:00:10
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Sure. Absolutely.
01:00:11
chrisyzen
Sure.
01:00:12
chrisyzen
Like I said, this since 2018, it's been on my radar. I know it's powerful and i've I've actually already, um, I'm thinking of a couple of clients with autistic kids where this could be, could be helpful when actually one of them,
01:00:12
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Yeah.
01:00:24
chrisyzen
is in the UK already. So um yeah, we're definitely gonna be staying in touch and and doing amazing work, Andrew.
01:00:33
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Oh.
01:00:33
chrisyzen
Thank you so much for coming on the show and ah looking forward to kind of seeing where you take this because I believe this is this whole movement is only in its infancy and you're one of the pioneers.
01:00:45
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Well, thanks. I appreciate that. A vote of confidence.
01:00:48
chrisyzen
Thank you so much.
01:00:49
Andrew Hill_ PhD
Definitely. Thanks.