Joe Rogan and Andrew Hill, PhD, explore how pre-podcast audio clips shape reactions, then challenge traditional substance abuse treatment by detailing Alternatives’ month-long abstinence reset with breathalyzers, GPS tracking, and neurofeedback to rewire brainwave patterns—like reducing beta/theta hyperactivity in trauma-linked regions. NASA’s 1960s cat studies reveal neurofeedback’s potential to curb seizures, but Hill suspects pharmaceutical industry suppression of non-drug solutions. They compare cannabis’s 20-35% THC strains (with liver-amplified psychoactivity) to Adderall’s dopamine-driven risks and modafinil’s severe side effects, even in its purer R-form. Mindfulness and float tanks emerge as tools for attention stability, while QEEG brain mapping targets sleep architecture and TBI recovery. State-dependent learning explains athletes’ pressure-induced failures, with SMR training offering a data-backed solution. Hill’s True Brain nootropics and Alternatives Brain Institute bridge science and self-optimization, proving the brain’s untapped potential outweighs rigid dogma. [Automatically generated summary]
We were talking, Dr. Andrew Hill is on the podcast today, and we were talking before the podcast started.
I didn't want to talk to you anymore.
I wanted to get you in here and sit you down.
Because you said something really fascinating.
That you take people who may have problems with substances, and instead of getting them to abstain, you get them to use them responsibly, which is an alien concept in this day and age.
Yeah, I mean, this is not terribly common in substance abuse, you know, sort of treatment world.
There's a few companies that do it, and one of them is here in Los Angeles, Alternatives.
And we...
We'll take people that, you know, might have an issue with alcohol, let's say, and the only option is not abstinence for our program.
We have moderation options, controlled use options, harm reduction.
So someone might come in and say, you know, look, I consider myself an alcoholic, but I want to start drinking again.
Or, you know, I'm someone who has been abstinent for a long time and struggles with craving, struggles with, you know, choice, and whenever I slip, I slip big.
Yeah.
Help me figure out how to not be that guy, how to use responsibly or to not use.
So we don't necessarily say you must be a moderate user or you must abstain.
We ask clients what they want to do and then help them figure out how to get there.
And for many of them, they come to us because we do offer a moderation, moderate alcohol use approach.
One of our principals, Dr. Mark Kern, has been doing addiction work with Moderation Focus for about 30 years in LA, and so it's not the newest thing ever, but it's newer than AA, of course, which has been around for pushing 100 years now.
I mean, you know, the biggest difference for an alternatives approach or a harm reduction or moderation approach compared to AA, in my perspective, is that a lot of the AA approach is disempowering.
You must give up control, you know, surrender.
And I think that there's another option out there, and that's We're architecting more control, more power.
Let's figure out your cues for over-drinking.
Let's figure out what happens, you know, why do you get to five or six or seven drinks?
Like, what happens on drink two?
You know, what are the triggers for, like going home and, you know, automatically driving into that liquor store parking lot you always pass by?
So we help people figure out all the different triggers and cues that are driving their out-of-control use and what control use might look like for them, you know, what sort of appropriate mindful drinking might look like for them.
And if it's alcohol, people spend the first month with us abstaining anyways, just to reset tolerance.
Because to be good at moderation, you have to be good at abstinence.
So the goals may not be abstinence always in our alcohol program, but everyone takes a month off, resets their tolerance, gets some sort of clear head, gets their sleep fixed.
And we're doing other things besides the alcohol interventions and therapy and biofeedback and mindfulness and another sort of whole team approach.
But then at the end of that month, if folks decide they want to, we go to a bar with them.
A lot of the clients that we work with carry around little breathalyzers in their pocket that, several times a day, ping them and ask them to blow and get a little camera snapshot.
It is them.
And a GPS location.
And so we determine where they are, who they are, and what their blood alcohol is.
And, you know, unlike most other treatment programs, if you blow dirty on a breathalyzer, it's usually like, you're out of here.
With lots, it's like, oh, great, so you drank.
What was that like?
I see you got this blood alcohol level.
How many drinks was that?
Was that two?
Okay, interesting.
Over what time frame?
How did that feel?
And we get people to, in a very structured way, analyze what alcohol is instead of it being sort of momentum-based behavior.
Also, things that are forbidden become attractive, and the conversation about them gets shut down a little bit when things get sort of put in these little isolated bulwarks of dangerous and forbidden.
Yeah, it becomes one of those things where everyone has this very rigid idea of what an alcoholic is supposed to do.
And if you bring up something like what you're proposing or what you actually, not just propose, but you enact in treatment, That's got to receive a lot of criticism.
And, you know, we get long-term sort of 12-step type saying, you're going to kill people, people are going to, you know, have problems.
The thing is, you know, we've done some research in our center and folks self-select abstinent track or moderation track.
And the self-selection appears to be what drives success, not which track you're on.
So if people identify their goals, we help them reach those goals.
But if your only goals are, or if your only allowable path is you must be abstinent, then you aren't taught any skills about how to drink a little bit.
You know, so when people who are on an abstinent-only sort of treatment programs have slips, they have big slips.
I forget if it's the mu or the kappa, but one of the opioid receptors in the brain, there's one genetic sort of flavor you can have where alcohol is extra rewarding.
Where it just, you know, you love that sensation, you love the feeling a little more than the average person might.
Yeah, I think partially there's this idea of, well, you're powerless over alcohol, therefore accept that you're powerless.
But a lot of that powerlessness, or I can't control my behavior, is because of the sort of over-learning that comes where behavior is no longer choice.
It's almost automatic because you've gotten so rewarded so many times from that behavior that then the behavior becomes reinforced.
I mean, you know, all addiction is this way, but all addiction is just learning.
It's not some special form of learning.
It's just learning.
So what you're talking about is people that have learned to lose control.
So, does that, like, there's the common thought about Native Americans, the common discussion when people talk about Native Americans and alcohol is that they didn't have alcohol in their diet, We introduced it to them with the Europeans, rather than introduced it to them, and then they became almost instantly addicted because they did not have the genetic predisposition to process it.
Is that BS? I think it's partially BS. I think it's more about, you know, if you lock a bunch of people on a small plot of non-farmable land and don't give them any mechanisms for advancement and take away all their power and then give them a drug to abuse.
They abuse it.
You know, there's always these studies showing that if you give a rat unfettered access to drugs and alcohol, it sits there and, you know, hits the lever until it dies, right?
That's actually not true.
If you give a rat access to cocaine or alcohol, well, probably not alcohol, but something really rewarding, it will only self-administer the drug and, you know, and sort of starve to death for the reward when the environment isn't interesting.
When the environment's impoverished, if there's lots of, you know, rat toys and lots of other cute rats hanging out, they're much less interested in becoming cocaine addicts or whatever it is.
It's only in the absence of stimulating enriched environments do these sort of automatic behaviors take over.
So I would argue, at least partially, the Native American alcohol connection is because these are people who are disenfranchised systematically and then given an escape.
I mean, humans are given this, well, if you're an alcoholic, if you're a drinker, a problem drinker, you're always going to be a problem drinker is the prevailing wisdom, which also isn't true.
Something like 90, 95% of people that are problem drinkers Learn to not be problem drinkers with no programs, with no intervention, no therapy.
They just learn to get control over their drinking.
And boredom and lack of ability to tolerate boredom or tolerate uncomfortable emotions, of which boredom can be one, is often the biggest driver for problematic substance use.
It is a really fascinating piece that they did, and it actually helped alter the law in Florida.
You're aware of the whole situation in Florida.
They had pain management centers, for folks who don't know.
And these pain management centers were essentially one-stop heroin shops.
They'd give it to you in pill form, but you would go there.
There would be a doctor right there.
And you'd say, hey, doctor, my back's all fucked up.
All right, well, you need pain pills.
And then you would go, literally, you would exit his door and go to the next door, and that was run by the same company, and it was a pain management facility pharmacy.
And you'd go in there, and all they had was pills.
And you would just go and buy OxyContin.
And there was all these people waiting outside.
Vanguard did the show.
On it and it was amazing.
It was amazing because they they followed people who were hooked on it They followed people that were going hopping from clinic to clinic and it was just rampant Florida had some ungodly percentage of people that were prescribed Now, of course, elders are also, I mean, Florida, half the state is elders.
And pain management is much, you know, more common.
Pain management in the medical sort of space is much more common when you're, you know, 70, 80 years old than it is when you're 30 or 40. It's very important when you say elders that you say age and not Mormons.
Yes, yes.
Not the quorum of 12 or whatever.
No, like people 60, 65 and up is what I consider elders.
Yeah, I have a buddy who's a Jack Mormon, you know, a lapsed Mormon, and he's this, you know, 55-year-old guy with dreadlocks down to his ankles and, you know, musician, and he left the Mormon church, but he was an elder in his, like, early 20s before he sort of decided it wasn't for him.
Yeah, once you're addicted to, you know, pain medication, you know, the doctors won't give it to you forever, so at some point you're getting off the pain medication prescriptions, but you might still be addicted, so you seek, you know, street opiates, and that's sort of the standard story there.
And I think you mentioned earlier people, you know, clinic hopping or doctor hopping.
I mean, that's a really common sort of way people abuse pain meds is they get multiple people to prescribe.
It sounds like, you know, Rush may have had his friends and family, you know, helping to develop his habit.
When you're taking lots of different things, though, there's an added risk, and that's what's called polypharmacy, or interactions between your drugs.
And a lot of painkillers, a lot of major tranquilizers are very significant drugs that suppress The cardiovascular system, the respiratory system.
And so if you combine different types of drugs being given from different doctors who aren't aware of the different drugs that you're being given, then you can get into life-threatening side effects very quickly for some people.
And, you know, to some extent, those little pharmacy slash prescription shops, they remind me of, you know, the cannabis culture we have in most states now where, you know, you can walk into a little mom and pop sort of prescription center where maybe you see a doctor, maybe you see their nurse practitioner.
You pay your 40 bucks, you walk out with a card, you go next door and you put your card down and walk out with your weed.
You know, nowadays you go online and you say, I'd like this strain delivered at my door at this time, and it shows up at your door with a smile and, you know, a little mint.
It's a very different sort of way to deal with drugs than the gatekeeper of the physician who's carefully paying attention to your full use spectrum and managing your life, managing your health with some, you know, good perspective on you.
When we have these, you know, as you mentioned, the short time, we have 10 minutes with a doctor or something, and it's a prescription out the door.
Yeah, well, the cannabis one is kind of a joke, because although there are people, I mean, I know people that use it for health reasons, the vast majority are juke in the system.
They're just like, hey, I've got a headache, you know?
Sure, well, you know, stress is one of the biggest detriments to health.
You know, cortisol rises, your hippocampus dies, and cells fall apart, and your body heals less fast, and you learn less well, your frontal lobe shuts down.
Stress is a big problem.
So, you know, I would argue that even the recreational cannabis users who sort of gamed the system are getting the stress reduction benefits from it, typically.
Well, the pressures of the average 9 to 5 existence, plus traffic, commute, bills, family, is overwhelming.
I don't believe that our bodies are designed for this.
And I think that any means that you can without completely destroying your body and mitigating whatever pressures and stresses you're under, I'm all for it.
I mean, I think aspirin should be legal.
I'm a big fan of almost everything being legal.
Sure.
I think that some folks are going to have a much harder time with certain substances than others.
And are you using it to mitigate the effects of trauma, especially trauma from your childhood, which is one of the things that people don't consider when they talk in disparaging ways about people being addicts.
They don't consider the fact that this person might have been wired in a certain way because of traumatic experiences that they had while they're developing, where their mind was developing.
Yeah, I mean, I do brain mapping, QEEG, and we look at sort of functional patterns in brains and try to tie it together to people's, you know, behavior and the things they're struggling with.
And I often see in people that are struggling with alcohol, sort of a sensitization, a hot spot on the back of the brain in an area called the posterior cingulate cortex, Which is to some extent involved with sensitization to threat, noticing danger.
And that spot shows up, that overactivity shows up when people have experienced fairly significant trauma.
So it's a pretty common reason people are using drugs and alcohol.
I mean, when you were a baby flopping around trying to learn how to walk, there was a lot of random activity making your limbs move.
Or semi-random.
You know, just trying random.
Your brain was just sending out random pulses to see what happened.
And suddenly, you put your arms down on the ground, you push yourself up, and you could see more.
You could see, you know, further in the distance.
Your brain went, oh, cool!
Remember this pattern of muscle activity because this one gets me to see more stuff and explore the environment.
And it wasn't like some magical, your brain went, okay, contract the left bicep and then the left forearm.
It just kind of happens randomly until it produces the desired effect, which is, oh, I'm sort of crawling now.
And then the brain does more of the thing.
That let it get more input, avoid danger, get pleasure, whatever the learning reinforcers are.
The same thing happens when you're sitting in front of a biofeedback machine trying to make a spaceship fly or a car race around a track with your brain.
You want it to happen.
And so whenever the car slows down and peters out next to the race course because your brain got distracted or tense, the brain doesn't like the lack of input.
And it starts to go, hey, wait, where's my input?
And it tries to figure out, oh, I'm controlling this environment out in the world, therefore I should do more of X, less of Y. It's actually a non-cognitive process, believe it or not.
You aren't trying, you're more sort of letting it happen.
We're instrumentally are shaping, conditioning the brain in certain directions.
It's kind of like if you were limping because your left knee was off and you went to do six months of physical therapy, from then on you're walking with appropriate gait and you're always practicing the new muscles and coordination and things.
Neurofeedback isn't permanent for everything.
If there's an active disease process going on, like schizophrenia or HIV or something, then the problems you're able to reduce can reemerge.
But if you've got ADHD or migraines or sleep issues or anxiety or trauma or OCD or PTSD, these things all do appear to change and change in a largely permanent way for most people.
Like, say, if you take someone who's had a traumatic childhood and issues with abuse and substance abuse because of that, and then they enter into some sort of a treatment like this, how long of a process?
And there's some truth to the people saying it doesn't exist.
I think that as a pathology, as a strictly a mental illness, it doesn't really exist.
I think what we have is a natural spectrum, continuum of attention management resources.
And some of us can notice everything in the environment and turn our attention and just be wide focused and be pulled off by all novelty.
And other folks are good at being heads down and sustained attention.
You know, 10,000 years ago, we needed hunters who could, like, you know, see the little tiger hiding in the corner or the hard, you know, red berry, hard-to-spot piece of fruit hiding under the leaf, who could notice all the little environmental cues.
And we also needed folks who could sit behind the village and, like, weed the plants all day long.
So I think that there's a natural sort of reinforcer of human, you know, a range of human attention regulation where some folks have more novelty-seeking, more wide focus, and other folks have more narrow or sustained attention.
So when we say ADHD, you know, the diagnostic criteria in general in mental health isn't really about what's going on.
It's about what's going on and does it interfere with your life?
So you can be really hyperactive, really spacey, really checked out, really, you know, hard to talk to, but if you're successful, I wouldn't call it a pathology.
I wouldn't even call it ADHD. And to call it ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the deficit implies you have less attention than average.
But, you know, we all know ADHD people that can sit and play video games without stopping for 20 hours straight.
That's not a deficit of attention.
That's an excess of typical attention to some extent.
So it's really about managing your attention in ways that are appropriate to the demands of the environment.
If your classroom teacher wants you to sit still for 45 minutes and you can't, then it's a problem.
It becomes a problem because of the classroom, though, doesn't it?
Maybe.
Who has this issue with attention when it comes to things that they're not into, but yet they can focus extremely well on something that they're fascinated by, and then that benefits them and they become successful at that.
If you are in a negative environment as far as teaching or school, and they try to get you to become this person who's just like everybody else, then it becomes something they want to medicate you with.
Especially for artists, especially people that aren't, you know, like, I'm, for instance, horrible at math.
I cannot do math in my head.
I'm dyscalculic.
But I'm verbally about as, you know, good as it gets.
And so, you know, I was always sort of not rewarded by being in math classes and really rewarded being in, you know, language or, you know, whatever, English class.
The artist ADHD kid thrives in, you know, one-tenth of their high school classes.
Potentially, if it's dramatic ADHD. But I would say that most people don't have dramatic attention regulation issues.
They have minor attention regulation issues that can be changed.
You mentioned that ADHD people can be...
I'm fascinated by things and really, you know, pay attention.
The prefrontal cortex, the most frontal, most anterior part of the brain, the most human part, the part that developed the latest, is really the executive of the brain, the CEO. And a lot of how it does its job is by telling the rest of the brain, no.
You know, don't turn your head and look at this other thing.
Don't, you know, grab that woman.
Don't eat that food.
Don't, you know, it's no, no, no, no, no.
It's a lot of what the PFC does.
In ADHD, the PFC is often underactive.
It's called the CEO is asleep at the wheel.
And so other parts of the brain kind of take over.
It's like the sensory system sees a pretty bird fly by and turns your head before you know it, because the CEO is not telling you not to.
This is why ADHD folks tend to really pursue activities that are dangerous.
You know, skydiving, motorcycle riding, taking drugs, risky sex, because anything risky, challenging, dangerous lights up the PFC and really turns it on and activates it in a way that most ADHD people don't experience most of the time.
This is why if you have an ADHD kid, they train parents to yell at them to create the conflict that then produces a more active prefrontal cortex.
They train people around them to create conflict with them because being yelled at, being punished, being engaged aggressively lights up the prefrontal cortex.
Now, when you're dealing with people that have such an incredible amount of variation, the variation between human beings and personalities, you're sticking them in a classroom, and you're forcing them to adhere to...
Some sort of program that was designed by someone who's never going to meet them.
And is there some benefit from just dealing with this homogenization, dealing with the boarding, The curriculum, you know, they're forcing upon you, just some sort of stress management benefits?
I mean, you know, it's certainly people management.
You can't teach every individual kid one-on-one.
And so there has to be an accommodation or a compromise somewhere for doing classroom, public school, broad teaching.
I think technology is changing that.
I think the massively online, you know, courses that are mostly free these days, that's mostly adults taking those, you know, taking advantage of those, but I think that will change how we teach children long term.
It will allow more individualized.
You know, if you take the traditional public school common core system on one end of the spectrum, and you look at something completely opposite like Montessori schools, Montessori is all about finding the thing the kid is interested in.
And then funneling all their learning down that one avenue of interest.
Yeah, yeah, you know, but that's also a little bit more, I mean...
I'm not sure that we need to segregate ages.
We create cohort effects.
People experience specific things because of the groups they're lumped in with.
That's a little artificial.
A couple hundred years ago, we had a six-year-old and a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old in the same classroom, and they probably all learned from each other, even if they didn't know it.
But it would seem to me that it would be incredibly different.
I'm not that aware of the monetary system other than friends that have kids in it that have complaints.
But I would think that The variability would be so large that if you have a classroom of 20, 30 kids, how are you going to pay attention to each kid's needs?
Knowing what you know about the mind and the development of the mind, is the current state of education, public education in this country, is that one of the more frustrating things that you have to consider?
I mean, people learn so many different ways, and I also don't think that learning stops when you're out of school.
I think that the role of public education should be to do as much as possible for as many people as possible.
But, you know, the people at either of the extremes are never going to be well served.
People that are struggling or people that are advanced are never going to be well served by You know, general public education, while it's this sort of 1 to 35, 1 to 40 ratio.
I teach at UCLA. And, you know, we get people Yeah, it should be a huge honor.
Yeah, we don't have that.
We don't tend to have a lot of traditional mechanisms left in our sort of modern Western culture.
We don't look at, you know, coming of age or differences.
I mean, women have an obvious coming of age thing that happens between like 9 and 13. There's a physiologic change, so it's obvious.
Boys don't have that.
And so, you know, a thousand years ago, when we hit 13 years old, we were, you know, made men.
There was some ritual.
We hunted a boar.
Who knows?
Got a tattoo.
But nowadays, people go from, you know, being children to adults without any clear stages, without the sort of social reinforcers of where you are and what your life means in terms of the community, in terms of your family.
So I think that's unfortunately, you know, it's a function of living on a planet with seven billion people.
That's a topic that's been brought up on this show many, many times because I'm a big fan of and a big proponent of engaging in difficult activities to understand yourself.
And I think that coming-of-age rituals They, at the very least, signify to a child, like, now I am this.
In martial arts, you get belts.
And when you achieve your blue belt, there's this moment where you get that belt, you go, wow, I am a blue belt now.
And it doesn't seem like it should be much, but I remember when I was doing jujitsu and I went from a white belt to a blue belt, I was like, wow.
And in historical, cultural, sort of coming-of-age rituals, the young person is given advice by all the men in the village, all the women in the village.
They pick a new name sometimes.
They go through like an ordeal.
I mean, the ordeal, I think, is what you're talking about, too.
The ordeal should not be underestimated.
I don't know if we haven't met before, so I have a history as an ecstatic shaman.
...pushing yourself hard until your reality changes.
Define shamanism, define it as, you know, ordinary reality is what we all have.
And if you push yourself hard enough through any mechanism you can think of, eventually your reality breaks and you have other insight, other knowledge, other ways of, you know, understanding the world.
And so for me, it's been things like, you know, dance all night long or drumming or, you know, other things as well.
But the idea is to push yourself until you get out of your own way.
Until your monkey mind breaks down, until you leave that behind.
I don't know enough about it, is the short answer.
I think it's interesting.
I'm intrigued by it, and I think for folks that are struggling with certain types of drug addiction, I have some clients who've gone through that particular thing and say that they were impressed by it or they got something out of it.
I just don't have enough You know, a real clear first-hand experience to talk about.
The amount of people that have done it, I've never done it either, but the amount of people that have done it that have had addiction issues and gone through it and it's wiped out their addiction issues, it's pretty staggering.
These things, and this is a hypothesis, this is a theory I have, that all of these things act in a similar way on the brain to reset, to cause a systemic, wide, sort of flip the switch.
You know, ECT is still used for medication-resistant depression.
It's one of the few things that works.
If drugs don't work for your depression, ECT will lift your depression.
So will ketamine.
You know, one is zapping you, one is sedating you, but I think they're really going after sort of a reset deep in the brain in some way.
So this transformative experience being so completely alien to normal states of consciousness is enough to give you this new blank slate, or at least a new starting point.
I'm really glad you brought up the expression depression.
Yeah.
I don't suffer from depression.
I've had many close friends who do, and I've always been concerned or confused or curious as to what causes it.
Is it an environmental issue?
Is it a biological issue?
Is it a combination of the two?
Because I've had friends whose lives were not going well.
Their career wasn't going well, their romantic life wasn't going well, and they were quote-unquote depressed.
Right.
Their career turned around, their romantic life turned around, and they were no longer depressed.
And so I've always wondered how much of this idea that we have of someone being sick is just based on the input that you're getting from your environment, whether or not you're getting positive feedback.
If you're in love, you'll feel great.
You know, you're with someone you care to be with.
If you have a job that's awesome, you get excited to go to work.
All these things are good.
You're doing well.
You don't have to worry about your bills.
You're in a rewarding relationship where you feel supported and loved.
You don't have this feeling all the time of being lonely or being left out.
How much of that is an environmental issue?
How much of that is just your brain is lacking a certain amount of pills?
And how many people are medicated because their environment is shitty?
And so instead of giving you the impetus to change and alter your environment to benefit you, You're instead given a pill that makes your environment tolerable.
I would say that major depression, I mean, I'm not actually sure when it crept into the DSM. The whole issue of diagnosis is a very thorny issue anyways.
The DSM... Was not really developed, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is what psychologists and psychiatrists use for diagnoses, was not really developed to help with diagnoses.
It was developed to help with insurance companies.
It's kind of like the BMI. You know, the BMI, for you and me, would say we're overweight, if not obese.
But if I was, if my body fat was higher and muscle mass was lower, I would be.
And the same thing's true with diagnoses.
It was really a tool used to figure out what to pay on insurance to some extent.
And so at a population level, if I took a thousand people, the BMI would work pretty well for most of them.
And the same is true of the DSM. It works pretty well at a population level.
But when you drill down to the individual, sometimes their symptoms don't fit the DSM, or how long they've had symptoms for, or the course of their disease doesn't really totally fit.
And does a psychologist say, oh, you don't fit all the criteria, therefore I can't give you a diagnosis?
No, they pick whatever's closest.
So that your insurance company can pay for their therapy, and so that you can maybe get the drugs that they want to give you.
So it's a pretty vague...
I mean, the diagnosis is not as precise a field as a non-psychologist might think.
I love that you use that term, disease, because that's what I wanted to bring up, because that's what it's referred to as a disease.
Depression?
Yeah, depression is a disease, and you hear it all the time, and you hear it oftentimes in commercials that are selling drugs, and that really concerns me, because I'm like, well, you might be giving someone the green light to take a pill, and it takes away the power,
From them takes away the power to change your life to alter your life for the better because you've got this horrible scenario in your life horrible situation Circumstances whatever they're leading you to feel like shit all the time and someone's coming along and saying hey, man You don't need to get a better job.
It can become entrenched and become stuck in that mode.
And that's when it's a big problem.
You know, from the point of view of brain activity, if you look at depressed brains, if I brought in 100 depressed brains into my clinic and did brain mapping or QEEG on them, what I would find in most of them is is an asymmetry in the frontal lobes.
Many people who are depressed have an overactive right frontal lobe and an underactive left.
This bias of left side being more active than right is typical.
Glass half empty, approach the world, explore environments.
When the right is more active than the left, You withdraw, you shut down, you don't want to do anything.
And so there is a brain signature often present in major depression of a left-right bias that goes in the opposite direction.
You know, if you measure the Dalai Lama, he'd be really strong left biased.
I mean, I've never, you know, tracked someone through being non-depressed into depressed because they all come and see me once they're depressed.
So it could be a predisposition.
Your brain is a little bit like this, and you're a little bit, you know, oriented towards becoming a little bit depressed, and then stressors mount.
I mean, genes are the same way.
Genes only account for about 30% of our experience.
And 70% of our experience is how the environment interacts with us.
And the same is true of anything else that's cognitive or psychological.
You may have a slight tendency towards a depressed brain, you know, right-front dominance.
But unless your life becomes sucky, or things really build up, or you feel unsafe, or unmet, or unfed, or something else, you might not ever develop the depression patterns that really you get stuck in.
I mean, all the time you see the asymmetry reverse, go back to the sort of normal or typical brain patterns.
Yeah, it happens all the time.
I mean, not every person with depression has frontal asymmetries, but it happens often enough that I believe it when I see it in the brain maps as a sign.
I mean, I often do brain maps without doing clinical histories first, because I don't want to be biased.
So I'll sit you down and, you know, record some baselines, and then after I have the data, I'll say, okay, I'm seeing this pattern.
I'm seeing some frontal asymmetries.
You know, this thing here, the literature suggests, and many people that come into my clinic have some depression when they see this pattern.
Is that true for you?
And I usually get a, yeah, how'd you know?
Or anxiety there's patterns for.
There's patterns for ADHD or trauma, you know, OCD or PTSD. And so I tend to unpack what I'm looking at based on their symptoms and then confirm, get them to confirm what I'm guessing.
So I would stick an electrode to the top of your head and measure the amount of, let's say, theta.
And theta is a brainwave that when it goes up, you're distracted, impulsive, checked out.
When it goes down, you're focused.
And it's going to fluctuate moment to moment because you aren't making a static amount of this brainwave.
You're making, you know, the amount your environment and your internal environment demands.
And so whenever it tends to trend down, Maybe I'll have you play one of your podcasts, and the volume of your podcasts will go up whenever your theta goes down.
Whenever your theta goes back up, the volume drops.
And so your brain goes, hey, wait, I was listening to that interesting guy.
And over half an hour, you might have several hundred of these resuming of feedback, of rewards.
And that can be something like an audio or a video.
It can be a spaceship flying.
It doesn't seem to matter how we reward the brain when training.
Just when we yoke the rewards to some parameter that's changing in your brain.
And then six months of this one experiment that Dr. Barry Sturman did in the late 60s, six months later he pulled a bunch of cats out of his subject pool to do a rocket fuel exposure experiment.
NASA had said, hey, look, our astronauts are getting really sick.
They're getting nauseous.
How dangerous is this, you know, hydrazine stuff we're using as rocket fuel?
Could you please expose a bunch of animals to it and see, you know, how much it takes to kill them?
Or what the dose-response curve is.
And so Dr. Sturman at UCLA in the late 60s was exposing cats to increasing levels of rocket fuel vapors and found that a little bit, you know, they panted, a little more they stumbled, a little more they cried, and then, like, seizure, coma, death.
This nice linear, you know, with increasing dose.
Except of the cats he was using, a certain subset, like 6 of 30 or something, Refused to have seizures, and the whole curve of unstable brain was pushed to the right.
Couldn't figure out why until he realized, oh wait a minute, I used these same six cats in a previous experiment to increase their brain waves.
In this one brainwave that I thought was a nice target to go after, it turns out that brainwave is the anti-seizure brainwave.
When you train it up, you have decreased, dramatically decreased seizure activity in the brain.
And so he found this, you know, this brainwave was sort of metastable in encouraging brain activity.
And his lab manager at the time was a medication uncontrolled epileptic.
Having, like, tens of seizures a month, which is basically a death sentence.
Your brain will, you know, Swiss cheese over time, and you'll have major, major long-term problems.
And she demanded he build her a biofeedback machine to train up this brainwave.
And over the next year or two, they did some training, and after a couple of years, she went off all meds and was seizure-free.
He submitted a paper to Epilepsia, the journal, and suddenly his government funding all vanished.
So, the conspiracy theorist ideas start to mount when you think about the late 60s and big drug companies not wanting a non-drug intervention for epilepsy out there.
I've had a few folks come through my center who do have seizures, and I've reduced them.
But I'm not sure of the numbers of epileptologists out there using it.
The numbers of neurofeedback providers, just as a hand-waving guess, let's say there's 10,000 in the U.S., And there's many more, of course, throughout the world.
When I go to big conferences, there's, you know, 1,000 to 1,500 people at the professional trade shows for this stuff.
And there's two of them.
So you figure, extrapolating, there's at least 10,000 practitioners in the U.S. In fact, just down the street here in Woodland Hills, some of the giants in the field, the Othmers, they sort of founded the field.
Soon after Sturman made these discoveries, the Othmers...
At EEG Info launched sort of the field of neurofeedback for clinicians.
They built software and hardware for many years for clinicians to use.
And who knows if that's actually what happened, but it's a good story that there's this potential, you know, sort of big brother, big pharma...
And this is not beyond the pale.
This is very possible.
When neurofeedback started getting really big, a lot of what it was first used for is ADHD. It's sort of the magic bullet for ADHD. It's called the 20-hour solution for ADHD. This is starting to really be used maybe 15, 20 years ago.
A couple of the big drug companies were paying scientists to go to CHAD meetings, the ADHD support group meetings, and say, nope, neurofeedback doesn't work.
They were being paid by the drug companies to go and anti-shill for anti-neurofeedback.
Not just failed, found so many positive things they had to bury.
And we're dealing with that today.
I mean, today you still have, there was this horrible story, a horrible video of the head of the DEA having a conversation with someone in Congress where the guy is breaking it down to her, saying, what is worse?
Is cannabis as bad as meth?
And she's like, well, they're both bad, and they're both bad.
Okay, what has a more negative health effect?
Is it cannabis or is it meth?
And she won't do it.
She won't do it because it's an ideology.
She's got a very specific pattern of thinking and speaking that she's supposed to engage in and she won't vary.
Yeah, and unfortunately there's not a lot of good research out there.
I mean, I'm putting together a cannabis study with my lead tech at Alternatives, and we're going through a literature review trying to figure out what the state of the literature is.
And I'm looking at brain activity, so my questions are things like, well, how long is it active in your brain, and what are the brain changes that cannabis produces?
And we're looking at studies from the 70s and some of them in the 80s, and little footnotes and methodologies say, okay, the THC concentration in this study is 2%.
2.5%, 2.1%, whatever.
And nowadays, you know, the stuff being delivered to your door from the collective is 20%, 23%, 25%.
So cannabis has gotten 10 times as strong since our parents were, you know...
They said that they got a hold of some marijuana from the 1960s and 70s, and the variation was between 2% to 5% for shitty weed, but as high as 15% for what they called Acapulco Gold.
Your liver produces this metabolite, 11-hydroxymetabolite, and it's so much more potent, which is why when people eat cookies, they always think they're dying.
They always think, like, oh my god, somebody dosed it.
I'm sure you've...
Probably heard of this.
There's a hilarious 9-1-1 call where these cops had stolen weed from these kids and made brownies with it.
And then they eat the brownies and they call 9-1-1 and they're like, time's going by really slow.
Pull it up, Jamie, because everyone should hear this because it's so fucking stupid.
It just shows you that cops are just people.
And the idea that you could give these people...
is this?
unidentified
Over a 911 call.
He wants to know why no charges have been filed against a police officer who admits to confiscating marijuana from suspects and then baking it in brownies.
And once he and his wife were full and high, they thought they'd overdosed and called 911.
Because that seems to me, I've never done Adderall, but from the people that I've talked to that have and understand it, it's a stimulant like very close to amphetamines.
He just accidentally did it, but he's like, God, I got so much work done.
And I've heard that before, like my friend Eddie.
My friend Eddie Bravo dated a few gals who had problems with stimulants and he said you would always tell because you go over their house it'd be fucking spotless.
He was like those chicks would always be cleaning their apartments.
They would just constantly be cleaning.
What is it about stimulants that make you want to get things done?
You're popping these pills, and at first it's benefiting you, and then slowly that starts to wear out, so you're taking And a lot of kids aren't ADHD, not dramatically, and they're taking stimulants off-label, other people's, you know, black market prescriptions.
And, you know, there are some consequences to psychostimulants.
There are some negative consequences if you're not managing them in the absolute right way you should, including things like cardiovascular side effects and habit formation and appetite suppression.
And, you know, all these things can cause major issues.
I mean, college students are some of the least healthy people anyways.
Yeah, I was watching her and this guy, this other guy who used to work there, and they had this conversation, and he's like, yeah, well, you know, I would just take Adderall.
And she's like, you got Adderall?
You have Adderall?
And it was weird.
It was like you were watching someone, it was like Gollum in the ring.
And people that have attention problems, and I grew up, you know, ADHD, people that have attention problems have dramatically increased side effects...
From that class of drugs, Provigil, NuVigil, Adafinil, you know, arm Adafinil.
What they said eventually was it was something called erythema multiform minor, and there's a major form that's called Stephen Johnson syndrome, and that's where your skin peels off.
If you look at the old, like, some of the review papers on modafinil, you find that all of the studies on people with ADHD have incredibly dramatically increased side effects compared to non-ADHD people.
So you shouldn't use, you know, modafinil's great if you're a sleep, you know, a narcoleptic person or somebody's doing, you know, sleep-wake-shift disorders or things, but unless you absolutely need it to modify your sleep, it's not great for attention.
I mean, I got some mild attention benefits from it the first couple of weeks.
It's just nothing compared to psychostimulants, it's nothing compared to neurofeedback, or even like meditation, mindfulness can change your brain and shore up attention resources.
Yeah, so Modafinil, the first product, ProVigil is the brand name, is a mix of left and right hand molecules.
When you're making organic chemistry, things are sort of naturally developed in sort of two mirror image molecules in most chemical synthesis.
And so there's an L and an R form of the modafinil.
And they're mixed in the modafinil product.
In the R-modafinil, which is nuvigil, It's only one half.
It's the right-hand molecule, the R. And so the R molecule, theoretically, you know, typically in brain chemistry, one of the molecules is psychoactive, and one of them is much, much less so and or causes side effects.
So a lot of the modern drugs will use an L or an R form only and get rid of the other half of the molecule.
But modafinil, both the L and the R, versions of the molecule, are psychoactive.
The R form is a little more psychoactive and tends to have a more stimulant-type feeling.
So subjectively, I've taken both.
Subjectively, modafinil is interesting and has a sort of bimodal peak where you get one hump six hours in, another hump about 12 hours in.
R-menaphenyl has the same sort of 12 to 16 hour window of activity, but it's only one peak of activity.
It's because you're only one molecule.
So in regular menaphenyl, you're metabolizing two different substances, if you will, having slightly different effects from them.
And the R-menaphenyl is only one half of the molecule.
Yeah, not being forthcoming about taking it either.
It's one of those weird things you wanted to kind of keep on the DL. Tim Ferriss, who wrote a book, The 4-Hour Body, he didn't want to talk about it in his book because he was worried that people would start taking it like candy.
But you see the carcinogenic effects, or the people that have an issue with cigarette smoking, it's far more likely to cause cancer than it is people that are using, say, cigars.
And, you know, so, I mean, I don't think we yet know.
And I'm kind of excited by what's happening with the medical and recreational cannabis in this country because we're finally doing some of the research.
We're finally looking into constituent components, all the other cannabinoids beyond THC. We're starting to examine the endocannabinoid.
We have a cannabinoid system built in.
There's a neurotransmitter called ananda, you know, the Sanskrit word for bliss, that hits our endocannabinoid systems.
Well, it doesn't bother me that it's happening now.
What bothers me is the suppression that exists, that used to exist, like the same suppression that caused this, This reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to accept this treatment of epilepsy that didn't involve drugs that they sell.
It was William Randolph Hearst, the Orson Welles movie.
Citizen Kane.
It was all about this one asshole.
William Randolph Hearst...
He owned Hearst Enterprises.
He owned all the newspapers.
He just had this massive stranglehold on information.
And he was a motherfucker.
And this guy came out with the idea of, first of all, they got in cahoots with Harry Anslinger, and they decided to call it marijuana, which wasn't the name for it before.
Marijuana was the name for a wild Mexican tobacco plant.
It wasn't even cannabis.
So when Congress was outlawing marijuana, they didn't exactly understand that they were outlawing hemp as a textile and as a commodity.
So then you had to get like a tax stamp in order to grow hemp and then They needed it for World War II, so they started this campaign, Hemp for Victory.
And Hemp for Victory was this famous video that Jack Herrer, who was a famous marijuana activist, found this video to sort of Establish what he had been saying all along.
Like, look, this is something that we had grown and used as a culture for thousands of years, human beings.
It was a huge part of, I mean, it was what George W., or George Herbert Walker Bush, it was what his parachute was made of when he parachuted to safety in World War II. It was what the sails that Columbus sailed on was made out of.
But there's all sorts of other connections to gut bacteria, and there's a bunch of inflammation issues, diet, and things that change that for kids who suffer from these things that they don't totally, truly understand.
And we may never, because every individual is a little bit different, too.
I mean, autism specifically is not really one thing.
It's more like the autism.
The only thing consistent across them is the social deficit.
But you can have a high-functioning Asperger's individual with, you know, superior cognitive skills, incredible abilities, but still some deficits in other areas.
It's got a lot of resistance in terms of how it's going to react or how the federal government is going to react to it if a Republican gets in office in 2016. That's also one of the things about medical marijuana, like they've recently softened their stance considerably on medical marijuana, but all it takes is like one thing, one Jeb Bush motherfucker to get into office and things can get really weird.
But as of right now, we have to get our stuff from Canada.
We would love to buy it from America, from American farmers.
But also, it just should be something that people could...
Yeah, and not only that, there's a lot of medications that they prescribe, especially for people that have heart disease, where aspirin can just nip that shit right in the bud.
Yeah, it's an interesting thing that that's been around for so long, and it's sort of like very subtly swept under the rug, the health benefits of aspirin.
Well, you know, at least in the cardiac medicine, there's still this focus of giving people the heart risks, or cardiac risk of heart attack, you know, prophylactic doses of aspirin every day to reduce the strain on the blood system.
Well, I've also heard people say that after you get to a certain age, you should just take aspirin every day anyway, just to mitigate the natural reaction that your body has to inflammation.
Isn't it one of those things where there's not an either or?
There's benefits to genetically modifying things to our advantage, but there's also greed.
And also when people don't want to address the actual real health concerns of their creations.
And that's what people were worried about.
That's why when Brazil as a country filed suit against Monsanto and won.
Brazilian farmers joined together and filed this gigantic suit.
But then there's the Indian farmers that they have this huge issue where they get leased out these seeds and then they're in debt and they wind up committing suicide.
It's sort of like the old sharecropping model where you rent the land, sell the seeds, sell the tools, and now you must work for me for the next 60 years to make back your money.
One of them was about peanut butter and jelly being racist.
And I was like, what the fuck is this?
And so, of course, everybody's tweeting it and retweeting it.
And if you actually read into it, it's like, I think some editor just jazzed up this idea of three meals a day and peanut butter and jelly and, you know, where does three meals a day come from?
What is the idea?
And then...
Someone actually put in the, you know, the byline, is it in fact racist?
Like, oh, what the fuck?
And then everybody's, they're saying that three meals a day is racist.
And then you start tweeting, it's clickbait.
They fuck you.
They just, and this, it's just this mad rush to get people to read your shit.
And in doing so, you've sacrificed all credibility.
No, Why did I read about peanuts that said that it wasn't always the case and that one of the real concerns about peanut allergies is that keeping kids from peanuts when they're very young because you're worried about peanut allergies could in fact be causing peanut allergies.
Well, I bought it at a place, and it was really smooth.
If you haven't heard of it, there's an animal called a civic that is like some type of cat, actually.
Like a weasel, yeah.
But I think it's in the cat family.
And they eat coffee beans and then shit them out.
And the farmers didn't want to waste these coffee beans, so they would literally pick them out of the dung of the Civic and put it into, you know, they'd roast it.
And somehow or another, stomach acids do something to the bean.
My guess is the roasting is really where that matters the most, because you have to bring the oils out of the bean to the surface and caramelize them or oxidize them to produce the flavor you're looking for.
So my guess, and the longer you roast, the more the caffeine goes down.
Yeah, I saw an article, I think it was inflammatory more than real, but it pointed out that the ownership cost and the environmental impact of a Prius versus a Hummer We're equivalent.
Because the Prius has a 100,000 mile lifespan and there's all these really expensive mine battery components that go into it.
Where a Hummer has like a 300,000 mile lifespan and it's just an old-fashioned, you know, traditionally engineered car.
I mean, the air quality has improved pretty much every year since Reagan in L.A., right?
Like, Reagan was the peak of the horrible smog.
I have to tell folks that, you know, when I go back to visit the Northeast where I'm from, that, oh, yeah, we don't actually make jokes about L.A. smog.
It's like, well, it's actually not that bad.
The air quality is pretty darn good, especially where I live in, you know, West L.A. It's...
The smog, you know, when I first moved to LA in 2005, I rode cross-country to motorcycle, and I was coming down to the San Fernando Valley, and there's this layer of black and orange sludge that I drove down into, you know?
Even that's happening less and less, I think.
So I think the sort of Southern California smog trope is really overblown these days.
If you're lucky, you get one of those down to 2,200 pounds.
If you're really a fucking psycho, you can get it down to like maybe 1,800, but you have to use carbon fiber fenders, fiberglass fenders, things along those lines.
Yeah, but it's amazing because the new aluminums that they're using are just as strong, if not stronger in some ways than steel, you know, and they're substantially lighter.
It's really incredible benefits as far as like gas mileage, all those things, yeah.
The way they construct them is a little bit different, but so far no detriment.
The new Range Rover is doing the same thing.
The new Range Rover is cut somewhere between six and seven hundred pounds from their cars as well.
He had some weird project he was doing, though, that everybody was like, alright, good luck with that.
He was trying to make some super expensive MP3 player that recreated the sound of vinyl, or as close to it as possible, and he had a GoFundMe or a Kickstarter or some shit like that, and people were like, what?
First of all, No one's giving Neil Young money.
It's not happening.
Dude, you're rich as fuck.
You got a thousand acre ranch in Northern California making your own diesel, alright?
So, like, that was problematic, but it was also, like, the shape of this thing, it was like a, you know those Tobolaroni, whatever it was, chocolate bars?
Well, there's many different types of meditation, right?
The classic meditations, Vipassana, Samatha, Metta, these are all fairly similar in that you pick something, some anchor to hold your attention on.
And then simply you notice when you've drifted.
Since you have a mind, it will drift.
It'll get...
You know, fantasize, dream, remember, wish, plan.
And when you notice you're not holding that attention focus, that anchor, you release whatever it is you've gotten distracted by and bring your attention back to the anchor.
And that's the wrap of meditation.
That's it.
Oh, I'm supposed to be thinking about this sound or watching my breath or listening to one note or something in a music play.
Oh, I've gotten distracted.
Oh, let it go.
Not now.
Back to the focus.
Again and again and again and again.
And that's the entirety of most classic meditation is noticing when you've gotten distracted, you've left your anchor of your attention, put down the distraction, go back to the anchor.
You tell people, here's how you should meditate, and they go to a meditation class, like a Buddhist center, and they have to sit there for an hour and a half.
That's a big ask, initially.
So I often tell folks...
20 minutes.
You know, even that can be a big ask for some folks.
So I say, you know, take your first five minutes and do a concentration practice.
Take a very narrow focus.
Like, watch the sensation of air crossing your upper lip.
Just pay attention to that tickle.
That's it.
Very narrow, tight, spatial focus.
And do that for five minutes.
By the end of that time, your mind's probably a little more stable.
And then do what I call an awareness or insight practice.
Watch more rhythmic things like your breath rise and fall or the sound of traffic going by the road or something.
Well, you have less random things popping up in your mind after doing some concentration practice.
It feels less busy, less of the monkey mind chatter.
It's still there, but it's a little less insistent when you've done some concentration practice.
I mean, concentrating on anything sort of redirects your attention resources and what you're thinking about.
And if what you're really thinking about is simply attending, focusing for its own sake, then you build those resources and build more strength and resources in focusing.
And so then later on, when you're walking around the world, you have a more spacious mind.
You have some space between your thoughts.
You're less automatically reactive.
You're going to cut somebody off in traffic and, you know, pick them the bird.
These are all things that happen as a consequence of developing more resources.
So what you do on the cushion or wherever you happen to meditate translates to less reactivity, more sustained focus, better attention, better sleep, less anxiety, less anger.
But you aren't practicing all those things.
Those things come from having more stable attention.
I sort of feel like a lot of people operate on momentum and that they kind of, that momentum oftentimes is like nipping at their heels and they can never rest.
It's like the momentum of all their past actions and thoughts and the things they have to deal with in their life, their bills, their responsibilities, all that stuff is sort of pushing you.
I went to a place and tried it out for the first time and I was hooked.
I, you know, read about it, seen the Altered States movie, got excited about it, read John Lilly's book, The Deep Self, and if you've never done it, it's meditation times a hundred.
There's lots of ways you can sort of trick the brain into producing input.
Like that, even without climbing into a float tank, the simplest hack for that is probably something called Gansfeld classes.
Take a ping pong, cut it in half, trim the edges so they aren't sharp, and essentially make a pair of goggles where you're covering each eye with the ping pong half, ping pong ball, and then sit and look through the white balls at a white wall that you're projecting light onto, so there's some indirect light.
Keep your eyes open and stare at the insides of these curved spaces.
The difference being that in the flow tank, one of the benefits of it is the fact that in the absence of sensory input, it seems like your brain has way more resources.
So it seems like problems seem to be easier to fix.
Yeah, you know, I think why I haven't gotten into float tanks is because I have other, you know, ecstatic, ecstatic meaning taking you out of ordinary reality.
I have other techniques that work really well for me and that I tend to use, you know, like rhythmic movement until your mind, you know, shifts.
And then for technology-assisted stuff, I mean, I run a neurofeedback center.
I can put you in a state in half an hour, you know, with wires on your head.
And so if I want to dial in a specific state, I will dial in a specific state for myself.
There are a few ways that this might be accomplished, because I've seen EEGs done on actual divers, like on scuba divers.
So there probably are ways of, like, electrodes that can get wet, that you can sort of seal against the scalp with colloidal, you know, gels and things.
But I would love to see what happens to brains under that, you know, altered state.
Crash is also developing some sort of a weird video component to his tanks where he has engineered these screens to have the lowest amount of light emission that you can possibly Have while still seeing the image so that these images because you're in complete silence complete darkness I mean you you don't there's no light in there at all so having this incredibly minimal amount of light on these screens you can see the the images but you don't see the television I don't see the screen itself and
he believes in the absence of sensory input your your brain having more resources you can take in information better so you can learn quicker I mean, I think it's probably very likely.
Yeah, less distraction.
And also, you can do things if you did things from first-person perspective.
If you had videos of people learning things from first-person perspective, it could sync up in your mind.
Yeah, it sounds like we need to do it as a biofeedback component to it where what you're seeing is contingent on your brain moving in specific directions.
And then you actually could, I mean, if the float tank's putting you into this receptive state and deep state quickly, and it sounds like it is, with biofeedback, you could probably, you know, like, incredibly powerfully just move people across state shifts.
Because of the fact that there's a thousand pounds of salt in this water, and the water being 93.5 degrees when you float, or 94. Some people, you're floating in this, you're not feeling anything.
The water becomes your air.
The air becomes your skin.
It's all one thing, and you're just no more input, and you just...
Right, like oftentimes people discuss that when they talk about police violence, that much of the violence that they get involved in could be mitigated if they had a better way of communicating with people.
I couldn't get his frequencies to train up or down enough.
I couldn't get his symptoms to shift.
He got worn out at noon every day, and he was really impulsive, and all the standard TBI stuff.
So I think I've worked in the past decade with about seven or eight TBI people, and three of them were dramatic responders, and a couple were tough movers.
You know, he ended up going overseas to teach English.
He had an end to the time that I had him because he was going to the next job, which was overseas.
So I only had him for like six or eight weeks or something.
So had I had him, I would have said, look, let me stop billing you, which is what I do when I don't make results.
It doesn't happen very often.
But I said, let me stop billing you and then just keep training and just keep trying different things until I find something that works for your specific brain.
So I sign people up for like a 30-session package, which costs some money, you know, costs a little over $4K. And 90% or more of people, their brains do exactly what I ask, and they're really happy with the results.
Yeah, and he went coma for many weeks, lost a big chunk of his brain in the front, and so he had massive impulsivity because the frontal lobe, again, is your inhibitor.
It was sort of like acquired ADHD. He sort of acquired it in his mid-40s because of his head injury, where he had no self-control, said whatever, you know, inappropriate, you know, and then he would get worn out by 1 o'clock every day, noon, 1 o'clock, he was just done, which is really common in TBI. Just not having any mental stamina.
And so for him, it was, let's get your sleep better, because he wasn't sleeping well.
Let's make your daytime energy better, and let's get you less impulsive with the goals.
And those things all moved, but they moved, you know, a fraction of what I really wanted them to move.
And most people, the reason why it was so frustrating, because for most people, neurofeedback is sort of, you know, it's my silver bullet.
I can do lots of things with it.
I expect that nine or more than nine out of ten people will just, you know, their brains will do what I ask.
Even if they're dramatically impaired, you know, profoundly self-stimming autistics, people with major PTSD or major alcoholism.
A really common presentation these days is people that have been on sleeping meds for decades and they aren't working and they can't sleep.
But they're still on massive amounts of sleeping meds.
But, you know, you might have more alpha than I do, you know, as a baseline.
And so when I'm doing the brain maps, this is a really good question.
When I'm doing the brain maps, I'll take baselines.
Let's say I have you sit with your eyes closed for five minutes and record your eyes closed, you know, resting state.
And then I'll record eyes open resting state.
The brain's very different, eyes open and eyes closed.
I mean, very, very different typically.
And so I'll take that baseline data and compare it to a normative database with thousands of brains in it and get heat maps, picture maps, out of that that tell me how different you are than the population, statistically.
If somebody's really sleep-deprived, there are some differences in the QEEG. But if there are a little bit vagaries in sleep here and there don't actually affect the sleep, it's much more important, like caffeine status and psychostimulant status.
Those things are a much bigger deal when I'm doing brain recordings than how rested you are.
I mean, folks come in having not slept, it's not a very valid reading.
Or having been, you know, drunk the night before, it's not a valid reading.
But if someone's just like, ah, I've got seven hours, not nine hours, ah, no problem.
You know, and then statistically we say, okay, you know, let's say your brain has X amount of alpha with your eyes open.
If it's too much, that means you're spacey.
Too much theta means you're impulsive.
Too much beta in the back might mean you're anxious.
You know, different asymmetries in the front may be depressed.
And so I'll see five to ten of these big patterns.
I draw some arbitrary line in the sand, you know, more than one and a half standard deviations I consider clinically relevant or problematic, maybe.
And then we sit and talk about all these patterns that rise to that, you know, outlier level and try to figure out, well, you know, this one can mean this.
Is that true for you?
Oh, it is.
Okay, great.
Let's believe that one.
This one can mean this.
This one can mean this.
Oh, this one isn't true?
Okay, that's a normal variant for you.
Let's move on.
So these are not diagnostic tests.
They're more sort of prognostic, where I'm guessing about what might be true.
But the pattern, the brain mapping patterns, don't fit into nice diagnostic boundaries.
So I might see a really dramatic ADHD pattern, and the person reports somewhat mild attention problems.
But, you know, if there's a dramatic outlier, three, four standard deviations out of range, chances are very good that thing is causing you some trouble in some way.
There actually were, in the 70s, several videotaped multi-martial art competitions, expositions, between Osensei, the founder, and several other principles of other martial arts.
Probably because he, you know, gave us a little cue that made them prepare to move in one way and then switched it and, you know, essentially using their mind against them, overbalancing them, you know?
I have a vast, extensive experience in watching bullshit, especially martial arts bullshit, and a lot of it comes from these traditional martial artists that claim to be able to anticipate and use people's Well, there's very little claims being made by Osensei.
There's a lot of fuckery when it comes to martial arts and a lot of people that get trapped into all this fuckery and I've met a lot of people that are very intelligent people that swear that their sensei is the guy that has the answers to all this jazz and I just have I've seen too much I know how much of it is based on predetermined ideas that you have about this person's abilities I make no claims about my senseis, the people I've learned from being from on high.
I landed on my shoulder on a street on tar and was standing up watching the bike spin away with one little tiny tear on my shoulder because I took the force of being thrown the way my body had been trained.
Well, there's just a long history of that stuff where it's like a part of people's map of the world.
You have your model of the world of what's effective and what's not effective.
There's a lot of people that don't like the idea of mixed martial arts because it's not In many ways, it's not traditional martial arts and some of the some of the positive benefits of traditional martial arts have sort of been cast aside in favor of Mohawk tattooed savages, right?
But the reality is a lot of the ideas that Powered those traditional martial arts beliefs are bullshit.
Mm-hmm And we thought they were real for a long time and there was only one way to find out they were real competition.
Yeah and And in competition, you find that the reality is most of that stuff doesn't work.
You know, someone grabs me in a bar, and before they know it, I'm standing next to them, and they're not interested in attacking me anymore because their wrist is, you know, in pain or they're on the ground.
You know, that's happened to me.
I've used this stuff in real-world environments, not against some, like, you know, professional wrestler who's coming at me, but against some asshole in a bar.
There's benefit in a lot of different things that I would...
Look, one of the best platforms for going into jiu-jitsu, we're recently finding, is breakdancing.
These breakdancing guys, there's a whole team of them from 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu that started out as breakdancers, and these guys have this incredible athletic ability, because they learned how to support themselves on one hand, do handstands, and spin around, and they can manipulate their bodies in these incredibly unique ways.
And these guys, you'd never think of breakdancing being a martial art, but once these guys learn basic positions, they're so good at them, because I I would say that the same is true of an Aikidoka.
I would be real concerned, and this is one of the reasons why I'm so adamant about this.
I'm very nervous about people getting inaccurate ideas in their head.
And I've seen it in action.
I mean, we used to have guys when I was...
My competition days that would come to the gym that had come from some crazy kung fu martial art where they had this distorted perception of reality and they would spar with people who actually knew how to fight and they would get knocked out.
It was horrible to watch because they had this idea in their head of who they were and then in practice it just didn't work at all.
You know, one of the things that I think would be really interesting to talk to you about specifically is what is going on in the mindset of someone who is engaging in conflict.
Because one of the most important aspects of any physical altercation is being able to keep your wits about you.
You know, violence, conflict causes a huge surge in adrenaline, cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and it shuts down the connections between the executive, the CEO of the brain, and the other parts of the brain.
We sort of have a dual-track brain or mind, almost.
We have top-down resources and bottom-up resources.
So there's automatic things that happen.
Like, I can't look at the picture behind you without seeing it.
That's bottom-up.
That's automatic.
And then there's top-down, you know, how I interpret what I'm seeing or how I decide to feel about it.
That's top-down versus bottom-up.
A lot of the bottom-up stuff in crisis and in violence is what takes over.
And the top-down ability for your intentions, your perceptions, your moment-to-moment perspective on your brain or on your reality, that goes away in a crisis.
And the PFC, the prefrontal cortex, gets shut down, or at least its connections between the PFC and the rest of the brain gets shut down a little bit, and you go into automatic deal-with-the-crisis mode.
I wish we could monitor that in competitive martial arts contests, because I've seen it time and time again where people are professionals, and they have a long experience of competition, but they get to the big event, whether it's fighting for the world championship, fighting a contender, the main event on a big show, and they freeze.
I used to be, in college I was a fencer, and I fenced a lot, you know, weapons.
And most of the time it's pretty chill.
I'm left-handed, which is an advantage in fencing often, and so I was pretty good at my school.
I was one of the better people.
But then you go to these big events, and the adrenaline kicks in, and there's spectators and a crowd.
It's a very different environment.
It's state-dependent learning, where you learn skills in one set of Contexts, and if the context change too much, the skills may not be there.
So these fighters who get to the big event haven't practiced in the big event room or with enough noise or enough flooding or enough, you know, caring about the fight.
You see sometimes people can work well with small crowds with very little pressure, and then if you put them in front of a large crowd, you literally see them constrict.
Well, they're used to performing somewhere in the top of the curve where they're stressed out enough or they're physiologically aroused enough to perform very, very well.
But a little more stress, reaction time's down, judgment's down, awareness, memory, learning, all these things are impaired.
This sleep spindle that we tend to train up called SMR, sensory motor rhythm in the brain, seems to improve athletic performance.
It's used a lot in golfers who are trying to get in the zone.
Most neurofeedback is this non-voluntary operant shaping, but with golfers, you follow them on the golf course with a laptop, and when their brain goes in, they tee up and get ready to strike the ball.
And then they wait until the computer makes a noise and tells them, okay, you're in the zone now.
And then they release and you hit the ball.
And so there they're trying to associate the feeling of being in the zone with performing, with delivering the golf balls, the club swing or something.
Right, which is why you're training the brain to go there again and again and again, and you're giving an audio cue, so you start to recognize, oh, that tone means zone.
That's what it feels like right now.
Okay.
And if you reinforce that association, if you're pointing at that state and saying, oh, there it is, there's your brain, it's in that state, you get sort of more able to access it.
If you monitored the brainwaves of fighters leading right up to the moment they got into the cage and then take the equipment off of them, let them compete, and then find out where the winners were when they stepped in and where the losers were.
When I do assessments, it's a full head of EEG and gelled caps and things, but you can stick a single wire or an ear clip on someone's head and measure EEG. How long would it take?
Yeah, you'd probably find increased fast alpha, sort of flow state, you know, a lot of beta, but not a lot of very fast beta, so focus but not anxiety.
Probably very low amounts of slow brainwaves like delta and theta, which happen when you're dreaming or creative or checked out.
So my guess is the performance would be correlated with better access to flow states and focus states and less presence of anxiety states and distractible states.