Episode 56: Peak Brain Performance with guest Dr. Andrew Hill
About Dr. Andrew Hill
Dr. Andrew Hill is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and biohacking advocate. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA and is best known for his mission to bring the brain-hacking technology of neurofeedback into mainstream practice. In 2015, Dr. Hill founded Peak Brain Institute a community-oriented company that teaches brain-training from a fitness perspective and uses neurofeedback and brain mapping to help people achieve their brain performance goals.
Dr. Andrew Hill originally learned neurofeedback or biofeedback on the brain at a Neuro Development Center with Dr. Hirschberg. When Andrew first learned about neurofeedback, he was shocked because he saw Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) go away more often than not. He saw symptoms of autism lift on a pretty reliable trajectory. He saw big shifts in people’s outcomes – e.g., he saw migraines lift.
What is Neurofeedback?
The neurofeedback field has been around for about 50 years. In a broad sense, neurofeedback is exercising the brain. Most forms of neurofeedback are actually what's called operant conditioning (e.g., Skinner’s pigeons that get rewarded for pecking closer and closer to the pattern you want until it learns the pattern you use.) In the case of pigeons, you progressively shape the behaviour by rewarding it with pebbles of food.
But the case of brainwaves, what you're rewarding is input.
The brain likes input. If you measure the brain moment-to-moment you'll see different brainwaves, different EEG (electroencephalogram) brainwaves, that go up and down, up and down, up and down. Let's say you want to measure the theta and beta brainwaves (different speeds and circuits in the brain) on the right-hand side of the head. You can modify the frequency of the different types of brainwaves using different combinations of audio and visual feedback. By modifying the video that the participant is viewing, for example by making a spaceship fly faster or audio get louder or a Pac-Man eat more dots, etc. You can also stop the video all together and the brain goes, “Hey, I was watching that!?!?! Where's that information? That was kind of cool.” When the electrical brain ways change and move across a predetermined threshold, something changes in the environment (e.g., the car starts up again, the spaceship accelerates, the music gets loud, etc.) The brain responds and goes, “Oh, cool! That's interesting.” After about 10 minutes, the brain figures it out,”Hey, wait a minute. I’m controlling this video (the brain, not the mind. It is not a voluntary process.” The brain figures out which frequency of brainwave (e.g., theta or beta) makes “cool” stuff happen in the environment/video. The brain then adapts and keeps producing the necessary brainwave to be stimulated by the environment.
The brain starts to learn the trends and it leans into them. The trick, here, is that - every few seconds - Peak Brain moves the goalposts. So, at Peak Brain, they are shaping your brain’s wave frequency like Skinner would reward successive approximations of his pigeons’ behaviour. They shape the trend of brain frequencies (e.g., theta, beta.) slowly. The next day, your brain does a little tiny bit more of what produced the input. Your brain reacts with plasticity or learning.
If your theta drops, for example, you get much more control over your executive function and start noticing being less impulsive or distractable. You have more control over your focus.
How Long is a Neurofeedback Session?
The neurofeedback sessions at Peak Brain are three times per week for 30 minutes each session.
It doesn't permanently change your brain activation patterns. You’re exercising resources – e.g., the executive function control over your attention.
What is a Theta Brainwave?
High Theta is a state that makes you really bad at staying focused on any one thing, but you’re really good at noticing all of the things, all the patterns, all the novelty. Human brains are generally good at heads down, distraction free focused awareness and good at wide novelty seeking synthetic pattern matching.
Some people brains are biased one way over another. Using neurofeedback, you can unstick it and give them control over the range.
What is Brain Plasticity?
Brain plasticity is the brain's ability to change itself. One thing that Dr. Hill thinks we need to remember when talking about plasticity is that it's not a question of if it's happening, it's how and when.
Shift happens.
Your brain is changing your whole life. The whole function of the brain is a changeable organism.
Let’s say you don’t already plan the piano - if you went to a piano lesson today, within a few hours every single cell in the hand area of your brain (motor cortex), would have moved around and be talking to different cells. Every single brain cell in the hand area would be shifting around and trying to find a more optimal and efficient way to be to learn the information that you were just trying to give it.
Every brain cell could also send out additional arms and start talking to other neurons. The creation of novel circuits would be taking place without the creation of novel cells. Furthermore, your synapse (the connection points between different brain cells) can pull back and move out to another cell. There's an infinite number of different ways that your brain cells can connect and communicate with one another.
There’s this reorganizing as a function of immediate plasticity, and then there’s another type of plasticity that happens. One of them is the consolidation of long-term memory from short-term memory.
Memory Consolidation
When you're sleeping, your brainwave frequency is predominantly delta. The Delta brainwave state represents slow wave, dreamless sleep. This dominance happens pretty soon after your first REM (about 90-minutes to 2-hours into the night.) Around two hours after we fall asleep, you start dropping into deep sleep.
You cycles - back and forth - through various sleep stages – including 2, 3, 4 and Rapid eye movement (REM.) REM has this paradoxical quality where the brain looks like it’s awake (in terms of brainwave frequencies) even though you're deeply asleep. In Stages 2 and 3, there is a lot of delta (slow wave, dreamless sleep) right before you hit REM. In high delta, the brain is doing this broad plasticity thing where if you haven't gone to bed with high insulin or high stress, you have a pretty big spike of growth hormone. Note – for those aged 40+, that's the only growth hormone you're going to get throughout the day. If you’re younger than 30-years-old, you get 75% of your growth hormone in one giant pulse and more later on throughout the next 24 hours. But, for most adults older than “middle age”, you will get one small pulse about 90-minutes to 2-hours after falling asleep. This pulse of growth hormone is what drags you into deep sleep, and this is also what cause all kinds of healing things to happen – for example, memories get reset. So, plasticity occurs right after you learn something in a physical or cognitive sense, and then – while you sleep – this information gets moved into long-term-memory.
Neurogenesis
The brain has the ability to make new brain cells (neurons) its entire life. Your brain will make 1000s of new brain cells when you're young. But, even if you're in your 60s and 70s, your brain is still making about 700 new brain cells every single day. Note – it takes about five weeks for a new brain cell to mature.
Through chemical signaling, a new brain cell will turn into whatever kind of brain cell you need most (e.g., blood vessel cell, glial cell, neuron, etc.) New brain cells can be born in a couple of different places in the brain – for example, the lateral ventricles or other places where there's a lot of extra plasticity. The new brain cell takes about 5-weeks to travel to the place in the brain where it will likely reside. On it’s travels, the new brain cell transforms into the type of cell they should be based on the information they're getting from the chemical environment.
Half of all those new cells never make. But, the half that survive are incorporated into existing neural circuits. When a new neural circuit is created, it is like the brain cell is making friends and shake hands with the brain cells around it. After a new brain cell gets incorporated into a neural circuit, it becomes a fully formed functional brain cell.
Brain cells that are dramatically plastic are always generating and always growing and incorporate themselves into a new tissue. There is unlimited potential for ongoing plasticity.
“Shift happens. Get yours.”
Can you help new brain cell integrate into neural circuits?
One contributing factor is brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is really the strongest plasticity mediator in the hippocampus (your brain’s centre for memory and learning.) Your hippocampus is the seahorse shaped structures in either side of your head.
The hippocampus is involved with:
Forming memories
Exploring environments and physical places
Recalling and storing episodic information
Your hippocampus (centre for memory and learning) is a very changeable area. It's among the most plastic.
Your hippocampus gets really excited when you learn new environments or experience things you haven’t seen before (e.g., nature environments). Exploring novel environments is anti-depressant and causes plasticity in hippocampus. Exploring new environments or having new experiences is actually causing plasticity throughout regulating the changeability of hippocampal brain cells and making that brain rearrange.
If you’re experiencing a low mood - do some stretches of your hippocampus, and go explore, go learn, go move your body. Exercise or novelty can really have an impact on depression because they cause plasticity.
Can you become better at learn new skills through constantly engaging plasticity?
Yes – plasticity, in general, boost learning. But, lots of different things increase plasticity:
Good sleep
Low stress
Blood sugar and insulin control
Meditation
One single session of neurofeedback has a measurable amount of change in the cortex plasticity. Right after the session, you can see that change. Eighty-five percent of people show learning after one single neurofeedback session.
Dr. Hill is convinced that the bizarre dreams that are often reported after a neurofeedback session are due to the boost in plasticity that is occurring. In vivid dream, people are people traveling, visiting and exploring new places (hippocampus).
After a neurofeedback session at Peak Brain, people feel really empowered. Peak brain is flipping the agency back onto the person.
Peak Brain Institute
Peak Brain has multiple branches throughout the world and do virtual training. After receiving the required amount of demonstrations with the equipment, people are able to do all the training themselves.
There is also an assessment that is conducted – called a brain map. In the assessment, your resting brain patterns are measured and various abilities (e.g., attention.) Your average performance is then calculated and compared to other people in your age range. The process helps to determine in which ways you're most unusual. Dr. Hill doesn’t care that people are unusual. He know that people are weird. What he’s looking for is for areas of performance where you are a couple of standard deviations out of range. Based on this data, you’ll then have a conversation and decide if what your “out-of-typical-range” data is relevant for you. If it is, it can be added to the list of things to address during the upcoming neurofeedback sessions. Of note, Peak Brain never charges for repeat brain mapping.
All listeners are given a discount on your brain maps – just mentioned Dr. Andrea Wilkinson and the BrainShape Podcast.
Peak Brain isn’t about telling you what's wrong with you. Peak Brain wants to help you learn how to use tools of brain mapping and attention assessments to make your own meaning. Then, armed with this new knowledge, using the neurofeedback programs to make modifications.
Peak Brain has physical offices all over the world and you can train with them a few times a week – similar to a brain gym. If you want to work with Peak Brain, but are not near one of their offices, you can come for a workshop (available at all of the big offices once a month). At their offices you can also get a brain map done, practice setting up neurofeedback on yourself and learn the tools. Once Peak Brain sends you home with hardware and software, you’ll have access to the senior team for live support system on Slack and one of the chat apps.
Afraid of Neurofeedback?
If you feel apprehensive or fearful about using neurofeedback to modulate your brainwaves, Dr. Hill says that – although, you can create harm with your neurofeedback, it is hard to do. It is similar to going to the gym, in that if you lift weights that are far too heavy, you’re really going to feel it the next day. Your sore muscles will likely prevent you from going back to the gym right away and lifting heavy weights. In a similar way, you have to be sensitive in neurofeedback. A good neurofeedback coach will help you navigate through the process.
Conclusion
To learn more about Dr. Andrew Hill and Peak Brain, you can visit their website - CLICK HERE
Follow Peak Brain on Social Media
Twitter - CLICK HERE
Facebook - CLICK HERE
Instagram - CLICK HERE
Follow Dr. Andrew Hill on Social Media
Twitter - CLICK HERE