good afternoon good evening good morning wherever you might be thanks for checking out the video so my name is Dr andrew Hill if you haven't met before nice to meet you please uh look me up and leave a comment and tell me all about your brain so uh this is the neuro feedback and chill weekly live stream where we tend to dig into a topic or two while doing some neuro feedback and demystifying that for folks um as usual uh I want to verify that I have adequate a audio and adequate video so if you're hanging out and showing up please give me a wave or a checkin so we can make sure that the live stream's working okay and tonight I wanted to talk about uh left versus right brain training and um I've been doing these live streams for nine months or something and you'll find one from a couple months ago that has a lot of left versus right brain discussion and that one I think focuses a little more on the organization the laterality the left right uh division of labor so to speak within the brain and I do talk a little bit about ways to train and this taps into the idea that the left hemisphere has a more approach and and focus driven set of circuits and the right is more about uh avoiding and pulling back so if those topics uh seem interesting you can dig more into them with those videos i'll make sure they are on the end cards for this video once this one's done and uh the essential uh topic tonight is again talking about left versus right hemisphere stuff but I wanted to talk a little more about the ways we might actually train the brain you know the the the neuro feedback process so again if we haven't met I'm Andrew Hill i have a company called Peak Brain that does neuro feedback all around the world and we help people understand their brains using QEG brain mapping if you want to come check us out we have physical offices in Manhattan Los Angeles St st louis and Orange County California and we also have some popups in London and Stockholm and a few more to come so if you want to come check us out please do and anyone who's watching or checking out this stream you're welcome to a discount brain map where we'll give you unlimited EEGs in any office for about 250 a year so the best deal in the world for EEG acquisition so hey folks who are showing up hey El Chatarino nice to see you thanks for the audio check i appreciate that um I saw the email actually today i have to get have to get back still to you via email or I think maybe to your dad but hope you guys are doing well who's out there in YouTube land and again left right hemisphere stuff tonight and from the point of view of neuro feedback there's a couple basic things to start thinking about and I'm going to set myself up for a neuro feedback session here shortly and show you some more of the details but the general idea in neuro feedback uh if we go back you know 50 60 years to the start of the field a lot of the initial training was sort of um accomplished under what became an arousal model the idea that individual bits of cortex that had functional significance or functional specialization could tune themselves by making a combination of alphas thetas beta waves other frequencies and sort of create thisformational mode that would change based on which brain waves were dominant which brain waves were showing up more in that tissue and it's oversimplifying it's still useful to think about but it's oversimplifying however alpha is sort of that neutral between the gears beta is the gas pedal high frequency beta is the gas pedal revving little beta spindles uh theta brain waves which are slower than alpha is a release circuit that takes the brakes off and allows things to happen in specialized tissue and then delta is more of the heartbeat of the brain that is the twice per second background tone of the brain you sort of live in it you don't think in it and it drives immune system and the heart and lungs and deep sleep and learning when asleep and growth and repair and all that life stuff in the brain driven by delta in fact delta creates this two hertz uh pressure wave a fluid wave that washes the brain at night just like your brain's on an agitation cycle like a washing machine we get one of those happening uh because of nighttime delta surges slowwave sleep is delta for instance so we have all these brain waves happening in modules but one thing that is different in the left and right hemispheres is that the left hemisphere is a bit more modular it's a bit more isolated in its modules so when we're talking about a module we're talking about combinations of what are called uh micro columns or mini columns you'll see both names used i know it's kind of confusing but it's um one of them is the voltage one of them is the size essentially and what these micro columns or mini columns are are cortical structures that are um the same electrically as you move a wire down through them you would get the same electrical field the sum field they would share and these columns are made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 or 40,000 neurons and probably double that in gal cells so there's about a 100,000 cells hanging out in a little block a little uh uh building that is doing all kinds of information processing within it and then exchanging messages to nearby buildings and far away buildings where different floors just imagine a six-story building and the cortex is a six layered structure most places and different layers will send you know clos lines to adjacent buildings and some layers will send faraway lines to other buildings that are you know across town and that will comm that'll coordinate some of the communication between different parts of the brain but by looking at what the resting patterns are how much of alpha or how fast the alpha is or how much beta how little theta etc you can start to make guesses about the functional significance of the brain and when looking at these patterns in the left hemisphere versus the right you start to see that many of the free of the of the clusters the patterns the phenotypes they run a little hotter on the left side so beta waves at C3 and the same functional beta waves at C4 will run at a different speed because the left hemisphere has fewer of these long distance connections between uh regions so most of the of the neurons running between chunks of tissue are inhibitory they pump the brakes a little bit and dampen information flow and with a reduced amount of inhibitory interneurons the left hemisphere modules end up running a little bit more on their own it's they run a little bit hotter with less input and they tend to act a bit more in beta faster frequencies in beta often in the teens u in terms of a natural uh frequency a healthy frequency you'll see people running lots of beta waves up in the 15 16 17 18 hertz range and it's functionally appropriate and feels really good on the right hand side similar tissues in the middle of the head let's say would run beta a bit lower 12 13 14 15 hertz for the same functional significance of stabilizing the job of those tissues on each side so the first thing we notice is that the left hemisphere is a little bit faster in general than the right hemisphere and this is true of all the brain waves but you'll see it in beta you'll see it in alpha and you start to get a sense of the spreading out or the slowing down within a hemisphere becomes important looking at things like speed of processing or mood that's about the alpha synchronization within the hemisphere but left and right have different jobs so left is more driven by the uh tasks of approach and reaching out and sinking your teeth in and motivating left typically has a lot of language uh resources for most humans that's where language is dominant um the left also has a lot of systems involved with turning on behavior stabilizing behavior continuing behavior also staying asleep and the right is more about shaping and supervising in the middle of the brain we have a supervisor that knows if you're paying attention that knows if you're a squirrel it helps you pull back from the shiny objects or not be fidgety we have an area in the front right whose job it is to pull back on things that take too much effort or are frustrating or are potentially adversive in some way so the frontal loes do this approach versus avoid dance where the kid in the left frontal lobe goes "Hi yay come here." And on the right front corner there's a character going "This sucks go away it's all too hard leave me alone." And those characters they balance essentially the approach versus the avoid systems in the frontal corners and the the front and middle's job is to reconcile those that's why we can get a little bit stuck and uh in some ways you can think about the lack of reconciliation the lack of deciding who's in charge is a big feature of many things we suffer from like procrastination you can go watch my video on avoidance and procrastination that talks a lot about the physiology but the idea is that they're they're shared systems so in general when doing brain training you have to think about the specialized tissue you're training the phenotypes or the patterns the person has but also the sort of way you might be relating to the other hemisphere so to back up for a second some of my um my PhD research was looking at uh how the brain was reacting to neuro feedback so let me take my headset off and set myself up for some neuro feedback while we are exploring that idea i'm going to get rid of the video topic here and where's my title there it is okay so let me go into eager and set up a session show title there we go guessing you guys can still hear me el Chatarino has a question so FZ is the traffic warden kind of yeah it holds what's important it reconciles competing ideas it helps you hold value decide what's important there's some evidence we may feel love in some aspects of the anterior singulate so it's an interesting structure very heavily involved with the intersection of um attention and anxiety in some ways so uh let me set up my eager and I'm going to do some of those left and right areas that left side is C3 it's involved with stabilizing attention and the right side is C4 it's involved with supervising attention so together these areas would be involved with uh let me select the client these areas involved with both sleep and executive function the ones that I'm going to train tonight so let me set up a plan and I'm going to do uh let's see so we'll start off with left uh this is right side training this is set up fine for right side training c4 minus A2 let me put in some additional segments here ahead of this so I'm going to insert before a couple times make that one a setup oh sorry a setup not a run and that's a C3 C3 A1 so we'll do this one at four to seven hertz so this is the inhibit or a range of brain waves i'm going to uh allow um the game to run only when these brain waves are going down or staying down we have a reward and as I said the left hemisphere runs faster so I'm going to run this left one at 17.75 and uh at the top edge and 14.75 on the bottom edge and the right hemisphere i'm actually running this oh is there a typo in there there probably is 14.75 um 24 to 36 the numbers in the reward and the high inhibitor are faster than they were on the other side let me set my auto goals up oops cancel auto goal settings if you work with us um at Peakbrain and you're confused by what I'm doing right now the auto goals it's because we set these up for you in general so you shouldn't have to go in and fiddle with these but doing a vanilla config I'll have to set them up uh so what I'm doing is setting the software up so every 30 seconds it's going to adjust the software and then get next to where my brain is in the amounts of different brain waves and then it'll wait for my brain to flex itself a little bit in the right direction so to speak for the workout and that will um applaud my brain for movement essentially so it'll teach my brain to move a little bit that's the bio feedback process i'll show you in real time let me do 12 minutes on the left side and then 12 minutes on the right i'll do a full a decent session today okay so let me go back and answer any questions while I set myself up and tell you more stories about the hemispheres so um one of the reasons we have to think about training both hemispheres is because we are affecting both hemispheres when you stick a wire on the left hand side you know minus the right half of the signal you're getting under that electrode is still from everywhere else in the brain mixed together so while you can play some tricks to get better localization of signals it's not the easiest process in the world to get good spatial localization in EEG especially in a real time way any processing you would do would add time lag so if you did some like source analysis called Loretta you can do that offline but doing it real time you you have a lot of compromises all right so I have some ear clips out you can see here some silver ear clips i'm going to put these in my head and I have some electrolyte paste just some basic tacky conductive paste there's an art to this so I'll show you if you're interested you hold the electrodes like that and then you scrape the inside of the bucket you load up the surfaces with paste so there we go and then I'm going to hang this so the electrode wire is away from my neck to avoid any mechanical disturbance and the other side the same way okay so finding my ears is not that hard i kind of know where they are but head locations can be a little tricky especially on yourself so let me make sure I have the right wires out i'm going to grab one that's not tangled up and put it aside and I have cats so I got to make sure to get the rest of the wires hidden away before they see them or I'll have to buy new ones if you have cats and you also do neuro feedback it's one of the one of the downfalls cats love wires maybe more than neuro feedback providers do all right so I have an amplifier here to measure my EEG called a U-w it's a twochannel amp with a bunch of sockets on it so I'm going to put the I'm going to start off with a C3 minus A1 a1 odd number is my left ear so I'm going to plug that into the uh black red minus black on this amp is the first channel so we're going to use that for both sessions today the right ear is the ground that goes in the green socket and then on my head I'm going to start off with a C3 goes in the red socket and for my head we're going to use a flat silver wire real basic one and uh you see it maybe not there it is and for this one just want to make sure that I have a little bit of paste covering the wire and then since I'm bald I'm going to put a dab of paste on my head in that location so this is my left side there we go let's see how close I got pretty close i know I have a couple neuro feedback providers on the chat right now what do you guys think pretty close c3 i won't be offended if you think I should double check all right so now we have three wires in the amp and that's going to let me measure electricity off my head and that electricity will get measured and filtered into three different bands theta beta and high frequency beta and this is that 14 and change let me start the software and let's run a simple game a puzzle piece game called formation oh let me make sure my screens are set up properly let's see so where is that game screen did I let's see there it is okay so bottom right hand corner is going to be a game and until we see the game you can see there's other squiggles on the screen the top squiggle is the raw signal and when I move my head you can see that it's moving if I clench my jaw you can see it's going to jump that's muscle tension when I'm sitting still it'll be uh just basic brain waves getting pulled off on that complete squiggle and then we will filter out three different frequency ranges so this one here that I've highlighted um is 4 to seven hertz you can see it's a slower brain wave has wider spacing and then this one is 14.75 there's a fast one here 24 to 36 but if I'm highlighting here the the the uh 4 to7 I guess my head is covering it move that a little bit there we go you can see 4 to 7 hertz below my head that's the frequency we're measuring we're getting right now 18 and change microvolts of that 17 and change of the theta brain waves that I'm pulling off my head right here on the upper left um the threshold the number that's highlighted in red says THR 23 and what that is it's the lines around the brain wave I'm creating that's an amplitude cap essentially so whenever my brain stays below that range or inside the lines it's not going to have a red line through it and that will allow the game to run and the other thing's true for the other brain waves so this one here is 14.75 or or a more fast beta and for that one you can see that my average is 7.9 and my set a threshold at it says eight and that's not not going to work because it uh you want to reward a band so let me go ahead and hit the threshold button why is that not There it goes then hit F11 there we go okay so what I just did was adjusted the threshold now my THR number says 6.25 and my average is 8.5 so my average is outside or higher than the threshold which is what you want for a reward band now you can see whenever that beta brain wave that 14.75 brain wave is outside of its lines it's getting a green strikethrough line saying that you're on the proper side of the threshold and then the third uh band 24 to 36 is another inhibit so essentially the computer is going to watch my brain and whenever my brain spends a half a second moving or staying in the right direction in these three brain waves the game will run thanks Joshua for the the vetting of the placements appreciate it let me kick off the game here f5 now it's running what do we do to the circle oh where's the display all right so turn up the audio you hear those beeps probably happening now looks like I have this game in default mode i just did a reinstall of the software and so I like to set it up so this game uh gives me a random display but right now it's going in order so I think I must have overwritten the defaults uh with the defaults so this is a game called Formation and what's happening is whenever my brain spends half a second moving or staying on the right side of the thresholds we get a beep and we get a picture grid square being dropped away and I've turned the volume down a little bit so you can probably barely hear it this game screen the picture grid's actually an ey line on a big TV for me so my brain is hearing the beep stop and start and it's seeing the visuals stop and start and it's mostly an involuntary training process so back to why you need to think about training both hemispheres at once now a we know the circuits are interrelated the left side C3 is a stabilizer of vigilance and deep sleep the right side C4 is the supervisor executive and those work really powerfully together and failures under those areas or weaknesses if you will produce things we often call stuff like ADD on the left and ADHD on the right colloquially um but it's more it's more than that it's more than just that you want to think about complimentary structures and complimentary training there's actually connections and resonance and behavior between these two locations on either side you know for my grad work um at UCLA a lot of what I did was look at what was happening during the process of neuro feedback so I took electrodes at C3 and C4 like this and then on top of them I put a 64 channel cap using a piece of tech called biosemi which is a DC coupled amplifier it goes down to zero all the way up to like 2,000 hertz so really wide range of frequencies being picked up over a good density of placements on the head and using uh the neuro feedback process you can hear there's a beep happening at the same time there's a square unveiling i took that synchronous event and I sent that into the 64 channel record as an event and then clipped out the couple thousand events per halfhour game session and created averaged EEGs called ERPs or evoke potentials and looked at how the brain was reacting to the neuro feedback in this case I'm rewarding 14.75 what I found was the brain will create an amplitude burst a desynchronization in time and a increase in amplitude in the frequency rewarding so whenever my beta goes up the beep happens and my brain will respond by bursting the beta a little bit kind of a nice little round trip and I discovered this by doing a double blind placeboc controlled study so I looked at about 45 or so UCLA students four groups 46 um four groups and it was an asymmetric waiting where about 24 of them were in a sham group unbeknownst to me and the rest were either C3 training or C4 training and I set everyone up with C3 and C4 electrodes put the cap on their head ran neuro feedback for five days in a row and I gathered the full head channels on days one three and five and I watched how neuro feedback evolved how the brain started to learn when it started to learn you know was it the f I compared the first 10 minutes to the second 10 minutes to the third 10 minutes of each half hour i looked at the evolution of those uh within the 30 minutes across different days and looked at how the brain was yoking to the information how does the brain know that it's being applauded you know where is that information loop coming from and we found it in this thing called the ERSP or event related spectral perturbation that increase of amplitude and shift in time in the brain wave that was just applauded by the stimulus pretty cool i was excited they gave me a PhD for it they were excited but doing secondary analysis with a group in Northern California called uh Pacttell uh Pacific Development Technology with Len Tjo we did a lot of deep analysis of those data sets looking at the mechanisms of neuro feedback because we were finding that in the QEG and the flat maps even though you were getting change in people's experience um in general we weren't seeing always change within a session and so since I had such good session data we dug into my data and looked at the within session effects versus the change across a week now most neuro feedback providers will tell you it takes several days maybe several weeks to start feeling anything but my research showed that within the very first 10 minutes every single person doing real neuro feedback their brain started to react to the frequency being applauded and those doing sham neuro feedback it did not you know uh in I should unpack what we were doing for placebo or sham because people always wonder um so nerf feedback as you can see is happening but in a sham case what would be happening is the computer would realize I was a sham subject in a special hidden locked away blinded uh study module you can bring somebody else in to lock away things essentially and then it grabs um one of your subjects like if I was a study subject or a sham subject it would instead of grabbing real EEG on the screen here it would grab several segments of stored EEG that were not mine it would scale them all to match my EEG it would shuffle their order it would stitch them together and then it would blend that bogus file if you would the the the the non-contingent file it would blend that with my real EEG for the display on the screen here so that movements and coughs and blinks and turning it off and pulling a wire off all act like you would expect but the beeps and the change in the game were only being driven by the non-contingent EEG the EEG that wasn't theirs so that sham group still got an auditory P200 the the beep still creates a a sensory event but you don't see the event related spectral perturbation the ERSP or the high frequency burst in the brain wave that you're rewarding if it's a sham so that was the bulk of maybe a third of my PhD work was looking at the mechanism of neuro feedback a lot of it was actually looking at left and right hemispheric specialization and how training at C3 and C4 created different effects on attention in the two hemispheres and I started to see that in my C4 group we were getting sometimes for some aspects of attention more of a left hemisphere effect and for my C3 group we were getting left and right hemisphere effects as well so it didn't look like and when I say hemisphere effects in attention I don't mean the change in the EEG uh with Dr tjo we sort of figured out that a really bizarre phenomena is only about 50% of people show a trend under the training electrodes while training neuro feedback in a session even with change across time within a session you don't reliably see a change in the thing you're training even though the brain still does learn from it and will create a change later on but in digging in to figure out how the brain was doing this we did a bunch of things you might do in fMRI we're looking at source localization npm kind of stuff statistical parametric mapping and what we found was in a very clear way for a lot of people when you're doing neuro feedback at C4 you get an evoke potential at C4 but you get a different effect over time a change effect at C4 and at C3 so while the the training is local some of the long-term change you're getting is happening elsewhere in the brain not under the location you're training but in areas it's connected to so this might give you a sense already about if you train one side and not the homotopic side you might be creating a more of a bias and less of a balance in your training oh some new pictures in this game that's nice all right so I've done nine uh minutes here three minutes per segment for this game uh and I'm going to go another few minutes and then I'll change the wire over to the right hand side so anyways as we were digging in Dr tjo and I into this big uh data set and realizing well wait a minute only half of the people in that group experienced change in session and the trend changes that showed up over a week or two for that group and for some other data we have we would get effects under the electrodes sometimes and often elsewhere in the brain for long-term change atoms of change essentially Dr dr tjo did some cool work at Pacttell looking at something in the EEG called atoms which are like just what it sounds like almost little units that aren't divisible any further and some of those uh are predictive like we were working with the um uh the the the Navy um trying to help them figure out if there was an atom in the EEG that would predict visual fatigue and we were sending information into different visual hemispheres for people scanning scanning screen so as they get tired you could shift which hemisphere the information being sent into using uh visual tracking and divided vision eye trackers and things um so pretty cool stuff but the um the left and right hemisphere as we dug in further and further we find complimentary homotopic the same site would be impacted sometimes so I had already been trained in neuro feedback when I got to UCLA and we had this left right hemisphere arousal model left running faster there's front to back divisions um you know as you go more forward in the brain things get faster as you go back in the brain things get slower as you go left things get faster as you go right things get slower as you get older things get faster as you get very old they get slow again so you have this arousal model of how fast things should quote unquote run and against that landscape brain mapping came into the into use heavily once the the cost came down enough that people could afford those devices and suddenly we started seeing that there was good uh agreement in the arousal model as had been discovered and taught and experienced by providers in autism and anxiety and seizure we were seeing the same kinds of things in the phenotypes and the patterns resting in the QEG and when looking at the phenotypes or the the functional significance of these two areas C3 and C4 you realize they do work together with the left as a stabilizer and the right is a supervisor or as you go forward you end up with Richie Davidson's work where the left is an approach and the right's in a void and really does inform some mood uh bias if you will some positivity versus negativity bias richie Davidson Cliff Sarin bunch of those folks did research looking at long-term lifelong meditators nuns and monks and things and there's a strong correlation with a left dominance with the uh meditating for longer and longer and there's a um u an emotional signature in the brain of approach versus avoid cliff Sarin and B allen Watts did a bunch of really interesting research showing um nuns these you know monks and nuns intense pictures of suffering and looking how the brain reacted and they saw strong changes in their brains compared to typical brains based on how long they had been meditating or praying and how old they were essentially contemplative work changes the structure of your brain including this left right laterality so all right I'm halfway through let me look at some questions here hey Meline how are you tonight would the bilateral effect be independent of reference point left or right that's a great question it's a very very sophisticated question um no i mean yes because half the signal is going to be from everywhere else in the brain combined but you're going to get a different training effect when you do something like C4 minus A1 and C4 minus A2 let me put put my C4 on here before I fill my screen with noise so um right now I have C4 minus A1 set up so it's my scalp minus my left ear and that means that it's going to get some contribution from the left hemisphere because the left ear is not electrically neutral so I'm going to swap the referencing ground now and change over to a C4 minus A2 and that C4 minus A2 is going to be a much more right hemisphere focused signal now there's still some left hemisphere being picked up in it electricity moves around and mixes but by bracketing the right side and doing a subtraction on the right you know one minus the other to create the signal that's really going to bias the measurement to the right so my work showed a left hemisphere activation and change over time at C3 with a C4 minus A2 protocol but if you did a C4 minus A1 protocol you would also be directly training CZ C3 and other regions between C4 and A1 with that low beta it's not a pure localization so you are getting a little bit of or a lot a lot of uh other location trained remember only half of the signal under an electrode comes from that region and the rest is all other places uh summed and lagged so everything else is mixing together and arriving at that location and becoming the other half of the signal hey VJ nice to see you uh so left is more developed than right for meditation i would say that the asymmetry is different if you're a long-term meditator you probably have a better dominant left asymmetry um I believe Cliff Sarin also showed that the activation of the right hemisphere under intense grief was stronger for at least the nuns he was showing them like crises in the world and their right hemisphere was activating more strongly than typical as well and they also showed this was the same study I believe that showed that some of these phenomena were also occurring and the changes in these people were occurring in the gamma frequencies up in the several hundred or several thousand hertz range things you can't measure using flat electrodes really flat electrodes passive electrodes really only get you up to 38 hertz or so reliably and so you shouldn't believe gamma with commercial sorry consumer equipment only believe gamma when it's very very expensive equipment um so uh so yeah so left and right are both involve EJ but I would say the long-term meditator has more cortical thickness you can look at the work of uh Lazar both as a grad student and in her labs since um showing that there's a cortical thinning sparing effect that happens as a direct proportion of how many hours in your life you meditate the more you meditate the fat and happier your cortex is so I'll say that again the more you meditate the fatter and the happier your cortex is so meditate away get a fat and happy cortex um but it's also the hemispheric dominance the left versus right and the right gets too active in depression and anxiety and fear and anger and that's a resistance the meditator would have they would control over the excess theta the excess alpha the disinhibition modes so it's not as simple as which one's stronger but there's a better resilience and balancing the hemispheres in that population uh let's see um Meline saying "Internesting thought my work was C4 A1 even cooler outcome." I'm pretty sure it was C4 A2 someone should look at my dissertation and tell me if I'm wrong i think it was C4 A1 uh C4 A1 active C4 A2 active and then a sham which looked like either C4 C3A1 or C4 A2 um and so it ended up being uh 12 people active in each group and then there was like eight people in each sham group for a total of 16 people in the sham across both versions of it um people could not tell the sham which was interesting uh I was experienced in neuro feedback pretty experienced by that point i couldn't tell the sham um I did set them up and leave the room there was no one watching the nerf feedback happen uh did one protocol for 30 minutes with one with with a full head cap on so after setting them up we left the room until the beep stopped and came back in and unhooked them i also did left right uh lateralized attention network testing so we flashed um attention stimuli into the left visual field or right visual field looking at a central fixation cross in the screen very rapid flash and have them respond with left or right hand in a blocked way and by responding with one hand and flashing something into one visual field you can test one hemisphere at a time with attention because if you're fix if you're doing central fixation then the same side of each eye converges in one hemisphere so the visual field like the the right visual field of my left eye the right visual field of my right eye will both converge the information will converge and end up in my right hemisphere in my occipal area kind of sorting of visual fields and so if you flash something into the right visual field and make somebody respond with their left hand with a mouse the information has never gone into the other hemisphere and you've just measured on the left hand side so I first validated this work measuring all of the split brain subjects that Roger Sperry and Joe Boen did initial work on my adviser Dr aron Zidell was a grad student himself at Caltech when all that split brain subject was happen uh uh work was happening and he was involved in it so late in his life I would travel around the western US with him and find these little old ladies and little old men who'd had epilepsy seizures like 30 40 50 years before and test their brains because they don't have a corpus colosum so you can do a pure test and say is hemispheric attention different in each hemisphere is it intact is it fully there in each hemisphere and it was in this surgically separated population and it turns out that the same performance the same attention stuff happens within each hemisphere separately even in intact people normal people so looking at this attention test I then measured the full head neuro feedback system and saw divergent effects in each visual field on the neuro feed or from the neuro feedback on the attention testing so those of you I see at least one of my employees I won't I won't name you on on the channel unless you want to say hi um this is why we train the way we do at Peakbrain i see a few clients too that we have this left right perspective we have an arousal model perspective you'll notice we we tune the frequencies a lot this is where that comes from it's the old school arousal model layered through a laterality model that I developed of hemispheric attention layered through things like the CPTs that we use those have a bit of a laterality component too because of left side approach and right side avoid left side activate right side supervise so this is that left right thing we think about when training and so Oh did I not start my second session i did not let me I was so excited to talk let me go start that all right c4 minus A2 let me hit F4 we changed it over now F5 oh that was F4 which voids the timer so let me remember to start stop the timer one of the bugaboos in eager is if you hit F4 instead of F5 it advances just like F5 does but also avoids the timer and so you can overtrain if you don't uh if you miss it all right so other questions here from the Peanut Gallery thank you guys for contributing um BJ's asking "Could I talk about F4 minus A2 or F8 minus A2 and how those help with decision making is it just greater calm decision making?" Huh uh so F4 and F8 are related areas and they're over the right dorsal lateral PFC and F8 may also be over the insula which is more deep but it's sort of the same area um just a bit deeper and we think of F4 and F8 in neuro feedback as being areas that are involved with mood and anxiety and anger um F4 can be relaxed with more alpha and we often get a better mood not always it's not as reliable area to train um but F8 is somewhat reliable it's it tends to feel really calming really chill uh getting more insula FT8 you know more a little bit further back that's also more chilling more more calming and we end up with um bringing alpha bringing relaxing brain waves up to get those calming effects on the right on the left he would want to bring up the beta waves and that would produce in some people a similar effect so I think if those things are helping with decision making there's one of two possibilities VJ that seem most likely one is there was anxiety in the way of decision-m extra theta extra fast beta making it hard to move either feeling overwhelmed filled with dread frustrated etc that can happen um another piece might be that you just happen to tap into right-sided theta doing F8 minus A2 or F4 minus A2 you might have gotten uh some reduction of theta on the more central strips and the FC strips which we don't generally train directly but FC being between F strip and C strip has some aspects of the F the mood and the C the executive and so you probably got some FC4 and that will have helped decision- making probably and dissolving any anxiety at like F8 um by bringing up the alpha bringing down the very fast beta that can also help lubricate action because if you aren't resistant remember the right side resists and avoids if you dissolve resistance it might translate to smoother decision-m perhaps that's my theory there um and do those touch the preffrontal oh let me let me ask uh let me answer Radar's question skipped it hey Radar Ashwood nice to see you uh why are intrahemismic protocols like T3 minus T4 and C3 minus C4 stabilizing the short answer is because of what you're measuring with a difference protocol like that measuring within hemispheres you're not getting a lot of signal the closer together the electrodes are the less signal you actually get because you subtract out a lot of the EEG so A you're getting less signal to train so they're gentle and B you're training the homotopic regions and so you can break up hypercoherence and you can create that beta resonance that I discovered um that happens in the homotopic sites that works very well for generally the sites that make beta doesn't work as well for things like the occipitals the frontals i wouldn't necessarily do F3 minus F4 for instance but C3 minus C4 T3 minus T4 um those can work really well because those tissues are those corticalamic hubs that are sort of specialized on both sides and do spend some communication energy between each other through the phalamus so I think that's why those work i think you're tapping into corticothalamic and then back to cortex channels on both sides and I think that's a similar idea like T5 minus T6 even though it's not going through the central part of the phalamus it is still a corticalamic and a colossal channel going between the posterior temporal loes so I think you're just training the the relationship of the hemispheres and it allows another change it's not just a local amplitude change so it probably gets into some of the same stuff that infr low and in for slow are doing because of the relationship can happen in a very low frequency range not just an oscillations it's probably getting into a little bit of the general ideas about neuro feedback that sometimes any signal can help this is why some of the one-sizefits-all systems can work really well because a mirror back to the brain for some people can be really really useful so I'm not exactly sure but those are my handwaving explanations for you uh radar VJ's asking "Do those sites touch the prefrontal?" Like C3 C4 F3 F4 yeah um C3 and C4 are the most posterior parts of the frontal lobe the C sites are frontal lobe did you know that central sites are frontal lobe the back of the frontal lobe and they go down into the phalamus so the sea sites are the mindbody connection how's them apples the mindbody connection happens at the sensory motor strip with C3 C4 and CZ blow your mind hopefully VJ there i I bet you enjoyed that observation uh VJ noticed that the right front that anxiety and thought regulation was improved ah interesting i think you're doing combination frontals which again can be gentler for some people the combination now just to uh I'm sure you won't mind but you're also doing a dual protocol so you're doing both sides at once and both sides at once is a strategic decision that has to do with not just the laterality not just the individual activation of each tissue but the the rationale and the strategy to co-activate this the the resource you're talking about that does not always work for individual resource doesn't always make sense for brains in general or for individual individual people for some people doing homotopic sites at the same time is kind of magical and creates an intram hemispheric communication and internal awareness breaks up deep anxiety breaks up deep fatigue really helps cement some focus ability because you're training not just the individual arousals of the local cortical patches but the long distance relationship and the long-distance regulation between these regions that share jobs like attention or mood so there's your highle answer VJ i hope that was important hope that was uh useful for you uh VJ saying mind was blown with the sensory stuff okay mind body connection with C3C4 has noticeably improved too wonderful wonderful and uh magic incredible stuff well I I mean I'm a fan but I am biased so I'm curious anyone on the channel right now for the live stream who've never tried neuro feedback i see a lot of people i recognize I think you've all tried neuro feedback at least those of you who are chatting with us right now um so uh we're getting toward the end of our hour and I have a few more minutes left of neuro feedback of course happy to answer more questions those are the general ideas I wanted to cover the idea of the left being more biased towards leaning in the right being a bit more careful in supervisory and shaping things the left running hotter and faster in actual frequencies um but also more modular so you can push harder on individual modules the right being more stabilizing more interconnected uh and then we had some great questions about left versus right uh in hemispheric protocols and bilateral protocols yeah you can also do some fun things in that same direction with sum protocols so I do a lot of alphatheta with people and often you're doing a two channel alpha theta on the parietal loes but I do a sum meaning I measure the raw signals before measuring the thetas and the alphas in the signal in the combined signal in this case what that does is it creates a relationship between the two locations you're training because if you're rewarding amplitude and you're adding raw data together then if the two sides become in phase the amount of brain waves doubles and if the two sides are 180 degrees out of phase then the amount of measured alpha or theta whatever it is is is abolished it gets you deconstructedly interfered with so by doing a twochannel sum bilateral sums you can do those at the parietals or occipitals or frontals um and you can create this interheismic communication across different circuits the duels do that as well um that's one trick and then another trick uh that can be magical is to take some of these bilaterals and based on the needs of one individual is you can do regional activations of a bilateral nature so you aren't just doing F3 F4 you might do F3 F4 and then move back to the C sites and create a much stronger regional frontal lobe activation by doing that vj that's what your one of your favorite protocols I think is the F7 F8 or F3 A4 followed by a C3 minus C4 we call that a dual duel the beta dual duel and it it's really powerful and much much more powerful I would argue than either of the things that make it up and this is true of other sweeps and segmented protocols like Jack Welen Ginsburg's um beta reset and some alpha sweeps that I've created that do uh multiple alphatheta protocols backtoback on a twochannel nature those are more sophisticated highlevel protocols that are about combining the hemispheric communication and it does take some thought about left versus right and you generally want to do those sorts of things after you've helped somebody balance the individual resources on each side then combining them is a better idea that's probably what I should say about that and kind of leave the bilateral training for another video or topic vj's uh agreeing that the dual duel is his favorite protocol no I meant that you would do dual for frontals i meant you would do ds uh and that creates some of the same effect as a sum i I misspoke you wouldn't do you would not do alpha theta frontally generally there are historically a few people have tried that um in the field as far as I know it never works i've never heard of it being a good idea um although you know Seaburn Fisher's trauma protocols are theta in the orbital frontal regions FPO2 F2 etc so those may be doing theta surge release things that are not at all the same because the tissue is different you know that you're doing it under but some of the theories about releasing new states may be similar for doing theta reward prefrontally allah s and fissure for trauma as doing theta rewards posteriorly for awareness and emotional access so there's you wouldn't do alpha theta frontally because you don't need alpha frontally basically but you might do theta rewards under some very narrow goal goal states so all right let me stop my session here before I overtrain and cook myself too much and I will of course hang out with you guys and answer any more questions you have meline's asking question if I'm familiar with Jilly Taylor uhhuh who had a left hemisphere stroke and claimed the right side is responsible for feeling oneness yeah um in terms of that specific claim my hunch is she had a temporal lobe experience either the frontal stroke was also pushing on the temporal lobe or um some of her autism was changed briefly because remember wait I'm I'm sorry I'm I'm getting Jill Bolty Taylor uh conflated with Temple Grandon um I read Jill Bolty Taylor's uh letter or essay on what she experienced and I remember noticing several different aspects of consciousness that she felt change that we we could almost like track as a mechanical process so I um my hunch is that because of the oneness she was getting a medial temporal lobe um not a seizure but like an inflammatory event you know with with a bleed you're going to have glutamate everywhere and the brain does not deal very well with iron or blood being in the actual tissue so my guess is she was having essentially temporal lobe seizures or temporal lobe irritation when she was experiencing oneness there's a somewhat well understood or at least frequently reported phenomena where um stimulation of the medial temporal lobe will create this profound experience of being one with um existence you know it's sometimes called the god spot there was a uh squidbased helmet um I forget what the technology is behind squid i think it's uh essentially a pet a pet device a pet that was zapping temporal lobes with energy kind of like an MRI or a TMS can do and creating some experiences of oneness with God and and the world and I think there's been um some hypotheses around temporal lobe epilepsy TLE maybe being some of what's behind the classic uh ecstatic visions that we read about in the Bible and other classic books like that some of that might be TLE feeling God speak to you feeling one with God um there's also an amazing uh set of essays um I'm blanking who the author is uh the Jillian James and the bicamel or mind biccameal mind is the name of the book and it's the idea that left and right hemispheric laterality is something that developed uh somewhat recently you know a couple like several thousands of years ago and this does sort of make sense if you look back at the evolutionary record there's this time frame like 20,000 years ago or so where brain size started to explode and we're not exactly sure why between 20,000 and about 12,000 years ago massive elaboration of tissues in many of the humanlike uh creatures seem to be showing up and and this was probably what really developed language and tool use and abstract thought and all those things essentially happening but there's some thought that non-dominant hemisphere language your other hemisphere speaking to you may have been the basis of early religion so our mystics are crazy and they're hearing voices now sure but back then thousands of years ago some of the basis for feeling one with an animistic world may have been not being as in touch with a non-dominant language system in our in our brain while the brain was developing into having more of a unilateral language system those of us with bilateral language or alternate hemisphere language may end up have having had these other temporal lobe experiences perhaps so uh Jillian James and the origin of thought in the bicameal mind i forget the name of the book i will dig it up and put it in the show notes tomorrow or the next day as well if you're watching this later or want to come back so uh let's see other questions um yeah Meline thinks the Jilly Taylor's stroke was temporal so that's probably what was going on is pressure from the bleed causing electrical discharge in the temporal lobe causing essentially a TLE temporal lobe epilepsy kind of experience or spiritual oneness and ecstasy which doesn't always happen with TLE he can also just like hallucinate and have you know intrusive thoughts or a tick tourette's for instance can be that kind of phenomena joshua was telling us that this concept was covered in the recent Avatar Way of Water movie epilepsy or spiritual experience they can be both maybe right don't know and just because it's epilepsy just because it's a seizure far be it for me to tell you that doesn't mean it's also not validly spiritual maybe that's the way we have spiritual experiences maybe there's you know for some people maybe that's how the door opens i don't know uh I'm I'm a bit agnostic to that no pun intended el Chadarino has said like office space getting stuck in the trance maybe i'm not sure the reference uh Radar Ashwood's asking does any of the benefits of CZSMR on the vertex come from the fact that it straddles both hemispheres and is maybe stabilizing like a bipolar intermispheric protocol probably um I think it might be simpler i think that if you do CZ minus A1 or CZ minus linked ears I think you just get a a more gentle broad SMR effect and you're able to pick up SMR on the vertex on the right side on the left side because CZ is in the middle of the head it's going to share the most summed information from both sides so 50% on the electrode 50% from everywhere else but if you're in the middle the contributions of the everything else will be roughly equal from both sides so I think doing CZ even minus A1 training is doing a more global CAstrip SMR enhancement generally that's my thought on that well guys thanks for hanging out with me tonight on this Monday evening or if you're watching it later thanks for watching it uh as always I am Dr andrew Hill owner of Peakbrain co-founder of True Brain if you would like a brain map we have the world's best deal come to an office if you're not near an office we can work with you anyways a lot of our clients do neuro feedback from home at 80% including brain mapping so we have lots of availability all around the world if you want to learn your brain come find me if you're just a YouTuber watching videos awesome please watch a few more uh those of you who are here or watching later please give this video a like please give the channel a subscribe and do me a favor and find a video or two to comment on to boost or to share with your friends because YouTube loves that i think next week I might go back into a basic topic another brain wave you guys seem to really enjoy last week's rant on alpha waves got a lot of direct uh messages about that one people seem to really enjoy digging into some basics and so tonight was kind of like that but a bit deeper and then maybe next week I'll go into some other basic brainwave science and go back and forth a bit for a couple of weeks so if there's things you want to learn come ask me if you have questions about your brain come find me and otherwise until I talk to you guys next take care of those brains and I will