The Taproot Podcast - Learn How to Integrate qEEG into your clinical practice with Peak Neuroscience

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

Join us for an exclusive interview with the visionary owners of Peak Neuroscience as they share expert insights on integrating qEEG into your clinical practice. In this conversation, learn how advanced neurostimulation techniques are making a difference in the treatment of ADHD and ASD. Discover practical strategies, innovative methodologies, and the latest research trends that can help you elevate patient care and transform your practice. Whether you're a seasoned clinician or new to these cutting-edge approaches, this interview is packed with valuable information to help you navigate the evolving landscape of neuroscience in clinical settings. Watch now and join the conversation on the future of mental health and brain optimization! #PeakNeuroscience #qEEG #ClinicalPractice #Neurostimulation #ADHD #ASD #BrainHealth #Neuroscience #MentalHealth #InnovativeTherapies #CuttingEdge #BrainMapping #NeuroFeedback #Alabama #Texas

All right. So I'm here with Jay Michellani and Deanna Pizarro of Peak Neuroscience, who provide QEG brain mapping services in Texas and also in Alabama. And we're going to talk about kind of how the brain works and go through some of the exciting new things that people may not even be aware that exists. But first we have to go through the serious stuff, the boring stuff, and get Jay to give us kind of a thumbs up, thumbs down on the neurology of a lot of things that have been in my brain since I was eight years old.

So the hard questions. First, if I sit in a green suit that have been in my brain since I was eight years old. So the hard questions. First, if I sit in a green suit that is covered in question marks under a green spotlight, like in the movie Batman Forever from 1995, can I beam information, people's secrets, credit card numbers, fantasies, and dark blackmailable facts into my head like the Riddler in Batman Forever. How do you rank that on a scale of one to 10 with neuro plausibility, with how far technologies come so far since then? Surely.

Yeah, AI. Yeah, I don't know. The plausibility of that AI probably thinks that it can help, but it is very likely wrong as is the state of the technology these days So at least some people in Silicon Valley to think that we're gonna get there just after one more After you know the the Z round of capital funding we're gonna Just going out on a limb I don't think the limb is too thin here, but I'm gonna say that's kind of remote All right. Okay.

Then the arm, a thumbs up, thumbs down. No, it's not likely. Okay. So Philip Kadex, Valis, uh, is how likely is it that it may be an alien consciousness, maybe a rogue AI or maybe the Gnostic God Sophia is beaming information down, trying to find a new mystical prophet who can contain the information, but it's actually just making a whole lot of people Psychotic, but maybe there'll be one prophet that it will find again How likely is that to be of having gone on since the Bronze Age?

right, I Think that I've lost some IQ points from having listened to that narrative there for a moment. I think that I've lost some IQ points from having listened to that narrative there for a moment. I think that I need some neuroplasticity assistance just from listening to that. So yeah, I need to go and take a break. Internal sunshine, I don't know if you have a flawless mind. Can you all come to my house and put a colander on my head and hook it up to a laptop to remove? Memories that are painful. However, when we don't remember our mistakes were doomed to repeat them So I'll just kind of continue going up to the same breakup or whatever. Whatever my mistake was without therapy

I'll let you take that one. Deanna. How close are we to being able to modify specific memories? honor how close are we to being able to modify specific memories. No, they're far. Far. Joseph will do is reveling over in his grave. No, he's still alive. Nevermind. Sorry. You look great, Joseph.

Have fun at NYU. Um, and total recall 1990. So, you know, we've got, uh, I want to go on a vacation, but I don't have the money, but I do have the money for someone to implant the memory of a vacation in my head, you getting, we've got, I want to go on a vacation, but I don't have the money, but I do have the money for someone to implant the memory of a vacation in my head. You getting close to that? No, not really. Okay.

Not really, therefore. Minority report, if I lay down in my kid's kiddie pool, can the technology somehow help me see murders precognitively so they can be prevented in the present, even though they happen in the future. All right. So I don't know if y'all are familiar a rock with the social media, and so I'm more with the inclination of unplugging. I might be one of the last people to really be able to muse about some of those fun ideas.

A lot of it is just old science fiction. Most of that stuff is not even in the past 20 years, but just niche stuff of things that we thought would be possible in the future. Yeah. So once of a kitchen and then just have a memory of the best people you've planted on the environment. Yeah. But then what's real?

I think that's the total recall is a Philip K. Dick short story too, but I think it changed quite a bit before it turned into the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Can we talk for just a minute just about how brains work? Because that is integral to understanding the technology. I find myself talking about this a lot because what I do in a session is walk people through, I don't want them to feel like there's only one way to get better.

We want to have a big bag of tools at Taproot. So whether that's in-house, a lot of our people we refer out to different kinds of things. You guys were lucky enough to have you in the collective doing the brain maps on site, so people just have to walk downstairs. But some people, if they're having sexual dysfunction after sexual assault, they'll go.

We have worked with very intuitive, myofascial release practitioners. They can support the physical recovery. They're going from the body into the brain. We're going from the brain into the body. We have the micronutrition, which a lot like the QG brain mapping and neuromod helps a ton with ADHD without medication, my experience and also dopamine disorders and a lot of times with autism spectrum disorders especially in kids. It all works really well with micronutrition you know we offer a lot of

stuff at Taproot, brain spotting, somatic experiencing, etc. But then a ton of things we also refer out so I think having a big bag of tools is good but I find myself trying to explain how all of these things come together to affect the experience of being, you know. You know how micronutrition changes the way that we think and feel when you have some things like the precursors for neurotransmitters and it's probably good to talk about the way that the brain works, you know, to understand the way that QED brain mapping helps us understand the way that the brain works.

Because I think there's a ton of misinformation about that, even in academics, like even in clinical psychology, I see. People say some stuff that seems like 30 years old or just wrong. And can you say anything about that, or the kind of networks in the brain, the way that it prefers different types of cognition, some of the things that newer neuroscience is pointing to? Well, we understand,

Indyana can speak to this also, we understand that different brain regions have different functions. So different regions do different things. And if you're able to measure the activity level of various regions, if regions are functioning too slowly or too rapidly, then that's gonna manifest in terms of you thinking differently than you otherwise would, or sleeping differently, or emoting in a different fashion or different magnitude than you otherwise would.

And so not only do we need to see if we can measure the activity level of different regions, we also want to see how well different regions talk together and work in concert to be different subsystems of brain function. And so with the QEEG, we're able to do that now. And QEEG stands for quantitative EEG. So. And that's because if what I understand, I'm going to have my like dumb guy understanding and then have you clarify at different points, cause that probably a good way to involve the audience is to have the simple metaphor

and then overcomplicate it. But it's a QEG, a quantified EEG, because an EEG is just these lines. When you're doing a QEG, you're saying, well, lines in this frequency from this hertz to that hertz is a specific type of cognition that the brain likes. We know that this is associated, you know, high beta with in certain regions ADHD or obsession or hyper focus or, you know, intense sensory awareness of an athlete. Whereas we know this other range of waves is associated with a different cognitive function like openness

and creativity and you know, meditation states and maybe too much of that is psychosis or dissociation but you know, a little bit of them are always good and needed too much of one or too much of one in the wrong area. Could you could you over complicate that for us and and get into the granularity My wife says i'm very good at sir That's one of my talents. Um, but but yes, uh, so so taking uh, Um a reading just of the raw eeg If anyone has has seen that it's just a bunch of squiggly lines going across the page

uh eeg electroencephalogram, measuring electricity that the brain's generating and that electricity escapes the head and we call it brain waves. So that's EEG. So a quantitative EEG is where you quantify how much of all that gobbledygook, all that going across the screen, all that come off the head at the same time, you have slow rhythms, you have fast rhythms, it all comes off the head like a Muck and you and you quantify a how much slow activity is in all that garbage How much mid-range activity is in all that garbage? How much fast activity is in all that garbage and there's a there's a there's a covariance

There's a there's a meaning behind how much slow because that affects sleep and other things how much mid-range that affects certain like attention emotion regulation How much fast activity that's usually stress or something of the high arousal mix? uh, and so we can we can Really complicate this but I think um, does that what what would you add to that? Deanna about about the about What the q eeg?

adds to our knowledge of a person all right, so The ee being the for the basic level our neurons fire electricity with the electrochemical and then when groups of neurons fire together, then they fire at different rhythms or certain frequencies. We have many different ranges of frequencies and we usually tend to see the knee as a balance. So if we have those frequencies all the time, it's not like we produce only one when we're doing certain things. It's a balance at once. So for example, when she is sleeping, she produces lots of patella waves, which is a very slow wave in the bone.

And so on, depending on what we're doing, some waves are more common than others. But yes, we have all of them all the time, just more common than the other ones. I want to build. So when you do the map, I want to make clear how much work this is. Because Jay, you've messed around with the technology since the 70s, Dan has been doing it for a long time. A lot of the places that say that they do brain maps, what they're doing is just saying,

oh, you have autism click, let me turn the machine to autism, oh have ADHD click you've got I'm gonna switch ADHD which doesn't make a ton of sense to me even though they probably make a lot of money because what you're doing there is you're assuming that all ADHD is the same all autism is the same which it isn't I mean we know that ADHD can be you know about six to eight different eight different things that happen in the brain that result in the same behavior and respond to the same medication. Is it the same disease just because you can go through the DSM-5 and check the same boxes for it with behavior

when you can look directly in the brain and see that it is actually different networks or forms of dysregulation? I'm not going to tell the APA what to do, but you guys are seeing which one specifically is happening in that child, that adult that wants to lower the symptoms of ADHD without medication and treating that. Now, a lot of the EEG that you guys are the one that are quantifying. When you're looking at that thing, it's like in the movie The Matrix where people just see the computer code and they're like, oh, but I know how to read the computer code. So that's the lady in the red dress and that's this.

There's ones where Gianna has tried to show me something, or Jay has tried to show me something, and I see the line bounce and I'm like, okay, so is that what this is? Is that high beta? Jay will be like, no, that's a tongue movement. You can either patient or that's a blink, and you can see that the patient has made a muscle movement,

and your brain has spent enough time with that information that you're just filtering that out organically in a way that I don't know that an AI could and I certainly don't think that you could just hit a button and have it happen. You know, the maps are so precise. Yes, it brain is different. And what we do is we tailor our protocols depending on what we see on your brain. So we are not diagnosing anybody. We can see some symptoms of certain things, however we're not diagnosing and we are gonna target a particle on what we see on your specific brain. It's not gonna be a quickly colored treatment. Yeah. You know, I'm very happy that there seems to be an increase in the prevalence of, I'll

say the word gadgets, I don't mean to be disrespectful by saying that word, but different tools that you see advertised on Facebook or different mediums, you'll scroll and you'll see an advertisement for this headband or this piece of hardware, which purports to measure activity and give stimulation and that's going to help sleep. Oh, if you have sleep, then wear our headband. I would not advise doing that because as Diana just said, different presentations like say anxiety, for example. Anxiety, yeah, it can look a certain way in a brain map,

but there's a variety of ways that the brain is functioning That produces the individual to be feeling anxious uh, so Uh, if the impetus is hey if you're anxious then you need more then that's due to an excessive amount of fast brainwaves Which is co-occurring with regions that are functioning too rapidly. So here, use this plug and play device that gives slower brain waves. Well, what if that gives slower frequencies? What if that person's anxiety is not coming from a high amount of fast activity, but it's

coming from someplace else, and there's a variety so you need to know what what the Neural optical functionality is up is that's underlying that presentation to know how to augment it I Can I can hear myself saying a lot of words? I don't know if I'm being very clear, but but but you but you need to do a clinical interview at the at the very least you you need to do a clinical interview. At the very least, you need to understand how the person feels and do a solid history taking to know who the person is and what their journey has been and where they're at

right now, and then apply that to the neurological values that you record from the QEEG, you need both. So I like that there is an impetus clinically to address brain functionality. That's a good thing, but you need to work from a brain map. In my opinion, and I've been doing this for a while. I think I'll say the word dangerous. It's not a good idea to do brain training of sorts, even if it's a simplistic, oh, it's just a headband. I think it's a poor idea to try to address brain functionality without recording, without measuring the organ that you're trying to treat. You need to measure the organ that you're treating and

QEG is one of the few that does that not even psychiatry does that? Yeah, and I believe in psychiatry I believe in that and you can see into the brain as specific right places You're not just asking somebody to explain their internal experience, which there's two failure points there already Did they notice it and are they articulating it correctly? Before you even get there, are they being honest? Yeah, let me give an example. Somebody can come with, let's say, in a centered ADHD, for for these typhus-like spots of fatal ways,

which is the slow ways. And they are having trouble focusing and this is causing a lot of anxiety for them. Anxiety to typhusiety typically is more of a fast way that you can get more of a faster speed. But if the anxiety is coming from not being able to focus and then your theta, you've got to have lots of theta which is a slow wave and then you give that person more data. It's only then a slower wave also, the delta will make them even more on focus. So it will make the tone actually work

instead of helping it. Well, and Jay, you're talking about the devices. If I decide I'm gonna go to Skywall or Brookstone, I think the further that you, one of the, another way of saying what you're saying is that the further you get away from that map that is specific to the patient. I mean, the reason why we go to great expense to do a map that's specifically for each person that

requires a great amount of a human's time. You have what a dual PhD and the Ana has a PhD in electrical engineering. Somebody who knows a lot about it has. You know it spends a lot of time is the further you get away from that person's brain the more you're relying on guesses based on pumping a lot of data together and making. programs the Brookstone or the Skymall device that says it helps with sleep is saying well most people can't sleep because they don't have a theta wave or they most people can't sleep because they're in too much I don't know what their assumption is but whatever it is that they're making which maybe is right for 60% 65% but what about the dissociative patient that doesn't need any more theta that now is dissociating for a week you know because it wasn't wasn't based on them. It was based on an average of what most people need, not what you need.

And so that's another reason why while we do quantitative EEGs on a routine basis with a client. In my clinic, we do them every 10 sessions in the Dallas clinic, and we do it also in Birmingham there too. So you wanna do it on a regular basis because the brain does learn and grow and you're shaping it with your treatment efforts and so you want to have updated measurements so that you're continuing to give the brain what it's needing most at that time. And so yeah, the further that you get away from that individual's map, the more of a likelihood that you're not giving them the best treatment,

like what their brain really needs at that moment. And just to go through the specifics of the procedure, there's a brain map, which is not treating anything. You're just going and getting some information, one. and then when you go through the map with the patient and say, well, this is what we're seeing, you don't really have depression, you don't really have anxiety, I think you have diurnal depression so you're getting anxious before you go to sleep. But sometimes you all can see things pretty granually.

You say, do you want to do your neuromodulation plan? This is what it would look like if we did the neurostimulation and the neurofeedback, which would be part two, which is actually going to the machine, sitting for 10 sessions for a little under an hour, while this thing gets your brain to mimic the frequencies that we want it to learn how to do. Then over time, it becomes more comfortable doing that,

and things change. Anything you can do to enhance neuroplasticity during that time, like drink a lot of water, get sleep, take care of yourself, eat healthy is going to get you more bang for your buck when you're getting the brain to mimic a frequency, but there's kind of a part one and a part two to it. When you, my understanding of part one is this, and I'll have you all jump in and be more granular, is that the map is kind of doing two things, like one, it's saying during the eight minutes that you sit

under here, what is each region of the brain, which type of frequency is it using, which correlates to the type of cognition. So like what type of cognition is each part doing just right now, eight minutes while you're in the room. And if it's doing that really strongly, like it really wants to hang on to that frequency, maybe it's a little bit too stubborn. You think that you need to be a little bit more in, you know, obsession than you actually do or whatever. And then the second part is the Z-score where it says how fast can each

part of the brain communicate like a, like a server test and you ping, you know, every single part to see how fast to add information travels. And then you get the, you and the clinician get a blue lines or red lines from based on your age and your gender is this faster or slower than it is normal and the the speed so that gives you a history of cognition that is a lot wider than that eight minutes because as you use a neural pathway the brain enhances it and makes it faster because it knows that you need it and you get better at doing it whereas if you don't really use one, it's

not there, you know. So you can tell, you know, what people are using and what they're not and go in and really help them kind of enhance the pathways that have not grown because they haven't used that type of cognition much, they haven't used that network very, very much. So I'll let you do the details. That's my like, you know, simplified understanding of how that works Or is there other information is the map? Finding other things that that that's what I use most as a clinician with people You have something to say that Deanna I'll let you have the first first go through with that.

You can go ahead. Yeah, the QEEG, people call it brain mapping. So we're doing a brain map. You'll hear me say the word Q or meaning QEEG. You'll hear me say the word Q or meaning Q-E-E-G. The brain map is measuring what is both cortically and subcortically, like whole brain. What are each individual regions doing at that time? And how well do they, does each region play well with others? How well does it talk to other regions as you're doing your daily business, your daily processing.

And oftentimes, regions, I mean, there's no perfect brain. None of us in this communication is ever going to have a perfect brain. That just doesn't exist. And so if we can measure accurately the strengths and the weaknesses of what the brain is doing, then you have a good starting point as to how to further help that person feel more like themselves. Feel less depressed, feel less anxious, feel have more restful countenance. uh have more more restful countenance um and uh so that that's what gives you that initial game plan from the clinical interview and from the actual values recorded from from the brain um and and by by the way the brain uh values that you do record that's pretty upper level People ask uh, so what if I fall with my mom on the way over here?

So what if i'm having a bad day? Um, or or what if what if i'm having a really really good just a lucky good day? um that that does matter some um, but it uh, you know, this this is like measuring the climate Uh rather than the weather on a Tuesday in Topeka, Kansas. I mean, it's just more upper level than if you somebody's told you a funny joke and then we reward that. Then we recorded the brain. It would be pretty much the same. So you're looking at big patterns, you know, not specific memories and definitely not, you know, kind of looking for really big memory patterns that have the somatic correlations

to help the brain re-consolidate. It's not just something you happen to think about that minute is changing the kind of things you all are looking at very quickly. Yes. Yes. And let me, let me say this isn't exactly what you were kind of speaking to at the very beginning, but, but let me, let me, let me say, when you can correct me too. Cause I don't, I don't know what y'all know.

I'm, I'm giving my understanding in order to, you know, help but jumping off point. To that's right. And don't forget it. There's only one perfect brain, Jay. Mine. Uh, joking, Jay. My. Joking, joking. The brain reorganizes like, like from moment to moment to moment, the brain is always different.

Like that's, that's the, that's the important feature behind plasticity. When we say plastic, we, that's just a funky word that just means changeable means that it's it's moving So look at the brain like at the bowl of worms like it's it's moving. It's not like Like the liver it just is what it is or the kidney it just is it's just stagnant But the but the brain microscopically if you could you could use a fine enough tool. It's always in motion That's why you can learn. That's why that's consciousness. And so if a person is depressed, then they likely have some psychology input to that

and some physiology input to that. Psychology, more likely than not, they have some thinking errors, they have some misunderstandings, some inaccurate beliefs about some things that has caused them to be troubled. And then the brain is adapting and functioning in a way that's manifesting them to feel low mood to feel depressed and Say if a person gets nothing but talk therapy, which I'm a huge believer in If a person receives talk therapy and they feel better if we were to do a brain map before they did the talk therapy And did no neuro just simply talk therapy and did a brain map when they were feeling better,

there would be significant improvement from pre to post. The brain would be functioning much less like a typical person who's depressed, like that kind of a functionality. So the brain reorganizes as the emotions change. So with neuro-therapy, we're mechanically creating pathways, weakening maladaptive pathways, when I say pathways, connections between regions, helping the brain reorganize to be able to be a healthy functioning brain. You still have to do the psychological work.

You still have to iron out the faulty beliefs that you might have. You still have to do the psychological work. But it's kind of like walking through a forest. And if you're doing talk therapy alone, then you're walking through that forest with your machete and you're blazing a trail while you're walking it at the same time Kind of hard to do but it's very I mean people do it all the time. It's it's it's incredibly doable But with neuro therapy, it's like we're blazing that trail beforehand before you actually even begin to walk it And then when you do the talk therapy now, it's much easier to walk that trail because your brain is now ready to Now it's much easier to walk that trail because your brain is now ready to

regulate the brain is ready to do to reorganize around healthy beliefs and Psychological functionalities so wanted to get that out there That that we're kind of getting a head start when you're doing neuro therapy and talk to even either neuro therapy alone And then you talk therapy later or the better model in my opinion is concomitant Neurotherapy with talk therapy doing both at the same time. You can really make tracks and and feel better You can just expedite how a person can can feel more like themselves when you do both at the same time You know, we recommend that to people a lot I mean ultimately it's up recommend that to people a lot.

Ultimately, it's up to the patient, but a lot of people have the best results when they're in talk therapy. I think brain spotting and things that treat acute trauma really quickly are useful to stabilize that, but things like the QEG brain mapping that change, just like emotion regulation and

tolerance to distressing situations and your ability to focus under stress and the effect that anxiety have on the whole person, you know, how fast you just lose the ability to see the forest for the trees is I see that help a ton, especially in dopamine disorders that are very genetically predisposed and resistant to medication, especially in ADHD, especially in kids with autism and adults with autism. It just seems like there's things that is like, I never really could have got there and talked therapy.

Like, you know what you're supposed to do, you know how to do it. It's not emotion recognition that's the problem. It's not trauma that's the problem. Your brain just is likely to lose its ability to function when there's this amount of stress. And I see QAG and Neuromod enhance that a lot for my people. Yes, and also, relief has a big part of this.

Sometimes people say, I sleep eight hours a day, but the brain is not actually resting and we can see that on the scene so if a person says okay, I sleep eight hours or Talking to him or wake up in the middle of an outing on the back of his face We can see one person has four feet and you can help that and a lot of times When the brain is able to rest better then other things start coming through automatically.

That's because your brain has been functioning with 3% battery for so long that you kind of got used to it. But then you realize how high you've been after you have done ament in your eyes? Okay, yes, I am not saving trouble. And the brain is actually going through the proper sleep cycle. We've had people that were, you know, those watchers or overings that, you know, practice sleep and sleep after the treatment starts. Well, that was the effect on me that I was kind of wanting to just feel better in a certain capacity and then I did and I felt tired and then I slept better and then I started to feel better. Just, you know, a lot of what you guys are doing is I think kind of stabilizing things

that we're maybe overcompensating for, you know, internally so that the system can just kind of go back into flux. It's like engaging the natural healing mechanisms that the brain has anyway, but just faster, you know, giving a little push to start to be more in equilibrium. Are you familiar, Jay, with any of... I noticed that a ton of people that are familiar with the older kind of depth psychology, Jungian analytical psychology stuff, are mistrustful of the newer neuroscience, brain-based medicine stuff, and then vice versa.

There's a few people that people that are in both worlds, but they really, it seems like are saying the same thing. One with a technological metaphor and one with something else. Are you familiar with the John Bibi model of the MBTI or anything like that? It is fine. No more than the average. I have a cursory Understanding of that of that so I'm not really able to go in depth

Well, just a lot of the things that he says are that you know, I mean not talking about you know He probably doesn't know that QG brain mapping exists and he's talking from Mike analytical psychology perspective like that The brain basically has four or five modes of cognition, but they're mutually exclusive. Some of them are mutually exclusive to another one. They cannot do them at the same time and that the problems that happen in talk therapy when you do that test are around people who over-prefer one type of cognition. So they're trying to solve every problem with one type of thinking and he says that any therapy modality that works, what it's doing is it's teaching you to get comfortable

with the type of cognition that you don't like. You know, it's having the introvert go, you know what, I can't find all the answers in this inner world. Sometimes I have to come outside and engage with other people and then be able to solve a problem relationally. Sometimes it's saying the opposite, that you can't just call your sister on the phone

every time you're sad, that you have to kind of go inside and self soothe. You know, thinking and feeling a lot of times or a dichotomy intuition and sensing, you know, the MBTI would say, you know are Are hard to do at the same time Because one of them is going into a place that has no objectivity and just kind of going with a gut feeling and then the other One is looking at really hard concrete data to say this is you know an objective Variable to make base information on but we this is, you know, an objective variable to make base information on but we need both, you know, I don't know, overlap between a lot of that is interesting

to me. Yes, it is. It is. And I think that's pretty unequivocal really. It's we know that so putting that together with with with how we know a person changes, you know, you usually people usually people change in three domains. Usually behavior changes first, and then once behavior is shaped,

then cognitions are more easily shaped. And then once behavior is kind of on the road, your thought life is kind of on the road your thought life is kind of on the road then lastly emotions change so behavior thoughts and emotions emotions are the last thing usually the last things to change in a way it's kind of a shame because that's what we want like I want to feel better that's that's why I'm here I want to feel better that's the last thing that's going to change like likely the last thing and so if you can work on behavior first in terms of your basic hygiene basic social skills

Like like you were talking about, you know for the introvert to let their friends friends kind of Kidnap them and take them out and go see a movie and have some dinner even if even if they're not feeling it just let them take them out and go see a movie and have some dinner. Even if they're not feeling it, just let them pick them out and then just get more external. Then with healthier, more balanced behavior, then it's easier to analyze and have a more balanced thought life. What kinds of thoughts do you allow to stay? Which ones do you begin to debate with and to see if you

can get rid of the maladaptive thoughts, and then emotions come around from the other two. What you just said does coincide with what we know about human progression. Well, I think that right now, if you just looked at the average, I mean, there's some people doing interesting stuff some places, but it seems like cognitive science and neuroscience are almost like ahead of understanding how the brain works ahead of clinical psychology.

I think some of that is that we want to be so reductive with these metaphors, and we want to pretend that the brain works on our terms when it just doesn't. Are you familiar with Joseph Ledoux or like Michael Kazaniga's books, or Antonio de Masso, any of those like consciousness guys? Yes. Yeah. I think that we tend to think about like, well, first off, if you're not familiar, Joseph Ledoux ejected rats with a drug that inhibits protein synthesis.

Then he would show them, he would try and teach them to either get punishment or avoid, or not, I'm sorry, avoid punishment or get food. When the protein is inhibited, the brain can't make new memories. So that proves that you need protein synthesis to make these memories that are new. Then like Todd Sachter takes that further and says,

the way that we think about long-term memory is not really right. It's not like it's just saved on the hard drive and that's what happened. We're always going back to it, revising it and being like emotionally, what does that narrative mean? One of the ways he proves that is when he injects the protein synthesis, long-term memory changes. So the brain is going back in, it's modifying it.

He's the one that proved that that PKM Zeta enzyme is crucial for making long-term memory. But it's not like the memory was formed and so it's there, the brain's going back in, it's trying to figure out what it means, it's trying to update it. And we're always making meaning of our lives in this fairly dynamic way.

And I read a lot of research coming out of academic psych and it's like, they don't want it to work like that. You know, they want it to be a very cognitive and behavioral paradigm that cannot make the base of the brain as alive as it is and as meaningful as it is within consciousness, which is, I mean, that's my bigger ax to grind,

but I think it's relevant to what you guys do. Just because a ton of the people who come to Taproot, who come to y'all, who get get help have been told in cognitive behavioral therapy you know snap the rubber band and tell your anxiety to stop oh well if you can't if that doesn't work you need to take medication which just seems so silly you know but that is still the majority of the field at least in Alabama right now I think it's important what you say. So there's a recent, I don't want to say push, that sounds kind of superficial, but there's

a development, there's an appropriate link being gradually established between clinical work and cognitive neuroscience, clinicians and researchers. It's becoming less dichotomized these days to where if you speak a research language then the clinicians can't understand you, or if you speak clinician lingo then the researcher is laughing. But there's a bridge that's being created by the EEG work that we're doing by the different labs at UC Davis in California and UC San Diego. Those folks are really the heavy hitters in terms of cognitive neuroscience. And if you're familiar with MATLAB, if you're familiar with these different platforms that

help us to learn more about the brain and use that data, that's where this is coming out of. And so clinicians and neuroscientists are now being able to go to parties together and be in the same room and, and communicate back and forth. Uh, it is a wonderful time. It is, this is a very exciting time. And I think that's why, uh, brain knowledge about how the brain, uh, processes and helps regulate our emotions.

Things are advancing at such a quick pace now. Research, as you guys both know, research is slow. It is like watching grass grow, but not so much in the cognitive universe. And all the funding, probably. Oh, yes, yes, Yes. Yes, indeed. Indeed. But our knowledge base is now moving at such a rapid pace. Now you have to try to keep up with it.

Or else it'll just leave you and you're doing your half step behind. What's current and what's the absolute best? Well, there's decades where nothing happens and then a year where a decade happens like in our understanding of psych and you look at the history of the country, it's just kind of always been like that, you know. Like it jumps. But I mean, what you're saying is important because it's like, like we lost for a decade or two that the

role of psych research was to make clinical psychology better. There was like 20 years where clinical psychology and academic psychology were going in two different directions, which is not good. The point of it is not for you to have an impact factor. The point of it is not for us to corporatize academia. The point of it is for you to be able to help clinicians do their job and ultimately help people hopefully, you know, Yeah, I've got a

I've got a phd in physiological psychology, which is the study of how the physical affects the psychology, right? And we're all doing all doing psychophysiology, which is a study of how the psychology affects the physical doing psychophysiology, which is a study of how the psychology affects the physical. It goes both ways. And so I think for the first time now, people who are encamped or historically encamped in one of these partitions, now it's like, ah, yeah, there's, I need to get out of my bubble or else I am drastically uninformed. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's Karl Friston who said that like what the brain is doing is just trying to use past experience to anticipate the future to minimize uncertainty.

We want to have the most certainty about the future that we can and so it's trying to take all these patterns that it learned and it's trying to turn those into a mode of understanding the future so that we feel like we will know what happens. You know, and if you're, the paradigm is not right. You know, like if the incentives in your house were bad, you know, if you're a trauma survivor or something, you know, the guesses that you're making about how the world works when you're out of that environment aren't good anymore. You know, a lot of what, you know, brain mapping, when anything's doing is just helping the brain adjust

to a new reality so that your thought is effective, you know, at getting you the outcome that you want and understanding how things work and kind of having clarity, you know, which I think when you go too far into cognitive behaviorism, you lose that because it's trying to get this objective result, which in my mind is not always the point, you know, psychology. You know, when I did the brain mapping with you guys, I felt like I understood something about my body and about emotions that I didn't know before, but I couldn't tell you what that was. I couldn't say, well, I sat down and made a treatment plan and I wanted to sleep for six hours. Well, I did sleep

more, but I couldn't say I wanted to go out and be more community involved or something, and then I did that. A lot of those behaviors happened, but it wasn't the point of the process for me the point of the process for me was that I understood that my back holds tension that I can breathe deeply that I can notice that I have more empathy for people when I'm speaking to them. Things that I you know were remembered that I used to know you know but that we lose touch with and kind of chaos and all this and I think to making things too objective and too empirical which you need to do research, but you lose when you're trying to make it a point of psychology in my perspective.

And you guys remember the human, you know, even though you're messing with microchips and wavelengths, like you remember the human and what you do, which is wonderful. Wonderful. I think it's empowering for the person when they can see us overtly keeping that in mind. It's like, when a person comes into our office for a session, we pull up the brain map. And so just to have it there, we may not talk about it, may not go through it again, but it's up. And so if we ever just kind of looked at the brain map, just that if we do want to have more conversations about what we're doing, well, then there's the map.

We're trying to cool down this area because of these reasons, trying to increase this area because of these regions. It just gives us a talking point if we were so inclined on that day. But you're more than your brain. It's true that we're handcuffed to the brain. If it's not functioning as designed, we're going to be a little bit different, maybe a lot different. And we don't have a lot of choice in that matter. But we're more than our brains. I mean there is something called the spirit. There's something called the soul, you know, if you're gonna If you're going to talk to me, i'm going to give you these answers. So there's there's uh, there's there's there's more to the person than the brain

Uh, and so I think it's empowering for the client For anyone that's that's that's listening to us talking about this field To To know that we all understand that it's not we're not just Brain mechanics and with our wrenches and we're trying to tweak this and adjust that well, I think what is it? Julia Tonoi? said that like, you know, consciousness is really just all of these different types of information that we have to process being blended in a certain way, you know, and then we don't, we can't like empirically ever really know where all of those streams of integrated

information that become consciousness are even coming from, you know, there's just, there's so much going on in the sub brain and feedback loops and feed forward loops from the neurons that we have in our gut. You know, the only place we have neurons other than our brain and the psycho physical reactions like but those do get put together in this experience of consciousness. And I think you have to be empirical what you can be empirical about and you have to leave room for the mystery where you can't and know that you can't very well said. Okay, Jay had to leave the room for a second So we're gonna let Deanna answer that question and then Jay will hop back on when he gets back

Yeah, you had to had to a change the protocol on somebody. Go ahead Wait, hold on. What was the question again? Well, you were talking about the show you were saying that you had a parallel to show severance I think that's as far as we've gone. Severance, yes. They implant a chip in a person's brain and it creates an artificial dissociative identity disorder where they don't know anything about the person inside of work

and the person inside of work doesn't know anything about the person inside of work and the person inside of work doesn't know anything about the person outside of work. So it's what I mean by that is it's very difficult to exactly explain what consciousness is because it can be I mean, is it awareness because that's all this psychological ethics stuff like the Michael Gazaniga where he talks about like you know when one half of the brain does not know language but it still has an opinion about something like in split brain patients that have had a bifurcation of the brain either due to an accident or due to surgery around an epilepsy or something you

can you can detect two types of consciousness that are in conflict, you know, so what is the person? You know, is it the part that can talk in words or is it? Is it anything that is you know alive for the lack of a better word? Yes, exactly The severance you see can you tell us about severance? I think I saw the pilot. I haven't I haven't gone further Yeah, so basically they implant the chip into people's brains and they wake up at work one day.

And the main character, he's mourning the loss of his wife. He gets fired from his job, so he decides to do the severance procedure. So he goes to work, he has no idea what he does for work. Then once he goes into the elevator, he even talks differently. So a new personality is emerging around the experiences he's had at work. It's the one he's had.

Yeah. It's almost like two different people. Well, that is one of those neuroscience things that's interesting is it's like the different structures of the brain were sort of designed to think a certain way and they can, but you can also just cut half of it off and the structures can be repurposed like those networks are fairly m graphics card if you want, it won't work as well. But if your graphics card breaks, you can use the integrated graphics processing on the CPU. You can take different types of processing structures and then the network can handle them differently. And I think brains are moving networks around like that all the time. And you're right, that is what you see in DID, where somebody, there wasn't enough ego integrity ever for the memory to be associated with like one persona it became this kind of expansive thing that were all extreme reactions to different extreme environments. Yeah, yes. And yes the network the networks and the brain do organize. So if seen in patients with epilepsy that have had one of their temporal lobes,

respected from the brain, and yes, they do have some memory loss. However, they can still function day-to-day and a lot of times without epilepsy because the focus has been resected. Yeah, I wonder too about like we were talking about memory how the brain can assign different meanings to the same long-term memory that it's there's not really a thing like I mean long-term memory short-term memory function differently biologically but it's not the same long-term memory. There's not really a thing like, I mean, long-term memory and short-term memory function differently biologically, but it's not like the long-term memory is static, it's still changing.

Because our relationship to it and what it means about us and our identity is changing. Like, do you see a lot of precuneal dysregulation in certain types of trauma? Because my suspicion about, I do more brain-spotting, but a lot of the clinic, I think everybody now except for me does lifespan integration at the clinic,

which is this kind of therapy where there's a lot of techniques, but you're basically digging up different moments in people's life where they had a really strong conception of who they were and what their values were. But it conflicted with what I believed later. And you make them experience all of those kind of on a timeline really quickly, and you smush it up until every year, like this is what you have to be.

No, actually, it's this. No, this is actually what it is until those things kind of war and fall apart. And you're left with this core identity of who you are without all of the things that you sort of had to identify with at different times. And my theory about how those work is that it's, it's messing with the precuneus' ability to assign significance to different periods of time that you're kind of playing with time there. So I was curious if, if that's something that you see,

you see on cues, I don't know. So every memory that we store in the brain is associated with emotion. So if we have a traumatic experience, then it's associated with an emotion and you are more likely to remember it. And same with happy experiences. So the long-term memory usually has a lot of emotion associated to it. Sometimes there are points and we saw this when I did the brain spotting with E2, that there were aspects,

and I never thought about it, aspects of my own personality that became that way because of a traumatic event, which at the beginning I didn't think that it was going to be a traumatic event, but it did affect how I view the world and personality. So we do see often trauma in the brain when we do EEGs. And we have had experience with people with PTSD and trauma. We can see it and it stems from different ways that like we explained before that everyone's brain behaves differently

and everyone's brain is different. But we do see some of the markers of trauma in the brain. And oftentimes when we start treating that trauma, it brings up those memories, not in the same way because of the treatment, you cannot see it a little more calmly, but it can bring up nightmares. And when your brain has been stuck, not wanting to remember the trauma,

and then all of a sudden it is out in the open. You feel that in your body and it can bring up some. Some nightmares and and that relieving some of the trauma however is not going gonna be as if you're living it again, but your body does remember, even if you don't want to. Well, the emotions are tied, or the memories are tied to emotions, and emotions are partially a somatic reaction when there's a mismatch between what we need and what the environment is, you know. So it would make sense you couldn't have one without the other. Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting and we see too, you know, nightmares being

triggered when we go in and look at trauma with brain spotting or with ETT or with lifespan integration or a lot of the other, you know, clinical things that we do. We had an interview last week with the host of the This Young Gain Life podcast about dreams and that was one of the things is like, that a lot of times dreams are this way of trying to make sense of the future with the past and trying to get information that, you know, trying to like know something that we don't really want to know. And when the ego is turned off and we don't have our other defense mechanisms, the brain is like, here you go. You know, here's, here's the thing

that you need to accept and a repetitive dream. You see that clinically, like people that have had the same dream for years and years and years. If you can really kind of get at the core of what it's saying. And sometimes they can't hear it from the dream, you know, they're not going to get it from dream work. You know what it means as a clinician. But when they accept that thing that they're avoiding knowing, then all of a sudden that's when the repetitive dream goes away. You never have it again because you don't need to be told that this is something that

you have to kind of accept when your defenses are down, when you're asleep. And the overlap between all that, it's really interesting. Jay's back. Hello gang. I apologize for my brief absence. So and the overlap between all that it's really interesting Jay's back Hello gang, I apologize for my brief absence. I hope I wasn't too interruptive now you're fine Do you do you want to just kind of go through? Kind of how you seen the technology change over time just the history of the technology and then we could maybe do one or two Specific case studies and I know you off got other stuff you need to get to you

Sure. Sure. Yeah happy to So right brain change really has sort of Progressed from from its early days, you know, most people are pretty familiar with neurofeedback Which is a paradigm where you're apparently rewarding certain kinds of EEG functionality. So you're measuring EEG, and then you're rewarding the good stuff. If we see that from the person's brain map and their history,

that they would be feeling better if they were potentiating more of what we call beta, a certain wavelength that we call beta, then we can measure, the EEG while a person is wearing a couple of implements on the head. And then we can reinforce the brain, reinforce the person every time that the brain potentially more beta as for just for talking points. So neurofeedback has been around for a while. It, it, it works. It's always worked.

Um, it's just a little bit slow sometimes trying to catch the brain doing something good, and then you reward it and then encourage the brain to keep on doing, doing that functionality. It's just kind of a slow gradual process, but it works and it's a very good non-pharmaceutical option for people who want to sharpen their brain or to address some kind of a clinical aspect. Recently, the knowledge has come about that cells copy frequencies. We didn't know that until about maybe 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, that if a frequency in the form of EMF or AC, if a frequency touches the brain, then after just a couple of minutes,

call it 10 minutes, 15 minutes, now the brain will be oscillating at that exact speed. So it just mimics frequencies. Why is that, Jay? Is there some sort of evolutionary benefit to taking external frequencies and mimicking them, or is that just kind of a spandrel effect that the brain talks to each other that way? So you can use an external source to kind of pretend to be a neuron and, and stimulate

it and it just thinks it's part of a bigger structure while that's happening. What is it that causes the mimicry? I think the latter is the case. It does. It does cause, yeah, the anions and cations involved in a cell's propagation of the impulse. I think the EMF, we know that it does augment calcium channel gates. And so it just on a very gentle level, frequencies cause cells to fire at that pace. It just depolarizes the cells and causes them to

function just like the Pied Piper. It just mechanically hits the on switch. The cap when you're doing the neuro stimulation is just pretending to be part of the brain and telling the brain, hey, I'm a neuron, like it's a narc at a dead show or something. It telling the brain, Hey, I'm a neuron, you know, like it's a narc at a dead show or something. And it's, it's telling you like, Hey, I'm a neuron. You got it. This is what you want to do on the top level of neurons.

Just like that. Just like that. You think it sounds like that? Hey. Yeah. Yes. We're telling the, the, yeah. Let's, let's start firing these frequencies a little bit more.

What is that? Yeah, it works faster than near feedback. Because near feedback, like Jay said, you have to catch the brain doing something good and don't reward it. Just like an example that I like to use is, uh, when you are raising a child and then you see the bad behavior, uh, and the good behavior. So catching children, you know, doing good things sometimes it's hard, especially at the beginning.

But if you tell the child, okay, uh, maybe don't pull the dog's hair. Just let me show you how to pet the dog. So the child is more likely to learn how to be gentle with the dog by showing them how to do it, then, then, you know, punishing or rewarding when they do it. Correctly or not. Well, and one of the technologies that people are more familiar with, it's a little bit older, is what in all these terms,

you may hear them used interchangeably because it's not like there is a rule about not, I mean, people call stuff brain mapping, and I wouldn't call brain mapping because you're not mapping the brain, but I guess they're allowed to do that. But one of the older technologies is what generally is called biofeedback, which is where you give the person a readout of all of their types of QG frequency. My high beta is a red spaceship and my theta wave is a green spaceship,

and they say, okay, well, the green spaceship is too low. The patient has to sit there while they're actively being monitored in it and think, how do I erase this? Oh, it's that type of cognition. Oh, good. And they kind of reward their own brain, but that's one, assuming that they're gonna spend enough time and figure that out.

And then two, research says that that takes about 65-ish sessions to work. Whereas what you guys are doing is mapping the brain, seeing what they need, then immediately making the brain automatically mimic that frequency even if the patient isn't participating intellectually. I was doing emails while I was doing mine, but you-all were trying to pull me out of mania basically.

While I'm doing emails, I could feel something trying to make me relax and I could feel something else being like, No, stop it, I need this, stop it. You know, reached out. Then afterwards, I had a great nap. But like y'all's, you know, it's, it's similar to that, you know, using QEG to help somebody modify things, but you're kind of doing it for them, because this is expensive it's time-consuming and people got stuff to do and so being able to make significant progress and then remap and see what that was in ten sessions versus you know the 65 that research says is what you would need for biofeedback is an improvement on the tech I would say. Yes and it also helps for children. Yeah, you can't explain to kids how to remove the red spaceship, especially now they're

going to look for a button or touch the screen, you know, like they don't- Yes. Yes. So when we have children in the spectrum or ADHD, a lot of them, especially children in the spectrum, they will, the parents would bring a tablet or something and the kid can be playing, you know, doing something, watching while they're receiving the treatment. And that is a good distraction when we have, you know, something on their heads, which usually, you know, sensorial input is strong. So putting something on their head sometimes it's a lot for them.

And having, giving them something to do helps distract from, you know, having that helmet on their head. Well, could we end with maybe just a case study, just an example so people understand of like, if I come in with average ADHD or average autism spectrum disorder and I'm complaining about getting overwhelmed by sensory stuff, if I get something slimy on my hands washing dishes or I'm around hot or cold, I flood. And what does that look like on a map? You know, and so how do you, you know, show that to a patient? And then after you do that, what would the plan be like, you know, those sessions in order to change that?

And then what are we hoping to see on the remap and what do we do if it doesn't completely resolve on the remap? Could you just take us through a hypothetical there so people maybe understand a little bit more about how to use it? Because we want to work with therapists in the community. I mean, there's people who want to work with the brain maps and we're happy to comp some people's map because we want you to, that's how I learned how to use it as a therapist.

That's how we hope community therapists will be able to use this technology in this area. And if you're not in Alabama, find somebody who does something similar to J&Giana if you're in Texas or if you're somewhere where you can find another firm that's doing a similar thing. I'd love for the treatments in psychology

to be more integrated and more cohesive. And I think that's one of the ways we get there so could you just kind of explain for you know for therapists so they could maybe understand how this could enhance you deciding the kind of therapy and support the therapy that you are doing you know with this technology sure sure and to your point yeah I was I was recently approached by a spine surgeon here in Dallas that they're going to begin to treat individuals with developmental delays, putting together like a neuroscience institute and treat people, think people with hyperbaric oxygen

and red light therapy that we can talk about if we want to talk about, but they're interested in somebody like me come in and do brain mapping, do pre and post to show the efficacy of those treatments and guide the regimen of what they're delivering. of what they're delivering. So yes, I think that we would all benefit if we all do work together. You ever tried it with ketamine, IV ketamine patients or are there any studies on that? I've wondered if the neuroplasticity,

if the brain kind of being more malleable and memory being sort of less consolidated would mean that you had rapid change or maybe something bad happens. I don't know. I'll be the guy. I don't know as much about that as I would like and maybe as much as I should at this point, because it's been around for a little bit now. Have you have you read much,

Diana, about about about microdosing or about the ketamine We we did have a a client that was on ketamine every two weeks and it was pretty much the highest dose you could get and um They came the the uh treatment with us Um, we could not do it longer because it was an out of state client.

So we did just, you know, not as many sessions as we would like, but I got a call from that person a few weeks later that their ketamine treatment actually had been reduced. No, it was oral. Yeah, lower dose. Was that an oral ketamine though? I am not entirely sure. I don't really remember. Usually the IV, usually the IV is like, uh, you just get six to nine sessions of pretty intense stuff.

Whereas the oral and then the nasal or something that you take over time So I was curious how they were sounds like they've been prescribed it for a while reduced. Yeah. Yeah, they have been on it for a while Well, if we if we all work together I tell colleagues and we all talk about this that There could be 10 neuro-therapists down the hallway. We could all office in the same building on the same floor and we would not take clients from one another. I mean, there's that kind of a need for treatment and sharpening.

So yes, I think that we really do, not just lip service to this idea, but we really would be doing right by the community if we did work together much more than we seem to be working together now. Yeah. If we, go ahead, I'm sorry. No, I just agreed with you. Okay.

Well, go ahead and agree with me. Well then, it's a fun joke. So if we saw a person's brain map and we were knowledgeable about their history, then you know what a brain map looks like. It's multi-pages, a lot of pictures, a lot of, of I mean just kind of like a map and so on the summary page You'll be looking at five heads from slow brain waves all the way to very very fast brainwaves it's color coded as to how much of each of those firing classes that the brains making and so if a person

Was was saying that they were struggling with some concentration vigilance and some just kind of not being able to sustain attention like they once did or that they would like, then that would usually look on the map like the person is a little bit underpowered with how much of what we call beta being generated in certain spots And now Joel all this is I'm speaking very upper level and I know that You you know this but this is very nuanced So but but but in general talking just kind of broad strokes Person would show that they're not generating enough

of a wavelength that we call beta that is associated with cognitive output, memory, sequential processing, to some degree mood. So it would be color-coded to where that's a little bit low. So if all things were equal, then to help that individual, we would put implements on the head that give off electromagnetic field frequencies, and probably also add some implements giving off some very, very gentle AC frequencies. So a couple of electrodes. I know that's a scary word for people sometimes,

but some sensors in some strategic spots, according to the brain map, in our knowledge of neuroanatomy as to what's happening with that person, put the sensors in the spots to get to the regions that we're trying to get to, and with the EMF emitters. And then we simply give those beta frequencies.

It's more detailed than this, but overall, you're giving those beta frequencies that the brain is having a hard time generating on its own. You give those frequencies, and now in a matter of minutes, now the brain is potentiating more of that frequency. So they leave the office differently than they arrive and that will continue, the brain will keep functioning that way for essentially the rest of the day, the next 12 to 15 hours and then it will begin to fade off. And then with repeated presentations of those frequencies, multiple sessions of those frequencies,

the brain begins, we say the word entrained, it just learns and memorizes those frequencies and begins to function that way for longer before it fades away. And as you're creating the synapses between the tracks that support that activity, you're actually creating pathways or strengthening weak pathways, then that's what makes that change permanent to where eventually they'll no longer need that stimulation. The brain's now doing it on its own. It now has the network that it has created

through protein synthesis and all of this working together. Now the brain is able to function that way on its own. And then you begin to talk about discontinuing the therapy or move on to the next phase. If the brain needs something else in addition to that, then to move on and go to the next phase. That's what that would look like. Then doing the brain map roughly every 10 sessions to make sure

you're still doing what the brain precisely needs at that moment. Making changes to the protocol, if you're now done with that phase, now the brain is now showing us that it needs something else, or now there's an inefficiency that we can now see that we couldn't see before because something was covering it up. And this can get really detailed, but in general, that's what it would look like. Well, and they know the map is a map, whereas the neuromodulation is a treatment. And so the same

thing that the map indicates this kind of cognition is what is hard and what needs to be focused on improving. Neuromod is the only way to do that, but we use a tap read the maps clinically a ton. When I'm like, okay, that makes sense. You have to have a really hard time focusing. Let's try and get you to focus on something pretty granular for a session and see what the protective parts that flare up when

you are trying to concentrate on something. How do you try and pivot off that and deflect and spin off? For myself, it's like exhaustion. If I sit down and try and write something, I'll just get a headache or I'll immediately get tired. I know that that is a defensive thing that I've worked on in therapy. A lot of the neuromodulation was helped for us. If I could say say one one more thing

um, uh, you know parents parents usually so I see a lot of Autism a lot of ADHD a lot of anxiety. Um, I mean we all see these people. Um And so people so so so people come in and they they ask Okay, we want to find out if this If this is a difficulty related to a won't or a can't. And so we're trying to problem solve as to whether the concentration, for example, the concentration issue is just simply poor discipline or if this is a truly, if this is a can't. So the brain map can help us delineate between what's just simply what the brain can do, but the person just lacks discipline because it's not a lot of fun to concentrate versus if it's really having a neurological difficulty concentrating. Case in point for this is anxiety, uh, we see it we see it a lot, um

That that a person will come in and they'll be really wanting assistance to reduce anxiety And so in the brain map And anxiety can look at different things but two major ways that anxiety can present in a map Is being very heavy in the fast firing speed, what we call high beta. And so having a lot of that very fast activity from certain regions, then you can infer that the person is high arousal, that the person is genuinely they're anxious due to a high arousal level. But anxiety can also present an elevation in the amount of what we call theta, which is a slower waveform.

So sometimes theta, which is an introspective, like a meditation, it's an internal self-monitoring activity. So when a person is showing us a lot of theta on their maps, you can go, huh, so this person may have a hard time focusing. Like theta can be a slowing, like an ADHD, kind of daydreaming and drifting away. That could be the meaning behind what the theta is showing us or the person can be really screaming with their theta because they're trapped thinking about self they're trapped inward there's their their self-referential type reflection yes yes and they can't get

off that merry-go-round of, of just monitoring self, but how they're feeling and, uh, and they can't drop it. They want to just take a brief rest and go and do something else for leisure. But that theta wants to keep them handcuffed to that thought and keep on thinking about how bad you feel. Keep on thinking about difficult things. Um, so that's, that's one example about how a presentation does not look one certain way.

You have to do the clinical interview to understand the person and then pair that with the brain data or else you could make a mistake. Yeah. Yeah, and I think every model of therapy kind of has dead ends and that's one of the ones that sometimes the people that are less flexible with a very subjective model or a very somatic model get people stuck in just endlessly thinking about how bad that they feel with kind of no out. And a lot of times you can see what kind of therapies you need, what kind of therapy you don't. A joke with the therapist is like anybody that calls and says they want existential therapy probably doesn't need it. They're probably too much in their head and kind of need to get in their body

You know a lot of people do call and say they want existential therapy But a lot of times we kind of want the opposite I think Uh, or we need the opposite of what we we think we want to get better. Um Because what we said earlier that the brain wants to double down on what it knows how to do well And a lot of times we need to do something that we don't know how to do yet That is well said Well, do you have anything to add I'd love for people just to know about the technology internationally a lot of our listeners is Therapy patients therapists and therapy nerds, you know kind of across the world, but there's also you know, a of local listeners. So if you're in Alabama, this is something that Jay and Diana can do for you. If you're in Texas,

it's something that Jay can do for you. And if you're not, there's a lot of people who are doing what they're doing elsewhere that you can form partnerships with and really expand your practice and your ability to help people. So, you know, gettherapybermingham.com is the place to go in Alabama to, you know, hit that QEG brain mapping page. You can watch a video of me getting one done on me. They really wouldn't stay HD on it. Did not know what she was going to see. That really was the real map.

Then there's a lot of information on that page too. Peak Neurosciences website if you're in Texas. Is there anything that you want to add or that you feel like is useful for people that are wanting to learn about these things? You have anything to add, Diana? Yes, we have had lots of feedback from our clients and the main feedback is, okay, so I'm not making it up. You can see it in the map. And I think that

it has been very validating for a lot of people just to see the map and see that, you know, it is in my head, but it's not like I'm making it up. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I would I would encourage people to Uh find someone who is board certified in neurofeedback This unfortunately, uh is is a treatment modality that people are allowed to do without any special certification in it. Now that's changing, it's not gonna be that way for much longer, but right now you can see a person,

they have to have an independent license to practice, counselor, a psychologist, chiropractor. So they have to be licensed in their field. And I'm sure that people doing this do have training. But I would make sure that you sought consultation from somebody who is what's called BCIA board certified, board certified in neuro therapy. Just to ensure that people have a base level of didactic training with neurofeedback and neuroSTEP. What about the technology? I mean, you don't want to go through everybody and say, good, bad, and in the middle, but just what are things with

the technology that we should look for? I think you guys still are the only providers of neurofield in Alabama that I've ever found, and we've called the other places or looked at them, and they usually tell you what they're using. But some of the older stuff, what I see nationally is there's a lot of people where their site looks good and they talk a good game,

but you look at what they're actually doing and they're running a brain map, but then they're washing the whole brain with white noise. The plan is the same for everybody and it's just neurofeedback. You're like, well, why would you do an x-ray if you're just going to give everybody the same drug? You know what I mean? The diagnostic maybe makes the patient feel good when you're like, oh, you have anxiety and blah, blah, blah, and they feel heard, but you're not treating that specifically. So why are you even doing them out there? You know, there's a couple of things like that that don't make sense to me that I see.

Yeah. And I'm sure practitioners are trying to help people and they're trying their best to do right by people and delivering a therapy modality that they had the most comfort level with that they feel that they're the most effective with. I've got no doubt about that. But there's newer, I'll say more advanced, this sounds like a commercial, I'm not making it sound like that, but doing doing neuro stimulation uh is Much more effective than neurofeedback. Um, it's so not all neuro therapists or uh Private practitioners who who who do neurofeedback in their office?

um, they're not hurting anybody and they're trying their best to be private practitioners who do neurofeedback in their office. They're not hurting anybody and they're trying their best to be the best that they can be for their clients. But neuro stimulation is being shown. The white papers are coming out. They've been coming out. That's more effective and quicker. It's both.

It's more effective and quicker. It's both. It's more effective and quicker. So I would just orient people to seek out practitioners who administer neurostimulation. Sorry, I've got a stuttering disorder. Sometimes it waves at me. It's waiting right now. Neurostimulation, which is that gentle frequency presentation. It's not DNS. We can talk about that. That's something different. Um, but, uh, seek out providers who do neuro stimulation, uh, maybe in

addition to their neurofeedback or, or just in lieu of neurofeedback. Well, um, that sounds great. I really appreciate you guys' time. And if you want to check out Jane or Diana, just go ahead and give us give us a Google and we'll link to everybody's website in the show notes. Thank you all so much. Thank you for having us. Thanks for watching!