The Taproot Podcast - 🧠🗺️ Mapping: What is Neurostimulation and Neurofeedback?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Thanks. That boy needs therapy. Psychosomatic. Down on the couch? What does that mean? Hi, guys. It's Joel Blackstock with the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast, and I wanted to give you some news about new developments.

Starting point is 00:00:17 We are putting a neurostimulation clinic in the basement of our practice. That's with the really nice people at Peak Neuroscience out of Texas. And we hope when they're in town, we can talk to them more and shoot a video about the technology to show it to you. But this is a new thing. So what neurostimulation is, which is what the podcast is going to be about today, is new. It's different. So a lot of people may have heard about biofeedback, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or neurofeedback. Those are older modalities. They've been around a while. They're offered at a couple places in town. They all basically use different wavelengths and different technology to do about the same thing. Neurofeedback and transcranial magnetic stimulation

Starting point is 00:01:03 are washing the whole brain with a kind of white noise that the receptors mimic for a minute, and then that sort of resets the brain sometimes. I don't see a ton of really long-term effects. I think what it can do is maybe stabilize a mood disorder for a very treatment-resistant person with maybe a bipolar disorder or major depression a little quicker than medication can, especially if you're going to have to try a couple medications. I don't see there being a really long-term effect because you're doing the same thing to the whole brain. And sometimes it's calming. Biofeedback is a little bit different. Biofeedback is where

Starting point is 00:01:41 you have different wavelengths that are being monitored by a cap and you see them visually on the screen. Sometimes it's like lines on a bar graph. Sometimes it's like a little video game where you're moving an airplane or something. But basically it's teaching you to feel what those states of consciousness or those wavelengths, those brain wavelengths, brain functions feel like by showing them visually. A lot of people call it brain training. And you're kind of moving the little things on the screen by thinking differently. You're not moving your body. It's reacting to your actual brain state. So you actually phenomenologically feel what these states are like. And then in doing that over months, a lot of places, they rent this stuff. If you want to try brain training, I know Tal and Teresa Prince at Insights, they rent them and you can take them home.

Starting point is 00:02:30 But you look at the screen and you kind of practice with it and it teaches your brain that it can switch from different states, obsession, anxiety, you know, more mindful focus and these different things. And so the thought is that it becomes more flexible and research shows that that does do that. It takes a little while. It's not a short-term thing because you're teaching your brain to think in different ways. So neurosimulation, which is what we're doing, is a totally different technology. What neurosimulation does, there's going to be three phases to it, right? So just a little bit of information about the brain here. To talk to the bottom of your brain, you don't actually have to send a super, super strong signal that goes all the way through the whole brain. Because the brain is a series of neurons that are all like an individual

Starting point is 00:03:16 little computer processor, and they talk in frequencies. They think in frequencies. That's how they process information. So you can tell what kind of information they're processing or the way they're processing information by measuring the frequency that they're moving information. So you can tell what kind of information they're processing or the way they're processing information by measuring the frequency that they're moving at. So if you just talk to the neurons on the top of the brain, those neurons are going to transmit that signal all the way through the system of the brain because they are all talking to each other. And the way that different structures in the brain function is that they work together.

Starting point is 00:03:43 One neuron doesn't really do that much, but when you have a neuron that's in a network, it kind of says, hey, look, this is what we're working on. And then all the neurons in this part of the brain, they synchronize and they're in the same brain wave. And they're all emanating the same EMF frequency while they're doing that. You can have things where someone has had maybe a part of the brain removed. They do that in infants for epilepsy, sometimes real severe epilepsy or a traumatic brain injury. And do that in infants for epilepsy, sometimes real severe epilepsy, or a traumatic brain injury. And the neurons will notice that they can't talk to the part because it's not there,

Starting point is 00:04:11 and they will reroute the information. They build like a new little cable. And so they make a new neural pathway, and you can see that happen. So the brain is pretty resilient. And the problems with the brain not healing are really where it's kind of gotten stuck. And it thinks because of trauma or PTSD or a dopamine disorder that it has to think one way. And that's where you see the majority of dysfunction. Without going too terribly far into detail about this, a lot of our early models of the brain, we talked about it like

Starting point is 00:04:40 it was creating things, like it was doing that that and the new way that we're thinking about the the brain function especially the prefrontal cortex is that it doesn't really do that it's not creating anything what it's doing is it's filtering the information that comes up the brainstem from the body from the nervous system we just can't feel all of that and if you are feeling all of it it can make you psychotic or it can make you unstable. And a lot of times when you look at the dopamine gating theory of schizophrenia, what schizophrenia is, they think now is actually the brain not filtering out all this stuff that it should be filtering out. And because it's not filtering out, it's permeating into, you know, unconscious mid-level consciousness and prefrontal cortex cognition, and that's overwhelming us. So the brain is more of a filter,

Starting point is 00:05:25 and it's removing all the stuff that we're not really supposed to think and then focusing on the stuff that we are supposed to think and feel. And so when the brain is stuck, the problem is not like, oh, well, you just took, we think about it like when we have a brain injury, like, oh, you just took some RAM out of the computer, it's missing a part or something. That's not really what happens. I mean, what happens is that the brain starts to get stuck using the wrong kind of thinking in a certain area. And if you

Starting point is 00:05:52 can teach it to be more flexible, then it starts shifting in between these states more easily, and it can build new neural pathways. Because if you think about one thing a lot, you know, that's what muscle memory is, you know, you start to do something over and over and over again you're strengthening that neural pathway and as you strengthen it the the neurons on there the myelin sheaths where they connect they go back and they basically build you know what was another net cable is now a power line or a big fiber optic cable they build a stronger connection because you're using it more and they're going to devote more energy to making that pathway strong that's why things like practicing piano or is effective um so the brain can reroute around things and it thinks in frequencies is the big takeaway if everybody if anyone feels like that was ancient greek and they're lost um the big takeaway is that the different ways that we think the different

Starting point is 00:06:39 modes of thinking are frequencies and that the brain can kind of reroute around damage and repair itself it's just that when it gets stuck trying to think one way, that's what results in the majority of dysfunction in something like PTSD. So the first step in neurostimulation is something called QEEG brain mapping. And so what they do is they put a cap on your head. There's two other places that do this first part in the state right now that I was able to find or that are licensed to do it. Maybe somebody's doing it in their garage. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:07:09 But there's two places that are licensed to do it. They do a QEG brain map, but that's only the first step of our process. So you put a cap on, and it basically measures electromagnetic frequencies that the neurons think at. And so it looks at all the information shooting through the brain for about 40 minutes to an hour. And after that amount of time, there's an enormous amount of data. And there's only a couple people because the technology is pretty new that can interpret the data. A lot of it, we have to filter it out because an eye blink, or a swallow, or a fidget, that all shows up as or a power line,, you know, digital noise, cell phone transmission, that all gets picked up too. So it takes somebody who has, it's half art, half science. You need

Starting point is 00:07:49 about a year and a half of experience with the training to be able to read the cues. So somebody has to go in and they have to read that map and they pull the data out and they filter it all out and then they put it into this brain map. Once we have all the other frequencies that are erroneous cleared out, you get your brain map. So you come and you meet with, you know, Jay Michelini or Deanna, or, you know, some of the other people maybe that are training, and they go through what the brain map says. And so it shows you the way that your whole brain is thinking. And so if somebody has like ADHD or an obsessive disorder, you're going to see the prefrontal cortex be bright red because all these high beta, you know, frequencies that

Starting point is 00:08:29 are incredibly intense, that's what's happening. And if somebody is maybe, you know, dissociated or completely gone, you'll see, you know, a lot more low level frequencies. Anyway, and the thing is, too, I'm not a brain mapper. I'm a social worker, so I don't know a ton of, I don't know everything about the technology. And I'd like to just shoot a video so you guys can actually see it happening and hear Jay and Tiana do their work themselves. But you get this brain map, and then the brain map is taken.

Starting point is 00:09:00 And it kind of shows you what's working in the brain, what's not, parts that should be talking or maybe they're not talking. And after they do that, they do something called neurostimulation. And so they build a neurostim plan. And that neurostim plan is completely yours. If you go do neurofeedback, biofeedback, whatever, those devices are doing the same thing to the whole brain. They're washing the whole brain with white noise to reset it. This does two things different. One, it's completely yours. It's not just washing the whole brain with alpha or beta or high beta, because maybe you don't need that. Maybe your brain needs a different frequency.

Starting point is 00:09:31 The other thing that it does is it has 20 electrodes, and it talks to different parts of the brain differently, which means you can do things like build a neural path from one way to the brain to the other. You can kind of tell it what it needs to do. And the way that it does that is that the neurons think in frequencies, right? And those frequencies mimic each other because that's how the brain talks. It's like, hey, come on, we all need to do this together. Let's get over. And it defaults control to this one top level neuron that takes over and then it starts to do that

Starting point is 00:09:57 functioning. So the brain cap has emitters that emit the same frequency as neurons. So they can actually directly talk to the brain. They're like look I'm a neuron let's do something you know it's like a you know guy going in undercover cop being like hey does anybody know where the neurons hang out anyone you wouldn't have any myelin for sale but they impersonate a neuron and they talk directly to the brain so it's it's a natural process I mean it's work in the same way that the brain works anyway and then they're like okay this is what we need to do. Why don't we chill out? We're too upregulated here. Let's deregulate. Or, you know, these two parts, let's take this information,

Starting point is 00:10:32 let's put that there. And it temporarily becomes part of the brain to talk to it. And then that is able to work directly on your issue that you're bringing in. So there's a couple of sessions of NeuroSim, and then they start alternating, and they do neurofeedback too. But the neurofeedback is not the same as the other kind of neurofeedback that I'm talking about. The industry is a little muddied in sharing terms and technology, calling multiple things the same thing, and the same thing different things in a couple

Starting point is 00:11:05 places, and this is one of them. But the neurofeedback goes in and it doesn't train the brain, but it reinforces that neural pathway that we made or that training that we did. So it's a lot quicker than something like biofeedback, which just takes hours and hours of time. I'm blanking on it. Somebody was trying to sell us one a while ago, and I think they said it takes kind of using it at least four times a week for three months or something. This is pretty quick because you can do these sessions. Something like brain spotting,

Starting point is 00:11:32 if you've done brain spotting or heard me talk about it, the processing is outside of the room, so you can't just do it every day. You've got to do it. It opens something up. You feel it for a few days. You come back. It doesn't really help you to just do it every day.

Starting point is 00:11:42 Something like this, you can do the sessions pretty quickly. And for something, you know, there's a lot of different kinds of therapy. We're not abandoning traditional therapy, but you can't talk to the brain. You know, you talk through the brain in therapy. You're talking to the prefrontal cortex and encouraging people to maybe feel the midbrain and get a little bit more mindful. Or maybe when we've built some rapport and trust, we can go all the way into the unconscious subcortical brain and we can talk to the repressed emotion and somatic pieces of this trauma here and learn to hold it and get it out of there. So it's not coloring our thinking and cognition all the time. But you can't talk to the brain. This is the first thing that does that.

Starting point is 00:12:29 And so there's some really exciting stuff. I mean, I was looking at the STEM plans with Jay and Diana and it's like, you know, when somebody has autism, there's a signal gap. And so there, you know, if a child has an issue with stimulation, like they can't feel hot or they can't feel cold or they can't hear noise, certain kinds of noise without extreme emotional reaction the reason that's happening is because they have no memory of it it's the first time that they've ever felt that and i don't mean brain memory and intellectual i mean somatic body memory they don't know what to do with this i mean when somebody puts an ice cube on your neck the only reason you don't freak out is because you know what an ice cube feels like and your brain has kind of learned to pick them up and put them in a cup and all that stuff.

Starting point is 00:13:08 If you don't know how to feel that, you're going to react extremely emotionally because it's new and uncomfortable. It's like the missionaries when they first started going to Africa and they would get blind children or deaf children that were 16, 17 that had been blind or deaf their whole life and then do this surgery and they expected the kids to be all excited, and the kids like screamed and they'd cover up their ears or cover up their eyes, they'd been blind or deaf their whole life, and they'd do this surgery, and they expected the kids to be all excited. And the kids, like, screamed, and they'd cover up their ears or cover up their eyes because they'd never seen this since, and it was too much, and they wanted to go back to the world that they knew. And slowly, you know, they learned how to do it.

Starting point is 00:13:35 So that's kind of what neurosimulation can do for something like ASD or autism spectrum disorders. You know, it helps to be younger because the neural pathways are still growing. It's also harder to get younger kids to sit still for an hour. So that's part of it. We got a cool computer screen and music and YouTube. You can pull up your Yu-Gi-Oh or whatever, pick your poison or bring something, you know, candy, whatever. And so they take this, the thalamus and autism is saying, hey, this is how you feel the sense. This is how you feel the sense.

Starting point is 00:14:06 This is what it feels like. But there's a signal gap and long-term memory is never getting that signal. So every time the child feels it, it's like a new thing. And they take what the thalamus is saying. They take that frequency and they can stem it with the stem plan directly into memory. And then when the brain mimics that pattern, because that's a pretty complex thing, you're teaching it. When it mimics that pattern, just like with real learning, they hit the dopamine center and the brain gets a little treat. And it's like, oh, great, I did the right thing. That's what I was supposed to do. I got a reward. And so then it,

Starting point is 00:14:38 you know, it, this is an aside, but if we ever make t-shirts, I'm trying to find some way to make like, you know, cat treats or something, but like brain treats, I thought that'd be funny. We're working on a bumper sticker. Um, but the brain that that's what happens in real learning is like when I, when you're learning music, like we, there used to be all these theories about why music was effective and people were like, well, maybe the deep bass pounding, it feels like the heart rate in your ear when you're hunting or something, and that is primarily rewarding. And, you know, that's a good theory. There are all these different things. Anyway, that's not true. None of them are right. The reason that music is pleasurable

Starting point is 00:15:14 is that we are memorizing patterns, and we are memorizing incredibly, increasingly complex patterns as we get further into the kind of music that we like. And we do that and our brain is predicting the pattern right it starts releasing dopamine because it's like you did this you did a good job it's learning learning feels good i mean i know a lot of you guys did not have a great time in school i certainly did not until i got to swanee um but that's not learning that's why you weren't enjoying school is because it wasn't learning um learning something like right now if you're going oh wow cool your brain is getting excited because i'm telling you something you don't know and you think that's cool and you're integrating that um and so

Starting point is 00:15:54 when you're learning how to read when you're learning how to do a thing dopamine is being released once you pick up on this pattern to make your brain go oh good job and then keep that information it's why people who learn more have less issues with dementia and trauma and aging and these things, because the brain's plasticity is still new. It's still rewarding and treating itself and building these new neural pathways. There was a, and we're doing way more brain science in this than I thought we would, there is a study from a ways back about Catholic nuns, because nuns are a pretty good population if you're going to do an experiment. And the reason that they're good is that they do the same stuff. And so you don't have to control for that many variables. If you're going to measure, you know,

Starting point is 00:16:36 PTSD in the general population or something, you're like, well, maybe this guy ate a ham sandwich every day, and that was bad for his brain. Or maybe this guy drank too much beer. Maybe this person had, you know, a pre-existing condition or whatever. You look at nuns, they're all eating the same food. They're all living in the same place. They're all breathing the same air. Their routine looks about the same. They get up. I'm not a nun expert, but I guess if they're Benedictine or something, I can tell you about that one. But they follow the schedule and all of the things in their environment are very, very, very similar. And so it's a neat population to study because you can look at the brain and you don't have to control for a lot of variables.

Starting point is 00:17:10 So they did this study with Catholic nuns. And when they did it, they looked at them aging and dying. They looked at dementia. And so the only way to diagnose dementia is through behavior. You cannot, to my knowledge, and maybe they invented this in the past two years or something since I, last time I looked, but you can't scan the brain and really see the plaques and tangles. You have to diagnose it with an autopsy. So you can diagnose it behaviorally, but you can't do a physical diagnosis without cutting the brain open and looking at it. But when someone dies, you can do that, especially if they've assigned their body to science. And so with these nuns, they did. And

Starting point is 00:17:49 they go through and they're realizing some of the people who had the most severe and profound dementia, they look in the brain, doesn't really look that bad. The brain's pretty good looking. So why did they have all these terrible symptoms? And then they looked at other people whose brains looked like real rough. You know, there's tons of plaques and tangles. There's completely dead areas where protein has just cut off circulation entirely and the brain has died and atrophied. And they're like, why would it do that? And the reason that it does that, they go through what they ate, you know, how they lived. Nothing is there. What their genes were, what race were they, where did they grow up? There's not anything in their history that is consistent. The thing that was consistent was

Starting point is 00:18:27 behavior. The people whose brains were the most damaged but showed no symptoms were nice and creative. Do you hear that? Nice, be nice. And because they were kind and they had an openness and a mindfulness to them, they were still learning. And when you're still learning, you are curious. When I'm trying to hire clinicians, that is the biggest thing that I look for. If you want a job at Taproot, listen up. When I talk to somebody and they know everything,

Starting point is 00:18:58 even if they're brilliant, even if they're 100 times more brilliant than me, but they don't really care about new information, they're not going to be a great clinician because they're not going to listen to the patient because they can't even listen to the person trying to hire them. And they're going to learn one little thing and then be like, okay, well, this is what I do. I want to do a hundred C's in this for the rest of my life. And that's all I'll do. And there's something about that that doesn't work because they're not being like, oh, wow, I don't know that. Cool. They're afraid of what they don't know. They're like, oh, I don't know that. Oh, bad. I don't have that training. Okay. Well, wonder. Have a wonder

Starting point is 00:19:27 and a curiosity. And so the nuns who's, when they started to look at the brains more, the nuns who, man, I did not expect to go on this much of an aside, but it is relevant. The nuns who were very open and kind and nice, their brains rerouted around the damage. So you didn't even see it in behavior because the brain, even though it couldn't cure plaques and tangles, it couldn't cure the physical damage, it was building these new pathways. And you really couldn't tell, you know, it's like taking a computer that's old and underwater and doesn't work, but you're not putting Windows 11 on it. You put a teeny tiny little operating system like Chrome OS or Linux, you know, your favorite Linux build. And then someone's like, wow, this computer is real fast.

Starting point is 00:20:06 And you're like, well, it's a Pentium 2. But the reason that it's fast is because the operating system is less. It's nimble. It's not, even though the hardware is not great. And the nuns who brains had a little bit of plaques and tangles, but not much, those just did debilitating damage because they had no ability to learn, no ability to think creatively, and no ability to reroute around this damage. So that is relevant to neurostem because you can do this without dementia. You can reroute. Dementia is not the only kind of damage there is. You can reroute around these places where

Starting point is 00:20:41 there's rigidity and bad habits and neural patterns. I mean, maybe we talked to Wynn Cheps last week, and he was talking about family scripts. We sort of learn how we have to act in a family, and there's a rigidity there. You can undo that wiring with more than just talk therapy. Most people know what they need to do. They just don't think they can, or they don't know how to feel the thing that stops them from changing.

Starting point is 00:21:06 You also can go in and these somatic muscle memories that maybe every time I'm vulnerable, that's bad. I have to, my back gets tight and I have to get angry and my blood pressure goes up because vulnerability gets me hurt. You know, dad said that I was a baby or, you know, that, you know, don't cry. I'll give you something to cry about. And so I'm not allowed to be sad. I'll just get angry, you know. That is one type of connection that can be unwired, you know, analyzed and unwired with the QEG neurostem combination. So, you know, there's a couple different conditions that neurostem can treat. I think that brain spotting works really well for PTSD. Neuro-STEM can reinforce a lot of the changes made there. You can do this stuff together, which is why we're putting it in the same office. I always thought it was like really cool that, you know, it looks like the pathway to the future is

Starting point is 00:21:58 implied. We always want to be a little bit ahead of research. And if you're an academic and I just made your heart rate go up because I said ahead of research and you're like, what could exist before research proves that it's real? The answer is intuition. If I get trained in 13 models of therapy, which I did, and then I do four of them and they work better, then I know that those work. I was in them as a patient and they worked for me. And I tried them on a bunch of people and was like, hey, what do you think about these? And they're like, I kind of like that thing you did. And I was like, oh, well, that was parts-based. That was voice dialogue. there's some ifs type ideas in there too um when something works it works and then research figures out why it works later or how well it works or what it

Starting point is 00:22:34 works for um and so you do need research to point you into the future but research is implying that a lot of this stuff is the pathway to be the future of the profession. And my goal is to put all that stuff in one office. Because if somebody's only doing brain spotting, if I never talked to Jan D'Anna, then I don't know anything about neurostimulation. I can't say, oh, wow, look what brain spotting did in the brain. Or it looks like two brain spotting sessions. And then one neurostim is this new protocol that works. So you can't collaborate. Smart people tend to know a ton about one thing. And these guys are so smart. They're can't collaborate, you know, smart people tend to know a ton about like one thing. And, and, and, and these guys are so smart, you know, they're an engineer and a PhD engineer and clinical psychologist. And, uh, but you get smart people together and then they start

Starting point is 00:23:13 to understand how other people think. And then you start to build these cool interactions and understand what's happening better than if you were just sticking to your one little lens. And so I think micronutrients and gut health, not just taking vitamins, but taking like some of the precursors, the raw ingredients for the neurotransmitters in the brain, and then having the bacteria in the gut that processes that, that's going to be a pretty big pathway

Starting point is 00:23:38 in the next couple of years because you can maybe reduce the need for an antidepressant or make antidepressant more effective where you're treatment resistant. How do you build the stuff in the brain that you need to be happy if you don't have any of the ingredients? You can have the best construction crew in the world, but if you don't have any steel, you can't build a building. And then there's a lot of other things that work synergistically. So it's not just one thing that works this way, but if I take three things together, like if i eat curcumin nothing happens but if i eat curcumin with black pepper and then with vitamin c and then maybe with quercetin

Starting point is 00:24:10 they all build something that is completely different now i have all of it like in my body and that changes it goes to uh i'm not going to go too far into the woods about amino acids but they build a new thing um that does something totally different on the body and can affect behavior and change more naturally. And so neurostimulation, brain spotting, myofascial release and Rolf massage being brought into therapy where a practitioner can help you understand what your body is doing. And then once you map that, you take that into therapy or brain spotting or neurostim and you have a more mindfully way to unwire it. Because if you don't know what's going on with the muscles in the back, if no one's helped you understand that, then you can't really. If it just hurts and that's all you, you can't really start to really understand what's going on and heal it.

Starting point is 00:24:55 I think all that stuff is coming. And so that's what we're trying to build and get in the same office as soon as we can find providers. It's very new and, you know, it's hard hard to build something like that in Alabama. It probably is easier if you're in California or Texas or places where they're a little bit further ahead of the curve, but we're trying to build it here for this community. And so NeuroStem works with these other conditions, with these other treatment modalities,

Starting point is 00:25:21 and we want to find out how. We've already done a couple different experiments on ourselves. Like I'm going to do, I did brain spotting on Deanna when she was wearing the cap and we got to see what it was doing in the brain. The QEG showed that. And so there's a ton of possibility. It's really neat. So with the neurostimulation, it can treat anxiety.

Starting point is 00:25:41 It can treat bipolar. It can treat PTSD. It can treat autism spectrum disorder, dissociation, mood disorders, and especially chronic pain. Because a ton of chronic pain stuff, you know, sometimes there's physical pain conditions that the nerves are actually hurting and telling the brain that they're hurting. Other times there's, like, sort of feedback loops that get formed in the subbrain. And it's just, like, replaying the cycle. And so you're feeling this pain. But you can go in and, like, downregulate it and turn it off.

Starting point is 00:26:08 And so there's a lot of different ways that chronic pain can be managed with something like neurostim, which means that you're less likely to be on a whole lot of drugs and less likely to get addicted to those drugs, less likely to run out of your prescription and buy street drugs.

Starting point is 00:26:20 I don't want to catastrophize, but that does happen to a lot of people with the opiates. We have a fentanyl crisis. Anyway, it's good stuff if you need it. When it's something that's addictive, you want to be on as little as you have to be. And with Neurostim, you can be on a little bit less. So I was going to go through a little bit of how the brain is mapped. So when you do the neurostimulation and the QEEG reads all these waves,

Starting point is 00:26:52 it will show like a little picture of the brain. Like you'll see this map and it has like 17 little heads on it. And the heads all have hot and cold areas where a certain wavelength is more or less active and each one of the heads represents one wavelength or one hertz you know going up from 1 to 12 and so it's pulling all that information up and then you get the clinical psychologist to put it together and the waves are these i'll just go ahead and go through those. There's delta waves, and delta is the slowest, so they're going to be vibrating at half a hertz up to four hertz. Anything in that frequency spectrum is going to be called delta, and they're associated with,

Starting point is 00:27:36 like, deep sleep and relaxation. They're very present in coma patients. It's kind of a holding pattern that the brain does, where it's like, all right, prefrontal cortex is off. Just hang out. Don't land yet. The airport's full. And that sensation of the delta wave when it's turned on is this like profound awe and relaxation that's kind of impersonal. It's kind of like you're losing you and going into this rest state of rejuvenation, like you're falling asleep. And so that is one frequency that happens. And these frequencies in different parts of the brain do different things too. You know, a delta wave in the prefrontal cortex is different than a delta wave in the mid or the subbrain. But, you know, to talk about something that has, you know, the brain that has literally 12 trillion connections

Starting point is 00:28:24 connecting in five places. So there's an exponential amount of that is very complicated. This is no one way to make sense of it. So the next frequency spectrum is from the 8 to 12 hertz. And that's alpha waves. And so alpha waves, they're observed when a person is awake, but they're relaxed. So it's kind of a focus wavelength. They're commonly experienced when you're closing your eyes you're practicing meditation the delta kind of deep sleep brain turned off and then the higher frequency waves alpha is kind of a bridge so it's like you're mindfully meditating like you're staying with the relaxation transcendental but you're also pondering it or thinking about it or being open to what's down

Starting point is 00:29:06 there. And so, decreasing alpha waves sometimes in certain parts of the brain is linked to anxiety or depression. So, when you see that way too low, you know, then somebody's so checked out so much that that needs to be upregulated so that the anxiety or the depression can go away um and then improve like raising alpha waves also improve relaxation and stress reduction in different parts of the brain so that's something that may be on a stem plan where they go in and raise or lower this for your unique brain um and the sensation of alpha waves is most people describe it as like peaceful or like calm um uh and so the next is theta theta waves are from the four to eight hertz frequency spectrum anything in there is going to be called theta on the map and they're observed during like very light sleep like a power nap or just kind of drowsiness like you're you're

Starting point is 00:29:58 fading out you know and the theta may be present during meditation and creative activities, but it's a little bit more, uh, active, like creativity, like drawing where you're kind of zoning out into this, uh, thing that you're doing, but it isn't, uh, like sleep. It's that kind of, uh, relaxation. And so, um, increasing theta waves usually, when you have a lot of them, especially in the front of the brain, a lot of times that's indicative of ADHD. And decreasing theta waves where that's just going away entirely can be indicative of a cognitive decline. And so the sensation of theta waves when they're being stemmed or they're being turned on is like a dreamy kind of introspection a lot of the time. And that can be kind of raised or lowered based on what you need. The next frequency is beta waves. And so beta waves have a frequency of 12 to

Starting point is 00:30:59 30 hertz. And they're usually present when a person is awake and engaged in cognitive or physical activity, and they're assigned, they're associated with like alertness, focus, concentration. So abnormalities in beta waves can be linked to conditions like anxiety, depression, and especially inability to sleep. If you are an insomniac, you're probably going to have high beta everywhere. I mean, not high beta, beta just beta and the sensation of beta waves is often described as like a state of heightened awareness uh yeah something it's like the mountaintop experience wave maybe um it's kind of a transcendental feeling when it's turned up real high uh and then high beta waves have a frequency of 30 to 40 hertz and they're often associated

Starting point is 00:31:43 with intense cognitive or physical activity um such as problem solving or exercise and an increase in high beta waves in the qeg when you see that it usually uh does mean adhd2 or uh in really high amounts it can be something like ocd um so that sensation of the high beta wave is described as like alertness or intense focus or kind of like a tunnel vision type feeling. And you do need it. If it's turned off too much, you can't focus, you can't go into like kind of crisis mode and act, and you can't filter everything out and just get this one thing done um i am looking forward to my qeg but i'm predicting that my high beta is all over the place everywhere i bet that my high beta is nuts um so we'll show my brain map when i when we get the technology

Starting point is 00:32:37 set up and we get all of the electromagnetic shielding done for the room because you can't have cell phones and microwaves and all that stuff polluting the neural EMF spectrum. So I think that's it. I'm trying to figure out if there's anything else that I want to say or am qualified to say because obviously a clinical psychologist and an engineer know a lot more than me about how these things work. But it's really exciting technology. And I've seen people that have done it. And I've seen people that have done lots of different kinds of therapy and kind of talk to them about their experience. And I think that's really how you learn about how the brain works is the experience of doing all this stuff. You know, not just reading 100 books about parts of the brain. That's nice information to have. But once you know them, you kind of know them, you got to

Starting point is 00:33:27 start feeling them or else you don't really know what they do. And this is a really cool way to figure out, well, how what somebody is feeling is correlating to a functional space in the brain. It's just neat. So, yeah, that is kind of what we are going to be working on. And if you're interested in neurostimulation, you would just call taproot therapy like you're a new patient, even if you're an old patient, and leave a voicemail. And we'll put you on a wait list because it's not open yet. But the good news is that there is a promo that they're doing. And if anyone gets on the wait list before they open, the neurostimulations are only $100, not $150 for up to 10. So if you want 10 sessions at 100 instead of $150,

Starting point is 00:34:12 which saves you some money, you can get on the waitlist. And there's no obligation. I mean, if you don't want to once we call you, just say, I don't want to, but there's no reason not to have that option. So give us a call or send us an email and we'll put you on the wait list. And if you're interested about this stuff and you don't live around Birmingham, but want to read more and find somebody who maybe can do it, there's a whole lot of information on our website. If you go to gettherapybirmingham.com and then you go to the neurostimulation and QEE Brain Mapping page, you will see all of this information. And people have been playing around with electricity for a long time and kind of wondering how it was going to change behavior.

Starting point is 00:34:53 A lot of Victorian horror is about electricity. Edgar Allan Poe, well, not Poe, but what's his name? Lovecraft kind of takes Poe and then starts to say, yeah, you're into spiritualism, but what if technology was opening the pathway to the spiritual? And then H.P. Lovecraft kind of creates a techno-mysticism that I think is interesting, obviously. Jungian doing depth psychology and putting a neurostimulation clinic in the basement. But they, you know, it's a bit Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is about what if you shocked the body and then it created this.

Starting point is 00:35:26 You know, so there's always that we've always been curious about the electricity that is inside of us and and and controlled us. You know, a lot of people in the New Age movement would take EMF readings of the person's body and kind of read them like the aura. And they would put people in an EMF scanner because all of your cells they emit this electromagnetic frequencies all the time and we're just kind of learning how to work with them and what they do. I think taking a photo and reading an aura maybe is not going to revolutionize medicine anytime soon but there is something there and we're trying to figure out what it is. Going all the way back to the ancient world, Greeks, there's manuscripts where

Starting point is 00:36:05 ancient Greeks would say, if you got somebody with a migraine, go out and catch this fish that uses electricity to stun its prey. You know, here's the description of the fish and then slap it on the person's forehead and it'll shock their brain and that makes the migraine go away. Which I'm kind of wondering what fish that was now. It's not an electric eel there, Amazonian. So I don't know. I'm not sure if they ever figured it out. But yeah, we have been playing with electricity for so long,

Starting point is 00:36:35 and there's a lot of different kind of technologies that are going around right now, deep brain simulation, TMS. And I know a lot about it, and I don't, I know a lot about, I know a little bit about all of them. And I think that NeuroStim is probably where the field will end up. Sometimes when people own a patent on a certain technology, they're going to push it regardless, even if they maybe know it's not the best thing because they have a patent on it. You know, we don't have any sort of financial incentives to do one thing or the other. I'm kind of trying to do what I think is the future and what's good for patients.

Starting point is 00:37:11 And I think this is, I think it'll be really cool. So we'll have some videos coming soon. And if you would like to try NeuroStim, give us a call. And if you want to learn more, head to the website. And if you're in Texas, you can go see Jay in the DFW area at Peak Neuroscience in Dallas. If you're in Birmingham, Taproot. And then if you're somewhere else, check it out and then see if there's somebody near you. Thank you all for listening, and I appreciate it. I will talk to you soon. Bye.

The Taproot Podcast - 🧠🗺️ Mapping: What is Neurostimulation and Neurofeedback?

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