Transcript of Neurofeedback Technology with Dr. Valdeane Brown · 00:08:34 What is neurofeedback and why it is Dave’s most effective biohack Dave: I've been a bit remiss in that

© The Bulletproof Executive 2013

Transcript of Neurofeedback Technology with Dr. Valdeane Brown

Bulletproof Radio podcast #54

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Biohacker Toolbox Podcast #54, Dr. Valdeane Brown

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© 2013 Bulletproof Executive

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Warning and Disclaimer

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If you do not agree to the above conditions, please do not read further and delete this document. 00:00:01 Dave: Today's cool fact of the day is that your body, if you're average, has enough iron in it to make one small nail…or maybe two staples. That's kind of an interesting thought because it turns out iron overload is a major issue for people. So from a biohacking perspective having too little iron equals anemia equals weakness. Having too much iron in your blood as evidenced by high ferritin is a problem that cause excess oxidation and can actually make you live less long. Like most nutrients iron, having the right amount, not too much not too little is the right way to go. ...... 00:00:45 Dave: Dr. Val Brown is an internationally recognized trainer of neurofeedback trainers and he's taught and consulted widely on personal and organizational transformation. He's got a PhD is clinical psychology but what makes him really interesting as a guest on the show today is that he's got a background in math, physics, computer programming, philosophy, yoga, meditation, Nd martial arts. In other words, he's a biohacker. Val brings a presence and precision to his work that's been really impressive to me and it's one of the reasons that his company's neurofeedback equipment is the stuff that I carry on UpgradedSelf.com

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I’ve also noticed with Val that he has a profound sense of compassion and he kind of understands energy dynamics in groups and organizations and he's really interested in learning and transformation. And because of that he's developed the 5 phase model with his wife Sue and the Period 3 Approach to clinical neurofeedback. These are pretty geeky things in you are just coming into the show but that's alright. He's going to go through that with us today and talk about what neurofeedback is and what the dynamical approach that he has pioneered does for your brain. This is a kind of technology that I use on myself for bio hacking on a regular basis. And it's a kind of technology that I use with my bulletproof coaching clients around the globe. So it's pretty important stuff. Dr. Val Brown welcome to the show! 00:02:11 Dr. Val Brown: Well thanks. Glad to be here! 00:02:15 Dave: Tell me a little bit about yourself. That was an intro kind of from the high level view, but give me the real sense. When we first met and first talked on the phone I mean you've done some pretty amazing and interesting things so give me the quick version. 00:02:28 Dr. Val Brown’s wide experience & the creation of NeurOptimal Dr. Val Brown: Well I guess I have... It's funny, I look back over my life and some of the experiences I've had and I guess it is kind of a unique combination. Yes I have a background in computer programming and I've done all the programming for our software and as you've pointed out it is a totally unique approach. And my background in material arts and meditation and yoga and such was an important part of all of this because having that background I know the kind of place, I know the kind of flow that we want to get to and I know the idea is that we are really trying to help the central nervous system turn to present. So it's been quite an experience over the years to develop e software to realize this vision in conjunction with my wife, Sue. But the vision went back to me in high school, when it first came to me--that sooner or later we would have computing power on hand around the world in homes and just available to anybody almost, to be able to comprehensively dance with the central nervous system. And help it to tune itself to optimal flow and function regardless of why someone wanted to do the training. 00:04:07

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Dr. Val Brown: So I had a lot of experiences meeting a lot of people along the way. I presented for a number of years with Dr. Karl Pribram who was the developer of the holographic memory model and perception model. And that's really a basic pattern of our software is that we really see the central nervous system as a whole as a vastly interconnected passively parallel system much like the entire World Wide Web than like a single computer or even a network of computers. But all of that has been simplified in the software and that's been a guiding principle of my work both when I was practicing as more a traditional talker therapist but especially now with the software, with the project with me wife, Sue. We really wanted to make this accessible to everybody so no special training is needed to use the software no particular background. We a personal system and a professional system. Ad it really is the culmination of all of the threads in my past. 00:05:35 The high cost and complexity of normal EEG technology Dave: That's a great way of explaining it because I've spent an enormous amount of time, since about 1998, I've had an EEG machine at home. In fact if we were on video right now I could hold up several different amplifiers (Val Laughs). My kids knit the electrodes into finger puppets, no not really. The problem is that I am not a certified biofeedback practitioner and the difficulty is almost always even if you can scrape together the money and get your hands on some of these systems that are really expensive, easily $20,000 for a clinical grade system. You do that and then you have no idea what to up-train and what to down-train and you can actually do some things that are not that good for your brain that way. 00:06:25 The problem with typical EEG technology Dr. Val Brown: Well that's exactly right and part of the problem is that the rest of the field is still stuck in this hyper-localization hyper-specialization focus. They keep believing that the way to go is to find THE center in the brain responsible for a particular function or dysfunction or problem or whatever and then what is the supposed normative range of frequencies and amplitudes and other signatures in that location and then try and up or down-train, as you've said, those specific targets. The problem with that is that it fails to recognize first off that when we do surface EEG we are recording the voltage on the surface of the scalp. The localization effects die away as soon as


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you start to get out to the scalp because basically it becomes what is known in the field as volume conduction. We use a two channel set up and with the two channels we not only cover both hemispheres, if you want to think of it that way, but we cover the entire range of frequencies rough which any form of useful training can occur. We do that with a comprehensive targeting approach that modifies and follows the actual electrical activity during the training. So it's very much like dancing with yourself. The central nervous system is getting real time information in exactly the same way that it perceives. And it is getting it holographically if you will. It's getting it holistically. So you start to train a certain frequency up because you know beta is supposed to be good for concentration. Well that's a really great way to precipitate out headaches, for instance. 00:08:34 What is neurofeedback and why it is Dave’s most effective biohack Dave: I've been a bit remiss in that some people that are connecting with this podcast maybe for the first time haven't really got a great grounding of what neurofeedback is and why it's my most important brain hacking technique above things like breathing exercises and meditation and dual N-back training and info like that. As a guy who has spent a lot of time doing neurofeedback how do you explain it to someone in an elevator who has never heard of it before? Like what is your shortest best description about what the heck you are doing with Zengar? 00:09:10 The central nervous system, neurofeedback, and connectivity Dr. Val Brown: Well, first off, Ill say is we train the central nervous system and it isn’t called central for nothing. It's central to everything. And what the training does... It is millisecond to millisecond mirroring of the brain to itself. So just like when you look in the mirror at yourself you don't really have to be taught where to look to recognize yourself or to see that your hair does not look the way you want it to or whatever it is. The brain is very similar to that. It is essentially an enormous feedback system or collection of feedback systems. But most of the feedback we get through life is too time delayed to help us. You know, you go to school and take a class and if it is in college you may not know how you are doing until the final exam is graded. Well that doesn't help you know when to study what exactly. So your efforts can get very misplaced but with the neurofeedback, what we are doing, and the brain is literally seeing


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what it is doing as it is doing it. And that allows it to course correct far sooner than it would otherwise waiting for the anxiety for instance to expand and take over. Or the trauma response to re-initiate and then become the live terror once again. 00:10:44 Dave’s problem with typical EEG technology Dave: That is a profound way of looking at it and it's the reason that yours is the system I use at home because of the real time feedback nature of it honestly. Because it can be a lot of work to hook up electrodes to your head, as you well know. (Val laughs). There's goopy kind of paste that you need to rinse out of your hair and I've found that even without a mirror I can put two electrodes on in about a minute and then a couple ear clips it's the only practical way I know. Trying to glue four or eight electrodes to your head in a mirror on the back of the head just becomes a chore. And a lot of the stuff that I've done involves being somewhere so you have to drive there, get connected, do the thing, and it requires a lot of money, I mean $100 plus per session. And I think you've done something kind of profound by number 1) using your approach to make it simple enough to do the processing and to do just the simple hookup and then making so it's accessible to people for $18 per session when you averages it out over the number of sessions you get. So it's something in my mind something that should be in every high school it should be available at a very reasonable cost to almost anyone on Earth. And the only way to do that is to make it easy to hook up and very, very affordable. I think you guys are on the right track there. Is at vision going to happen? 12:10 Dr. Val’s vision for neurofeedback and NeurOptimal Dr. Val Brown: Well that is the vision. You know, it's a question of how quickly can computer prices come down and of course Moore's Law is operative there. So we're able to do things today that when I started actively writing the software back in late 1998 I had to project ahead to when we would really be able to implement all the things I really wanted to do. We had to do a series of approximations if you will as computing capability came online affordably for folks to use. And that process is continuing so is the simplification. Two years ago we released our version 2.0 which its primary feature was what we called Autonath. And is allowed the system to automatically adjust itself moment to moment to anyone no matter what. Before that there was one control you would adjust at times depending on how many of the interruptions or feedback events you personally felt



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comfortable with. And it's been very interesting since we released Autonath because for years I was telling people that they were setting the number of feedback events too high. And they just didn't leave it. There was this real gaining mind perspective out there where more is better, work harder and it gets better. And actually frequently it's the opposite way. It's less is more when it's done at the right time. 14:04 Dave: it would definitely match my experience with this because I've done many different forms of neurofeedback and this is one of the simplest ones because you really sit there and listen to music and if the music occasionally has a glitch. And it's mostly not conscious like you're not trying to get glitches, you're not trying to avoid glitches. It's the brain optimizing itself because it has a feedback loop it didn't have before but as far as I can tell and as far as I understand from our discussions when I was deciding whether or not I was willing to hook this thing up to my head was a bit of due diligence there. And I think that's my understanding of it. Can you talk a little bit more about how the brain optimizes itself when it's given data versus how in some models you control what your brain does or in the worst case something else controls what our brain does? 15:04 How the brain optimizes itself vs. controlling what your brain does Dr. Val Brown: Well you know it's fascinating to me because the central nervous system is wonderfully designed to do 2 things: 1) To detect difference. When there is a change in the internal or external environment the central nervous system responds to that. And that’s detectable in so many ways. It's an old saw* at this point in neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry. But the other thing it is wonderfully designed to do is to minimize discomfort. Now frequently that gets put into terms of it trying to feel better. But actually it's minimizing discomfort. And everything that we consider to be a disorder, or a disregulation, is actually "discomfortable". But the central nervous system cant detect soon enough the differences that are precipitating that decent into those states. 16:10 Hangovers and drunkenness vs. NeurOptimal feedback Dr. Val Brown: That's why you run into it in life, you run into the consequences of what you do at this moment because the feedback doesn't come until you've had too much to drink you



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have the effect, you can no longer talk or make sense. You get the hangover the next day. But that doesn't help you at the moment you are having the drink, is this enough is this too much? Is this really what I want to be doing? And that’s all true in spades for things like anxiety or depressive thinking or any of those things. They're momentary steps on the way, like the snowball that starts at the top of the hill and just keeps gathering larger and larger mass or the avalanche that just a small event can trip it off but once it trips and there's no stopping at that point it becomes a huge disaster. 17:15 Why negative feedback is more powerful than positive feedback Dr. Val Brown: So our software is set up to use negative feedback not positive feedback. Everything else out there uses positive feedback and what that means is their set of conditions say increase beta decrease theta that was an old standby for a long time for working with attention issues. And when beta intensity increases and theta intensity decreases in those models that be a little ping made or the bar we go up on the graph so you had to attend to that and had to try to make more pings had to try to make the bar go higher. The problem with using positive feedback is that positive feedback inherently has a problem named as shoot in engineering terms you never actually just get to that target, you go past it and then sink below it. 18:10 Real life examples of negative feedback Dr. Val Brown: If you think about the furnace in your home and you have the thermostat that you set the temperature to well the temperature is very, very rarely that exact temperature because what happens is is when the temperature falls too far below that set point the furnace comes on and starts heating. By the time it hits that set point where the thermostat is there is still heat being generated through the furnace and being pumped through the house so actually the temperature goes higher than that and then has to cool back down the better the furnace and the better the thermostat smaller the range of that variability. But there's always variability there and if you watch all the science fiction movies you see the rocket taking off from Earth then they're going full tilt to intersect with the orbiting pace station and they go right to it. Well if you did that you would destroy both vehicles. But what actually happens when you go into Earth orbit above the space station that you want to go to and you slow down the shuttle so it drops down progressively. You're not trying to go to the target but rather to almost fall towards it if I can say it that way.


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So negative feedback is like what happens in a well-designed sailboat. If you're out on a sailboat and you let go of all the control lines, let go of the lines that position the sails and you let go of the rudder what's going to happen is that a well designed sailboat is going to point itself up into the wind. Now that may feel a little bit rocky depending on what the current is but it is actually the safest place to be if you doing know what you're doing. So you negatively go back to that place instead of positively trying to overcorrect. And you find this too when you're driving winter conditions. One of the resins people get into skids is because they state to feel something happening and they really massively overcorrect and that is going to throw you completely out. What you have to do is slowly correct in time particularly if there's ice. so that you maintain traction. So that you maintain some way of controlling. So our little interrupts or the crackles that some people call, some scratching are basically subliminal. unless several of them occur very close in time to each others. But the central nervous system detects those because, remember one of the things it is wonderfully designed to do is to detect difference. so it will hear that there’s something just a little bit off and that’s enough to reorient the central nervous system back to the present, and kind of ask itself metaphorically if you will, is what I'm doing right now what I really want to be doing? 21:27 Dave’s initial response to NeurOptimal Dave: Its actually pretty profound. I’ve developed a higher than average of awareness of what is going on in my head because of the time I've spent hooked up to these machines and the first time I used NeurOptimal I thought it was really irritating because (Val laughs). I mean I'm listening to this music kind of nice relaxing music kind of chillin’ a little bit and all of a sudden you have this like scratch on a vinyl record, like this is not fun at all. Dr. Val Brown: Right 22:01 Dave: And when I was doing it I was like I don't know if I like this at all and then I did it another time and it had less of a negative effect. But what was going on there was that my nervous system is going "no, wait, I don't like that". What it was notifying me of was that when my brain was mopping from one state to another without my conscious knowledge which made it easier for me to stick in that state and then moving to another state when I decided to instead of my brain kind of (Val says "Exactly!") flopping around like a fish not really knowing what’s going on. 22:28 The strange abilities of musicians and cameramen




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Dr. Val Brown: Yup, that’s exactly right. And it is interesting because people have very different responses at times. The kind of response that you had is also sometimes shared by those who are highly skilled musicians and they'll say something is wrong with your audio equipment here. No actually there’s nothing wrong with it, which is how it works. But you know its a fascinating thing too because what they bring to that task that makes it more difficult for them is of course their heavily trained ear to listen to the nuance in the music. And that’s great when that’s what you're trying to do maybe because you're a professional musician and you're trying to record something for later distribution. But when you're out living your life that’s not really the most efficient use of the central nervous system to be silently there and not so silently is a kind of critique of how the audio is going all the time. 23:40 Dave: Yeah definitely I've seen strange abilities in musicians (Val laughs) as well as cameramen, people who shoot video for a living they see the world through eyes that are bizarre. They can see through stuff that other people just don't pick up. Dr. Val Brown: Yes 23:56 Dave: And so I’ve noticed through doing neurofeedback, particularly yours, but also any of the ones where you really have to strain to hear the sounds that would brain is making that they do have an effect on my auditory processing, actually very beneficial effect where I become maybe more in charge of what I’m hearing but also just more aware of it. Having awareness of what your hearing is kind of a cool thing because you realize, hey, there is something irritating going on right now in the environment--what is it, and you can tune it out but at least you know it's there, versus someone who just sits there and gets bombarded by a low frequency hum and gets tired at the end of the day and doesn't even know that it was there. 24:38 “Therapy in the rearview mirror” Dr. Val Brown: …Doesn't know why, yeah. That's exactly it. In fact one of our trainers has coined the phrase "therapy in the rear view mirror" because what it seems to do for many people is they'll have seen this change occur and sometimes you can forget what brought


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them in for the training because the change is so seamless but part of that is because they recognize far, far sooner even without consciously knowing it that they’re starting to get irritated or they're starting to get anxious or you know--whatever the proclivity is that's not particularly useful and they change the situation or change themselves to decrease it. You know, if you watch how children learn to rollerblade as opposed to how adults do thou see this kind of negative feedback learning process happen all the time. You try to teach an adult how to rollerblade and they want to figure it out they want to know consciously how much to do this or how much to do that. You strap them on a kid and they move around a little they kind of wobble and then pretty soon they integrate right into it because they don't get in the way, they don't try and figure it out, they allow their central nervous system to generate and then utilize that internal feedback based on what other kinds of movement skills they are used to. And that’s really the fundamental model for the kind of training that goes on in NeurOptimal training as opposed to the other neurofeedback systems where you do have to try really hard, you have to notice when the bar goes up or whatever it happens to be. 26:28 Dave: What are some of the effects that people get at… I know that our listeners are interested in sleeping better, they're interested particularly in learning faster and they're interested in generally performing better cross-discipline. So things like athletic performance. What are the domains where NeurOptimal style neurofeedback training has the biggest and strongest impact versus areas where its less impactful? 26:56 What aspects of life are NeurOptimal most impactful? Dr. Val Brown: Well you know its interesting, you mentioned sleep because if you look up in the DSM5 or DSM4 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) which is kind of the bible for what goes wrong as far as psychologists and psychiatrists are concerned, you're hard pressed to find anything in there that does not involve sleep disturbance of some sort. So when sleep starts to improve everything else starts to improve as well. You know, mom was basically right--most of us need about 8 hours a night, that’s really 5 sleep cycles that are about 90 minutes average a piece. Now there’s variability. You know, I'm a little different, for me its more like 6.5 works. Some people need a little bit more, their sleep cycles are longer. And of course all of that can change as you age. And your circadian rhythm will shift too. 28:10 The answer to the teenage sleep





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Dr. Val Brown: If we really wanted to have teenagers perform well in high school and dovetail with their circadian rhythms we wouldn't start school until like noon because its not for no reason that they have a hard time waking up in the morning. It is part of the set point and there’s one biological and if you think about it there’s some real benefits in terms of where we can from because back in the day when we were still roaming around, you know – Cro-Magnon time – around Neanderthals. If you think about it, you had to sleep but there were some pretty heavy predators out there. So who are you going to want to be up awake late at night who can most easily defend the group, well its going to be the teenagers. And its not for no reason that tis late teens that we draft into armies, because that’s part of where they're at. But when we look at what impact NeurOptimal has one place almost everybody notices to one degree or another is changes in their sleep. Changes mean improvements. Frequently those suffering from depressive situations actually sleep a sleep cycle too many, and so that’s the sleep disturbance that they have and that will shift as they start to normalize their sleep. And its not about depression versus anxiety or trying to change what we do in order to fix problems. This is the sort of therapy or transformation through the rear view mirror the changes happen and frequently the users have to kind of look over their shoulders, if you will, as to where they came from to recognize just how much of that change has occurred. Of course, their significant others around them notice and comment frequently. But sleep normalization is one, increased focus occurs, ability to shift gears, to be more emotionally and psychologically resilient and flexible, and that also means not putting up with stuff. 30:40 How NeurOptimal has helped people with abusive relationships Dr. Val Brown: We've had many folks use this to deal with the aftereffects of trauma, particularly around abusive relationships and what they find is that their tolerance for the precursors, for those forms of abuse really, really goes down. They get to detect far sooner when things are happening rather than putting up with them they take some kind of action so that that sort of situation doesn't occur. In many cases that can mean completely leaving that relationship or whatever it happens to be. 31:30 Val’s golf game and rapid improvement




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Dr. Val Brown: So in terms of in particular sports performance… one of the stories that I do tell about it, we also have a little video up on the website about it. Its about 5 maybe 6 years ago now that I started playing golf. I'm 58 and had never played golf in my life, as soon as I started playing because we were going into that arena with NeurOptimal and we wanted to know a little bit about the game so that we could have a more meaningful interaction in that environment but also then I realized that it was something that she and I could do together the rest of our lives. And two years ago I got down to a 10 handicap and the club I belonged to recognized me as the most improved player by handicap index. So did I use it specifically for golf? No. But that kind of ability to just return to present and allow my body to do what it was learning to do, is what comes out through the NeurOptimal training. 32:40 Biohacking technology and sports Dave: That’s really funny. I find a lot of the biohacking technologies that increase awareness about what’s going on in the body really do have an impact on things like golf (Val says Yes!) and even like professional level athlete things, but our Heart Rate Variability training is another one where you do that and there’s a book about what it does for golf, so it sounds almost trivial where were talking about upgrading your performance neurologically and it comes down to where’s the proof point and one of them is "okay, your ability to focus and be in the moment and then reliably do a complex activity like swinging the club just right to get it (the ball) to where you want it to go. 33:21 Dr. Val Brown: What one of out trainer works for quite a while and still does actually with opera singers and their performances have vastly improved. We've had folks working with musicians, with professional athletes, I mean across the range. What people find is that whatever their level is, they improve because they are more in the game instead of in their heads. You know Bobby Jones was the first one to say that the most important 6 inches in golf is the space between your ears. Because it really is what is going on inside your head that influences how well you play. Whatever your athletic ability, however well you have learned some skill about hitting the ball or course management or whatever. 34:24 Dave: Its really funny, I think in every sport in fact there are a lot of mixed martial artists including some pro fighters who use the whole bulletproof lifestyle with the food and the brain activation things, and its the same thing in that sport that if you lose it while you're grappling and someone comes at you and you switch from the awareness state where your in charge to



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the animal state, you know, you need the energy from the animal state but the control from the other parts of the brain and I don't think it matters if you are bowling or golfing or swinging as hard as you can at someone else it's the same 6 inches between your ears that matter the most. That’s a beautiful quote It's interesting, if you work with special operations for instance one of the things you find out about them is that they're psycho-physiological profile is different from most everybody else and the primary difference is that they're able to return to the moment regardless of what's going on around them. And that’s partly a trained skill part of the proclivity that they bring into that training because that’s the only way you survive in that kind of environment. 35:47 Special Ops psychophysiological abilities Dave: Do you use NeurOptimal training with special operations or SWAT team kind of guys? Dr. Val Brown: We've involved ourselves much more at this point with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder situations so we have a mission going forward with veterans in Canada to make use of this. Which we've had some really profound responses with and I've worked a lot with security forces over the years. For a while I was involved with the World Wide screening program for escorted access to nuclear facilities and those security forces are really very interesting to work with. The toughest job in that environment was to be what was a called a watcher. The job was to sit in a little space for their shift, for 2 hours or whatever they do, and then get up to pray and do what they do, and then they watch a perimeter, you know, to watch a section of the fence. Very difficult to do that because it is very easy to get bored and let yourself wander and not notice things. So the ability to just to the job if I can say it that way, and bring the right resources to do it, not too much not too little thats really what the core of NeurOptimal is all about, and that is about returning to the present regardless of what is going on. 37:32 The power of mastering awareness/focus at a young age Dave: That is a pretty amazing gift. If you can, if you can learn to do that, and if you learn to do that early in life it can make such a difference because I know a lot of men and women who achieve some level of this when they're 40 or 50 and there is a lot of things that happen in the first 40 or 50 years of getting there. I'm only 40 but I look at the changes that I’ve had in the last 10 years as a result of this kind of work and oh my god I feel literally like there is lifetime sod progress and understanding of learning in my ability to be calm a focused when




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I'm on stage or when there is a situation that is incredibly flu of pressure and just to have it roll off of me. Its that kind of resilience that I'm talking about when I feel like I'm bulletproof, its not just having energy, because if you combine energy with a brain that is flopping all over the place like you can sew distraction all over. High energy and high control and high focus and telling your brain "hey stupid brain you just flip-flopped from one state to another and you didn't even know you did it, he's a sign that you're doing it right. For me this is a really core thing and for at least 10 years I've searched for a way to get this accessible so people didn't have to drive into an office and spend $150 per session to get it. Because I've driven to lots of offices and spent $150 and sometimes even $250 per session. And I'm also very lucky that times in my life I was wealthy enough to where it was a really good investment even though I wasn't dealing with a brain injury or something. And other times I couldn't afford to do it and I would have liked to. So for you to be able to come out with a thing that’s this cheap on a per session basis, I want to see clubs forming (Val laughs). You know, where you get 6 people together and then if becomes very. very cheap simpered to traditional doing it in a clinic, you just have to arrange to share the machine somewhere. 39:46 NeurOptimal™ and family Dr. Val Brown: We have the personal system, which is what you’re talking about, and then there’s a profession system as well but frequently families will buy the personal system. They may have gotten into the neurofeedback because of the phrase identified patients* there is someone who is presenting as the biggest challenge for the family, might be a child having difficulties in school for example attention difficulties, and we suggest that really everybody in the family get involves because everyone can benefit, as one of our trainers says "anyone with brain can benefit" and I used to joke at times "that may leave out some politicians but that’s okay. But truthfully to have the whole family working doing sessions makes a huge difference she your have the delayed development of a child for instance it puts enormous demands and stress on the rest of the family regardless of what the particular manifestation is. Giving the tools internally that are just there through as a result of NeurOptimal of the whole family makes is just that much easy to cope with the very real challenges that may be repent. We've had research projects that have dealt with chemo-brain (folks who have had cancers and have had radiation or chemical therapy which can really have quite an impact on your




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cognitive process as well as other aspects of health as well. And we've shown a really good response in terms of restoration of cognitive function. So in just about every realm. 41:57 How the brain is blind to itself Dave: I've never had cancer or chemo-therapy but I did show in a SPECT scan (Single-photon emission computed tomography) this is a 3D radioactive sugar scan of your brain to look at which parts have metabolic activity and which don't. They said I showed signs of toxic brain exposure they didn't know what the toxin was but they said I showed scalloping and some other problems. In bract I had 2 full pages of strange finding. The psychiatrist who did the scan said "Dave inside your brain is total chaos, I don't know how your are standing here talking to us". And I looked at that as a compliment. And since then I’ve done so much training of the brain that I fundamentally convinced that if you have the right nutrition and the lack of stuff getting in your way like toxins and you give the brain that awareness that you get from playing this kind of signal back that the brain on its own will just heal, its just that the brain is too blind to heal because it doesn't have any nerves going into it, all the nerves are about sensing the environment but there is the one, the 5th cranial nerve inside the brain (other than that it's blind to itself). 43:05 Case study: NeurOptimal and migraines Val: Well the feedback that the central nervous system has gotten throughout most of evolutionary history is out in life what happens so you may not know until you're overexposed to some toxin that it actually is a toxic substance or toxic for you. This happens a lot in allergies and migraines, migraine triggers are frequently environmental. Some perfumes or soaps, or a variety of things. Its fascinating to watch in the work, I’m speaking here about Sue (his wife) had a massive problem with migraines when me and her first got together. I was teaching her neurofeedback course, a different system from a long time ago, I've trained on all of them and I've used basically all of them too. But she came and she was going to be the demo for this one point of the course and I hooked her up and saw her spectral density and I said to her "Are you taking any medications?" and she said "no". Looking at the spectral density I thought well okay, I guess.



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Anyway she came back the next day for the next day of the course and she said "when you asked me yesterday if i was taking any medications, how my mind heard that was "are you taking any extra medications" because I take massive amounts of medications to manage these migraines, and how she really knew that the neurofeedback back then was really working for her was after something like 5 or 6 weeks of doing sessions she realized that the last 2 weeks she hadn't been carrying any meds with her for prophylaxis or for if she had a breakout. It just was no longer n issue for her. 45:22 Dave: That’s pretty profound if you have migraines or you know someone who does you know how disruptive they can be and that follows my experience with this kind of training that the brain realizes it is having a migraine and then it stops doing it. 45:41 The NeurOptimal approach to diagnosing health problems Val: Yes, its important to realize we are talking here about various things that can be medically or psychologically diagnosed or treated as separate disorders, out approach is diagnostically agnostic, as I like to say it. It really doesn't matter. What comes in, we are not specifically treating conditions, and what we do is not a treatment for any conditions but we simply have researched mostly done by a lot of our users but also by some others doing completely independent research showing how the outcomes, kind of across the range, for where neurofeedback has been used with our system with no further modifications. You don't have to do anything special, you may be coming because you have migraines versus because you are feeling depressed or anxious or you want to improve your creativity or get back in touch with your artistic or spiritual development or whatever. 46:54 How NeurOptimal takes your “game” to a whole new level Dave: It's kind of a new paradigm on the bulletproof blog where, and I'm talking much more about performing well, because everyone on earth wants to be healthy and most people think they are healthy even if they are not but also everyone wants to perform well and if you push your performance limits you'll discover whether to not you are healthy. But using a system like NeurOptimal to really push your brain's performance limits and find out what it and thus you can do, is kind of a new spin on an old game. But if you have a migraine or another problem, yeah biohack it yourself, see the data, see what’s really going on, and experiment, yeah go to the doctor when you need to but bring the data and bring the data and results of your biohacking. Go in and say hey doctor, I already



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know that my sleep quality is like because I monitor that, I know what my brain waves are like because I've tried that, etc etc. But if you have nothing wrong with you and you feel like you're at the top of your game, you are so wrong, you're not at the top of your game you don't even know the top of your game. But when we get your brain fuels right and we get your central nervous and even your peripheral nervous system trained right maybe Bruce Lee could do it playing ping pong with himself for 10,000 hours but there is much, much faster ways in order to achieve levels of performance that are shocking. I haven't done all that stuff, I'm not Bruce Lee by a long shot or a martial artist but I can tell thou how I move and how I think and all those things are radically upgraded and so different from how they were before. So alright, how many sessions does a healthy or at least reasonably healthy, reasonably week performing without depression or migraines or other stuff, how many does it take to notice "oh hey my creativity is different, my sleep is different, I'm faster, I’m better, I kicked ass on stage, or whatever they do of a living. Is it one session is it 10? like 300** sessions comes with the personal system. How many does one person need to outperform? 49:03 How many sessions does it take to improve performance? Val: Everybody's results are going to be a little bit different. But what I can tell you is that most of out users report that they notice some difference in the first session. It may not be in their identified area of concern or areas of concern but certainly by 5 and then by 10 they are already starting to notice differences there if not sooner. We used to say that sort of a rule of thumb for most people kind of coming in from situations your are talking about or with some identified problems beyond that they want to perform better, to think of 20 as a really good series. But it varies a lot some people get to session 10 and say "okay I’m done., I feel this is good, I'll come back later on if I need a boost or whatever". And sometimes that’s a really good way to do it because if you are coming from one of these black holes, if you will, like an abusive situation or whatever you've got to dig yourself out frequently out in the world from the psychology of all of that where you are in your life and once that happens more transformations can occur and your can even go further with the neurofeedback, its something that your can keep doing really as long as you want


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50:44 Dave: That's pretty amazing and that sort of matches my experience. This podcast is a learning thing for people and not an infomercial for NeurOptimal, and you wrote the code, you invented it obviously, its your baby so its not ugly (Val gives a hearty laugh). 51:05 Val: I certainly feel like that way and so does Sue, and I think that most everybody who is associated with Zengar Institute feels that way but especially those who have used the product feel that way and that is the most important thing for me--is the fascinating personal transformation, because that is where everything else comes from. 51:30 What are the possible risks of NeurOptimal? Dave: One of the risks that I'm frankly really concerned about with some forms of feedback, particularly QEEG where you are trying to measure the average brain from a bunch of people and you say "oh your brain is not average lets make it average", that’s great if you are a F student, now you are a C student but if you are an A student now you are a C student. What's your take on that style of quantitation of brain waves and the future of that and does it work is it good is it bad, and what are the risks of NeurOptimal versus that? 52:06 Val: (takes a deep breath) Well I think that the biggest problem with the kind of QEEG approach and this whole normative data approach, is that all of that is based on linear classical statistics so Gaussian statistics, normative curve, and you've pointed out one aspect which is who really wants to be normal or average? I mean if you are in a committed relationship, do you ever go up to your partner and say "hey can we have an average kiss now?" You know it doesn't make sense. It really just doesn't make sense. Yes I understand, I remember a number of years ago one of the statistics i used to talk about I used to illustrate this was some insurance company I believe in the US that had commissioned a study which found out that the average American family had 2.3 children. And the problem they used to say was that no American family has 2.3 children, you can't have .3 children. You can have 2, you can have 3, you can have 1, but you can't have 2.3. They don't come that way, they're quanta, they come as a single unit, you know. But where are those statistics useful? Well if you are trying to project out how many seats you need in an


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elementary school in the next generation or whatever, well then that data is useful. So there are uses for normative data. But the central nervous system and the brain is a non-linear dynamical system, it is not a linear system. So trying to capture it in terms of averages or those kinds of statistics is just fundamentally off as far as I’m concerned and I have yet to see any study showing that QEEG driven neurofeedback is better than NeurOptimal in terms of outcomes and client satisfaction. If anything our stats is reported by our users and our users survey and the research that we have presented at our research conferences and such, shows that our outcomes are better. 54:30 Dave: That says in a nutshell something pretty powerful. So I don't know that I can say the outcomes are better I've had QEEG based treatments, I think there were some problems afterwards, but I got some nice benefits, especially gastro-intestinal stuff but cognitively there was a maybe not so positive afterwards, maybe it went away after a while and maybe I became unaware of it but I appreciate that perspective. 55:03 Case study: Problem with EEG Val: Well we have had a number of years ago one of our users actually helped another user out who had had quite a number of sessions and prior attempts with QEEG driven neurofeedback over the course of many years. She had lime disease and so the chronic fatigue and the immune system involvement sorts of sequel and she had a history of the cues. Well she came ultimately to use NeurOptimal and became not only a client but also a user of the system. And after her symptoms basically ameliorated from the NeurOptimal she had another QEEG done and the thing that was fascinating was that all of the changes that were supposed to have come from the QEEG driven stuff that didn't come, came from NeurOptimal even those sites and those particular frequency targets were never trained directly. It was just what occurred along the way, the brain renormalized itself and her symptomatology, her problems, her presented complaints basically dropped away. 56:33 Dave: Wonderful, that’s kind of amazing. We're running out of time Val, and there is a question that every guest on the show – except for one when I forgot – has answered. And that question is: What are three things that you've learned in your life, not just from neurofeedback, but from any domain, that you think people should do in order to perform


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better, basically to kick more ass. If you just want to live in that state of flow and resilience, what are the most important things you have to offer? 57:10 Top 3 recommendations to kick more ass in life Val: The first thing is I think is the most fundamental in many ways is to find out what you love doing and do it. If you really want to flow in what you do it needs to come from the heart and that means the core of your being. NeurOptimal would not have come together except Sue was on board and all of the other people around and all of the live experiences that she and I went through and shared on the way to developing it. But for me facilitating personal transformation has been that core passion in my life. Everything I've done as I look back on it has been oriented towards that. That makes it very easy for me to let other thing drop away, because they are just not that important. So the related point, the second point that is important to do is to do what you love and let the rest go. That doesn't mean you just completely give it up but don't put your energies in places that aren't really your hearts desire because no matter how you do that, at best you are sort of wasting yourself. But you are also going to build up a sense of resentment and anger at having those efforts trifled away. I think the third thing is vastly connected to both of those and that is to stay connected to a wonderful group of "mighty companions", as the phrase goes--those who even if they don't share your specific passion share their passion so that you can learn from them so that you can dance (intellectually, metaphorically) with them, so that you can stay connected, I mean all the research shows very, very clearly that those in committed relationship live longer, have better lives, have better satisfaction in lives despite even the problems of committed relationships falling apart, but those who have a circle around them of people who are friends and close friends who they can have time with, gear down with, gear up with, celebrate life with. All of those work together. There’s certainly little practices you can do on all of that, and I know you cover that all over your website and in all your materials, so I'm not going to go into any of that. I'm trying to go more for the way I think about what’s the most important stuff. 1:00:08 Dave: That is exactly the answer the answer I was looking for--what do you think about all of this stuff. And that is what our listeners want to hear, so if you are one of the few people who make it onto the show, you have done something unique and thanks for sharing your life's learnings there because that is some of the most valuable things that anybody has to share.



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1:00:27 Val: Well thank you, I appreciate it. 1:00:29 Dave: Val thanks again for being on the show, and you can learn more about NeurOptimal and the specific unit we are talking about where we carry it on UpgradedSelf.com And Val if they want to learn more about the Zengar Institute themselves what URL would they go to? 1:00:46 Val: Zengar.com will get you there. 1:00:51 Dave: Thanks very much, have an awesome day! 1:00:53 Val: Thanks, you too! End

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Transcript of Neurofeedback Technology with Dr. Valdeane Brown · 00:08:34 What is neurofeedback and why it is Dave’s most effective biohack Dave: I've been a bit remiss in that