Podcasts about fmris

For today's episode, we expand on Autism and Sensory Processing. We return to the mesencephalon—a brainstem region with superior and inferior colliculi—as a critical hub for sensory integration and attention bias. We cover four scientific articles, starting with Marco et al. (2011), which uses EEGs, MEGs, and fMRIs to reveal autism's auditory processing inconsistencies (e.g., delayed N100/M100 cortical responses), tactile hypersensitivity from overactive receptors, and visual processing quirks like reduced fusiform gyrus activation for faces. Russo et al. then explore brainstem-level deficits, showing autistic children's auditory brainstem responses (ABR) to speech syllables like "DA" exhibit poor neural synchrony and phase locking, especially in noise, due to disrupted wave V, A, D, F timing—linking these to language impairments. These findings point to biological roots, including denser neocortical mini-columns (30-40 vs. 50-60 microns in controls) and cerebellar Purkinje cell loss, impairing local processing and long-range connectivity.The episode continues with Leekam et al. (2007), confirming over 90% of autistic individuals have multi-modal sensory abnormalities—hypo- and hypersensitivity tied to serotonin and GABA dysregulation—persisting across life, while Tomchek and Dunn (2007) note 95% prevalence via caregiver reports, hinting at neural pathway disruptions. At some point, we need to acknowledge the mesencephalon's embryological stasis as one of four neural cell types, suggesting its evolutionary role in sensory modulation is key to Autism's biology. These articles collectively highlight altered neural circuitry, from brainstem to cortex, and biases us to remaining within ourselves. Remember, the biology that gives us Autism allows us to be comfortable within ourselves. Marco et al 2011 https://www.nature.com/articles/pr9201193Russo et al 2009 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00790.xLeekam et al 2007 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-006-0218-7Tomchek & Dunn 2007 https://affectautism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/tomcheck_dunn.pdf0:00 Autism and Sensory Processing; comorbid conditions; Mesencephalon3:03 Article 1 Marco et al 20114:11 Auditory5:00 N100 & M100 tools9:17 Tactile11:23 Visual13:53 Multisensory Integration15:16 Postmortem; Cerebellum & Purkinje Cells; Minicolumns17:06 Speech19:02 Article 2 Russo et al; Brainstem scientists20:28 Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR); Quiet versus Noisy environments; Beatles comparison23:49 Neural Synchrony; Waves V, A, D, F24:33 Phase Locking27:34 Article 3 Leekam et al 2007; Neuroplasticity33:09 Article 4 Tomchek & Dunn 200736:36 Reviews/Ratings and Contact InfoX: https://x.com/rps47586Hopp: https://www.hopp.bio/fromthespectrumYT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGxEzLKXkjppo3nqmpXpzuAemail: info.fromthespectrum@gmail.com

The radio host, journalist, and best-selling author shares insights from her viral TEDx talk, 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation, and discusses neuroscience & FMRIs, empathy & compassion, Homo sapiens & Neanderthals, food pantries & squirrel treeing Oh yeah, and how to tell when you might be the A-hole, which of course is a word Celeste cannot say on NPR.

It can seem like our culture is obsessed with our ability to focus. Why can't we focus, how we can focus better, why is our lack of focus ruining society? There are best-selling books and apps that promise to teach us the secrets of paying attention. But what do we really know about what's happening in the brain when we're focused or not? In a fascinating set of studies, University of Chicago neuroscientist Monica Rosenberg is using fMRIs to study the science of attention and answer all sorts of questions about focus. In this episode we ask her: Do some people have an easier time sustaining attention while others don't, just because of the way their brain activity works? And if you have a harder time, are there things you can do to make your focus better?

Adam Morgan talks about the battle between emotional-driven creative and data-based selling, dealing with a hostile audience, the formula for creating memories, the (correct) length of headlines, hooking up people to fMRIs to measure their emotions, and doing a front flip off a table in the middle of a pitch. If you enjoy the show, please share it with someone else who might appreciate it, and if you can, leave a review. Follow me on social media for video clips of the episode, or visit the website for more information.  Website: http://pitchguy.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dannyfontaine/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pitchguy YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@pitchguy/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyfontaine/  

The human brain has various states which alter our mood, cognitive function, and even physical health. Being in the right state at the right time may dramatically bolster our bodies against diseases such as Alzheimer's and neurodegeneration or optimise our brain functioning. Photobiomodulation (PBM) is a field of study dealing with light and its physical effects or interactions with the body. Vielight's products, which utilise PBM technology, may help address neurodegeneration and a variety of other health concerns. In this episode, Peter Adams, Vice President of Business Development at Vielight, talks about the science and mechanisms of action behind photobiomodulation's health benefits. He also discusses Vielight's products and their therapeutic effects in fighting off neurodegeneration. If you want to learn about photobiomodulation's positive health effects, this episode is for you! Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode: Understand the benefits of photobiomodulation on brain injuries and other health concerns. Learn PBM's mechanisms of action and the science behind how it works. Discover Vielight's PBM products. Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme, all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.peakwellness.co.nz/epigenetics. Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5 km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, goals, and lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching. Health Optimisation and Life Coaching Are you struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the world's greatest science and health minds? Then reach out to us through support@lisatamati.com, and we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or want to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health, and more, contact us at support@lisatamati.com. Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey of how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again. Still, I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within three years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes, chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions worldwide, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books. Lisa's Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, an NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting-edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that can boost the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and the liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health to live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements of the highest purity, which are rigorously tested by an independent, third-party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful third-party tested NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting-edge science) combats the effects of aging while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection, 'Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection. Episode Highlights [03:08] What Is Photobiomodulation? Photobiomodulation or PBM utilises the way light physically affects the human body instead of light's effects on our cognitive and mental faculties. Light wavelengths of 600 to 1100 nanometers (nm) have therapeutic purposes. Blue or ultraviolet light is an excellent disinfectant but can't penetrate deeply due to its shorter wavelength.  At the red end of the colour spectrum, infrared light may overheat heat or burn cells. There's a sweet spot near the red end that has a nice combination of penetration but without the negative cellular effect.   [05:21] How Light Gets into the Body One way to get light into the body is intranasally. There's a profusion of blood cells very close to the surface in the sinuses, so it's a good place to penetrate the blood. Dr Lew Lim, founder and CEO of Vielight, discovered the non-invasive intranasal method.  Another path is transcranial using diodes. Vielight's goal has always been to develop and design low-power rechargeable devices that are easy and safe to use at home. Vielight did a study with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), proving that the whole brain is affected by light diodes.   [10:21] Neuro Alpha and Neuro Gamma Vielight's product, Neuro Alpha, pulses at 10 Hz, helping the brain resonate in the alpha wave band. Neuro Gamma, pulsing at 40 Hz, was designed mainly to address the reduction in beta-amyloid plaques, which may be associated with Alzheimer's disease.  The effect of the two products has yet to be rigorously scientifically quantified, but users have reported significant benefits. Many sports professionals and psychological trainers use Vielight's products to prepare for a match or game. After Peter was in an accident, Neuro Alpha calmed him down while he had a concussion. He used the Neuro Gamma to help alleviate brain fog while at work.   [13:32] Healing Mechanisms of PBM There is an increase in glutamate after a traumatic brain injury, which leads to neurons constantly firing and dying, so glutamate level needs to be controlled post-concussion. Vielight recently completed a study on forty retired athletes with repetitive head injuries at the University of Utah. Pre- and post-fMRIs showed increased blood flow in the brain. One of the key mechanisms of PBM delivered intranasally is a change in the viscosity, which increases microcirculation. PBM also increases nitric oxide and leads to a reduced oxygen species effect.  PBM increases adenosine triphosphate (ATP) levels — a good indicator of immune function. The Cytochrome c oxidase leads to increased oxygen at the ATP synthase, which increases ATP production. [35:30] 633 Red, 655 Prime, 810 Infrared and Neuro Pro Vielight's 633 red uses a light-emitting diode (LED), while 655 Prime is a red laser diode with more power and penetration. Both products bioinfuse the blood. 810 Infrared is near the infrared band, and its diode produces a red glow. Near-infrared diodes can go into the deep brain.  Neuro Pro uses six diodes and an intranasal. Users control each diode with an app, where they can change the power, pulse frequency, and phase. The device can go from 0 Hz up to 10 kilohertz.  Vielight's products can help address neurodegeneration, which can come from repeated brain injuries usually experienced by athletes. [35:30] X-Plus and Neuro Vielight's X-plus has an intranasal and applicator. Users can use it with Neuro devices to reach the back of the head or other body parts.  Recently Vielight completed a clinical trial with COVID-positive patients, wherein X-Plus was used to stimulate the immune system of the thymus.  X-Plus can also be used to repair wounds from injuries in the bones and muscles. Vielight's Neuro uses four diodes, covering the default mode network of the brain.  7 Powerful Quotes “One of the key mechanisms of photobiomodulation, especially directly into the blood through the nose, is a change in the viscosity, increasing the microcirculation, and also an increase in nitric oxide, which is another great healer as well. And, of course, then there's the reduced oxygen species effect, so inflammation gets affected too. So there's a whole bunch of effects that seem to be happening in parallel.” “I think there's hope for Alzheimer's. I just saw another study with autism come out of Italy using neuro as well, which looks really promising.” “I always caution people to think that photobiomodulation is the answer to Alzheimer's. I think even if you look at, for example, antipsychotic drugs, anticonvulsant drugs, all of them, you're not gonna say that one is going to fix everything, and the chances of one fixing anything is less than 30%. [It's] the hit rate.” “It's my belief that underlying conditions that cause plaque in the brain could come from a myriad of sources, and I think it depends on your own individual profile, or physiological profile and chemical pathogenic profile.” “I think a lot of us have now over-excited brains from brain injuries, from toxins in the environment, from the wrong foods and inflammation, and all of the things that sort of happen. Trying to come down and get it in the right zone at the right time is definitely very, very important.” “...The gamma brainwave state of sleep, when you enter that state, that's the key detox part of the brain at night. And so, there is definitely something there to be sought, I think. If you can do it in meditation during the daytime, I think that's even better.” “There's always another quest to research, and it's really patient-reported outcomes that give us great spirit.” Resources Listen to the podcast episode: Photobiomodulation - What it is and how it helps. With Dr Lew Lim  Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!  Pulsed Near-Infrared Transcranial and Intranasal Photobiomodulation Significantly Modulates Neural Oscillations: a pilot exploratory study. Find all the Vielight's products discussed in this episode on their website. Vielight's Research & Clinical Trials Study on the effects of the Vielight Neuro Gamma on individuals with sports-related traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) Connect with Peter Adams: Apollo About Peter Peter Adams is the Vice President of Business Development at Vielight. He has worked in executive, consulting and management positions internationally and in Canada, in large corporations and startups, including Fortune 500 companies. His current focus is on early-market development for Vielight Inc. Learn more about Vielight's products on their website.  Get to know Peter's professional experience on Apollo. Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn about the benefits of photobiomodulation (PBM).  Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa

Dr. Daniel Clauw is the leading researcher in the field of fibromyalgia and chronic pain at University of Michigan. HIs group was the first one to show that the pain of fibromyalgia was real. By using functional MRI of the brain (fMRI). We chatted about many things and today I am bringing you part 1 of the 2 part interview. Part 1 brings the following: - how it all came to be that he was leading the group in studying fMRIs in patient with fibromyalgia (his group got funding for studying various symptoms in Gulf of War veterans and used fibromyalgia patients as positive controls) - What this meant for pain classification (entirely new group of pain type was created as a result of the study results - neuroplastic or nociplastic pain!) - I asked whether you can actually see the fMRI "lighted up" images in real life (no, you cant :-() - what the term neuroplasticity actually means (yes, the brain is trying to "shrink" certain regions and augments other regions!) - is the cause of wide spread pain actually known? - Children develop sleep problems and memory issues before they develop multisite pain - Importance of correcting sleep (seriously) - Effectiveness of NON-Pharmacological treatments as effective if not more than pharmacological treatments - We did get to chat about pain reprocessing therapy and the approach that emphasizes focusing on prior trauma and psychological issues. His group offers free guide for patients called Painguide: https://painguide.com As always you can find me at: www.winningatfibromyalgia.com or on Apple Podcasts Winning at Fibromyalgia and I love if you can leave a 5 star review :-)

The papers behind the pod:1. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601 & https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.679952. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2021.8056793. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-98356-3It's the 3rd Thursday of January – happy new year! You're listening to 3 Minute 3Rs, your monthly recap of efforts to replace, reduce and refine the use of animals in research. Of course, we focus on those three Rs, but many have suggested adding a fourth R to the list: reproducibility. Designing experiments with reproducibility in mind is a key aspect of reducing unnecessary animal use, as well as being good for advancing science.In 2013 the Center of Open Science and Science Exchange began a collaboration to investigate the reproducibility of 193 experiments from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers. Over eight years of repeated experiments, they found that they could only reproduce 50 experiments from 23 papers, generally due to a lack of detail about the methods used or resources being unavailable. 15 of those 50 repeated experiments used animals, and while just over half of them at least partially confirmed the original results, the repeated results were not always statistically significant. Experimental design was also an issue: only one of the original animal experiments used randomization and none used blinding or calculated a sample size before the study began.Papers describing these results are now available in eLife, with all the relevant data available on the Open Science Framework website and more Replication Studies to come from this collaboration. As the reproducibility crisis continues to rumble on, why not check them out and put designing more robust experiments at the top of your agenda?Next, let's look at how training rats can help make fMRI a less stressful experience. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI is a powerful non-invasive procedure that is used to assess brain function and connectivity. However, fMRI research in animals is often confounded due to the physical restraint and loud noises that occur during recordings as these induce stress which can alter information processing and cognition.An article from Frontiers in Neuroscience describes a protocol for habituating rats to fMRI that also avoids the need for surgical head restraint. Rats were gradually trained via 18 sessions over 3 weeks beginning with basic handling phase. After following this protocol, fMRIs in awake rats were successfully conducted without inducing increased stress and still achieving stable images with very low motion artifacts.To learn more about this rat refinement, read the full paper online. Finally, playpens for mice – could they be a viable option for refinement when home cage space is limited? Good environmental enrichment improves the quality of life for laboratory mice by providing increased opportunities to carry out natural behaviours such as running, climbing and burrowing. However, due to space requirements, cost and sanitation constraints many facilities worldwide still use standard housing, which has been associated with potential welfare problems. In their publication in Scientific Reports, Ratuski et al show temporary access to playpens could be an effective method to provide mice housed in standard cages with space and structures to facilitate natural behaviors. In this study, female mice were given access to playpens three times a week for several weeks. Mice in the playpens were more active, compared to mice in conventional cages and over time, the animals entered the playpen more quickly and showed increased anticipatory behaviors before accessing the playpen. All indicating the mice found access to playpens rewarding. Want to learn more? Follow the link in the description. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode I introduce the 5 core steps of my Winning at Fibromyalgia Method. I have worked hard to distill it to just the main 5 so that it is short and simple. Today I am bringing you episode #6! It is so far my longest episode and possibly the most exciting. I am explaining my “Method” how I approach fibromyalgia in my practice. It incorporates and summarizes things I learned from multiple years of rheumatology practice, attending, and listening to lectures on the topic of fibromyalgia, and attending courses of providers who treat (and often cure) chronic. It is a method I use on myself, as I have a mild to moderate case of myofascial or fibromyalgia pain in my back. I have worked hard to distill it to 5 basic steps and I will be sharing them with you in this episode. Before I dive in, I want to mention that I do not talk about any medications that are frequently used in patients with fibromyalgia. The reason for this is that in my coaching practice, I do not prescribe medications. They CAN help but are rarely a long term solution on its own. I only rarely see cases when a medication works on its own, without the person doing any extra work. It does happen, but not that often. So I will not spend any time on medications today. Another comment or disclaimer I need to mention is that The pre-requisite for working with me (whether privately or in my clinical practice) or applying this method on your own is that you do have a confirmed diagnosis of fibromyalgia. Which is best accomplished, IMO, by a rheumatologist. Reason for that is that as rheumatologists, we are uniquely trained to recognize and weed out all different sources of pain. So that's a really important step “0”, ground 0, so to speak, before you can dive in the deep work of “Winning at fibromyalgia” method we will discuss here. So, Are you ready? Here it is  The 5 steps of my unique WINNING AT FIBROMYALGIA method are: Be open to learning the concept of neuroplasticity Believe you can and deserve to feel better. Practice sending messages of safety to your brain. Feel and process all of the emotions. Listen to your intuition and let it guide you. That's it. 5 steps. Simple. Let's dive in each one. Step #1: Be open to learning the concept of neuroplastic pain. I have had many patients tell me that just the mere act of explaining the concept of neuroplastic pain literally lit the bulb in their head and they understood for the first time how their emotions are related to the pain. As a brief summary – neuroplastic pain means the pain you feel is REAL but is not caused by the injury or structural damage of tissues that are hurting (whether it be back, or arms or legs or any other body part). It is caused by misfiring neurons. Misbehaving neurons. Neurons that are misinterpreting neutral or safe information from the body as unsafe and translating it into pain. Brain is making a mistake. WE ALL Know that stressful situations can cause symptoms – e.g. blushing in certain people (including me) when embarrassed, tightness or knots in the stomach when nervous, heart beating fast and sweaty palms – we accept those as normal and physiologic. We also accept that the symptoms described above are brief and resolve on their own. But many people balk at the idea that physical PAIN ALSO can be a physiological response to stress. As if it was something to be embarrassed about. But guess what? It IS. Research has shown this. Pain in patients with fibromyalgia is facilitated through the SAME MECHANISM – of activating the “flight or fight” response. The difference is that it does not turn off. The neurons connections of pain pathways loops do not turn off, their pain volume is turned up. Many people talk about pain in FM as just the pain volume control problem. It is volume control problem DUE to chronic stress, unprocessed emotions and all the past hurts dating as far back as our childhoods. Our memories, every single experience of our life is stored in the billions of neurons that compose our brain. Some of them are wired together through similar painful experiences, they created a NEURON SIGNATURE. And that gets activated when the “critical” threshold has been reached. And as I mentioned many times before, the pain IS REAL, as documented by multiple studies with fMRIs (functional MRIs). Understanding of neuroplastic pain, where it comes from AND THE FACT THAT IT IS NOT PERMANENT/it does NOT HAVE TO BE permanent, brings about a breath of hope. Because pain pathways CAN BE REWIRED 100 percent. Which brings me to #2 point. Step #2. Believe you CAN and DESERVE to get better. This has been arguably the toughest part for me on my own journey. And I have found to be the case with many of my female patients. Believing we CAN AND DESERVE to get better. We often carry various burdens, sometimes dating way back to our childhoods, that we are not deserving of good things in life, or good health, or whatever good. It has been shocking to me to discover that I myself struggled with it, and MANY other women, including women physicians, have the same issue. At the same time, becoming aware that it might be your problem is a source of hope. Because believing one can get better is written all over the research studies and demonstrated by multiple success stories. Women with pain DO get unburdened from their pain, IT is a fact hence it is ok to believe it is possible for you too. Believing we are DESERVING is separate from believing in a possibility of getting better. I struggled with this a lot and had a breakthrough in this belief (or rather, dis-belief) after hearing a comment of one of the prominent life coaches in my recent coaching program. It went something like this: “our innate essence, our pure SOUL, is inherently lovable”. The light went off in my brain, and I felt an instant relief. How to go about this in general? IMO, it helps to identify where the idea of not being deserving comes from. My lack of belief in being deserving came from all the past wrongs I did (usually related to uttering hurtful words to family, or coworkers). I believed all the things I done wrong in my life made me undeserving. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are all humans and we all make mistakes. Hurting other people feelings does not make us undeserving, it means we have some faulty thought processes or beliefs that we need to work on. It makes us human. And forgiveness is available to each of us. If we give ourselves compassion, like we do to other people we love, we are able to see that making mistakes is human, it does not make us undeserving. Eventually my “disbelief” was released when I believed that I can forgive myself for all the past hurtful things I said. It is a process though, and it does not happen overnight. Believing is a HUGE step in getting better and I cannot overstate the importance of this. Power of belief has been written about by many authors, Dr. Bruce Lipton and Benson just to mention a couple. There is now scientific evidence that the power of belief can heal. Or harm. Our mind is very powerful and if we believe we can get better we usually do. Step #3. Deliver messages of safety to the brain! Another important one! Here belong the somatic tracking, fierce self-compassion and any other technique, of mindfulness or meditation that installs stillness and feeling of safety and calmness. It is also referred to as relaxation response. We talked about how neuroplastic pain is a result of chronic irritation/activation of the flight or fight system (sympathetic nervous system) of which main hormones are the adrenalin and dopamine and cortisol. The brain needs to be calmed down, and it is achieved by activating the PARASYMPATHETIC nervous system. We deliver messages of safety by calming our breathing, our thoughts, observing the sensations/pains in our body and telling brain – “it is ok, it is just pain, and we know where it is coming from. I am ok, my body is ok, you are ok, brain, it will be ok”. I heard a very helpful comparison to what it means to activate a parasympathetic nervous response. The person explaining the process compared it to imagining you need to calm a scared child or scared self when you were little. You would soothe the child with calm voice, hugging and talking in a low voice and giving messages of safety and reassurance that everything will be ok. And our brain is behaving like a scared little child sometimes. This is where FIERCE Self Compassion comes in also – recognizing all the emotions or difficult situations we are going through and giving ourselves love and compassion like we would to a good friend or someone we love. When our breathing and heart rate slows down and blood pressure is lowered by eliciting the relaxation response, during somatic tracking or practice of self-compassion, our brain gets the messages of safety and reassurance. The practice of activating the parasympathetic nervous system literally activates the healing response. Chemicals produced by neurons during the relaxation response literally counteract the toxic effects of the chronic stress response. Your body starts healing DURING the practice of mindfulness, self-compassion and somatic tracking. Step #4. FEEL and PROCESS all of the emotions. So this is the step that is equally important to all the other steps. I talked a little bit about the importance of addressing emotions in the last podcast. People with chronic pain often have a lot of emotional distress, related to the pain but also to the current and past charged interactions or events in their lives. Often times the emotions were not being able to dealt with for one reason or another so the person suppressed them and just bottled them up. Unprocessed emotions can manifest in myriad of ways, of which pain is just one. I don't mean to talk about all the ways unprocessed emotions are detrimental to us. The most common examples are chronic irritability, or eating or drinking as ways of coping with unpleasant or difficult emotions. I want to zero in on emotions as they pertain to chronic pain. Anger, guilt, resentment, all of them have a role in chronic pain. Mutliple studies have shown that processing and releasing the emotions leads to improvement in pain and overall life quality. Possible avenues for release include EAET (emotional awareness expression therapy), IFS (internal family systems) and literally ANY THERAPY that allows for processing of the emotions related to current and past pains and hurts. It can happen whatever way you know that works for you. I have searched many years to discover that IFS (internal family system) method is the best for me. It may be the same for you or something else. We will explore together what are your ways of coping and what would the most suitable step to engage in if you have not discovered your preferred method yet. The bottom line of this step is to go back to the upsetting event, feeling the things you felt in the moment and REWRITING the story, in your imagination, of how you would have preferred to handle the upsetting event. It is/has been truly transformative for me. Step #5. Get In touch with your intuition And let it guide you. Your inner core self, your intuition, is like the all knowing guide that will tell you where you need to go. It is that little voice that you often feel, but many times don't listen to, that knows what is best for you. Dr. Lissa Rankin refers to it in her WHMI course as the inner pilot light. Sometimes we call it gut feeling. Steve Jobs had the best quote on this. He said: “"Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” IN essence, our core self is calm, wise, curious, compassionate, loving, and having a lot of clarity. Our inner self what is best for us and where it would like for us to go. If we listen, amazing things happen. If we don't listen, interesting things happen. Sometimes we have pain, sometimes we feel uneasy or we can tell something is off. The reason I mention intuition here is that following our inner wise or core self has implications on how we perceive our lives. If we live out of integrity with our core true beliefs, we often find ourselves feeling frustrated or stuck or irritated or angry or all of the above. And often we can experience pain. Our inner core self can make us bold things, that sometimes others would judge or disapprove of. I am talking about people pursuing their dreams by changing careers, signing up for a school, or new course, asking for a promotion, asking for a raise, speaking up on behalf of others, becoming an activist. Or it can be ditching an old friendship if it does not feel it is serving us. Following our intuition can have MANY forms and it looks different for each of us. I suspect we will talk more about this step in some of the future episodes but I considered it important enough to incorporate as one of the 5 core steps of my program. I do need to mention one other disclaimer here at the end. I DO NOT consider winning at fibromyalgia being pain free. What?? Yes, you heard me right. I do not believe that in order to live a good full life, free of fibromyalgia burden means being completely pain free. Don't get me wrong, it IS nice to be pain free but I have found it is NOT required to be pain free in order to feel good. So how do I DEFINE a successful end to my method? For me personally, success means feeling good, healthy, strong, strong enough to do things I need to do and to enjoy life on my terms. Some pain is not a deal breaker – if it does not consume me. So these are the 5 steps of my method (WINNING AT FIBROMYALGIA). Shoot me a message if it piqued your interest. Book a call with me on my website. I would love to hear from you. More good stuff to come from me in the future  https://www.martinaziegenbeinmdcoaching.com

In this episode I give a summary of my approach to fibromyalgia pain. It has 3 main steps and we talk about the first two and one substep of the 3rd step :-) Hello there! Welcome to Winning at Fibromyalgia Podcast Episode #3: What can be done about fibromyalgia pain? I am Dr. Martina Ziegenbein, the executive producer of the podcast. I am so excited to be here today. In the first two episodes, I talked about what is fibromyalgia pain – that it is neuroplastic type of pain which comes from misfiring neurons of the brain pain centers and pain pathways. IN the second podcast How does the fibro pain come to be, I explained that it is believed that certain emotions, including past traumatic events, current or past stress all increase cortisol levels in our system which sends danger signals in the brain and that CAN PRODUCE PAIN in the body! I also stressed several times that the PAIN of FIBROMYALGIA IS REAL. You feel it is real. The reason it has gotten a lot of negative “press” in the past is that women were felt to be making the pain up or that the pain was “in their heads”. The pain is REAL but it is caused by the brain. It is NOT a product of their imagination! Today, I will summarize my framework of approaching this problem. As a way of disclaimer and disclosure, I would like to mention my resources and where I go for information. I am a board certified Rheumatologist and my basic and first understanding of fibromyalgia was from reading all kinds of articles, resources and attending numerous lectures on fibromyalgia organized by ACR (American college of rheumatology). In that regard, I follow work and available resources from the team of Dr. Daniel Clauw at University of Michigan who has been leading Fibromyalgia research for decades. His is the group that was among first to CONFIRM with fMRIs that the pain was real. I also recently became acquainted with work of Dr. Alan Gordon whose book Way out talks about all kinds of research related to brain pain/neuroplastic pain and what to do about it. I will talk about his PAIN REPROCESSING SYSTEM In the coming episodes. I integrate ALL of this information when I work with patients and am currently putting a course together for women in an online format. So, in summary, there are only THREE BASIC steps that one has to follow in order to get started on the journey of improvement from fibromyalgia pain. They are: Confirm the diagnosis of Fibromyalgia START accepting the notion and concept of neuroplastic pain. Be willing to do things you have never done before, in order to get results you have never gotten before. Practice of self-compassion and mindfulness DAILY. Pain reprocessing therapy. Evaluate your life for all stressors and where you might live out of integrity with your true self. Let me elaborate on the first two. Confirm the diagnosis of Fibromyalgia. It is of crucial importance to have the diagnosis confirmed by a Rheumatologist. This is not just to plug for myself or my profession. I truly believe, and there is data to support this, that Rheumatologists are uniquely trained and positioned to diagnose the condition. Why you ask? We are trained to look for clues on your history (meaning what you tell us, what your symptoms are) and your exam, that may point to the diagnosis of an inflammatory or autoimmune process. Fibromyalgia symptoms MAY LOOK LIKE inflammatory symptoms of someone with RA or other inflammatory condition. We, the rheumatologists are the ones who help you distinguish that. The reason it is important is that RA, Lupus and other inflammatory conditions get treated with medications that suppress immune system and decrease inflammation. Fibromyalgia does not get treated with these meds. So it is of crucial importance to distinguish. Generally speaking, once we are confident in our diagnosis, we don't usually follow fibromyalgia patients longitudinally in our practice. I do so because I specialize in helping women with fibromyalgia. General rheumatologists specialize in seeing patients with inflammatory conditions. There is no harm, in my opinion, to check in with rheumatologists every 3-5 years, or if there are any new symptoms that worry you or your primary care physician. For the first visit, we generally want to see, or check ourselves, several labs including blood counts, liver, kidney, inflammation, muscle test and thyroid. Sometimes we check vitamin D level. IF these are all normal and exam is normal, we don't usually look further. In some instances, if the labs are normal but the exam is not completely normal we look further. That is why you want to see us first. So I hope I helped explain this topic  The second point was to start accepting the concept of neuroplastic pain. This is so crucially important. We as physicians are still learning how to explain this to our patients so that they have a good understanding of the scope. I still see quite a few patients whose first reaction to my explanation about neuroplastic pain is: “oh are you saying my pain is not real?”. That means that despite my best efforts to reassure the person that the pain is real, there is no damage to the tissues, the message still gets lost. It IS A LOT to take in. If you have lived with pain for years or even a decade, and you believe that there is something wrong with your body, you can feel naturally dis-inclined to believe that the body is ok and that the pain is all produced by your brain. You could ask “why would my brain do that”? So yes, I get it, it is hard to accept at first. I usually just start by asking my patients to being OPEN to the idea of neuroplastic pain. They don't have to believe it or accept it right away. Because you can start taking steps to feeling better even without believing it fully. But it IS important to start being OPEN to the idea of neuroplastic pain. Acceptance changes something in our brain that allows learning and new information to settle in. Step is to be willing to do things you never tried before. I would like to touch upon the practice of Self compassion and mindfulness daily today. I have to dislose something here. Up until today, this item only included practicing mindfulness. And as serendipity would have it, I had the privilege of listening to Dr. Kristin Neff speak earlier today. Dr. Neff is the leading researcher on compassion, self-compassion and its effects on mental health. I am part of the Empowering Women Physician coaching program and she was a guest speaker today. It was truly transformational for me to hear her confirm what I have suspected for so long. Mindfulness is important and is actually part of having and practicing self-compassion for ourselves. So what does it mean, you might ask, to practice selfcompassion? It means CARING about the pain and suffering of others and YOUR OWN. I mentioned in the earlier episode that stress activates our “flight or fight” response. That sends danger signals to our primitive brain and increases cortisol levels in our body. Increased cortisol levels can directly lead to pain through increasing tension in the back muscles (and other muscles in the body) or just increasing sensitivity of the neurons to pain signals. Practicing self compassion lowers blood pressure, heart rate and INCREASES levels of oxytocin in our body. Oxytocin is the “feel good” hormone that is released when the mothers first bond with their newborns, or anytime we have somebody touch us with care and kindness. A practice of selfcompassion does not have to be complicated. It has three main components (kindness, awareness and the sense of common humanity) and literally means the following steps: Find a comfortable position, close your eyes. Slow down your breathing. Bring your attention to something stressful happening in your life. ACKNOWLEDGE the pain or suffering you are feeling. Name it – it could be anxiety, sadness, frustration. FEEL THE EMOTION. Now Imagine what you would say to a good friend if they were in this situation – it could be something like: of course you are sad or frustrated. Or angry. This is the human experience. It happens. Life is not perfect. Mistakes happen. Life happens. This is the human experience. You did or are doing the best you can. This is all you can do. And NOW SAY IT TO YOURSELF. Feel the emotion, allow yourself to feel it. Put a hand over your chest as if putting it over the heart to protect it, and feel kindness to yourself as it if was your friend or someone you love, because - it is. you are your best friend. Believe this friend that this is part of human experience, other people suffer too. You are not alone. You don't have to fix it, you don't have to do anything else, you are just bringing awareness to the emotions you are feeling, and you say kind things to yourself, because you care. That's it, you can open your eyes. Selfcompassion is not sugarcoating things. It is also NOT letting yourself off the hook. It is OPENING YOURSELF TO PAIN WITH KINDNESS. If you made a mistake, and you feel guilt, with kindness you can commit to doing your best not making the same mistake again. Rather than feeling shame you feel resolved not to make the mistake again. When your brain gets kindness in response to frustration, anger, anxiety, something changes in the way you are able to deal with stress and pain. Your chemistry changes. Everyone has THEIR OWN flavor of suffering. I have rheumatoid arthritis and some chronic aching in my back, other person has back pain, and yet another person has history of significant trauma. Everyone has some flavor of pain and the amount is different and the way it manifests is different. THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE is about CHALLENGES. That's what it means to be HUMAN. There is not a single person alive who does not have some pain or difficulty. When we remember that truth, what happens is that instead of feeling all alone in our suffering and isolated in our struggles, we feel more connected to other people. The sense of CONNECTEDNESS gives us a sense of strength and coping and feeling we can handle this because this is a human condition. So the main three components of self compassion are mindfulness/awareness of our pain, kind warm response to the pain and remembering that everyone has struggles. I am going to leave you with that thought. If you like this or found it helpful, please leave a comment or review. You can find me at Fb as Martina lenartova. Or on my website at: https://www.winningatfibromyalgia.com. I look forward to chatting with you in the next session.

Hello there my friends and fibromyalgia warriors! I mean warriors in the most loving way. Welcome to episode #2 of my podcast Winning at Fibromyalgia. I am Dr. Martina Ziegenbein, a rheumatologist and an executive producer of the podcast  Today's episode title is: How does fibromyalgia pain come about? One of my girlfriends just emailed me asking about the follow up episode to the first one. Thank you Sandi, I am a few hours behind on recording  I was told in the past I sometimes talk too fast and I am a little self-conscious about not being a native speaker. So I think about the BEST or OPTIMAL way to express myself and it may have caused a little paralysis  But here I go. In the first episode last week, I explained the difference between acute and chronic pain, with the biggest contrast being that the former comes from the neurons in the injured tissues and the latter, also referred to as NEUROPLASTIC pain, comes from misfiring neurons in the brain. BOTH pains are processed in and by the brain, however. In the case of neuroplastic pain, brain changes in a way that reinforces chronic pain. The neurons in the brain are misinterpreting safe (or neutral) signals from the body as if they were dangerous. BOTH PAINS feel the same AND ARE REAL. I feel It is important to stress this again. The PAIN of fibromyalgia, and any chronic pain for that matter, IS REAL. However, based on our current knowledge, there is no damage to the tissues that are hurting in patients with fibromyalgia. So what is going on? I will give you short answer and then explain it: stress, emotions and especially fear. It is common knowledge that stress can cause physical reactions. My face turns red when I am embarrassed. That's because my emotions cause the autonomic nervous system to increase blood flow to the face. For somebody else it can be sweaty palms when they are nervous or upset stomach. These are not signs of disease, just normal physical reactions to stressful events and the mechanisms of BODY MIND SYNDROME. Stress causes emotions that cause our bodies to react by producing physical symptoms. The symptoms are real. What is not common knowledge is that stress and emotions can create the neural pathways that can cause chronic and often severe physical symptoms. The cure for such chronic pain or other symptoms is not a drug but rather to identify and treat the underlying cause of the pain. For most people, the underlying cause is that the emotional reactions to stress trigger neural circuits that create physical pain. During times of stress, the emotion-based network sends signals to active the autonomous nervous system (ANS) and produce hormones of cortisol and adrenalin which turn on the “fight or flight” reaction. That's a system that directs blood flow to muscles to get our body ready to run or do battle, and it causes our bodies to react instantly before we are aware of what is going on. We have this system to protect us from danger and improve our chances of survival. When we see a squiggly thing that looks like snake on the ground as we walk in the woods, we jump back, we don't investigate what it might be. The autonomic nerve system controls the nerve fibers that affects every area of our body. Studies have shown that emotions such as anxiety or anger cause increased tension in the back muscles of people with chronic back pain. This muscle tension, which can occur WITHOUT our conscious awareness, can cause severe and real physical pain. Often we are not aware of the emotions that are triggering these automatic physical responses. The autonomous nervous system can produce a large variety of physical symptoms in humans in response to stress and emotions. They include: tingling, numbness, burning sensation, dizziness, tinnitus, anxiety, abdominal pain, heartburn, diarrhea, constipation, pain, itching…you get the idea, the list goes on. The brain has complex mechanisms to handle pain that involves many structures. One part of this mechanism is anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Emotional responses increase activity in this area, causing pain to be amplified. MRI studies show that when ACC is activated the pain is generally increased. Emotional experiences in childhood are imprinted in the brain. Human infants are exposed to repeat blood drawing within the first few weeks of life have increased pain when they have medical procedures several months later. Adults who are exposed to traumatic events in childhood such as emotional, physical or sexual abuse have a much higher chance of developing chronic pain. Chronic stress produces increased sensitivity to pain in the brain, the spinal cord, and the nerves. Certain cytokines are released during the times of stress, and these cytokines cause cells and nerve endings to be more sensitive to pain. At least one study showed that adults with chronically elevated cortisol levels are more likely to develop pain. This further cemented the relationship between chronic stress and chronic pain. Our brains have trouble dealing with chronic stresses of modern life. When stress becomes chronic and we feel trapped in situations for which there is no easy way out, we can easily develop a set of neural circuits that are painful. Many patients I have worked with started experiencing pain shortly after or during a stressful situation in their lives. Big life changes, positive OR negative, can generate feelings of stress. With many of my other patients, it Is their past experience of exposure to physical or emotional or sexual abuse, that predisposed them to chronic pain. Certain behaviors, such as worrying, self-criticism and putting pressure on ourselves can also set up stage for chronic pain by putting our nervous system in the state of high alert (or chronic flight or fight reaction). So how does an acute injury evolve into chronic pain in the setting of stress? It can be a sprain, fracture or strain. Most injuries heal within several weeks. After that, if the pain does not go away, something else is usually going on. Many times, patients feel that the injury never healed or that there are “misalignments” that continue to cause pain. This is not really supported by research. Even if there is a scar tissue, scar tissue does not cause pain. The injury triggered a series of events that lead to the vicious CYCLE of pain. In the setting of stressful life circumstances occurring around the same time as the injury, NERVES that carry danger signals from the site of injury to the brain are activated for prolonged time. They become SENSITIZED, meaning they are more likely to fire and send more danger signals with lesser amounts of tissue activations. These small nerves learn to react to even very minor changes, such as tense muscles, which are EASILY triggered by an overly active ANS (autonomous nervous system) and ACC (anterior cingulate complex) – part of the brain that is closely connected to emotions. These tiny nerves eventually start affecting the brain, through communications to the brain with other neurons. The areas of painful sensation in the brain also become sensitized. They continue to experience pain. Bam, this is where the scientists used the term of neuroplasticity (or brain reorganization= the brain ability to create NEW pain pathways). The term BODY MIND SYNDROME (TMS) is used to express the connection between the reactions/symptoms in the body and the brain. One of the best examples of Mind Body syndrome is Phantom limb syndrome – people who had their limbs amputated continue to feel pain in an extremity that is no longer attached/present. That's because brain re-organization and nerve sensitization happened. Going one step further, a group of researchers tried to determine whether the brain could actually CREATE Pain. It is described in books by Dr. Alan Gordon in his new book WAY OUT and Dr. Schubiner's book unlearn your pain: A study at University of Pittsburgh looked into hypnosis and pain. Researchers placed subjects in an fMRI machine and administered pain with a hot probe. The pain regions of the participants' brains lit up. Then the scientists took the same subjects and HYPNOTIZED them, and induced pain through suggestion. The exact areas of their brains lit up on fMRIs. WHETHER THE PAIN WAS INDUCED PHYSICALLY OR THROUGH HYPNOSIS, THE SENSATION WAS THE SAME, as far as the brain was concerned. This was the first evidence that the brain can CREATE PAIN that is indistinguishable from pain caused by stimulation of nerves in tissues! Real pain can be caused by either physical disease states OR by neuroplastic processes that create learned neural circuits. The fact is that ALL pain is experienced in the brain. We cannot have pain without activation of the pain pathways in the brain. The pain is NOT in the HEAD, it IS IN THE BRAIN! This concludes our second episode. If you liked it please share with friends or write a review. If you are interested to learn more, or have feedback please head on to my website martinaziegenbeinmdcoaching.com and click on “contact”. I look forward to speaking with you next week again! 

Hosted by Robin Ince and Dr Helen Czerski this episode of the Science Shambles podcast is an audio recording of our weekly Sunday Science Q and A show that goes out at 10am BST on our YouTube channel. This week Robin and Helen are joined by Prof Pete Etchells and Ginny Smith to talk of brain beliefs, FMRIs, cobalt recycling and video game research... Watch them on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/cosmicshambles and get bonus content and extended conversations with guests by subscribing at patreon.com/cosmicshambles

There's a stigma associated with unresolved trauma. Many people don't talk about their traumatic experiences. Unfortunately, we're only taught short-term solutions like coping with stress and managing our emotions. With these short-term solutions, the root cause remains unresolved. The trauma is still present and can affect our everyday lives. In this episode, Dr Don Wood joins us to talk about how unresolved trauma can directly affect our health. He aims to remove the stigma around unresolved trauma, and the first step towards healing is understanding the pain we've gone through. He also talks about the power of our minds from the different stories of his past patients.  Tune in to this episode if you want to learn more about how unresolved trauma can affect your health and life.   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year's time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com. Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. 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Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce' Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce', go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how unresolved trauma can affect your life and compromise your health. Discover Dr Don's alternative ways of how he sees addiction. Understand the power of our minds and how it can do anything to protect us from feeling pain.   Resources Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron! You can choose between being an official or VIP patron for $7 and $15 NZD per month, respectively. Harness the power of NAD and NMN for anti-ageing and longevity with NMN Bio. More Pushing the Limits Episodes: 183: Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Elena Seranova 189: Increasing Your Longevity with Elena Seranova Connect with Dr Don Wood: Facebook Inspired Performance Institute – Learn more about Dr Don's books and the courses they're offering by going to their website. The Unbeatable Mind Podcast: How to Deal with Trauma with Dr Don Wood Brain Wash: Detox Your Mind for Clearer Thinking, Deeper Relationships, and Lasting Happiness by David and Austin Perlmutter  Emotional Concussions: Understanding How Our Nervous System is Affected by Events and Experiences Throughout Our Life  by Dr Donald Wood   Episode Highlights [05:32] What Inspired Dr Don to Start His Career Dr Don founded the Inspire Performance Institute because of his wife and daughter.  Dr Don shares that he had a quiet and idyllic childhood. He didn't experience any trauma. His wife had a rough childhood which contributed largely to the unresolved trauma and fear she lives with today. His daughter also inspired his research. She was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at 14.  [11:10] Dr Don Shares About His Childhood He remembers he used to get bad stomach pains when he was young. They would go to their family doctor for a checkup. His grandfather mentioned that he has stomach pains because of the stress at home. Later on, Dr Don realised that he felt the pressure in their home. The stress from this manifested as stomach pains. [15:00] Impact of Unresolved Trauma in Later Life Dr Don believes that unresolved trauma creates inflammation in the body. It compromises a person's immune system and neurotransmitters.  A person gets sick and starts feeling bad because of serotonin neurotransmitters. They are affected by our guts' inflammation. Unfortunately, the only things taught to us are managing and coping with the stress. We do not get to the root cause of the problem.  [18:10] Dr Don's Career Before Inspired Performance Institute Dr Don has been an entrepreneur all his life. Before he founded Inspired Performance Institute, he was in financial services.  He realised that committing to Inspired Performance Institute meant studying again.  To add credibility to his name, he went back to school and got his Ph.D. [20:31] What Causes Addiction Dr Don doesn't believe that addiction is caused by physical dependency. It's more about how the mind connected using drugs and survival.  Because people feel bad, they find a way to stop the pain and feel better temporarily. Most of them find it in using drugs.  The subconscious mind tries to find a way to feel better. The conscious mind builds a habit based on it. The interaction between these two memory systems is a factor in developing addictions. [25:39] Subconscious and Conscious Mind 95% of our mind works on the subconscious survival base. The remaining 5% is concerned with logic and reason. The 5% uses reason and logic to make brilliant things in life. However, when survival needs arise, the part dedicated to survival overrides the other. To learn more about Dr Don's analysis of the Time Slice Theory and how it's connected to how we respond to our day-to-day lives, listen to the full episode. [35:08] Effects of Brain Injuries on Brain Response People with repeated brain injuries might have problems with logical and survival thinking responses. Brain injury patients have lower blood flow in the frontal part when faced with survival situations based on brain scans.  [36:03] Available Help for People Who Have Brain Injuries Dr Don's son had three head injuries since he was young. The third one affected his communication skills and emotions.  He believes that his son has functional damage to his brain. Once they discovered that, they got him into hyperbaric oxygen therapy.  He started getting his blood flow into the areas of his brain that process his experiences.   [40:18] Probable Use of fMRI Dr Don shares that fMRI can be another procedure that can help people with brain injuries.  fMRI can detect abnormalities in your brain that other methods may not pick up. [42:26] The Story of Dr Don's Daughter His daughter was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. It affected her career as an actress.  His daughter's condition made him realise: inflammation responds to unresolved trauma. They managed to resolve her unresolved trauma that happened when she was six years old. Her mind understood that, and her negative response stopped.  [46:01] Talking About Depression In cases of depression, the person's mind puts pressure on them to do something in the past.  Depression then becomes the absence of emotion. It tries to numb you from the stress in your mind. When they get to the cause of what their mind needs and resolves it, their depression eases.  [48:02] Story of Rebecca Gregory Rebecca was a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing. She came to seek help from Dr Don five years ago. She has PTSD. Dr Don helped her realise the connection between her response to daily life and the memory she has. To know more about the process on how Dr Don helped Rebecca tune in to the full episode. [51:43] Similarities of Dr Don's Approach to EMDR Dr Don shared that he also studied EMDr In his practice, he used some of the techniques in EMDr He enhanced them to become quicker and more comprehensive.  Unlike EMDR, Dr Don's approach is faster and more straightforward. The patient can choose which way they would like to do it.  [54:36] Dr Don on Talk Therapies He believes that talk therapy is good. You must deal with a current problem. They aim to resolve the old issues that aggravate the new experiences.  [56:22] How Dr Don's Program Helped His Daughter Crohn's disease is incurable. However, since his daughter underwent their program, her Crohn's didn't flare-up. He believes his daughter's body has more energy to do maintenance and repair issues. It's possible because her unresolved trauma has been resolved.  [56:22] How Stress Connects to Our Other Unresolved Traumas The daily stress that we encounter every day might pile up and affect us in the long run. They might also connect and add up to our trauma, making it harder for us to cope. We misinterpreted experiences when we were young that still affect us as we grow older. Dr Don shares stories of how unresolved childhood experiences may affect a person as they grow up. [01:08:15] People Have Different Filters Dr Don says that people have different atmospheric conditions they grew up in. These factors affect how they filter and deal with their everyday experiences.  Our brain acts as the filter, and all of our experiences pass through that filter. The differences in how we operate upon those experiences are based on them.  Dr Don proceeds to share different stories of his patients regarding the differences in people's minds.  [01:15:06] Dr Don on Smoking  Dr Don says that smokers are not addicted to nicotine. They need the sensation of feeling better. The mind of a smoker associates feeling better to smoking. This link causes addiction.  You can break the habit by introducing a new, healthier factor. [01:19:17] A Better Approach Towards Addiction Many approaches to addiction make the person feel useless. They surrender to never getting better. Dr Don pushes a system that empowers people. He makes them realise they can overcome their addiction by understanding the cause.  [01:24:42] How the Mind Reacts to Pain Dr Don shares that the mind is powerful enough. It will do anything for you to stop feeling pain.  People who commit suicide act in desperation to stop the pain they're feeling.  He shares the story of the German sniper. It can represent the power of the mind in reaction to pain.   7 Powerful Quotes  ‘I really started the Inspired Performance Institute because of my wife and daughter more. Mostly my daughter than anything else.' ‘So if I had been a little frustrated with something that worked that day, or is, you know, some other thing that was nothing related to her, she could pick up on that tone change. And then, in her mind, what her mind would be doing is saying, “What do we know about men when they start to get angry?” And a whole bunch of data and information about her father would come flooding in and overstimulate her nervous system.' ‘And so when my daughter was 14, she was diagnosed with Crohn's. And they just told us that you just kind of have to, you know, learn to live with this.' ‘And that's really what led me to develop the program, is I realised that when my daughter was 16, she disclosed to us some sexual abuse that she had had when she was like six years of age that we had no idea. So my wife was, obviously both of us were devastated, but my wife was extremely, she had experienced, you know, sexual abuse as a child and thought she would never let that happen to her child.' ‘How could the body crave a substance that it doesn't know? It doesn't regulate heroin. How could it crave something that doesn't regulate? I believe it's the mind has made a connection between the heroin and survival.' ‘What's happened is your mind has been calling for an action for many, many years, that was impossible to accomplish. But your mind doesn't know that and it keeps putting pressure on you. “Do it, do it, do it.” And because you don't do it, it's using these emotions to call for the action, it stops calling for the action, it shuts off the emotions. And so now depression is the absence of emotion.' ‘I believe in a lot of cases, that's what they're doing, are trying to desensitise you to it. You know, talk about it enough, maybe it doesn't feel as dramatic. And talk therapy has its place so I'm not against it. I think where talk therapy is really good is when you're dealing with a current problem. Where I think the difference between what we do is we're able to get the talk therapy much more effective when you take out all the old stuff that keeps aggravating the new stuff.'    About Dr Don Wood Dr Don Wood, Ph.D., developed the TIPP method after researching how atmospheric conditions affect our minds and impact our lives. In his search for answers for them, Dr Wood connected trauma and their health issues. He also recognised the daily stress they lived with. The only solutions provided came from medications. His experience with his family provided the determination required to develop a cutting-edge neuroscience approach. The program has benefited individuals all over the world. The results have been impressive. Dr Wood has helped trauma survivors from the Boston Marathon bombing attack and the Las Vegas shooting. He has also helped highly successful executives and world-class athletes. Marko Cheseto, a double amputee marathon runner, broke the world record after completing TIPP. Chris Nikic worked with Dr Wood and made world news by becoming the first person with Downs Syndrome to complete an Ironman competition.  The Inspire Performance Institute was built on this simple phrase, ‘There's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing wrong with your mind'. Some events and experiences have created some glitches and error messages for your mind during your lifetime, and all you need is a reboot.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can understand how unresolved trauma can affect our overall health and well-being. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa   Full Transcript Of The Podcast Lisa Tamati: Welcome back, everybody to Pushing the Limits. Today I have Dr Don Wood, who is sitting in Florida. And Dr Don is a wonderful man. He is a trauma expert. He is someone who had a problem in his own family and sought about finding a solution. He is the developer of the TIPP method, T-I-P-P method. He spent years researching, and to understand how our minds affect our bodies. Dr Wood made the connection between trauma and health issues. In addition, he recognised the daily stress that people live with when they've been through trauma, and that the only solutions provided in the normal conventional world and medications. But his experience with his family provided the determination required to develop a cutting-edge neuroscience approach, a real holistic solution that provides immediate and long lasting relief for people who have been through trauma of any sort, whether it's small or large. The TIPP program developed by Dr Wood has benefited individuals all over the world. And he really wanted to create a solution that removed the stigma of trauma. Too many people are afraid to ask for help because of that stigma. And that's why he named the program around increasing performance levels. The name of his institute is the Inspired Performance Institute.  I really love this episode with Dr Don Wood, he is a lovely, amazing person with a way of helping people get rid of PTSD, get rid of trauma out of their lives. So that they can get on with being the best versions of themselves. And that's what we're all about here. He's worked with everyone, from soldiers coming back from wars to victims of the Boston Marathon bombing campaign, to highly successful executives and world-class athletes. He's been there, done that. So I really hope that you enjoy this conversation with Dr Wood.  Before we head over to the show, just want to remind you, we have our new premium membership for the podcast Pushing the Limits. Now out there. It's a Patron page so you can be involved with the program, with the podcast. We've been doing this now for five and a half years; it is a labor of love. And we need your help to keep this great content coming to you, and so that we can get the best experts in the world and deliver this information direct to your ears. It's a passion that's been mine now for five and a half years and you can get involved with it, you get a whole lot of premium member benefits. And you get to support this cause which we're really, really grateful for. For all those who have joined us on the Patron program. Thank you very, very much. You know, pretty much for the price of a cup of coffee a month, you can get involved. So check that out at patron.lisatamati.com. That's patron P-A-T-R-O-N dot lisatamati.com.  And just reminding you too, we still have our Epigenetics Program going. And this, we have now taken hundreds and hundreds of people through this program. It's a game-changing program that really gives you insights into your genetics, and how to optimise your lifestyle to optimise your genes basically. So everything from your fitness, what types of exercise to do, what times of the day to do it. What, whether you're good at the long distance stuff or whether you be a bit more as a power base athlete, whether you need more agility, whether you need more work through the spine, all these are just information that's just so personalised to you. But it doesn't just look at your fitness, it looks at your food, the exact foods that are right for you. And it goes way beyond that as well as to what are the dominant neurotransmitters in your brain, how they affect your mood and behaviour, what your dominant hormones are, the implications of those, your predispositions for any disorders and the future so that we can hit all those off at the past. It's not deterministic, that is really giving you a heads up, ‘Hey, this could be a direction that you need to be concerned about in the future. And here's what you can do about it.' So come and check out our program. Go to lisatamati.com. And under the button ‘Work With Us', you will find our Peak Epigenetics program. Check that out today. And maybe you can come and join us on one of our live webinars or one of our pre-recorded webinars if you want to you can reach out to me, lisa@lisatamati.com, and I can send you more information about their Epigenetics Program. Right, now over to the show with Dr Don Wood.  Hello, everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. This week, I have another amazing guest for you. I've found some pretty big superstars over the years, and this one is going to be very important to listen to. I have Dr Don Wood, welcome to the show, Dr Don. Dr Don Wood: Thank you, Lisa. I'm excited to be here. Lisa: This is gonna be a very interesting, and it's a long-anticipated interview for me, and Dr Don is sitting in Florida, and you've got a very nice temperature of the day, isn't it? Dr Don: Oh, absolutely gorgeous- low 80s, no humidity. I mean, you just like I said, you couldn't pick a better day, it's very fast. I would have tried to sit outside and do this. But I was afraid somebody would start up a lawn mower. Lisa: Podcast life. I've just got the cat wandering, and so he's probably start meowing in a moment. Now, Dr Don, you are an author, a speaker, a trauma expert, the founder of the Inspired Performance Institute. Can you give us a little bit of background of how did you get to where you are today, and what you do? Dr Don: Well it's sort of an interesting story. I really started the Inspired Performance Institute because of my wife and daughter more. Mostly my daughter than anything else. I talked about this, is that I led this very, very quiet, idyllic kind of childhood with no trauma. Never had anything ever really happen to me. You know, bumps along the way, but nothing kind of that would be considered trauma. And I lived in a home that was so loving and nurturing, that even if I got bumped a little bit during the day, you know, was I, when I was a kid, I'm coming home to this beautiful environment that would just regulate my nervous system again.  Lisa: Wow.  Dr Don: So I believe that that was critical in terms of having my nervous system always feeling safe. And that really resulted in amazing health. I mean, I've been healthy all my life. And as an adult, when things would happen, I could automatically go back into that nervous system regulation, because I had trained it without even knowing it.  Lisa: Yeah. Dr Don: that I was able to get back into that. Well. And so when I met my wife, I realised she was not living in that world. And amazingly enough, Lisa, I thought everybody lived like, because I had no idea that a lot of my friends were being traumatised at home. That I had no idea, because everybody's on their best behaviour. If I come over, everybody's behaving themselves and you don't see it. My friends, a lot of times wouldn't share it because of either shame or guilt. I mean, my wife, nobody knew what was going on in their home.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr Don: And she had one best friend that knew, that was about it. And if you met her father, who was really the bad guy in this whole thing, everybody thought he was the greatest guy. Because outwardly, he came across as this generous, hard-working, loving kind of guy. Loved his family, but he just ran his home with terror.  Lisa: Wow. Terrible. Dr Don: And so, oh, it was terrible. So when I met my wife, I realised, wow, this, because we got close very quickly, because I had the chance to play professional hockey in Sweden when I was 18. So we got married at 19. So very quickly, I was around her a lot, while we were sort of getting ready for that. So I got to see the family dynamic up close very quickly. And that's when I realised, boy, she's not living in that world, which is living in fear all the time. And that's why I sat down with her one day, and I just said, ‘Tell me what's going on here. Because I can sense this tension in here. I could sense that there was a lot of fear going on. What's going on?' And she started sharing it with me, but swore me to secrecy. Like I could never tell anybody because of all that shame and guilt, because nobody really outside the home would have been aware of it. Lisa: Or probably believed it.  Dr Don: Or believed it. Right.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr Don: And then it was again, that ‘What will people think about me? What do they think about my family?' That's really common, when you have people who have experienced trauma like that. And so, I sort of follow along and said, ‘Okay, this will be our secret,' but I thought to myself, ‘Well, this will be great now, because I'm going to get her out of that home'.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr Don: And she's going to be living in my world. So everything will just calm down, and she'll be feeling that peace that I've experienced all my life. Lisa: Not quite so simple.  Dr Don: I was like, Well, how is this not helping? Like, why now? She's living in the world that I grew up in because I was very much like my father. I wasn't gonna yell at her, scream at her, do anything that would have made her feel fearful. But she was still living in fear.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr Don: And if, yeah, and if I said something like, ‘No, I don't like that.' She could tear up and start going, why are you mad at me? Yeah. And I would be like, ‘Oh my God, like where did you get I was mad at you for?' I just said. That made no sense to me at the time. Now I understand it perfectly. What I didn't realise at the time was that people who have been traumatised are highly sensitive to sound— Lisa: Hypervigilant and hyperaware of noise and people raising their voice. Dr Don: Any kind of noise. And what she also, as a child, she had learned to listen very carefully to the way her father spoke, so that she could then recognise any kind of the slightest little change in my vocal tone. So if I had been a little frustrated with something at work that day, or, you know, some other thing that was nothing related to her, she could pick up on that tone change. And then, in her mind, what her mind would be doing is saying, ‘What do we know about men when they start to get angry?' And a whole bunch of data and information about her father would come flooding in and overstimulate her nervous system. Lisa: So then it's like they Google search, doing a Google search and going, ‘Hey, have I had this experience before?'  Dr Don: Yeah.  Lisa: And picking out, ‘Yeah, we've been here before. This is not good. This is dangerous. This is scary.' Dr Don: Yep. And that's actually what led me to the research that I did, mainly because of my daughter, though. So my wife lived with that, she developed Hashimoto's. So she had this thyroid issue with, because she was constantly in a fight or flight state.  Lisa: Yeah, the cortisol. Dr Don: More flight than anything. Yeah, cortisol. And so when my daughter was 14, she was diagnosed with Crohn's. And they just told us that you just kind of have to learn to live with this. And she's going to be on medication for the rest of her life. And we'll just continue to cut out pieces of her intestines until she has nothing left and she'd have a colostomy bag. That's just the way it is.  Lisa: Oh. And she's 14 years old. Dr Don: She was 14. Yeah. She ended up having for resections done, she would go down to you know, 90, 85 pounds. She'd get so sick, the poor thing. No, because she just couldn't eat. Yeah. And she couldn't hold anything down. And they just told us to have no answers. My wife did unbelievable research, trying to come up with answers and really couldn't come up with anything except this management system that they've been given her. And so, I was adopted. So we didn't know my family history. Yeah. So our family doctor was my grandfather. And I didn't know this until I was 18.  Lisa: Oh wow.  Dr Don: I always knew I was adopted. But my mother shared the story with me when I was 18. That he came to my parents and said, I have a special child I want you to adopt, right. Now. I guess you just knew that my parents were just amazing people. And you know, at that time, you know, unwed mothers, that was considered a shame. Right? You didn't talk about that. So that was a quiet adoption.  Lisa: Wow. Dr Don: In fact, his wife didn't even know about it.  Lisa: Wow. Dr Don: Could be my grandmother. And that's, it's interesting, the story, because I should share this too. Because what happened was, is I never understood why my birth certificate was dated two years after my birthday. And what happened was, is that my parents adopted me, like immediately upon birth. But my grandmother found out about it, his wife found out about and sued my parents to get me back.  Lisa: Oh. Dr Don: And so they had to go into this legal battle for two years.  Lisa: Oh, wow.  Dr Don: Now I remember when I was really, really young, I used to get these really bad stomach pains. And I, and they took me, I remember going to doctors, I was really young. I remember going to doctors, but my grandfather was very holistic at the time for an MD. So you know, I was on cod liver oil, and you know, all these different things like, and so what he said to me, he says, No, he's just stressed out because of the stress in the home. You have to take the stress out of this home. He's feeling it.'  Lisa: Yep.  Dr Don: Right. So it's not that my parents were yelling, screaming.  Lisa: He's ahead of his time. Dr Don: Oh, way ahead. But what he realised was that, because it was so hard financially for them, that had a major effect on their life. So I guess I was feeling it. And so they went out of their way to take all the stress out.  Lisa: Wow. What lovely parents. Dr Don: Oh yeah. So it created this unbelievable, unusual home life. And so I never had any real tension in the home.  Lisa: Wow. Dr Don: Well, that was, I guess, as my wife said, we were the perfect petri dishes for this because I was living what we want to be, and she was living in the opposite world of what a lot of people do live in. And so at least I knew what the model was, what we were going for. Lisa: And when we're exposed to trauma very early in life, it has a much bigger impact on your health and everything then when it happens later in life. Is that right? Dr Don: Absolutely. Because we've never learned how to balance our systems, so then it stays, you know, in dysregulation a lot more than it did. And that's really what sort of led me to develop the program, is I realised that when my daughter was 16, she disclosed to us some sexual abuse that she had had when she was like six years of age that we had no idea. So my wife was, obviously both of us were devastated, but my wife was extremely, she had experienced, you know, sexual abuse as a child and thought she would never let that happen to her child.  Lisa: Yeah. Dr Don: So now my poor wife has also got a new, you know, trauma onto her. And so that's where it really came down to, is, you know, she said to me, ‘You could research this and find out what's going on, because I have no answers.' And that's when I started to research and I made the connection between trauma and these autoimmune issues, for example, that my wife had, and my daughter. And so what I discovered is that I believe that unresolved trauma creates inflammation in the body. The inflammation compromises the immune system and your neurotransmitters. So we start getting sick, and we start feeling bad because our neurotransmitter, serotonin is produced mostly in the gut. So the serotonin is affected by the inflammation, which was from my daughter, right? She's not going to feel good.  Lisa: Nope.  Dr Don: And then that just leads to a host of other problems. And it's, it's really, really sad that the only solution that we currently are using is to teach people to live and manage and cope with it.  Lisa: I think, yeah, so we, we know, which is, which is good. You know, we're learning things, how to cope with anxieties, and breath work and all that sort of good stuff. But it's not getting to the root cause of the problem and being able to to deal with it. So when we're in a heightened state of stress and cortisol, and when we're taking energy away from our immune system, and blood literally away from the gut, and and from a neurotransmitter production, and all that sort of thing, so is that what's going on, and why it actually affects the body? Because this mind body connection, which we're really only in the last maybe decade, or 15 years or something, really starting to dig into, isn't it? Like there's and there's still a massive disconnect in the conventional medical world where this is the mind, and this is the body. And you know, from here, up and here, and it's separate. Dr Don: And so on and so forth? Yeah. Lisa: Yeah. And it we're one thing, you know. And so this has a massive effect on our health, and it can lead to all sorts of autoimmune diseases, or even cancers, and so on. So you were at this time, so you didn't have the Inspired Performance Institute at this stage? What were you doing professionally? And then, did you go back and do a PhD? And in...? Wow. Dr Don: I've always been an entrepreneur all my life. So I was in financial services, we did a number of different things. We, my son and I, still have an energy business, we do solar energy and stuff like that. Lisa: Oh wow.  Dr Don: I decided if I was going to do this, I needed to go back and really study. So I went back and got by, went back to school, got my PhD.  Lisa: Wow. Dr Don: And, you know, to truly, to try to add credibility, number one, to what I was doing. Because, you know, people are gonna say, ‘Well, who are you? Yeah, you know, why should we listen to you? You never had any trauma and you're supposed to be an expert? Like, how does that work?' You know, it's the same thing with addiction. You know, I help people with addiction. I've never had a drink in my life, never touched a drug in my life. Now that I say, but I know what addiction is.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr Don: I don't believe addiction is a disease. I believe it's a code that gets built from pain. Lisa: Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit. And then we'll go back to your daughter's story. Because addiction, you know, it's something I know from a genetic perspective. I have a tendency towards, towards having addictive nature, personality traits. I chase dopamine a lot. I have a deficit of dopamine receptors. And so I'm constantly going after that reward. Now that's worked itself out in my life, and in running ridiculous kilometres and working ridiculous hours, and not always in negative things. Luckily, I've never had problems with drinking or drugs, but I know that if I had started down that road, I would have ended up probably doing it, you know, very well.  Dr Don: You'd be a star as well.  Lisa: I'd be a star in that as well. And luckily, I was sort of a little bit aware of that and my parents never drank and they, you know, made sure that we had a good relationship with things like that, and not a bad one. Have struggled with food, though. That's definitely one of the emotional sort of things. And I think a lot of people have some sort of bad relationship with food in some sort of way, shape, or form on the spectrum, so to speak. What is it that causes addiction? And is it a physical dependency? Or is there something more to it? Dr Don: Yeah, that's why I don't believe it's a physical dependency. Because here's the way I look at it is, people will say to me, ‘Well, if I stopped this heroin, the body's going to crave the heroin, and I'm going to go into withdrawal.' And my response to that is, ‘How could the body crave a substance that it doesn't know? It doesn't regulate heroin. How could it crave something that doesn't regulate?' I believe it's the mind, has made a connection between the heroin and survival. Because you have felt bad, right? Because of trauma, or whatever it is, whenever you took the heroin, you felt better.  So I had a lady come in who had been on heroin. And she said to me, she's, ‘Well, I told my therapist, I'm coming to see you. And he told me, I had to let you know upfront and be honest and tell you I have self-destructive behaviour.' And I just smiled at her. And I said, ‘Really? What would make you think you're self destructive?' And she looked at me, because this is what she's been told for a year.  Lisa: Brilliant.  Dr Don: She says, ‘Well, I'm sticking a needle in my arm with heroin, don't you think that's self destructive?' And I said to her, I said, ‘No, I don't think it was self destructive. I think you're trying to feel better. And I bet you, when you stuck the needle in your arm, you felt better.' That nobody had ever said that to her before. And so I said, ‘Now, the substance you're using is destructive, but you're not destructive? What if I could show you another way to feel better, that didn't require you having to take a drug?'  Lisa: Wow. Dr Don: And I said, ‘You're designed to feel better. And I believe that the brain, what happened is, is it because you felt bad, you found a resource that temporarily stopped that pain.' And you see your subconscious mind is fully present in the moment. So when does it want pain to stop? Right now. And if that heroin stops the pain right now, then what happened was, is that system, you have two memory systems, you have explicit memory system that records all the information in real time. So it records all the data, and stores. No other animal does that. We're the only animal that stores explicit details about events and experiences. We also have an associative procedural memory that we learned through association and repetition over time. So, because the explicit memory kept creating the pain, because we kept thinking about it, and looping through this pain cycle, you started taking heroin, then you engage your second associative memory, which learns through repetition and builds, codes, habits, and behaviours.  Lisa: Wow. Dr Don: Because you kept repeating it your mind built a code and connected up the pain being relieved by the substance.  Lisa: Wow. Dr Don: Now, your subconscious mind is literal. So it doesn't understand negation. It only understands what's happening now. And so if your mind says that substance stops the pain, it doesn't look at the future and consequences of it. It only looks at what's happening. It's only our conscious mind that can think of consequences. Your subconscious mind, which is survival-based only understands. That's why people at 911 would jump out of the buildings. They weren't jumping to die, they would jumping to stop from dying. Yeah, if they didn't jump, they would have died right now. So even if they went another two seconds, they weren't dying now.  Lisa: Right? So it's really in the right now, there's really no right now. It's really in the seconds.  Dr Don: And the very, very milliseconds of what's happening now. And there's no such thing as consequences, it's basically survival. So now, if you keep repeating that cycle over and over using heroin, and then somebody comes along and says, ‘Lisa, you can't do that. That's bad for you. I'm going to take that away from you.' Your survival brain will fight to keep it because it thinks it'll die without it.  Lisa: Yeah. Makes a glitch.  Dr Don: It's an error message.  Lisa: Have you heard of Dr Austin Perlmutter on the show last week, David Perlmutter's son and they're both written a book called Brain Wash. And there they talk about disconnection syndrome. So the disconnection between the prefrontal cortex in the amygdala and the amygdala can be more powerful when we have inflammation in the brain. For example, like inflammation through bad foods, or toxins, or mercury, or whatever the case may be. And that this can also have an effect on our ability to make good long-term decisions. It makes us live in the here and now. So I want that here and fixed now; I want that chocolate bar now. And I know my logical thinking brain is going, ‘But that's not good for you. And you shouldn't be doing that.' And you, you're trying to overcome it. But you're there's this disconnect between your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala. And I've probably butchered that scenario a little bit. Dr Don: No, you got it. But 95% of your mind is working on that subconscious survival base. It's only about 5% that's logical. That logical part of your brain is brilliant, because it's been able to use reason and logic to figure stuff out. So it created the world we live in: automobiles, airplanes, right, computers, all of that was created by that 5%, part of the brain 5%. However, if there is a survival threat, survival will always override reason and logic. 100% of the time.  Lisa: Wow.  Dr Don: So you can't stop it. And it's what I talked about was that time slice theory. Did I mention that when we were going?  Lisa: No.  Dr Don: When I did my research, one of the things that I found was something called the time slice theory. And what that is, is that two scientists at the University of Zurich asked the question— is consciousness streaming? So this logical conscious part of our mind that prefrontal cortex, is that information that we're, as you and I are talking now, is that real, coming in real time? And what they discovered is, it's not.  Lisa: Oh. Dr Don: The 95% subconscious part of your mind, it's streaming. While let's say your survival brain churns in everything in real time, processes that information, and then only sends pieces or time slices, because your conscious mind cannot handle that detail.  Lisa: Oh, wow. So they're filtering it. Dr Don: Filtering it. And yeah, so as it takes it in, processes it, and then sends time slices or some of that information to your conscious mind. Right? But there's a 400 millionth of a second gap in between your subconscious seeing it, processing it, and sending it. And when I read that, that's when I came up with the idea that what's it doing in that 400 millionth of a second? It's doing a Google search, see? And so in that 400 millionth of a second, your survival brain has already calculated a response to this information before you're consciously aware of it.  Lisa: Wow.  Dr Don: And so the prefrontal cortex has got a filter on there to be able to stop an impulse, right? So it's the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is sort of the gatekeeper to say, ‘Okay, let's not go into a rage and get into trouble. Let's try to stop that.' So we have that part of our brain. However, here's where the problem comes in— You're driving and traffic and somebody cuts you off. And so your first response is, you get angry, because this person is like, ‘Oh, I want to chase that guy down and give him a piece of my mind.' But that part of your brain can say, ‘Let's think about this. Hold on,' you know, even though it's 400 millionth of a second later, the first anger response, then it should be able to pull that back. Here's where the problem comes in. If getting cut off in traffic looked like you had been just disrespected. During that Google search, your now, your subconscious mind has filtered through every experience of being disrespected. And so much information comes in that it cannot stop the response. It overrides it, because now it feels threatened. And our prisons are full of people who had been so badly hurt, that that part of their brain can't do that. You and I can probably do that. Right?  Lisa: Sometimes. Dr Don: Because we can say, sometimes? You know, you can run them down. You can leave the car. But that's where the problem comes in. Yeah, can't stop that, then that rage and all those things come in. And that affects your relationships could affect all kinds of things. And people would say, ‘Oh, you got an anger management problem. We're going to teach you to live with, you know, and manage that anger.' What I'm saying is ‘No, it's a glitch. We don't need all that data coming in.' Right, good response, a Google search is creating the problem. Lisa: Like there's so many questions while hearing what you just said that, and I've experienced in my own life where with my family, where the initial response is so quick, that someone's punched someone else before they've even thought about what the heck they are doing. In the, when you said that, disrespected like this is, you know, I think when I've gotten really really angry and overreacted to something, when I think about it logically later, and a couple of times were of, like, in my early adult years, I was in a very abusive relationship. Thereafter, when I would get into another relationship, and that person tried to stop me doing something, I would just go like, into an absolute fit of rage. Because I was fighting what had happened to me previously, and this poor person, who may have not even been too bad, got the full barrels of verbal assault. Because I just reacted to what had happened to me 10 years previously. And that's the sort of thing where I felt like I was being controlled, disrespected when he went in. So that Google search is happening in a millisecond.  Dr Don: 400 millionths of a second. you couldn't have stopped, impossible for you to stop. And then people would say, ‘What's wrong with Lisa? She's just normally a great person, but where is that coming from?' Up until now, you may not have known that. But that's what it is. And it's impossible for you to have stopped. It was the same thing when my wife and I would say, ‘No, I don't like that.' And she would start to cry. I'd be saying, ‘Gosh, what am I doing to make this woman cry?' It wasn't what I said. It was what I said that activated her Google search, which then flooded into data about her father. She was responding to her father, not to me. We both didn't know that; we all thought that she was responding to what I just said. Lisa: Isn't this always just such complex— and if you start to dissect this, and start to think about the implications of all this, and our behaviour, and our communication and our relationships, so much pain and suffering is happening because we're not understanding, we're not, we're angry at people, we're disappointed with people, we're ashamed of things that we've done. And a lot of this is happening on a level that none of you know, none of us are actually aware of. I mean, I liken it to, like, I know that my reactions can sometimes be so quick. Like before, my, just in a positive sense, like effect glasses falling off the beach, I would have caught it with my bare hand before my brain has even registered it. I have always had a really fast reaction to things like that. That's a clear example of, like, that permanent brain that's in the here and now, has caught it before I've even realised that's happening. Dr Don: You know, and that's why I always say to people, ‘Did you choose to do that?' And they'll say, ‘Well, I guess I did.' I go, ‘No, you didn't.' Didn't just happen that happened before you could actually use the logical part of your brain. And because it was so much information, right? Even though the logical part of your brain would say, ‘Well, you know, don't lash out at this person. They didn't mean that.' It would already have happened. Yeah, I worked with a professional athlete. He was a baseball player playing in the major leagues. And I explained that concept to him. And then we were at a, one of his practice workouts, and his pitcher was throwing batting practice behind a screen. And so as he threw the ball, this guy, my client hit the ball right back at the screen, and the coach, like, hit the ground. Right? And I stopped right there. And I said, ‘Great example.' I said, Did your coach just choose to duck?  Lisa: Or did he automatically do it?  Dr Don: He had no, he had no time to use exactly. The logic. If you use the logical part of your brain, what would you have said? ‘This ball can hit me; there's a screen in front of me.' Lisa: Yeah, yeah. But you know— Dr Don: No way logic is going to prevail, when there's a threat like that coming at you. Yeah.  Lisa: This is why it's important because we need to be able to react in that split second, if there really is a danger and there's a bullet flying in ahead or something like that or something, somebody is coming at us from, to do us harm, then we need to be able to react with split second timing.  Dr Don: But you don't want that logic coming into it.  Lisa: No, but we do want the logic coming in when it's an emotional response. Do you think like, when people have had repeated brain injuries, they are more likely to have problems with this, you know, the prefrontal cortex not functioning properly and even being slower to respond or not getting enough blood flow to that prefrontal cortex in order to make these good decisions? Dr Don: Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at SPECT scans or brain scans of people who have had those kinds of injuries, you'll see that that part of the brain, that frontal part of the brain, the blood flow will drop when they get into those situations. Lisa: Wow. And then they can't make a good decision. And here we are blaming them for being— Dr Don: Blaming them for being— Lisa: —and they end up in prisons, and they end up with hurt broken lives and terrible trauma. And, you know, it's not good if they react and hit somebody or kill somebody or whatever. But how can we fix this? And that one of my go-tos is the hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And I've heard you talk about that on a podcast with Mark Divine in regards to your son. And that is one way we can actually help our brains if we've had had a traumatic brain injury or PTSD or anything like that, is that right? Dr Don: Yeah, my, like I said, my son had three head injuries, one in elementary school, one in middle school, one in high school. And the first one, we didn't see as big an effect. But he did have a problem. The second one, he ended up with retrograde amnesia. And then the third one, we just saw him go downhill and just really couldn't communicate very well, didn't have any energy, had a lot of anger issues and they just kept saying he's got major depression, you need to medicate them. And I was like, ‘No, I believe we've got traumatic brain injury.' But I could not get them to give me a script for a SPECT scan or an fMRI. It was impossible. And I wasn't looking for the structure, because they'd look at an MRI and they'd say, ‘We don't see any damage.' Well, it wasn't the physical damage we're looking for, it was a functional damage that we were looking for. Lisa: Yeah, the blood flow. Yeah.  Dr Don: And once we discovered that that's what it was, we got him into hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and he started getting the blood flow into the areas that he needed to process what he was experiencing. And so if you can, you can imagine how difficult that would be, somebody saying, well just go over there and do that. And you don't have the ability to process it.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr Don: And so that frustration there is anger would be coming from just complete frustration.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr Don: That he just couldn't do it's like, you know, you ran in somebody and you couldn't lift your right leg.  Lisa: Yeah.  Dr Don: Right. And somebody said, ‘Just start running.' ‘I'm trying.'  Lisa: Yeah, yeah.  Dr Don: It would be very, very frustrating.  Lisa: Yeah, I mean, having worked with, you know, my mum with the brain injury for five and a half years, and I will tell you, man, that is so frustrating. And still, even though she's had well, you know, must be close to 280 or something hyperbaric sessions, and gone from being not much over a vegetative state to being now incredibly high functioning. But there are still some pieces missing that I cannot get to. Because obviously damage in the brain where parts of the brain cells are, have been killed off. And we, you know, I'm really having trouble with things like vestibular systems, so, or initiation of motivation, and things like that. And hyperbaric can do a heck of a lot, it can't fix areas of the brain that is actually dead. So I, you know, and we don't have SPECT scans over here, this is not available. We don't do them. Dr Don: Yeah. And they're hard to get here. I just don't understand them. Lisa: They're very frustrating, because they just are so powerful to understand. Because when you see you've got a problem in your head, that it's actual physical problem, then, you know, it takes away the blame the guilt, and you know, like, I was having this conversation with my brother, and I'm, you know, talking about Mum, and why isn't she doing this, that and the other end. And I said, ‘Because she's got brain damage, and we can't get her to do that thing.' ‘But she's normal now. She should be doing that now.' And I'm like, ‘She's much, much better. But in that part of the brain, I haven't been able to recover.' It is still a thing. That is the year. That is, I am, not that I'm giving up on it, but you know, there are just certain things that we haven't quite got the full thing back. Dr Don: The SPECT scan would show that. And you'd probably see it, or do they do fMRIs there? Lisa: I haven't checked out fMRI because yeah. Dr Don: Check out the fMRI.  Lisa: I only heard you say that the other day, and I didn't, I knew about SPECT scans and I knew about. Dr Hearts and all the SPECT scans that he's done, and Dr Daniel Amen and the brilliant work on it all and I've searched the country for it. And New Zealand there's, they've got one that does research stuff down in New Zealand and I think but it's it's nobody can get access to it. And it's just, oh gosh, this is just such a tragedy because then we can actually see what's going on. Because people have been put on antidepressants. They've been put on, you know, antipsychotic drugs. Some things that are perhaps not necessary. We could have, we could have dealt with it with other other ways, like hyperbaric and like with, you know, good nutrients, and even like your program that you do that would perhaps be the first line of defense before we grab to those types of things. But— Dr Don: The fMRI would definitely probably help you. So it's, you know, a functional MRI. Yeah. So it's going to give you blood flow. I just had a young boy come in, nine years, nine years old, having real issues. And anyway, his mum's gone everywhere, tried everything. And I said, have you done an fMRI? She says, oh we've done the MRIs. But, and I said, ‘'No, you need an fMRI.' She'd never heard of it. No, I was telling her about it.  Lisa: I hadn't even heard about it either. Dr Don: She didn't want to do SPECT scans, because SPECT scans are going to put something into your system, right? So she didn't want any kind of dyes, or any kind of those, you know, radioisotopes and stuff like that. So the fMRI is the other answer to try to get that. Lisa: Oh, okay. I'll see whether they've got that, they probably haven't got that either. I'd say, probably having Dark Ages with a lot of things. Dr Don: There's so many things like that, that would give you answers that they just don't do, which is surprising to me. Because when you think research, I mean, you find out how effective they are, why wouldn't they do it? You know, they just won't. Lisa: Oh, yeah, like one of those doctors who was on my podcast, and we're talking about intravenous vitamin C. And he said, I said, ‘Why is it taking so long when there's thousands of studies proving that it's really powerful when there's critical care conditions like sepsis, what I lost my father to?' And they said, ‘Yeah, because it's like turning a supertanker. There's just 20 years between what they know in the clinical studies to what's actually happening in the hospitals.' He says at least a 20-year lag. And this is just, when you live in New Zealand, probably a 30-year lag. We're just just behind the eight ball all the time, and all of these areas of what's actually currently happening.  I wanted to go back to your story with your daughter. Because she's got Crohn's disease, 14 years old, diagnosed, having to hit all these restrictions, and that she's going to have to manage it for the rest of her life. And she will never be well. What actually happened? Because we didn't actually finish that story. Dr Don: Well, like I said, so she had, you know, suffered for many years with that, and she's an actress, so any kind of stress would just aggravate it. So she would constantly be getting sick, because, you know, the more stress she has, the more inflammation she's creating, and then she would just get sick and go back to the hospital. So it has really affected her career. So that's when my wife said, ‘You've got to come up with some answers.' And so I did the research. And I really believe that it was a trauma as a child that continued. Because this is when I made the connection between unresolved trauma and inflammation. Inflammation is the response to trauma, whether it's physical or emotional. And the purpose of the inflammation is to protect the integrity of the cell. So the cell gets into an enlarged space. So it sort of puffs out, gets enlarged and hardened to protect it from getting penetrated from any kind of foreign invader.  Lisa: Wow.  Dr Don: So the idea behind it is, it's a temporary pause, because there's been an injury. So the idea is, we need to protect this area. So let's protect it and not let anything get into the cells while, until the danger has passed. So this temporary pause in the system, temporarily suspends the immune system, temporarily suspends the processing of the cell until the danger passes, and then the immune system can come in and clean up, right and take care of everything. The problem was, is that my daughter's trauma was never resolved. So those cells in her intestinal area stayed in an active cell danger response, in an inflamed response, because as far as it was concerned, she was continually being assaulted.  Lisa: Wow.  Dr Don: Because it kept looping through the trauma. Yeah. So once we took her through this program, and we resolved it so that we were able to stop her mind from constantly trying to protect her from this threat as a six year old, because your subconscious doesn't have any relationship to time. So if you think about something that happened to you when you were six, that's happening now. So in her mind, she was being hurt now. And until we got that updated, so it's like a computer, I say your brain is a computer. Your body is the printer.  Lisa: Oh, wow. That's a good analogy. Dr Don: And so if the brain has an error message, it's going to affect the printer.  Lisa: Yes.  Dr Don: So in her mind, that trauma kept on looping. As soon as we got that corrected, and her mind understood that there was no memory— the memory was still there, but the activation of our nervous system stopped, the inflammation went down. Lisa: See, that's it, like your body's calling for action. I've heard you say—  Dr Don: That's when it processes the emotion.  Lisa: Yeah. So when you think back to a traumatic event in your life, and you start crying and you're reacting as if you were right there in the in, which, you know, I can do in a split second with some of the trauma that you know, been through. That means that there is a high-definition in your brain, that those moments in time are just locked in there, and causing this, the stress response, still now. And that's why you're crying years later, for something that happened. And it's actually calling for action. It's telling you to do something. But of course, it's a memory you can't do something. Dr Don: So action required, you know I think that's the glitch, the error message that I talked about. So if you think about something that happened to you five years ago, and you start to feel fear, or cry, your heart starts pounding in your chest, your mind is saying ‘Run,' five years ago, because it's seen it in real time. Now, it's impossible to run five years ago, but your mind doesn't know that. So it's going to continue to try to get you to run. And so a lot of times when I talk to people who have depression, one of the things I asked, I'll ask them is, ‘What are you angry about?' And they'll go, ‘Well, no, I'm not angry, I'm depressed.' And I'll say, ‘What's happened is your mind has been calling for an action for many, many years, that was impossible to accomplish. But your mind doesn't know that and it keeps putting pressure on you. Do it, do it, do it. And because you don't do it, it's using these emotions to call for the action, it stops calling for the action, it shuts off the emotions.'  Lisa: Wow.  Dr Don: And so now depression is the absence of emotion. Lisa: Right. Dr Don: And so what is done is to protect you, it's shut down the request. Lisa: Everything down. So you go sort of numb, numb and apathetic and just— Dr Don: Because you can't do what it's been asking you to do. And so it's been calling for that action for many, many years. You don't do it. And so it says, ‘Well, this isn't working. So let's just shut the system off for a while. We won't ask for the action anymore.' And so that's why the people are depressed. And as soon as you get to the cause of it, what has your mind been asking you to do and you resolve it, then your mind stops calling for the action. And then the depression will lift. Lisa: You had a great example of a lady that you worked with. Rebecca Gregory, was it from the Boston— can you tell us that story? Because that was a real clear example of this exact thing. Dr Don: Yeah. So Rebecca came to see me five years after the Boston Marathon. She was three feet from the first bomb that went off. And so her son was sitting at her feet. So when the bomb went off, luckily she shielded him, but she took the brunt of the blast. She lost her left leg. And five years later, she's having post-traumatic stress, right? And she says, ‘I have nightmares every night. I heard about your program. I heard that you can clear this in four hours.' She says, ‘Iy sounds too good to be true.' But she says, ‘I'm completely desperate. So I'll try anything.' And so she came in and sat down. And what I explained to her as she started to talk is, I said, ‘Rebecca, do you know why you're shaking and crying as you're talking to me right now?' And she says, ‘Well, because I'm talking about what happened to me.' And I said, ‘That's right. But your mind thinks a bomb is about to go off. And it's trying to get you to run.' And I said, ‘But there's no bomb going off. It's just information about a bomb that went off. But your mind doesn't know that.' And that, she'd never heard before. And so what we did is over the next four hours, we got her mind to reset that high-definition data that had been stored about the bombing into a regular alpha brainwave state, right, where it's very safe and peaceful.  So she could recall it and she could talk about it without the emotion. Why? Because, now we're not going for happy, right? You know, it's still sad that it happened. But what we're trying to stop is that dysregulation of the fear, the call for the run. That stopped. And you can watch your testimonial on her on our site, and she just talked about, she goes, ‘I just couldn't believe that you could stop that.' Lisa: But in four hours.  Dr Don: And then now she can go out and she spoke all over the country. You know, she was a very high-profile lady who did a lot of great work in trying to help people. But she was still suffering with post-traumatic stress. Yeah, trying to help people who were experiencing post-traumatic stress.  Lisa: She knew what it was like.  Dr Don: She was living it. Same thing. I tell the story, it's another dramatic one was a US Army sniper who had to shoot and kill a 12 year old boy. Lisa: Oh, gosh.  Dr Don: And when

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This week Alyssa sits down with friend, colleague, and Neurofeedback (NFB) clinician Leanne Hershkowitz, LPC. Leanne and Alyssa dive into some of the limitations of modern psychotherapy and how neurofeedback can help to fill in the gaps.  Support the Podcast Follow Leanne on Instagram to learn more about NFB @theneurofeedbackgal Transcript:   Alyssa Scolari [00:23]: Hello, everybody. Welcome back for another episode of the Light After Trauma podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Scolari and we are talking about neurofeedback today. I'm so excited. You're probably so sick of hearing me say that, but I mean it when I say that this is seriously one of my favorite topics. We have with us here today, a dear friend of mine, Leanne Hershkowitz. Leanne's passion has always been working with adolescents and young adults. Combined with her passion for the outdoors, she became a wilderness instructor in 2004 for youth and adolescents in northern New Jersey. She then decided to take those combined passions a step further and pursue a career in counseling. Leanne received her undergraduate degree in psychology from the College of New Jersey. Woo woo. You know, I went to TCNJ too, right? Leanne Hershkowitz [01:17]: Mm-hmm. Alyssa Scolari [01:18]: And then she got her Master's degree and educational specialty at Seton Hall University. Leanne knew at this point that she wanted to find a place where she could hone her craft, while gaining more experience integrating innovative approaches. This took her to a residential treatment center in the Midwest where she specialized in the treatment of trauma, adoption and attachment through advanced training in dyadic developmental psychotherapy, as well as animal assisted and adventure therapy. Leanne has completed her certification as a therapy dog handler team with her cockapoo, Harley. Leanne has since furthered her understanding of neuropsychology and treatment of developmental trauma, as well as other diagnoses with the addition of neurofeedback to her practice. She is mentored by the one and only Sebern Fisher, author of The Fear-Driven Brain and renowned neurofeedback trauma specialist. She is currently pursuing her board certification in neurofeedback. Alyssa Scolari [02:22]: Leanne, welcome. Leanne Hershkowitz [02:25]: Hello. Thank you. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. Alyssa Scolari [02:29]: I am so happy to have you on here. To the listeners out there, Leanne has played a major role in my recovery from complex PTSD. And we'll definitely get into that, but I'm going to turn it over to you first. I guess my first question for you would be, what is, because you talked in your bio, you use the term developmental trauma, what exactly is developmental trauma? Leanne Hershkowitz [03:06]: It is an attempt to be a diagnosis by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the leading researchers in trauma. It is really designed to replace in some ways, complex PTSD, RAD, a host of diagnoses that really are not real great and don't really represent what people are going through. Developmental trauma is if you Google it, you can see the beta test version. It actually has enough research support to be a DSM diagnosis, but they told Bessel when they were putting out DSM-5, they have too many anxiety diagnosis, they don't need another one. Alyssa Scolari [03:44]: Really? Leanne Hershkowitz [03:45]: And so it was excluded. That, he talks about it. That is how bad our diagnostic manual is and don't get me off on that tangent, I'll go out for 20 minutes before you get me back about how useless the diagnostic system that we currently have is. But this has actually attempted a pretty decent diagnosis that has different categories of impact of trauma on relationships, arousal, which is mood regulation, not the sexual kind. Things like that. Development, and it's also historical about what the person's experienced. For laypeople, the developmental trauma is really about trauma during your developing years. Birth, actually in utero counts 100%, in utero all the way through to, you could say 12, but I really would take it to 18, 20. Your brain's not fully developed, I'm giving you air quotes, until 25. Within those developing years, but just know the younger it is, the greater the impact. That's developmental trauma. Alyssa Scolari [04:49]: It's basically this form of or another way of saying complex trauma. Leanne Hershkowitz [04:55]: Exactly. It's just a flushed out diagnosis that's not about necessarily flashbacks. It's about kind of the whole constellation of symptoms that people with complex trauma tend to see. Alyssa Scolari [05:07]: Yes. Right. And the difference being, and for the listeners out there, if you want to learn more about developmental trauma or complex trauma, head back to some of the earlier episodes, I think it was maybe episode either two or three, where I break down kind of what exactly complex trauma is, but it's so different in the sense that somebody can experience one traumatic event and develop PTSD, but it's a whole different ballgame when you have significant, long lasting trauma in your developmental years. It fundamentally changes. Leanne Hershkowitz [05:43]: Changes your brain. Alyssa Scolari [05:44]: Exactly, exactly. Hence neurofeedback. One of the questions I have for you is how did you personally stumble upon neurofeedback? Leanne Hershkowitz [05:58]: I was first introduced to neurofeedback when I worked at CALO in Missouri, Change Academy Lake of the Ozarks, which is now owned by a giant conglomerate. But when I worked there, it was just one tiny little company with 20 students. And they had neurofeedback there, but the clinicians didn't do it. They had technicians who were supervised doing it as a separate thing. And so I kind of had a rough idea that it was there. We had kind of always said like, "Oh, when we get some downtime, I want to try it." But if you've ever worked in residential or been to a facility of such, there basically is never any downtime. You're always working and working too many hours. I didn't really, I just kind of had an awareness of it. And then I got very lucky that when I was leaving CALO and coming back to New Jersey, I made contact with a clinician named Kate Langhart and she said, "Hey, you want to come share some office space? I'll help you get started with your own practice." Leanne Hershkowitz [06:55]: That's a whole nother story how I became a business owner when I never planned on it, but she did neurofeedback. And the more she told me about it, the more excited I got, the more I felt with the students I worked with that I was trying to regulate their nervous system, their emotional regulation in our sessions with my own nervous system. And that was burning me out too. I was exhausted from it because you do regulate your children that way, but you're really not meant to regulate 25 adults or young adults that way every week. It's running your motor too much. And so I was experiencing that fatigue, but it also wasn't very effective because it only really worked when they were in the room with me. She was like, "Come on, you got to try it. You got to try it." And so eventually I went and did my introductory course and just, it's been a love story ever since. Alyssa Scolari [07:52]: I feel like that's exactly what it is with neurofeedback. You and I met probably coming up almost on a year because we had a mutual client and we had. Leanne Hershkowitz [08:09]: Mutual family. Alyssa Scolari [08:09]: Suffice it to day, yeah mutual family. Exactly. And there was something that you had mentioned to me when we were talking about it, this concept of neurofeedback, I had never heard of it before. Absolutely didn't know a single thing about it. And you had told me, this was the first time that we met. You were like, "You need to go and read Sebern Fisher's, The Fear-Driven Brain. And I was like, "Huh, I'll do that." I downloaded it on Audible and spent, because the book is so dense. It took me a while. Leanne Hershkowitz [08:49]: Wonderful though. Alyssa Scolari [08:51]: Wonderful. Took me a while to get through it. But with every passing hour that I listened to that book, I became more and more excited. And there was something inside of my body that was like, this is the piece that has been missing to my treatment and my recovery from trauma. And yeah, just kind of like you, it's that love at first sight. Something I stumbled upon thanks to you. And I guess, could you explain, because I still have a hard time doing this and obviously I don't have my certification in it at all, but could you explain, what is neurofeedback? I find that to be such a hard question. Leanne Hershkowitz [09:34]: Usually the way that I start explaining it is talk about biofeedback because that's a concept that most people have been loosely exposed to, which is the idea that you can change your heart rate and your breathing rate at any point in time. If you're given the feedback, you know those little finger things they put on you, the doctors or the hospital that shows you your pulse? Alyssa Scolari [09:58]: The pulse ox. Leanne Hershkowitz [09:59]: How fast your heart is beating. Yeah. You can do it with your oxygen saturation as well. You could actually do it with your physical body temperature in a specific location, too. These are all methods of biofeedback. One of them is heart rate variability, which teaches you to regulate your heart rate and breath. But meditation, all of that is around the heart and the breath. And if you get the feedback, okay, my heart's beating a 150 beats per minute, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. If you sit there and take slow, deep breaths, your heart rate will decrease and you can control your body. Leanne Hershkowitz [10:35]: The important piece to that is heart rate is technically an unconscious function. If you stop thinking about your heart, it still beats all on its own. That's the difference between the brain and the mind. The brain controls things without our conscious awareness and will continue to do things, but the mind is our conscious thinking and therapy really targets the mind. But truthfully, most of what we deal with, especially in trauma is controlled by the brain, the unconscious parts that we don't have access through through talk. Just like you can learn to use the feedback of seeing it on the screen. Okay, my heart rate's a 150, I want to make it 90. Leanne Hershkowitz [11:18]: The same we can do for your brain. We put sensors in specific places to target specific brain parts, and that piece gets very complicated. But then we put feedback on the screen and your job is to change the screen, change your feedback. You can think of it like graph bars. You want to make them smaller or bigger depending on what we're trying to do. And that's actually you changing your own brain. Now it's not as a conscious process to do that. You actually just sit and relax and let your brain kind of do the work because it wants the reward. It uses learning principles that way. And then your brain, which is ever seeking kind of a positive state, will try to figure out how do I get the reward? And it will make the internal changes to get there. It does always help to relax and take deep breaths because generally that's what we're trying to encourage. But yeah, hopefully that's a good start to explaining it. Alyssa Scolari [12:13]: Yeah. It's like, I can't remember if this was something that you had said or if this was something that I had read in Sebern's book, but it's like, there are limitations. Leanne Hershkowitz [12:23]: Of course. Alyssa Scolari [12:24]: I think we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the limitations of psychotherapy, modern psychotherapy. There's so many limitations on it. Just one of them being... Leanne Hershkowitz [12:34]: Outcomes haven't changed in 40 years. We've done thousands of hours of research and our outcomes are no better than they were 40 years ago. Alyssa Scolari [12:44]: Right. There's no real progression in the fields. It kind of just is what it is and we've stalled in terms of psychotherapy. And while it can certainly be helpful. Leanne Hershkowitz [12:57]: It gets stuck. Alyssa Scolari [12:58]: It does definitely some people need to be in therapy for the rest of their lives. It can be expensive. It can be time consuming, it can also be retraumatizing. And it's so much work on, like you said earlier, the therapist, because a lot of what, especially when you're dealing with developmental trauma, the brain is formed in a way where you grow up not really learning how to regulate your nervous system. The job of the therapist is to co-regulate and help you, help you regulate. But when we're seeing 25 people a week roundabout, it's well, what happens to our nervous system as therapists? Leanne Hershkowitz [13:43]: Right. And you're not in the developmental stage where co-regulation makes as much of an impact. I think it does still make an impact, but co-regulation is the developmental task of toddlers. You are no longer a toddler. One, your system is much larger and has much more complex problems so me regulating a toddler does not tax my nervous system in any way that it does. And I know this, I do it with my niece all the time. It doesn't tax my nervous system in any way that co-regulating a full grown adult does. And it's not as effective because you're not in a developmental stage. You're a full grown adult. Your brain is using it in the moment. Leanne Hershkowitz [14:25]: I don't think it really absorbs it in a sense that it helps you change your brain. Maybe over thousands and thousands of experiences, sure. But I don't want to say it's futile. I don't think it totally is, but its ability to create an opening for the brain and the attachment and regulation system to change with talk therapy alone is quite long winded. But what I love about neurofeedback is how it pairs with talk therapy because I can get a lot more done in talk therapy when neurofeedback is the regulating agent and I'm just the helper. And I love that pairing. Alyssa Scolari [15:06]: Yes, because it makes it so much easier on your nervous system as the therapist. But it also provides personally, it provided quicker relief than what I was getting in therapy, years of therapy. But then after one neurofeedback session, I could feel a change. Leanne Hershkowitz [15:33]: When you came to my house that first time. Alyssa Scolari [15:35]: When I came to your house, that first time, which was the best decision that I ever made. I think neurofeedback itself because of what it looks like, the sensors on the brain, people have concerns about it. People, it kind of looks a little bit scary. For whatever reason, the therapist I had at the time was just like, "Don't do that." Obviously I'm no longer with that therapist. And as a disclaimer, if any therapist tells you not to do something, get up, walk out of their office or shut the computer and don't ever look back because therapists don't tell you what to do, but that's for another day. For whatever reason, that therapist was like, "Don't do it." And I was like, but something in my gut was like, I really want to do it so I went and I did it. And so the first experience I had, I think what did I do? Six minutes? Leanne Hershkowitz [16:28]: Yep. I think that's all we did. It could have even been three. Alyssa Scolari [16:30]: Right, so six minutes. You might've started me at three because you want to start small because you don't know, everybody reacts differently. And I came home. One of my triggers is car accidents. I have had a lot of traumatic car accidents in my life, have lost a lot of people, been in bad car accidents. And typically any time that I even come close, if a car gets too close to me, I go into a full blown panic attack. And I remember I was driving home. I was on the highway and somebody almost drove me off the road and I was appropriately alarmed, but I didn't go into this place of, I have to pull over, I'm shaking. I can't feel my limbs. My heart is racing. I am sobbing. None of that happened. And that was the first time that ever happened to me. And that was three, maybe six minutes of neurofeedback after years. Leanne Hershkowitz [17:37]: In a very particular place. Alyssa Scolari [17:40]: Yes. In a very particular place. Right. That's just an example of what neurofeedback can do. Now can you kind of talk a little bit, and I don't know if this would be too complex, but about the different spots on the brain? Leanne Hershkowitz [17:57]: Sure. Where we put sensors and how we pick training stuff is very, very complicated and we all have different approaches, different ways. And what I did that worked really well for you, somebody else could have done something slightly different, it could have worked very well too. In a lot of ways, almost anything we do in neurofeedback tends to work, but the places we choose on the head have to do with what networks and what brain parts we're trying to affect. And what we know about trauma is it's the base of the brain. It's the limbic system and the sensory systems and actually our brainstem systems as well, that are so heavily affected. Leanne Hershkowitz [18:41]: Dr. Ruth Lanius has kind of pioneering a lot of the research. She's studying it under the heading of PTSD, but that includes chronic PTSD and truthfully developmental trauma. Her research is great to look into, to learn more about those brain parts. And so where we put the sensors depends what we're trying to affect. And one of the things that Sebern Fisher, she didn't create it, but she has really pioneered it, is inion ridge training. Now that's I-N-I-O-N not Indian. I'm not being racist. It's inion, promise. Alyssa Scolari [19:14]: That's what I said the first time. I was like, "Oh, the Indian Ridge." And you were like, "No, no, no. Don't say that." Leanne Hershkowitz [19:22]: No. I make the statement every time I say it now, because if you don't see it in writing, it does sound like I'm saying Indian. Alyssa Scolari [19:30]: It does. Leanne Hershkowitz [19:31]: But not enunciating. It's inion. And it is for the inion ridge on the back of your head, which is a biomarker. It's part of your skull. If you are to imagine holding a baby's head, that is where your hand is and that is no accident. That regulating piece of the mother's hand on the back of a baby's head is extremely important for development. And it is symbolically and actually, but that is also where your cerebellum is. You can also through neurofeedback, kind of get towards the periaqueductal gray and the superior colliculus, which are all involved in your fear systems and connected to your sensory input systems. When something sets you off, like somebody swerves into your lane, what we now know is your sensory systems immediately lock into your fear systems. It bypasses all the other normal systems and goes right, we have a crisis. But if we can get those systems to calm down and be more regulated, you can have a more normal top of the brain. Leanne Hershkowitz [20:39]: Your top part of the brain is your thinking and logic for the most part. You can have a more normal response because the bottom part of your brain hasn't hijacked the system. And that's why Sebern's book is called The Fear-Driven Brain because that system is designed, rightfully so, that when it thinks there's threat to life or limb or psychological threat, we now understand, it hijacks your entire brain and it drives the show. But it also destroys your body in the process because all of the systems that take over during fight or flight are very taxing on our bodies and our brains, our immune system, everything. Our digestion, particularly as well. When it hijacks and it stays that way, which is chronic PTSD, you have fallout in almost every major system in your body. Leanne Hershkowitz [21:29]: To calm that, which is inion ridge training, can have a very fast and very profound effect. And it is one of my favorite training spots to do, but we also train things like the temporal lobes, which are kind of mood related. We chain, I'm pointing at the temporal lobes like you know what? You can see me. It's above your ears. Also, top of the head, front of the brain. We train all over the place depending on what we're trying to do. But for those of us who do work a lot with developmental trauma, chronic PTSD, we're really focused heavily on that foundation, the fear system and the limbic, our reptilian brain, as it's called sometimes. Alyssa Scolari [22:12]: When somebody starts neurofeedback, is it something like therapy that they have to do for the rest of their lives? Or is there an end to it? Or does it differ from person to person? Leanne Hershkowitz [22:32]: It definitely differs from person to person. We are still gaining the tools in neurofeedback to fully understand what we're even doing in the brain, because neurofeedback is putting sensors on the skull, on your head. We're not inside your brain. It's like putting a microphone on the roof of a church and figuring out what's happening inside the church from the roof or the side doors or the windows. You get what I'm saying. Now with fMRIs and diffuser tensor images, we're starting to get a picture of the inside of the brain before and after neurofeedback. Leanne Hershkowitz [23:10]: Dr. Ruth Lanius does a study on alpha down training, which I get into more on my Instagram. And she was able to do before and after. And what she found out was that training actually affects an entire neural network that we've never known it did. We only know what symptoms it changes. We know when we train at inion ridge that we get vagal nerve function improvements, we get emotional regulation, we get lower fear responses. We do sometimes get grief, but controlled grief responses. We know what it usually affects those spots and what brain parts we think we're affecting. But until more fMRI research is done, we don't actually know what we're affecting. Now I'm trying to remember your question. God, I was going round about to it and then I forgot it. Alyssa Scolari [24:01]: It's fine. I was asking, is there a endpoint to it. Leanne Hershkowitz [24:05]: Oh longterm. Yes. Leanne Hershkowitz [24:07]: Yeah, yeah. Is this something that people have to do for the rest of their lives? Leanne Hershkowitz [24:11]: Right now people do tend to probably do more than they will 10 years from now, because in 10 years we will know so much more about what we're doing that we're going to tailor what we do very individualized medicine that it's going to work better and faster. And we're on that road already. Right now though, it usually takes people, like you ended up getting lucky that the first neurofeedback person you met was one who happens to do the specialty for what you were struggling in. But other people don't. Sometimes they go to a practitioner who does lots of just ADHD and regular anxiety, regular depression. Not that those can't have challenges too, but it's a very different brain. And they'll have an experience where it can actually make them worse, not better because the person doesn't understand the traumatized brain. Leanne Hershkowitz [24:57]: And so sometimes it takes people two or three tries, practitioners to get the right approach. And then there are complex conditions that neurofeedback can affect. There are things more complicated. In a general sense, it's typically if you're doing kind of run of the mill normal neurofeedback training for developmental trauma, complex PTSD, you're looking at probably a year to two years of really solid training to get to a very good place and that's more cost effective with home use than in the office. I'm working with Dr. Rob Coben to do, what's called multivariate coherence training, which takes a brain map so there's more upfront cost, but it works in 12 to 18 sessions and you might need two or three brain maps and rounds, but that's about, you do it twice a week so that's less than a year profound changes. Alyssa Scolari [25:57]: Yes. I have a client right now who she did the brain map, which is quite literally what it sounds like. It's the map of your brain that tells them exactly kind of what work needs to be done and what parts of the brain. And she has been doing it for less than a year, twice a week. And she, in terms of her nervous system, I see zero anxiety. Zero anxiety. Got out of an abusive relationship. Leanne Hershkowitz [26:31]: Awesome. Alyssa Scolari [26:33]: Just life changing. Really what you're saying is it absolutely depends. Depends on the clinician. Leanne Hershkowitz [26:38]: It does. Alyssa Scolari [26:39]: Depends on the person, depends on everything. Leanne Hershkowitz [26:42]: Depends on the complexity of the issue. It also depends on comorbidities with physiological issues. I've been battling toxic mold exposure and a tick parasite and that has really complicated things. Heavy metal exposure, different things in your environment, diet, all that stuff can also slow down the progression because your immune system is active in your brain. The old thinking that your immune system does not go into your brain, it's not true. New research indicates your immune system goes in your brain. What's happening in your body deeply affects the ability for your brain to regulate and heal itself. Alyssa Scolari [27:22]: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And the more that I've learned about neurofeedback and all the ways it has helped me and it truly has helped me from my sinus symptoms, to being able to get off all of the medication that I was on, to just all of the flashbacks, it has helped so much. The one thing I always wonder and I think I have some of my own theories about this, but why is this not a more, and I think we might've discussed, we might have the same exact theory because we might've talked about this before, but why in the hell isn't this blasted everywhere? Leanne Hershkowitz [28:14]: Well, the conspiracy theory is is because pharmaceutical companies run our industry and this makes them no money. But somebody is going to come for my head for saying that one out loud, but I'm going to say it anyway, because it needs to be said. And I'm not important enough for anybody to come for me. Alyssa Scolari [28:33]: Go ahead. Leanne Hershkowitz [28:34]: I think that's the easy answer. It's not the full answer. We also don't have the technology to prove what we're doing, which makes people a little scared of it. Alyssa Scolari [28:44]: Right. Because a lot of it is mostly theoretical right now. Leanne Hershkowitz [28:47]: Yeah. We have EEG, which is reading the brainwaves, reading the electrical activity from the top of the church, the top of the head or all over the head, but we can't go cutting people's brains open. And the double blind kind of gold standard is very expensive so our research studies tend to miss the mark. We are getting there like Dr. Ruth Lanius has a lab in Canada, which is funded so they're able to do double blind control studies, but that's very rare in neurofeedback research because my software company, the EEG Store is very small. They don't have research money. In fact, they don't even have any funders. They just have clinicians buy their stuff. That's how they get money. Who's going to fund a double blind research study of a 1,000 participants? Nobody. The field doesn't have that kind of money and we don't have the backers get that support. Leanne Hershkowitz [29:43]: Insurance companies, it's a crapshoot whether they'll reimburse for it. Certainly very rarely covered in network if ever. Out of network's a crapshoot. I think these obstacles to getting kind of official recognition, make it harder to get it out to people. And then implementing it requires clinicians to go from psychology, like me, to applied neuroscience and a lot of applied neuroscience. And that's a big jump and a lot of clinicians are not excited to do it. And there's no manualized approach. I shouldn't say that. There are some, this is personalized medicine. It shouldn't be manualized. It needs to go through a human brain, not so much a computer system. Alyssa Scolari [30:29]: Right, right. It can't be manualized. Leanne Hershkowitz [30:32]: There's too much to take in. A computer just can't do the work that a human can do. Alyssa Scolari [30:38]: Exactly. Leanne Hershkowitz [30:39]: That is the list of problems. And I could probably come up with some more that makes this not more widely available. It's also expensive. The equipment's not cheap. Alyssa Scolari [30:49]: Right, right. I was going to say, that's the other thing is it can be rather expensive. But I always look at it as like, when you look at what you could potentially be saving in therapy costs. Especially if you see an out of network provider, then it's kind of a big upfront cost. But at the end of the day is saving you tons of money in what could potentially be decades. Leanne Hershkowitz [31:11]: I ran the numbers. Alyssa Scolari [31:13]: Ah, you have. Okay. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it saves so much money. Leanne Hershkowitz [31:21]: And I just ran the numbers for in home use versus in the clinic, in the office use and that's a huge savings. Over one year, it's mild savings. Over two, three years, depending on how you end up using it, it's huge savings. And then if you're not having to go see a therapist more than once in a while, that's another huge savings on top of it. Plus medication that you're saving on, potentially other medical bills, all that stuff. Alyssa Scolari [31:47]: Right. Because for me, as I started to do neurofeedback, I was able to come off all of the medications, the psychotropic medications that I was on because my brain started to finally fall into place. And so I haven't needed the medication anymore. And I just want to clarify, when you say at home use, what you mean is it's a possibility for people to find a clinician who will authorize them purchasing the equipment and will see them throughout it. This is not something people can go out and just buy on their own. Leanne Hershkowitz [32:32]: With the system I use, that's correct. There are systems you can buy yourself and try to DIY it. If you have trauma, I strongly don't recommend that. It will most likely not go very well. But yes, you do for in home use with trauma, you want to be whatever system I use EEGer, but that doesn't have to be, there are other systems too. You want to work with a provider who has spent their career understanding the effects of trauma on the brain, because the ways it goes haywire are going to be worse than what you're already dealing with. Yes, definitely. It's not a DIY at home. It's a clinician who sets you up and checks in with you and make sure everything's going well and make changes. You just do the actual, put the sensors on and stuff at your own home. And you can do it two to three times a week in your own home rather than having to come into the office and pay for my time two to three times a week. Alyssa Scolari [33:29]: Right. Now, so for the listeners, if somebody is listening at home and they're like, okay, this sounds amazing. I really want to do this. What's the first step that they take? Do they just kind of Google neurofeedback clinician near me? Is that what they would do? Leanne Hershkowitz [33:46]: That's the biggest gap. It's one of the big gaps in our field right now, especially in trauma is we don't have a Listserv of trauma clinicians, trauma informed clinicians, which I'm actually starting to work on a Google form that everybody I know, and we can pass it on, can add their information in so that, that can be available. Right now, it's a lot of word of mouth. If you're in New Jersey, you can certainly contact me. The hard part is in the US we can't practice in states we're not licensed in, not for trauma so that makes things extra complicated. Leanne Hershkowitz [34:21]: You can go on bcia.org. And that's a listing of board certified neurofeedback providers. And you can ask them about their experience with trauma. Are they aware of Sebern Fisher and try to gauge their responses. As a trauma informed clinician, if somebody says, "Oh, I don't believe in her approach. And that stuff is bunk." I'd go somewhere else, they should at least have an acknowledgement and understanding that she knows her stuff. I've only run into that once, but you never know. That EEGer had a clinician listing as well. But over the pandemic, they're trying to revamp a bunch of stuff so that's not up and running right now. I will be honest that that is one of the biggest challenges. Alyssa Scolari [35:10]: That's one of the hurdles. Leanne Hershkowitz [35:13]: We're not an organized field. Alyssa Scolari [35:16]: Well, it's still so new. It's still so new. I can't wait to get started. Leanne Hershkowitz [35:21]: It's been around for 30 years. Alyssa Scolari [35:24]: Yeah. But you know what? How long has psychotherapy been around? It's been 40 years since we've made any kind of progress in psychotherapy. Leanne Hershkowitz [35:33]: Well psychotherapy has been around since Freud. I don't know, did it come before Freud? How long ago was that? Alyssa Scolari [35:39]: I don't know. Leanne Hershkowitz [35:43]: But 30 is still relatively new in this world, but I truly think it's that our generations, us, oh, I hate to say I'm a millennial because I really am at the very cusp of that. But we're comfortable with technology. It's not weird to stick things on our heads. We've been poked and prodded and tested and we stick phones and all sorts of devices on ourselves all the time. Alyssa Scolari [36:04]: Yeah, we're cool with that. Leanne Hershkowitz [36:04]: Why not fix our brains that way? I think that it's not hijacking your medical treatment. There's a term for biomedical devices that we're all comfortable with now. I think it's biohacking ourselves is what it's called. And millennials and younger are very much more comfortable with that than other generations. Alyssa Scolari [36:25]: Yeah. Yeah. We're more comfortable with technology. One of the things that you also do is you create a lot of free videos for people to be able to go and learn more about neurofeedback. If people want to find some of the stuff that you do, where can they find you at? Leanne Hershkowitz [36:44]: I'm @theneurofeedbackgal. You can also put my name into Instagram and both my personal and my professional will pop up. I can only accept you on my professional. My personal is only for people who have met me IRL, but you can put my name in or you can put @theneurofeedbackgal. Alyssa Scolari [37:06]: Awesome. And I will link the Instagram handle in the show notes. For those of you who are interested, you really should go and give Leanne a follow on her Instagram because the videos that she does are really incredible and they're very, very helpful. Thank you for sharing what I consider to be one of the biggest secrets to healing developmental trauma that people don't talk about. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Leanne Hershkowitz [37:35]: I 100% agree. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. I will talk about neurofeedback forever and ever to anybody who will listen because not enough people know and many people need it. Alyssa Scolari [37:46]: I know I love your passion for it. Alyssa Scolari [37:50]: Thanks for listening, everyone. For more information, please head over to lightaftertrauma.com or you can also follow us on social media. On Instagram we are @lightaftertrauma and on Twitter it is @lightafterpod. And if you're on Facebook, please be sure to join our Facebook group. It is a private community where trauma survivors are able to connect and chat with one another. That Facebook group is called Light After Trauma so just look us up on Facebook and be sure to join. Lastly, please head over to at patreon.com/lightaftertrauma to support our show. We are asking for $5 a month, which is the equivalent to a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Please head on over. Again, that's patreon.com/lightaftertrauma. Thank you and we appreciate your support. Speaker 3 [38:41]: [singing].

The media is increasingly bombarding us with reports of advances in neuroscience which claim all sorts of amazing feats, like allowing us to read our thoughts and intentions. It sounds like neurobabble. Most of these reports though are either based on bad science, reach false conclusion, or are based on conceptual misunderstanding of how our psychology works. To be fair, much of this is manufactured by the popular media but, unfortunately, some of it comes from the neuroscience community itself. So, what information can we really get from fMRIs? As with the misunderstanding of what genes are (like whether there is a God or a conservative gene), are there really parts of the brain dedicated to categories of thoughts like some of these reports claim? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the ethical implications of this neurobabble, should we arrest people who we can tell, based on this research, will be committing a crime? Sped up the speakers by [1.1752873563218391, 1.0]

In honour of Election Day in the United States, we're diving into a study that analyzes how the brain's reaction to political, non-political, and exaggerated statements affects us as copywriters. Not interested in politics? Don't worry, we'll be using the study's findings to discover how WE as copywriters and marketers can BUILD TRUST instead of evoking negative emotions in our clients.  In this research study, participant brain activity was monitored through fMRIs while they read different types of statements. Researchers found that while reading these statements, participants' brains treated unfamiliar or disagreeable statements as a threat to their identity which caused anxiety and triggered their fight or flight response (just like how a physical threat would!).  As copywriters, we know the 2 elements that help build overall brand trust: a consistent brand voice and brand story. If your brand story is unbelievable, your prospects are going to think that you're off in la-la land. Even a hint of deception fires up the amygdala and destroys the existing trust you have with your clients. How can we make sure our brand voices and stories put our clients at ease?    Listen to the full episode to find out how consistency builds trust and trust builds sales!   What To Look For In This Episode: [00:11:50] The brain treats a challenging belief as a threat or harm to our body. [00:15:00] In our copy, we need to learn to alleviate any fear through implementing a consistent brand voice and brand story. [00:19:11] 3 things to keep in mind in your brand story if you want to keep your clients' amygdalae from firing.  [00:21:22] Your brand story and your origin story are not the same thing- your brand story is about your customers!  Journal Article: Neural correlates of maintaining one's political beliefs in the face of counterevidence https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589   Kaplan, J., Gimbel, S. & Harris, S. Neural correlates of maintaining one's political beliefs in the face of counterevidence. Sci Rep 6, 39589 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep39589   Resources: Brand Voice Template [geoffkullman.com/brandvoice]   Got a question you want answered on the podcast? Awesome! Send it to podcast@geoffkullman.com. Connect with Geoff: Instagram: instagram.com/geoffkullman Twitter: twitter.com/geoffkullman Inquiries: geoffkullman.com    Subscribe To The Podcast Here: Do you have friends, colleagues, or clients who would find The Psychology of Copywriting podcast valuable? Spread the word!   *** EPISODE CREDITS: If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.   Danny helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com  

On this show we have talked a lot about functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. We have talked about how it lets us measure the water in the brain and watching the blood flowing to neurons that are working hard and in need of more oxygen and sugars. But what if we could do more? In this episode of Water Cooler Neuroscience, sponsored by the Biochemical Society in the UK, we are talking with Alan Jasanoff about making fMRIs be able to see the neurochemicals in our brains. We are normally blind to where dopamine or serotonin is in the brain when we are doing an fMRI scan but now we can see the changes in real time. Want to know more? Then tune in.

Getting into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine can be a tight fit for just one person. Now, researchers interested in studying face-to-face interactions are attempting to squeeze a whole other person into the same tube, while taking functional MRI (fMRI) measurements. Staff news writer Kelly Servick joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the kinds of questions simultaneous fMRIs might answer.  Also this week, Sarah talks with Igor Grossman, the director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, about his group's Science Advances paper on public perceptions of the difference between something being rational and something being reasonable. This week's episode was edited by Podigy. Ads on this week's show: KiwiCo Listen to previous podcasts About the Science Podcast [Image: Amanda/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook] Authors: Kelly Servick, Sarah Crespi Transcript link:  https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/SciencePodcast_200110.pdf

Getting into a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine can be a tight fit for just one person. Now, researchers interested in studying face-to-face interactions are attempting to squeeze a whole other person into the same tube, while taking functional MRI (fMRI) measurements. Staff news writer Kelly Servick joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the kinds of questions simultaneous fMRIs might answer.  Also this week, Sarah talks with Igor Grossman, the director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, about his group's Science Advances paper on public perceptions of the difference between something being rational and something being reasonable. This week's episode was edited by Podigy. Ads on this week's show: KiwiCo Listen to previous podcasts About the Science Podcast [Image: Amanda/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook] Authors: Kelly Servick, Sarah Crespi Transcript link:  https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/SciencePodcast_200110.pdf See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Getting into an MRI machine can be a tight fit for just one person. Now, researchers interested in studying face-to-face interactions are attempting to squeeze a whole other person into the same tube, while taking functional MRI (fMRI) measurements. Staff Writer Kelly Servick joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the kinds of questions simultaneous fMRIs might answer. Also this week, Sarah talks with Igor Grossman, director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, about his group’s Science Advances paper on public perceptions of the difference between something being rational and something being reasonable. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Read a transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast

Comedian, TV host and author of the upcoming memoir My Life as a Goddess Guy Branum (@guybranum) returns to the podcast to talk with Andy and Matt about shipping stories, his knowledge of international law, legal murders in Yellowstone, how dingos changed shrubs, shark pathogens, Nanaimo bars, dogs in fMRIs, Matt in an fMRI, 19th Century female mathematicians, senior wranglers and British TV shows you should be watching on YouTube.

Dr. Mark McLaughlin, board-certified neurosurgeon, speaker, and Hall of Fame collegiate wrestler, joins our show in this special episode of the Elite Man Podcast! In today’s episode Dr. McLaughlin talks about his fascinating work operating on the brain and the myriad conditions affecting it, how to improve the health of your brain, and how to perform optimally under the highest levels of stress. He also shares with us his top tips for stress management and using stress to your advantage in virtually any area of life. If you’re wondering how to improve your brain health, get ahold of your stress levels, and perform at an elite level no matter how stressful a situation may be, check this episode out now! *Download this episode now and subscribe to our channel to get more of these amazing interviews! In our episode we go over: How Dr. Mark McLaughlin became a renowned neurosurgeon and why he thrives in the exciting nature of this job The key difference between neurologists and neurosurgeons and the specific conditions that Dr. McLaughlin treats What happens in the brain during a stroke, and the two main strokes - the ischemic stroke and the hemorrhagic stroke How to improve the physical structure of your brain and thus its health The easiest ways to damage your brain and what you should avoid or dramatically minimize Reshaping blood vessels and the structure of them The power of exercise in keeping your brain healthy and vibrant What it was like for Dr. McLaughlin to work with a true pioneer in brain science, Dr. Peter Jannetta How The Jannetta Protocol was ingeniously formulated The importance of stress in your life and why you actually need it How to harness the power of stress and use it to your advantage The meaning of “Always place a drain” and how this applies to neurosurgery, but also everyday life Having a safety valve and the reason why this can dramatically help you perform better and reduce your stress The importance of “Never cutting what you can’t see” Seeing through a problem or stressful situation and understanding all the aspects to it beforehand The hard lesson I had to learn about literally not cutting what you can’t see “Never worrying about a patient alone” and how this philosophy can be profoundly applied to any challenge you face Sharing your problems with others and bouncing your ideas off them What this does to your psyche and mentality towards facing the problem The term cognitive dominance and what it means Where Dr. McLaughlin’s cognitive dominance stems from and how he was able to cultivate it Our growing ability to actually tangibly see fear and courage in fMRIs and new, developing technologies The intimate relationship between courage and fear and how to master both Check out Dr. Mark on: Website: markmclaughlinmd.com Twitter: twitter.com/MMcLaughlinMD *Our Women's Multi Vitamin is now available. Packed with 28 powerful nutrients this multi vitamin for women can be the single greatest gift for your wife, girlfriend, mother, or even beloved granny, and can ensure she's at her best in all areas of life! And not to mention, for our female listeners of course, the perfect gift for yourself! Our brand new women’s multi contains the complete A-Z formula of nutritional essentials to keep women at their very best. Yup, every single vitamin and mineral women need, and all in the finest forms for superior absorption and bioavailability. Order one today for your loved one.  Go to Elitelifenutrition.com/womensmulti to order now. That’s Elitelifenutrition.com/womensmulti. And, while you're at it, check out all of our other fantastic Elite Life Nutrition products too by going directly to EliteLifeNutrition.com/products. *Hey are you following me on social media? If not, quit being a psychopath and follow me now! Seriously, I post regularly throughout the week and love giving behind-the-scenes updates on the daily life of an Elite Man. I’m currently most active on Instagram and Facebook, so follow me on both. Get day-to-day updates on book recommendations, biohacking tools, elite man know-how, and all other glorious content I probably shouldn’t post about but do anyways. Whether pics of me trying to conquer the world in my personal life or whether cutting edge research on the cures to all disease, keep up to date and have a few laughs by following either, or more preferably BOTH, my social media pages now. I’m @justinstenstrom on both Instagram and Facebook so it should be very easy to find me. That’s JUSTINSTENSTROM on both these social media platforms. Follow me now and see exactly what I’m up to throughout the week. Get your daily dose of Elite Man entertainment AND information Sunday-Saturday. Instagram and Facebook @justinstenstrom! *Have you joined the Elite Man Newsletter yet? If not, get on it now! Go to EliteManMagazine.com/newsletter and sign up to get special Elite Man content not seen nor heard anywhere else. Get all of our bonus podcast information, sneak peaks into upcoming shows, behind-the-scenes content, special offers, and exclusive Elite Man updates you won’t find anywhere else. I’m telling you if you’re not on our newsletter yet you’re missing out. Go to EliteManMagazine.com/newsletter and become a true member of the Elite Man Community. I look forward to speaking soon. EliteManMagazine.com/newsletter.

Today we talk about FMRIs reaching people in a vegetative state, Cassini data, fidget cubes & spinners, time travel & the 4th dimension, an american bobsledder passes, and respect to combat camera. Links from this episode: - Contacting Stranded Minds - NASA Spacecraft Dives Between Saturn and Its Rings - Fidget-spinner craze is sweeping the U.S., but some schools say they're distractions - Fidget Spinners on Amazon * - Fidget Cubes on Amazon * - Time Travel Is Mathematically Possible With New Mind-Boggling Model - how-to-imagine-the-tenth-dimension - LDS Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual: Section 30 - Olympic champion bobsledder Steven Holcomb found dead at 37 - Army combat photographer snapped one last picture — seconds before an explosion killed her - Joint Combat Camera Center

Hot on the heels of her recent Tonight Show appearance, comedian Candice Thompson (@jokesbyCandice) joins Matt and Andy to talk about Punching Henry, the movie Matt is in with Henry Phillips, ASMR, Richard Simmons, anti-Brit racism, what zoo animals taste like, Neanderthals’ medication, mini-pigs and films about them, iCondoms, 3D printing medical supplies and pizzas, swimming pool pee and dog fMRIs.

Ginger Campbell, M.D., is an emergency physician whose long-standing interest in philosophy and science motivated her to begin podcasting in 2006. While her Brain Science Podcast focuses on neuroscience, her other show, Books and Ideas, often explores the intersection between science and religion. She is also the founder of sciencepodcasters.org, which is a site devoted to promoting science through podcasting. In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Ginger Campbell recounts how she first got involved in science podcasting, and why she focuses on neuroscience as her topic. She discusses the impact of Jennifer Michael Hecht's work on both her intellectual pursuits and her views about atheism and religion. She talks about the trends in neuroscience that may suggest the brain can be "trained" with products such as Brain Age on Nintendo's DS Lite, or that one's diet can increase one's intelligence. She describes "neuroplasticity," and how new brain imaging technologies, such as advanced fMRIs, show that our daily actions can impact specific parts of the brain. She explores the implications of neuroscience for religious belief, and why she has at times resisted the idea of atheism. She shares her reactions to the "New Atheists." And she discusses the increasing attacks on neuroscience from Creationist activists because of what it implies about consciousness, free-will and the existence of the soul.