Learn More About Neurofeedback Therapy and the Life of Dr. Trish Leigh
- Andrea Basuroski
- Jan 31, 2021
- 30 min read
Disclaimer: Neurofeedback therapy is still not completely accepted by the mainstream scientific community. Most common criticisms of it are that the studies supporting Neurofeedback are flawed in their methodology, that the claims of it's efficacy are too exaggerated, that the practice isn't regulated enough, that it takes too much time and money while it's effects are not immediately visible and that they are potentially not long lasting. As an objective club/publication, we always encourage people to get both sides of the story. If you would like to find out more about the criticisms we encourage you to read some recent articles on Google Scholar. However, Dr. Trish is a member of our community, has helped many people, and has impressive credentials. This is why we still want to share her story with you.
Would you like to introduce yourself and share your educational background/degrees?
Sure, absolutely. My education is varied, and I think comprehensive, but it's different than most peoples'. I call myself a cognitive neuroscientist. But I have worn many hats, and I have done many professions. So I'll just give you a brief history of how it developed. I started as a speech language pathologist many years ago. And that's my first degree, I have a bachelor's degree in Speech, Language Pathology and Audiology. And then I earned a master's degree in speech pathology as well.
I went back to school, and I earned what I call a PhD and a half, because I only had to do one dissertation, but it was really two PhDs. Thank God, right. So one area was in Communicative Disorders and Sciences. But in that regard, I always focused on cognition, which is thinking, then the other degree is in cognitive science, which looked at the neuroscience aspect, and how it falls out and behaviors of the mind and body. So I've always thought about brain functioning, and how it ends up in thinking, and really socialization and pragmatics and human connection has always been very important to me, as well as thinking psychological and cognitive aspects.
After earning my PhDs, I have been a college professor for 25 years. I moved to this area, seven and a half years ago, I was a, I was a tenured professor before that. When we moved here, I wanted to start a private practice applying neuro therapies that I had been researching and teaching for all the years before that. And of course, people think I'm crazy for that, because if you're a tenured professor, why would you ever leave that to start afresh? For me, you can study something all you want, but unless you bring it to the world in a way that helps the world, that's where I think the real power is.
When we moved here, I became certified as a neurofeedback practitioner, which is no small job. In the future, that will be a degree in and of itself and it's already becoming that way. I have colleagues or people who are coming up in the field that are studying in universities to be able to become neurofeedback practitioners, but when I did it, and still really today, you have to have a degree and then go on and get more training after you earned degrees to be able to do it. Being able to bring what I had been teaching and learning in my research and being able to apply it. I work primarily with people who have ADHD, anxiety, dementia or cognitive issues.
My newest thing that I have gotten into is people who have internet addictions. And that is taking over the world and I feel like I'm on the forefront of that. It's pretty cool to be able to help people with that. The way that I help them is through neurofeedback brain training. Now we have neuroscience and technology that can rewire our brains for us but that only gets people so far. What I do for my work is I use the technology and the neuroscience, but I also coach people too. I have been trained through the Ayman clinic through Dr. Daniel Amen, who's a renowned psychiatrist, who is also on the forefront of neuroscience. I'm trained by him as a brain health coach. And so I'm able to help people to implement strategies. I rewire their brain, get it moving in the right direction, but then give them strategies to keep it moving. And that's the long and short of it.
We actually have some questions about your work. We're going back to the story where you said, in your experience with psychology and cognitive science - what's the difference between both?
Sure, so actually, in retrospect I should have done this, but I was one class off - three credits - in college, when I was getting my PhDs, one class off from having a master's in cognitive psychology. And I probably should have just done it, but I was maxed out on school, you know how that goes.
When it comes to cognitive science, what I think has been very important to me is really learning a lot about how the brain works, and then taking that information on brain functioning and being able to teach people and it's interesting, because at the core of what I care about is teaching people how their systems work, to empower and inspire them to be able to make a change. A psychologist can really be a sounding board and listen and reflect back to a person. So I think the major difference between me at least as a cognitive science scientist, is that I tell people more about stuff to do. Whereas a psychologist listens and reflects more. And you know, a psychologist does a lot of listening and a little talking, I do a lot of talking and less listening.
You said that one needs a license to practice. Does that give you permissions to do therapy? Or does it give you more than that?
I've always been an out of the box thinker, which some people don't like. But I find that's why I'm always on the forefront of things, doing things before it's acceptable. And I like it that way. So when it comes to licenses, every single license has rules of what you can and cannot do. And I've always pushed those a little. But I work with my husband who is licensed as a chiropractor. And what we do in terms of neurofeedback, both of our licenses can do. But then we have our practice, Leigh Brain & Spine.
I also have my own website, https://drtrishleigh.com/, which, I don't know if you've seen it, but on that website, I work outside of my license. So a little loophole, which some people aren't appreciating, is having coaching certification which allows me to be able to work with people in a different capacity without my license, but I wouldn't really encourage people to do that unless they actually have the knowledge and the skills. So because I have so many other degrees, I feel like that it allows me to work with people all over the world, you know, globally, and I wouldn't be able to do that just under my license and that's important to me.
Now the cool thing is there's many licenses when it comes to neuroscience. So as a neurofeedback practitioner, there's a variety of licenses right now, that can implement neurofeedback, and it's actually been a controversy for at least 25 years. So, some people think that it's going to either land in the lap of psychiatry or psychology using neurofeedback. I honestly think it should land in the lap of chiropractors, which I'm not. But psychologists and psychiatrists - psychiatrists know about the nervous system, but chiropractors really know a lot about brains in the nervous and so I think they're perfectly positioned. Plus they have private practices. So I think they're perfectly positioned to be able to bring it to the world.
So going back to the neurofeedback - can you explain to us first what it means?
Yeah, I can. And I think it's mind blowing, which is why I am here trying to share it. So neurofeedback has been around since the 60s, I'm gonna tell you a quick, hopefully quick, story about how it was discovered. And I love this story, and I'll just tell you another quick story before I tell you that one. When I was defending my dissertation - defending a dissertation is really stressful, obviously right, you know, you're out there for hours defending the science that you just proved. And that's how it works - it's like a three to four hour meeting where you show your scientific findings, and you have to describe it all. So when I was defending my dissertation [in front of] this professor, who wasn't a close professor of mine, who was on the committee who had to approve my dissertation to become a doctor.
This woman kept asking me if the findings were epiphenomenal. And you know, I'm young-ish, younger than I am now. I didn't know what epiphenomenal meant. So she's like, "is it epiphenomenal?" And I'm like, "I'm not sure what you mean by that. Could you tell me that in a different way?" "I mean, is it epiphenomenal?" And, you know, I'm thinking "I just told you, I don't know what that means. Could you tell me?" So what epiphenomenal means is - did the findings come out on accident instead of it being the thing you were looking for?
So the way that neurofeedback was discovered is epiphenomenal. A researcher whose name is Barry Sturman, at UCLA, he was studying cats by putting a sensor on their head (cats, felines, cats) he put a sensor on their head, and when they were in a get-ready-to-pounce mode, their bodies were really calm but their minds were sharply focused. He measured what their brains were doing, and fed it back to them. So they were calm and focused and their brains would learn that they were calm and focused, which would make them more calm and focused [- positive feedback]. I'll explain that in a minute.
But then NASA came to him and said, We want to study the effects of rocket fuel on astronauts. So he brought all these cats in and exposed them to rocket fuel. Some of the cats had the neurofeedback the sensor on their head. The cats that had neurofeedback - nothing happened to them because of the rocket fuel. The ones that didn't have the neurofeedback got seizures from the rocket fuel. So Barry Sternman was like "holy cow - epiphenomenal effect - what is this thing that I just did that made it so that these cats didn't have seizure disorder because of rocket fuel?" And what he discovered was - feeding back the information to the cat's brains about how they were performing made it so they performed better.
So the way that neurofeedback works, and now of course, technology has improved so much, and we offer neurofeedback in our office, and now we can offer it at home. And I'll tell you about that in a minute. But the way that it works is - you have a sensor on whatever area of your brain we're trying to improve speed, brain speed. And I'll tell you more about that in a second. But the sensors is on your head, and then you're watching a video, you can just watch YouTube videos, you're watching a YouTube video, and the screen in a special app, of course, the screen dims when your brain is going out of the zone of calm focus, and the screen brightens, and the audio plays louder when your brain is in calm focus. And so our systems, our brains and our nervous systems, are self healing. So our brains will work to get to that calm focus mode, because that's the mode where your brain is working the best. And so when it gets the feedback through the auditory and visual channel, it will work to get towards homeostasis, the best operating mode, and it's proven by neuroscience and there's thousands of studies that show - yes, indeed it works, there's no side effects and that there's very little regression, people don't go back to the old brain pattern.
But I believe that the coaching piece, not just believe but I also know anecdotally, when I provide coaching and I help people finesse the way they live their lives a little, so that they can keep their brain in the calm focus mode, they don't go back to the old mode of not being able to focus or not being able to not feel stressed out.
Now, the way that it works is that our brains have five primary speeds that they use on a daily basis, and that your brain cycles through on what's called circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is the rhythm and the flow of how your brain uses energy, and how it moves through your days. So the fastest speed is stress mode, or fight or flight, it's called high beta. And the way that I explain it is that our brains are going this fast, it's 35 hertz cycles per second, 35 to 50 or even higher - really fast electrical energy in the brain - that's extra fast speed. [Regular] fast speed is called low beta, it's at about 15 to 18 hertz, it's the perfect speed for you to be able to think, come up with good ideas, you still feel calm. A little bit slower speed is medium speed - alpha. That's when you're just chilling on the couch, that's calm mode, not calm focus, but calm chill mode. Then there's two slow speeds, slow speed is called theta. That is fall asleep mode. So when you get in bed, and you're feeling groggy, and you're starting to fall asleep, your brain starts producing more theta. When you fall asleep, it produces a very slow speed that goes 1 to 3 hertz, which is called delta.
So what happens in ADHD is, during the day, if a person has ADHD, their brain is making a lot of theta in the day when it's not supposed to - it's only supposed to make it when you fall asleep. If you have anxiety, your brain's making lots of high beta, which is only supposed to make when you're really stressed out - when a tiger is chasing you back in the day, at least caveman days, right? So the way that neurofeedback works is it can read if your brain is making that anxiety mode or that fall asleep ADHD mode, the sensors read them, and it feeds back the information based on the dimming and the brightening and your brain learns. It's a learning modality - it doesn't put anything into the brain, your brain actually learns to make more of perfect processing speed in the middle and less out in these extremes. And it's completely awesome. I think it is the game changer for society.
One cool thing that I tell people, and then we can move on to a new question, is this headband (I don't know if you can see it) I tell people about, which I have nothing to do with this, it's called a Muse headband. M-U-S-E - you should have all of your parents buy one for you - because what it does is it has five sensors in the front (frontal lobe sensors) two of them in the earpieces at the temporal lobes. And it's EEG so the way that neurofeedback works is based on electroencephalogram, and it's called EEG, and EEG is over 110 years old, or even older than that. It's old, and it's been around for a long time.
The Muse company has basically found a way to take the one most used protocol that I use in the office and put it in this headband. So I've started making more and more YouTube videos telling people "Get this headband!" even though it's not a good business model - my team keeps saying "Stop telling people to get the headband, tell them to come in!" - but I want the whole world to use it, it's $200. For $200 you can start training your brain to make more calm focus and make less anxiety and make less of that sleepy bored mode.
I think it's mind blowing and our mode right now in healthcare is to go to the doctor and they give you a medicine, for any problem you have, and you know some medicines are appropriate. But, you know, for someone who has long term anxiety or someone who has ADHD, the medicine is just a band aid - all it's doing is masking the symptoms. It's proven not to change the underlying brain pattern that is causing the problems. So I want the whole world to know that there is a treatment of therapy out there that can actually improve the way your brain is performing so that it no longer needs medication. And nobody knows that, isn't that wild?
It is! From personal experience, I know someone that was given 20 pills a day, and it was awful. This person was just, this person herself, was just putting down pills and pills and pills. Until a point where it wasn't right for her and she kept going to different psychiatrists. So someone finally told her - what would be like more specific for her, so she wouldn't have to take 20 pills a day. And the place where I used to live is not very modern - it's not going at this depth of psychiatry, and psychology and neuroscience. So that was the only solution.
Yeah, I know it's tough. And what I also want people to know, so neurofeedback is the treatment, the evaluation is called an acute EEG brain map - a quantitative, quantitative means measurable, EEG. So I can see how any person's brain is running, so then I know how I can help them. And and I know what you're saying, it's interesting, because now my work has kind of taken off across the world. And that's why I tell people in India "Get the headband, if you can afford it - it's 200 bucks," because a lot of people can't afford it. In my office, at the Brain and Spine here in Chapel Hill, most times people come to us when they've gone to ten, seven, five, twenty doctors and none of those doctors can identify what the actual problem is. And then they learn that we can see it, and we can show it to them. And then we help them get better. It's amazing.
It must make it so much more accurate!
Yeah absolutely, and I've worked with a lot of other professionals, because psychologists can use neurofeedback if they want to, most of them don't want to, which I think is mind blowing, but it's because they're taught. And what you're talking about is called a qualitative assessment. Qualitative is, actually some of them pretend to be quantitative, but it's like, I ask you a question and you tell me the answer. That's the measurement. But that's completely different [than] looking inside a person's brain and how it's using electrical energy. So we collaborate now, in the community, we have a few psychiatrists we collaborate with, we have a bunch of psychologists too, that would collaborate because they know that I can see how their clients' brain is performing. Much more effective to help them for sure. It's exciting.
Yeah, it is. So I think the next question is how is brain based therapy different from traditional therapy?
Yeah, and that's the main way that they're, it's all measurable. It is. So what happens is, let me expand on that for a second. When, so I told you how the map is completely measurable, when we do the assessment it gives us a visual representation of how a person's brain is using electrical energy in many different parameters in every brain area. But I think what's even cooler than that is that when a person does a treatment session, the computer system generates a graph of how their brain performed within the session. Then it also generates a chart of how their brain has performed across sessions. So going back to what you were saying about just trying to guess what's wrong with the person and then trying to guess how to help them get feel and perform better.
What neurofeedback does is I can measurably make sure that we are improving the person's brain performance pattern. And if I see that in the data, then I know that their behaviors will change also. So many times people feel and perform better as their brain is improving. Sometimes it doesn't catch up for a little while and that's why the coaching can be important. But it's completely different if you go to a psychologist, and I do part of this in my coaching and I do think it's powerful, but not half as powerful if you don't have the data; you go to a psychologist, you tell them a lot of stuff, and they'll give you a strategy or two. What I do is I pull up the data, I show a person how their brain has improved in the last couple of weeks. And then I say, "Okay, this is where your brain was and this is how it's performing now. How do you feel? What else is still tricky for you?" and then we'll put strategies to move them forward. Using scientific data is very powerful for people because if they feel stuck, and they see that their brain has changed, it's a major motivator. That's what makes science in and of itself. Like imagine if every scientific study that ever was didn't have data to support it. People wouldn't believe half the stuff that has actually been proven. And I find myself in conversations all the time, actually, where people are like "What you say isn't true." And I can just sit there completely confidently and I don't have to say anything else besides "Yes, it is." Because I know there's a ton of science that shows what I do is incredibly effective and all measurable.
Would neurofeedback work on even severe mental disorders?
Every psychological disorder or disease that exists is actually a neurological disorder and I'm just the messenger, you can look that up. So anxiety - proven to be a dysregulated brain pattern; depression - dysregulated brain; and all mental health issues - all psychological; and they also call ADHD a psychological - in those cognitive (thinking) disorders. They're all proven to be - the underlying root is neurological. And I'm also on a mission to let people know that, because people don't understand. "Why do I have bipolar disorder?" "Why do I have personality disorder?" It's because the brain is not performing at all like it is supposed to. And so when I see, and I was going to share this with you a minute ago, when we were just talking about how a person's brain is performing, when I see that a person's brain is performing, we don't make any diagnoses at our office. That's on purpose because we can, we can.
But the way that we think about it, and the way we want other people to think about it is "This is how your brain is performing. It is this far off from the optimal brain pattern. So our work is to help you heal your brain with neuroscience and technology to get it from where you are back to the optimal brain pattern or as close as we can get it." A lot of times people want diagnosis. And honestly, I felt this way forever, I've been practicing for almost 30 years, and even when I was in grad school I worked with my mentor, who's still a good friend of mine. We did a study on how diagnoses serve people. They only serve you if they get you services. And so when people come into my office, and then we'll probably do this and in terms of neurofeedback, right now it's a cash based service - there's insurance codes, but they don't provide any or much reimbursement so people have to pay out of pocket for it.
But it does help them get better so that people understand that and are happy to pay. But because of that, we don't have to come up with a diagnosis code for them and give them a diagnosis, but I also think that really serves people because of what you said before. They went to 10 other doctors and got 20 different diagnoses. I talked to a gentleman today he's like "I went to seven psychiatrists. One of them diagnosed me with adult ADHD," and I'm like, "You don't have adult ADHD, I haven't even seen your brain yet." But you know, it's people, other doctors, like throwing darts, because that was the seventh doctor who wanted to tell him something new but he didn't look at his brain. I said, "Let me look at your brain, I'll be able to tell you for sure if you have ADHD or not." And you know, it absolutely can be used for more severe issues.
I personally work with people with some of the most severe issues because they usually find us after they have become desperate and I wish it was the opposite because as people's challenges become bigger and bigger, it can become harder and harder to help them. There are lots of different, you know I could probably tell you a ton of stories that will blow your doors off in terms of people who have multiple brain patterns. So you can have a head injury brand pattern, you can have a chronic PTSD brain pattern, you can have ADHD, anxiety, burnout, bipolar - all at the same time. And that's a person who has big needs, and then we have to bring them back from all those patterns.
It seems to me that getting a diagnosis can be both helpful and unhelpful?
Yeah, and the way I do it, it's different. I tell people, I will say to them, "Your brain is using the ADHD pattern." And so I say "If I were to give you a diagnosis, you would definitely qualify as ADHD," and I've had people cry [from me saying that] because it finally validates what they have felt and there's a lot of power in that. But I think the power is actually in being able to show them where their ADHD is coming from not being able to say, "Oh, all the symptoms you're experiencing. Yeah you have ADHD." People already know they're experiencing the symptoms of ADHD. They don't necessarily need that validated -they want to know what the root cause of that is. So when I say, "Here's the ADHD brain pattern, see it right here, science proves this is the biomarker for ADHD." Then they're like, "This isn't all in my head. This is in my brain. This is neurological, this isn't just psychological," and that can have real, strong power for change. And all I care about is helping people be able to change and improve their brainpower and improve their lives.
So we're going to move on to the next question. So disorders like sleep disorders - do those count as low focus, and does neurofeedback and your therapy strategies aid such disorders?
It does. Many people don't understand that most disorders that are out there, and I can give you a long list of them very soon, most disorders out there are because the brain's running too fast, anxiety mode, or the brains running too slow, that sleepy mode. So sleep disorders are caused by a brain that's running too fast. And so if you just think about it logically, if your brain is running super fast all day long, it is near impossible for you to slow your brain down so fast. And so that's why people can't sleep.
And let me just tell you a few more, since we're talking about sleep disorders, is from an anxiety brain pattern. Sensory processing disorders, all learning challenges, all speech and language problems, all motor movement problems, like Parkinson's disease, ALS, dementia, Alzheimer's, they all come from too much slow brain processing speed, the majority of the problems that people have in terms of physical, cognitive, psychological issues are because of too much slow brain processing speed. If your brain can't do a thing, it's because a certain area in your brain isn't working fast enough.
We know every area of the brain has a job or a skill or ability it controls. So if that area is running too slow, it can't do that job. So basically, and this is the short version, *pointing to different areas of the brain* this area right here, in the frontal lobe, is for attention and working memory; this area's for executive function, planning, organization; this area's impulse control and judgment; speech and language production is right here; comprehension and understanding is back here; the sensory motor cortex for sensation and motor movements goes across the middle; emotional regulation and auditory processing are on the sides.
You know, there's more, but basically, in the back is cognitive processing, more verbal on the left, more mathematical on the right visual processing in the way back. So when people have vision disorders, it's because these areas don't work right; when people have auditory processing, or tinnitus, or misophonia, it's because these areas don't work properly. So when a person comes in, and they tell me their symptoms, I can basically visualize what their brain map would look like in my mind.
You mentioned anxiety a lot. A question I have about your answer to the previous question - would anxiety be related to the sensory cortex and the part you mentioned here that is related with impulsivity, because people with anxiety tend to get overstimulated a lot?
The opposite of what I was just saying, actually. So if your brain is running really fast, it is taking in a ton of information more quickly than it should, which then produces overstimulation which is that anxiety pattern. And it can be the sensory motor cortex. It tends to be, many times, in the frontal cortex because, one of my mentors, Dr. Daniel Gregory Amen, who is a pioneer in this area, he calls it the hamster on the wheel up here in the frontal, prefrontal and the frontal cortex. It's like you have a hamster there and he's just run, run, run, running. And that will create hyper vigilance, it creates ruminating thoughts, it can create hyper focus and the key to success is slowing the brain down, but not too slow. You're slowing it down to perfect processing speed.
You mentioned that the opposite of anxiety was ADHD. And that was actually really surprising because I thought they were more close, as I thought at some point that depression and anxiety were the opposites when they're actually pretty close.
Yeah, no and if you don't mind, I'll just expand on that for a second. So anxiety and ADHD are the polar opposites but science proves they are co-morbid. They exist together more often than not. So most people who come in to see me, in particular, they have ADHD and anxiety. And so they are in the extremes on the opposite, but they go together more often than not, and I'll tell you why. Hopefully, it won't overload you with information- if a person has ADHD that means they were born with a brain that's running too slow. So this is the analogy that I use to help people understand is that if you have ADHD, your brain has the brakes on.
So if your brain is breaking all the time, and it makes it difficult for you to focus and to attend and be productive, you have the brakes on, what our brain naturally does is it will hit the gas. And so it will hit the gas to compensate for all the braking. And so what that means is it will either give people very busy behaviors physically, or a busy mind and a busy mind is anxiety and it comes from all the extra gassing. So if you have ADHD you, many times, also have anxiety. The reverse can happen also - if you were born with a brain that's running fast, and you have anxiety, if you use that gassing, your brain burns out.
What burnout is, is an increase in the slow speed. Depression. So that's how you can have ADHD, then anxiety, then it will morph into depression.
That is called a negative feedback loop, you use a negative brain pattern and you know, I know negative is a loaded word, but a brain pattern that's less than desirable, and it gets you behaviors that are challenging, which gets you outcomes you don't want. That's a negative feedback loop - the proverbial downward spiral. The way that neurofeedback works is it pattern interrupts - it changes the brain pattern, which gets you new behaviors that are better, which gets you new outcomes that you enjoy more, and then it feeds back and it will reinforce it in the brain. That's called Hebb's Law [of synaptic plasticity], if you know that, it's neurons that fire together - wire together. Hebb's Law. So the way that you unwire the brain from the ADHD pattern, or the anxiety pattern and get it out of the negative feedback loop is called anti Hebbian learning - your brain learns not to use that brain pattern anymore. And at the same time, we rewire it with the new better brain pattern, which is Hebb's Law, and then we have to hardwire them in and people ride off into the sunset.
That's mind-blowing! it I was always mind-blowing for me. Since I was a kid, I was always very anxious. And then, at some point in being a teenager, it started being the opposite and for a long time, I thought maybe it can fit this or this, or this or this. And I met someone, who is my friend now, who has anxiety, ADHD, and depression. And I never knew how those three connected in that way. Now that you said ADHD and anxiety were opposites, I was like, "yeah!" And I never understood how this person could get so overstimulated and and at same moment, can just stop thinking. So, the next question was, how do you usually coach people and what effects do you see in your patients?
What I do when I'm working with people is I asked them to, of course I to take a history, look at their brain map, but I ask them to identify their three most important goals, because I want to know what's the most important thing that I can do for you. And that will help me address which area of the brain I should address first, if there's multiple areas, and how I should try to affect change. And so usually, I can address that first goal and most times, it's improving focus; it's improving socialization, because social anxiety can be a really big piece for people feeling calmer; not having racing thoughts, calming down the internal state; sleeping better. But the neat thing is that I can generally help people achieve those three goals. But what happens all the time is people will come in and they'll say, "I've had leg pain for 15 years pains", pain's a thing which I haven't even talked about, "I've had leg pain for 15 years, and it's gone away," because pain is processed in the brain. And so even though I didn't know pain was even a goal that we were working on, because we optimized the way that the brain is using speed, now it can process pain, and all of the sensory processing can just come and go and not have hiccups. So, generally, its focus, productivity, feeling better about their lives, being on purpose, less stress, less anxiety, but there's always really neat auxiliary goals that come for people and I'm always surprised at what they are.
I didn't know goals could be used that way with therapy.
Yeah. One kiddo that came in now, he's probably like, 20, but he was a kiddo then, he came in and he had pretty bad ADHD, so I would work this area primarily, and then his attention improved. His parents brought him in because the teachers told him, he was in high school, teachers told him that his parents had to medicate him. First of all, I'm like, "No teacher can tell you that you have to medicate your child. That's not a thing - that's not legal. So, no, you don't have to medicate him." They're like, "We're feeling pressure, etc." So over the summer, he did neurofeedback, he went back to school and the teachers just assumed they medicated him because he was so much better able to stay calm in the classroom, not have hyperactive behaviors, stay focused. But, then his parents, after school started, they came in and they gave me a couple of examples where he wasn't able to control his impulses. So we switched the training to over in this area. Then he was better able to make better judgments.
So cool! So we have some more questions about your career. So, how can you choose your field of study when there are hundreds of fields of study?
To my husband's dismay, my life exists in seven year chapters, which, actually, I really love and I want to change it for the world. So I started, and I don't know how your parents are, but my dad- when I was young, I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer because I liked the differential diagnosis - I like being able to take a person's problem, be able to think about it and come up with a solution. But I also knew I wanted a big family. So technically I have five and a half or six children - I have my husband, I have five kids and I have a stepson who's 29.
I knew I wanted a big family and those two careers and a big family don't match very well, even though my career and big family are the best relatively either. But I knew I want to be able to spend lots of time with them. So my dad saw an article on speech language pathology when I was in high school. So I'm like, :Alright, I'll check this out." At my old high school, in my senior year, I don't know how it is now, I got an internship, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, so I got an internship, in my senior year, at Buffalo Children's Hospital, where I went, every day, I only had to go until 10 o'clock and then I went to the hospital for the rest of the day, for most of that year.
I spent that year working in a pretty intense department, and speech language pathology is so much more than just speech. I knew I never wanted to be a speech therapist. But you know, there's feeding disorders, people with major cognitive issues, people with head injury, stroke, babies who are born with major developmental disorders. I loved it, it was amazing. So then I went to school and got my bachelor's, to make the long story short, I developed my interest in neuroscience. And so then when I went on for my PhD, I had to find a mentor and, because I've always been an overachiever too- I took all the classes already in speech language pathology, because I had extra credits. So they're like, "There's not enough credits for you in this department, you have to take them in a different department." And I started in neuroscience, but it was kind of like boring neuroscience, not applicable neuroscience. So then I found with the cognitive science department, I took all my classes in that, and actual cognitive sciences, kind of going back to one of the first questions, cognitive science is multi-departmental, it's not just one department. So getting a degree in cognitive science, I had to take doctoral level linguistics classes, doctoral level neuroscience. That's how I got so many credits in psychology, even though that wasn't my main area of study.
I got all these credits in many different area, so then I started teaching, as a college professor at the college level, and I started studying neuro therapies, which then I learned more about neuroscience springboarding off my education. There was a stint there, which gives you a peek into my brain, where I thought I could serve people better if I got a medical degree. 10 years ago, I was accepted into medical school, but I already had all my kids, and I had a whole plan on how I was going to go. And this was a defining moment in my own personal professional journey - I realized it was going to wreak havoc on my life for the next 20 years, my kids will be gone by that time and I would not enjoy any of the years with them - and I wrote the letter to the medical school that I wasn't coming even though I got accepted, and that really fueled more of my passion towards neuroscience. And then that's when I got the certification in neurofeedback, which took me a few years. I also was able to get a brain health certification which took me two years. But that was a really cool moment for me. And you know, you all have your own journeys, but before that, I felt like I had to get more degrees to know more. Now, I just learn more I don't need more degrees. I'm constantly learning. I know a lot about all of this, but I don't need any degree to let the world know because I have enough of them.
That's a flex, rejecting medical school. To get into medical school, you took the MCAT, right?
Yeah, and I did it as an adult, I, this is the crazy story. Like I didn't take a lot of the science prerequisites when I went through school as a younger person, so I had to go back at 10 years ago, I had to go back and take physics, organic chemistry, I was taking those classes from professors who had just been teaching for a year or two, I didn't even tell them I was a professor, because you know how intimidating that can be having someone who's been in that field 15 years, I had to take all these entrance exams, and I, I rocked it out. But just doing those was really like, you know, my whole family. My husband's taking care of my whole family. And I'm studying for the MCAT. That's when I realized like, this is just, it's not going to pay off for me, because it's going to be too much work. And I don't, and my husband kept saying to me, are you going to be able to prescribe pharmaceuticals? I don't know, I'll just probably not, and it just isn't the right framework for me either.
The way you can keep your brain and its best mode is to actually find the work that you love. Not the one that your mom loves for you, not the one your dad loves for you, the one that you love, and I grow my kids up like that, like my daughter is an amazing artist, but she's the most amazing musician, but she wants to pursue visual arts. And of course, I feel like you should go for music because you're the most amazing vocalist, but she wants to pursue visual arts. So I don't tell her. You got to go to school for you know, vocal music. She's going to go to college and pursue visual arts if she gets back to vocal music. It's her journey.
We're going into the last question. What sort of mental, like health effects do you see as a result of quarantine? And what advice would you give to especially teens during the budget?
I've actually looked at not all the science but a lot of the science about and I just, I don't think I put it on YouTube for everybody but I just did a webinar for professionals on the mental health effects of the pandemic and we know from the science that anxieties up significantly depressions up significantly. They're just through the roof. You know, I think it's unfortunate because I don't think that it has to be that way. But I also think it's a telltale sign of where society was before the pandemic hit, because so many people are stressed out and overwhelmed and not happy with their lives that then when now you're locked in your life, that that exacerbates that.
So science shows that internet addictions are through your roof, and people are just falling apart. Unfortunately, not everybody, but you know, as a rule, instead of an exception. And I still believe that if you if any given person can get themselves on purpose, and find what they care about. There is a body of science, but also a philosophy, called flow. When you can achieve flow state in anything you do flow state is when your brain is in that middle speed and you're in the zone and you lose time because you're doing something that you love. And, and that's when you can have your best thoughts, you'll that's why you'll have an epiphany in the shower. Because your brain is so beautifully in the middle, it's neuro plastic, it's not rigid. And so I've had the opposite experience and in the pandemic, just because of how I keep my brain and how I live my life.
Thankfully, I do have a big family because we're all here together. So you know, my five kids are here, they have their pandemic pod friends that basically have moved in. I went grocery shopping today, it was $600. Outrageous. But I'm glad to be able to feed them all because they're here. And they are here. Because when when you come here, it's chill. And everybody's happy, everybody's calm. We moved when the pandemic started, we put a pool table that converts into a ping pong table in our living room. But like for the time, it creates all the kids hang out, they put tunes on the Alexa and play ping pong and laugh. And, you know, it creates this energy. So you keep your energetic state. And this is where like neuroscience crosses over into Fufu energy, which is still neuroscience, talk about a misconception, your experience comes from the electrical energy in your system, not vice versa, but they play off of each other. Every time I go out into the world, I am shocked and surprised at how stressed it is.
When I coach people basically what I'm telling them is find something to get you on purpose. Get out of your own head, get out of anxiety mode, if it's art, do art, if you like to write, right if you like to sing, sing, if you like to workout workout. And that's the advice that I have for young people, the number one thing you can do, and this is how I talk about it is to get on purpose in your work. So for you, it'll be schoolwork and some of you might have jobs, do something you like if you hate your part time job, get a new one. Because life's too short to do anything that you don't like. And it affects your brain so you can get on purpose in your life. Get on purpose in your relationships, and in your hobbies. And then that's flow. And that's proven to keep your brain where you need to
תגובות