How to Stimulate Brain Waves for Healing with Toby Pasman, on The Healers Café with Dr M Manon Bolli
Welcome to the Healers Café conversations on health and healing with Dr M (Manon Bolliger), ND. so welcome to the healer's café and today I have with me Toby Passman and he is a neurophysiology researcher who graduated from the university of Oregon in 2018 with a bachelor's degree in psychology and then completed his masters of psychology through Lynn university in 2021 he has worked on the emotions and neuroplasticity project at the brain development lab at the university of Oregon while in undergrad and learning eeg acquisition and artifacting so I'm going to stop reading from here what your what your bio is and welcome you to this and i i guess my very first question is how did all that begin for you what got you into this and how did you see the the great healing potential in this study yeah great question i'm so happy to to be on your show um so as far as my kind of path into this field i would say i i took a biopsychology class well in undergrad and i found that fascinating to just learn about how the brain actually is is working and creating all of our thoughts emotions beliefs you know just our whole perception of reality um based on kind of these all the chemical and electrical events that are that are taking place in our nervous systems so that kind of led me to working at at a research lab as you were mentioning where uh we're utilizing a technology called eeg which stands for electroencephalography it's kind of a mouthful but basically what that enables us to do is to record the electrical activity that comes from someone's brain so with a swim cap looking device uh you were basically able to record uh the electrical brain waves that are coming from a bunch of different areas of a person's brain and that was fascinating to me just learning i i had no clue that we could even do that but once i got involved with that i was like you know them sort of thinking okay was there a way to this is what we're seeing as far as what the electrical activity of the brain is but it it got me thinking you know is there a way to change that electrical activity can we modify it and the answer to that is yes there's several technologies such as neurofeedback or neurostimulation that can actually dramatically shift the electrical activity of the brain and can promote healing um better mental health better cognitive performance uh in a variety of different aspects of our life so that that really kind of just set me off on that on that journey of trying to learn as much about these different technologies as i could and then eventually getting into turning that into a career so but to to get excited about that like how did that first step how did you know one that it was out there or is it like curiosity leading to more curiosity or was it something in your own life or family life or friends something that made you go i need to i need to go deeper in this i need to check this out like what led you there because i'm i'm almost curious how do we end up doing what we're doing it's a great yeah that's a great question i think i think i was always a very like kind of self-aware and and self-reflective kid just growing up and and wondering why i'm thinking the thoughts that i am and wondering why people are behaving the way they are uh just thinking about thinking i guess that sort of described as like meta metacognition and i think i i was always just that that kid who was wondering about that and that led me in high school just to reading a lot of like pop psychology and neuroscience books and following that um so it kind of was one thing one thing led to another but i just kind of followed my curiosity i had no idea that i'd be able to like really do anything uh in a career sense um with this stuff i just thought it was kind of a cool sort of hobby to learn about how the brain works but yeah just just kind of continuing to follow that curiosity really paid quite a lot of dividends interesting so i'm going to ask you a bunch of things that i've heard and then you can tell me oh that's a myth or no that's true and why that's true and and especially how it can be changed right so in many many seminars i've gone to they they show this um iceberg and they say that's the tip of the iceberg and there's this big you know part that sunk the titanic that really is the cause of you know you know the damage that is created and so some people call that the subconscious and it's the it appears to be this programmed um from way back could be from different generations even and early childhood at least till the age of seven four to seven that's in debate i i understand but things that we don't have time to reflect upon and bring to consciousness and then there's all the automatic behaviors of the body that are all automatic and therefore are we're not consciously thinking of breathing or digesting or you know all of that so there's always an element of it um when we choose to but much happens um automatically so if first of all is that true is that still yeah yeah that is still the the the uh sort of this moment of science it's still what is being seen yeah absolutely i mean and neuroscientists have have just the more they kind of probe into the conscious and subconscious uh you know it it becomes more and more apparent that you know everything is really being driven by the subconscious by what's under the surface by these deep-rooted thoughts and beliefs and ideas about the world that that you know may not have you know they didn't really come from us they may have been instilled at a young age by parents or teachers or society but we don't realize that that we think that's who we are and if we don't examine those kind of with what's going on at the subconscious level we might not realize that that's actually a lot of those things we kind of got programmed um to believe because i i've also heard that in this subconscious as far as thoughts 80 80 of our thoughts are negative and i i'm like how can one know that to be true is it because the chemicals that are set out from that negative thinking can be measured or how does one actually how can you make it one can make a claim like that and is that accurate yeah i've heard similar sort of statistics and i'm assuming that just from the research that i've read it's usually kind of like self-report kind of questionnaire is it where unfortunately we're not at the level of neuroscience where we can we can examine what someone based on the the chemicals they're producing or the electrical activity you know i can you can sort of maybe get a sense of their their moods or their uh tendencies towards specific kind of emotional states but you know we can't necessarily say we can't measure a thought yet in terms of right that activity okay so so i i understand that um but how does frequencies you know when they've done that study um where the monks were all tapped up and and they're at a very high level of frequency and at peace and how does that tie into neuroscience like in how do you how do you explain that um yeah what can be done like is part of what the work you're doing now therapeutically allowing people to connect to these different frequencies is that how we get our brains back is that how you get the hypocampus to function if you're using memory like yeah tell us a little bit more about all that yeah no that's those are all great exploration questions and and yeah i love the the research uh a lot of it was done i believe by a professor uh richie davidson from the university of wisconsin who who studied kind of the brain scans of these tibetan buddhists meditators people met been meditating for long periods of time and kind of examining you know what's what's going on in their brains and why are they you know kind of trying to figure out their these people are so at peace with themselves and with the world and you know experiencing these like great transcendent states that we all kind of want access to so his sort of area of examination is like okay what what what's going on with the electrical activity of these people's brains that that are enabling that to to sort of occur and there were some interesting findings from that from those studies one being that long-term meditators produce a lot more gamma waves than the average person and gamma waves are kind of a lesser talked about brainwave they're they're actually the fastest of all the brain waves and basically neuroscientists have kind of discovered that they play a big role in kind of our our awareness our ability to be intently focused and actively go about sort of solving different problems along with sort of integrating information coming from different areas of our awareness so kind of increasing this this sort of awareness is sort of reflected with that really great uh greatly increased gamma wave activity um there's also some uh just an uh uh anatomical differences that that are occurring in meditators brains so so the functionality of the brain or the functionalities change but also the anatomy of the brain has also changed from this long-term meditation so they found meditators have a thicker corpus callosum which is the sort of band of fibers that connect the right and left hemisphere uh hemisphere and that's been linked with a lot of positive uh kind of an ability to to sort of transfer information between the left and right hemispheres of our brains a lot quicker so that produces a lot of really beneficial results too so there's lots of different ways to examine it but but what's clear is that meditation really does impact the brain in quite a profound way and the longer that you do it and the more that you do it the greater those results are seen to be so i think that's the big takeaway is is just the power of meditation there yeah and i and there's lots of um studies like you mentioned on that and but how does that um the mechanism by which meditation works and the gamma waves and whether it's tapping into um i don't know if you know chris duncan but he did this whole thing on the super conscious many people talk about that and intuition and it's a way of putting things together pulling in information maybe it's to do with the fact that like you're saying left and right brain hemispheres are firing back and forth and connecting but when when you do work like with um like what is the work one does with neuroscience and how like why would a person decide oh i i want to do this kind of work or this would be beneficial for me or sort of what are the questions that they would be asking themselves if they decide okay meditation does this but working with neuroscience does this you know i'm not sure if my question is clear yeah so yeah if i'm understanding you correctly like the the neurotechnology these different tools such as neurofeedback or neurostimulation they're you know i would i would say kind of the the progression of sort of meditation technology you know in the sense that so meditation you know they know we know alters the the brain waves in specific ways for instance uh you and i right now are probably producing mostly beta brain waves uh along with the listeners just people you know if we're just kind of actively engaged in in you know kind of our day-to-day activities uh thinking about things cognitively processing we're producing mostly beta waves now when someone meditates and kind of turning their awareness inward you start producing more you drop down into producing more of these alpha waves and alpha brain waves are really important for kind of relaxation also increasing uh people's ability to learn process and recall a lot of information really quickly and then what happens with like people who've really been doing meditation for a while they actually are able to sink into even deeper brainwave states so they're they start to be able to produce theta brain waves in their meditation sessions and theta is uh kind of like the bridge between the the conscious and subconscious mind so a lot of kind of integrative experiences and and aha moments are taking place when people are able to sink into a theta brainwave pattern and basically with with neurotechnologies we're able to to kind of short circuit uh the process in the sense that it might take a meditator you know a long time to be able to eventually sink into producing theta waves through their meditation but i could put a couple of electrodes on someone's brain and specifically stimulate a theta frequency so then their brain is going to just directly entrain to that frequency that's being stimulated so it's it's you it's a similar sort of mechanism in terms of altering brain waves and the electrical activity both with meditation along with kind of these newer neurotechnologies but these different technologies can really accelerate the process quite dramatically so i mean that that's saying that nerve cells that is it called that fire together no that i forgot yeah fire together wired together yeah that's right so basically wiring together here you're aiming specifically at rewiring to increase let's say like the theta wave or whatever that's that's exactly what your what this technology can facilitate so give us an example of i mean we know there's musics that bring this about but what what is the the technology i'm just seeing this like big thing on your head and all these electrodes but what is the the most kind of easy popular way available and i know there's all these uh devices you can buy that have um buyer nailed beats and um can you tell us a little bit about all of that general technology sure sure so you're you're absolutely right in the sense that they're like neurotechnology is is becoming like more and more prevalent and there's all sort of different devices and it's it's difficult for people who are interested in this sort of stuff to be able to like figure out like what what works and what's what's going to be helpful for them so hi i'm dr manuel belichie and i wanted to take a moment to thank you for watching these podcasts if you haven't subscribed please do also feel free to leave comments and like it this way more people get to find out about this work and about other choices for health so i think it's really important that that we all share this information i have a free gift to you it's a a seven sequence email that has tips for every day and so little insight about how to live your life when it comes to health and it's very much built on how i managed to overcome stage four cancer and what it took so i i would love you to have this and thank you once again for listening to these podcasts i would say uh kind of answering your question as far as kind of what the what a main sort of popular technology would be i'd say neurofeedback is something that's been around for for several decades and basically what neurofeedback does is it enables someone to rewire their brain based off real-time feedback so for instance someone might be wearing an eeg cap being able to measure the so a computer is measuring the electrical brain waves that they're producing and then they're playing say a game like on a on the computer but they're playing the game with their mind so in basically you might be watching the screen and if you're training someone to say produce more alpha waves you're training someone to to be able to relax and and sink into that deeper kind of alpha state the screen would then get bigger whenever you're producing more alpha waves that would be visual feedback or it could also be audio feedback where where maybe you're listening to music that intensifies in volume when you produce more alpha waves so that's like the positive feedback and then when your brain say say you uh start thinking about some specific problem and getting back kind of into your logical mind you usually start producing more beta waves so then the computer measures that that you're producing less alpha waves and takes away that reward so then you'd see the screen shrink shrink in size or maybe the audio gets quieter so that's that's the feedback portion so it's basically telling your brain good job you're you're doing well you're producing the desired brain waves or no you're you're deviating now from what we want you to do so it it basically can guide the brain uh to produce more or less of whatever brain wave frequency that that you're wanting to do and i think what what's really important to mention here is that there's so many different neurofeedback technologies and protocols and it can be difficult to kind of understand where to get started i think it's it's really important that like the the technology that is usually start uh started with the the brain mapping that like the q uh qeg brain mapping it's basically quantified electroencephalography so he touched on earlier what just a kind of regular eeg is recording the the brain waves and a quantified electroencephalography basically just turns those brain waves into a visualized representation so then you can see you know you can see the areas of overactivity or under activity in a specific brain wave and you can also see where that's going on in the brain so for instance someone who already produces a lot of these alpha brain waves maybe they're they have no trouble getting into these relaxed states if you were to do a neurofeedback protocol that's training them to produce even more alpha waves that might not be too beneficial for them whereas for someone who struggles with anxiety or ptsd i think training someone to increase alpha waves is likely to be highly beneficial so it's it's really important to to do the initial assessment where we can actually see every each person's very unique uh kind of electrophysiology and then be able to determine kind of what a good a good protocol good neurofeedback protocol would be for that individual so where does one go for that kind of assessment yeah so traditionally people would go to a psychologist psychiatrist some neurologists use this technology it's going to become more and more prominent in sort of the the peak performance or wellness space so that is something that kind of as this technology becomes more more affordable more people learn about it it's going to the uses are going to start shifting but for you know at this current moment uh if people were wanting to to do say neurofeedback or to get a brain map uh you'd likely find that uh find that service at you know your local local psychologist or psychiatrist's office okay yeah so it needs to be done through like a um like a living brain scan or it's through the electrodes typically so the the brain maps are done with the electrodes so that's where i i think most practitioners who who utilize say neurofeedback they often do start with with a brain map and it's it's a very it's a it's a simple kind of non-invasive process where you a technician will basically put an electrode cap on you and squirt each electrode with some uh electro gel and kind of swirl it around and make sure you have really good connection and then they'll do like a 10 minute recording with a person's eyes open and then another 10 minute recording with their eyes closed so that yeah so that basically provides enough data to then at that point be able to see what's really going on in that person's brain and then from there put together a good sort of treatment plan based on that that person's unique neurophysiology interesting and and what are the links because my i run a college called bowen college so i teach other healthcare practitioners how to do this work and it's it's a gentle non-invasive pain elimination methodology that resets the body mostly i mean through the fascia and the free neurons but also through the parasympathetic system because it puts people in a deep relaxation and in that it would appear that the body just knows what to do and it heals so um it's it's often seen as like this is magic it's crazy but it's and it's simple and people resist all things that are simple that work well and don't require you know a whole bunch of pills and and everything but i'm i'm wondering and i've because i'm i'm also very interested in in the mind and um and that part of my program actually deals with our thoughts our beliefs and just understanding all of that that stuff but what what have you seen with this technology that i'm not familiar with that might explain or the correlation between pain because that pain is very subjective um and that's been well studied that the same sort of findings will bring different levels of pain experience and pain is also contextual right it yeah there's no two exact identical people experiencing the apparent same thing the same way so what can you share from your background that would impact positively or could be used at the same time or yeah i'd love to know more about that yeah so in in terms of the way i see uh in my work and in in research the way brain uh the the way pain often shows up in the brain is through over activation of of the cingulate and the cingulate is kind of a a structure that kind of runs right down the midline of the brain and it's often overactive in the beta brain wave frequency so it's kind of indicating kind of a hyper arousal a hyperactive nervous system and it sounds like kind of from the technology that you're describing that that you utilize and your college utilizes there's a lot of similarities in what this uh these neuro technologies are often doing which is to kind of calm that that fight or flight response which is is usually kind of a beta and overproduction of these beta brain waves especially the higher frequency of beta brain waves that are linked with you know anxiety racing thoughts ocd you know pain there it's kind of just a general over activation of the nervous system so any technology that's whether that be massage or acupuncture or meditation or neurofeedback they all have this same sort of mechanism the way i see it in common which is to to kind of quiet the the sympathetic nervous system and activate the parasympathetic nervous system which is enabling people's bodies and brains to to heal and really get this the deep relaxation that they that they need to heal that they might not be getting if they've been just chronically overworked and stressed out or have you know condition like ptsd where they're sort of reliving that trauma over and over technologies like this can be really impactful to sort of get people out of that over-roused agitated state yeah so it's interesting so you're seeing it like it's another technology it's basically it like whether it's your hands like mine it's just with hands and it's very light touch um so different than massage but it it stimulates and maybe that's not the right word in this context stimulates it seems like it's hyper but it and it's it regularizes it's it's not sedating it's neither one or the other it just basically allows the the nervous system to receive the message that it's not in fight or flight right now that you know here we are present and so much happens when people are in that state you know including old memories other things that release their emotional patterns and so i mean i i've i've been doing that for 30 years i'm just absolutely fascinated but i'm always you know i'm a learner right sorry i love what else what else can we do and so so if um if people are receiving one thing is this like it's just another way in another door to a similar type of end result or do you see it differently or are there so-called exercises to go with or things that that help patients in this direction that reinforces this work yeah so i guess to to answer the the sort of first part of the question of um in terms of the way if if i see the technology sort of differing from uh from other ways of of kind of healing the body and brain i would say that um the neuro modulation sort of work that i do is is definitely more targeted in the sense of we're taking a thorough assessment of each of the different electrical brain waves and seeing looking at a lot of different metrics of kind of the connectivity between different areas of the brain how fast signals are getting sent from area to area measuring a lot of different variables so you can you can really go pretty deep in sort of brain training and really dial in exactly what you want to enhance or diminish um so i would i would say yeah it's it's the way i view it is definitely a more a more targeted approach and it can be particularly useful for people um say like we've been talking about neurofeedback a lot that that really kind of got its start with um uh using it um for for children with adhd who had kind of failed a lot of traditional stimulant medications and they found that that neurofeedback kind of was able to to help these kids produce more of those really what they were training is a low beta frequency that was really important for attention and focus so uh you know a different technology just some general relaxation thing you know might be pretty similar if if someone was also doing uh one of these neurofeedback protocols that was also working on relaxation but there's a lot more nuances i would say to this based on what your what the goal is and that you know that can differ quite quite a bit from client to client or patient to patient well our time is like almost up there or probably it is something i had one more question for you though memory um what are you seeing is the issue it's actually a very personal question because for some reason i'm noticing now my memory is going it's it's very strange and it's not you know diet it's i'm not stressed out that i'm aware of and i'm reasonably aware what what would one do for memory that's a great question and it's not like it's not you know a series of unnecessary procedures that have gotten me there yeah so in terms of how that might kind of show up if you know you or someone else who is kind of reporting issues with with memory i can't say for certain because every person's brain will show up differently but oftentimes what we see is under activity in the temporal lobes and the temporal lobes are kind of right above and behind your ears uh and those uh those lobes are very important for memory and when there's diminished activity whether that be from just general aging or a blow to the head with a concussion the temporal lobes are super susceptible just based on their location to to damage based on on blows to the head in terms of ways to increase that activity in the temporal lobes i would say you know from what we've discussed like meditation is a great way that just boosts overall blood flow to the brain taking like an herb like ginkgo biloba is is a great way to also kind of increase blood flow and they've seen that it increases blood flow in that specific region of the brain and then also just kind of dialing in on on on sleep and nutrition exercise really all of those things are going to to be kind of the big regulators of of your brain's ability to to produce enough of these neuro chemicals and electrical activity and get enough blood flow to to perform optimally so it's oftentimes you know kind of really dialing in on the basics that makes the big the biggest impacts for people great well anyway this was very informative and yeah thanks for sharing that because i was i realized that yeah you could probably see it where the area is you know so um they're very cool it's exciting good well thank you so much and where can people find out more about um your practice or um or more about you if they want to reach out like i guess underneath our talk there'll be ways to reach uh is there anything you want to leave with people where they can reach you also yeah i would i would encourage people to head over to roscoe's wetsuit neuro.com for listeners i'll just spell that out it's r o s c o e s wetsuit w e t s u i t neuro n e u r o dot com and you can learn all about these different technologies there's a lot of information on my website that thoroughly explains the different brain waves the different technologies to assess brain waves and then how to actually alter those brain waves with neuro neuromodulation technology so you can read all about it and I'll soon be offering neuromodulation services including neurofeedback and brain mapping and neurostimulation along with a couple others to clients who are interested in peak performance in the Miami fort Lauderdale area so if you are in that area and you're interested in kind of seeing what your brain is doing and getting the most out of your cognitive performance that will be something that will be available uh beginning in November of this year it was a pleasure being on and thank you so much for the opportunity to be here Thank you for joining us at the Healers Café with Dr M (Manon Bolliger), ND for more information go to: www.DrManonBolliger.com
2021-09-19 07:17