#500 After 25 Years of Brain Scans, Here’s What Separates High Performers - Dr. Andrew Hill

Andrew Hill (0:00)

We are comprised of many regulatory resources, and if you understand how they interact and how they work, then you can steer them, you can take control of your life. Improve your sleep, improve your executive function, reduce your anxiety, improve your social function. And these are things that are hard to manage unless you understand them. You know, it's not as useful often, I believe, if someone just hands you down a diagnosis. Sometimes it can feel like something's happening to us, our anxiety, our ADHD, our sleep issue is happening to us. And it is, but it's also resources. And if you know how those work, it's a lot harder to be overwhelmed or ashamed about what's going on, and it creates this urgency, this agency to take control. And that is fun. It is fun to train your brain or do some intervention and feel different in a way you wanted to.

Siim Land (0:45)

Dr. Andrew, welcome back to the show.

Andrew Hill (0:48)

Thanks, Siim. Nice to see you again. How are you doing today?

Siim Land (0:51)

I'm doing good. Yeah, you were on the show many years ago. I think it was even something like six, seven years ago. And yeah, now you've come out or you're coming out with a new book called the Gifted and Tortured. So yeah, my channel is a lot about longevity and healthspan. And the brain is obviously a huge component to that. And your book specifically talks about these, I guess you can call them different types of brains out there. And your background in neurofeedback also is just on a daily basis involved in looking at people's brains and helping people to optimize their brain function. So I'm happy to discuss with you. We'll first start with some of the research that you've been doing in the book. And then later we'll also talk about my brain scans, that I happened to do. I think I did the scan first time in 2018, and the second time in 2022 or 2023, something like that. So you're the person who knows the most about my brain, I guess, in the world. So yeah.

Andrew Hill (2:05)

I take that responsibility seriously. Your secret is safe in me until today, when we might tell people a little bit about what makes you tick.

Siim Land (2:14)

Yeah. So yeah, let's start with the book, and maybe give a brief introduction to it and what it's about.

Andrew Hill (2:22)

Sure. So the book is titled Gifted and Tortured, and it's really about these patterns in our brains, these resource patterns that we all carry around. And I do this assessment technique called brain mapping or quantitative EEG. We measure someone's attention performance, measure someone's brain at rest, and then look at how unusual they are against the average population. And out of that, you can see how we each have sort of resources that are tuned in certain ways. And I've been doing brain mapping for about 25 years, and sort of emerging out of that is this concept of phenotypes or patterns of resources tuned a certain way or set a certain way. It's almost like phenotypes of hair color or height or things like that, but they're not quite as stable. The brain is more changeable largely, especially things that are meant to change, like attention and anxiety and sleep. So in talking to people for 25 years or so about their brains, the same areas kept coming up whenever there was a performance difficulty or an unusually high performance, the same dozen or so areas kept emerging. And so I started to teach people really more about how brains in general work and their brain specifically might work using these metaphors, these phenotypes as little characters in our brains. So out of that, of course, I've been involved with that wellness and longevity and health optimization landscape for a long time. I taught gerontology for over a decade at UCLA. So my perspective on trajectories of change and long-term wellness and optimization came up at the same time. And now what I really do with this data is I teach people to think about these resources more as something that they can manage and modify. So the book is capturing those dozen phenotypes, those dozen resources in our brain that often get in the way. And then it talks about how they might produce both a giftedness when they're operating well and a tortured dysregulation when they're not, and sometimes at the same time. And then it gives you that strategic modifiable behavior, biohacking perspective on how you can go after making change depending on how these resources are operating for you.