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About Guest

Dr. Michael Mark is a neuropsychologist, legal professional, and the co-founder of NeuroEdge Inc, a sports concussion and brain treatment center in Southern California. He holds degrees from UCLA and ABSI in Political Science and Neuropsychology, as well as a Juris Doctorate from Southwestern University. He has been an entertainment manager, a professional sports agent, and a lawyer for industry elites. But his current specialty is treating traumatic brain injuries, neurological disorders, and optimizing human performance.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: Hello and welcome to the Fitness In Post podcast. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Michael Mark, who has so many different degrees I may not have the time to read his list of credentials and interview him after. He is a neuropsychologist, legal professional, and the co-founder of NeuroEdge Incorporated, a sports concussion and brain treatment center in Southern California. He holds degrees from UCLA and ABSI in political science and neuropsychology, as well as a Juris Doctorate from Southwestern University. He’s been an entertainment manager, a professional sports agent, and a lawyer for industry elites. But his current specialty, and the reason he’s on the show today, is treating traumatic brain injuries, neurological disorders, and optimizing human performance. So, Dr. Michael Mark, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Dr. Michael Mark: You’re welcome. It’s nice being here.

Zack Arnold: So, what the heck are you doing on a podcast called Fitness In Post?

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, about about 10 years ago, when I was a sports agent, my at that time, I wanted to see how I could help athletes from a different perspective, based upon the collective bargaining agreements. At that time, my expertise wasn’t as needed. Well, I thought wasn’t as needed as much as it is in other areas. So I wanted to help the athlete, and then through my experience in working with the athlete, I began working overseas with professional soccer, both in Italy and England, and worked on optimal performance, reducing injuries by a great deal, and had a great deal of contact with top people in the sport. Led me to work on traumatic brain injury optimal performance in the states, and I’ve been working on that ever since.

Zack Arnold: So, just as a full disclaimer to my audience, as they know, I always try to get all the information out that I can. I’ve worked with Dr. Michael Mark for years as a patient of his, so I have a lot of experience with the the treatments that you do and also the effects, which is why I want you on the show because I’ve experienced firsthand some of the really profound effects that your treatment can have. But let’s let’s go backwards for a second and define for me what when you say you’re optimizing human performance, what does that mean?

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, it happens is is in in simple terms, the brain has a couple different frequencies, variations of slow frequencies, very variations of fast frequencies, and when those frequencies are not connected, when they are not performing in a manner that is efficient, we suffer. We suffer in focus and concentration. We suffer in sleep. We suffer in mood dysregulation, and so the goal of what we do at NeuroEdge is, after a thorough assessment, we pinpoint exactly what’s needed to optimize brain performance. Now that varies from individual to individual, from professional to professional. Obviously, from professional athlete, amateur athlete, and by position, so it’s quite individualized. But through our experience, we are able to assess how the brain is functioning, what networks are either regulated and functioning well, or dysregulated and causing issues. We then take those results, pair it with the patient’s symptoms, and we have we prepare an individualized treatment that not only optimizes brain function but reduces a lot of the symptoms that go with it, which go through frustration and anxiety and the inability to think clearly, stay on your feet, be alert, and so we’ve had great success throughout all mediums of professions.

Zack Arnold: Now, whenever you start talking to people about the brain, they kind of freak out, right? They don’t really understand how this whole process works. So, when you’re saying you’re assessing a patient, what does that actually mean, and what’s the process, and what’s the technology?

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, that’s a really good question. The assessment, in our belief, is the most important part of any treatment because if you don’t have an assessment that you can objectively look at with the patient, with the client, and come up with a plan, then really it’s it’s guessing, and that’s not something that we do. So to do a complete assessment for anyone. Now, obviously, you can get more detailed as required, but we do a brain map. We do a QEG. Now, what is that? That’s a quantitative electroencephalograph, which is a fancy word for a diagnostic test of brain function, and it measures electrical patterns on the surface of the brain. So, unlike new functional imaging procedures like an fMRI or a SPECT scan or or PET scan, EEG provides a continuous measure of cortical function. That’s what’s really important. We do the procedure allows us to record electro. Activity within the brain from 19 different areas or channels, and by doing this and then transforming it into different software, we have the ability to view all the dynamic changes taking place throughout the brain during processing tasks. For example, that assist in determining which areas of the brain are fully engaged in processing efficiently or that are dysregulated and really out of sync, so to speak. These measurements that we look at reflect electrical activity, which we call brain waves. Some brain waves occur at faster frequencies. Some occur at slower frequencies, and our goal is to see how efficient those frequencies are working. That is the QEG brain map. We also have at our disposal brain network activation from El Mida. It is a technology that measures exact networks in the brain that are functioning, gives us a up to minute view in color within about 30 minutes of what networks are functioning, what isn’t. So it is it’s one of the top assessment tools in the field currently.

Zack Arnold: Okay. What I don’t want to do is get into like a massive anatomy of how the brain works because that literally could you know take years, but just very very quickly just help differentiate for my audience the difference between neurochemistry and electrical activity because a lot of people are familiar with things like dopamine and serotonin and norepinephrine and you know that’s chemical activity. Just kind of give a really brief overview of the difference between the chemistry of the brain and the electricity of the brain.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, well, when you start looking in that direction, the brain is electrical. The brain clearly has patterns, hundreds of millions of connections. When we talk about neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonin, we’re talking about how efficient those connections are, as a byproduct of the efficiency, it determines whether we have too much serotonin, whether we have too much dopamine, whether we don’t have enough dopamine or serotonin, and the balance when the electrical activity is off, the neurochemistry is off, so they have to be in sync, and that’s where we do a lot of our work.

Zack Arnold: And the reason that I bring that up is because if anybody out there has read the blog posting that I did recently for the American Cinema editors for ACE, I have pretty much put out everything on the table as far as my background, and for years, I dealt with intense anxiety, stress, severe depression-you know, suicidal depression at one point. And the Western medical field, if you go in and sit down with a doctor and say, “I’m depressed, I’m anxious, what can I do? They’re going to say, “I’m going to give you a pill. And when you ask them, “Well, you know, isn’t there more quantitative way to approach this because I’m very analytical, very rational, very scientific about my approach, and it’s like, well, we can’t really measure that stuff. We just have to give you the pill and see if it works. And it wasn’t until discovering the work that you do with neurofeedback and with all these EEG measurements that I realized you can’t actually quantify this information and treat it scientifically and analytically.

Dr. Michael Mark: Correct. That’s that’s a good point, and you know the goal for today is to to take something that has always been maybe a mystery and kind of simplify it, so you know we can have an intelligent conversation and not get too technical. So you’re absolutely correct.

Zack Arnold: Exactly. And what I want to do is share a little bit of my story with a specific example to explain how I found this technology in the first place. I had been going to the Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine, which is in Santa Monica. And if you’ve listened to the podcast, the founder of that center, Dr. Edison de Mello, has been on my show. So he’s been treating me for years, and he’s the one that turned me around and got me towards better health. But I was dealing with really, really intense anxiety and depression for years to the point where I would get in front of my workstation and I would freeze because I would be getting emails and I would have text messages and I would have work to do and I would just freeze out of complete anxiety. I would have a panic attack. I just couldn’t handle it, and I was on multiple versions of antidepressants and I was on Adderall, which is ADD medication, and I realize I cannot function as a human being anymore, living like this. And my job put me in this place where I was just locked in front of this computer, being bombarded with all the stimulus, and I could not handle it. I just froze. And one thing that Dr. de Mello suggested is he’s like, “Listen, I don’t want medication to be a long-term fix. I don’t want you have to be on it for the rest of your life. Let’s try something else. And he had somebody in his office that did these treatments, and I was like, I’ve got nothing to lose, right? So I started doing some of these neurofeedback treatments. And for those that are unfamiliar with neurofeedback, we can go more into what that is in the show as it progresses. But the what I. Want to get through at this point is that I wasn’t taking medications. There was no invasiveness. There were no injections. It was just using these QEG measurements you were talking about. And within maybe three or four sessions, I started to see an absolutely substantial improvement in my level of anxiety, meaning it was going down, and I was more focused and I was more centered, and I continued doing these treatments for 20 or 20-five treatments over the course of a few months. And I remember I had this giant pit in my stomach when I would try to get anything done, just from the sense of feeling so overwhelmed. That pit in my stomach disappeared literally from this treatment, and no matter what I’ve dealt with from that time, and this was about six years ago, that pit in my stomach has never, ever, ever come back, and I’m not using the medications that I was using, and that’s because my brain was literally being rewired. So, talk a little bit about the treatments that I went through and how this actually happened from a biological and neural level.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, so let’s thank you for that compliment, Zack. That’s nice of you to say that, because you know you came into treatment and you were skeptical, like like everyone is, and you gave it a shot, and that’s that based upon some knowledge base. You gave it a shot, and that’s what this is about. Basically, what happens is, is after we see the assessment and we see the you know how the brain is balanced, how efficient it is, how the networks are working or dis or or not functioning in an appropriate manner, we then can come up with a we can clarify how to have the brain become more efficient? So some of the treatments that we do provide, briefly, one is a lens neurofeedback, and lens stands for low energy neurofeedback system. It’s a passive system. It is not like typical neurofeedback. And if I step one, take one step back, when you talk about neurofeedback, what what is it? What is biofeedback? What is feedback in general? And basically, it’s the ability to have the body, if it’s biofeedback, which is physiology, heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, through visual processes, through games, the brain and body learn how to change, and it is based upon at least traditional neurofeedback is based upon operant conditioning. So we reward. You know, when you get a point, the brain’s rewarded. You’re rewarded, and the goal is is to get a certain amount of points per minute. Traditional neurofeedback, you’re getting feedback on your physiology with neurofeedback. You’re getting feedback on how efficient your brain is. So that’s the the old version of neurofeedback. Lens is a different type of neuro feedback where it’s passive. It’s not active, and it’s and lens is unique in the field of neurofeedback in that instead of just displaying information on a computer screen and assisting the client in conditioning a healthier brain wave pattern, it uses very very weak electromagnetic signals as a carrier wave for the feedback to assist in reorganizing brain physiology. Now, it is 400 times weaker than putting a phone next to your ear. There’s no, there’s no side effects from that actual frequency, just from using it. Lens is a disruptive process. It’s basically a confusional feedback technique that utilizes the frequencies in our brain, typically a dominant frequency. It trips the timing mechanism that perpetuates dysfunction, and basically the brain begins to reboot on its own. So unlike traditional neurofeedback Zack, which is a learning paradigm, lens is a disruptive paradigm that lets the brain re-establish appropriate connectivity, and that varies from patient to patient, there is not one system, there is not one treatment that works for every single person.

Zack Arnold: So, so for the people in my audience, basically, if you’re going to take it, you know, and put it in our industry terms, you’re basically in front of your computer. Your computer has a kernel panic, crashes, and you hit the reboot button. That’s kind of what you’re doing on a point by point basis throughout the brain, and saying I’m going to trip it up a little bit and kind of reboot and let it refresh. Right,

Dr. Michael Mark: Correct. The the

Zack Arnold: Other thing that I want to clarify too for people is that when you’re saying like they’re playing games or something, I want to kind of walk them through what this process means because I’ve done this process many times. So when you put the the few sensors that are going on the specific parts of my brain. I know that I’m not getting any feedback to my brain. It’s me giving feedback to the computer, and the really cool thing is that it’s helping me teach my brain how to refocus. So, for example, I’m staring at a computer screen. I don’t have a video game controller. I don’t have a mouse. I’m not connected to anything except the sensors on my brain, and I have to make a cube spin. And if I can’t make that cube spin efficiently, it means that my brain waves are not functioning at the optimal level they need to be. So when you say games, I want to make make sure people know you’re not measuring their activity as they’re playing an Xbox game. They are the game, and that’s where the training and the learning comes from.

Dr. Michael Mark: Right, and and what’s really interesting is we’re only asking the patient to focus for a quarter of a second at a time, so it’s not, and then you get rewarded. So it’s not focusing for seconds on end; it’s on, off, on, off. Basically, like a like a light switch, and that’s how you know the the the brain gets it, and that’s how you get it. Is that you can turn on the focus and concentration and turn it off, and you’re in control of that. It’s not happening 24/7 without any input from you.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. Now you and I talked earlier about kind of this whole process of like kind of tripping the brain and changing it up. Walk me through the analogy that you made of the staircase, because I thought that was a really good way to bring this down to earth, so anybody can visualize it.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay. Well, if you’re you’re used to going up and down stairs, you’ve been doing it for a long time, years. And I, you know, as a carpenter, you know, was trying to repair something, and I made the second to last stair, for example, a little bit longer, a little bit longer than you’re used to. Well, you’re not checking that out, but you know, if it’s not the same size when you go over that step. You’re you’re tripping and falling right on your face because we’re a learned population. We we learn, and it becomes repetitive. There’s no thinking involved. Well, you you trip, and so basically, what the lens does is in a millisecond, it is looking for any disruptive paradigm that’s going on and trips it with a little frequency, and then your body and brain start regulating appropriately. Now it’s not like it works, you know, in one second or in five minutes or an hour, and you’re going to go out of there. You know, not always someone going to leave treatment and say, “Wow, what was that? But typically, you’ll get a response. You will get a response within either 20 minutes or two to three hours, and sometimes, you know, you won’t even pay attention. You go, “God, that’s weird. What was that? And that’s the beginning of the changing of the frequencies and the disruptive paradigms that have been going on could be for years in the individual.

Zack Arnold: So basically, a healthy brain is a normal staircase, and then all of a sudden you have something happen to your brain, whether it’s trauma, whether it’s from stress, whatever it is. That’s the weird step, and then all of a sudden, what you’re doing with the lens is telling the carpenter, “Hey, put that step back the way that it was, so I can walk up my staircase again. That is that kind of a good breakdown of it.

Dr. Michael Mark: Yeah, that’s a that’s a good breakdown for you. Yeah.

Zack Arnold: So what I can say from my own personal experience is, again, like I said, I was skeptical going in, but I figured if if Dr. de Mello was was saying that I should try this, I trusted his judgment enough that I figured I would try it out, and I did the first treatment. And after, and the treatment, so people understand the lens treatment, not the neurofeedback. Lens and neurofeedback are different treatments, but with the lens treatment, it’s completely passive. You just sit for like five minutes. They do stimulation on a few different points. You don’t feel a thing. But I remember walking out of that office, and I felt like I had lost about 20 pounds. I just felt lighter. It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever had. Where I’m like, “Wait a second! I don’t feel like the weight of the entire world is on me. When did this happen, right? And then I remember, and I didn’t start with you initially. So I had another doctor I started with at the very beginning, and then he referred me to you just mainly because of geography more than anything else, but he had said to me, “Listen, people have a lot of habits and a lot of behaviors that they suppress, and when you do this treatment and you start rewiring your brain, some of those habits will come out of the woodwork. And I’m like, “Yeah, okay, whatever, right? Didn’t really know what that meant. Thought maybe it was a bunch of hocus pocus, and all of a sudden, I started chewing my nails. I used to chew my nails like a fiend when I was in middle and high school, and I hadn’t done it for like 10 years. And I started biting my nails again. And I’m like, why in the world am I biting my nails? I’ve I got rid of this habit a decade ago, and then what happened after the third or fourth treatment? I will never forget this experience. I used to have a really really horrible, angry temper when I was younger. I’m not. I’m certainly not proud of it. I’m. I mean, I’m ashamed of having it, but I’m just being very open so people understand that we’re all human, and there are probably people listening to have the same issue. And I had suppressed that temper, and I had learned to deal with it. And after my third or fourth session, for about 12 hours, I literally felt like the Incredible Hulk, where I wanted to smash everything, and I was just so incredibly angry, and it was for no reason. There wasn’t anything that had happened. There was no external stress, but I just turned green, and my pants ripped, and my shirt ripped, and I’m like, I am so angry at everything in the world, and then it went away like 12 hours later, and it was like again. I lost another 20 pounds, and I’m like, “What in the world is going on with me right now? And it was all about the way that my brain was starting to rewire and heal itself.

Dr. Michael Mark: That happens a great deal. The situation, though, is that a lot of a lot of patients want to know where that’s coming from. They just can’t believe that it’s coming from anything that we’re doing, you know, because that’s another form of disbelieving. And when they feel changes, they sort of go, “Oh, well, that’s because I was on a vacation in Hawaii for a week. That’s probably why I’m so relaxed, or I’m probably sleeping better because you know what? I went for a long walk, and that’s fine at the beginning. But when it happens over and over again, you can’t keep using the same reasoning. You have to kind of let it go, and what ends up happening too, Zack, which is something important to mention, is that you know this does change people. It takes them out of their shell or what they think their life is about, and that for some people, for a good many people, could be scary. It could create anxiety, and they have to be. They have to know that they’re going to change, and they’re going to be different people, and they’re going to have more time to kind of do things they want to do. They just need to be prepared to, you know, it’s not a band-aid approach; it’s a life change. So they they need prepared need to be prepared for that.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that that’s an experience that I’ve had myself. I remember, I don’t remember the exact timeline, but it was probably around the time that I had started these treatments. And when I say started, this was maybe three or four months before when I was at my worst. But I remember I was out to dinner with my wife. We we weren’t married yet at the time. We were still dating, but we went out to a big family dinner at a big steakhouse. There were like 16 of her family members, and she’s Jewish, so it’s 16 Jewish family members. So you can imagine, you know, there was just you know a little bit of high energy, and I had a panic attack literally, and I basically just you know very quietly excused myself. I was already dripping with sweat under my shirt. I was just sitting there, like if you had looked at me physiologically, you would have thought I just run 20 miles in 90% humidity. I was drenched in sweat, and I walked in the bathroom, and I basically sat in the stall, thinking, “I’m going to throw up. I’m going to throw up. I’m going to throw up, like having a panic attack. And then I started to notice after I was doing this treatment that not only was I not having the panic attacks, but I was starting conversations with people. And we would go somewhere, and I would actually be somewhat social, and I’m like, who the hell is this guy? Because I have never been social in my life. I’ve always hung back in the corner, and largely because of that change, I’ve you know become a public speaker, and I you know travel and do panels, and I do podcasts, and I’ve started my own business. Like a lot of that has come from the treatment because it’s changed me from being extremely severely introverted and having panic attacks in social situations, to being able to walk into a room and be like, “Hey, what’s up, everyone? So that to me is an amazing, amazing effect of this treatment.

Dr. Michael Mark: Yeah, that that happens a great deal, especially you know in executives, in in students and children, adults, athletes. We have it across the board, you know. That as long as as we can have the same amount of energy from the patient into getting better, then we know we can help them. And by the way, I mean, if we do a brain map and say, “Listen, there’s some areas here that we might not be able to help, we don’t just go ahead and do the treatment. You know, we’re not in it just to do everybody that we see and and promise that every single disorder and difference in known to mankind and the DSM and for psychological purposes we can fix everything we can’t, but we what we can do we do very well.

Zack Arnold: Well, speaking of fixing things, we’ve kind of been talking about general feedback and anxiety and depression and things that a lot of people in my industry, I’m sure, face, whether or not they share it with people, because I know just physiologically what this business does to you. I’ve been through it myself, but I know that one of your specialties is actual traumatic brain injury, which deals a lot with like professional football teams and professional football players. So I want to talk about that a little, but then bring it back to where we started. So, give me a little bit more information about your background dealing with sports teams and actual physical injuries.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay. Well, after the experience overseas and and learning about optimal performance and reducing injury and and really you know creating with with the amazing doctors something that was unique in the field, because Europe is more proactive than the United States still is, for that matter, in the ability to make sure athletes are functioning and performing at their best. And if they start to lose their their abilities, we know prior to anyone else if they are. That’s how exact this this technology is, but when we came into the states and we’re dealing with football or hockey or baseball, whether it be in in high school, collegiate, or professional, what we’ve done is is we realize that what a brain injury is, and it’s you know there’s 2 billion people suffer from brain related disorders. Worldwide, 2,002,000,000 traumatic brain injuries every year, and an annual cost for healthcare services for traumatic brain injury. It’s $3 trillion So, what are we doing here? Basically, through the unique assessments that we can provide, which is and the brain map. Listen, the QEG Zack has been around for years. You know, it’s a lot easier taking a 20-$5,000 piece of equipment and providing a assessment in a locker room than taking a $500,000 portable MRI machine with technicians all over the United States. So, just from an economic point of view, it’s very efficient. The the ability for us to if we have to do this on the sidelines or in the locker room, it’s very efficient. We know what’s going on. We do baselines with every athlete, so that’s the key. We do a baseline, whether it be preseason, a training camp that goes in the files. It’s only brought out when there is an injury of of any significance, and at least we have something to use and for reference. So our assessments are pretty detailed. Like I said, we do the we we do provide brain network activation QEGs. We do balance tests. We do eye tests, King Devik and Sway Balance. So we do a lot of different tests, and we also do the impact test, which has been around for years through the University of Pittsburgh, which is basically a 25-30 minute neuropsych exam, measuring memory and focus and concentration, impulsivity. It also gives us an idea of all the symptoms that are the patient is experiencing. But once we have that, we have through this through all the the unique software that basically it’s like having a CAT scan or an MRI, and you could slice up the different parts of the brain online without this is you know this is not invasive situation. It’s it’s it’s painless, and we found you know once we have a good assessment and and the training goes as planned, we have really you know our results are are really amazing.

Zack Arnold: Okay, so if I’m somebody with anxiety or depression and I come in and you do this treatment, I can say oh I have less anxiety. But if you have a boxer or a football player that has gotten massive amounts of impact and injury to their brain over a sustained period of time. What’s happening on the neurological level that’s actually giving them improvement?

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, well, basically every time one gets hit, the brain gets hit, and we always know the example of the eggshell and the the yolk. But every time something gets sheared, we’re stretching out the neurons. We’re stretching out the connections, and the problem with this is that it’s silent, right? So most concussions and most traumatic brain injuries do not result in loss of consciousness. If we do a traumatic brain injury exam, not always does it show the severity of the actual brain injury right off the bat. But what ends up happening is, is that when there is severe disruption of the electrical activity in the brain repetitively, the brain, you know, our body. Listen, when we injure ourselves and we cut ourselves and we got the white blood cells going and we got the body going. Oh, let’s go to the wrist. That’s where all. That’s where we need to put all our energy. The brain doesn’t differentiate from a injury on the wrist as to an injury in a neuron. So it’s flooding the brain with what it thinks it’s doing. You know what it should be doing, and it’s really hurting the brain. I mean, without getting technical, you know, between the potassium and sodium going going in and out of that cell, it’s not benefiting the brain. So what we’re doing is, is there’s a wide variety of treatments. If it’s strictly concussion and traumatic brain injury, like for example for hockey, just treating the brain doesn’t do wonders by itself. We have to desensitize the the athlete to that concussion. So we actually play. We with hockey. We’ll play the player getting hit, then we’ll play a goal, and then we’ll play a hit, and then we’ll play a goal in the Stanley Cup Finals. And when his when he doesn’t react at all physiologically to the actual concussion that he’s seen over and over again. We know he’s on the road on the road to recovery. So first of all, physiologically, we have to desensitize. If you hurt your knee and you tear up your knee, for example, what do they say? Listen, Zack, when you get in, you know after you take a few hits, you’ll be okay. Peyton Manning. After you get a few hits, your neck and you’re you’re okay. You can play. So it’s a little bit of trauma there, and you’re anxious about that first hit. But be that as it may, with a traumatic brain injury on top of that, you now have to repair connections. You have to repair the networks. You have to repair the electric. Activity, the dysregulation, if you will, of brain functioning. So you know it’s not the first injury, but it’s repetitive hits and hits and hits, which over time disrupt the quote normal function in the brain and cause significant damage from Parkinson’s to mood disorders, to irritability and anger, to lack of sleep, to the inability to work without you know without bright lights bothering you or noise bothering you, nauseousness on a regular basis-a lot of symptoms that come up from the body just not being in tune.

Zack Arnold: And for people that are listening, that are in the post production industry, they’re probably thinking to themselves right now, “Well, I’ve never played football, and I’ve never been a boxer, so why does this matter? And I will tell them firsthand why I think this is so important to bring up. This is from my experience with Dr. Mark. I had been going to see him for a while, and you know you do evaluations, you do the tests, and you know a couple of times he had asked, he’s like, “Well, have you ever had brain injury? Have you ever had, you know, impact? I’m like, “Well, no, I’m fine. Like I’ve I’ve never had anything. Like I practice martial arts, but there’s very little contact to the head. But then I remember you did. I don’t remember the exact technical term, but you the EEG is two dimensional, where you’re seeing brain waves and you’re seeing a map of the brain of the different points. But you did a 3D brain scan, and I remember, and this was like a life changing experience for me. You started doing, and for people that work at Maya or that are 3D designers, they know what a 3D model looks like, and a 3D model of my brain having been scanned started to turn, and you turned it, and there was this big red spot on the back of my head. And you said that’s an area of extremely high levels of low frequencies, meaning your brain isn’t functioning optimally. And all of a sudden, I got this flashback in my head to when I was in high school. I was playing baseball, and I was in the outfield during practice, and somebody was doing batting practice, and they hit the ball, and it hit me squarely in the exact spot that was lit up red. And I wasn’t throwing up, I wasn’t passing out, I didn’t think I had a concussion, but I obviously had a traumatic brain injury. And as soon as you noticed that red spot and you started treating it, my entire world changed because that’s what had been driving my behavior and the way I felt for so many years.

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, you mentioned a really good point, and what what what you saw was a picture from Loretta, which is low resolution electromagnetic tomography, which base it’s a it’s a bunch of words, but basically it we take the actual raw data from the EEG that we that you’ve been tested at, and then we take that, edit the raw signal, so we don’t have a lot of muscle tension and a lot of noise. We then put that into a program through Dr. Robert Thatcher’s NeuroGuide program in conjunction with Loretta, which basically takes a look at all the amplitudes and frequencies, and all the inefficient areas, and all and and you know hypo and hyper, and we look at the areas in red and the areas in blue, and we can kind of correlate that-not kind of, but we correlate that to the exact symptoms that you are describing, and when a when a patient or an athlete or a child or parents see it visually, they now can you know now they know well I’m not I understand exactly what’s going on I can actually see it and this is what’s going on so we try to correlate the visual pictures from the data to what symptoms you particularly are going through at the time.

Zack Arnold: So explain to me in a little bit more detail what that actual red spot was. Like when I said it was a a high amount of low frequencies, it took me a while to actually understand what that meant. Can you just in very brief detail explain the different frequencies that you know, for example, the alpha state, the beta state, and how they relate to just our normal states of being.

Dr. Michael Mark: Sure, for you, of course. So, so basically, to understand what we’re doing is earlier I said we have slow frequencies, fast fast frequencies, and you know it’s kind of general. But let me just go a little more specifically. So the classic names of brainwave EEG bands are delta variations of theta, alpha, sensory motor rhythm, and beta. So they’re all identified based on their frequency. These frequencies are measured in terms of repetitions or cycles per second or hertz. Okay, and there’s some variations as to the best way to group the brain waves in clinical bands. But if we’re going from slow to fast, let me just briefly say what they are. So, for example, delta brain wave is one to three hertz, so it’s slow. It’s the slowest wave. It’s primarily when you sleep and. They’re dominant among infants. Okay, so that’s sort of. They also, if they’re high in rhythmic activity, it’s also accompanies brain injury because it’s slow activity. The more slow activity one sees in adults, the more traumatic brain injury there is. Because just think about it, if you want to do a math problem, or you’re reading, or you want to edit, and you just can’t do it, or you’re trying and trying and trying, and everything’s really slow. It’s it’s not your fault. It’s that your brain is not efficient and moving at a speed that is good for your particular profession. Then we go to a theta wave, which is four to eight hertz. Again, it’s slow, but these waves are known for creativity and spontaneity. If there’s too much of this particular wave, we get fuzzy thinking, poor decision making, a slower reaction time. Okay, and there’s different forms of of these theta waves. We won’t have to go into it, but those are you know people who go through self hypnosis, and they’re highly, you know, they’re highly, they’re able to be in that state. They produce more of these waves in the waking state and hypnosis. So you know that’s kind of like an exception. Now there’s alpha waves, which are about eight to 11 hertz. We’re going a little bit faster. They’re associated with a state of relaxation, meditation, idleness, just kind of being in a nice state. Okay, again, if there’s too much of that, then we’re zoning out, watching TV, sitting in a class, at a lecture. We’re alpha state and we’re not performing. Now, as we go a little further, we got a brain goes a little bit faster when we talk about beta. So when we talk about beta, you know, we’re doing tasks. Our mental activity is enhanced. We’re more physiologically alert, and you could see that if the brain, if the beta waves are too fast, then you got anxiety, you got excessive thinking, you got rapid thinking, you have some OCD traits, you have addiction states. So what the key is is when you see red areas, when you see excessive areas, or you see areas that are not functioning as fast as they should. It’s real simple. It’s like you’re going on a freeway, and you’re going 60 miles an hour, and you keep your foot on the gas, for example, and all of a sudden something’s wrong with the engine, and your foot’s all the way down. The car is slowing down, slowing down. You’re afraid you’re going to get into an accident. You have no control over it. Those are issues that, when we do not have control of our the activity in our brain, meaning that we can’t shut it off, turn it on, we have severe issues. And when those issues get out of control, the first thing a patient thinks of because they don’t see it that way, but they go, God, I got to go to a doctor. You know, I can’t sleep. I’m too anxious. I’m really depressed. You know, things are too difficult for me. So they’re looking for medication because the frequencies of their brain there’s not the proper mix, and that is an issue that we all face, so we have to kind of understand that I’m not saying one frequency is better or worse than the other. They’re all essential to healthy mental functioning. The problems arise, Zack, when there is an improper mix of those frequencies for dealing with a specific task at hand. Does that make sense?

Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. Are you familiar with Stephen Kotler, who does the Flow Genome Project?

Dr. Michael Mark: Yes.

Zack Arnold: So I wanted to talk about that a little bit. Basically, for those that don’t know, Stephen Kotler has been investigating what’s called a flow state. He’s kind of become one of the foremost experts on it, and you probably know more about him than I do. I’ve just kind of, you know, I’ve read his book and heard him speak and kind of learned a little bit, but the basic idea is that he’s dedicated his life to figuring out finding that number, that optimal performance level, and where he found it more than anything else on the planet was in extreme sport athletes, people that are you know mountain climbers and you know the skateboardists that jump over 150 foot ravines, and he’s looking at it from a quantitative approach as opposed to oh these guys are really good at what they do. It’s more how are these guys getting into this flow state, and and to specify the flow state is what a lot of people call being in the zone where you just feel like time disappears and you’re totally focused and the world is just gone, and you’re just you’re into it, and then 12 hours later, you’re like, “Whoa, where’d the time go? That’s that’s a very generic definition of the flow state, and one thing that he’s found, and the reason why I wanted to bring up the different types of waves is that a lot of the super high performance that comes in these athletes is when they have high levels of alpha waves and like a high alpha frequency, and the the interesting thing about that is that the alpha wave is kind of when you’re in a meditative daydreaming state. But it’s so when people think you’re you know you’re functioning optimally, you think oh well your brain must be going really fast and firing on all cylinders. And the funny thing is, it’s actually the opposite, where a lot of the brain is kind of. Starting to slow down, so one part of it can function optimally. So talk a little bit about this idea of just being in the zone and what’s happening with the brain, because I want people to understand all this is quantifiable and measurable.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, so that’s you know very clear what how you described it. Typically, being in the zone from a EEG perspective is between the hertz, the frequency of 12 to 15. That’s called sensory motor rhythm. You can imagine a point from ear to ear, kind of like a crown that goes straight across that particular part of the brain. When athletes are tested, they’re very high in that. So I’ll give you an example. When we deal with goalies in soccer, a football overseas, but soccer as we know it and hockey, they are in that zone. Now, what is that zone? They are extremely focused, but you’ll notice that their reaction time is amazing. They are not heavy focused. They’re extremely focused, but they’re very flexible, and their reaction time is through the roof. That is a frequency that we try to train, and that’s between 12 and 15. Well, when an athlete is when that is low, we know what our issues are. Now, here’s something really interesting. That frequency was tested years ago to show you how old this is by two brilliant people, Dr. Barry Sturman and Dr. Joe Lubar, the four really the the pioneers in this field at at UCLA in the early ’60s when they were talking about and they were looking at how that works in you know unfortunately rats or you know than mice but they realized that when that is understimulated the rats got extremely rageful, and when it was overstimulated, they got very calm. And so you can kind of understand it’s really slight when you’re in a zone. You are hyper focused, but you are as relaxed as you can be. And that is I wouldn’t call it a meditative state because you have to react, but they’re trained to be highly reactive and very calm. Now, sure, it’s not always that easy, but if you take a goalie, if you take a quarterback, you take a basketball, you take a guard, for example, who’s the quarterback of a team. What does he say? At least, what do they say when they’re playing well? Everything slows down. What do you say in football when you come out of college and they go, you know what? He needs to get some reps under his belt because the game’s still too fast for him. You talk to Drew Brees, you talk to Peyton Manning, Eli Manning. The game slows down for them. They’re able to think. Tom Brady, you know, just get me in a tight situation, he sees things slowly and very efficient. So you’re absolutely right. When you get in a zone, that means that that even though things are happening around you at at fast speed at double time, your ability to relax and focus now bring it into a performance area where you can perform better than anyone else because you have now you’re now in a flow where you no one can really stop you. That makes sense.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So walk through. I’m a layman. I’m somebody that’s in front of a computer all day. I’m not Peyton Manning. I’m not Drew Brees. But I’ve heard enough that I’m like, you know what? This sounds interesting. Walk me through the process of getting started and how a first session would look.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, so basically, getting started begins with either you go on our site at neuroedcenters.com. You go on our site and kind of say, you know, you just write down either your what you like to accomplish or phone call one of our you know specialists. Get back to you when we when the paperwork and we kind of find out what’s going on, what are the symptoms because we really care about the symptoms. We do a really detailed discussion with you on history, you know familial history, health history. Not every you don’t have to be in a in a sport, but we can fall out of a tree. We can get into a car accident. We can have some issues at birth. All those play a point in assessment. So once we do that thoroughly, we do the brain map. Brain map takes what about 1015 minutes. Only prior, only area you got to make sure you don’t have any caffeine for 24 hours before, and it’s not. It’s it’s it’s a simple test. You do have to wash your hair before, and I guarantee you got to wash your hair double after. But it’s a it’s a really great test. We then see what other tests are necessary. If there’s attention issues, we do continuous performance tests such as the IBA, which is computerized, kind of the gold standard for anxiety. If we have balance issues, we have reading issues. We do tests for that. If we have some pain or some imbalance that we need to do a little applied kinesiology test, all these tests, the tests like I’m talking about for balance, applied kinesiology, and eyes are maybe two three minutes each. The brain. Map is about probably 20 minutes complete, maybe 25, and then depending if we need to do the brain network activation assessment, that’s about 30 minutes. But once we have all that, Zack, we then take all that information and we decipher that into an individualized treatment plan. Not like I said, not every treatment is for everybody, and we match the symptoms that we see to the brain dysregulation and the brain networks that we see. So it’s client symptoms, brain symptoms, making sure they match, and then we figure out what treatment is best. And it’s always a combination of treatments. It’s not one treatment fits all. I’ve never been of the belief that one treatment could fix every single person coming through. There’s a lot of people that do. I, you know, bless them, but that’s not how we operate. So we do individualized treatment plans. Once we do that, we discuss it with the patient, and then we’re ready to go. Typically, if it’s a typical treatment, it’s twice a week because the brain has about 72 hours before it kind of goes back to baseline, so we like to make sure that we’re constant in a state of improvement. We have had we do obviously with athletes it’s different. We’ve done athletes twice a day for a week, two weeks, a month. We’ve done people who fly in to see us. We do them twice a day, morning and afternoon, but typically it’s twice a week, and that through that we can optimize brain function. We can we then throughout treatment kind of do treatment plan updates. We do more brain maps. We do more assessments. So we’re always fine tuning the assessment, and it needs to match the you know the assessment matches the patient client’s improvement, and we work it into their schedule. We don’t overdo it. We don’t cause them severe side effects. We kind of do it so they get better gradually. And the most important part of this treatment is is enduring. It’s not a state effect. It doesn’t just work in an office. You can take it out of the office. It applies to everything that you do. That’s what makes this so special,

Zack Arnold: And that was actually going to be my next question: is that if I go to a doctor and the doctor says I’m going to give you some Zoloft because you’re anxious, I know that that’s going to work as long as I’m taking it and putting it in my body every single day for the rest of my life. But from my understanding, your treatment is very different. So explain to me how many times I’m doing that twice a week, and am I doing it forever?

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, so to be to you know, obviously I can’t be specific. I can give you some general guidelines because you know I would be guessing, but typically traditional neurofeedback. When I started doing this years ago, one had to do 40 treatments to to really make a life difference, and that’s a lot. Sometimes some patients I had to do 80 treatments. Okay, so besides the financial commitment, the timing just doesn’t work. So most of this treatment and and the the specialty of these assessments is to to highly to to find out exactly how to most efficiently treat the individual. What we do is, is we we start at 10 treatments. We don’t treat anybody less than 10. Why? I could say you know things are going to happen in four or five, and and if they don’t, then well, you know, then there’s something wrong. No, the brain takes time to rewire. Takes time to get better. Anybody that get that thinks they’re going to get better in 24 hours, if they do, that’s terrific. But that’s not typical. So what we do is we have our treatments are an assessment plus 10 treatments and then another assessment. Typically, we say a minimum of 20 treatments. Now it could be more, okay, and and but we don’t we don’t say it’s going to be more. We actually compare our objective data. We care about how the patient feels, Zack, but subjective data is not important. It’s not as important as having objective data, knowing that that the brain is improving, the patient can see it, they’re also feeling better. Now when we’ve dealt with with armed forces, you know that could be a lot longer. When we deal with with professional athletes, it’s more intense. When we deal with children, and who and we’ve dealt with children, I’ve I’ve seen a child at 20 months. You got to be really careful. You know, once a week is is is about it, but typically, if the person is in the area or we set appointment, it’s twice a week. We’ve gone to three times a week. Twice a week is norm, but we obviously change our treatment schedule based upon the requirements and the severity of the injury. Does that help you?

Zack Arnold: Yes. Which means that my next question is: I’ve done my 20 treatments. How long is it going to last before I have to do 20 more?

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay. Well, you know what? That’s a really good point. Does like anything else? What we do is when we do the treatments, it’s sort of like the retainer approach when you’re at the orthodontist and finishing up braces. We don’t go well. There’s 20. You’re done. We spend after we get going and we see the results. We then go. We reduce the treatments from twice a week, once a week, once every two weeks, once every three weeks, once every four weeks. And if we get to six weeks and you’re feeling good, we know that it is lasting. So sometimes you know we might have tune-ups, three, four treatments every six months, every year. It varies, you know. know, some athletes come and see us in the off season just because they feel much better when they have a high dose of treatment. So typically, the treatments last. We spread them out so we know they last. The patient knows they last. But you know, we might want to do tune-ups on occasion. We don’t go to the same 2030, treatments, obviously, unless there’s a severe injury or something happens that is not anticipated by both of

Zack Arnold: Us, right? And the the questions that I’m asking are coming from a place of skepticism because that’s where I started, and I think that’s where a lot of our audience can start. But stepping in from my own experience, the way that that I’ve experienced this whole treatment is that let’s let’s take the scale of one to 10, one being I’m practically suicidal, panic attacks, anxiety is taking over my life, and 10 being I’m amazing, I’m at the highest level level of performance, and I’m on top of the world. I came in at a one, and after about those 20 or 25 treatments, I was at like an eight or a nine, just feeling fantastic. Could not believe how much my life had changed. Six months later, you know, find out I’m going to have a kid. Find out, you know, issues are going on with the business. I may have slipped down to maybe a five or a six, but I wasn’t back at the one. And this was had no influence for you know any additional additional or changes in medication. It was just this treatment. It was the only variable that it changed. So I’m like, well, you know what? Let’s go in and try it again. So you go in, and the five and the six becomes a 10, and then you slip down to nine or eight. And what I found is that it’s completely lasting, and you never go back to where you started. But eventually, you say to yourself, I want more of this. I remember what this did, and I need a little bit of a tune-up. So now I want to go to that next level. So it’s kind of like you take five steps forward, step back, four steps forward, step back, but you’re still continuing forwards. And I’m at that point now where I feel really good all the time. I’ve made changes in my diet, made changes in my exercise. I’ve done this treatment for a while, but it’s it’s probably been like a year or two since I’ve done it, all the effects are lasting. But now it’s like I want to be a optimized human performance machine, so it’s time to get back into the treatment again. But I have never once experienced the way that I felt at a one, which was about seven or eight years ago. I’ve never felt that way again since I started these treatments, and it’s of all the different things I’ve tried. It’s probably one of the most profound experiences I’ve had.

Dr. Michael Mark: Thank you for that. You know, our goal is is when we take a look at some of the goals that we like to do at NeuroEdge. One is, you know, we like to perfect focus, concentration, and mood and balance. I think that’s important. I think we like to make sure honing fine motor skills and reaction time. I think that’s important to our daily life. Obviously, optimizing brain performance, and you know most importantly, we alleviate symptoms. We want those symptoms to we reduce those symptoms. You have to understand that we don’t go in and say we’re going to alleviate them 100% and make a guarantee. But when we deal with people with severe symptoms, if we can reduce 20% 30% it’s almost like 200% for them because they don’t know what it’s like to be without those symptoms day to day. Those chronic headaches, migraine headaches, terrible ability, you know, pain, terrible ability to focus and concentrate, can’t sleep, right? And what’s really important is that this is all not evasive and FDA approved. It’s not voodoo medicine. It’s not. Yeah, I think I know what I’m. I think I know what’s wrong with you because you know, I do one treatment. It’s really specialized and it’s really effective. You know, thank you for being a big supporter of what we do.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. And then the the most important question of all is where the heck are you? So I can get started.

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, we have some different offices. Our main offices are in Manhattan Beach at the Manhattan Towers. We have offices in West and Westwood. We kind of split time. We see a lot of patients, a lot of athletes out of Manhattan Beach. So I’m there part of the time. I’m in West LA part of the Westwood part of the time, and also sometimes, if necessary, you know, we see people at the home office in Tarzana, California. So we, you know we kind of cover areas. A lot of times we’re traveling. At least I’m traveling. So, but we try to be as efficient as possible, and our offices are are nice, and they’re you know it’s not it’s very private. You know the the people we have, the technicians, are state of the art. So feel pretty good about that.

Zack Arnold: Well, this has been an absolute pleasure going through all this, and I’ve learned more today than I had learned through all the the various treatments we had. So now I feel like I could do the the neurofeedback treatment myself. But this has been an absolute pleasure, and I’m very very glad that you were able to come on the show with me today. So thank you for that.

Dr. Michael Mark: Yeah, thank you for your time and for your effort in putting this out there, and hopefully the. Helped a lot of people as well as it helped you, and that would be a lot of fun for all of us to see that.

Zack Arnold: Remind me one more time what your website

Dr. Michael Mark: Is: www.neuroedgecenters.com. All one word. E-u-r-o-e-d-g-e. Centers spelt out.com.

Zack Arnold: So neuroedgecenters.com. If you decide that you want to improve and get yourself to optimum human performance.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Kristin Martin (@KristinCMartin), show notes were written by Maciek Kaliski (@MaciekKaliski), and the show was executive produced by Kanen Flowers (@iamkanen). We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.