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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: Today I am joined by returning podcast guest Dr. Michael Mark. I will leave some links in the show notes for you for the previous two episodes that I have recorded with him. So if you’re interested in hearing his backstory or hearing a little bit more about the science behind depression, you can go to those two episodes. But today we’re going to talk a little bit about the science of attention deficit. Oh, hold on a second. I’ve got a text message here. All right, just let them know that. All right, so let’s go ahead and try that again. Today we’re going to talk about the science behind attention deficit disorder as well as attention deficit hyperactivity. Oh, hold on, I just got a voicemail here. Let me listen to the voicemail. See what I’m doing right now is I’m multitasking, and multitasking is really, really good for the brain, and the brain loves it, especially the prefrontal cortex. And we’re going to talk all about that. Oh, hold on a second. All right, I got an idea. How about I just turn all of my alert sounds off? I put my phone in airplane mode, and I actually focus on one task at a time. And what we’re going to talk about today with Dr. Michael Mark is the science behind attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. So I am so pleased to have you back, Dr. Michael Mark. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Michael Mark: You’re welcome, Zack. How are you?

Zack Arnold: I’m good, thank you. So obviously that was a little demonstration of the behavior that I think has just kind of become rampant in our society today, where you’re trying to have a conversation with somebody, whether it’s over the phone or it’s even in person, and there are just constant distractions everywhere. So, what I want to talk about today are the differences between actual ADD and ADHD, as well as people that are just multitasking poorly, and people maybe they’re just not eating right, whatever it is. But I want to get down to the nitty gritty science of how attention deficit disorder actually works because there are so many people now that say, “Oh yeah, I’m just I’m so ADD. And for people that have actually dealt with ADD firsthand at a much deeper level, myself being one of them, it’s actually kind of annoying. So let’s talk about just the sheer basics of the difference between actual ADD and ADHD versus somebody that just has too much going on and they’re just too distracted.

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, that’s a really good point. I mean, first of all, for the purposes of our conversation, we can define attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as a disorder of the inability to regulate attention. I think the fallacy is that people think that the general public thinks that this is a issue of I just can’t focus. I just have the inability to stay on point. That means I must have this. I’m multitasking. I can’t find my keys. I can’t remember the conversation. I create lists and lists, and I don’t know where the lists are. Something’s wrong with me. Okay, now let’s just go back. First of all, when we talk about regulating attention, the very first thing is people have to understand that that has a lot to do with your present state of mind, i.e. anxiety, depression, extreme stress. When that happens, and when our cortisol levels get all out of whack, and we’re going, we can’t really understand what we’re going to have for lunch. Not alone what we’re doing in the next five minutes. Real easy for us to say, you know what? I I have some attentional issues. I need to see a doctor. I know there’s some problems here, so I think it’s a diagnosis of exclusion because to really understand if someone has these significant issues that can be treated, by the way, assessed and treated very, very effectively, it can’t be a self-report. It can’t be a you go to a to a to a doctor, your pediatrician for a child, your general practitioner, psychologist, and gives you a couple self reports, couple questionnaires. Takes a look at the new DSM five and says, “Aha! You are part of this group, and that just doesn’t work because it takes. You have to know the individual. You have to know what goes on. You have to know what happened early on in their life if they have any of these conditions or any of these symptoms from the ages of four, five, and six. Now the new DSM five says 12. Why is it that age 12 is the miraculous number? Because they found out through research that a typical kid at four years old will run around and not focus all the time, and so therefore they extended that range. So going back to your question, I kind of diverted a little bit.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. You’re gonna have to start over.

Dr. Michael Mark: If we go in some statistics, like for example, National Mental Health would say three to 5% of children have have hyperactivity disorder may incur eight to 10% of school age children. Some say kids. Outgrow it. It varies because the bottom line is, this is a genetic and environmental issue. If one’s parents have it, there’s a good chance that the child will have it. What does have it mean? It means that there are areas in the brain that are not functioning optimally, that the harder one tries, the slower the brain actually works, and the more frustrated and angry the individual gets. So that is one area to look at, but obviously there is inattention and there’s hyperactivity, and that is distinguished by testing. And through testing, one then can determine the appropriate treatment to improve and decrease those symptoms and improve the individual.

Zack Arnold: Well, I’m really glad that you brought up the word slow because that’s the most counterintuitive part of this discovery to me. Because ADD is something that I was formally diagnosed with, and like you said, you know, like three to five to 10% of people have it. And you would, you know, if you look at society and the the colloquial definition of ADD, we would say, “Oh well, I bet more than 70-5% of people have it, and you realize that so few people actually do. But what I just assumed when I found out that I had some form of ADD is that it was like I was, you know, I had a cup of coffee in me 20-four hours a day, and the way I explained it to my doctor, Doctor de Mello, who’s been on the podcast before, I said it just feels like there’s this machine inside my chest that just spins and spins and spins and spins, and I can never turn the machine off and I can never relax. And he explained to me, well, that’s actually because your brain is functioning too slow, which to me is so counterintuitive. And then when you get a stimulant as your prescription, it’s actually helping to increase activity. So explain to me the inverse proportional nature of brain activity versus the way that you feel, because this to me was fascinating.

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, what happens is when one does a brain map, for example, and I’ve discussed this on the previous shows, which is a QEG or quantitative electroencephalograph. We see the electrical activity in the brain. There are a lot of different forms of ADHD and ADD. It’s not one form fits all. So there’s different categories that one can go in. But let’s just talk about this. For example, most of the people that we see complain about similar to you. They complain that they, or they maybe not, might be different than you, but they complain that it’s hard for them to wake up. Their brain starts working at 10 in the morning and goes a mile a minute and can’t shut down. And then what do they do to shut it down at the end of the day? Now they’re taking their Dexedrine or Concerta Ritalin the night before. What happens is when we see the brain map. What the there’s there’s parts of the brain in the frontal cortex that are going just too slow, and what happens is the faster the faster one is processing, the faster when the brain you really need the brain to work as a professional editor or as a producer or a director, and you’re putting things together, and you’re multitasking. You know the brain’s going a mile a minute. You think, but it’s actually working slower, which means you are putting out more activity, and you are getting exhausted faster. So it is taking you actually longer to do something, but you’re not telling anybody about it, typically not you per se. But it’s I’m fine. I’m fine. But you wake up in the morning, and the person feels like boy, it’s really hard to wake up. It’s painfully hard to wake up, and then they start kicking in. So let’s go back to some of those those questions. It’s always interesting that we talk about the brain producing a slow activity. We’re not necessarily saying that. We’re saying that the brain is having such a tough time regulating that by the time it’s pulling in all its neuronal resources, it’s taking a lot of time to do that. It’s over processing, and that is the condition that creates the slow activity. It’s not that the brain is just slow. It’s not that you talk to someone and there’s a delay, there’s a processing delay that the person responds 10 seconds later. It’s that the energy that’s required to pull in all the resources that you need to function is taking most of your energy up. Remember that 30% of all the calories that we eat go into brain function. So that’s what we’re talking about when we. Say the brain is working really fast, but it’s taking a longer time than average to process all the information. Does that make sense to you? Or

Zack Arnold: Yes, no, that that absolutely makes sense to me. So talk to me a little bit then, and I’m for those that are listening. I don’t want you to think that I’m saying that pills are the answer, but what I want to just kind of expand on this idea a little bit further, is that when especially there’s just such a rampant diagnosis of ADD and ADHD in kids, and the answer is oh we’ll just give them Ritalin or give them Adderall or whatever it is. And to me, before I knew anything about this, I just assumed well that was something that calmed you down, and I didn’t realize that you were literally taking an amphetamine that was really maybe half a step away from taking cocaine. It’s basically legal cocaine in a way, not not directly. But explain to me a little bit about the science behind what these pills are actually doing to your brain activity, and then we’ll go further into talking about ways that you can do the same thing without having to take the pill the rest of your life.

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, this is this is kind of a okay. Let’s go through some basics here. So, ADD, ADHD, those conditions are believed to be linked to maybe a sub performance of certain neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine, primarily in the prefrontal cortex. So that’s that we know. We know the prefrontal cortex is responsible for self-regulation, for inhibition, motivation, memory, executive function. What does that mean? Maybe reasoning, organizing, and problem-solving and planning. So what they’re saying is, is if you look at this through a chemistry point of view that the medications out there-they’re primarily as a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, so they block the dopamine and norepinephrine, leading to increased concentrations of dopamine, which they say leads to improved function, concentration, and focus. So that’s a chemistry point of view. And now we add something in it, so we all know if one of us that quote is not diagnosed with ADD or ADHD takes Dexadrine or takes Ritalin or takes Concerta, it will have the exact same effect on an individual that is not diagnosed. It’ll make them focus, concentrate, race a little bit. You know, sort of like taking caffeine, some Excedrin tension headache medication. It’ll have the same impact, which is always curious. Curious is as if if this is the reason why we take these medications. Shouldn’t it be more effective for an individual that quote is diagnosed with this? And in fact, it isn’t. It’s that a person who has never been diagnosed with this, if they do take this medication, they will have the same information going on. Now, I want to say one thing. There has been studies, or have been studies, pardon me, over the years that talk about neurotransmitters and talk about serotonin and talk about dopamine and talk about these other issues regarding depression and why medication works and attention and focus and why medication works. And there is a lot of studies that show this isn’t definitely the issue. That this may not be the issue. It may be based upon drug company studies, but it might not be what’s really going on. And then the answer question is what’s really going on, and you will have some people that say, and some doctors and scientists say we don’t know yet. We’re assuming this, so that’s what happens when we take medication. For example, we know that increased serotonin is good for depression. It makes one feel better. Okay, so if you have chocolate, unless you want to gain a ton of weight, chocolate’s an antidepressant. Dark chocolate. We go into ADD and ADHD, and you talk about dopamine, you talk about norepinephrine, you talk about the prefrontal cortex and inhibition and motivation. Yeah, okay, let’s take that medication. Now, I’m not saying that medication is not good or not necessary for some people. Some people, it is, and what is that? That determines the extent and what’s going on. A, in their personal life, if their parents have it, if they’re bilingual, if they’re under a lot of pressure, especially if private schools will say, “Listen, we really love your child, but you know we don’t have enough experience in this, and so either you put your son or daughter on these medications because you know the effects we hear are fairly fairly soon. We don’t have time for you to do neurofeedback because that takes some time. So either you put them on medication or you find another. That’s best suited for your child. So a lot of the times you have teachers, and not teachers because teachers are really important. You have administrations in schools that don’t really know the extent of these differences.

Zack Arnold: Sorry, my wife just came in and I missed like the last little tiny bit of that. But the and that part I’m actually serious about. It’s so crazy that we’re trying to do a show about attention, and I keep getting interrupted. It’s driving me crazy. But anyway, it’s funny that you bring up the thing about kids because that’s obviously where we’re all talking about attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and all these kids bouncing off the walls. And I think that it’s important to note that when you say, “Oh well, put your kid on medication, or we’re going to have to let them, you know, ask that you take them to another school. What people are seeing is that when you put a child on a medication like this, it works, and it’s almost immediate. And they’re like, “Wow, your child is behaving so much better, and he’s so much calmer, and he’s focusing more. What nobody’s looking at is that there are actually long-term effects of being on a stimulant over the course of several years, and when you look at traditional Western medicine, they’re just going to say, “Oh, well, you had these symptoms on Monday, and I gave you a pill that you took on Tuesday, and you feel better on Friday. Therefore, this is working, and I made the right choice. But they’re not looking at it from a long-term health perspective, which is what I started to realize, because I was on Adderall. I don’t remember how long it was. It wasn’t that long because I started to feel the adverse effects of it fairly quickly, probably within a month or two. And that’s when I started this quest of trying to find other ways to solve this problem. But there were there are just a lot of long term residual effects, and there are other effects as far as your general health. But from a very specific point when it comes to the brain, because that’s obviously your area of expertise. Can you talk about how, if you’re on a stimulant, how the brain is actually? And I know this isn’t the right term. You’re going to correct me with the right term, but I look at it from the way that muscles work. They start to atrophy. If you stop using one of your muscles, it will atrophy. And isn’t it true that if you start taking a stimulant, you have a similar effect of certain parts of the brain with neurotransmitters and functioning because your brain isn’t learning to self-regulate.

Dr. Michael Mark: Sure, Zack, you’ll you’ll have listen, you’ll have different opinions to this. I’m not saying that you know obviously opinions are are not right or wrong. They’re just an opinion. So, from a educated opinion, this is where I’m coming from. That I don’t know if the brain is atro is not you know by not being able to self-regulate is literally that muscle is is losing its its function or beginning to atrophy. But what’s happening is it’s not. It should never be the first choice. The issues with these medications, and I’ve seen, I parents have come to me, and and I find out that they have been giving their child Ritalin for years, for 10 years, and that’s an issue, you know. And I always tell the parents, why don’t you try it for 10 years? Why don’t you see how that feels? They, you know, they they don’t understand what goes on. I coach basketball, and you have the star player just playing great. Well, there’s something called a drug holiday. Sometimes the you know it’s suggested that during the summer that children that are on these medications should not take it. Why? Because it’s not good for them. It stunts growth. It causes you know other issues which which are you not healthy. Well, going back to this basketball player, parents decided not to give him the medication on Sunday when he was performing in front of all his friends and family, and he literally had no reaction time. The ball hit him in the head, and I said, “Do you think this is good self-esteem for your child? It’s it’s amazing to me. What what the issue is really is that what is when you talk about attention issues and you talk about fidgeting or squirming or difficulty playing quietly or blurting out when a child blurts out in school and raises hand, and the child and the teacher says, “Oh my God, Johnny, you’re out of tune. You’re out of turn. You’re interrupting the class. Why is he raising his hand? He’s not raising his hand to be disruptive. He is afraid he will not remember it, so he doesn’t have the memory skills down. So he’s blurting it out. But now he’s considered someone that is distracting. The issues are when you deal with medication. Let’s go back to medications. So we have medications. We have stimulants like Ritalin and Concerta and Adderall and Dexedrine. We have quote non-stimulants like Straterra. We have different interventions, which is behavioral therapy and social skills training. Obviously, neurofeedback, which we specialize in. We obviously believe that that is the best area and the the best treatment protocol for for ADD and ADHD. The the reason why, just go back. The reason why the diagnosis of ADD was difficult to establish prior to the age of four, mainly because. Because, like I said, it’s hard to distinguish normal variations in behavior from hyperactivity associated with ADHD because they don’t know what is overly excess excess activity and what isn’t. The distinction is if it disrupts, if it causes a disruption in school and in family, then they determine. Okay, maybe there’s an issue there. But we go back to the medication. I do believe. I mean, going back to what you said originally, that if you if you take medication, just like for anything else, you take medication for depression and learn no skills. You take medication for anxiety and think anxiety will never ever come back to you in any form of any form in any way the rest of your life. If you think stress, you know, if you take a couple meds to alleviate stress as well, you think that’s never going to come back. You’re right. You need to be able to understand the symptom, associate it, and do the appropriate treatment because medication is not something that one takes their their lifetime, and if they do, you know they need to be checked every three months for liver functions, and there’s a lot of things that can go wrong.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I mean those are the kinds of things that I’m talking about chronically. Where I mean, first of all, we don’t have long term studies on any of this medication. It’s not like we can say, well, we have people that started taking Adderall in 1943, and we researched them in 2012, and here are the health effects, like we have none of that. So if you’re talking about taking it for two weeks just to kind of balance out, that’s great. But if you’re talking about taking it for 10 to 15 years, you have no idea what that’s going to do for your long-term health in general. To go back for one second, you know, just as kind of an anecdotal joke more than anything you had said that you start diagnosing ADD at like age four, and if anybody has young kids, I would say that if you diagnose it before the age of four, you get about a 100% diagnosis of ADD because kids are squirrely and they run everywhere and they blurt things out, and that’s just normal. So I think that it’s funny that you brought that up because everybody’s like, oh god, these kids are so ADD. It’s like, well, yeah, they’re kids, you know, they’re just developing. So to just jump in because you hear about kids that are like three and four years old that are on these medications, and I just want to take the parents and just shake them and be like, why are you doing this, you know? But then once you hit that age of four or five, you do start to to differentiate. Like my son just turned five, and he’s much more settled down, and can sit, and can have conversations, and can reason, and can write. But two years ago, he was bouncing off the walls. That didn’t mean he had ADD. It just meant he was a kid. So I think that’s important for people to realize. But the other thing that I want to mention that I think is really important for me, taking the medication is what opened the door to me understanding that life could feel a lot different than it did. As soon as I felt that, that’s when I realized I need to find a way to do this long term because I do not want to be on medication. But there was a great analogy that was given to me on my last podcast by Sean Fever. We were actually talking about sexism, which has nothing to do with this, but she had made the analogy that I’m going to probably be using the rest of my life because it’s a brilliant analogy. If you ask a goldfish what water looks like, they’re not going to be able to answer, right? Because they’re surrounded by 24 hours a day. It’s kind of similar to the analogy of not being able to see the forest through the trees. And if you’re in this and you have it, you kind of don’t know what it feels like to function normally. So in that sense, taking the Adderall after about a week, not even I felt the machine slow down, and I started to realize, wait a second, this is what it feels like to function normally and be able to get things done and not be so stressed out, not have these crazy amounts of cortisol pumping through my body all the time. I want more of this, and I want it long term. But I’m not going to rely on the pills to make that happen. That’s really what started my quest to figuring out diet and figuring out exercise and finding neurofeedback. So let’s say that somebody has decided I’m. I just want to take the pills short term. I want to see what it feels like to function normally, and then I want to jump in and I want to do this for real. To me, the first place to look is your brain function. So, if somebody comes to you and they say, “I’ve been on Adderall for three months.

Zack Arnold: I feel much better. I just don’t want the pills. How is the process going to work with you? And if you want to learn about the general information about neurofeedback, that’s what the previous two sessions are for. But let’s talk specifically about what your protocol is going to be for somebody that knows that they have some form of ADD and they want to achieve all the same things long term without the medication.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, that’s a great question. So first of all, we we do a complete at NeuroEdge. We do a complete assessment, and what does that mean? We we sit down with with the patient. We talk about what’s going on, what what when they were diagnosed, how they’ve been taking the medications. We then go into doing specific objective tests because we’re trying to when we we look at the brain, it’s really important to associate the symptoms that one is feeling with brain dysregulation. So we do the brain map. We do a quantitative EEG. We do a couple other network activation assessments, which are all objective, computerized, non-invasive, doesn’t take a lot of time. And by looking at that and putting to our software, either in Loretta through NeuroGuide Bob Thatcher program in in Florida, and Loretta, which is an amazing program, slicing up the brain in different areas and different colors, we can see exactly what’s happening from that point of view. We then can tell the patient, listen, this is a treatment protocol, and the treatment protocol is based upon operant conditioning, and we all know operant conditioning. We are trying to you know what what feels good the brain likes what doesn’t feel good the brain doesn’t so through neurofeedback we reinforce we reinforce the optimal function of the brain which is you know we we naturally create the ability to feel as if they’re taking the medication, meaning that if they feel more alert, more focused, more concentrated, if they sleep better, if they’re not as anxious, they wake up in the morning more refreshed instead of exhausted. They don’t go to sleep with their mind racing, and they don’t know how to slow it down. All those things begin to change. And one something that’s important, what’s really good is that they already know how to feel. They already know what it means for their brain to be, for them to have that energy and not be dysregulated and and not feel out of time and what they’re doing. If someone doesn’t take medication and comes to us, then when they start feeling better, they worry. They go. It’s. I haven’t felt like this. Is this like okay? They they think to themselves. Is is this really going to last? And and they have to sort of get through that point where their brains changing, their life’s changing, and it’s different and it feels good, but it’s still a form of anxiety to them because they’ve never felt this way for a long, long time, if ever. So I think your point about the medication coming in the least, they know what it feels like, and now we’re naturally dealing with it. Now, with that said, any time you take medication, you need to be weaned off properly. It’s not like, well, let me take it, let me get off, let me take it, let me just you know take it a couple days a week, or I have a final, I’m going to take it, that’s not a good way to take medication. It’s not healthy, and it’s probably not medically prescribed that way. Even if patients do that, but one thing’s important: if you’re on any medication that’s prescribed by a doctor, you need to wean yourself off properly and not do it yourself.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, that’s that’s a really really good point. I’m glad that you brought that up. So, as long as we’re on the subject of treating the the symptoms with the neurofeedback instead of the medication, I think the most logical next question is: Well, if I have ADD and I’m on Adderall, I know that if I don’t continue taking this, all my symptoms are going to come back. So, does that mean that I’m basically going to be chained to a neurofeedback device five times a week for the rest of my life.

Dr. Michael Mark: No, neurofeedback. What’s great about neurofeedback is that it’s permanent. It changes your brain function and your outlook permanently. Typically, they range the old-fashioned neurofeedback was 30 to 60 sessions, and you know financially it was impossible, and time restraint constraints were really tough. Now with Loretta neurofeedback and the different types of neurofeedback, including lens and neurogen and and different types of products out there with combinations, one could say that you would do a minimum of 20 sessions. We see changes in six to seven, but because it’s based on operant conditioning, you want to do it over time. After those sessions are over, it depends, Zack, on the severity. Obviously, it’s not a foolproof at 20. We might go over a little bit, but what the important part is is after you start seeing changes, and others see changes around you. Those changes start to happen quicker and more permanently. And then, as we see that, we wean off the neurofeedback. So, at the beginning, it’s typically recommended twice a week. We then bring it down to once a week, and then once every two weeks, once every three weeks, we go up to once every six weeks. And after six weeks, we then, if that’s if they’re feeling good, we we the treatment is over, and we might do touch-ups once or twice a year, maybe, which is one or two treatments, sometimes not. But we always follow up with our patients to make sure that they’re they’re doing well.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I can speak to all of this firsthand. And obviously, I myself am not a scientific experiment. Like I’m n equals one is my study. Like I’m it. So it’s not like I did this with 100 other people. But I can say anecdotally that it didn’t take me 30 or 40 sessions to say, “Wait a second, this is making a difference. When I started at the very very beginning, it took two or three sessions to feel a. Substantial change in the way that my brain was functioning, in the way that I was thinking, in the way that I felt. And I think after like 20 or 20-five sessions of doing this in conjunction with the lens, which is low-energy neurofeedback system, which is a little bit different, it was a substantial change. And the effects that I used to feel of anxiety, and when I gave the analogy of the machine inside of me. I’ve never felt that ever since then. That was, I think, in 2008 or nine. And I may, I, I don’t even remember for sure when it was anymore. But the point is, I’ve never felt that feeling again. And I’ve gone periods of six months to a year without doing neurofeedback once. And then, like you said, I will decide to go in for a touch up, and you and I will sit down for five or 10 sessions and kind of you know grease the wheels or whatever and make sure that things are functioning optimally again. But I’ve never gone back to zero. I have never felt the way that I felt five or six years ago when I started working with neurofeedback. So when you say that it’s permanent, for me it is. Like it, there are always slip ups. It’s really no different than exercise. If you’re going to decide to get fit and build your muscles and work out every day. You get to a point where you’re going to get stronger. You’re going to build more muscle fibers, more muscle tissue. But if you sit on the couch for six months to a year, you’re going to lose some of that. You’re going to start gaining weight again. But the strength is still mostly going to be there. You just kind of need to clean things up and retouch it, which is why when you exercise, you try to do it on a regular basis, but it’s not like if you miss the gym one day, you’re going to gain 25 pounds and lose all your muscle. And I kind of feel like neurofeedback is very similar in that sense.

Dr. Michael Mark: Yeah, it is. I I agree with you 100% I wanted to I wanted to say one thing to you that you know that that the stimulants when stimulants are given to children, and they then become the teenagers. The abuse of prescription stimulants is higher among college students than non-college attending young adults. But you know they use it as a study aid or to stay awake longer. They then mix it with alcohol. You have recreational users that actually crush the tablets, so they can have more of a rapid onset. It’s used for a purpose, but clearly, when one gets used to it and likes a certain feeling, thinking that that’s the only way they can get it, like you said earlier, then there’s some significant issues as the child goes and grows up and goes to college. So I just wanted to make sure that that’s out there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I think it’s if anybody is listening to this right now that may have a child diagnosed and they are on medication, don’t just think about oh wow they’re behaving better and they’re learning in school because at the end of the day the long term effects are going to be way more detrimental than the fact that you’re seeing short term gains. So it’s it’s definitely something that I really think needs to be brought up, and people need to think about. But I now want to switch gears a little bit. This is still going to be within the general realm of what we’re talking about. But so far, we’ve pretty much been talking about people that actually have either a genetic disposition, or there is legitimately a brain function issue with whether it’s low activity, dysregulation, whatever it is, that’s the category that I was in. Now there’s the category of people, which is a much much larger category of the people that say, “Oh yeah, well I’m just so ADD and I’ve got so much going on. What I want to talk about is the concept of multitasking, and this is kind of the the joke that I was making at the beginning with all the different alert tones, because we are so bombarded by outside stimulus, and we have so many things that we are trying to do. And there are people that will constantly say, “Oh yeah, I’m such a great multitasker, and I just want to slap them, and I want to tell them, “Well, you’re actually not, because the human brain is not capable of multitasking. So, can you talk a little bit about the difference between people that are actually afflicted and people that are just bombarded by too much stimulus, and how the prefrontal cortex actually cannot handle multiple stimuli at the same time.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, so that’s really interesting. Most of the adults or children that I deal with, or teenagers that are diagnosed with ADD, they the only way they really can function they think is to have the radio on, the music playing, the texting going on on their iPad, their iPhone. So they’re having all this going on and doing homework, and they’re wondering why homework takes six hours or eight hours. So put that aside. On one hand, on the other hand, the very first person who taught me years and years ago, Dr. Marjorie Tumham, one of one of the sweetest ladies in the world, who who who did biofeedback and neurofeedback for years, almost like my my mother, and she would say we would have these long conversations, and she said, you know, let’s talk about regulated attention. You know what it’s like? I said about multitasking, she said, “This is what happens if someone is has attentional regulation issues. It’s like in their brain they have seven or eight rooms, the doors are open, and nothing, not one of the doors ever closes. So they can go into any of those.” Rooms do something, but nothing’s ever finished, and they keep and they constantly go visit the rooms, and the rooms don’t have you know the doors never close, and I think that’s that’s important in the sense that I’m not necessarily saying that you know obviously one of the questions that we ask on a report is can you multitask? Do you have difficulty multitasking? Are you slower? Do you want things done right now? Do you avoid instructions? Do you avoid directions? Do you need to? Do people think that you know you’re aloof because you hyper focus? So what I think happens is that multitasking, in a way, is is a way, in a sense, to basically disrupt the feeling that they that the individual thinks something’s wrong. It basically allows them to not feel different because a lot of times they do feel different, and they feel like there’s a problem, and they take medication. They know there’s a problem. Other kids don’t take this medication. Why am I taking this medication? What’s wrong with me? And so it’s really hard, Zack. I really feel bad because you know a lot of times I sit there with the family and we sit there with the children. You know, and it’s really important. Like, don’t criticize your child. It’s not that he’s too slow, or he’s not too. He’s not not trying. He’s doing the best he can, but the multitasking, in a way, is kind of a. It’s a way for them to kind of get themselves out of the “what’s wrong with me” phase and just kind of blur things together because it’s it’s sort of like a a part of them that they don’t like, and so I don’t know. Multitasking is something that if we say that we’re going to do three things, we’re going to finish history lesson and we’re going to read a paragraph in English, and we shut off the phones, and we shut off the TVs, and we shut off the internet, and we actually do that. There’s a good chance that we might be able to do that. It might take us a little bit longer, but we’re not distracted intentionally. But you know, everybody says, “Hey, if you can multitask, you’re intelligent. And most of the people we see, you know, just like yourself, if you’re not intelligent, this doesn’t become an issue as much. Meaning, I don’t mean that as a disregard, but if you’re an average student and you’re performing average or a little bit below average, it’s yeah, you know what, it’s okay. But if you are defined as an exceptional student or a student that really is, you know, right there and trying, then this becomes a a separation. Remember that if a person if a person is one and a half standard deviations less in their when we’re doing performance testing, and we want to see if there’s a learning difference, you know it really matters in those that are it comes across in those that are above average more of a problem than those that are just average. But to go back to your question on multitasking doesn’t matter. I don’t think that you know multitasking one can’t do.

Dr. Michael Mark: I just think that we never complete any of the tasks. We always do the tasks to about 1020, 3040, 50% We never complete. So we have eight uncompleted tasks, and that just keeps going on like that. Instead of just focusing on one or two tasks and get them out of the way, I think you know we do that as a coping mechanism to have all these open tasks because that means that we’re busy. I’ll give you one example. I had a patient, actually, I had an employee who would literally have while he was in. I didn’t know this, but while he was doing work, he would have two computers, two screens. He would actually do the work for the office on one computer. He would then email four or five different. He had four or five different accounts on the other computer, and he would also have music going. And you know he had to be stimulated on a regular basis because otherwise he would consider himself to be bored.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that that’s a really interesting point. Like when you say he would consider himself to be bored, I think that some people will mistake busyness and multitasking for being productive when it’s actually quite the opposite. I read a study, and I’ll have to look it up. I read it a while ago, but it said that the the percentage of people that are actually physically able to multitask successfully is somewhere in like the three to 5% range. Like it’s a very very small number of people that have a gift with the way that their brain is wired that they can multitask. The vast majority of the rest of human beings are incapable of it, and when you multitask, you are actually losing up to 40% of your productivity. So that’s why you said you just get into this hamster wheel of doing all of these things and spinning and spinning and spinning and nothing getting done. So I think it’s like, for example, if if you take let’s do it mathematically. Let’s say that you have three tasks. And you know that each task should take roughly 60 minutes to do. Most people will think, well, geez, if I’m doing all three of these at once, I’m going to get it done faster, and I don’t have to block aside an hour for each one of these tasks. But what you don’t realize is that if you do all three of those at once, trying to get get them done in that one hour instead of the three, all three of them are going to suffer. You’re not going to put nearly as much time or energy into one of them. You’re not going to do nearly as good of a job. And the most important aspect of that is that if one of those tasks is a learning task, say you’re reading an article or reading a book or studying, you’re not going to retain any of that information because your brain is just not able to multitask. So just talk a little bit about how the prefrontal cortex, which is the human part of our brain-the conscious part, the learning part, the memory-how if you’re, let’s say, that you’re trying to study and you have music going with a lot of lyrics, and you’re checking your email and you’re texting, why you’re not going to retain any of the information that you’re trying to learn?

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, we know we know that the prefrontal cortex is very important for for executive function, for inhibition, for the ability to process. And so, what happens? I believe that as we we do all these multitasking, it forms a anxiety, gives us the a little you know, our heart rate goes up, our respiration goes up, our breathing goes up. It’s almost like a fight or flight. So we have all the circulation goes from our from our hands and toes goes basically into our chest, and we’re kind of like going a mile a minute. And again, the brain is using all these resources when what we’re talking about short-term memory plus or minus seven. We’re talking about 30 seconds to to try to have that. We need to then take that short-term memory and stick it in the long-term memory. Well, how’s that going to happen? If our if we’re not able to do that because we we are focused on eight things, we can’t remember eight things. I mean, what’s the rule of thumb? If you read something, and I tell you what’s in the middle of what you just read, you won’t know it. You’ll probably know what’s the beginning of it, and depending on how long it takes you to before I ask you what’s going on, you might remember the end of what you’re reading. But what happens is, is all gets jammed into sort of like the middle of a paragraph, and you don’t have the ability to remember it. And then what does that do? That leads to frustration. That then goes to ah, yeah, you know what? I have a memory issue, I have a focus issue, I’m not good enough, and therefore, yeah, can you help me somehow, and really, what you said is is absolutely correct. We’re overly processing, and we don’t have the resources to take what we’re doing and stick it into a form of a long-term memory, just so we can remember something and do it. It’s going to be exactly like my my teacher told me years ago. You’re going to have eight doors open. You’re going to get 10, 15% done on those eight items, and you know what? You really won’t remember what those eight items are. You might remember number one and number eight, but nothing in between.

Zack Arnold: Right, and what I want to do is give a really, really concrete analogy for the people in my industry, because I think that it’s important for them to be able to relate all this information to how they can actually apply it to their daily life, and I will give them the perfect example for all of the editors or assistant editors out there. We have to watch a large volume of raw material, and we need to take that raw material, being raw footage, and cut it into a scene or cut it into a trailer or whatever it is. And I see so many editors that will sit in front of their computer, they will be watching dailies. They have their email open. They have their phone in front of them, and then they have a separate laptop where they’re either you know listening to a a podcast or a radio show or whatever it is. And then you sit in with them a couple of weeks later, and you’re like, hey, you know, there’s this moment here. Do we have a better performance of that? I don’t know. Let me go check, right? Because they don’t remember the material because even though they’re watching it, they’re not absorbing it. So a concrete way to fix this is a technique that, and I’m not saying I invented it. It’s just what I’ve done for myself. Is that whenever I watch dailies, it is the only thing that I’m doing. So I turned off all of my alerts on my computer. I’ve turned off the alerts on my phone. I don’t have my email open, and what I’m doing is I’m in front of my computer and I’m watching dailies and that’s it. So I’m retaining the information more and I will set aside time whether it’s 25 minutes or an hour or whatever it is where I literally have no distractions whatsoever and I’ll sit in with producers or directors and they’ll sit in the room and they’ll say, “Oh, hey, you know, do we have another moment like this? No, we don’t. Well, how do you know? Can we look at the dailies? I’m like, sure, let’s look at the dailies. Oh, you’re right. No, we don’t. Or they’ll say, well, do we have this? I’m like, oh yeah. Take three of setup. A, I think I have something here. And they’re like, well, wait a second. How do you know this so well? It’s like because I am focused intently on watching the dailies and retaining that information. It’s a process that I just jokingly call to my. Mental digitizing, where I’m just digitizing the information into my brain into short-term memory, and I’m doing it so much more effectively because I have no outside distractions. So for those that are in this industry saying, “Well, how do I how do I actually apply this? That’s the way to do it: is to turn off all of your alerts, all of your reminders, all the little pop-ups, all the dings, and if you want to get much, much deeper into this, part of the reason that I wanted to have this podcast where I did is I just did a podcast on increasing and hacking your productivity, which includes how to manage your email, how to manage alerts, and how to get more done by what is the opposite word of multitasking? What would monotasking like not multitasking? I don’t really know what it would be-but the idea of doing one task at a time will actually make you immensely more productive.

Dr. Michael Mark: I think that what is is really important is that you realized that instead of doing nine things and all have them incomplete, you are choosing to do one and finishing it, and that’s a process that we all have to do. I myself, if I’m if I’m studying for something, if I’m teaching, if I’m writing a report, I can’t do all three at the same time. If I do, I get nothing done. I’ll get frustrated. That doesn’t mean that I have issues with that. Just means that that’s how we are naturally. You need to block time. You need to do what you have to do as a priority, and not go. Something’s wrong with me. Therefore, I probably need some medication to kind of focus through this because I heard, I saw some of my friends, and they said, “What’s going on? This is what’s happening. And so, you know, we’re we’re used to quick fixes, Zack. I mean, that’s what our we specialize in in the society, and you know, give me something to get rid of this. Give me something. Get rid of my headache. Give me, you know. I got. Well, let’s fix your headache. No, no, no, no. I just need a medication for that. I don’t have any time to get better, but I because I have a job to do, right? And and I think that if we just know that we need to look at the symptoms, see where they’re coming from, deal with the symptoms, resolve them, treat them, then at that point in time, if there’s medication that’s necessary, fine. But you know what? Medication should not be the first resort. It should not be the first resort because that means that the individual then thinks that a chemical can now permanently change attitudes and moods and feelings and and focus for a lifetime, and that you know that really is not the truth.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that I want to go back to, going back to again the discussion about multitasking in the prefrontal cortex, maybe this is something you can help explain to me a little bit more. But I was reading about the idea of creating blank spaces where you actually do not solve a specific problem that you may be working on until you actually step away from the problem. So if you’re looking at a math problem or a scene that you can’t edit, or you know whatever the task is, you’re like I just can’t figure it out. You’re staring at the screen and staring at the screen. I’m sure everybody has experienced this. If you just decide to throw your hands up in the air and walk away and take a walk for 10 minutes or take a shower or whatever it is that you’re doing depending on the time of day. All of a sudden, bam! You get this lightning strike in your head and you’re like, “I’ve got it! And it’s when you’re not even thinking about it. So, how how does that process actually work in the brain?

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, I think you know there’s a there’s a there’s a psychological process which is that if you want to come back to a project and finish it, you need to leave it in the middle or towards the end, never complete it. For example, if I’m writing a song and I have an issue, it’s a lot easier for me to come back to the song if three quarters of it is there, and I come back, I can click right in versus, and writers do that. They don’t complete chapters. They leave a little bit left in the chapter so they can go right in, see what’s going on, and continue. Our brain works that way. Our brain works that if we just step away, and like you said, blank spaces are great. If we step away and we kind of allow ourselves the ability to have our brain in all parts of it, but you know, to sit there and to connect the dots and to logically see what’s going on. We’re much more focused than if we sit and we try to push through something. When someone says, “Yeah, I got to just push through it, well, you’re not going to push through anything. You’re going to get a block. You’re going to be able to not be creative. You need to step away. I mean, one of the things that we learn is, you know, what our brain can’t sit there for for an hour at a time. We really need to to sort of break every 15 minutes for physiological reasons, for for you know aches and pains for energy. You just can’t sit in one location for a period of time. But being creative, I think you know what you’re what you suggested is is excellent because it it does not allow the brain to be taxed and overused.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I’m I’m so glad that you brought up the idea of not completing a tax. Because this is another productivity trick that I learned that is so immensely useful to me. I know that the anxiety that I used to go through as an editor is something that’s very common because I’ve talked about it to other editors. But the worst fear that I ever had as an editor, and I know that many others go through the same thing, is what I call the the blank timeline. And that’s when you look at your timeline and it’s empty, and you say to yourself, “Oh my God, I have to fill this. I have to cut a scene, or I have to cut a promo, or I have to cut a trailer. I have no idea where to start. And I would just stare, and I would stare, and I would stare, and I would procrastinate. I’m I’m gonna go check Facebook for a couple of minutes. I’m gonna check check my email. Oh, I just got a ding. I got a text, and the blank timeline stays there because of anxiety, and the mistake that I made is that once I got into a scene, I would get hyper crazy focus, and I wouldn’t let anybody bother me until I was completely done with the scene. I would put off lunch, I would put off taking a walk, and I would finish the scene, and then I would come back. and The worst case of this was always after I was done with lunch. I would look at a new blank timeline for a new scene, and I would go through the same thing over and over and over. And once I learned about this idea of not completing something, that totally changed my level of productivity. So now, what I do is I will work on about 90 or 90-5% of the scene. So let’s say it’s a three-page scene, and there’s I don’t know 40 lines of dialog. I’ll stop editing it when I’m about 30-eight lines of dialog in, and I maybe have three or four left. And I’ll say, “All right, the scene’s feeling really good. I’m going to walk away. I’m going to go have lunch. I’m going to take a walk. Then when I go back, I’m not quite finished, but I already had a train of thought. I know it’s going to be so easy to complete that task. So I edit those two or three lines. I finish the scene, and now I’m back into a groove, and I have momentum, and I don’t have that anxiety anymore about opening up a new blank timeline and starting a new scene because my brain is already functioning in the proper wavelengths to just be able to do that task. So, if anybody else out there is dealing with this blank timeline anxiety, not completing a task is the best way to get through it because you just you constantly have this feeling of momentum and you never feel like you’re starting over. So I’m really really glad that you brought that up.

Dr. Michael Mark: You’re welcome.

Zack Arnold: Ah, you had said something else, and I got so caught up in this. See, seriously, podcast about ADD, and here I am showing the fact that I’m just so massively ADD.

Dr. Michael Mark: Zigerneck effect is what that’s called.

Zack Arnold: That’s so amazing that you brought that up because I talked about the the Zuckernick effect on my podcast about productivity, and I’d never heard of it. When he brought it up, I looked it up. I’m like, “This is genius. So as long as you brought up the Zuckernick effect,

Dr. Michael Mark: Yes,

Zack Arnold: Let’s let’s talk a little bit more about that and the idea of how the brain just has to complete a task to be satisfied.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay, I don’t know if the brain has to complete a task as much as we do, I remember the brain is a processor. It’s your hard drive. It can store years and years of information based upon emotion. So we have different forms of memory. You can remember birthdays from 20 years ago. You can remember where you were in high school or college or middle school. If there was a emotional tie to it, good or bad, so I think our brain can put those away in separate categories, and we can access it. The question is: is how do we complete a task presently and have our brain access it? And I think that many people just have difficulty, Zack, in completing. You know, when you when you have when you take a look at very successful people, like Stephen Covey has his seven his seven habits of highly successful people, and the first one says, you know, there’s there’s all these things one has to do, and the first one says learn how to delegate, right? So then I delegate it to my assistant. I don’t do the other six, you know. Is is that really helping me? The situation is that our brain, if things aren’t completed, what happens is our brain loses focus; it loses the ability to fully go into something 100% because it’s always going. Did you finish that? Did you finish that? Or you’re thinking, what’s the last thing I need to do on that other project? What’s the last thing I need to do on the project? So, so you know, it’s our own way of creating more anxiety and more stress. You know, doing something 90% and then coming back to this one thing, doing something 90% and going into a total new project and trying to come back and do that, it doesn’t work. And I think I think naturally procrastination is a problem for individuals with attentional issues. We say it’s a problem. Again, it’s a way for them to say, “Listen, I can’t deal with this right now. I need to distract myself and relax. Because the more stress they put on themselves, and the more self critique they they put on themselves, it creates low self esteem. It creates a lot of individual. Issues that are debilitating, and so therefore, their ability to do something else kind of gives them a little bit of freedom. They think, but they then have that issue. So one of the things we we work on, like like you were suggesting, is that the brain likes completed things, so it can put it away, put it in storage, whatever storage, whatever memory we want to put it in. At least it’s done. It’s not that we have 16 different apps open on our MacBook slowing down memory. I think that we need to. You have a couple open, that’s fine, but when we have a lot of open-ended issues, we first create so much stress that it’s impossible to figure anything out, and we have no energy to do it. And we definitely think something’s wrong with ourselves.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that’s a really great analogy, especially for this audience, which is highly, highly tech savvy. Because if you’re an editor and you’re cutting a scene, or you’re a visual effects artist that’s doing you know really intense rotoscoping on 4K footage, and you realize that your system is really bogged down, and the pinwheel is spinning constantly, and you just can’t get it to work. And then you realize, oh my God, I have 14 apps open in the background. Well, duh, I know my computer is not going to function optimally if I have all these apps going. So I need to quit all these outside apps, and I just need my computer to focus intensely on After Effects right now because I’m doing this intense compositing. That’s a really good analogy for the way that your brain works. Because if you’re trying to do all these different tasks, you’re not going to be able to do any of them well. So that’s a really good analogy for the the tech group. I think that makes a lot of sense. There are like 100 other things that I could go into right now. This is a topic that I’m really interested in and excited about, but at this point we’re probably running a little bit long, and I don’t want the the show to go too much longer because I’m really worried that people aren’t going to finish it. I want to make sure that people get to the end of the podcast and they’re not distracted by other things. That was a joke, by the way. I know. So yeah, I think there there are definitely follow ups available to this, and I’m definitely going to continue to hit the idea of ways to be productive and ways to try and not multitask to get more done in less time. And I think that all this is kind of related to the idea of attention deficit and attention deficit hyperactivity. So before we are through with the show today, can you just let people know how they can find you and where they can start if they decide they want to make long-term changes instead of just relying on pharmaceuticals to get them through this issue or through for their child, their children.

Dr. Michael Mark: Sure. well, our company is NeuroEdge. We have offices in Manhattan Beach as well as Tarzana, California. Our phone number is 424-456-3020 That’s 424-456-3020 Our website is www.neuroedgecenters.com. One word: neuroedge. N e u r o e d g e centers c e n t e r s.com And you can also reach me by email if you like at Dr. michael@neuroedgecenters.com

Zack Arnold: And if I have a listener that’s in Indianapolis or New York or Florida or somewhere where they’re obviously not going to be able to see you guys in person, is there a directory or a place that you would recommend that people go to get reputable, licensed people in this industry? Because I know in the world of neurofeedback, you can literally go online, buy a device for a couple $1,000 and call yourself a quote unquote technician. So, if somebody’s not local and they want to make sure they’re doing this right with somebody licensed that knows what they’re doing the way that you do, how can they go about doing that?

Dr. Michael Mark: Well, a couple things. One is we’re affiliated with offices in New Jersey and Philadelphia. If someone wants to see someone in their neck of the woods, their best thing is just email me, and then I’ll go and see where they’re located, and I’ll give them a list of individuals who do what we do. The reason why it’s not like just go on, you know, BCIA or look at someone who’s licensed. It depends the issue and the type of treatment. There’s different types of treatment, and not everybody is licensed for everything, and not everybody is knowledgeable, so if they just let me know where they’re located, if they’ve been diagnosed, what their issues are, and what they would like as far as assessments and treatments, if they’re interested, I will refer them. Especially Jersey and Philadelphia, we have affiliated offices there, but anywhere else, I’ll do some research, or our office will do some research and get back to them as soon as we can.

Zack Arnold: Awesome! So once again, for everybody, that is neuroedgecenters.com. That’s the place to get started if you decide that you want to rewire your brain and get things fixed permanently. So thank you,Dr. Michael Mark, for being on my show once again. You’ve been here so many times that if I have a theme song, I’m going to have to put you in it.

Dr. Michael Mark: Thanks, Zack. I appreciate all the effort you’re doing on your behalf to make what we do known, and also to help a lot more individuals have access to this.

Zack Arnold: Well, part of the reason that I’m able to get all of these things done and be happy and be productive is because of all the brain rewiring that I have done over the last five years. So I can I can thank you for that.

Dr. Michael Mark: Okay. Well, you’re welcome, and have a great day.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Kristin Martin, and the show was executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.

The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.