Rebecca Bassam: Brain Mapping, ADHD, Trauma & The Hidden Electrical Signals Controlling Your Mind

32:31I usually work with two to five milliamps and it's just a tiny little barely perceptible tingle. And, and when you deliver that, and this is another diagnosis that, that, that people get, it's, it's so commonly diagnosed, it's depression. Okay. Anxiety, depression, these anxiety and depression and and sleep meds and statin drugs for high cholesterol they're the most commonly prescribed medications but it addresses it's just a chemical nobody has a deficiency of chemicals it's physiology i am the biggest neuro nerd okay i'm i'm a psychophysiology specialist and i i can't call myself a psychophysiologist because i dropped out of grad school i was just too busy in the trenches doing the work but board certified in brain mapping we're going to come back to that neurofeedback biofeedback even equine assisted learning horses horses are big giant biofeedback they resonate they feed they mirror facet that's a whole nother topic would love to take you out to the ranch anyway so so that's the difference between ect and microelectric current and the reason why i mentioned that in depression is that when i hit when i fell off my horse one of the times many many i hit this part of my head right here left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is where we experience pleasure.

34:17The left frontal cortex is where, um, causative emotions approach behavior, willingness to try new things. I like that. I resonate with that. The right side is where we experience negative emotions, emotional reactivity, avoidant behavior. I don't like that. Okay.

34:36Darin Olien:Negative. Well, if you hit your head and I see this every day up at the recovery center, every day. Guys diagnosed with depression. Every one of them, I see a frontal asymmetry where the left side is going slower than the right side. One of the interventions, and this is what's one of the things that saved my life when I was suicidally depressed after this head injury, because this side of the brain had too much slow activity. I had a big, really bad head injury that actually showed up on the MRI and the CT. And you can see it on the EEG. There's a 1.2 by 0.6 centimeter area of white matter demyelination showed up.

35:22That means that part of the brain was not functioning. So I had a hard time experiencing positive emotions no matter how rosy my life looked. And so one of the things that I did to rehab it, And I'm going to come back to the whole treasure trove of tools that we use here in the lab. But one of the things that really got me out of the woods was delivering a microelectric current with a positive, running a current from here through to my right shoulder. Positive, and then dialing down the posterior limbic lobe. and this right posterior temporal lobe here is where a lot of emotions are. This is where we tend to store traumas.

36:08Anybody with a history of PTSD, I don't diagnose PTSD, but I can spot it. And I just, I can spot it. I'll see an excess idling and then an excess of fast activity back here. and so we address it by first we look at we assess it we measure the brain waves and then i look at stress that's a big thing stress hijacks everything it will get you out of your higher cortical mammalian you know about the mammalian versus the reptilian brain mammalian is the cortical function, reptilian is the deep limbic lobes and the amygdala, the hippocampal gyrus. That's the lower level reptilian brain. It has the ability to hijack cortical functioning within milliseconds.

37:05Okay. And so got to look at stress. And we measure, like I said, respiration, heart rate, heart rate variability.

37:18Darin Olien:So, so yes, I mean, so, I mean, people listening, cause primarily people listen to this podcast and they're, they're listening to all of this brain stuff and they're like going, I don't know if my brain works. I just, I just feel like I am who I am. Right. Or I just take on, I'm ADD or I'm my head when I was 15 in football or I fell down on my bicycle and then the body just adapts or the brain adapts and then we think we are what we are. The thing that you had a severe brain injury, I've had one as well off a motorcycle flying down a highway in Colorado without a helmet on. Luckily, it was closed head, so I never hit anything, but my head whipped so hard that my brain bounced around inside.

38:17Oh, let's come back to that.

38:19Darin Olien:That's a thing. Yeah, so, yeah, so, but there's hope here because, I mean, we need people to get more access to this kind of therapy. And when I say that is like when the brain doesn't work well, and especially if you've had injuries or you have excess trauma or you're in repeating patterns of any kind, that when you get a brain mapping and you get some individual diagnostics, you can then tailor what your brain needs to come back online. because the thing that through these microcurrents that I'm aware of when you're talking, the brain and the body wants to heal, right? And so just giving it little nudges now and again allows it to restore itself.

39:16Darin Olien:And like your injury, it allowed your brain to restore itself so that you can function again. And that's the thing that I'm most excited about about what this is. It's not just because we talk about a lot of people listening, maybe they don't have brain injuries, but they want optimal living. They want to be happy. They don't want to be a victim of brain fog or not having energy or they're too sleepy. And like you said, maybe they're functioning. They've got a stressful function on the one hand, but yet they're not feeling like they can think or they're depressed or something like that. And the thing that I love about what you're doing and the thing that I'm intimately aware of is these are patterns.

40:08Darin Olien:They're not us, right? Right. They're patterns. And so once we understand individual patterns, we then can actually, like what you're doing, you can test them. you can see the pattern and then we can help to address those patterns once they're, that's why knowledge literally is power in this instance. And like Daniel Amon says, he's got a couple of great quotes, how do you know if you don't look? And so that's exactly what we do. We identify patterns. Now, I want to come back to that question, how did it start? It's not always a head injury. Sometimes it's just life. Sometimes it's just life. And if somebody's lived a life where there's a whole bunch of really bad stuff.

41:00Now, there's that whole cup half full, cup half empty. Some people have just had a lot of really bad, bad stuff. Now, some people are just more resilient and adaptive than others. You can take two people in the exact same circumstances, even if they're identical twins. And there's been, I've done twin studies as well. And, but sometimes it's just life. And if a lot of negative things happen, the right frontal cortex just gets real busy noticing and filtering. Our brains are designed. They're pattern seeking devices and they seek out patterns and they, and ding, ding, ding, you see something, you're going to process it real quick within 200 milliseconds.

41:44You've heard this is a whole nother thing we can measure the brain's ability and speed of processing in different areas. And it gets really deep. I'm not going to get too nerdy right now. So sometimes it's just life. And if there's a lot of negative stuff and there's not a whole lot of positive stuff, then the left side of the brain, even without an injury, can start actually shrinking. Use it or lose it, that's what happens. If neurons don't fire, they start to degenerate. The body will prune whatever is not working. And so sometimes it's that. The left side just kind of shuts down. And the right side is real busy.

42:29Darin Olien:So are you saying then, like, let's say someone has a really bad year. They have a lot of, they have a death in the family. they lose their house, they get a divorce, they get in fights with their spouse, and it's just a piling up of things. So are you saying that because of a lot of negative things that seems to also happen in life, that that can definitely alter the brain, and the brain then adjusts to those patterns of intensity, And, and, and then we, we kind of default ourselves into this new pattern. But again, then we think that that's us. And then we try to psychoanalyze ourselves out of it.

43:25Darin Olien:But in fact, there's a much deeper thing that we can, in addition to maybe other therapies or whatever, that we can influence and get our brains back into firing correctly again. Absolutely. And one of the interventions that I do is just helping people to change the way their narrative, the way they talk about it, the way they look at it. You can use different words, different semantics to describe the same situation. And I'll have them with the EEG cap on the head, and we'll be looking at frontal gamma activation. Just changing the way you look at it and the way you talk about it. And maybe being thankful for the learning that that bad experience, thankful that it's over and reminding yourself that it's over and you're safe now rather than reliving and going back in the past.

44:19People get stuck, like you said, in these patterns of thinking and that the brain starts to adapt and and not just the brain patterns, the thought patterns. What we want to do is disrupt those patterns. And now back to the interventions. We can use bioresonance frequencies for the whole body. We're going to also look at restoring functional breathing and releasing muscle tension. This is something, has anybody ever said to you, Darren, just let it go? Yeah. And were you able to? No. But how can you let it go if you don't know where it is or what it looks like? Really? Really? This is what I promise people when they come in for their psychophysiological stress profile with some sensors on them.

45:16It's painless. It's non-invasive. And I promise you, I can't read your mind. But I'll be able to. Your secrets are safe with me. But I'll tell you about how you're thinking and how to adjust the way you're thinking so that you'll feel better, work better, remember better, sleep better. let it go better, relax better, get in a better mood. It's all about adjusting physiology. And so we can use mindful self-awareness, verbiage, your semantics, the way you look at a thing, and then the tools like microelectric current. I have micro Tesla, little micro Tesla magnetic coils. You know, we've got the amp coil.

46:02That's a big, big thing. We've got TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation. Don't we go, don't get, do you want to get me started on that? I've got three years of experience with it, got certified, learned, learned from Tony Barton himself who invented it. It's a wonderful device, but it's got to be applied to the specific spot at the specific frequency based on looking at what that brain is doing, not just the symptoms. Okay, super important. And then we've got, so we've got microelectric current, we've got magnetic, pulsed electromagnetic field. Now pulsed, meaning we give it a frequency, a pulse, based on whatever that brain needs.

46:47Sometimes it's an excitatory pulse, we need to wake something up. Sometimes we need to dial it down. One cycle per second pulsing turns things down, dials down things that are going too fast. Or sometimes it's an overcompensating thing for parts of the brain that are going too slow. It's just like, did you ever have a coworker that wasn't doing their job? And the other people, they get agitated and they work harder. And it just results in dysfunction. Brains do that too, believe it or not. And so we also have, we use light and sound. Are you familiar with red light therapy? This is, this is, check this out.

47:25Okay. If you have any propensity, any sensitive to flashing light or pulsing, close your eyes. But so this is a super powerful red light device and I can set it to pulse to just go continuously, which is what it's doing now, or I can put it at frequencies. So I call this red light dopamine. My football players with the depression, I just put this on their head right over where the dopamine. Dopamine starts in the nucleus accumbens deep in the basal forebrague brain. Then it takes a left turn and it goes forward through the ventral tegmental area, the striatum to the left frontal cortex right here.

48:08So we can activate it. So I have an interesting question.

48:15Darin Olien:So, you know, as we are all on, there's so many things and we're probably going to do, I'm going to come into the office, we're going to do even more stuff. But, you know, we have these damn devices, right? We have social media that's hijacking dopamine. We have the modern world that's grabbing our attention at every turn. And what are you seeing in the brain with all these people that you see maybe relating to kind of that kind of thing? And like, yeah, illuminate some of that for us. Like what are you actually seeing in the brain as it relates to, I don't know if you're looking at kids or whatever.

49:05Everyone. Yeah. Everyone. And so these devices, they're job security for people like me.

49:15Darin Olien:Screen addiction, it's a diagnosis now. It wasn't, was it about 10 years ago? It's an addiction. It's that intermittent reward, scrolling. So what am I seeing? Well, I'm that girl who measures stuff. I get hired by companies to test their devices and do efficacy studies. And I'm like, hey, if you pay me enough and give me enough free stuff, I'll measure it. Well, a friend of mine, Isabella Mercado, she's a social media influencer. She's also an aesthetician who used to work in the office where I was. And she came in one day. I put the cap on her head and I'm measuring all her physiology. And so we just established a baseline.

49:59And then I gave her her phone. And I had her just start scrolling through social media. I won't pick on anyone in particular, but you know what I'm talking about. So she's scrolling through for about 20 minutes. And she's just scrolling just a wide variety of content. And here's what I found.

50:26Excess, high beta, fight or flight in the limbic lobes. It activated her.

50:31Darin Olien:So stress just looked just scrolling. emotionally and she was looking through a variety of content she was looking at at funny stuff at sad stuff and at informational she was just scrolling and she got really emotional she actually started crying and and i saw her deep limbic lobes just light up going fast and um we can i could share my screen but but so basically those limbic lobes got going really really fast. And it resulted in a flood of emotions she could not control. And then I'm like, okay, let's stop this now. Let's press pause. I took her through some breathing exercises. We shifted gears, changed our thoughts.

51:19And, and, and literally she's, she and I are both believers and, and just slow down her breathing, allowed her, and, and, and we literally went into meditation and prayer. And I'm not kidding you, her brainwaves normalized, everything normalized. When she stopped, she shifted her attention and slowed down her breathing. Everything went back normal.

51:45Darin Olien:Wow. So in real time, you're watching her scroll, you're seeing the brain shift into these stress responses, these deeply, deeply emotional reactions and responses. And then just through stopping, breathing, attention. Shifting attention away into a more positive space. And it shifted right away. The brain switched. It was pretty quick. It was pretty quick. Yeah. Within what? Minutes or? I don't remember. Yeah, minutes. Not a long time at all. Right. And I do this when I'm in session. I have people think about different things and we can actually watch. Sometimes the brain activation will shift within milliseconds.

52:42And all it takes, when I have sensors on people and they get to see how they're breathing, their heart rate, heart rate variability, muscle tension and the way they think, you can actually see it in the lab. And this is how our bodies were designed to reset just with the breath. Breathing is powerful and it's empowering. And I don't like to call it breath work either. That's work. Let's like, don't try. Kano, it's willful volition. It's stress. Allow, allow yourself to slow down and change your breathing. And I'm not kidding you. This is how our bodies were designed to shift gears and rebalance just with a breath.

53:25All it takes is a breath or two. Once you're aware of it and you learn how to shift gears with your breath, that's how we were designed. And when you breathe in, your heart rate and blood pressure go up. When you exhale, heart rate and blood pressure go down. So if you spend more time in the exhale, a slow exhale, it's going to help you shift.

53:49Darin Olien:So it's that simple thing of like, you know, an in-breath of five account and an out-breath of like 10 can definitely shift the brain and body right away. And we can actually measure it in the lab and figure out what your optimal breath rate is. It can be a little bit different for everybody, but generally speaking, about a four second inhale, tiny little pause in a six second exhale, spending more time in the exhale and a 10 second breath cycle. Don't make me do math. I don't like that. I hit that part of my head too, but a 10 second breath cycle times six breaths is 60 seconds. Get it? so six breaths per minute six breaths that's the math about a six breath per minute four second inhale six second exhale that's a 10 second right times six breaths now you got 60 seconds that usually and people can remember four and six that's that's the easy thing rather than you know 5.2 and four and six for a minute can change the brain four and six with two breaths i'm not kidding you it doesn't take long i have a little i have a little drill i teach people but here's the thing here you have to do it right and that's what you get to do it semantics are everything yeah we get to do it and and yeah but i'm saying i'm saying that facetiously because because so many people just accept this is the way again i'm going back to the this is the way i am but there's a absolute way to shift it and you're seeing it in real time with all of these brains and you're giving us the goal this is gold right now and i want to emphasize this so you're like you know in in for four out for six, just do it for a minute and it changes the brainwave states and it gets you out of this fight or flight.

56:02Darin Olien:That's a problem. It does. Now, sometimes people are still in fight or flight no matter how they breathe. So that's why I look at these other measures, but typically the breathing is the biggest hack. I mean, it's written, right? Just take a breath. It doesn't cost any money. In prose, in poetry, in song, even in scriptures, the breath of life. Just breathe. Allow yourself to slow down and take a couple breaths. Just allow. Shift gears. Don't try. Allow. It's mindful awareness. Rather than what we're typically told, oh, just take this pill. Just take this pill and keep doing what you're doing and take this pill.

56:45Now tell me, Darren, what medication is going to work on one part of the brain and not the other? What medication is going to make the fast part go slower and the slow part go faster? Especially when it's right to left or front to back? I see this every day. Can you say medication non-responder? Happens every day. Yeah. But so we don't just use getting back to the interventions. We don't just use the light, the sound, the magnetic pulses, the microelectric current, but there's also, that's the training. I call it the training wheels. It gets you started, gets you triaged. It's the assistant. It's like bumper bowling.

57:31Okay. It helps you bumper bowling or the training wheels. Then in some people, all they do is use the devices and the devices are wonderful. I think of them as my medication. I don't travel without them. This is my little device that inside there's glasses with light emitting diodes and you wear them with your eyes. Glasses.

57:52Darin Olien:So we can at some point, we can go back and when I come to you, we can show a lot of this stuff and we can do it. Because again, most people are listening to the podcast so they won't see a lot of this stuff. But I want to come to you and we can do a whole thing. Let's do it. Love to get the brain mapping and all of that stuff. Because I think the thing, and I would love to, you know, again, not everyone has access to brain mapping or to your speciality. And just like you said, breathing is our, like that's our life. And we can consciously breathe. and that is such an incredible tool when we use it to then shift our brain, our bodies, our physiology, our mental state just by doing that.

58:47Darin Olien:And again, if we don't do it, we don't get those benefits. And it's really powerful to do this in the lab with the sensors on so that you can actually see how adjusting your thoughts, your posture, your muscle tension, and your breathing. This whole mind-body shift. And when you have the sensors on, biofeedback, that's another thing that we do. That's the training part. That's establishing an awareness of the biology and the body-mind connection. When you've got sensors measuring a biological signal, be it brainwaves or muscle tension or breathing and you feed it back on a screen you can train it and you actually see how you can use your skills and your mindful awareness even your self-talk and and navigate your way through so that's where the neurofeedback and the biofeedback comes in and your brain learns your your brain is designed to perceive and interpret the world around you so we give it signals to follow those are the stimulation technologies the training wheels and then we guide you with feedback to see how it's all working and how you can shift your attention.

1:00:01And your brain's designed, once again, to perceive and interpret the world around you. You're seeing what's on the screen, be it the physiology or playing a video game or watching a movie on a feedback dimmer where your screen is being influenced. It's a brain-body-computer interface. And that's where the magic happens. Now, a lot of people do have access. They may not be aware of it, but we have concierge services. We can ship equipment out and work with you remotely and show you where to put the sensors and do remote measurements. Or we're also organizing an upcoming retreat experience where people can come here and work with us for five to seven days and get the assessments, get some tools, and take home things that can help them to continue this process moving forward.

1:01:01Darin Olien:And it doesn't have to be only for the elite. It doesn't have to be only for people. Yeah. And, and that's, that's the thing I would love to, to figure out ways to scale. I always think my brain, my brain always goes to how do we scale things so that more people can have benefits that, you know, are in the far off lands who can't travel and things like that. And at the same time, how do we create the opportunity for more access in general, more ability to get this type of treatments, this type of assessment, this type of analysis in more clinics, in more places, in more accessibilities, situations where people can get very specific on what their situation is?

1:01:55Darin Olien:is. Absolutely. I think the key to that, um, number one is awareness and, and, and knowledge, just educating people is that there's, there's, there's options in, in addition to medication and traditional psychotherapy, you know, truth be told, sometimes just keep talking about it, just reinforces that pathway. Um, so, so, um, what would really help is if people, if insurance companies would cover this work. Now, there's a code for biofeedback and neurofeedback, and some insurance companies will reimburse. Some of them won't. And don't get me started about insurance companies. That's another topic of conversation.

1:02:43But the brain mapping typically is not covered. It's only going to be covered if it's done according to the bean counters at the insurance company, the people who authorize or deny things, it's only covered potentially if it's done by a neurologist. Well, neurologists don't spend their time on this typically. They record EEG. This is going back to something that came up earlier in our conversation. Typically, when they record EEG, they're looking for, is the person brain dead or are they having seizures? that's typically but there's so much in between between brain dead and seizures and optimal

1:03:23Darin Olien:function so much between the whole world worlds of thank you for that thank you and so what we do is we can train the brain and with with various various modalities from very complex to even simple methods to find new patterns. And it doesn't necessarily take that long when you use a – I'm a very big proponent of a multimodality approach, not just a couple sensors and not just a multimodality approach because they have a synergistic. I'm that girl who's been known to put AVE glasses on in my hyperbaric chamber and then come out and do red light therapy while I'm meditating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then go to the kitchen, make a green smoothie.

1:04:23And then go out for a walk in nature barefoot, super important. And disconnecting from these guys.

1:04:30Darin Olien:Right. Just EMF, it's a thing, electromagnetic. That's a whole other thing because I'd love to, because I know when we were talking about this, when Nick was talking to you about this, there's a whole EMF side of this, and I'd love to come. So I see this. This is such a podcast as a start because I want to come there and we'll do a bunch of content so that people can see this stuff and they can understand more and more because it becomes arbitrary when you don't realize this unseen world of frequencies and magnetics and pulses and influences and traumas. It's hard to understand it, but then when you can see it through your diagnostics, through the techniques, and through all of these things, then people can go, oh, wow, there are all these influences, and I can do something about it.

1:05:30Darin Olien:I think the thing in wrapping up here, what are some, what is like a couple things that you would say that people can do right now? I kind of have an idea of what you're going to say. But what are some things that people can do right now to shift their brain into a better optimal kind of functioning? Okay, I'm going to give you a gift. I'll tell you something you can do right now. It's one of the first things I teach people. And I learned this from one of my favorite mentors. There's several. You know, when you want to learn how to do something, you seek somebody who's doing it well and successfully with decades of experience.

1:06:13And so that would be Dr. Sue Wilson, who is an icon in the field of sports psychology

1:06:19Darin Olien:and peak performance. And she is the one who helped me to start the NFL Hall of Fame Alum Academy Performance Lab in Canton, Ohio. working with what was essentially a bullpen for NFL linemen. And she taught me this technique. This is the first thing we taught them. Here you go. We'll do it together. It's a mental reset drill. And she calls it the awesome technique because it's awesome. And it's all about taking a breath. Okay. So you ready? Yeah. Take in a breath. Now, as you exhale slowly, imagine smooth your forehead, soften your gaze, drop your jaw, release your shoulders, and send blood flow down your arms, your wrists, your hands, your fingers.

1:07:11Darin Olien:Okay, now one more time. Take a breath. And as you exhale slowly, smooth your forehead, soften your gaze, drop your jaw, drop your shoulders send blood flow down your arms did you feel a shift for sure awesome isn't it yeah yeah it's just the the mindfulness of just scanning because my i'm like wow my shoulders are up like they dropped you know half an inch it's like wow it's you don't and you didn't even realize your shoulders were up here and you were and when you see that when you do that with sensors on you, it will blow your mind in a good way. Yeah. Yeah. Well, amazing, Rebecca. I love this.

1:07:58Darin Olien:I think this is a start of many conversations and I love this. And plus you're 20 minutes from my house so I can run over there anytime. But I love this work and this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you're doing. And again, thank you for jumping on and providing some hope to the audience that, you know, patterns are not us, but patterns can be influenced and positively changed. And the story, the story is not you. And I just want to leave, I want to leave the viewers with one thing that's so important. If you have anybody in your life who's struggling with mental health issues, it's a brain thing.

1:08:40It's just hardware and wiring. And no matter how my football players, this is just one of them, dear Shilmarco, one of my favorite clients of all times and I have permission. He left our program and he went on to publish three books. On the outside, you're all healed and you look perfectly normal and beautiful and whatever and perfectly you look normal. It's not like when you damage your knee and there's stitches and swelling. You can look perfectly normal but on the inside, people are suffering. please just understand them and share this video with that because there's hope and there's help and they're just not the same as they used to be but they don't have to stay this way

1:09:27Darin Olien:i love it i love it that's so good such a great message thank you so much and i know the audience is gonna love it you're welcome thank you for inviting me to join you today i look forward to talking more soon. Yes.