Ep 174: He Was Making Progress, But His Brain Map Showed Something Different (A Case Study)

Welcome and the need for vigilance 0:00

Hi, everybody. It's Dr. Laura with Connect My Brain. Welcome to the podcast. Wow. So today, it's going to be a little bit of a deep podcast because I just feel like there's more layers falling upon our children. And we do, we have to talk about this stuff because if we don't have a certain degree of vigilance, so many things can creep in and really just rob the child, rob of their childhood. I've done many podcasts on many different topics, but when I sit and I think about them, the majority of them they're on the primitive reflexes, they are on sensory development, and, I want to get more into the brain.

We talk a lot about labels, ADD, autism, dyslexia, oppositional defiance. We, we talk about many things that are right here on the surface that we see, but there are so many thing that don't see. and they have to do with the brain and the chemistry. So I think I'm going to be doing several podcasts in this direction because there is so much going on for our children. I've done podcasts on neurofeedback. So if you're new to Connect My Brain, welcome. But we are a brain-based facility. We have a three-tier approach, mechanical, chemical brain.

we work on looking at the developmental journey of every child, every person. Even adults come in, and they'll come for neurofeedback. And once we do a Brain Map and we see the things that are going on, they will always connect it back to being a child, or they'll say, I can remember this as far back as I remember. So the brain is such a huge part of how we look at things and how support things. Some children, when they're very little or very delayed, we'll call them low functioning, They're really not in their body.

And so we don't even start with neurofeedback until they're actually in the body, what does that mean? You come into the world, you're fully formed, but you are not fully functioning. You're down in your brain stem. You are not having heavy conversations. you're not reading a book, you are moving. So everything about how we get wired up has to do with movement. And now if I drew a bell curve for you and we looked at the other end of life, what happens when we lose the ability to move. I've talked about my mom several times.

She had a very bad injury in 2018 and she is stuck in a wheelchair. and the left side of her body has a deficit. Even though after that stroke she restored movement after this accident in 2018, it was like the bucket tipper. And I'll use that phrase a lot, what tips the bucket? Everybody's got a bucket and everybody's gotta bunch of stuff in the pocket. And that's what we have to look at. We've talked about that concept of bucket as it relates to all these kids getting identified as autistic and most of them are regressive autism.

Brain-based care and developmental foundations 4:06

or it's the label that was used because what they are going through, it matches autism the best. When my mom had an autoimmune storm in 2016, they called it Gillian Barre, even though the neurologist standing right beside me said, you know, It's just the closest diagnosis that we can call it. So these are really important elements to understand about our health and well-being. So the chemistry will go deeper, but we have spent some time in chemistry and talking about gut function and the health of the gut.

but there's so much more to it. I want to talk about de novo jeans, I wanna talk jumping jeans. There is just so many information. This is one of the things that I really pride myself on, is I am a life learner. i am not stuck in the past, i've been in practice now 30 years. And there's so much to learn and there is so to offer the community. And I always say the Community is our world. Because these podcasts can go everywhere. If you find a podcast and you say, you know what, this was really good and I think my friend, my sister, the teacher, could really benefit from hearing the share it.

There's so much information that we've got to open up our eyes and realize that as a parent, you are the chief executive officer of your child. You must be the advocate, you must watch everything. And even when I get to start with a new family, and mom will say, this is where we're at, we tried all these things, that one of the very first questions I ask is, what does your gut tell you? Mom's intuition is fabulous. So be vigilant. Be vigilant over your child. Don't sit back and just say, that's the way it is.

I can tell you with 100% certainty, we have power to change. We have the power, to observe and to figure out. And then there's lots of people like me out there. You can go on the website connectmybrain.com and you can fill out a form. I'm going to be the one that calls you. i'm gonna be The one That talks to you one of the gifts that I truly believe that God has given me is I can see What's going on? He's given Me that gift Let me give you an example So working with more of like a young adult and when we do brain mapping, what's brainmapping?

So we'll put a cap on the head. There's actually 19 active channels. That's considered the gold standard. What does that mean? That means you're collecting the proper amount of information in order to make some kind of rationale after you see it. Now, in healthcare, you never take one piece of information and make a concrete diagnosis. Example of that. There's patterns that show up in the brain. For example, there's a pattern for attention deficit. You get way too many slow waves in front of your brain, the names of the Brainwaves that we know so far, and I know they're always figuring out more, but Delta is your sleep wave, Theta is you precursor to sleep, your imagination pretend play, Alpha is our processing, collecting resources and locking in on them.

Low beta, this has a lot to do with orchestrating the sensory motor cortex and bringing that information from one part of the brain to another part. Beta is are executive function and as adults, that's our primary brain wave. Then there is high beta. Now you could be high-beta as a CEO, but you could also be high beta and have anxiety. And then there's gamma. Gamma is one of my favorites because it's our aha moment. It's like the light bulb goes off and you figure it out. And so there there are others, but these are the basic ones.

So delta, theta, and alpha actually match the age of the child up through alpha. Delta is 1 to 3. That's your sleep wave. This is why babies sleep so much. Ages four to seven, your dominant brain wave is theta. Subconscious pretend play imagination. I can take a broom and turn it into a horse and have a fabulous time. Alpha is eight to 12 Hertz, and that's broken up into two parts.

Brain mapping, neurofeedback, and self-awareness 9:42

And we look at the ability to process this information. Then it shifts. So when a young adult has too much delta, theta, and alpha in the front part of that brain, yeah, it's going to give you this twilighty kind of a feeling, which is then feeding back into the person. And this is why one of the big questions is, OK, do you daydream a lot? And as they get older, some of The other things that they mention is that They got racy thoughts. They can't put things together. Brain fog is always in there, but it does.

It changes for people depending upon what it is That they're going through. So we started neurofeedback. What's neuro feedback? So neuro-feed back is brain training. Anything that actually provides the brain some piece of information that you're doing it correctly is feedback. You are a feedback mechanism. When you're hungry, you get a message in your belly that then is sent to the brain and it says, hey, You need some protein, some carbs, the minerals, and vitamins. Hey, let's go get that tuna fish that's in the refrigerator.

If you have to go to a restroom, your detrusor muscle of your bladder has receptors and is literally stretching and sending a And you can have normal messages, and you could have an overactive bladder because you have a weak pelvic floor. And so it takes nothing for that stretch to give you that urgency that you'd have to go to the bathroom. But that's sending the message to your brain. For the podcast audience, I'm pointing to my brain, everything you do is gonna give a feedback, but think about How did you learn how to do that?

All of that started back even before you were born. Lots of things are going on in the womb. And there's lots of podcasts that break these pieces down. So again, if this is new information to you, go back. If you need direction on, hey, which one? We have a search bar. You can put in a word and it will bring you some ideas of which ones you may want to look at. If you want some additional help, send me a contact page and I'll help you because information is key. So this young man was getting neurofeedback.

He was having trouble focusing. And we started to really make some progress, meaning that as he was doing neuro feedback, the data that we were getting back real time after every session was that he engaging in the process. Part of the engagement is a filter goes over whatever the conscious mind is watching. We do screen what people watch because different things will put your brain into a different state. We don't do anything sexual. We do nothing too emotional because those are heightened states in our brain and we don t train in those states.

When the program is set for you to improve what brain waves are supposed to be dominating in the front, so some reorganization, you are going to get a very bright screen. When you're not in that right place, you get dark screen." One of the things that we had to do with this particular person, we have to teach him first or simultaneously, how to perceive himself when he was training. And one of the things that I love that we have here is we had this giant teddy bear. When you do this particular training, it's teaching you how to be aware of self, so you're not watching anything.

But when you are in the right place, the bear vibrates. And this has actually become a wonderful tool in the office. Now, this is a young adult and it's a male. And of course, initially, I think he felt silly. but he really got into the process. So again, I'm trying to teach him how to be aware of when he's in that right state so that he can engage in the processes more deeply and therefore help reorganize his brain. It's a teaching process, Neurofeedback is not meant for you just to come here and let a machine take over.

It's about your ability to learn. So as this individual was practicing, he's not watching anything, eyes are closed and he is breathing deeply. That's when you're talking more about biofeedback. Biofeed back has to do with our vital organs like breathing, like sweating, muscle control, temperature, respiration. Now, and pulse rate. So he's in the training and after probably about, I don't know, seven, eight sessions of the bear. Now he does the Bear and then goes right over to his regular training.

So we build on it while he is here at every session. But the light bulb gamma went off one day and he said, Dr. Hansen, I got it. I said what did you get? And he goes, i noticed the bear was vibrating and then I kind of drifted off. And I went back into myself and kind of checked myself out. And what I realized was that my shoulders were up towards my ears and I wasn't breathing. I took a big breath and the bear vibrated again. This is what i mean about self-awareness. Do you know, I think it would be interesting, see if you can catch yourself throughout the day.

Ask yourself, am I breathing? So when we breathe correctly, that's our built-in biofeedback system. When we breath with our diaphragm, which by the way would also help your pelvic floor, When you breathe with your diaphragm, the vagus nerve, which is a cranial nerve meaning that it's up in the brain stem, but it is like seaweed through the whole body. And when you breathe, your diaphragm, which is right below your ribs, it will expand and brush up against that vagus nerve which goes back into every single organ of your body.

And, when we're doing the proper breath work, we are actually resetting our body to greater relaxation, to great parasympathetics. So we've got a nervous system and an autonomic nervous. You have a central nervous as well. The autonomal nervous has sympathetic and parasympathy. Sympthy is that fight or flight. Parasympathetics is rest, feed, and breed. So in order to get back into that state, we have to know how to breathe. We have know know to use that diaphragm. One of the number one things that we do here at Connect My Brain, when we are starting with somebody, that is a fundamental piece of The First Training.

Do you know How to Breathe? Then we also have biofeedback equipment. And even the children come up and they learn how to belly breathe. And so much of this has some entertainment to it. So, for example, the biofeedback software, when you're in the right place and you are breathing correctly, and this is very active, then this guy comes out and he starts exercising with you. And what we do with the kids is we go, okay, who's going to win today? How many times are you going bring the guy out? And now they're learning some healthy challenges.

Dr. Hanson, I got 14 times today. They're becoming more aware through joy. Anytime our brain is in a joy state, We are really making healthy circuits fire. And things in the brain, the chemistry is definitely more balanced. So he learned it through, he had done a ton of biofeedback, but now he has to do it with his eyes closed. He had to be aware of his body. So moving along, we go and we do an assessment, reassessment.

Breathing, biofeedback, and nervous system regulation 19:30

And this time it didn't look good. I was like, what is going on? He was really making this incredible transformation. So remember how I started this conversation with my gift? God does. He wakes me up in the middle of the night and he shows me things. So I really started thinking about this and the first thing that came to me was metabolic, meaning does the brain really have the fuel it needs to function? He's coming in in the morning. What is his morning routine for feeding his brain? Why is that important?

Well, when you think about what time did you eat dinner last night, most people, it's going to be five, six, seven, some people even eight. This young man, the last time he eats something is closer to nine, maybe even sometimes 10. but then he comes in here and he won't get done at the office until noontime. Well, that's over 12 hours of no fuel going in. And just like little babies, this is why little baby's wake up every three hours to feed because glucose is going to get used up faster than any other part of your body.

So that was the first question that I asked. I said, are you coming in? Do you eat breakfast? Oh, no, I never eat. Breakfast. And I go, OK, don't come in tomorrow. For the next four days, i want you to eat and then on Monday, we're going to remap. But you come and fed. And then over the weekend I got another gamma moment with God and I kept seeing nicotine. And I didn't think he smoked because I have a very sensitive nose and even if you try to cover it up with a mint, I can still smell it. Plus cigarette smoke gets on your clothes and all that kind of stuff.

But when he came in I said, okay, did you eat? And he said, yes. So being a young person, one of the first things that I asked was, do you vape? And then he goes, no, and he says, but I do chew a nicotine pouch. And I went, oh, I said God told me so. And so that had a lot to do by putting his brain in an incredibly anxious state or just a heavy arousal state. And I happened to capture that on that particular reassessment. So that morning there had been no nicotine, he had eaten, and now we got to see a true picture of the progress that we had made.

And this is what's so important about understanding chemistry influencing your brain. And the same thing is true on many different levels, medications that people are on. One of the things in order to earn my credentials that I have in neurofeedback, I had to be able to identify what does this brainwave signify that a patient might be taking and cause this excessive high beta and beta brainwaves. So these are important for us to understand. We can have outside influence, of prescriptive medications, stimulant medications.

Medications for anxiety, for depression. Any of those things will impact the chemistry of the brain. It can also be internal. What is your diet like? How often are you feeding yourself? What are your feeding yourselves? Well, we can also watch our brain chemistry change based on what kind of influence we're bringing in, especially through the eyes. And this is going to go in that direction now of when I started and I said, this going be a little heavier today, but You know, we've got to take a step back and realize what's really going on in the world and what children and young adults and even us are being exposed to.

And so I'm going into the direction of AI and chat GPT. I did a truth bomb and check that out. That's on our YouTube channel. And it literally research has already been done that when we use chat GPT, what we're actually shutting down our brain because chat, GP T is taking over and just telling you what to do. So if, if you're not doing it, If you're not thinking, if your child isn't thinking if you child is looking something up, it's influencing them. The eyes are the only piece of neurology that's on the outside of your skull.

And that interpretation of what you see is all the way in the back of you brain. It's called the occipital lobe. And that means that as you see, it travels all the way through and it influences. So even like some of these shows that kids are watching, that the screens just like are changing pattern very, very quickly. That's the same thing as scrolling vertical on your cell phone.

Metabolic factors and chemistry affecting brain training 25:48

which if you just took a seat at a bench somewhere or lean up against a little wall and just watch people, everybody's faces are down. And this is very apparent. And what we're doing, first of all, that is over-fixation of gaze, especially for little kids when they're being entertained with an iPad. The eyes, when you're little, they are meant to be looking all around and taking in and building that brain. If I'm overly fixated, I am changing the information that's going in there. And therefore, we have to realize because we've got research on it and we got events that have happened as a result of it, that it is changing us.

The same way, if I were to do exercise every day, Over time, I'm building a stronger body. That is a great feedback to the brain. When you look at like the elderly population and the difference between those sitting in a nursing home and those that are still living on their own, what is their body posture like? What is there dynamic involvement in life? It's totally different. Now we even have a diagnosis called Tex neck. I mean, it's literally in the diagnostic statistical manual that we're straightening out the posture of the head.

This is neurology up here, y'all. this is not just a head and bones. And so if you shift it to a downward gaze, it's being associated with the same posture of dementia. Meaning, if we're changing the direction of our eyes, and they're always looking down, If we are changing posture, the shape, anatomical position of the neck, we give feedback to the brain, just like is happening in dementia. And so are we looking at early degenerative changes? Yes, that is very possible. Just like when all the research came out about the impact of the COVID shot, that there's prediction that we're actually going to have an epidemic of Alzheimer's.

So here's a mechanical influence about constantly looking down, and here is a chemical influence of changing the brain chemistry. And that is real. I've shared this before, but I think it merits it again. We don't have early dementia in our family. So if you always rest on genetics, I can tell you right now, that is not part of the Hansen family I was talking to my cousin the other day and her father is 94 years old and still lives on his own. And just said to his daughter, I think it's time for me to stop driving at 94 and he lives his on own, okay?

My mom was a very, very dynamic business woman. She had a showroom in Atlanta, show room in Miami. she traveled all the time. Even after the stroke, she recovered and was living on her own and returned to driving. Not that I really wanted her to, but she did. she was able to heal and get back to a high quality of life. That last trauma in 2018, very significant, but that's what landed her in a nursing home for rehab. And then she also got three COVID shots. Today is October 13th, 2025. I never know when you're gonna actually hear the podcast.

Today's Monday. On Saturday. And it ebbs and flows. But on Saturday, she didn't know I was her daughter. She thought I just her caretaker. That's not my mom. And I really encourage you, I'll put it in the show notes again, we've done it one other time. The Indoctrinated Brain is a very good book. You need tools so that you don't just either take my word for it or dismiss what I'm telling you.

AI, screens, and the risks of overreliance 31:06

I don' bring this information to you lightly. I really dive in and I read. And I'm constantly finding out all the things that are going on. My passion is to help people realize that if you bring yourself into a direction of health, you can change. I know it's not easy. But we are really facing, we're facing some really great challenges today. The one thing I wanted to bring to your attention was about the young man, 16 years old, family is alleging that Adam Rain committed suicide after getting too deep into chat GPT.

In his just over six months using chat GPT, the bot positioned itself as the only confidant who understood Adam, actively displacing his real life relationships with family, friends, and loved ones. The complaint filed in California Superior Court. When Adam wrote, I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me. ChatGPT urged him to keep his ideations a secret from his family. Please don't leave the noos out. Let's make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.

It states, that's right on CNN's business. This young man, took this information and was able to have his thoughts altered. And he's not the first one, there's several. There was one even a couple of years ago when some of this stuff got started. This is happening. Do you remember During COVID, how many young people? Because they were lonely, because they are isolated, and they took their life. I used to just focus on, of course, the childhood development and autism and ADD. But, you know, in reality, those labels are actually in the DSM under mental health diagnoses.

What's going on? Why are our children of this time and even earlier being pulled into a direction? I am really encouraging you to be vigilant over your children, over yourself. I don't live on my phone. I feel strong that I haven't gotten to that state. Ask yourself, what are you doing? Are you on your phone all the time? are on the computer all time. There's got to be more. We've got get back into the human part. The other day I got so stressed out because I thought I had lost a recording on Zoom, and I will name it.

And here I have, I do Zoom meetings all the time. I pay every month for this. and I couldn't find my recording so I could send it to a parent. So there was a phone number, so, I called. What did I get? I got a robot. And I'll tell you, that was probably the most stressful encounter. because I couldn't get anywhere. And then I just, I did, got so frustrated and I didn't tell the robot to shut up. I'm embarrassed of that, but I do. Even the robots comes back and says, it sounds like this is really making you frustrated.

That was like, you're darn right it's making me frustrated, and said I want to speak to a human. and then I was told that my account doesn't qualify me to speak to a human, but I can send you a chat link where you can. And then it had to go to my cell phone and the steps that I had go just to encounter a Human. I Was grateful the next day After my mom didn't recognize me, after frustrated by a robot, I went to Trader Joe's. I wanted to get my girls that worked for me some fall things, some good good foods, apples and grapes, and they always have the prettiest flowers.

Human connection, community, and closing remarks 36:30

And I was sharing with the person that was checking me out, one, what my mom's going through, and then, you know, that I trying to celebrate my office. And she, at the end, she said, One of the bouquets are on us. Thanks for sharing your story. I felt so renewed that I got to have a conversation with a real person and a person had a REAL response. Connect My Brain is a brain-based facility. No matter what other services you believe you really need, knowing what's going on in your brain and getting an idea about functional labs and the things that we have at our fingertips today.

In fact, the next podcast, I'm going to focus on de novo jeans. Very exciting. the world of genomics, the word of peptides, and so many wonderful things that are at our fingertips that we really can use. We also have some great tools here for you. Our CMB membership is for everybody. And if you put in the code, I'm going to assume it's going be October 2025, but we'll put it in The Show Notes. It could be OCT 2025. But we will put the show notes. You get $5 off. Its normally $19.99, which brings it down to $14. 99 a month.

It lets you get involved in private podcasting, our mom's corner. Yes, dads are invited to, but it's our private Facebook group where we really can share ideas, ask questions. In fact, one of the things that we're doing for the holidays is share your recipes. We're even going to have a contest. We really believe in building a community here at Connect My Brain and we want you to feel connected with us. We want to share this information with our community, the world. Thanks for tuning in today and be blessed.