salamandyr

Mindfulness / Meditation has the biggest bang for the buck. It's free, and it probably has at least as much effect on the brain as other approaches, but you must actually "do" it. This doesn't address adherence, but if one does develop discipline in one area (like a daily practice) it may translate to supporting other areas of change.

My take on how to meditate.

I have seen QEEGs on many people including chronic cannabis users. Their brains look a great deal like inattentive ADHD brains. E.g. there is a large amount of alpha power that doesn't suppress / block when the eyes open - these brains are stuck in neutral. The patterns are so similar that I cannot tell long term stoners apart from inattentive ADHD people.

There is indeed some evidence that a contemplative practice has huge brain health benefits. This can be faith-based practices (prayer) or secular mindfulness. Believing "in" something probably isn't what matters, versus having regular opportunities for contemplative practice.

Thanks for your considered comments. We are indeed early in the research stage of the product. Just a couple of comments - one, the pilot study last year was small, wasn't blinded, and no, isn't published in any journal format.

The goals for that study weren't really to demonstrate scientific fact but to prove out our methodology and get some idea about the gross findings we would want to investigate further. Some of the 7 people were interns, yes - most of them had no affiliation with truBrain beyond incidental (population of convenience - friend of a friend, etc), and no, we didnt just test all the core team.

You are right to be skeptical of claims. One thing we have really tried to do is avoid making claims - we have put together a bunch of ingredients that seem to work well together by subjective report, and that have a large history of support for individual ingredients in the existing research literature. Our own research contribution has to come after formulating and finalizing product, to some extent. None of the marketing materials should say "we DO x" - that's one of the ways we are trying not to run afoul of the FDA. But we also don't have millions to run the product through huge clinical trials.

To address some of these limits, we recently completed a study with a slightly better design - ~ 20 people, double-blinded, placebo controlled, two days of testing for each person, QEEG measures, and on-task EEG measures. We did this project with Sang Lucci as their traders are a very active truBrain userbase.

I don't have result to report on for that yet - it's taking some time to crunch through what is > 200 QEEGs and reduce the data to the point where questions make sense, but we are almost there. So yup - you got us, the first bit of science we gave you wasn't a true experiment. I would still suggest that the investigations into our product are many times what any other nootropic company is doing, and also ask you to bear with us as we work on data.

Yes, I received my Psychology PhD from the department of Psychology at UCLA, in the Cognitive Neuroscience program.

Yes, I'm leading the EEG efforts in the research, although we have a few others helping. I am mostly an EEG clinician at this point, working with Alternatives - my expertise in working with QEEG and EEG in general is both clinical and "academic" in nature, and i've been doing both for quite a while. No I've not published first author papers or run a lot of large research studies before. You can find a couple book chapters I've published (in the realm of attention), but in stepping out of academia last year and working with two startups - one focused on delivering services and one building building a nootropic product - has meant chosing to try to bring tools to people, and to some extent I've dragging my research agenda along with me.

Please don't forget that truBrain is a young company working hard in a market we are helping to prove. If I want to run 7 people and look at the effect of their brains on and off truBrain I'll do it. I certainly won't cite it as published data, but I may talk about what I found informally. I don't think that rises to any suspicious agenda or ethical dilemma.

Stay tuned for more palatable results in from a more robust study design in a few weeks.

This falls under my "too new to mess with" rule. I'm very adverse to RC's being used by self-experimenters. I think the risks are untenable.