Neurofeedback: What I Learned From My Own Brain
Ryan Munsey
Ryan Munsey (US)
Chief Optimizer @ Natural Stacks, Performance Optimization Specialist, Host @ Optimal Performance Podcast
Ryan Munsey the Renaissance man of the biohacking space. Ryan has a degree in Food Science and Human Nutrition from Clemson University and has worn the titles of fitness model, strength coach, gym owner, author and now works with Natural Stacks as the Chief Optimizer where he hosts the Optimal Performance Podcast and specializes in helping people around the world optimize their lifestyle, mindset, productivity, and brain performance.
Ryan Munsey shares his personal journey experimenting with neurofeedback to understand
You get to control your mind. You can dictate your day and your life, as opposed to it being dictated to you or leaving it to chance.
Summary
- Holding a power pose for two to three minutes can increase testosterone by twenty percent, providing an immediate energy boost for meetings, speaking engagements, or high-performance situations.
- Establishing a brainwave baseline via QEEG is essential to identify deviations from the norm and create a targeted plan for cognitive optimization rather than guessing with different biohacks.
- Twelve weeks of neurofeedback training can provide the same protective benefits against age-related cognitive decline as a lifetime of regular meditation, sparing the brain from structural loss.
- Neurofeedback works as a passive training system where a computer provides immediate sensory feedback to help the brain reach an optimal state without the user being an active participant.
- Optimizing mental performance involves using nootropics to enhance short-term states and consistent habits like neurofeedback or yoga to build long-term, high-achievement cognitive traits.
Article
Neurofeedback, Nootropics, And The Search For A Better Mind
At Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki, Ryan Munsey Framed The Brain As Both Battlefield And Blueprint
On Thursday, 17 November 2016, at Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki in Finland, Ryan Munsey took the stage with a proposition that felt at once futuristic and deeply human: if the brain shapes every experience of the world, then learning to read it, train it, and respond to it may be one of the most powerful forms of self-knowledge available.
Munsey, Chief Optimizer at Natural Stacks and host of the Optimal Performance Podcast, titled his presentation **“Neurofeedback: What I Learned From My Own Brain.”** It was a talk rooted in personal experimentation, but aimed at a much wider ambition. Not simply sharper focus for the workday, nor just another biohacking trick for the conference crowd, but a more enduring question: can fleeting states of clarity be turned into lasting mental traits?
A Stage Exercise Became A Thesis On Performance
Before discussing neurofeedback, Munsey asked the audience to stand and hold a “power pose,” arms spread wide in a T or lifted into a V. Hold it for two to three minutes, he said, and research suggested testosterone could rise by 20%.
It was a theatrical opening, but not an empty one. The point was straightforward. The body could alter the mind. Physiology could change psychology. A meeting, a speech, a high-pressure moment might be influenced by something as simple as posture.
From there, Munsey widened the lens. “The brainwave profile and things going on inside of our brain at any given moment are inseparable from the way that we experience the world,” he said. It was the central claim of the session, and everything else flowed from it.
The Promise Of Measuring What The Mind Usually Hides
Munsey described travelling to Los Angeles to work with neuroscientist Dr Andrew Hill at Peak Brain Institute, where he underwent QEEG testing, or qualitative electroencephalography. The goal was not merely to gather raw data, but to establish a baseline, to compare his brain activity against a normative database of people of the same age and sex, and to identify where he diverged.
That baseline mattered, Munsey argued, because so much of the biohacking world operated in the dark. People try supplements, routines, fasting protocols, meditation apps, cold exposure and sleep hacks, often with zeal but without measurement. The result, he suggested, was guesswork dressed up as precision.
“Establish a baseline, determine a course of action to move to where you want to be, and show up to do the work,” he told the audience. “We are never finished; there is always work to be done as humans to continue to grow and evolve.”
It was, in essence, a plea for discipline over novelty.
Meditation, Ageing, And The Seductive Speed Of Neurofeedback
One of the most arresting parts of Munsey’s talk came through a statistic he cited from Dr Hill. After the age of 65, he said, most people experience a 10 to 25% decrease in structural brain density, particularly in areas of the frontal lobe tied to awareness and executive function.
But there was an exception, he said: long-term meditators.
Munsey told the Helsinki audience that people who meditated consistently over many years appeared to be spared this decline. Then came the line that gave neurofeedback its almost miraculous sheen: “Neurofeedback in as few as two to three months can provide the same benefit as a lifetime of meditation.”
It was a striking formulation, and in the room it must have landed with obvious force. Here was the ancient discipline of contemplation, compressed into a modern training system of electrodes, computers and feedback loops. The appeal was unmistakable. If meditation was slow craftsmanship, neurofeedback was being pitched as accelerated architecture.
Reading Ryan Munsey’s Brain
Munsey shared the results of his own QEEG scans. Conducted first thing in the morning, fasted and without stimulants, the tests suggested that his alpha brainwave activity sat two to three standard deviations above the norm, while beta activity was relatively low to neutral.
That mattered, he explained, because a high alpha-to-beta ratio could be associated with inattention. A high theta-to-beta ratio, by contrast, was linked to impulsivity. In older diagnostic language, he said, the former might resemble ADD and the latter ADHD.
Yet Munsey was careful not to present this as pathology in any simple sense. Dr Hill, he recalled, had offered a pointed observation: ADD only became a disorder if a person was forced to sit in a chair for eight to 10 hours a day. The implication was not that brains were broken, but that environments and expectations often made certain kinds of minds seem deficient.
“If you know what is going on in your head,” Munsey said, “you can design your days, your workload, and your life to work for you.”
That line may have been the most practical insight of the talk. Neurofeedback, in this framing, was not only about correction. It was about compatibility.
Ciltep And The Lure Of Instant Results
The second part of Munsey’s self-experiment involved Ciltep, a nootropic marketed by Natural Stacks. He underwent a second EEG 48 hours after the first, this time after taking a single dose. According to the results he shared, his alpha waves were reduced by one to two standard deviations.
For Munsey, and for the company he represented, this was exciting evidence. A single pill, he suggested, had produced measurable changes resembling what might otherwise take two to three months of focused neurofeedback training.
That claim captured one of the talk’s underlying tensions. On one hand, Munsey repeatedly stressed habits, repetition, baselines, retesting, yoga, meditation and long-term practice. On the other, there was the undeniable glamour of immediacy: the right pose before a meeting, the right supplement before deep work, the right intervention to shift the brain today.
He acknowledged this distinction through the language of “states versus traits”. Nootropics could influence a state, he said. Neurofeedback, meditation, yoga and practices such as Holosync were aimed at traits, the more durable qualities of mind that persist over time.
It was a useful distinction, and perhaps the most mature framework the presentation offered.
How Neurofeedback Was Supposed To Work
Munsey described neurofeedback as a passive form of brain training. Once electrodes were attached and the target pattern established, the user did not consciously control the system. Instead, a computer offered immediate sensory feedback. In his example, a spaceship on a screen moved when his brain produced the desired wave patterns. When it drifted away from them, the screen went dark and the spaceship stopped.
This, he said, was the feedback loop: a reward when the brain moved toward the target, a correction when it moved away. Not effort in the usual sense, but repetition and conditioning.
There was something almost eerie in the way he described it. The self was no longer directing the mind through willpower, but outsourcing a form of learning to an interface. The brain was teaching itself, guided by a machine that knew what “better” was supposed to look like.
Beyond Optimization, Into Injury And Recovery
Munsey also argued that neurofeedback had applications far beyond the healthy, high-functioning professionals who tend to populate biohacking conferences. He pointed to traumatic brain injury, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, military blast injuries, sleep disturbances, and attentional issues in children as areas where the technology could have serious therapeutic value.
This widened the moral frame of the talk. Neurofeedback was not only a luxury technology for optimising already productive lives. It was also presented as a clinical tool, potentially capable of helping people recover capacities they had lost, or supporting children and adults whose brains did not fit conventional demands.
In that context, the promise felt less like enhancement and more like repair.
The Culture Of Self-Measurement
What lingered after Munsey’s presentation at Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki was not just the science he cited or the devices he described, but the worldview underneath them. The modern self, in this vision, is measurable, trainable, improvable. Focus can be mapped. Awareness can be supported. Even ageing, at least in part, might be negotiated.
The appeal is obvious. So too is the burden. To live this way is to accept that one must always be auditing, recalibrating, refining. Munsey embraced that ethic openly. Baseline. Action plan. Re-test. Repeat.
His closing advice reflected that mindset. Build habits, he urged. Use short-term tools to optimise daily states. Use long-term practices to shape lasting traits. Return to the data several times a year to ensure progress is real.
“Build habits and practices into your life to shape and train your brain so that you can have the mental qualities we all want for a lifetime of high achievement, happiness, and success,” he said.
What The Talk Finally Offered
For all its technical language and gadgetry, Munsey’s talk was really about agency. It argued that the mind need not remain mysterious, that attention and clarity could be cultivated rather than merely hoped for, and that understanding one’s own neural patterns might turn self-improvement from aspiration into method.
Whether every promise of neurofeedback will withstand time, replication and scrutiny is another matter. But on that November day in Helsinki, Ryan Munsey gave the audience a compelling narrative of possibility: know your brain, and you may yet redesign your life.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki