The Longevity Formula

The Brain’s Blueprint You Didn’t Know You Had

• Dr. Brandon Crawford • Season 1 • Episode 30

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Dr. Brandon Crawford explores the brain's natural blueprint for development and healing. This blueprint guides the brain throughout life, enabling it to adapt and recover even after injury or dysfunction. Functional neurology plays a crucial role in identifying and addressing imbalances that may hinder brain function.

Primitive reflexes, sensory systems, posture, eye movements, and the Reticular Activating System all contribute to brain health. Chronic pain can negatively impact brain function, but the brain's innate healing capacity can be leveraged to address these challenges. Dr. Crawford emphasizes the importance of persistence and the brain's lifelong potential for growth and improvement.

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Voice Over: Welcome to the Longevity Formula with Dr. Brandon Crawford. Let's explore the new era of wellness. 

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Well, welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Today we have a very exciting guest, myself. We're going to be talking about brain health and development. This is something that I have to talk through every single day with patients because it is vitally important to understand that you actually have a blueprint in your brain, and your brain actually knows how to develop itself.

And if that's true, which it is. Then that means that your brain actually knows how to heal itself to our job in functional neurology and developmental functional neurology is to identify areas where the brain is maybe struggling or maybe taking a longer time, maybe because there's inflammation, maybe because there's autoimmunity or these imbalances that are making it even more difficult for this blueprint to be fully expressed and we're just nudging it along, right?

We're creating. new pathways. We're just trying to help these imbalances correct themselves, right? It's so that that blueprint can be expressed and you can continue on this path of maturation, growth and development. So this blueprint in your brain, right? This developmental blueprint, this applies to everyone.

This is not just about babies and neurodevelopmental disorders in childhood. This is every bit about young people, young teenagers, preteens, teens, young adults, adults, geriatrics, like this, this blueprint, what I'm going to talk about, this applies at every age. This applies in every scenario. If you're alive, if you're breathing, you have a heartbeat.

You have neurons firing in your brain. This applies to you. Okay? So, let's get into it. So, what is this blueprint? Well, we like to simplify it a little bit. We like to put these things, these concepts, into big buckets, if you will, right? So when we look at the buckets, we need to understand that we need to integrate and make sure that we have properly functioning them.

sensory systems, okay? Those sensory systems are then very intimately connected with our primitive reflex systems. We'll talk about that more. But then our primitive reflex systems turn on and are very intimately connected to our postural reactions. Our postural reactions are not just physical. This is how we navigate our world physically, but also mentally because it's also connected to what's known as our reticular.

activating system. Now, our core stability comes in play at this level, but we also need to understand core stability is important at all levels. And we'll talk about that more, but after the postural reactions, we have our core stability. And then we have to talk about the vestibular system. This is how we navigate our world.

This, this is our sense of, of space, like our spatial awareness where our body, our body is in relation to gravity. And then we have eye movements. So many people like to geek out on eye movements. Well, I do too, but if we go to eye movements too soon, then it's all for not or maybe we're not getting the full potential of what those eye movements could be doing for us.

And then we get into cognition. We get into executive skills, learning, academics. This is where. We all want to be very proficient, right? We all want to be smarter, faster, have that cognitive flexibility to be able to plan and adapt and all of these things. But we have to understand that our brain is designed in such a way that if these foundational skills of these foundational things have not yet integrated then we're not going to have the full potential of our cognitive power.

Right? So when, when people come to me, they bring their kids and they say, we need to improve learning, right? Maybe they have dyslexia or some type of learning difficulty in school. We have to go through this whole thing, right? We can't just go, okay, let's, let's work on cognitive behavior, right? We, that, that doesn't work if there's primitive reflexes, if there's core instability, if there's abnormal eye movements, all these things have to be addressed because think about this.

The brain is like a series of gears, right? So, if the gears at the lowest level are not connecting, then they're not turning and driving all the gears up north, right? They're not driving all those gears in the newer part of the brain. So we want to go to the very lowest level and make sure to connect these gears, and we call that integration, okay?

So we want to make sure that our brain is well connected and our brain is well balanced so that we can get the full Optimal potential out of our brain, right? So, why? Why does this matter? Well, again, number one, we want to optimize ourselves. Like, I want to be the best that I can be. I want to function to my fullest potential.

So, I like to get checked. I want to know if I have primitive reflexes, if I have vestibular imbalances, if I have all of these things. I don't want to just know what my cognitive aptitude is. And if I see cognitive skills start to slip, then I start going back and checking all of these boxes, right? How's my sensory system?

How's my prim, primitive reflexes, how's my postural reactions, et cetera, right? So I'm going through all that and oftentimes you'll find something in there, you'll address it. And then those executive skills improve, right? That happens. But then also in neural behavioral disorders, this is huge, right? We find these these, these asymmetries in the brain where some parts of the brain are functioning very strongly and others are functioning weaker, and we like to balance those.

And we do that again through the blueprint. brain injury. So this is huge. Okay. So the brain has this blueprint for development. So the brain is developing and it's doing a good job and you're hitting your milestones and, and life is good. And then all of a sudden life takes a twist. You, you take a fall, you get hit, you drown.

And Something like that, right? And you go through the acute care, they save your life. That's good. But then they tell you life will never be the same. He's, you know, this person's not going to improve past this, right? Well, that's, that's just not true. So many times, right? That like, that just, that can't be true because the brain never stops trying to develop.

And What will happen is the brain will go, man, I was doing such a good job developing and then I got hit with this thing. So what do I do? Well, I remember how I learned to walk. So let's go back and turn those systems back on. I remember how I learned to talk. So let's go back in time and start leveraging those early systems, right?

I remember how, right? So the brain starts to use. those early foundational mechanisms to start to try and rebuild itself. Now, there can be caveats along the way. You can have altered movement patterns because of spasticity because of networks that, you know, have been heavily impacted because of a bleed or because of, you know, a tumor or something like that.

But fortunately, we do have neuroplasticity, so we have the ability to rewire, or remap, a brain. Will it look like it did before? Maybe not. But again, the brain is never going to stop trying to redevelop and to, you know, You know, heal itself that that just won't happen until the final breath is taken and everything shuts down.

Right. So I hope that that makes sense to everyone. And that is really where our concept of never accept never came from is because we understand. This fact that the brain does not give up our nervous system does not give up our neurophysiology is wired to never Give up. So why should we right? Why should we as providers give up?

Why should we as caregivers give up? That's just not how we're designed. But again, this also applies to chronic pain syndromes. In chronic pain there's several different areas of the brain that are heavily impacted. Chronic pain can be looked at as a chronic stressor. We know that with chronic stress the brain is bathed in cortisol and we start to have areas like the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus that really start to diminish both in size and function.

So it actually starts to to lose volume in these very important brain areas and start to see executive skill loss, short term memory loss things like this, right? Altered sense of smell which is a whole fun topic that we could go on. But again, what does the brain do? The brain goes, Hmm, how did I develop that frontal lobe?

How did I develop that temporal lobe? How did I do this? Right? Oh, I remember. Let's go back and leverage those systems. Same thing applies, same rules. apply. I don't care what we're talking about, right? The brain has a blueprint. So let's talk about it. So the first thing to talk about are those sensory systems.

So sensory systems can be difficult to ascertain and evaluate. From a provider standpoint, if your patient is nonverbal or if your patient is a child that doesn't, you know, can't really communicate if something feels weird or is hot or cold or something like that, right? So there is a certain skill set required to evaluate the sensory systems in certain populations.

That's where I believe we thrive in developmental functional neurology, especially in our neurosolution centers. We've, we've really be keen, have been keenly aware of how to evaluate the sensory systems. So, That can be done in multiple different ways. I'm not going to necessarily teach all those ways here.

That's not really the purpose of this podcast, but it's just to really bring attention to. We have to be able to assess the sensory systems. Just a example that just popped into my head, you know, someone may come in with balance and coordination issues. They say, man, I'm, I'm constantly falling to the right or, you know, I'm, I'm constantly running into walls or something like this.

Right. And you know, most people are thinking, okay, they have an ataxia, they have a cerebellar problem or, you know, something like that. What if they can't feel their feet? That is a legitimate reason why someone could be falling or running into things or having a lack of balance and coordination. What if the sensory loss is driven by metabolic concerns like diabetes or some other type of small vessel disease?

That is a real thing, right? And so, While it's true, that could be a cerebellar issue, that could be a brain issue, but we have to be able to take this in a stepwise manner. We have to be able to fully evaluate this person, right? So these sensory systems are vitally important. We also need to understand that sensory.

drives motor. So our sensory systems are what drive the development and the coordination of our motor systems. So if we have an abnormal sensory system, we will have abnormal motor output every single time. It has to happen that way. That's how we're developed. That's how we're designed. Then we also have to finish that story.

Motor drives cognition, right? And that, that's like the 30, 000 foot view. Sensory drives motor, motor drives cognition. So we have these sensory systems, and then we can talk about our primitive reflexes. Primitive reflexes have a sensory and a motor loop. All right. So they're both sensory and motor. Now, again, think about that person that can't feel their feet and you go and you test the Babinski, right?

You, you strike up their foot and there's no response. You go, well, Babinski is integrated. Fantastic. Well, what if the sensory system was abnormal and they just didn't, did not get the signal transmitted in? What if they do have a Babinski, they just have an abnormal sensory system and we need to actually work on that first.

So these are little details about why maybe we just don't need to be doing only primitive reflex work, or we just don't need, you know what I'm saying? So we need to look at this as a whole. So sensory motor loop, right? So our primitive reflexes are designed to develop the areas of the brain that they are connected to, right?

So if I take my hand and I touch it and there's any type of, Muscle contraction, right? Can be anything from a full grasp to a, a slight muscle contraction. This is going to be a Palmer reflex. Okay? So what we're seeing is we have a sensory stimulus that then drives a reflexive motor response. So the reflex mechanism here is such that you're not going to be able to voluntarily turn this off.

That's what makes it a reflex. So you have a sensory input, a motor response. When those muscle spindles contract, that is what drives the brain development associated with the network connected to my hand, right? Now it goes well beyond that because what do you do with your hand? You feed, right? So, so your hand is highly connected to your mouth.

And your mouth obviously is connected to feeding, but it's also connected to speaking, right? And what's also connected to feeding is the ability to hold your head up. And so our spine is also connected to feeding and speech. And so if we're working on maybe someone with nonverbal autism or someone that had a brain injury and they lost the ability to speak, guess what reflexes we're keenly aware of.

We're looking at the hands, the face and the spine. And these are just things that we've been able to outline over the years and there's more to it than that. It's not like we're only looking at that. But so continuing this primitive reflex discussion, so we need to understand that these reflexes. Are, well, I like to break these primitive reflexes into different levels.

We have our foundational reflexes, and that's going to be our hands, feet, mouth, spine, and our moro. Now, all of these are more so connected to the lower part of the brainstem called the medulla. And these are more related to the concentric type of muscle tone. So when it comes to muscle tone, we have to understand there's concentric tone, isometric tone, and eccentric tone.

And every time we step up from concentric to isometric. From isometric to eccentric, this requires more energy expenditure from our mitochondria, from our cell. So as we're integrating a system, this is not just about vibrating a hand. This is more about muscle spindle conversion. So as we're working on the hand, the face, the feet, the spine, working on the moreau, we're having to navigate this muscle spindle conversion story.

Because if you're not converting concentric tone to isometric tone, you're not truly integrating the system. So if you take a vibration tool and you just vibrate a hand and it doesn't Maybe you have not fully integrated that reflex because they're still lacking some isometric tone and they cannot perform a hand supporting reflex.

That's when the hand supporting reflex is when you stimulate the base of the hand, which is a richly populated area of mechanoreceptors. There's roughly 20, 000 mechanoreceptors just located in the base of the hand. And so think about. When a baby is on their stomach and they don't even have to have their hands open, right?

So that's why it's important that it's the base of the hand. Their hand rolls and presses into the floor. You start to stimulate all of these mechanoreceptors. And that starts to stimulate what's called the hand supporting reflex. And what will happen is when you stimulate this area of the hand, you should start to reflexively contract the triceps muscle.

And when you start to contract the triceps muscle, what starts to happen is your, you start to push up against the floor, right? And so now, this reflexively contracts the serratus anterior muscle, which splays out across the top of the ribcage. Why is that important? That's important because you have to stabilize your ribcage and able to then get up on all fours and crawl, okay?

So I consider this hand supporting reflex as a bridge from that medulla to the pons and from the concentric to the isometric tone. So, very, very important that we take this in the proper order. Again, we focus on hands, feet, mouth, spine, moreau. We work on hand supporting. We're converting muscle spindles from concentric to isometric tone.

And by the way, I didn't explain what concentric, isometric, eccentric tone is. Concentric tone is contract and relax. So like, again, going back to the palm of my hand, because it's viewable, right? So I have a stimulus, muscle contracts and relaxes. Okay. That's how the reflex works. Contract, relax, contract, relax, contract, relax.

Every time that happens, it's building neurological integrity. Can isometric tone contract and hold. So now this helps me with my postural muscle development. This helps me stabilize my proximal joints, like my hips. And my shoulders, this gives me proper head and neck control. This gives me proper core control, right?

So I can sit still. Number one, the ADHD kid that can never sit still. They don't have proper isometric tone. So it allows me to stay still, allows me to hold my head upright, allows me to take a step, turn my head and not fall over, right? So. Isometric tone is exceedingly important and we have to understand it doesn't just come out of nowhere.

Just because you know you have these postural muscles does not mean that they automatically have isometric tone. We have to build this integrity by firing these foundational systems first, building Isometric tone. And then guess what we can work on. We can then work on this glorious asymmetric tonic neck reflex, symmetric tonic neck reflex, tonic labyrinthine reflex, all of these reflexes that you see people working on all the time where they're on hands and knees and they're turning their head and they're turning their head and they're turning their head.

That's all fine and well. But again, that reflex is dependent upon the conversion of that concentric to isometric tone. If you don't have the isometric tone in the shoulder girdle muscles, You're, you're going to see that arm give way. You're going to see that elbow bow. You're going to see that person fall, right?

You're going to see that ATNR reflex come out. So it's not just about a head turn on hands and knees. There's so many more things to consider with that reflex. That's a way to work on it. But if you truly want to integrate it, we have to talk about muscle spindle conversion. So those reflexes, the TLR, those are connected to the pons, more so, right?

And then what we need to do is we need to build eccentric tone. Eccentric tone is that push pull reaction, right? So if I'm holding my bicep and yet pushing it at the same time, this is creating an eccentric tone. Another way to think about it is If you're standing upright and I come up next to you and push you, right, and you, you kind of hop and you, your, your arm goes out and your head writes you just experience postural reactions associated with eccentric muscle tone and just like you need more energy expenditure to go from concentric to isometric tone.

You need even more energy expenditure to be able to do this. Push pull reaction at the same time to go from concentric. That means you need to continue to build mitochondrial efficiency, cellular efficiency so that you can actually convert those spindles and be able to provide perform the type of muscle contractions needed to facilitate the postural spiral.

Reactions which are more associated with our midbrain, right? And so you just watched me go from the bottom of the brainstem talking about our foundational reflexes and there's more than the ones I listed, right? There's hundreds of primitive reflexes. These are just the ones that we talk about and focus on.

So you watched me go from the bottom, talk about the hands, feet, mouth, spine. Moreau, how those are connected to concentric muscle spindle tone and then move up to the pons and we have this bridge called a hand supporting reflex, right? And then that builds our isometric tone, which allows us to then properly work on and integrate our ATNR, reflexes more associated with the pons.

Right. And then we need to use our hands pulling reflex. That's another bridge into the midbrain because of the brachiation. Brachiation is when you pull on the arms and you fire the rubro spinal pathways, which terminate in the red nucleus and the midbrain help to stimulate dopamine production. But that's another bridge.

So we use our hand supporting down here, our hands pulling up here. We start to build midbrain integrity and we start to build those postural reactions which is our hopping, propping, head writing those types of reactions associated with our eccentric muscle tone. Some things that can really hinder this mitochondrial dysfunction.

If we don't have proper functioning mitochondria, we're not going to build mitochondrial efficiency and we're not going to be converting those muscle spindles. So if you are in a place where you say, man, I've been doing primitive reflex work for years. I'm I'm not seeing any type of integration.

Guess what? This is why I introduced lasers to the functional neurology profession for primitive reflex work. This is the reason. Because of the people that have been stuck, that have hit plateaus and are not seeing reflexes integrate. Whenever I started to use lasers, whether on the brain or even on the body, we started seeing faster integration of these primitive reflexes, and this is largely why.

It's because we facilitate mitochondrial energy efficiency, and we actually start converting these systems and integrating these systems faster and more efficiently. Vitally important to understand that right? Okay. So in the midbrain, you heard me talk about these are postural or associated with postural reactions.

But our postural reactions are also developing something called the reticular activating system, the RAS for short you have a RAS associated with the pons and medulla. We call this the pontomedullary RAS. And then you have the RAS associated with the mesencephalon, which the mesencephalon is just another fancy word for the midbrain.

So you have your mesencephalic RAS. So. Your Ponto Medullary RAS is more about your extension tone. So, if I need to develop muscle spindle conversion and I need to really work on ATNR, STNR, TLR, maybe some of those concentric foundational reflexes in the hands, feet, mouth, spine, maybe I need to do more of this in an extension tone posture.

Maybe I need to facilitate isometric tone in my extensors to drive the pontomedullary RAS, right? To help as a co activation strategy. Or, if I need to work on more postural reaction, eccentric tone type of thing. work, then I need to work on driving the mesencephalic RAS system, which is more associated with our flexion tone.

And this is why we use our hands pulling. And if you're not familiar with what a hand's pulling is this is where you heard me talk about the base of the hand. So instead of the base of the hand being an extension, we put the base, we put the wrist inflection and we stimulate that same area, that same base of the hand.

But then I pull, I put tension on the arms while that person is in a sit up position and you reflexively see that person start to contract their biceps and tuck their chin and start to lift themselves up off the floor. That's how it should work. So that hands pulling mechanism, right, is driving more flexion tone because it's associated with our mesencephalic R A S system.

Now, our reticular activating system, like you heard me mention is a filter. It helps us navigate our world both physically and mentally. One way I'll demonstrate how this filtering system works mentally is like this. I'll give you five seconds to identify Everything around you that is red, the color red go, you have five seconds, so you're identifying everything around you.

That's the color red. All right. So I'm assuming maybe 2 percent of you actually looked. So for those 2 percent that looked for something red, tell me how many things did you see that were green? So what happened there? What happened was I primed your reticular activating system to look for things that are red, right?

That's how the RAS acts as a filter. And so you can see how there's this very intimate interplay between our physical development and our mental development. So if you have trouble filtering the world, right? Maybe you're a very pessimistic person. Hmm. Or sounds or other types of stimuli just are overwhelming.

You have a trouble with, you have trouble with this RAS system. That's a big sign that we need to work on some of this stuff. Of course, there could be other things going on too. But that's a big sign. This is another reason why we need to intentionally prime our RAS development, right? Or our RAS. We need to set the tone for it.

So first thing. We need to do when we wake up, we need to be thankful. We need to think through all the different things that we're thankful for. We need to set the tone for what we want our RAS to be looking for, for that day, just like I primed you to look for something that's red. You didn't see anything that was green because you weren't looking for it.

So we need to prime our RAS to be looking for things that are positive, to be looking for opportunity, to be looking for the things that we are grateful for, to be on the watch for those things. And what will happen is if we prime ourselves properly, those negative things are less impactful. Clear?

Because we've set the tone of our filter, unless your filter is not properly integrated then we need to do that, right? And that's where we can, we can help out in therapy and whatnot. So we, so we just got through brainstem. We went to midbrain, we went through the reticular activating system.

Next we can start, start to talk about our core tone. Okay, so I know what you're thinking. Crawford core tone. It's not like it just all of a sudden starts developing after the brain stone. I know. But again, we have to describe this in buckets so it's easier to digest. And then I would even go back and say, look, the way that I just described all the different primitive reflexes and how they're associated with different parts of the brainstem.

I understand that that is absolutely an oversimplification of that. I have been acknowledged that there's parts of the spinal cord that are associated with the primitive reflexes. You can see research studies where you can disconnect the brain. You can still see these reflexes and, and they're still doing things.

So there's definitely more going on than that, right? But I'm trying to oversimplify this so we can understand this. Okay. Thanks. Better, right? So with our core tone, we need to understand that This is still a discussion on muscle spindle conversion core tone starts to develop in utero and our core tone, right, is actually very intimately connected with our moreau reflex.

And so in utero, when, You as a mom start feeling kicks. Well, sometimes it's not actually kicks. Sometimes it's the baby going into this flexion extension tone because of the Moreau so that you can build your core tone to get out of the womb. So if I have someone that has an unintegrated Moreau, right, they're easily startled.

They, you know, have this fear paralysis, they have all the things, you know, connected to the Moreau anxiety, depression all these things, then I immediately am going to check their core tone. I need to know not only can they do setups, but can they hold an isometric setup? Can they hold an eccentric setup, right?

I'm going to be testing this because core tone is very connected to the integration of our Moreau and our other reflexes as well. And so we can be working on that core tone at every step of the way. But I just had to throw it in somewhere. So this is where I put it right. And again, this is a muscle spindle conversion story.

So we want to see conversion of spindles from concentric And then we want to see a proper balance between extension and inflection tone. If you see someone with those imbalances, right? Someone is very flexed forward, their flexion dominant. What's that telling you? That's telling you that they have this over dominance of the mesencephalic RAS system, right?

Your mesencephalic tone, it's geared more towards our sympathetics. It's geared more towards that fight or flight. It's more anxious. It's going to anger easier. Mesencephalic beast, right? But then also, especially in brain injury, when you see certain areas of the brain injured, then you have this excessive extension tone, right?

And so you see this imbalance there where you have this dominant pontomedullary RAS system. So, so that balance of our core tone is very, very important as well. Then we always have to acknowledge vestibular system development and I understand the vestibular system starts to develop in utero, 100 percent fully understand that.

Okay. Thanks. And so we need to understand how the vestibular system develops and how to check it, right? Because what if we have a primitive reflex that, you know, let's say the ATNR, right? And so we're thinking through, man, this ATNR, it's not integrating, I'm, I'm not making any progress. And I know Crawford talked about muscle spindle, something or other, blah, blah, blah.

But what if you have this vestibular imbalance underneath it too? Because vestibular is a big part of those tonic neck reflexes. So if I turn the head, right, and we get that bend in the arm, we get that instability in the shoulder girdle. Well, this could also be driven by the vestibular imbalance. And by the way, our vestibular system is highly connected to so many different parts of the brain.

Our vestibular system also will gate and control our amygdala. That's part of our limbic system. The limbic system is conscious, is constantly monitoring for things that are pleasurable, that are painful or non noxious, just nothing, right? So every Stimulus that comes in conscious or subconscious has to be graded by our limbic system as painful, pleasurable or nothing.

So our amygdala, as sometimes referred to as the asshole amygdala is constantly monitoring. And if there is a potential stimulus, whether it's light sounds, smell, thought, touch, anything, any type of potential stimulus that could that could remind the amygdala as a potential life threat, it's going to sound the alarms and what the amygdala is going to do is it's going to fire via spiny motor neurons.

It's going to fire our fight or flight mechanisms via the sympathetic nervous system, or it's going to fire the dorsal vagal complex via again, spiny motor neurons, which will shut us down. And it can oscillate one moment, it can fire us up the next moment, it can shut us down and you can get this oscillation.

It does not have to be in either or. So what the vestibular system will do is it will gate the central amygdaloid nuclei. And so think of a crying baby, right? So this baby's crying, you're like, man, what's going on? And you start moving the baby, you know, you pick him up, you start moving his side to side and the baby calms down.

You just witnessed what I just talked about, right? So we're the same way. So if we have this vestibular imbalance, we can have this inability to properly gait our limbic system. We can have an overexpression of a fight or flight system. We can have an overexpression of a shutdown system. We're definitely going to be in balance some way.

But then again, there's also connections to the frontal lobes, to various parts of the brain that are vestibular in nature. So the vestibular system is literally helping us navigate our world. It lets us know what's going on. where our body is in relation to gravity, like where the earth is. And so obvious signs of dysfunction here are dizziness, motion sickness, muscle tone imbalances because let's also remember that the vestibular system fires down via descending vestibulospinal pathways.

And gives rise to proper muscle tone down our back, down our spine into our proximal muscles like proximal muscle systems like our shoulder girdles, our hips things like that. So people with scoliosis that is not related to a wedge vertebrae which is the, a misshapen vertebrae in the spine, you know, actually literally tilting the spine.

If that's not present, then we know that there has to be vestibular imbalances and by the way, those people, there's literature on this, those people with scoliosis not due to wedge vertebrae also typically have a spinal gallant and or spinal Perez primitive reflex, right? So all these systems do integrate together and in parallel, right?

We just have to know. how to examine how to evaluate and then when to apply the proper stimulus and in what intensity duration and in, in how to do that, right? There is literally a way to ascertain that in, or at least we've come up with a way to ascertain that. So vestibular system is very, very, very important.

From a developmental standpoint, we were first develop our otoliths. Our otoliths that's our saccules and our utricles and every, I've been teaching this for many years. I always tell people after I teach you about saccules and utricles, you're never going to forget which one does what. So, our utricles are side to side linear acceleration.

Our saccules are this up and down acceleration, so like head to foot acceleration. So what I'll tell you is, if you kick a man in his sac, he jumps up, right? So that's your saccular activation. So when you kick a man in his sac, you activate his saccules. That's how you'll never forget saccules from utricles.

But it's this linear acceleration. So, if I'm working with someone with a vestibular imbalance, I need to be able to evaluate saccules, utricles, but then I also need to look at semicircular canals, right? So those turn on as well in our semicircular canals are more involved with this rotational acceleration.

Like if I turn my head quickly to the right, I activate the right horizontal canal. If I turn my head to the right and then tilt it back, I activate my right posterior canal. If I turn my head to the left and tilt it forward, I activate my right anterior canal. And by the way, each of these also have an eye movement associated with it.

So let me teach you. Okay. So, if I put my thumb out in front of my, in front of my eyes, just directly in front of my nose, my eyes are staying locked on my thumb. Let's activate the right horizontal canal. I'm just going to turn my head to the right. My eyes stay locked on my thumb. I activated my right horizontal canal and my eyes went left.

So my right horizontal canal must drive my eyes left. That's true. So now I'm going to activate my right posterior canal. So in this position, with my head turned right, I'm going to tilt my head back. Okay, so now my eyes went down and left when I activated my right posterior canal. So that's the direction that my right posterior canal drives my eyes.

What about my right anterior canal? I'm going to turn my head left, I'm going to tilt my head forward. So I just activated my right anterior canal and it drove my eyes up and right. So that must be the direction that my right anterior canal drives my eyes. So, now that's a quick and dirty way to understand how your semicircular canals drive eye movements.

So now when you start to see abnormal eye positioning, or nystagmus insert as these would be torsional nystagmus unless it's a straight horizontal which is typically more cerebellar in nature. Now you will start to be able to understand, oh, this is not only vestibular, but now I can start to understand which canal is associated with that eye movement.

Okay. So that's vestibular. That's a quick and dirty vestibular discussion. Then we move into eye movements, right? We already talked about a little bit of eye movements and how those are associated with our semicircular canals. Now why do I wait until this part to really talk about eye movements?

So eye movements can be very, very powerful in therapy. And we use them so often to co activate different parts of the brain, to rehab different parts of the brain. They, they, they can be very powerful. But think of it this way if I need to move my eyes in a certain direction, that's going to pull on certain cranial nerves and those cranial nerves are coming out of my brainstem.

So, if my brainstem is not fully integrated. Right. If I still have these primitive reflexes intact that are supposed to mature and develop my brainstem, right, then I'm going to most likely have abnormal eye movements. But maybe it's not because I need to move the eyes. Maybe it's because I need to integrate those brainstem networks via.

The networks that were designed to integrate first, right? So if someone comes in and they have these reflexes present, I don't just go straight to eye movements. I need to build the brain in the order that it was designed to be built. Okay, so I will use eye movements, but I will use them either after I've integrated the reflexes or I'll use them as co activation strategies to activate different parts of the brain.

For example, quick and dirty eye movements, right? So if I take my eyes to the left. That's a smooth pursuit. So it's just a nice, easy movement of my eyes just to the left. The parietal lobe pulls, right? So think of a P and P, right? So the parietal lobe pulls that I to the left, right? So I can stimulate my left parietal lobe with just a smooth pursuit left.

Now, the frontal lobe pushes. So, It pushes away, right? So if I do a saccade, which is a quick eye movement. So if I slowly pursue my eyes left, that's left parietal. But then if I go bam and I quickly saccade my eyes back to the right, well, that right saccade is going to activate my left frontal lobe. Right.

So that's very important to understand. Now the cerebellum is highly at play here. The cerebellum is coordinating a smooth pursuit and it's targeting the eyes at all times. So if you see the cicada contusion where the eye is moving and it jumps and it jumps and it jumps, that's a cicada contusion.

That can be a cerebellar problem. It could be a prial low problem. And then if you see this overt targeting, this overshoot or undershoot, right, this hypo RIA or hyper riaa type of eye movement, that can be a cerebellar problem, right? So if I take my eyes all the way over here. And at end range, I start to see a little bit of a ticking in my eye.

That's called an end stage, end stage nystagmus. That points to a right cerebellar weakness, right? So if my eyes are going all the way over here and I see this, bam, bam, bam, bam, where my eye starts to tick at end stage. that's telling me that the right cerebellum is weaker at that point in time. And again, you might see cicadic intrusion, you might see undershoot, overshoot troubles in the eyes, et cetera.

But these, again, this is, these are good co activation strategies. So if I want to stimulate someone's right cerebellum, maybe I'll turn their head to the right and have them look at a stimulus with that withholding in stage gaze fixation, right, to pull on the right cerebellum while at the same time I'm firing the right horizontal canal, which is very intimately connected to the cerebellum.

The vestibular system is very connected to the cerebellum. That's why so many people call it the vestibulocerebellar networks. And then I'm also engaging with that left eye movement there, my left parietal lobe, right? So all these things start to come in motion together and I using something like a laser can then go, okay, I'm raising the metabolism of the cerebellum.

I'm raising metabolism, the parietal lobe. So now's a good time to use my lasers here and here and on these settings, right? And so that's how I've over the years really developed these co activation strategies, right? It's just this interplay of trying to understand what's dysfunctional, what is functional and then how to activate these networks accordingly, right?

There's so many different things to talk about. I movements. I don't know how much I want to go into it. There's like a whole thick book that we could read, but there's convergence and divergence and those are very, very important. very important to ascertain and be able to understand as well.

Before we, you know, really even go into pursuits and saccades and anti saccades we need to understand that that person needs to have gaze fixation developed and our optokinetic reflex developed, right? So those will be the early stages of care. We'll work on gaze fixation. We'll work on developing our optokinetic reflexes.

And again, we can use those therapeutically too as co activation strategies. And then to, you know, in the discussion, we have our cognition. Now, what I'll tell you is if I've done my job appropriately as a developmental functional neurology expert, then once I get all through this approach and we get your eyes moving appropriately and we get everything online.

I don't really need to touch those cognitive systems. They really start to flourish. They start to do what they're supposed to do. You start to think appropriately, coordinated thoughts. You start to be able to have executive skills. You'd be able to plan your day. You're not overwhelmed. That's how it typically works.

I don't typically have to go in and do academic challenges or, you know, work on cognitive behavioral therapy if that needs to be done. Then I refer to a cognitive behavioral therapist and it's okay to be working in parallel with that individual too. That's fine. Or to be working with some type of academic tutor or something like this.

But again, we need to be doing all of this other foundational information, uh, when it comes to cognition, I think where it does help is to understand the different lobes of the brain understanding things like, you know, the inferior parietal lobe, the left inferior parietal lobe is simple math and being able to understand what the medial temporal lobe does and the prefrontal cortex and understanding all these different lobes of the brain, because then, you know, if someone has mild to moderate brain injury and they come in and they say, man, I lost my sense of smell or a man I can't, you know, organize my day or something like that.

Then that gives me some really good strategies based on their symptoms. I can really target different brain networks to heal and to help that person recover those cognitive skills. So there are various therapeutic strategies in that regard. Definitely don't have time in this podcast to go through the different lobes of the brain.

Maybe that's going to be a whole nother podcast coming up in the future. We'll just walk through the different lobes of the brain and what types of skills and in things are associated with each area of the brain. But that would definitely be another podcast. So that's the broad level overview of this developmental.

Blueprint when it comes to growing and maturing and optimizing your brain in your life. I hope that makes sense. And I hope you understand that this is not just about developmental disorders. This is not just about autism. This is about you. If you're breathing, this is about you. This is about you, whether you're suffering from something, this is about you, whether you just want to optimize your performance, this brain that you have between your ears is every single day, trying to make you the best version of you that it possibly can.

And I'm here and people like me are here just to make sure that it can be optimally expressed and that it's going to do its job accordingly and fully develop you and help you to live a fully successful life. Life. So I hope that was beneficial. I hope you learned something. If this resonated with you, please like, and share this information.

If you know someone that could benefit, please, please share it with them. That's why I'm here. So thank you. And I'll see you next time.

Voice Over: We hope today's episode has inspired you to take that next step towards your best self. Remember the path to longevity is paved with small daily decisions. Your journey is unique and every step, every choice brings you closer to your ultimate vision of a healthier, happier life. For more insights, tips, and resources, visit drbrandoncrawford.com.

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