In preparation for this weekend's Superhuman Summit, we spoke to Hiroko Demichelis, founder of Vancouver Brain Lab about happiness, what's going on inside our brains, and the importance of breathing.
Hiroko Dimechelis: Hello! What can I answer for you? What are you curious about? What are your passions?
VanMag: Can you tell me about the Vancouver Brain Lab and the work you do there?
Vancouver Brain Lab is my practise as a clinical counsellor, which has a bit of a special angle to it. Mostly what I do in my clinic is measure people’s brain activity. I have equipment that measures EEG, (electroencephalography) like you would in a hospital. What we typically do is look at five locations of the brain. The brain, in a way, has certain rules it should follow. The back should present itself different from the front, just to give you an idea. It’s like a game of hockey, every part has to have its own defined role. We measure the back, front, left, right and the centre, so that we can get a better idea of how the brain is functioning. These markers tell us, is this brain functioning optimally or should we adjust, should we do some intervention? There are definite markers, for example, for depression. Scientific evidence shows that the brain of a depressed person looks different than the brain of someone who is not struggling with the disorder. It's the same for poor sleep quality, or trauma. Then what I do is use a whole set of tools in my Italian bag of tricks. I work with neurofeedback, trauma therapy, eye movement therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), or brain entrainment, which uses light and sound stimulation. I try to alleviate the pain as quickly and effectively as I can. I am quite passionate about happiness and trying to help people.
What drew you to this specific area of the field?
I think most of us become therapists because of personal suffering. Sometimes life hurts, have you noticed? Sometimes we are anxious, we are sad, we are depressed, we are traumatized or hurt. From my personal experience, there is some mental illness in my family; my brother sadly suffers from schizophrenia. So through my own pain and my loved ones, I thought I should learn more about it, working for myself and then for other people. This approach of quantifiable data is something my dad taught me. He’s a famous sports psychologist. Many years ago he told me in his strong Italian accent, “Hiro, you can measure emotion,” and I was shocked. Of course, tell a passionate Italian woman that you can measure emotion and she will be shocked. But he was right. In a way, you can quantify and measure states or feelings, emotions.
Of course, tell a passionate Italian woman that you can measure emotion and she will be shocked. But he was right.After I built my practice, I segued into my new project, Moment Meditation. At the lab I work with clinical patients, people that struggle, but I can only help one person at a time. In the practice lots of my tools are mindfulness-based. Getting people to sit with their pain, observe what hurts, quietly, in the brain. I thought, what if I can facilitate a bigger project where I help 10 or 20 people at a time? I came up with the idea of launching an initiative around meditation. We are creating a trailer that will travel around town and people can jump in and mediate. We currently have a pop-up studio in Gastown; it’s a very peaceful, delightful space. I’m adding those elements of measurability: measuring the brain before and after a couple of weeks of meditation, or measuring your heart rate variability, which is one of the topics I’ll be speaking about at the summit. Vancouver has many wonderful meditation spaces—the Shambhala Centre, the Zen Centre—but they’re not dedicated spaces in the same way. Most of them have a religious aspect like Buddhism, or are associated with traditional practices. As far as I know this is the only single use meditation space, plus I believe the idea of measuring is still quite new, having sensors that can measure breathing, the brain, muscle tension—it’s quite unique.
