A Day at the Brain Spa
The goal of a visit to NeuroVella Brain Spa in Los Angeles is brain performance optimization; we stopped by to see what that actually means.
By S.C. Stuart
I’ve just checked into the NeuroVella Brain Spa in Los Angeles. There are a lot of crazy pseudo-wellness businesses in this town, but this place was founded by Dr. Amir Vokshoor, a board-certified neurosurgeon, and is backed by his Institute of Neuro Innovation.
The spa’s mission is to establish a technological hub for brain performance optimization. Unlike body-based, gym-style entities (like the biohacking place we tried recently), there are no yoga types sipping herbal infusions at NeuroVella—just clinicians in white coats.
Inside, the space is all soft, white walls with a subtle aroma of eucalyptus. A cascading water wall cuts residual noise from the busy street below.
Trying Out Treatments
Holly Contreras, NeuroVella Facilitator, leads me to a treatment room with a NeuroSpa zero gravity chair and selects a multi-sensory node program on her tablet device. My session will be based on my time constraints, but treatments are usually set according to need, following an initial consultation.
I could wear the comfy NeuroVella-branded silk robe, but I decide streetwear plus noise-canceling headphones and an eye mask will suffice. I’m then left alone in the room, although I notice there’s a ceiling-mounted security camera, just in case I freak out and they have to rush in.
As the electric-powered blackout blinds slide down, the chair adjusts smoothly into the reclining position. Then its seven neuromuscular massage modes kick in. This is disorientating, but in a good way. The beats in my ears encourage brain entrainment, while vibrations pulsate up and down my spine to reduce tension. I surrender to the experience, breathe deeply, and trip out to the neuromuscular stimulation and acoustic vibes.
As the session ends and the zero-g chair gently glides to the upright position, I feel more chilled out, yet mentally alert and curious about my next treatment.
Virtual Chilling
Across the hall, I slipped into another zero-g recliner, and Holly hands me an Oculus Rift VR headset and high-end headphones. She asks how I’d like to feel in 15 minutes. We settle on “focused,” and she selects Introduction to Virtual Reality from the cinematic VR team at Felix & Paul Studios and audio gurus Headspace Studio (who we interviewed about Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs).
I bliss out on a virtual trip around the globe, getting up close and personal with awe-inspiring beasts in the wild (Jurassic World: Apatosaurus) before the image switches and a circus performer juggles blazing flaming batons right in front of my face in the pleasantly freaky Cirque du Soleil’s Dream of “O”. I can almost smell the incense inside a hut in Mongolia and hear the fish jumping as I drift down a river in Borneo in Nomads.
The VR session ends with a guided meditation. I find myself floating in the sky, miles above the city streets, as a pulsing hexagon directed me to breathe in and out. I’m sure my brain benefited from the reduction of incessant chatter with which it usually contends.
Passing on Brain Zapping
There were several more treatments to try, including IV infusions (not keen), brain mapping (yes, please), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (kinda fascinating, so why not?). Sadly, the latter didn’t work out. The electric current zapping is more of a medical procedure, so it requires a doctor’s prescription and prior fMRI. My clinician is open-minded, but she draws the line at my request for TMS “because it sounds cool.”
So Karen Jiang, Research Assistant at the Institute of Neuro Innovation, met me in the lounge at the back with an Emotiv mobile EEG instead. After I was hooked up to the 14-channel brain-machine interface, we peered at her tablet, which tracked the inside of my head as I did biofeedback, focusing on various lit-up areas to increase concentration and get into a low-alpha-wave state.
NeuroVella offers advanced brain mapping, which reveals how different areas of the brain function while clients perform tasks and process information, optimizing and restoring neurological activity. According to the screen, the meditating and neuro-stimulation sessions had done the trick; I was exhibiting chilled-out signals. If I became a client, my data would be stored and tracked over time.
Jiang’s academic work at INI is focused on cognitive research, and it was reassuring to know that NeuroVella isn’t just a cool place to hang out on zero-g recliners but also has a robust basis for its treatment recommendations.
To explain more, brain surgeon and NeuroVella Brain Spa founder Dr. Amir Vokshoor stopped by. Alongside his own practice, running INI, and the new brain spa facility, Dr. Vokshoor is also on the medical staff at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, where his surgical expertise lies in minimally invasive microsurgical spinal techniques.
Here are edited and condensed excerpts from our conversation.
PCMag: Dr. Vokshoor, why and when did you set up NeuroVella Brain Spa and what does the name mean?
Dr. Vokshoor: I was inspired by combining ‘neuro’ and ‘vella’ — which is what we call folds in the brain tissue. Plus it sounded like ‘bella,’ so ‘beautiful brain.’ We’re still essentially in beta, as we opened in August 2017. As to why, well, for a long time, as a neurosurgeon, I rarely got to see how patients fared after surgery, and I felt there was a void in the continuum of care mode.
There are many academics who influence clinical care outcomes, but it’s rare to see a working surgeon get involved in what is essentially a startup.
Frankly speaking, I don’t have a PhD, and I haven’t spent years in a lab studying neural networks. But I wanted to try and bridge the gap between laboratory sciences, practical surgery, and the growing presence of a body of knowledge in holistic healing.
It feels as if you’re bringing credence to the field, too, by setting up research-based INI as well as the consumer-facing NeuroVella Brain Spa.
Well, yes; I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of snake oil out there.
Especially in this town.
[Laughs] And even some of the best scientific thinking doesn’t have great evidence as yet, or the evidence is, at best, biased.
So that’s at the heart of my quest. INI’s board contains neuroscientists, exponential science researchers as well as a yogi and a Reiki healer. I’m curious to learn. There’s so much we simply don’t know, but I’m open to all rationales and processes to pursue the truth. There was also a personal motivation for me in doing this, because a decade ago, my father got Alzheimer’s, and I was responsible for his care during the last year of his life. I sought out all kinds of desperate measures to try and reverse an absolute catastrophe.
That must have been an awful experience.
It was. And, selfishly, I’m probably genetically disposed to it, so I feel driven to find a solution.
Genetics aside, there’s a clear link behind providing treatments which offset, or slow down, the detrimental effects on the brain and nervous system caused by stress.
We know that reducing biomarkers of stress such as adrenocorticotropic hormones and reduction of anti-inflammatory cytokines can help brain health. But we’re still in incubator stage here at NeuroVella, assessing which treatments are most effective and why. Essentially, we’re trying to decrease the number of ‘hiccups’ so your brain can reach ‘flow state’ and operate at optimum levels. There’s a growing body of evidence on the increase in cortical thickness and neuroplasticity, which directly relates to meditation practice, so we want to build on that here.
How much does it cost for an appointment?
Sessions start at $35. For that, you can do one of the treatments you tried today for 15 minutes; starting with some of the most basic things, like the acoustic vibrations that relax your spine, putting you in a almost hypnotic state. Then we can move up to 30 minutes or an hour, and try a combination of what we have to offer.
What’s your vision of the future for NeuroVella?
We’re a purely cognitive play, but I do see NeuroVella Brain Spas inside physically-based places such as medical facilities, spas, and even gyms. My vision is first to get the exponential side patented and perfected, so you can go on your cognitive journey with us and learn more about brain health.
Let’s talk about data and tech then. Those zero-g chairs are cool.
We’re testing out a lot of chair-based treatments and wearables, starting with the EEG, with Emotiv, for brain mapping. We’d like to develop our own proprietary blend of data output and analysis using off-the-shelf wearables that are in the market now, depending on how open the manufacturers are to research collaboration. We’ll be working towards clients getting assigned a unique ID and then tracking the data to show improvements over time. That’s not happening yet but that’s where we’re heading. Honestly, it’s a difficult balance between the research side and the purely spa side, so it’s something we’re figuring out.
Final question: what made you decide to be a brain surgeon?
(Laughs) How long do you have? Well, let’s see. My uncle was an orthopedic surgeon, so I have clinicians in my family. The brain has always fascinated me. The idea of the body’s coordinated movement of every limb and function as a result of getting orders from the Mothership, the brain, is amazing.
When I was in medical school, a surgeon from Glasgow invited us to observe him doing brain surgery. As I looked into this live, pulsing brain, the hairs on my arm stood up on end, and I said to myself: ‘That’s what I want to do.’ Taking my fascination out into the field, with NeuroVella Brain Spa, is the next step, for me, and I feel we’re unique in this space.
Read more: “How Brain Implants, VR Could Help Treat Diseases Like Alzheimer’s”
Originally published at www.pcmag.com.
