How To Fast Track Your Way To Optimized Brain Fitness (& Instantly Lull Yourself Into Hypnosis, Sleep, Energy, Meditation & Much More!) With Dr. Patrick Porter Of BrainTap.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, it's immediately starting to produce acetylcholine, which is the feel good, fall in love kind of neurochemical. So if you're on a romantic getaway with your wife or significant other, then what's happening is you're now creating the environment that's more romantic. If you do these things, you can actually affect a change at the brain that has never been recorded. Neurofeedback. And I challenge anybody listening to this, if you get me a study that shows neurofeedback can do this, I'll pay $1,000.

Faith, Family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, Ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

All right, folks, so you may have heard me talking recently in my articles, on my podcast occasionally and elsewhere about this new technology I've been using on my head. It's called a brain tap. It's a light sound stimulation machine. And the reason I've been using it so much was because, well, about two years ago I got one. I messed around with it a little bit. I didn't notice it that much. I kind of shelved it. And then I ran to the CEO of the company at a health conference a few months ago. He gave me one of their upgraded units to try because they've been messing around with the hardware and the software and kind of upgrading this thing. And it absolutely transformed everything for me from rapid sleep onset to napping, to meditation, to airplane and car rides, to just anything that I needed when it came to shifting my brain very, very rapidly and building my so called brain fitness. My guest on today's podcast is going to be able to explain a lot better how this thing works and how to use it. But, I mean, I have become so hooked on this thing. I'm literally using it every day for anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes. I can simulate like a two hour nap in just 20 minutes using this thing. I can use it for energy and it pick me up at the beginning of the day. I have, as you'll learn later in this podcast, different prayers and meditations and journaling routines that I've recorded that are actually featured within the library of all the different sessions that are within Braintap. So it's pretty cool. My guest is Dr. Patrick Porter. Now, Patrick is an author, he's an educator, he's a researcher, he's an entrepreneur, he's a speaker, and he has a pretty interesting history in terms of what he's actually Studied up on. So not only has he been the honored recipient of the lifetime achievement award by the Interdisciplinary association of Functional Neuroscience and Rehabilitation, but he has a career spanning over three decades on the cutting edge of brainwave entrainment technology. He was the co developer of one of the first ever personal light and sound brain training machines way back in the late 80s at the Consumer Electronics show and has been a highly sought after expert within the neuroscience and personal improvement industry because of his ability to use technology to activate the brain's neuroplasticity and do a whole lot more. He's written multiple books on this, many of which I'll link to in the show notes and interestingly, he also has a doctorate degree from Louisiana Baptist University in psychology of Christian Counseling, but is also a licensed trainer of neuro linguistic programming. So this guy basically knows how to tweak your brain with extreme precision. And all the shownotes for everything that Patrick and I are going to talk about, as well as all the links you would need to get your own brain tap if you want to try this thing are@BenGreenfieldLife.com BrainTap Podcast. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com BrainTap podcast. So Patrick, first of all, welcome to the show. And second of all, you have a very interesting history, like I mentioned, with Psychology of Christian Counseling and also neuro linguistic programming licensed training. So I would love before we delve into this brain tap technology to learn a little bit more about what inspired you to get onto this unique path.

Well, the main thing that inspired me was my father's alcoholism. And he, he went and got help because members of the church came over and said, Michael, we need to help you get off this alcohol. And they had a stress reduction seminar that was going on with something called the Silva Method. And that changed and transformed my father in such a way that it's. I learned to use this form of, if you want to call it technology driven meditation back in the 70s using GSR, galvanic skin response. And I just had a unique curiosity about it. I went to school first for electronics, but I just kept coming back helping my dad with his seminars. We used to do seminars twice a month in Michigan. And so we were helping him set up chairs and doing that. So it's kind of in my blood, you know, to be out there doing these things. And it got to a point where I had an opportunity to work with a company called Light and Sound Research and we developed that first portable light and sound machine you were talking about. And I was able to use my electronics and my passion for helping people with relaxation meditation techniques. And it just kind of came together, basically the six of us that put that together. I'm the last man standing, so. And I feel like it's a mission I have because it helped me. I wrote my first book was called Awaken the Genius. And I was held back in second grade and had trouble in school until my dad taught me. There's a book called As a Man Thinketh. I recommend everybody read that. And when you. When you read that book, that was my pill. That was my penance over one summer when I was 12 years old. And it changed my life so profoundly because I realized that my thinking was dictating my emotional behavior and then as a result, my life. So I've just. I still feel like I'm not working because I still feel like I'm working on myself every day. You know, that there's. Yeah, there's so much to do and I'm just sharing it with the world.

Yeah. That as a man think. Is that kind of related to other books like, like the Secret and Think and Grow Rich and some of the stuff by Napoleon Hill or that. I think there's another one called how to Program the Subconscious Mind. I forget who wrote that one, but is it a book along those lines? Because I actually haven't read as Men Thinketh. I've heard of it, but I haven't read it.

It is similar. It comes from the same. It's. James Allen is the author. And it's a very easy read. They now have As a Woman Think it too, you know, with the culture the way it is. So basically it's taking Bible quotes, helping you to understand that, you know, God wants what's best for you. And I actually thought as a kid that, you know, God was out to get me, that there was no good in the world. And I just had a very negative attitude. So it changes the way you think about your world and your perception because it puts you in. In the driver's seat. It starts. It starts with the way you think, you know, and then it also says, you know, like it says in the Bible, asking, you shall receive. What are you asking for all day long? And if you're just asking for trouble all day long, you're going to get trouble, you know. So to me, the book is. When I was working with suicidal teens, which was my first job out of college, that was my assignment. I kept copies of that book with me because it so changed my life. I just Wanted to share it with everyone.

Are there like updated? Because I know it was written in the early 1900s. Are there updated editions you think are good or if people wanted to grab it? Because I'm totally going to read it this week. Now that you recommend it so highly, do you recommend the original edition or is there an upgraded edition that's a little bit easier for our modern day vernacular?

Yeah, I think, I think any edition is good. I don't know of any new editions because it's such a. It's a simple book. You know, it's not a profound read, but it's the resources and it just wake your brain up. Especially if you have somebody that's never thought of taking control of their life that just thinks, hey, the winds blow and I follow. You know, it teaches you to, you know, basically the science of prayer.

Yeah.

Really? What teaching you?

Well, I'm looking on my phone here. The Kindle version is $0.15 and the audiobook is $1.35. So that's kind of a no brain.

No brainer probably being the worst analogy right now for the podcast that we're recording. But nonetheless I will. I'm just gonna click right now. There we go. I'm delivering it to my, to my audible app right now. So as a man thinketh. I got it. Okay. So the other question I wanted to ask you just about your personal history before we dive into the braintap is there's two voices because there's a whole bunch of different sessions that one can choose on the brain tap and different narrators or different personal that will do everything from guide you into sleep to increase your energy. There are like Christ based Christian Bible meditations and there's meditations that target each of the different chakras of the body, things that lull you into a sleep state, things that my kids can use before school for creative programming. I mean the list goes on and on. But there's two voices, yours and this guy. What's his name? Dr. Mumby. Is that his, his full name?

Keith Scott Mumby.

Yeah, Keith Scott Mumby. Both of you guys, when I listen to you, like over and above any other voice on the braintap library, you seem to like lull me into this deep state of hypnosis. And I've always thought I was unhypnotizable until I put this thing on. Listen to you and Dr. Mumby and you guys seem to just like shift me super quickly into this completely dissociated state that, that literally like I can, I can Barely even remember what happened during the session. And all I know is I've just kind of been subconsciously programmed. So. So I have to ask you. I've been wanting to ask you this. Do you have some kind of, like, training in hypnosis or something like that?

Well, nlp, I would say, is an advanced form of hypnotherapy. And. And hypnotherapy is one of the things we learned in psychology. I trained with Milton Erickson's group. He's probably the most famous hypnotist of our day. He was no longer alive, but I took the training in Scottsdale, Arizona, but Jeffrey Zeig was, and his organization. So it's more medically based, but we're going to use more positive psychology. So it's similar to hypnosis, but what we're doing is we're going to let the light and sound guide you into that altered state, and then we can focus on the positive message, which can basically tune up, if you will, 2,300 different gene expressions. So when we're using positive psychology, it's going to affect the way we show up. And now we know that our subconscious, which is our physical body, can be tweaked because of what we say, just like everything else. So your environment's tweaking it. The water you're drinking, the food you're consuming, all of that is going into those epigenetic expressions. So we're choosing those words to do that. And I've had a lot of training in it. In fact, my franchise, we did a lot of therapy. We were addiction therapy. And I would say that at least 25% of the time, we would do hypnosis with the people who had addictions in our therapy centers. We had 108 locations around the country.

Okay, got it. Yeah. I mean, I've done NLP before. I've done podcasts on nlp. I remember way back in the day when I was racing Ironman, I actually had this NLP practitioner come on and program certain anchors for me that I could trigger when I was racing to suppress pain or to go faster. And I remember during the race, I. I realized I'd made a fatal error because during the swim portion, which was when I actually needed to activate my anchor, I realized that my anchor was actually touching my thumb to my index finger as hard as I could. And I couldn't really do that effectively when swimming, obviously, because it interferes with the swim stroke. So it actually worked pretty well on the bike and the run. But for the swim. My, my anchor didn't work so well. And then there was another Guy I Inter, Dr. Don woods, who has a special form of reprogramming, like trauma reprogramming. And he came up to my house and worked with me and my family. And he had some really cool neuro linguistic programming things that he did as well. And I'll link to that, that episode in the show notes for this@bengreenfieldlife.com BrainTap podcast for those of you who want to dig more into NLP and what it can do. Now I want to get into the braintap Now. Patrick, can you tell me a little bit more about how it actually came to be invented? Because I know like I mentioned earlier, you, you were involved with the 1989 Consumer Electronics show and developed a light and brown light and sound brain training machine there was that like an early model of this or did this pop up elsewhere?

That was an early model. Basically it started with a machine called the sils, a sensory learning system that you would have to run by hand. So think about life before neurofeedback. There was no muse, there was no, none of these devices. So what we would do is we would look at respiration, hand temperature, you know, heart rate, those kind of things would tell us and we would know that if we could get a certain temperature in the hands, we would be an alpha. Now we didn't have any devices to actually prove that that came later. But what we. This was all done by hand and this unit cost $10,000. So how it really came about was I met up with a group and it's a pretty long story, but I'll shorten it here that they, they came to a crossroad. The guy that invented the sills passed away and they didn't have any records of how to make it. So with my background electronics, I, I told him and I had an office in Scottsdale and they were. Happened to be located in Scottsdale. I said, come on over to the office, we'll reverse engineer this and we'll, we'll figure out how to rebuild it. Well, while we were rebuilding it, I actually built with the team a little prototype. And then I said, wow, this is pretty cool. It does it. And then the EEPROM chip, which is a programmable microchip, just came out. It was like everything happened right at the right time. At that time we could only use red LEDs, which are a little bit high. I mean red LEDs are good, we all know that. But for the eyes, we Found that it was too stimulating for them. So that's why we now go with the 470 nanometer light. It just doesn't have as much energy. And it's more about the energy exchange than the light color because your eyes are closed. So we didn't want as much. You don't need that much energy to trigger the Cranial Nerve 2. And Cranial Nerve 2 is the one that actually is going to cause the brain to do its thing. And that's really what's happening also with that double voice that we might explain later. But what happened was we took this big machine that looked like a microwave and we took it down to a little tiny. It's actually my book, Awaken the Genius. And also my book about NLP is called Discover the Language of the Mind. And I have a cop. I have pictures of what it looked like. And of course, we were building it at Radio Shack. We'd get all the parts from Radio Shack, which is in a store that some people on the call probably remember. And we were building them in our back office and we were selling as many as we could build. You know, we're building them in the back. And just kind of one thing led to another. And this was before cell phones, before CDs. It was like we were aliens, you know, who showed up. Because nobody knew what this thing was. But we were using it first for pain control. And then what we found. Yeah, when you're in a state of alpha and theta, which is where you go naturally when you're praying or when you're in a deep meditation state, you're creating more of your own body's opioids. We have opioid receptors in our brain. So we have these. We trigger these responses in our brain. So we reduce the pain by reducing the cortisol and adrenaline in the body and increasing the acetylcholine and the GABA production in the brain. And we do that through this light and sound experience.

Okay, got it. So there's so many questions that I have here that I want to get into when it comes to how this thing actually works. And I know there's a lot of different kind of terminologies that go into this, like entrainment and frequency following response and binaural beats and isochronic tones. So I would love to hear you delve into what exactly is happening. Well, you know what, what might actually be really cool here is there are certain sessions that I tend to play a lot that are like my go tos. It's probably like a dozen. I think there's like 800 different sessions on it, but there's about a dozen that I use on a regular basis. You know, I really like the one for sleep onset. I like the one for creative thinking. I like a lot of the Delta Wave sessions for a nap. I really like the journeys from Dr. Mumby, where he'll take you to Avalon and to Egypt and a tour of the universe. And so those just completely dissociate me. And it's just amazing. It's like you check out and go to this magical universe, except rather than taking drugs and psychedelics and hallucinogenics, your brain's just getting shifted via the light and the sound. So let's use, for example, and I don't know if you've listened to this one, the tour of the universe with Dr. Mumby. What's happening? I press play. The lights and the sound come on. What's actually going on there?

I'm probably the only person who's listened to everything on there because I mix everything pretty much. But, yeah, what's happening is we're going to start off at beta about 18 cycles per second. That's the beta brain. That's our reactionary mind. And we're going to attract about 18 cycles per second. That happens to be almost where everybody out there is hanging out in our first sessions. So what happens is every session starts between 14 and 18 cycles per second. As you get into the series, you'll see that it starts, it's faster, ramp down. So you might find that it almost like an elevator drops out, you go faster into this deep state, but it's going to take you through a cycle from Beta down through Alpha, down through theta into the threshold of Delta. Now, depending upon that session is a deep, what we call a deep recycle session. So what's happening is we're doing a lot of theta. Theta is the brainwave that most adults are missing, but it's also the one that brings about the deepest, let's say hallucinations or visualizations, because GABA is a precursor to dmt. So when we're triggering that, when you produce enough data, your brain, the most powerful pharmacy on earth, goes to work triggering that. Now, what we did, just so the listeners know, In Dallas with Dr. Rosenthal, Dr. David Rosenthal, we did a study with a psilocybin in brain tab. And half the half of the military personnel did not want to take a psilocybin. So we mapped their brains while they were on the psilocybin and we found out that they had a high degree of gamma going on while they were doing it. And just on the right side, the right hemisphere was more lit up than any other area of the brain. Now we know that's like the spiritual center. People who have these spiritual kind of out of body experiences, they activate that region of the brain. So what I did in my gamma series, and this one will take you down, it'll take you up into gamma because we want to have that expanded state of consciousness. And gamma is just like theta in that it produces GABA as a neurotransmitter. But what happens then is it's a higher level. Like you have these zone experience, like when you were doing that Ironman when you were in the zone and you didn't feel your body, you were just doing your thing and you were in the moment, you were probably in a high gamma state. And so what happens with the brain tap is we're going to guide you through that, you're going to get into that and it's a timeless place. So you might hear, hello, this is Dr. Patrick Porter. Hello, this is Dr. Keith Scott Mumby, you know, whatever is the name. And then you hear eyes open wide awake and you go, hey, what happened? Well, what happened in the middle of that? You were going through at least six, if not seven cycles of sleep. But we compressed it into a 20 to 30 minute time period.

Okay? That's why I can settle down for a nap with this thing and feel like I've slept like two hours doing a 20 minute session.

Right. Because what sleep, one of the main functions of sleep, not the, not the only function, but one of the main functions is to the brain instructs the gut to start making your neurotransmitters. There's 54 of them. Right? So when we sleep, that's when we're filling up our neurotransmitter bank account. If we don't sleep well, that's why we don't think well is because we don't have the neurotransmitters to get the dendrite connections to happen in the, you know, the cascade of thoughts, ideas and concepts to come into our awareness because we don't have the chemical factory in order to make those things happen. So then we rob Peter to pay Paul. We get stressed out and you know, we make poor decisions because we're not resting. But if we get that deep rest or if we do that recycle session during the middle of the day or in the morning or in the evening, whatever it is, where we can offload the physical stress, our body will go back into that homeostasis and balance state and start operating at that highest level of efficiency.

Okay, got it, got it. So I know there's a few different key technologies that are being produced by both the earpieces as well as what I think is one of the more unique components of this, the eye light that's kind of like shifting and moving and flickering as it goes through the process. So first of all, I know you've got binaural beats worked into this thing, and I'm curious, are those just to do that brainwave shift? Because I've talked about binaural beats briefly on the show before. If you play like 220Hz carrier tone in the left ear and 226 and a half in the right ear, then you're going to get like a beat frequency of six and a half, which is the difference and associate with some kind of a deep meditative state. Now, is that pretty much what you're doing with the binaural beats? Just using that as the session goes on to determine whether you're going to do alpha, beta, delta or gamma?

Right. What we found in our research, because we can measure across time domains, like if you just have one 10 hertz frequency, or let's say 300 and 310, like you're saying, if you don't change that every three to four seconds, your brain actually goes bye bye. So a lot of people listen to the same binaural beat over a 20 minute time period. It's only going to work for three or four minutes and your brain's going to go. I tell people it's like living next to a paper mill. If you live next to the paper mill, you don't, you're not aware of it. After a couple of weeks, friends or family come over and go, man, this is terrible. How can you live here? But our nervous system says, you know what, that paper mill is not going to kill us. And let's omit that piece of information, we don't need to smell it anymore. Well, the same thing happens if we don't change that up. That's the neuroplasticity piece. So what we're doing with light is the same thing we're doing with sound. So just in the same way that when you look at the lights, if you've noticed when using the brain tap, sometimes it seems that the lights have shut off and then you open your eyes and you see they're still on. That's because when you're, when your brain balances, you don't see the light anymore.

Yeah, I've noticed that you almost like, forget that the lights are flickering because you do have your eyes closed when you're using this thing. But obviously the lights are still shining. Shining. 3. You can detect them, but then you get to a state where you can't even detect the lights.

So what will happen is about every three to four minutes, we have a certain training protocol we're doing in there that we found the brain will follow, but then we change it up, and that's when you'll see the pattern change. And if you're not tired or whatever, you'll return back and you'll see the light again. Because we disrupted it, we want to keep interrupting the pattern in light. The whole reason for retinal flashing. There's a lot of research that shows retinal flashing is really good for depression, anxiety, and stress disorders, because the eyes have 300 times more mitochondria than the brain. So if you want to absorb light, you want to absorb light energy in through the eyes, but your eyes are closed because we don't need that much direct light into our eyes. And then we have the ear lights that are also flashing. Those appear to be solid, but every two minutes they change to a different nogier frequency. And Dr. Nozier, what he found out was there's seven frequencies that if our body's in tune, these seven frequencies are working throughout the body. And you can do it through sound, through light, or through some kind of frequency response. We use it through light. So that light is actually flickering between 184 and 2000 something times per second. So we can't really see it. But the body, every cell of your body has something called a chroma form or a battery that absorbs energy. So it's absorbing that energy. So when we, when we're, we're giving it all this different stimulus, what happens is the brain has to go into the super state. Like we were talking about the two, two voices. The whole reason for that is if I speak to your right ear, your left brain will light up. Like if I had you on an EEG machine and we were just recording live readings. As soon as I say something in your right ear, your left brain will light up and then it will shut back down. Then I'll say something in your left ear and your right brain will light up. And what we find is that about three minutes into doing that, the brain will just Stop shutting down. And what we want to teach the brain is under stress to stay awake. Because our, the natural, our body's natural resonance is under stress, is to shut down, to go into that freeze response, to play dead. And so we don't, that's not good for us anymore. We're not being chased by saber tooth tigers anymore. And that same stress is causing people to shut down. But if we teach our brain through what they now call neuroplasticity, to teach the brain to basically fire and wire around these different whole brain states, then the brain, it's just like any other muscle. If you, if you use muscles, they don't get sore, but if you stop using them for, for a month or two and then you go back to the gym, you're going to get sore. The same is true with your neurology, because it's your neurology that's actually moving those muscles. So I mean it's instructing those muscles to move and things. So we're going to start with the core, which is how we think in the energy. When you think about everything we do, it's all about energy. How can we get energy into the brain so that it's self healing, self regulating system can go to work and return back to the divine design that the brain knows it has. But stress has caused us to get out of balance.

Okay, that makes sense. And I actually have more questions about the, the sound. Like I want to delve into these isochronic tones and some of the music too. But while we're on the topic of light, why is it that the earpieces also produce light?

We have meridians in our body. In America we're used to looking at the spine and we can look at the energy through it. But in China they look at meridians. So we think of them like highways throughout the body. And what they know is through photobiomodulation, we could put light in one of these meridians in the body because it's the path of least resistance. Energy is used to flowing through there, it flows through the body. Also. We now know that every cell, or I should say every genetic snip, every 40 seconds is changing based on a light impulse called biophotic light. But if your mitochondria does not have the energy, it cannot instruct the cell to return to its optimum state. So we're going to give light because I truly believe this. And William Cousins, Dr. Cousins, said this first. He said the most underprescribed nutrient on earth is light. And this is very specific light. We're using the light frequencies that are most prevalent in the morning and at night because we know that these two light sources, this red and blue light, a 650 nanometer, 470 nanometer, now 810 or 860 is really good too. But we're not using those in the brain tap. And what's happening is our body absorbs that light energy and then it goes almost like a stem cell. It will go to the part of the body that needs it. Wherever the cells are dying. Then that light will go in and reclaim the mitochondria and that cell will come back to life just like it would with any other red light therapy or other training that's out there. But we're doing it through the ears. And we can actually measure this through our neurocheck device that shows how this energy moves through the body and wakes up the body's nervous system. So it starts operating at its best peak potential.

Based on what we know, and I'm sure you're aware of this research on even a very low lux of light in terms of intensity and a disruption of melatonin production. Why is it that. Because I've used this at like 2 or 3am When I wake up to fall back asleep, or I've used it right before bed for rapid sleep onset, or again like, you know, to simulate a couple of full sleep cycles in a 20 minute nap. Why is it that the blue light would not be disrupting my ability to sleep? Does that make sense?

Well, this is such a low level amount. It's really the energy. Think about it, it's only eight LEDs. So when you think about eight LED and your eyes are closed, it's not enough energy. And most people don't realize we need energy to sleep, but we don't need energy in the form of caffeine or sugar. We need clean energy. And so when you're providing that clean energy to the brain, it can now do the work of sleep. Because your brain never sleeps. It's got a lot of work to do. It's going to do all the cleanup while you're laying in bed. But if it doesn't have the energy to do that, it was, it's going to try to wake you up to go get some energy in the form of food or beverage so that you can then energize the body and then do the work that it needs to do. But if it doesn't have that processes in place, it can't go into that deep state of delta, which is necessary to turn on the glial lymphomic system, which is going to detox and clean the brain. So it's hard to explain, but most people don't realize we need energy to sleep. When we're sleeping, our body is performing a lot of functions. It's not just laying there doing nothing.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, Because I was a little bit nervous about that at first and then realized I'm actually sleeping better when I use it, even before bed or when I wake up in the wee hours of the morning. So in this case, the light doesn't seem to be disrupting anything at all. Now, back to the sound. We talked about the binaural beats, and how you also have this dual voice technology where sometimes it'll speak into one ear to activate the. The right side, like if it's going to the left ear, or speaking to the right ear to activate the left side, which is kind of interesting. It's almost like you can hear these subtle differences in terms of where your voice is appearing in one's ears when you play it. But then you've also got, from what I understand, these things called isochronic tones. Can you explain what those are and what's happening with the audio of those?

Yeah. What happened to me back in 2009, I actually was on an airline flight, and I blew out one of my eardrums. And so I had to have surgery to repair the hole in my ear, and I lost about 20% of my hearing. And when I was doing some tests in the lab, I realized that binaural beats were not tracking the same way on my brain. And I realized that what was happening is you have to have perfect hearing for binaural beats to work perfectly. They'll work, but there'll be a lag, you know, if you don't have the same. Because it's measuring the difference. Right. So what I. What I said, what if I put that same process, but as an isochronic tone, which is a mono. You can. My isochronic tone is like if you ever saw in the office where you have a waterfall or you have a white noise generator in your bedroom. Some people do to sleep. Those are isochronic tone generators. The Earth itself is an isochronic tone generator. If we were flying a spaceship toward Earth, we'd look at Earth, and the frequency of the Earth would be between 0.05 and 100. The evoked potential of our brain is also 0.05 to 100 so what's happening is our brain is always matching its environment. That's why I like to inform people when, when that tsunami hit. And one of the biggest things in the news was where were all the animals when the tsunami hit? Well, the animals were in tune with nature. They were out of there. They were already inland far enough that they didn't get killed. But the people were so out of touch with reality, they're running out after the wave and then, you know, five, ten minutes later, here comes this giant wave and washes them out. It's because we're not in tune anymore with our environment. You know, we're on the earth, but we're part of this whole frequency of experiences. And so like some people will tell us, you know, when you go a nice chronic tone, just as a negative side would be going to the mall during Christmas and you don't like all that phonetic energy, you know what I mean? There are people that just will avoid them all at all cost during the holidays because they don't want to feel that stress. That's because their brain can't handle 18-25Hz frequency, which is about where the, the, where the malls are during the holidays. But if you go to the mountaintop and you're just relaxing at tree level, it's 7.8 Hz frequency that happens to be theta. So when you're sitting there, your body is actually not one thing with the brain. When your brain is in those different physiological states, it's creating the chemical corresponding relationship. So if we're in theta, we're going to produce gaba. We're also going to produce feelings of inspiration and we're going to have those epiphanies. If we're in a high stress state like beta, we're going to produce fear, anxiety, stress. You know, all those things are going to anticipate negative things happening to us. So that's why when we can start to control our own emotional strength state without the help of these other devices. I mean, these are all trainers. I still use my brain tap every day. But it's one of those things where it's just easy to put it on and let it do it for you. But these are things that people have been doing since the dawn of history on their own. We say we take ancient traditions and make modern technology out of it. Because one example of an isochronic tone generator is a fire. We've all been with a sweetheart and we're sitting in front of the fire. That fire is doing two things. One it's crackling and burning. There's actually a frequency to it. And that fire is at 10Hz frequency. So it's immediately starting to produce acetylcholine, which is the feel good, fall in love kind of neurochemical. So if you're on a romantic getaway with your wife or significant other, then what's happening is you're now creating the environment that's more romantic. But that's because the brain used its external environment to create an internal environment. But you can also come the other way around. You can create your internal environment. It doesn't matter what's happening in the external world.

Well, I would imagine if you program mall or airport isochronic tones into the brain tap, it probably wouldn't be that popular. But now I understand why. Something like the escape to a mountaintop retreat session, that's another one that I like. It seems to really make you feel as though you're literally on top of a mountain, which is pretty crazy. Now what about the music? Because almost all of them have music, which at first I'll admit, like I thought it was a little bit distracting. And then I realized there seems to be something going on with the music that's different than just like background noise. Are you guys using technology in the music somehow as well?

We can use music to offset the right and left ear just a little bit. Because anytime it's off, we're using music. Now we want to, as bizarre as it sounds, we're trying to just like exercise. We're trying to stress out the nervous system. And then what happens is once the but it's stressing out in a positive way. So it's kind of like a sport. It's nerve wracking and you get stressed about it, but you love playing it. That's what's happening with the brain. So with the music, when we can change the pitch and the tone and the speed, we can actually trigger different regions of the brain. Remember when I was talking about the psilocybin study, we wanted to go right in the middle of the top of the head, just to the right. There's a region there that we know on the QEEG that lights up when somebody's having a spiritual experience. So now during our gamma sessions, I can pinpoint that area of the brain and resonate energy there to activate. Now I can't promise people a spiritual experience, but we did have people telling us they were having a psilocybin trips without a psilocybin. So it's just like People who do, when we do painless surgeries with people, because. And I had painless surgery myself. I had a shoulder surgery with no anesthetic. You can train your brain to create your own opioids, so you don't need external opioids, you know, so. And so your brain can do a lot for you. Your body can. We're imbued with all of these gifts, but it's easier just to take a pill. So most people do that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I. So I have combined the brain tap with a couple of other technologies. One called the HAP B, which can use a magnetic signal to simulate any molecule. You know, like anything from GABA to melatonin to nicotine to CBD to thc. And then I've also used it with a haptic device called the Apollo, which you can put in like meditation mindfulness mode or relax and unwind mode. And when I combine the brain tap with either or both of those devices, I mean, you brought up psilocybin, for example. And I've really almost completely sworn off the use of any type of plant medicines from a recreational or a journeying type of sense of. Because I've realized using electrical medicine or using a lot of these technologies, I can simulate exactly what I'm getting from those type of compounds without some of the weird, edgy, hallucinogenic, psychotropic type of effects or psychedelic type of effects. And also without the obvious need to recover for hours and hours and days and days afterwards. If you take 5 grams of psilocybin, you're kind of screwed up for a few days. Whereas, you know, brain tap session. I'll do a session and then just for example, if it's for a nap, I'll do a brain tap session after lunch, go splash some cold water on my face and get back to work and I'm good to go. So there's definitely something going on with the tones and the music as well. I also wanted to ask you about this idea of entrainment, if you could explain what that means. Because for me personally, I feel like every time I use it, my brain gets burned better at using it, if that makes sense. And I don't know if that's the process of entrainment or something else, but can you explain that phenomenon?

You're exactly right. And just, you know, we love using happy, the happy because it's going to entrain the body. So if you can get the physiology involved, like a PMF too, people like doing that with it, the low level ones. But what's happening within, within the body and, and within the brain while this is happening is we're basically synchronizing the hemispheres and then the body is then getting into a synchronization of our body wants to feel at peace and at one that's a natural state of existence. So it's going to, to the exclusion of stress, anxiety, any fear based systems, it's going to keep getting rid of those. So if we can do that by doing the brain tap or some people do breathing techniques with it, I mean we have a lot of different people doing, doing, breathing with it in that what's happening is the brain is following along. So anytime that we can mimic that. So I'm going to tell you a story of a research project that we're doing right now in Brazil. We did the pilot study in New Bern at our research facility. We took 20 people, 45 minute session on BrainTap. We had them hooked up with the Muse on a live stream where we could measure their brainwaves with the Muse device. And we also had our, our neuro check which does over time HRV. So for 45 minutes we're measuring their brain. We had them listen to a piece of music, which we know is a good piece of music. People relax to it. There's something called the Mozart effect. People can just relax and a lot of people think music is what's doing it for Brain tap. So we wanted to prove to them it's not music. Music doesn't do what we do. Music is good, but music only does it while you're listening to it. So what we did is we had every one of the people go through the training, 15 minutes of music. Of course they relaxed, they felt really good. But at the end of that 15 minutes, we had a five minute washout. During that five minute washout, every person's brain went right back to its stress state. It was before the music. That's not entrainment, that's just an experience. So we took that same piece of music and we encoded it with Braintap algorithm and we had them listen to that music. At the end of that 15 minutes, their brain did not return at all to their quote, normal stress state. It actually took 72 hours for their brain to go back to its stress state. Now what we showed in two different studies, one was a study we did with autism children, they had 23% more alpha, which caused 90% of them to speak within four weeks in California. Six months later we measured their results. They were still at 23% alpha, which is incredible. So when the sleep. We did a sleep study in New Zealand, and these were coal miners, they, they go to. They go to work in the dark. They work in the dark, they leave in the dark. They have no circadian rhythm. It took three weeks to improve their sleep scores. 70%. And that's all we could do. I mean, they, they basically, they were at about 90% sleep scores, and they weren't seeing the light of day. What it took was we then took them and had them listen to the app, only to see what would happen. It took six weeks to get them to that point. Six months later, again, we looked at it, their sleep was still there. Now, eventually, if they don't keep practicing something, obviously the stress is going to cause their brain to go back to dysregulation. That's why we have to do something every day. Life is kind of like playing the game of golf. No matter how good you do it, you're going to want to improve something. You know, especially biohackers. You know, everybody's measuring everything and looking at their statistics. And the same is true of sleep. But what we're showing is if you do these things, you can actually affect a change at the brain that has never been recorded. Neurofeedback. And I challenge anybody listening to this. If you get me a study that shows neurofeedback can do this, I'll pay you $1,000. I mean, get it to me.

I've done a lot of neurofeedback, and this is totally different. And it seems to be more effective. And obviously, the inexpensiveness and the opportunity to be able to do it just in the comfort of your own home makes it pretty palatable too. Sometimes it's tough to be able to do DIY neurofeedback. Now, my kids have used a lot of the accelerated learning protocols on there for increasing their focus, increasing their creativity, decreasing procrastination. I've noticed it's actually helped them from an educational standpoint. And so I know it's safe for, for kids, but one thing I did want to ask you was, you know, with, with the light and the sound and everything, you know, are there certain people that shouldn't use it? You know, like if someone has a risk for epilepsy or something like that, I just want to make sure that my listeners know.

Yeah, if somebody out there has photic epilepsy, which is a subset of epilepsy there, if you can't go down a country road, you know how the leaves or the trees are flashing. Some people get very nauseous on that. I would not use the visor. I. Could you just use your earbuds?

Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. You can, you can get results with just the sound. It's just not as fast.

Okay.

We're finding it's about 50% less time to get those same results when you're using the headset.

Okay, got. Now there's some days where I will use it twice a day. And I'm just curious, like, you know, because with, for example, red light therapy, technically you're not supposed to do red light therapy more often than about every 24 hours. Like if you're doing a powerful 20 minute photobiomodulation session because it'll produce a little bit of an excess of free radicals, there's kind of a law of diminishing returns. With something like the braintap, how often could it safely be used? Or is there no law of diminishing returns?

Three times a day is maximum. And the reason is you're doing different things. In the morning. We're doing what we call SMR training or sensory motor rhythm. That has to do with focus and concentration. That's the brainwave. As we get better looking and more intelligent with age, we start to lose that, that starts to atrophy. In the middle of the day, we're going to do a reboot session. Basically we call it deep cycle, where you're going to go really deep into into theta and spend a lot of time there and then bring you back out with energy on a high. And then we have our evening sessions, which are sleep sessions which actually drop you off in delta. Then they don't return you back to awakened state. They we want you to sleep through the night. So there are different reasons for doing it. And the lights will change based on every session is recorded differently because we want that neuroplasticity to happen. But the lights sometimes will go a little dimmer, they'll go a little brighter depending upon what we want to accomplish with that session.

Okay, got it. Yeah. And speaking of sleep, by the way, the sleep through the night session, where you teach how to draw a number on a chalkboard and then say it three times and erase it and you count from 100 down to 93. And then you go down this set of stairs into this comfortable bed and you just basically walk me through this whole session. The cool thing is when I don't have my brain tap and I wake up at night and I just do that in my head instead it's kind of like the hypnosis that happened during the brain tap. Sticks with me. Have you heard that before?

Yeah, that's what we're hoping happens. So you start to learn because you can do these things on your own. The problem is that it takes effort, so you can as long as you can remember it. And a lot of times what's nice is because you've been practicing it, your brain remembers the whole thing. It's like being on an elevator. And you start hearing the first through three tunes of one of your favorite tunes. When you're growing up, even though they turned it into Muzak, you could figure it out after a while. The brain, it's like beads on a string. It just pulls on that and then that the body remembers the feeling and it's the feeling that's going to help you out. So once you tune into that feeling and put you back in that sleep state, you're able to sleep through the night.

Okay, got now, now, you mentioned that there might be some potential for combining this with microdoses or plant medicines or something like that. I mentioned the use of technologies like the Hap B or the Apollo in conjunction with it. Have you or any of your customers actually found other things to combine well with the braintap?

Well, our chiropractors, which we have about 3,000 doctors using this in their clinics. Our chiropractors use it when they do electrostem also. They do it when they're doing decompression work. Really, anything you're doing that they're just laying there or you're just laying there. I do it every morning. I have a sound bed that has the vibracoustics and I have a PMF mat with it. I do that every morning.

Oh my gosh. I have a sound bed in my living room that has a PEMF mat stacked underneath it. So I get the PEMF coming up through the sound. So I could actually use the. Use the AV cable port on the braintap, plug it into the sound table and actually have the light and sound stimulation in my ears and my eyes and then also get the full sound of it through my body.

Oh yeah. Just like Dr. Emoto talks about. We want to.

That's my nap this afternoon, by the way. I just wrote that down. I'm going to try this. So cool.

Yeah, that's what I love that. I mean, when Dr. Dewees created a bed for us for our doctors to have more like an up level experience, I said, man, I got to get one of those, I have two of them at my clinic, but I have one at my house.

Yeah, I use the bioacoustic one from. From Biomat. And then the PMF table I have is. Is the pulse centers one. So that's a perfect setup. I've been using it also quite a bit in the hyperbaric chamber. I mean, I don't know if it's pressure tested or whatever, but I bring it in there, and the hyperbaric chamber automatically kind of shifts you into this relaxed state. But with the brain tap in there, it's a total game changer. I mean, the combination of that, you know, I'll put, like, the Apollo on my ankle, put the brain tap on, climb into the hyperbaric, and. Oh, my gosh, like, it's. It's just like the best siesta ever. Have you ever used it in the hyperbaric?

Oh, yeah. I. I was just out at the hyperbaric conference speaking about it. I showed pictures of myself, and there. As long as you don't have oxygen in the tank, you can do that. You know, they. A lot of them now, you just use the capillaries and things like that. So, yeah, you don't have to worry about oxygen in there. But I. I love. There's a. There's one in Orange County, a group called O2 Labs that I. I would go to, and we would do the brain tap while we're in the hyperbaric.

Okay. Got it. Cool. Yeah, there's so many cool things you can combine with this. And obviously, any type of, you know, adaptogenic herbs or rhodiola or reishi or anything like that fits really, really well with this thing. And I mean, like, proceed at your own risk. If you're gonna try something psychedelic like, you know, taking a hit on a vape pen or using psilocybin or something like that beforehand. I personally think. Think there's no need because this thing just shifts you so rapidly. You don't have to mess around with that kind of. That iffy effect on your neurochemicals, especially if it's in the middle of the day and all you want to do is nap and get up and then go crush the rest of the day. Now, the libraries, like I mentioned, there's like 700, 800 sessions in there. It's almost dizzying. And I've just settled on the 12ish that I really, really like, and I just repeat those. But in terms of the libraries, I know you have, like, a power library. You have different subscription levels. Can you talk about what people get access to if they get a Braintap device, in terms of what's in the app for them.

For sessions, most people will get the Wellness Collection. In fact, when you share that link, I'm sure with this site they'll download the Wellness Collection. They can start using it. There's about 800 sessions there. There's actually 1,800 when they go into the power user. But a lot of those are for the clinics. You know, I'm always come up with new sessions. I mean, your sessions were new just recently here before we went to the Paleo event. So we're always trying to add new content and enrich the experience of the users. I just finished a series called Overcoming Overwhelm because so many people are in Overwhelm right now of what's going on. So there is a doctor we work with, Dr. Joel Rosen out of Florida that I did a series with. He's an expert at Overwhelm. So we kind of took his curriculum and I created a Brain Tap series of learning. So we're always doing. It's like, let's say you're going through menopause and you're having a problem with that. Of course I have my reading of it, but I also have a woman's voice reading it. So if you're wondering, you know, some of these, most of our programs are done in men and women's voice. We also have quite a few in other languages like Spanish, German, French, you know, Danish. So if you're a different language, we have some sessions for you. We're in 120 countries right now and just continue to grow.

How do I know when you add new sessions? Like, is there some kind of. I haven't even paid attention. Is it like a notification on the app or do I just need to go in there and scroll through and see what's been added recently?

You know, there is a. We keep a place on our blog post where we have the new things, but we're updating the app. So here, within the next four to five weeks, there's going to be an addition to the app that's going to say new. So anything that's been added in the last six weeks will show up there. And then I'll just. Because I'm always creating new when I'm home. I'm just creating some more sessions with Jim Kwik, who based on his new book that he has. So there's always new things that are out there, you know, that we can add to it. And, you know, I'm always adding business books too, because we have a lot of entrepreneurs out there that.

During that afternoon break, they still want to be getting some value out of that time. So I've taken. We have a whole series called Wake up Audio. It's basically. I've taken business books and I've condensed them into 20 minute brain tap sessions.

So I didn't realize that. Holy cow, Now I'm gonna have to go check that out. Okay. I'm writing a note to myself. Yeah, the thing that you mentioned, by the way, with my sessions, and this was cool because I came up to you and I'm like, well, I do this this morning meditation and journaling session with my spiritual. Spiritual disciplines journal and then the evening meditation. The morning ones focus on purpose and gratitude and service, and the evening one on self examination and purpose. And they're about 10 to 12 minutes long. I'm sure you recall I asked you, well, could I just program these in the brain tap? And rather than me just sitting there with my journal, do them with the brain tap on. And so I recorded them and sent them to you. And you actually turn both of those, as well as my daily page prayer into a brain tap session. You basically took some of the stuff I do anyways and encoded it. And I thought it was going to be weird listening to my own voice, but it seems to work really, really well. Have you found that before, too? Listening to your own voice seems to enhance the experience even more.

Oh, yeah. One of my favorite books, it's now only sold in Europe. It's called the power of your voice. Your voice is more powerful for you. When you hear my voice, even though I might know how to say things, you still have to translate it. When it's your voice, there's no filters. So we want to change. You know, most people, they say we speak 8,80,000 words a day and 60,000 are negative. So if you haven't been working on your own internal dialogue, this is a very meaningful way. In the book that I was talking about, the power of your voice book that I have that's no longer in print, although Amazon still sells it for like $200. I don't know where they're getting them, but there's a mystery. Discover the language of the mind book actually has transcripts in it. So I give people the scripts to read in their own voice because I think that's really important for people to do.

Yeah. And that's part of the library, by the way. If people listening in like, like if you want to try my journaling, like my meditation, if you get the Brain tap and you open up the app, there's, I think it's just categorized under Ben Greenfield. If you click on it, there's three sessions there, my daily prayer, which is about an 8 to 10 minute long prayer, and then two separate tender 12 minute sessions, one for the morning and one for the evening. And I've had a whole bunch of people find that, download it and they like it better than just sitting there with their journal because again, you're shifting the brainwave state super rapidly because it's got everything you and I were just talking about, the isochronic tones, the binaural beats, the holographic music, the light, the sound. So it's pretty nifty. I think it's super cool. And I actually want to do a few more sessions eventually. And by the way, for people wondering and what I do, because I'm not a big fan of being constantly connected, is I just put on the braintap and I have the sessions downloaded that I really like. And that way I never have to turn on my phone or be messing around with the WI fi or Bluetooth or any other signal when I'm using it. I can literally just hardwire it into the phone, be in offline mode. So the EMF issues really are not significant at all with this thing, which is really helpful as well. Now you mentioned that you guys are going to be upgrading the app. What, what kind of updates are you looking at in the future in terms of either the software or the hardware component?

Well, the main thing is, is we're going to have playlists. So like your Playlist, Ben, your 12 to 15 that you're listening to all the time because you have a lot of fans that will be on the brain tap. You could actually share that playlist if you wanted to. And they could say, hey, what has been doing today? And they would see your playlist if you choose to share that. You know, a lot of our doctors and they want their, of course their patients or clients to do certain sessions. So we're, we're going to. And also it's going to give us the ability to do more protocols, protocol driven. So people go, I don't know what to do, I have this problem X. And then we're going to have a solution for it in the app and it's also going to have a gaming component. Like I said, there's three times a day that people can do it. So we're going to have A way to keep score your braintap score during the day and there's a lot of fun things that are happening. And also we're going to be integrating it with other wellness technologies so that while you're wearing your OURA ring and things like that, you can, you can do your own readings, you know, to see how your, your physiology was affected while you're doing that brain tap session.

Oh, that's pretty cool. Now the other thing, I think that would be cool. I don't know if this is technically feasible at all, but I was going to ask you about it would be if you could program back to back sessions. Like if I want, wanted to do let's say like a 30 minute relaxation session, but then have it shift automatically into like the next one that I've selected on the playlist, like let's say a 10 minute energy session to kind of wake me up and get me ready to rock and roll again. Is that, do you think that's technically feasible?

That's actually one of the things, one of the features we're putting in because I, they asked me, I did a talk about jet lag just a few weeks ago where I showed usually I'm 100% on our neuro check when I'm at home for three to four days, get my body back to where it needs to be. But when you're traveling, your body just flying on airplanes and things messes it up. So you gotta, you know, do your thing. I did, I purposely didn't do any of the things that I would usually do on a flight and I did a pre and post scan, pre, pre flight, after flight. And then I did brain tap sessions and I did a 20 minute and a 10 minute and I brought my body back from a 17, which is probably the worst I've seen of myself in a long time. You know, after flying across the country twice. And then I brought it up to 85% and when they asked me how I did it, I said, well I did a 20 minute, then I did a 10 minute. And they said well I wish that was something I could just do. And I said, well we're fixing that, we are doing that because I do that all the time when I travel because I want to have the reboot, the deep reboot, but then I want to have the energy to get up and do something because I'm in a new location. I don't want to just sleep all day, you know, I want to get up and be mobile.

Yeah, yeah. Well I believe you because you know, coming full circle when Nicholas, your guys, I think he's your new CEO, when he gave me the unit at a conference, I was super exhausted. This was down in Phoenix. And he put it on a 10 minute session. Said, ben, just like, trust me, lay back and do this. I did it. I felt like I was laying there for hours. Came back after 10 minutes and I had energy to crush the rest of the day. And again, I take this thing everywhere when I travel, put it in a little soft case and it freaking works. You know, I've been actually looking forward to recording this podcast for a while just because I haven't talked about it in detail that much with my audience. And now folks are going to know about it and hopefully be able to use a lot of this and some of the cool sessions that you have coming up in the future as well. So I'm going to link to everything@bengreenfieldlife.com BrainTap Podcast. I don't even remember if we have some kind of like a link where people get a discount on it or something like that. I think we're working on something along those lines.

Yeah, we can provide you a page that can do it.

Yeah, I'll figure that out between now and when the podcast comes out. But for now, if you just go to BenGreenfieldLife.com BrainTap podcast I'll link to the Braintap some of my favorite sessions. Some of the previous podcasts I've done on similar things like neuro linguistic programming. Some of the things I like to combine with the Braintap like the Apollo and the Hap B. And I'll link to that sound table and the PMF as well too. So you guys can just go to town and upgrade your life with this thing. So, Patrick, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this. It's a fascinating device. It's become just a staple of my routine. So thanks for it and thanks for everything that you do.

Well. Thanks for getting it out there and helping us with our mission to Better a Billion Brains.

Is that the mission? Better a Billion Brains?

Yep.

I like it. Good alliteration. All right, so again, URLs@BenGreenfieldLife.com BrainTap podcast. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Patrick Porter signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week. Well, I have something that's pretty important for you to know about. If you're into electrical medicine or taking charge of your own health using this cool new technology. Well, it's not new. I think it was developed by NASA a long time ago, but it's. It's really taken the biohacking world by storm. Called Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy pemf. And it's something I use every day. I have a giant mat with coils and I'll hit my shoulder with it or my knee or my back or use it for sleep or energy. And basically, PEMF is just a natural electrical current that you can run through different parts of your body to enhance your health or your performance, your recovery, etc. And it can be a little bit confusing to know what to stack it with, how to use it, what frequencies to use, what settings to use, what kind of power to use, et cetera. So whether you are a practitioner who wants to use PEMF in your practice, or whether you're somebody who wants to like me, just use units yourself at home. The upcoming Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Healing Summit is this online summit that teaches you everything about how to use pmf, what units to use, what type of things it can treat. We got doctors, acupuncturists, naturopaths, scientists, a whole bunch of people presenting. And it's a pretty cool, cool summit. So it's free. It's one of those deals where you can watch the whole thing for free and get special welcome gifts and all that jazz. You've probably seen these kind of online summits before. That's what it is. But it's all about pemf. So the link that I've been given to share with you is Ben greenfield life.com p m f summit. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com p m f s u m m I t and guess what? I even have a presentation on there. Yeah, the guy interviewed me while I was walking around the forest. But hey, it's there if you want it. Check it out.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. If you liked it, or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.