How Sound Rewires Your Brain: The Science of Vibration | Dr. Dave Rabin

MDMA therapy is really unique because it's one of the most well understood psychedelic therapy techniques. And it works by amplifying safety cascades in our emotional brain. It sends positive emotion. And so we were trying to use sound waves to replicate some of those safety states in the body. The body has ways of regulating itself based on sound. It's actually been known for thousands of years that music and singing or chanting, the creation of music from the body, can actually induce what's called resonance states, meaning states of harmony between the heart and lungs.

What happens when you have the right vibrations in the right place? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an Upgrade Spotlight edition where I bring an innovator, founder and inventor in to talk about something new and interesting in the world of biohacking. And today we've got a returning guest, Dr. Dave Rabin, who's a well known, distinguished figure in neuroscience, psychiatry and psychedelic medicine, and some of the spiritual sides of it as well. We're friends and have gotten to know each other over the years. And one of the areas in biohacking that has been on the roadmap forever but probably doesn't get enough notice or respect is vibration. The definition of biohacking, when I started this movement, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology. And isn't it weird that vibration is a part of the world around you? And isn't it weird that vibration is something that is a primordial sense you can feel if something's tapping you and you'll know if it's tapping you in a big way, like someone punching you or, you know, we've all stood on maybe a vibration plate or just, you know, you're sitting on a, in a shaky car and you like, why am I tired after this? I used to have that. I had a, an Audi TT Quattro convertible. And by the time I got to work, I felt like someone had abused me. And that's just vibration stimulated my body maybe in a way that I could have handled with a better suspension system. So maybe it's a signal that matters. Well, it turns out there's a neuroscientist out there who said, hell yeah, let's do something about that. And that is Dave Rabin, in addition to many other things. So with that cool introduction, at least I think it's cool. Dave, welcome back to the Human Upgrade.

Thanks so much for having me, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here with you, as always.

Do people make fun of you being board certified, big name neuroscience guy, playing around with vibration?

I think 20, 30 years ago, there was a lot more confusion around this topic. And, you know, I think a lot of the modern approach to what we maybe taking a step back from what we think of as just vibration, as like tactile movement that you can feel, like touch or your phone vibrating on your, you know, in your pocket or something like that, or like what a pager might do in the past, in the 90s, right. These kinds of experiences are what we think of as felt physical vibration. But vibration, really, in the, in the traditional sense of physics, is every sensory experience we have. So everything. And string theory is based on this, right? That we are all composed of little vibrating particles that are subatomic, but also that the cells and the components of our cells also change and turn on and off at different frequencies. Light is vibration that we can see, sound is vibration that we can hear, and touch is vibration that we can feel. And so as we start to take into account the, the understanding of what vibration really is, which is it's just particles moving over time that create a sense of waves or rhythm, it starts to help us understand much more clearly that vibration impacts our bodies and how we feel and our sensation experiences, our whole life experiences, but also that it impacts our biology because it's creating resonance patterns in our cells, between our heart and lungs and between how our, all our brain and our organ systems work, which effectively governs almost everything we experience every day. Which is pretty darn cool.

It's beyond pretty darn cool. I think it's foundational in our nervous system. And a lot of the foundational things, you don't pay attention to how hot it is unless it's really hot or how cold unless it's really cold. But a fluctuation by a couple degrees changes all kinds of things in the body. So there are these invisible signals that change your state. And you invented a device. I've got it on my wrist right now. I actually have the strap on it that goes on my ankle. So it's a little bit big on my wrist. This is the Apollo Neuro. I remember when you first launched that in one of the first few units that came out like, this is cool stuff because you're doing something in the nervous system that's simple, it's non invasive, but it's relatively powerful. So what happens when you have the right vibrations in the right place? Walk me through the neurobiology of this yeah.

So, you know, Apollo is effectively wearable music that is tuned for your nervous system through your sense of touch. So anybody who's ever stood next to a subwoofer and listened to a great live show, or even in your own home or somebody else's home, knows the feeling of sound in our bodies, right? And you feel. When you feel bass, big bass, bass vibration, you feel it more in your body than you hear it through your ears. And the body has ways of regulating itself based on sound. And sound is sound you can hear and also includes sound you can feel, like bass. So when we think about music, it's really interesting. You know, we've never had a. I grew up as learning music. I was never particularly good at it, but I always loved music. And I always noticed that it had this tremendous impact on my life and those around me. It brought people together. When you're having a bad day and your favorite song randomly comes on in the car or in the office or on the radio, all of a sudden you start to feel better almost instantly. And when I started to look at the research behind this, knowing that this is a nearly universal human experience, there wasn't a lot of good data on the neuroscience of what happens to this sound wave that comes into our ears on a bad day. And then within seconds, or, you know, at. At minutes, at the most, we're feeling completely different. And that always fascinated me, and how music gets us into flow states, and music helps us recover and enter meditative states and sleepy states more easily. And so this was all known, and it's actually been known for thousands of years, that music and singing or chanting, the creation of music through the. From the body, can actually induce what's called resonance states, meaning states of harmony between the heart and lungs. And that when we induce these states of harmony, our heart and lungs are working at optimal efficiency together. So that can be done through listening to a calming meditation track, or it can be done through soothing, slow, deep breathing. It can be done through soothing touch. It can be done through yoga, stretching. Lots of different things that alternate in our bodies at different frequencies can either be what we call dissonant with our body's rhythm, or harmonious or resonant with our body's rhythm and with nature's rhythm. And it turns out that the more harmonious our heart and lungs and our brain are, the more they're working at a rhythm that's similar to nature, the better we feel, and they work together more efficiently. And the result of that is we feel more joy, we feel more present and we feel more like ourselves. And when we are dissonant with the environment, when there's like too much construction sounds or like you said, when you're driving and you're Audi TT and there was not enough suspension, so you're really feeling the vibration of the road quite a bit that can actually create dissonance in the body, which manifests as anxiety or restlessness or racing thoughts or increased heart rate or all of the above. And so it's really understanding the relationship that's happening in real time between our bodies and the environment that helps us to get into our peak state or flow, which could be with recovery or, or performance at any time. And the more we learn the impact of vibration on the body and frequency, the easier it is to teach ourselves to get into those states. Almost like training your muscles in the gym.

How do you know that when someone's wearing an Apollo that it's playing the right vibration for them?

So Apollo works by delivering several different vibration patterns. So there's about 12 in the app and 7 in the bass app and they're all for different times of day or different goals. So the kind of energy similar to music, right? The kind of energy that you're going to want in the morning is different when you're waking up is different than the kind of energy you're going to want at night when you're about to fall asleep. And that's different from what you're going to want when you're out socializing with your friends or when you're trying to zone in and focus on like intense, boring paperwork or whatever it is. And so what we are able to do is have you have our users tell us, okay, I need to do the following. I need to be social right now or I need to go out to a party and I'm tired or I, I have to focus or sleep or wake up. And so people can select from any of those different vibration patterns in the app, similar to choosing a song. And like and Apollo works in that way at the most basic level. It's a remote control for our emotional nervous system, which is really cool. So you can actually just like putting on a song that helps get you into a certain zone. You can set your Apollo to focus vibes and you can put yourself into a phone body or zoned in on exactly what you have to do right now, just like putting on a focus music track. But the nice part about Apollo, the benefit of having this ambient soundtrack composed with soothing low frequency sound waves for your body that activate the body in a way that's similar to soothing touch or breath work, but it does it on the go throughout our day, which is what all of us were supposed to do as learned to do as kids in with, you know, old school meditation and breathing techniques. But myself and many other people I know did not learn that growing up. And so we never learned how to master command of our breath, which to your point, about what biohacking is all about, you know, it's all about getting, taking control of your biology and learning how to deep breathe, learning how to control our thoughts, our attention and be mindful and. And all of these different ancient techniques are just as, if not more powerful ways to learn and master control over our biology than the modern stuff. The modern technology based tools are really great and a lot of the stuff that you talk about is really great because it helps remind us how to do the old traditional techniques. And they complement each other really well. And Apollo is another tool inspired by your work in biohacking and helping people assert control over their lives that we can use to give us more, you know, agency over the way we feel, our energy level and our emotion, emotional nervous system.

Do people use Apollo during psychedelic journeys, given that you're an expert in both?

Yeah. So this was actually something that we discovered by chance. Originally, we developed Apollo out of my work at the University of Pittsburgh Medical center to treat PTSD in veterans. And we developed it out of the way that MDMA therapy works.

That.

Because I was studying MDMA therapy at the time and treating veterans with severe ptsd, and I saw the results coming out of the maps MDMA trials which were, you know, regardless of whatever else you want to think about, those trials, it's the best results we've ever seen for any mental illness in the history of psychiatry.

Oh my gosh, we should ban that right away. We can't have people healing. I mean. Oh, okay.

Yeah. I mean, it's paradigm shifting for the field, right. To be able to give somebody one to three doses of medicine with 42 hours of highly condensed intensive psychotherapy, which is a recipe for remission or cure, is a totally different paradigm of mental health than what we were doing before, which is I'm going to stabilize you for life, but actually just, you know, walk around, steer around the core problem and never really talk about it. Right. And so, and so MDMA therapy is really unique because it's one of the most well understood psychedelic therapy techniques. And it works by amplifying safety cascades in our emotional brain, which tells Our amygdala, that fear center that all animals have, all even going back to ancient reptiles hundreds of millions of years, it tells that little fear center amygdala that's blasting off saying, hey, you might be under threat, you might be under threat, you need to watch out for your survival. And it, it sends positive emotion safety signals to that, that says, hey bud, you don't need to blast off right now. You're safe. You're safe enough to be present, you're safe enough to heal, and you're safe enough to remake meaning around past traumatic events. And so when we developed Apollo, we really were trying to use vibration sound waves to replicate some of those safety states in the body. And soothing touch is one of the fastest ways to get there. So now come full circle, people started using Apollo in psychedelic experiences. And in the real world, when we started doing our testing, just prototype testing between 2018 and 2020, we started to get tons of reports back from just regular folks who were testing Apollo, using it with ketamine, mdma, ayahuasca, psilocybin therapy, lsd, recreational experiences. And the three things that came back repeatedly over and over again that were so interesting were number one, this helped me drop into a deeper experience or helped me relieve some of my anxiety about what I was going to experience with this psychedelic. The second one was this helped me navigate challenging experiences and uncomfortable experiences that came up while I was under the influence of the psychedelic or helped me actually get out of a bad trip, which was actually fascinating. And number three was this is helping me integrate what I've learned. So it's helping me remind me of that feeling, the pleasant feelings of the psychedelic when it was active in my body during the medicine experience, so that I can start to unpack and integrate what I was learning from that experience into my day to day lives life. And these are the three most critical phases of psychedelic use. And this is in therapy and this is what people were doing without instruction. So now we've actually started two trials, one with Dr. Pam Crisco, who's doing some of the first group therapy studies for psilocybin and ketamine in traumatized first responders in British Columbia with Apollo in group therapy settings with ketamine and psilocybin before, during and after. And then we're also running a trial with MAPS for integration, specifically where anybody who has ever experienced MDMA in a MAPS controlled trial can get a free Apollo device just by reaching out to us through our study website. And then we'll do the Long term follow up of seeing can we sustain remission by in, by facilitating integration with the wearable. And then we have ketamine clinicians using Apollo just in the wild right now, treating over a thousand patients over the last couple years because it's our wellness device that anybody can access. So we've seen a lot of great results just in the wild with ketamine therapy as well.

I absolutely believe it. Ketamine is a really powerful substance and we're talking about an Apollo neuro device here that provides these low level neurological inputs to the body that evolved from psychedelic therapy. And we're in the late stages of turning on ketamine assisted neurofeedback at 40 years of Zen where ketamine enhances neuroplasticity in a very meaningful way. So I can help people who choose to add ketamine to their experience to have a more flexible brain. Question for you though is if I'm using Apollo neuro and I'm not using psychedelics, is it also going to increase neuroplasticity?

So we haven't done the official neuroplastic studies yet where. And neuroplasticity is very commonly misunderstood word. So for everybody listening, neuroplasticity means learning. So that's just the fancy neuroscience term for learning. And neuroplasticity on the biological perspective has three components, one of which is neurogenesis, so the formation of new neurons. The second one is neurogeneration, so the regrowth and repair of old, dead and dying neurons. And the third is synaptogenesis, which is the most common form of neuroplasticity or learning, which is the building of new neural connections. And one of the core premises, premise, the core premise actually for all neuroplasticity to take effect and for learning that we've seen in neuroscience research for the last probably 50 years is safety. We have to feel safe and be in a vagal dominant state. So more parasympathetic, more rest and digest recovery to optimize learning and neuroplasticity. And if we're not safe, what happens? All of our blood flow gets diverted to skeletal muscle fight or flight systems. Skeletal muscles, heart, lungs, motor cortex of the brain and fear center of the brain. And the first things that happen are tunnel vision, right? Emotional lability, emotional irritability, because we're diverting resources away from the empathy center to the survival centers. And open mindedness closes as symbolized by tunnel vision, because you don't want to be open minded when you're running From a lion. You need to get the heck out of there as quickly as possible. We don't want to be thinking about reproduction or digestion or immunity. We need to get the heck out of there. And that's what our bodies evolved to do. So the problem is we don't have those kinds of threats in our day to day lives. We have overstimulation from too much news, too much, too much, too much. Like inbound, incoming, overwhelm, too many responsibilities, too much stress, all of it. And so that tricks our bodies into thinking that we're under threat when we're not. So that makes learning really, really hard. And so when you're doing these practices, whether it's with Apollo or with neurofeedback, with, or with psychedelic assisted therapy, what were all of those therapies to work well, are rooted in a foundation of safety, which is as soon as you walk in through that door and meet your, your clinical provider, you feel comfortable, at ease and ready to have the experience you are there to have. And that safety sets a foundation for taking that tunnel vision of our day to day and doing what we call widening the window. Right. So it's expansive of our awareness. And so any technique or tool like Apollo, psychedelic medicine, neurofeedback or empathy breathing, slow, deep breathing, soothing touch, soothing music, all these things that boost vagal tone are inherently neuroplastic and neuroplasticity inducing because they facilitate learning by reminding us we're safe enough to learn. Does that make sense?

Oh, it not only makes sense, it's. There's so much richness in there, the idea of safety and just that you're being cared for. When I designed the 40 Years of Zen location, every little thing there is about safety. And you go into these pods that are designed, they're womb shaped, and you sit in this kind of round thing, but you just feel neurologically held and that you're in a safe space not because you thought it was safe, but because your body recognized it as a safe space. Like you're in your own cave.

Exactly.

And you don't have to watch your back right now. And you've got a staff who's caring for you, so you can just really let go and go deep, which creates those learning states. And to hear you explain it that way, you also opened something else up for me, the tunnel vision thing. So I was born in a fight or flight state because I had the cord wrapped around my neck coming out. So you come into the world thinking that something's trying to kill you now, you can get stuck in that state for a long time, and it's classical ptsd. So part of my recovery from that and also from Asperger's syndrome, when I was younger, I came to understand that I always had tunnel vision. And it took about six months of very intensive vision training for me to learn how to see in my peripheral vision, because I had never done it as a human being, because I was born in tunnel vision. I just always used that. And I had no idea that you could see other things outside of it. And part of that was reprogramming my. The way my eyes work together. These are all invisible to your consciousness. But I learned how to make my eyes team properly. I removed the need for corrective lenses through training my eyes, which is another thing. And I learned how to see the world in a working visual system that I never had as someone who'd been on the spectrum. It was a. One of the many things I had to rewire. But the idea that someone listening right now, you might be in tunnel vision, and you wouldn't know it because it may just be a state that you're used to. And if you take a few deep breaths and you relax and you sort of like, what can I see at the edges of my vision without moving my eyes? Well, that's part of the relaxation response. And I kind of wish I had an Apollo back then, because I could have put it on and I think my vision training would have been a lot less work. Sound likely?

Yeah, I think so. And. And I think because every. Like, we can stack these tools, right? That's one of the coolest things, is they're not. They don't. They need not be used independently. You know, you can stack all these tools. If you stack music with your meditation experiences, they get better. If you stack music plus meditation plus Apollo, your meditation experiences get better and deeper. And for anybody at home who's like, I really don't understand the difference between, like, what this Apollo thing really is. If you have an iPhone and you're listening to this right now, you can download the Apollo Neuro app on your iPhone. And you can get on the same vibe that Dave and I are on right now just by opening up the app and clicking Feel Apollo. It's only available for iPhone right now as a demo, but it gives you all a chance to feel Apollo and what it is we're talking about. And if you hold your phone to your chest for two minutes with the Apollo vibration going up and down, especially if you sync your breathing with it, you will notice what Dave and I are talking about, which is when your vision starts to relax and you start to widen your window of awareness and start to become notice. Start to notice. What am I feeling in my body, right? What is all that stuff that might be going on down here? What does my heart rate feel like? What's my breath rate and what is my, what are my clothes feel like on my skin? What am I seeing outside of the this that I didn't notice before? Right? And all that stuff starts to come into our awareness. And that is fundamentally the most basic psychedelic state that we talk about as humans. Because psychedelic doesn't mean drugs. We talk about it a lot around drugs because drugs, psychedelic drugs are super cool because they induce these states, you know, for a time limited period, very reliably. But psychedelic means psyche, means mind, and delos means to show or to reveal. So we're really talking about doing stuff, whatever it is, drug or behavior that expands awareness to all the things in our Freudian subconscious or Carl Jung described as a subconscious or what's just beneath awareness for us, what's normally just stored deep down. And that is essentially how we get access to all of our healing abilities.

I can see a few people saying, okay, this major neuroscientist has made a wrist vibrator for your soul.

A vibrator for your soul.

A vibrator for your soul. Okay, that's really good. But I mean, so people are going to say that and then the next question is, yeah, but okay, we have mechanisms, but can you prove it works? And the good news is you're kind of a real neuroscientist. So you've done a few studies. Tell me about how many studies you've completed. How big were they and what did you find?

So we've completed about 13 clinical trials to date, or 13 clinical studies. I would say about three of them were just early stage pilots that were done in the real world with different mentally ill and general regular, healthy populations. Those are published on our website, but they weren't done under IRB approval. The other 10 studies because Apollo came out of the university ecosystem were all done with university partners under strict IRB approval. So the same quality oversight that you require for publication of peer reviewed scientific studies that anyone from a university, academic setting, or pharmaceutical company or medical clinic would have to file to make their research valid. And the very first trial, anybody can view and you can see all of our studies to date on our website, on the research page with all the current updates we have one trial published to date that was a double blind, randomized, placebo controlled crossover study, which is the most reliable form, or, sorry, most rigorous form of clinical trial that is not by any means required. But we needed to prove to ourselves that Apollo actually was doing something different than other vibrations in the world. And so we conducted two of these very intense laboratory grade run at the University of Pittsburgh in electromagnetically in soundproof shielded rooms. These double blind, randomized placebo controlled studies which showed us that the Apollo vibrations are reliably improving heart rate variability. And heart rate variability is. At the time back in 2016-2020, heart rate variability was just known to be important for a sign of vagal tone or parasympathetic recovery, nervous system activity. And it was known that having a higher heart rate variability reflects a higher recovery in the body and a higher vagal tone. Higher, more parasympathetic recovery, nervous system activity and more sleep gives us more heart rate variability and more recovery. And that if it's low, if our HRV is low, our chances of getting sick go way up, our chances of recovery from illness go get, get worse, and our performance under stress goes, goes down significantly. And so what we were able to show in these first two trials was that under physical, like workout work, intense workout stress and collegiate athletes, or in regular people undergoing intense cognitive stress, that only.