A Groundbreaking New Way To Combine Artificial Intelligence, Sound & Music To Boost Creativity, Focus, Sleep & More.

Hello, it's me again. Surprise. Who else did you expect? It's Ben Greenfield. And in today's show, you're going to learn about this way that you can combine artificial intelligence and music to increase things like focus and creativity and sleep. And it's something I've been doing, and I'm saying the word and a lot, but I think you're actually going to really like this one. I know I say that a lot. You'll like all of them, right? In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, our vision and thesis is that music can alter your mental state in real time. We just have to navigate uncharted territory using innovation by combining music and neuroscience. So we started off with three basic mental states of what do people need the most in their daily life? They need to focus, they need to restore or relax, and then they need to sleep.

We're actively working with some of the top auditory neuroscientists in the world, like Ben Merilin and Psyche Liu at Westland, and we're getting MRI data, we're getting EEG data.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Hey, folks, it's Ben Griffin Greenfield. And for the past couple of months, I've been toying around, as I'm prone to do, with this app and a website called Brain fm, for everything from sleep to focus to creativity. And frankly, I have no freaking clue how it works. I know it can knock me out like a baby for sleep, especially when I'm napping, which I recently wrote an article on over at Ben Greenfield Fitness. Or when I wake up in the middle of the night. It can put me kind of like in the zone when I'm writing fiction or when I'm reading and when I'm playing on an airplane. I also just doze off like a baby, or as my kids correct me when I tell them that babies don't sleep that well, dad. So I suppose I doze off like a. Like a log or however the analogy goes. Anyways, though, it's different. This Brain FM thing is different than binaural Beats. It's different than white noise, but I know little else about the science behind it. So for today's episode, I managed to get the minds behind Brain FM onto the show to explain to you how you can use things like sound waves and the artificial intelligence that they've kind of like woven into these sound waves for sleep and focus and creativity and a lot more. So in today's show, I'm going to be interviewing Junaid Kalmaldi, the CEO and the co founder of Brain FM and Adam Hewitt, who's the mastermind behind the sound innovation and the technology that's used in this particular app that I've found fascinating. It's actually an app and a website as we talk. If you want to access the show notes for everything that we talk about, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com brainfmpodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com BrainFMpodcast or if you just want to check out Brain FM, go to BenGreenfieldFitness dot com BrainFM so who are these dudes? Well, Adam has been involved with audio and brain stimulation for over 14 years. He actually invented the first research focused entrainment software that has been used by auditory neuroscientists and research labs all over the world. And he actually holds a patent on a method of his own invention for embedding brainwave stimulation into audio. In Junaid, like I mentioned, he's the CEO and the co founder of this company, Brain fm and he has been involved in a ton of different projects in the neuroscience industry. He's been in Inc. Magazine, Guardian, Newsweek, Entrepreneur Magazine, Forbes, Vice, TechCrunch, Mashable, you name it. We actually had the opportunity to eat seafood together a few weeks ago down in San Jose. So that's probably his most important accomplishment. But this company, Brain fm, they've partnered up with Team USA Olympic wrestling to help with things like insomnia and performance anxiety during their prep for the Rio Olympics. And they have a whole bunch of people on their advisory board, like auditory neuroscientists and serial entrepreneurs and angel investors and a whole bunch of people in the, in the neuroscience industry. So this is a cool company that's doing cool things. And Junaid and Adam, welcome to the show. You guys.

Thanks so much for having us, Ben.

Yeah, thanks a lot for having us.

Yeah, no problem. And as happens when I have two people on the show, it's always important to differentiate between the voices. So Junaid, can you go ahead and just say some random things so that we know what your voice sounds like.

Ben is awesome.

That's awesome. How about you, Adam?

Random thing.

Okay. Yes. All right. I can differentiate between you. I'm hoping our audience, who are all pretty smart cookies, can as well. So I'll let you guys decide who's going to answer this question. But my first question is, what exactly is Brain fm? And I realize that's kind of an involved question, but. But what this. What does it do and how does it work?

So we combine music and neuroscience, and we create music for the brain to improve focus, relaxation, and sleep. And the vision of the company is to put music on the medicine cabinet against the pill. And our kind of thesis is that we live in a world where prescriptions are definitely overprescribed. Three out of five Americans, according to the medical association within the United States, has used a prescription medication. So we believe, kind of like the William James quote is that our science is a drop in our ignorance and notion. So our understanding of reality is really limited by the tools that we have of science. And our ignorance is a notion that same kind of applies to our belief with music is that our understanding of music as humans is a drop. But there's an ocean to explore. And our lens is innovation and science. And we are combining two things that two bodies of fields that don't talk as much, music and neuroscience to produce some pretty science fiction like outcomes that can be used in everyday life. Like if you can't focus, listen to it within 30 minutes. That's the promise that you should be able to experience a very tangible difference if you can't sleep. Like you said, Ben kind of knocks you out.

Now when you say music, help me to wrap my head around that because when I listen to feels more like hypnotic beats kind of played in each ear. I've played around with binaural beats. And a little bit I want to ask you how this is different than binaural beats, but it's not just. It doesn't seem like it's just music. Is there something special about these tracks that are actually being played in my ears when I select? Well, let's use this for an example. Okay. So last night I put it on eight hours of sleep and I literally, like had my little buds in my ears and was listening to it for a full eight hour sleep cycle. And the music kind of seemed to change throughout the night. And there's little, I guess, tinkling sounds and all sorts of weird little sounds kind of embedded into the music. But what is it exactly? Do you Just define this as music or. Or. I mean, what's. What's the science behind it? I want to delve into the physiology of this stuff and how it's actually working.

Well, this is. Adam. So. Well, there's a lot of questions in there, but let me deal with the first one. You know, is this music? And, you know, I would say that it is. I would make also no pretense that our AI is creating, you know, pop hits or anything that people would generally listen to, you know, outside of this. But it's. So it's. It's. Musically, it's nice to listen to, and we pride ourselves on that. But as you're saying, it has special qualities and qualities that aren't in other pieces of music. And we can go into all kinds of, you know, the science and the different things that we put into it. But on the surface, you'll hear at first something very kind of musical, easy to listen to. With the sleep sessions in particular.

You'Ll.

Hear just kind of this waving, kind of really slow kind of oscillation in the sound. And this is not normal stuff that you hear in music, so it may sound a bit strange at first, but we try to ease people into it throughout the entire session. So we don't just start off with heavy stimulation. But it is different, and there's a lot that goes into it. And, yeah, I'm happy to go into that throughout the podcast.

Yeah, I'd love to hear more, because on the white paper on your website, you describe it as patented music software that basically triggers specific cognitive states using something called neuronal oscillations. So I guess my first question regarding that from a more scientific standpoint here is when you listen to this type of music and you say that it creates neuronal oscillations, what are these neuronal oscillations you're referring to?

Well, sure, neuronal oscillations generally refers to brainwaves, or the way that two neurons will communicate with each other, or neurons communicate with, like, the deep brain, basically any way that two neurons communicate with each other. But we would generally, in common terms, you would probably hear of these as brain waves that are measured from the scalp using an eeg. And what we do is actually called entrainment. And we affect the brain waves, affect the neuronal oscillations. Through this process that involves specially structuring music that you actually see a response in the brain directly, we can directly stimulate neuronal oscillations, and we can see the response on an eeg, and you can see it on an MRI as well. We recently had some MRI work done. It's a very kind of tangible effect that you get. It's a very kind of real effect. And you can feel it too, which is really interesting that you can actually just listen to this music and actually feel yourself drifting to sleep. You can feel yourself focusing more, and it's a remarkable thing. And neuronal oscillations are what the brain uses to communicate with itself and affecting. That affects your mental state, affects how you feel, affects your focus level, what you're concentrating on, and many other things.

Okay, so if I understand this correctly, when you're creating neuronal oscillations using something like music, the way that that's achieved is you play music at specific frequencies, and those frequencies trigger certain things. Like, if I wanted to, say, increase focus and I wanted to amplify, let's say, alpha brainwave production, I would want to play music that resulted in neuronal oscillation of, say, like 8 to 10 hertz for, like, Alpha focus. Or if I wanted sleep, I would want to create neuronal oscillations using music that would create, like, a lower frequency. Like, I believe it's like 0.1 to 2 hertz or something along those lines for, like, deep sleep, for example. So what you're doing is you're programming specific music. So when someone logs into the website or opens up the app and they select sleep or focus or creativity, it's playing music. The music is creating neuronal oscillations in the brain. And each of those different neuronal oscillations, depending on the goal that you've chosen and is causing a specific brainwave frequency to be induced?

Yeah, that's correct. It gets much more complex whenever you're dealing with the brain, because the brain is just such a complex organ. And you know, what. What happens whenever you stimulate the auditory system and what happens to the surrounding areas? You know, how do they get affected? So there's a lot of other kind of elements in this, but generally, yeah, you. You would want to embed, let's say, like, embed a frequency using modulation or some of the other techniques we can talk about. And you would embed this modulation or this kind of beat into a sound, and the beat would be equivalent to a beat you're stimulating in the brain.

Okay, so is it that when. When you say the beat, do you mean, like, the backbeat of the music itself or. Or is every component of the music that I'm listening to when I put this thing in, involved with, with triggering a specific hertz frequency in my brain.

Yeah, that's an excellent question. It's actually both. It's everything, everything is timed perfectly. In Brain fm, the music is built from the ground up based on an entrainment protocol that we have. So we are trying, we're targeting a certain brainwave pattern. And the pattern isn't just, you know, 14 hertz or something like that. It's actually a very wide, broad pattern. But everything is aimed towards that. If you have, for example, a symphony, every single note is aligned precisely with, to what we're trying to do, to the brain wave pattern that we're trying to create. And if we say give you a rain sound, every single drop of rain, hundreds of thousands of them, it's kind of crazy to look at, are aligned to the brainwave pattern we're trying to create. So yeah, whenever you hear the beat in the background, your brain is actually in training to that and that's something you kind of tap your foot to. But we do it at such a precise level. It's so precise and it's so, and it's modulated in such a way with the, with the other elements of the piece that it creates this very precise brainwave pattern in the brain.

Okay, so in many cases, when I listen to music for a very long period of time, like, like over an hour, it starts to get annoying over time. As far as my brain almost feeling like it's getting distracted with the beats in my ears over time. Now, from what I understand, you have some kind of a filter or something like that that removes some of the hertz frequencies, like the really, really low hertz frequencies or the really high pitched sounds that can become annoying over time. How does that work exactly? How are you removing or how is this different than just me listening to say like, you know, let's say like a, like Bach or Beethoven for eight hours in a row while I'm asleep.

Well, it's interesting because a lot of the research over the past 10 years has been on Bach or Beethoven or Mozart, taking advantage of the kind of publicity of the Mozart effect. And we've really diverged from that. And I disagree with a lot of those conclusions. They're saying, okay, listen to Chopin at 60 bpm, 60 beats per minute. So it's a really slow, it's going to be boring to most people. And really, that just acts as kind of a background. And keep in mind that these composers, if they came back and zombie Beethoven came over and saw that the majority of his music was being used simply so people could have something in the background to ignore. He'd not be happy about that. And, you know, he didn't design it for that. He designed it to catch your attention. He designed it to be emotional. And he. The people playing it are not playing it to be very precise. You know, precise enough to actually entrain the brain or, you know, create like a reliable pattern. Because a lot of music is the creative use of the unexpected. So why would they be doing something like what we're doing? But I'm sorry, what was your original question? I got off topic on the other.

Yeah, my question is basically this. If music has really ultra low frequencies, like a lot of bass or a lot of high pitched sounds kind of like spread throughout it, is that different? When I listen to music on Brain fm, like, are those somehow removed?

Yeah. Well, what happened was initially I was just using my own experience, you know, 14 years of experience creating these kinds of sessions and knowing what people will like to listen to over a long period of time. But I had to end up training that into the AI. And it was a really interesting kind of problem. You know, how do you tell a computer how to recognize a sound that's annoying or a sound that's distracting? It's a complex question and there's really no easy answer. I'm still working on the problem, but it took me a long time to figure this out. The AI actually is very, very good at this point. You can drop pretty much any music you want into it, and it will make something out of that, and it will align everything and it will make sure that everything is at the right volume level to basically be listenable indefinitely.

Okay, got it. So basically, when I'm listening to this music, it is inducing neuronal oscillations in a specific wave frequency. Like whether I've chosen that I want sleep or whether I want focus or whether I want creativity. It's playing me this music. And you've adjusted the music, you filtered the music to remove like the really ultra low frequencies and the really ultra high frequencies that normal music has that would kind of normally distract you, for example. Now, the other thing I've noticed, however, is it almost feels like when I'm listening to it, that the music's like, almost like transferring or moving around inside my head. Almost this, like this. This illusion that it's. It's kind of difficult to explain, but it's Almost like this 3D sound throughout my head. Why is it or what is it that you're doing to the music that's causing that to occur?

Well, that's. I wouldn't say that's a common effect. It might be because you've used binaural beats in the past which rely specifically on a sound localization mechanism in the brain. But we do use 3D techniques. And you will find whenever you listen to a brain FM for the focus, for example, you'll find that initially sounds will appear that they're coming from the sides, for example, and they'll gradually focus into the front of you to the screen or the book about a foot away from you. And you'll find that your attention is then drawn there. And with sleep, you'll find that sounds seem like they're going around your head at all times. It's very, very relaxing. We have had people say that they feel like something's changing in their brain. They'll get tingling. That tingling is a whole nother interesting topic. It's called Frisian and we've done a lot of cool research into that. But another thing that people, I think experience is different. Well, this entrainment causes increased blood flow in the brain. So you can get kind of vascular effects where you get like a mild pressure feeling or it can feel like, like you were saying, kind of like, like something's moving around, I suppose. I've never heard a phrase like that. But yeah, this is. There's definitely a lot going on that would make you feel different. And most people feel tingles at some point while they're listening to it. And it's great that we can provide those feelings.

Yeah, I've definitely experienced some kind of weird sensations that I don't get with other music when I put these things in my ears. And of course, as you guys give instructions for in the app and on the website, I use headphones. And typically I've got a really nice set of Bose like noise blocking headphones, but I'll occasionally even use it with my iPhone headphones. Just the normal standard generic plain Jane apple headphones and still get pretty good effect even though honestly it's a night and day difference when I put in my noise blocking, big old cover up all the ears headphones. And then I actually wrap a sleep mask around those headphones if I'm using this for sleep. And so when I do that, I really get more of that 3D effect that you're alluding to pretty intensively. You mentioned binaural beats earlier and I've talked about binaural beats on the podcast before how if you play one frequency in one ear, like whatever, 400 hertz, and then you play another frequency in your other ear, like 390Hz, that the difference between those two frequencies, which would be 10Hz, is what your brain would be kind of induced to produce if you want like a 10 Hz frequency. And you can totally correct me if I just completely butchered exactly what a binaural beat is. But either way, is there a difference between this and binaural beats, or do you have binaural beats kind of built into these tracks?

Yeah, we are completely unrelated to binaural beats. And I like to give a simple analogy of it's kind of like comparing dial up Internet, which is binaural beach, to fiber optic. It's just way more advanced technology and it's just innovation. Like sound can be. Sounds relationship to the brain can very much be advanced. But I'll let Adam kind of dive into the details of the difference between binaural beats and what we're doing.

Yeah, we're completely unrelated really to binaural beats. And the story behind binaural beats is really kind of interesting and unfortunate. But on a basic level, binaural beats relate to using two tones, as you said, and whenever you combine any two tones that are similar, they'll produce a kind of wave. And you can see this. If you produce a binaural beat and you kind of condense it to mono, it will actually show the beat. But it's not really quite that simple in the brain because you're relying on one tone in one ear and another in another ear. And what ends up happening is they combine in the brain, in the. In the region of the brain that deals with sound localization. And there's a lot of problems with that. And they don't. They never have never really found a solid entrainment response, which is really important. And it's also important to note that they're just using one tone. And there's a lot to be said for using music as the stimulus. You know, it's much. It has a much wider spectrum. And there's aspects of the brain that the entire auditory system is designed to respond to a rich stimulus, not just a tone. Tone is very limited. So the research on binaural beats is really spotty. Really, really spotty. Sometimes it'll have a small effect, sometimes it'll have more, often it'll have no effect. If you register it on an eeg, you're lucky. But what we're doing is very Very different. It's where there's no tones. First of all, we're not embedding any kind of binaural beat. We actually don't even rely on stereo. We say that you should, the stereo sides from a modulation perspective actually synced so you could use this out of speakers. The reason we say that you should use headphones is because Of1, the 3D effects, which are very, you know, don't underestimate them, they're awesome. And the fact that whenever we have, whenever I've said to people in the past, okay, you can use speakers, it's really, it's, it's a bad proposition because you don't know what kind of speakers they're going to be using. They could be just using their laptop speakers or their phone and there's going to be a lot else going on, a lot competing for that kind of aural space, you know. So using headphones is definitely recommended and important for that. But binaural beats? Yeah, it's been kind of an ongoing nightmare to try to differentiate ourselves from that. We say like, oh, you know, we, we study the way music affects the brain and then I get somebody, oh, is that like binaural beats? I'm just like, you know, 14, 14 years of this.

So, so the research behind binaural beats, what you're saying in terms of, have of, of actual research that shows electroencephalography or EEG based changes in brainwaves, that there's not a strong link between binaural beats and changes in your brain waves?

Oh, the link is horrible. It's that there's no link really from a scientific perspective as opposed to what we're doing. There's plenty of evidence of entrainment as a result of music and sound in general that doesn't rely on binaural beats. Even some. The guy who wrote the white paper, for example, that you read, that's Ben Morillian and he had a paper in Nature on this very thing on entrainment and dat, which is called the dynamic attending theory. And so there's actually a lot of evidence behind what we're doing. But binaural beats, no, it's very spotty. And it's kind of interesting because the first study that coined the term by gerald oster in 1972, the first study actually mentioned in it that binaural beats are not as effective as monaural beats or other methods he mentioned right. In the studies, probably shouldn't be used for entrainment. You know, he wanted to use it for diagnostic purposes because you actually can't hear binaural beats if you're sick in certain ways, if, if it's a time of the month for women. There's all kinds of different ways you could use binaural beats as a diagnostic tool, but not as a stimulation tool. And the fact is that nobody read the study. Nobody read it. And now that we're in the information age, you can go online and just type in Gerald Ostarbinar beets and read the study for yourself. And that's good. So I hope that that helps clear some things up. But yeah, it's going to be a continuing problem. But we're different and we're hoping to counteract those kind of myths and the kind of charlatans that have come up in that industry.

Interesting. I'll link to that study that you mentioned in the show Notes about binaural beats and also this white paper that you mentioned that was written on how what you're doing is a little bit different than binaural beats. And by the way, if you're listening in, I know this is kind of some heavy science stuff, but I'll link to all the shownotes over@bengreenfieldfitness.com brainfmpodcast if you feel like taking the deep dive. Adam Speaking of taking the deep dive, on your website, I discovered a statement that it takes you or took you anywhere from two weeks to a month to create a single 11 hour music session with this Brain FM software. And then you eventually came up with like artificial intelligence, from what I understand, to actually generate these music sessions far more efficiently. So can you go into why it was originally taking you so long to actually make just one piece of audio to be used for Brain fm and what you did in terms of artificial intelligence to fix that and how you're using AI now?

Yeah, sure. It was, it was just taking me a long time to create these sessions and it was unsustainable.

How do you create them? Is this like a DJ creating music and you're, you're simply weaving all these sounds together and that's why it's taking such a long time.

Yeah, exactly. And I had to, I mean, keep, well, keep in mind it's just a, like an hour session, for example. I mean, that's a lot of music. You have to, every time you change one little thing, right, that means I have to listen all the way through for an hour. So that alone took a lot of time. But just piecing the session together, you know, we're talking about millisecond precision here. Everything had to be very precise in order for it to function correctly. And it became pretty clear early on that it was not sustainable as a service, you know, unless I cloned myself a bunch of times, which is essentially what I did, I guess.

How does that work? Are you, are you, do you have like a, like a keyboard? Are you using like a computer software to create the music or what is exactly that you're doing as you, as you sit there and create this music?

Yeah, I would use a keyboard and as well as just notes, I come from like a classical composition background. So just notating things is pretty easy for me. So I would use that and then I would bring it into my own digital audio workstation that I've been working on for a long time. It's kind of an in house thing. And I brought it in there and then I would align things very precisely and kind of mathematically to the entrainment stimulus that we're trying to present. It was just a very laborious, intensive process that like you said, takes months sometimes. So I had to create this AI that can do it in seconds, milliseconds really.

What does the AI do exactly? How does it work?

Well, it's different than a lot of, or any AI I've seen done today. Today a lot of people are focusing on deep learning neuronal networks, but the thing about those is that they're hard to tweak and we need to be able to go in there and say, okay, we don't like what you're doing here, we need to change that. So I started working just out of necessity, not even knowing it was going to be AI. I was just like, okay, this needs to be a complex algorithm that is really going to help us. And I started thinking about how could music be composed very simply, easily and rapidly. And I came up with kind of what's called an emergent AI. And that basically refers to the, the idea that you can take kind of very simple instructions and a simple set of kind of parameters. Like a seed, for example. And this, out of this seed will, will grow a plant and, and a trunk and roots. And it'll be, it'll. Something beautiful will emerge, a beautiful tree or whatever will emerge from that. And the same thing could be applied to like, you know, a colony of ants or even humans. Like we're just a bunch of cells working together. So what happens is you have a song, what I kind of try to call a songbot though. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about actual robots. So you have a songbot. And I would be able to tell the songbot, okay, I want you to use these instruments, you know, violins and Congo drums, you know, something like that. And I want you to use these instruments and in this style. And it's going to be a focus session. And go. And so it looks at all these instruments and all these drums and different notes and scales that it has to choose from. And it creates a bunch of what I call notebots. And each one of these has embedded in it kind of a DNA of its predecessors. So it's been learning this entire time. I'm training it and changing this kind of DNA to make these notebots do certain things better. And what happens is they compete with each other. The songbot will spawn thousands of these little notebots, and they'll compete with each other. And something like a drum, for example, would want to. The notebot would want to start on the first beat of the measure or the third beat. But that's not always going to happen because it has other things to compete with. So it might push another drum to the side. And so after a while, you get complex stuff. So it starts out with bum, bum, bum, and then you get another drum coming there, and it's like, okay, I want you to move to the size of bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. You know, something like that. So you can see how this would really create complex things. And then as those. As these notes and as these patterns emerge, they pass their own learning back to the songbot, which then creates more. And so patterns emerge, themes emerge, and beautiful things emerge.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting when you listen to one of the tracks on Brain fm, like, things kind of fade in and out, and you can almost hear these little notebots kind of like competing with each other as they create this complex piece of music. But it's really interesting. This is all being created by more or less artificial intelligence now, instead of you sitting there actually creating each track, you know, by hand, one by one. Yeah.

And a lot of folks, you know, there's. There's. There's narrow AI and there's general AI. And obviously general AI is, you know, like a super intelligent, sentient machine. And what we're doing is narrow, narrow AI and it. We like to say it's just extended human intelligence. So because it used to take Adam two weeks to a month to create an hour of a session, it took us six months to make just 20 tracks. So what would happen is that people would listen to them and then they would like more. Just. There's this. There's this effect called habitualization of music where it's very. You can kind of reflect on your own experience. If you listen to a Spotify playlist and you've listened to all the 10 songs, you want to kind of, after a few months, move on to new music. So out of necessity, we have to go and figure out, okay, how do we really scale this up so Adam can create more music? So it's not like, oh, let's just take this super cool thing called AI and kind of embed it. It was out of necessity that we had to create unlimited content, that now we have the ability to create electronic, cinematic, classical, really any kind of genre of music using this engine that we've built in house.

Now, has any of this stuff been actually studied? I mean, it kind of sounds good as you describe the concept of using artificial intelligence and these notebots to develop neuronal oscillations in the brain that are associated with specific frequencies or specific brainwave states. And, you know, like I mentioned, you know, I've used myself as an n equals 1 and toyed around with it for things like focus or fiction writing or sleep. But I'm curious if you've actually taken this into labs and looked at, you know, for example, EEGs in people's brains or, you know, or fmris of brains and seeing what's actually happening on a. On a neurophysiological level in people's brains when they're using this.

Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. My previous business, or it's actually. I mean, it's a business I still own, but that was actually heavily involved in EEGs in general. So we've been studying it for 14 years now. But we've also worked with Giovanni Sanostasi at Northwestern University, and he compiled some. He's a sleep study expert, and he compiled some very, very compelling data on sleep and focus, and we have that up on our website. But we are. We're actively working with some of the top auditory neuroscientists in the world, like Ben Merillon and Psyche Liu at Westland. And we're getting MRI data, we're getting EEG data. Unfortunately, the pace of science is very slow, and if we want to do this right, we have to follow that pace. So it's going to be a while before we get a grand paper, but it is in the works, and things are very, very promising. Everybody's very excited about it that we talk to in the academic community, and that's great. That's absolutely just great to see this after, after a long time, whenever I first got into this industry, entrainment wasn't accepted as an effect that could really happen in the brain. But I believed in the effect. I had experiences with it and I created my own software to, you know, the first software to create this effect and was Windows software. And it ended up taking off and became my day job within six months after releasing it. And I'm happy to say that now, after 14 years, we see articles in Nature and PNAS and Science, the journal Neuroscience, Psychological Science, all on entrainment itself. And it's basically, it's become very, very accepted. And the fact that neuronal oscillations affect mental state is also very, very accepted now. So, yeah, I'm really happy about all that. And we're working with great people and we have some stuff up on the website, but the stuff we're doing now is going to eclipse all that. And yeah, just wait. But until then, use your own experience as a compass. You know, go, go on the website, forget everything that we've told you and just listen to it. Give it 15, 30 minutes, you will feel it.

Yeah, and what I'm curious also about is when I use something like this, let's say I put in the beats for an hour for something like writing or focus, when I take the headphones off, do the effects stay with me at all or does it stop right after you remove the music? I'm curious about that. For sleep or focus or creativity or any of the settings that you have on the software, what happens when you stop the music? Does your brain just automatically go back to whatever state it was in before?

Yeah, that's a great question. We haven't studied that empirically under an EEG or an FMRI, but experientially n equals 1000 people. Just from user feedback and our own experience, the most common use case is you listen to it while doing an activity. So if you're focusing, if you're writing, if you're coding, if you're designing, you listen to it while you're focusing. And experientially we have more than often people report effects last after the session is completed, for nap and for sleep, it kind of knocks you out. And then after you wake up, it's not like you're, you know, you're continuing to be in a kind of daisy or sleepy mental state. You kind of come back to your more waking, cautious state. So it's not empirically studied at the moment, but the Effects for focus do last after. For sleep, it kind of, you know, for the first 10, 15 minutes you might feel like a little drowsy, but that's just like waking out of Eddie, any kind of nap or, or sleep. And for the relaxation, for the relaxation sessions, it definitely, at least experientially speaking, it does kind of last after and kind of calms you from where you were before listening to the session.

Okay, got it. That's really interesting that you can almost create these short term states and then take it off and get back into whatever state you were in before. It's kind of interesting because I even had my mom use it for about a 10 minute nap. I just had her put it on, lay down on her back, put on the little like sleep master sleep mask that I like to put over the headphones when I'm playing the Brain FM sounds or something like a nap or sleep and just lay there. This was on a holiday when I was down at her house just for an extremely brief period of time. And she thought she was asleep for like an hour. She went into almost like this hypnotic state. And then as soon as I took off the mask and tapped her on the shoulder and woke her up and turned off the Brain FM beats, it was just like boom, she was right back up and around. And I've kind of found a similar thing. It's kind of weird how you can be in this really deep state when you have it on and it seems as though you return to a different state or whatever the next state you need to be in pretty rapidly after you remove the headphones or after you, you remove the beats. And I find it interesting just because like I'm all about having these little, little naps sprinkled throughout the day or little period sprinkled throughout the day where I'll just like check out for a little while. And this seems to almost work as, as an alternative for, for meditation, especially when you have it in like the, the sleep mode. I was going to ask you guys too, you know, when it comes to headphones, you mentioned that it'll work with speakers and I've found that it works with noise blocking headphones and like I mentioned the iPhone headphones, but do you have any headphones that you found to be like especially useful when using the Brain FM or does it matter that much?

We recommend using headphones for sure, like especially because of the 3D audio effects. So for example, with the sleep session, what we do is that we simulate the rocking of a hammock or baby's cradle. And there is some really interesting literature that's pointing to increasing slow wave sleep, which is non rem sleep or deep sleep. That is the gold standard of measuring sleep at the moment. And if you listen to the headphones, it really stimulates that effect versus just listening to speakers unless you have really good 3D speaker setup. But for the choice of headphones, personally we recommend any decent good quality pair of headphones. The Apple headphones that come as default. It kind of from experientially speaking. If you're in a loud coffee shop or in a co working space, it kind of gets the bass kind of interrupts with the actual experience. But if you're in a quiet setting, the Apple headphones are fine. So we can recommend a couple links to you after the show that are particularly good if you're interested. But any sort of good quality headphone will definitely go a long way.

Yeah, sure. I mean I'm happy to put as a link into the show notes anything you guys recommend. And I'll put a link to the couple of the headphones that I've found to be pretty useful. The ones that I use, the Bose noise blocking headphones. Then also these special like wraparound headphones for side sleepers that I like called sleep phones. They're almost like a headband that wraps around your ears with little, little headphone embedded in them. Those work pretty well also. So the, the other thing that I wanted to ask you guys when it comes to the software is any, any planned addition of new features like I know you added an offline feature which I really like because I want to be able to download these tracks and listen to them without my plane or without with, with my phone in plane mode without having to have the phone on while say I'm sleeping or while I'm napping. And so that, that seems like a pretty cool feature to be able to download these and use them offline so you don't have to have your phone on. Are there, are there other kind of planned cool features that you guys have worked into the program that you plan on rolling out at any point for sure.

Our North Star since the beginning, our vision and thesis is that music can alter your mental state in real time. We just have to navigate uncharted territory using innovation by combining music and neuroscience. So we started off with three basic mental states of what do people need the most in their daily life? They need to focus, they need to restore or relax and then they need to sleep. So these are the three core mental states and the app's been live for about 12 months and it's grown just to reward them out to 200,000 users. And 90% of them almost ubiquitously love the focus option. So what's up next in the roadmap is kind of really enhancing the focus category. So the first thing is going to be having different musical options. So having all kinds of electronic music, all kinds of cinematic music, classical music. And then after we kind of add musical diversity is to kind of focus on workouts. So cardio strength training and enable people to, if they thought they could run two miles, now they can run three miles. So really producing some really magical experiences where people can. It's not just, you know, regular music. It's something that can really becomes your edge. So up next is kind of really enhancing focus in general for while you're working, while you're studying, and then branching to sort of movement. So cardio strength training exercise in general.

Cool. I like it. Well, if you're listening and you want to try this, you can go straight to the app download or the website. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Brain FM and you can also, if you want to access the show notes and I'll link to some of the research as well as some of the headphones that Junaid and Adam sent over to me, I'll put those in the show notes as well. Anything else you guys want to access and also any questions or comments or feedback that you have for Junaid or Adam or me, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com brain fmpodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Brain fmpodcast and we can point you in the right direction over there and you can access even more of the show notes. So check that out. And in the meantime, Junaid and Adam, thanks for coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us. Man, it's really fascinating. It's cool software and it's one of the most used apps on my phone now, especially for naps and sleep. So thanks for creating this cool little toy.

So glad you like it. And yeah, thanks so much for having us on.

All right, cool. Well, folks, thanks for listening in. I'm Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with Junaid and Adam from Brain FM signing out. Have a healthy week. You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness performance advice.

Sam.