How To Instantly Shift Your State of Consciousness From Anxiety To Relaxation, Wakefulness to Sleep or Brain Fogginess to Focus, With Brain.fm.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, people need to understand that the majority of music is made specifically to distract. And that's so important that I'm going to say it again. If you're a great music producer, your job is to distract people.

We can literally, using technology, make these shifts extremely quickly. It's almost like a cheat code for life.

It doesn't matter what language you speak, where you are in the diversity spectrum. It's that we're all human and we're starting to figure out the things that help us and get to the next level.

All right, folks. Well, I'm pretty excited about today's show because I had a like a men's mastermind at my house a few months ago in which I bring together a whole bunch of like minded friends in the, in the online and offline entrepreneurial community. A bunch of guys who I'm part of a so called mastermind with, which makes us sound all tootin flutent fancy pants important folks. But we generally just hang out at my house and play like kids for a few days and have some meaningful chats. And the first night when we were punishing our, I think we had a salmon burger dinner, I sat down with one of the guys who I'd briefly met in the past but hadn't connected with in some time. And his name is Dan Clark. And Dan started talking to me about like binaural beats and using so called entrainment to shift the brain in into specific states like alpha or beta or theta or delta brainwave states. And he started talking to me about how technology can be used to shift the brain in these ways for focus or for creativity, for relaxation or for sleep. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, it's like binaural beats and there's a billion million apps out there that do this. And he's like, no, this is different. It's got like artificial intelligence, some crazy technology, and some very interesting academic research studies behind how these actual sounds work. So what Dan introduced me to then was this app called Brain fm. And I'm like, oh, I've used this. I like had downloaded a couple years ago and messed around with it and just kind of come back to it a few times. And apparently they have been behind the scenes since Dan came on as CEO of the company. Absolutely transforming that thing and doing some really cool stuff with it. So Dan's here on the podcast with me and he actually has a really cool story about how he even came to be involved with Brain fm. So I'm going to let him tell that to you shortly. But then I have a two for one, because my second podcast guest on today's show is Kevin woods, who's a PhD and the director of science at Brain FM. So anything that might require putting on a white lab coat and talking with big multisyllable words that the rest of us may or may not be able to understand, we'll leave to Kevin. So, Dan, Kevin, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Yeah, happy to be here.

Thanks so much for having us, Ben.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And like I said, Dan, Brand FM's been around for a long time. I remember messing with years ago and then not using it for a. And then we were having dinner and you talked to me about how things have changed. So bring me up to speed. I'd love to hear the story about how you even became connected, kind of your unconventional journey to becoming CEO of Brain fm and then what exactly it is. I'm asking a two part question, I realize, but we got time.

Yeah, sure, let's dive right in. So I guess for me to answer the question fully, let me go back to where I started. So I started making websites when I was 13 and I'm actually second degree black belt in martial arts and that was teaching martial arts at the same time. I remember making my first website for the martial arts school and that basically transformed that dojo's business from getting 30 leads a month to 130. What I really liked in martial arts was it was a tool to empower people to be the best version of themselves. It teaches confidence, it teaches all these things because people find something they're really good at. Right. And then I had this luxury of being able to use technology to accelerate that. And before I knew it, I had a lead generation business for martial arts schools. I ended up getting out of that when I was 21. And then for my rest of my young 20s, I was basically creating a career, leveraging technology and then scaling businesses and I started doing that and optimizing for financials. Right. And it wasn't until I became digital.

You mean you, you mean you were the guy who just like made the websites work properly or you were more like the marketing lead gen, stuff like that?

Yeah. So actually I went into business mostly businesses that were, you know, hitting a certain level for amount of time. And I would go in with marketing, with automation, with technology, and I say, hey, let's triple this business and I'm going to take a percentage of that growth. Right, right. So I would do that and say, hey, let's do this. And especially being in my young 20s, I'd go to someone and they'd be like, there's no way you're going to double my business. I've been doing this for 10 years, but with the Internet. And this is when Facebook marketing was happening. And this is before HubSpot, when you could automate emails. And we had a lot of fun helping people transform their businesses. And it really started with operating with businesses that had a mission and wanted to empower or change the world. Some of it was through martial arts. One was like electric dog fence company, actually. And he just wanted to help save all the dogs to make sure that they didn't get hit by cars. And I kept doing that, and I kept doing more and bigger and bigger challenges. But then I found myself where I was no longer really helping people's missions and goals. I was actually just selling advertising. And for maybe another story for another time, I actually had a gun pointed at my face outside of a club with some of my clients. And it's funny, they say that your life flashes before your eyes and mine didn't. I actually was like, this is a waste. I could have helped so many more people and done so many more things, and I actually was just focused on making all this money.

Yeah, yeah. It's a whole kind of like income versus impact type of question.

Totally. Yeah. You know, on the outside looking in, I was, I don't know, 26 at the time. You know, my parents, everyone around me were like, you made it. Congratulations. And I just felt empty, you know, And I remember just thinking like, I'm, how can I make impact? Right. And then that, that situation happened. I remember quitting my job and saying, you know what? I just got to find something that I can leverage technology and leverage helping people. Right. And it was about three months later, I actually came across Brain FM for the first time. And I'll dig into Brain FM and our whole mission statement and our thesis. But I remember as someone who was a developer, someone who was very intentional with my focus time, I used to work from 10pm to 4am in the morning about five days a week. Because I found that it was this magic state where if I had two cups of coffee and it was like two in the morning, I feel like it could fly.

Yeah, it's almost the exact same as me, except I'm 10:00am to 4:00pm yeah, right.

So you find that state and then you optimize your time around that. Right. And, you know, people now call it flow state, right? And it's about finding that flow state. So that's what I was naturally able to do at late at night. And I remember using Brain FM for the first time, putting headphones on. And, you know, I like to think of myself as a biohacker or a light biohacker lite, maybe back then. And I've done the nootropics. I've done the different binaural beats. I was like, oh, this is probably just another one of those companies. And I remember putting these headphones in and getting into that flow state in, like, five minutes. I worked for two hours, and I took my headphones out, and I was blown away. I was like, what is this? And I remember actually thinking that it was like, maybe placebo. I was super skeptical.

And a quick question, by the way. Up to that point, had you messed around with white noise? Focus tracks? Like, that whole concept? Yeah, okay.

All of it. Yeah. Brian Eno. Pink brown noise. Different mixing of different things. Isochronic tones. I was very into that space, and I remember trying this, and it was. I could feel. Feel the difference, like, the pulsing. I could feel me driving forward. And even afterwards, I took those headphones out, I still felt in that zone, right? And I actually was like, okay, this might be my diet. I knew there was other things that could affect it. So I actually, for that first week, try to break it. So I stayed up 24 hours and then tried to do it. Still worked. I remember taking different nootropics. Still worked. I remember trying different times a day. And at the end of the day, I was like, okay, this has to be different. What is this? And I started digging into some of the science that we had at the time. And I was, whoa, this is. This is a unique way. And, you know, Kevin will explain it in a second, but this is a unique way, and it checks out. I want to be part of this rocket ship, and I don't even care. I'll work for free. So I actually called the company 12 times, and I would follow up with them every single, like, three days. And I'm like, I need to jump on a call with the founders. Eventually jumped on the call with the founders, shared with what I did, and I said, I'll work for free, and I'll show, and I provide value, right? So I worked for free for about three months, ended up starting leaning tech and becoming lead engineer. Started doing marketing, building out different parts beyond tech. About a year and a half later, I became CEO, actually. And then about two Years after that, I ended up acquiring the majority of the business. And now we're really setting the company up for how can we enable everyone to have that same feeling, to unite science and the things that people have been doing and having some success already with sound, but like blast it to a whole nother degree of ability and really allow this to be the switch in your pocket that lets you go into focus, into relax or into sleep, and then stay there as long as you want, no matter who you are.

Right. Because those are the three. Focus, relax and sleep. And then after we chatted at dinner, because I already had the app, I think at some point, I think a long time ago, we actually even did like a podcast about Brain fm and I had been gifted with a free lifetime membership or something like that. So it was on my phone and I started messing around with it and I'm like, oh, you're right, something's kind of changed with it or seemed to be working a lot differently than it had when I had initially messed around with it. And it was like 5, 10, 15, 30, 60 minute sessions for sleep and for relaxation for your wake up at 3am and you wanted those again. And I realized everybody needs another app, like they need another hole in the head. And so of course, my question to you, I asked this at dinner. You did a good job explaining. Maybe you or Kevin want to explain is how is this any different than like binaural beats or white noise or headspace or calm or any of these other billion apps out there that exist for relaxation? So which one of you guys want to, want to dive into the science of this stuff?

So why don't I start it off and then I'll switch it to Kevin and he can go into detail. So I think the first thing before we get into science is actually the application. So it's really unique about Brain fm. And because the method is listening to music while you're doing the activity, what's unique is that you're actually able to do it and just start immediately where if you're doing meditation or some kind of other kind of practice beforehand, you actually have to meditate for maybe 15 to 30 minutes and then jump into work. So what's really unique about this is it's inactive. You just put it on and you're ready and it's already going to start working in about five minutes. And it's about that way we're doing it. So that's the first part that sets us uniquely.

Okay, okay. And by the way, yeah, it makes sense and before we dive into the science, I already know people's brains are going to be humming away in the background. What I think is really cool is stacking. So, for example, you know, this is sound. But the body and the brainwave states can also be shifted into altered states or different states by two things in addition to sound, primarily, and that would be light and haptic sensations like vibration, even including, like, you know, the frequencies you might feel from music as well as the frequencies that you might received from some type of vibrating device. And so what's super interesting what I found messing around with this is you can take the Brain FM and you can play that, but at the same time, you can, for example, have an Apollo wearable, like around your ankle or your wristband, which is vibratory haptic sensation, to shift you into an altered state. And then you can also use magnetic stimulation using something like the HAP B, which is a focus mode that'll simulate nicotine, caffeine, anything else that you would want to shift you into this state. And then as far as the light is concerned, even something like red light therapy, one of these wearable red light devices for the head, like the V light or whatever. And holy cow, it's crazy that we live in this cool era where we can do what normally someone would have had to have sat in meditation for three to four hours to get themselves shifted into that state, or take some crazy plant medicine or something like that. We can literally, using technology, make these shifts extremely quickly. It's almost like a cheat code for life.

Totally. Yeah. And what's exciting about that is we get to learn from people like yourself, Ben, who's actually investigating all that stuff to be able to stack. You know, one of my favorite things is also, you know, caffeine and L theanine, you know, having that as part of the practice, you know. So, yeah, let's dive into science. We can come back to maybe best practices.

Yeah.

But, yeah, I want to let Kevin kind of jump in here.

All right, geek out time. Let's go for it. Kevin, explain to us how this technology is actually working and why it's different.

Yeah, so the term we like to use. Right. Is non invasive neuromodulation. And if you're expecting multisyllabic words from me, I will give them to you. Non invasive neuromodulation. Right. It's that you are guiding the brain states without drugs, injections, whatever it is. Even if you want to talk about, you know, magnetic fields or electrical fields, this is an even less invasive Way to be doing it just through the body sense organs. Right. And you're right that light and vibration are two other ways to do it. That's three out of the five senses. The other two senses, smell and taste, are excluded, basically because they're too slow. Right. You can't really oscillate, smell and expect anybody to get anything out of it. But any of the senses that can be modulated can cause the brain to modulate in kind. Right. And we're taking advantage of a principle called neural entrainment, right. In which you are essentially setting up the brain waves to respond to the environment. And a way I like to explain neural entrainment is that the rhythms in the brain reflect the rhythms in the world. Right. And I'll say that again, that the rhythms in the brain reflect the rhythms in the world. Now, it also turns out that the rhythms in the brain do all sorts of things, right? From getting you to the memory processes and sleep to getting you in a focus state. All these things are mediated by neural oscillations as well. So you have this constantly fluctuating set of oscillatory circuits in the brain that are both impacted by the outside and also are causing things to happen in the brain. Well, that's a perfect system for influencing the one thing with the other thing. Right. And so, again, you know, no electricity or magnets required. You can just do it through sound, light and touch. Right. But you're right that a lot of these systems have the same target. Right. And I don't know what particular magnetic device you're talking about, But I would bet that it has a similar purpose as brain fm, which is, again, brain entrainment. Right. And it's something that's been investigated from all sorts of angles.

And if I could interrupt you real quick because you've used the word entrainment a couple times. This is important for people to understand because this concept of entrainment dictates that the brain. And correct me if I'm wrong, Kevin. Becomes more receptive to these signals and more tuned and able to respond more quickly. It seems, when. When one engages in repetitive use meaning. Like the first few times I use the Apollo vibratory wearable or the HAP B magnetic wearable. I didn't notice that much. And then I kept using it and kept using it. And eventually it seems like after about 1 to 2 weeks, seems to me like 7 to 14 days is kind of like the sweet spot where you begin to shift very rapidly. I have another machine that's like A light sound machine called the Braintap. Very not to be confused with Brain fm, but very similar. Like the first few times I used it because it almost hypnotizes you into an altered state of consciousness for, you know, for anything from weight loss to sleep or insomnia to, you know, breaking habits to building habits, etc. And I went from not noticing anything to within about eight consecutive uses. Finding myself within like two minutes shifted into a deep, deep state of hypnosis. And it was one of those things where I didn't think it worked. I didn't think it worked. I didn't think it worked. And then after, you know, after a short period of time, it was like, boom. All of a sudden, based on this concept of entrainment, it was working really quick.

And then I'll let Kevin come back. Is what's really unique about the music, right, Is that it actually, the entrainment works within five minutes. And it's as if you ever hear a song that you want to dance to, how fast you want to dance to it. That's actually the functions in our head, you know, where we're actually like a lot of the stuff that science has been able to uncover or is known in science is how the brain looks in focus, how the brain looks, and relax, all these different kinds of states. But it's really unique is that our whole body is so tuned to hearing because of the way we've evolved, right? And what we're doing is we're able to add in these music, in these different patterns, to basically shift the brain into them very quickly and then have them stay there. Kevin, do you have anything to add on that?

Yeah, I just want to highlight the example of entrainment you just threw out there, because it's extremely accessible, and everyone will realize what entrainment is if they think about dancing, right? And it's that the brain is receiving a sound that's rhythmic and repetitive, and. And that your neural processing is being aligned to the rhythms and the sound. And in the case of dancing, you end up moving your body, but there are all sorts of other processes that are not moving your body with the music, where entrainment also matters in the brain. But dancing is a great example, and it's the same underlying neural process involved in dancing. And so if you want to think about timescales, we often get asked, how long does Brain FM take to work? And that's a great example. How long does it take for you to feel like dancing after you hear dance music? And by the Way, dance music is a great example of what we like to call functional music. Right. Inside Brain fm, we make this great distinction between art music with a capital A and functional music with a capital F. Right. To highlight the fact that Brain FM is doing something categorically different than 99% of music, which is art music. And dance music is a particular case where there's plenty of music that sounds terrible but still makes you want to move your body. Right. And isn't it. Right. And isn't that a funny thing? And so it just shows the functional aspect of music outside of aesthetics. Right. And that's, you know, basically brain. Brain FM is capturing that and using it to help you do all sorts of other things as well.

Yeah. And what's interesting is that when we take these senses, like, you know, you mentioned smell, or we. Or we look at taste or hearing or even eyesight, you can actually use these as hacks. You know, from a neuroscientific standpoint, you can, for example, when you're studying for an exam or studying certain material or learning certain material, diffuse, let's say peppermint essential oil. And then when needing to spit that material back out on a test or quiz or whatever, you could literally have peppermint oil applied to your upper lip and have the olfactory triggers be able to better recall memories because they've associated that memory with that smell. Very similar for hearing. You can study with a specific, say, focus track on Brain fm, replay that track when you need to recall that information. And it's very interesting how the brain will actually chunk certain forms of sensation with memories. And research has shown that hearing certain words, hearing certain sounds, can actually aid memory in that state. So, like, if you're listening to a soundtrack when you're studying for a test, then you play that same soundtrack, say, during the test, if you're able to, you'll actually be able to have better recall.

Yeah, I think it's called context dependent learning. And it's always best to do your studying in the same room where you're going to have the exam if you have the option to do so. Any students out there? Yeah. No, you're absolutely right.

Okay, so as far as the actual. The technology itself, explain to me how the actual tracks are developed, because Dan was explaining to me this concept at dinner I thought was fascinating, this whole idea of the way that you guys develop these tracks. So can you walk me through that?

So one of the interesting things about Brain FM is that we don't have pieces of music that are normal Radio length music, right? Three, four, five minutes. What we do is we might make much longer pieces of music because you don't want to be constantly interrupted, right? If you're listening to the radio, listening Spotify while you're doing your work, every couple minutes you have a track change. And when the track changes, most people, and we've done polls, basically, majority of people will get distracted by these track changes. It'll pop them out sometimes it's a welcome respite. But if it happens every couple of minutes, that's really bad news. So we make these things that are 20, 30 minutes, maybe sometimes an hour long. And that requires a different style of composition, right? So our composers have to be trained in, well, how do you make something that's interesting enough yet isn't going to draw someone's attention away from their task yet, you know, has this kind of. It's easily backgroundable, yet not boring, right? So our composers are especially trained in doing that kind of thing. They do have intelligent tools that help them create those long pieces of music. So they might, you know, compose a melody and then basically what you might call AI creates variations of that, spreads it out over time, does different things with it, right? Recombination of elements, that kind of thing. So we always have that sort of human warmth part of it, right. At the most basic layer, it's always people that are doing the composition, but then with a little bit of robot help to make things spread over time and be sort of repetitive. And that's just the music layer, right? And then on top of that, we put the science layer, which is our core technology, which is amplitude modulation at different depths and different rates, where the depth of amplitude modulation is how loud is that? The pulsing, which is our entrainment signal, how loud is that? Will vary over time. And the rate of the amplitude modulation, of course, is super important. And that may also vary over time. We add those on top of the music in a way that they sync up with the music, right? Yet they're providing an effect that isn't available in the music directly. And sometimes it's. Yeah, sometimes it's a bit tricky because music is intrinsically rhythmic, right? And you're overlaying rhythms on top of rhythms and you have to make sure everything fits. But again, they have quote, unquote, robot help to do that stuff as well, right?

So basically what's happening is that for, let's say, focus, which I assume would be a track that is designed to shift you into like a 8-13 Hz ish alpha wave zone. When you're playing something like that, these beats are overlaid with the actual music. So the music is steering you into your desired mental state. But then you actually have the. Is it some kind of, of like a binaural beat esque type of thing going on in the background that's making subtle shifts using your guys AI tools to kind of keep the brain in that state. How's that working exactly?

Yeah, yeah. So I'll clear up the binaural beats thing in a second. And just for the record, for focus, we actually use beta 12 to 20 hertz. But yeah, we're often in the region 14 to 16, something like that, but very similar to high alpha. And yeah, so the binaural beats thing is interesting. Right. So first for the audience definition of binaural beats is when you put pure tones, I.e. sine tones of slightly different frequencies in the left and right ear. And what happens when you do that is that in the brain stem those two pure tones are combined and what you hear is amplitude modulation. In other words, a change of loudness that's equivalent to the difference of those two frequencies. So for example, I put 410Hz in my left ear and I put 420Hz in my right ear. Right. And each ear individually just sounds like a tone. But because they're in my two ears separately. And again, this has to happen over headphones because they're in my two ears separately when they're combined in the brain stem, what you end up hearing is. So you hear, you hear this change of loudness that's like a nya nyah nya nyah. Right. That is at 10 hertz with 10 being the difference between 410 and 420. Right. And it. Right. And obviously if the difference was like 410 to 430, 50, you would hear 40 hertz beating, which would sound more like a buzzy fuzzy thing rather than a drum beat. So that's what binaural beats is. It's an amplitude modulation that's created by the brainstem as an illusion due to different tones in the right and left ears. What's the point of it? Well, it's the same thing that Brain FM does and it's entrainment. It's that you're trying to get the higher levels of the brain, the cortex to themselves have activity at that rate. Right. 10 hertz or 40 hertz or whatever it is. So what, so what's the point of using binaural beats? Right. Instead of putting that Modulation in each ear individually. The point of using binaural beats is that people think it's cool because it's this illusion. And I can't find any reason other than that. Basically, it's that, you know, when binaural beats was discovered, it was like this magical thing that, oh, I can't, you know, I can't hear it in my left ear, I can't hear it in my right ear. But when I put them together over headphones, magically you get this, like, beating sensation. Isn't that cool? So it must have magical properties. Well, no, not really.

Hey, Kevin, let me jump in here real quick. What I think Kevin's trying to say is binaural beats, they have a different effect. Kevin's job, actually, in his first job, which is the reason why he's here, is how can we create a reproducible effect for all individuals that use the service, right. And binaural beats in the past, you know, some people may be listening to this and have had their life change on binaural beats, right? And what happens is that the way it does. And as you heard Kevin's Explain, explain is it. It goes right to the brain stem, it creates its amplitude, and through process of entrainment, it basically spreads throughout your brain, right? And what we've done is we've. We've actually tried to take the same theory on why when we do brain binaural beats, right? To be able to, you know, add a different kind of pattern to their brain to shift their state. And we say, hey, what if we actually created the amplitude directly in the music rather than in your brain itself? So by doing that, we're able to directly entrain your higher cortical functions, to skip your reptilian part of your brain and be able to actually entrain the entire brain much quicker.

This is different than binaural beats because what you're saying is binaural beats produce this type of. I think it's called like a neural synchrony, where you have the modulation applied in each stereo channel, like the signal going to one ear and the signal going to the other ear. But you guys are using a different form to help people reach their mental states. Like a non binaural modulation that uses, from what I understand, almost. Almost like these subtle oscillations that occur overlaid underneath the music that are. That are shifting the state more effectively than something like a binaural beat would.

That's right. So there are three main advantages to doing it the way we do rather than doing binaural Beats. One is that with binaural beats, the depth of amplitude modulation is limited by the brainstem, right? The actual AM is being created in the brainstem, and so it's limited in how cool, quote unquote, loud it can be and how heavy that signal is that's being sent up to cortex. The second reason is headphones versus speakers, right? The binaural beats necessarily only work over headphones because once, once they're in the air, the sound is basically destroyed or heavily depends on your position in the room relative to speakers and other stuff like that. With Brain fm, we recommend that people use headphones for like, the cleanest, crispest experience, but it's not, you know, it doesn't not work if you use it over speakers. And the third thing is music itself, right? So the way that Brain FM is created, we're applying these amplitude modulations directly to the music. Binaural Beats has nothing to do with music. And if you do hear quote unquote, binaural beats music, like on YouTube or whatever, it's music overlaid on top of binaural beats, where really one thing, you know, one thing is getting in the way of another. It's like they made binaural beats with just these pure tones, but it sounded too boring, so they threw some music on top of that, and now it's getting in the way of the binaural beats, which is not what you want. With Brain fm, they're going hand in hand, right? It's the rhythms and the music are being enforced by the science layer that we put on top of it, and everything's working together so you get a stronger effect. It's intrinsically part of the music, and it can work over free field as well as headphones, right?

Which is why, for example, I can have my phone in airplane mode rather than having to fuss around with wearing headphones. I can literally pump this into my bedroom's space speakers or out of my phone at night and be getting what I'd be looking for from binaural beats without actually needing to wear the headphones to get that. Which is also kind of cool because you can play it as background noise in your office, for example, but not necessarily have to be tied down to wearing headphones in your office. Now, what I think is interesting is some of the stuff that you guys looked at regarding, for example, speaking of sleep, slow wave sleep with this idea with slow wave sleep, just for people listening in, that's the part where you store new memories. That's where memories are kind of encoded into long term memory. And then that's what we would associate with or that's what we would associate with deep sleep. Like slow wave sleep is where Alzheimer's related peptides like beta amyloids are flush from the brain. That's where a lot of that so called glymphatic drainage occurs. So there's a lot of things that we're looking for in slow wave sleep. And I know a lot of people who will use wearables, they sometimes get a little bit disappointed in their deep sleep or their so called slow wave sleep scores. So tell me what Brain FM would be doing, for example, when it comes to the enhancement of something like deep sleep and what you guys have found.

Yeah, it's essentially driving those slow waves that you're talking about. Right. So the slow waves in slow wave sleep are approximately the speed of. Think of waves on a beach. Right. Like one wave every two seconds, which is half a hertz ish. So about that speed. Right. And so the brain FM sleep music that you'll hear has essentially heavy dominant modulation rate at that speed of waves on a beach, no matter what the sound is. Right. So it might be the sound of crickets and wind through the trees, or music itself, but whatever it is, there are these very slow half a hertz or even less sort of long time scale modulations. And those are, you know, as with the focus and training your brain into those states just to. It basically deepens the, how do I say, heightens the oscillatory cycle. Right. Like the. Yeah, if you like the size of the neural population that's engaged in that slow wave. Right. Should be expanded by that, by that auditory input as well.

Right. The actual spindle activity, I think is what it's called in sleep talk, in fancy scientific sleep talk, you would be basically inducing greater spindle activity if you were increasing slow wave sleep. And the way you would induce the spindle activity would be via these sounds.

That's exactly right.

Okay, interesting. And have you found, like, have you guys actually studied this?

I was about to mention actually just before I came on. I've been with the company three years and just before I came on, they did a pilot sleep study. It was a little bit underpowered and I want to get back to it as soon as possible. But in the participants that they did run, they did find greater spindle activity with the Brain FM condition. Yeah. So that actually worked out really, really well. But because it was before I came on, I'd have to replicate it myself.

Have you guys Done other studies on this when it comes to brain or behavior for sleep.

It was just that one, which is why I do want to get back to it. But what we've done while I've been here has been mostly focus.

And what have you found regarding focus?

Yeah, we're diving into the focus studies.

Yeah, sure.

Oh, amazing. Oh, let's go. First off, we got a grant from the National Science foundation to do this work. In particular was a remit was to look into how to make music to support people with ADHD and intentional challenges. Right. And so we took this money, we teamed up with an excellent academic team at Northeastern University here. They have access to the scanners, fmri, eeg. And what we did is we did a series of studies with brain and behavior. Let me first describe the task that we used. Okay. So we used something called the sustained attention to responses task, Response times task. And it takes the form of a very simple video game. So imagine you're sitting there in front of a screen. Numbers are flashing up on the screen one by 1, 0, 3, 5, 9. And you hit the space bar on every single number except one of them. And the special number, let's imagine the special number is three, right? So 90% of the time you're hitting the space bar, but only when you see a three, you withhold your response. Now that sounds like the most boring video game in the world because it's meant to be. Right? And so this is a task that is basically mind numbing. People sit here doing it for 10, 20 minutes is about the length of our experiment. While we play them different background music conditions. And I'll talk about what the music is in a second. But the idea is that when your mind wanders, you get fatigue, you lose your sustained attention, you lose your motivation to the task. You start making errors, you start hitting the spacebar when you're not supposed to, or not hitting spacebar when you are supposed to. And that's just it. So it's just a very simple, well controlled video game for doing this kind of thing. And by the way, it's a gold standard test in psychology. This is used all over the place to test sustained attention in particular. And so what music do we play in the background? Well, we've done it a couple different ways. One that we do is just our competition, right? Spotify music. We'll go on Spotify, we'll go on YouTube, we'll look up what's the best focus music to listen to and use that in comparison to Brain fm, that's Fine. But an even better test that I'm proud of having done is the super controlled version of taking Brain FM's underlying music without our science layer versus Brain FM music with our science layer. You're purely just testing that added amplitude modulation and we find that that test works as well. And so in behavior, obviously we find improvement in the start task over time, over the course of a block with Brain FM versus the other things, either no Brain FM technology or Spotify. But perhaps more interestingly, we find these effects in the brain that really jump out at you. So the first thing is, in eeg, you find much stronger entrainment with Brain FM music versus other music, even though all music is rhythmic. So to be clear, you know, any rhythmic stimulus will entrain the brain. All music, vast majority of music, is rhythmic, also entrains the brain. The question is, how strong can you get that entrainment to be and can you get it to be useful? Entrainment as in the right regime of rates, Right. And it's important to point out that like the beta rate of things, right, 12 to 20 Hertz or even Alpha, like 13 Hertz, that's a weird, that's a weird speed of things to happen in the world. If you think about what 13 hertz actually sounds like, it kind of sounds like a helicopter or a pulsing or throw, like, right? And in normal music, that rate of stuff doesn't really happen. In normal music, you have things that are like drum beats or singing that are much slower, like generally under 8 hertz, 5, 6, 7 hertz. And then you have really fast things are like distortion, roughness, fuzziness, fizziness. But there's very little stuff in natural music that's like at a helicoptery sort of speed. So it's a really unique thing that we're doing. And it turns out that when, you know, when you create music that is dominated by that stuff, the brain does respond really strongly to it, right? So that's partially a sanity check, but also partially a really cool result. And then, so that's eeg, right? You're looking at the brain's response over time to these stimuli. And then importantly, you look at fmri, so you're looking now at the functional networks in the brain. What is the attention network doing? What is the salience network doing? And basically what you find is that, you know, there's a much stronger response in the people getting Brain fm, obviously, but then in the people, particularly the half of the population with attentional challenges, right, or the half that would need this product, most they have particular greater activity in exactly the regions that you would expect to be less functional in adhd. And if it matters to anyone, this is the inferior cingulate gyrus and some parts of the insula. But it's just, it's a really cool thing to see that direct correspondence between brain regions directly reducing the.

Hey, look, a squirrel mentality. And you use the placebo control. Like comparing what happens if you just use the music versus the music with the brain FM technology applied to it.

Exactly right. And that's the contrast in FMRI that's being set up is between the control and the brain FM test condition.

I think it was Dan who was describing to me how there's actual 3D effects that are laid into the tracks to where when you sleep you would want to be. If you look at this from maybe like an ancestral or evolutionary standpoint, we respond very well to being rocked. Like my wife used to swim when she was pregnant because the babies just love that rocking side to side sensation of the water kind of sloshing around as the babies are there in the uterus and mom swimming back and forth. And then of course, when they're born, you might rock them in a rocking chair, swaddle them and rock them back and forth to soothe them. And then there's also this idea and kind of a two part question, I suppose, of the sound events that would grab your attention during focus. Like if you're listening to focus music a lot of times, like there are certain sound events that happen during music that would distract you. And I think Dan said there's like a reduction filter in there to keep those from occurring. So tell me about the rocking. And then also this, like this. I think it's called salience reduction that's worked into these tracks.

Yeah. So let me jump in and actually kind of maybe restate some of the stuff that Kevin is. Because I know we're going super deep. Right. I think the first thing right. Is that if you think of us as a camera, as a technology, right. What we're doing with the different kinds of pulses that we're adding to music, like these rhythmic pulses we're able to do is directly have a higher resolution camera. So this is like one of those professional cameras directly doing the amplitude. But what's cool about it is because we have this fancy camera, we're also doing exactly those things, Ben. We're doing these salience reductions. That's part of our smart, like our AI tools that make sure we're creating this music in the Right way we're doing the 3D sound. So Kevin, feel free to jump in on the 3D sound. But what's unique about, I think, the Brain FM, and really what we're getting at is what we're taking is all of these things that is known in audio to help someone focus and combining it all together. So it's not just the frequencies, it's frequencies in the best known way in science. And we're putting that, that's step one. And then we do salience and then we're doing 3D sound and then we're doing the genre selection. And all of this is combined to then make that focus switch in your pocket.

Right? And just a second before Kevin jumps back in, I mean, I'm gonna grab my phone here. I just want.

Because I'm.

I'm sure a lot of people like, what the heck does it sound like? So here's one. This is Focus. This one's called Happy Swim. This is Focus Music. I'm just gonna hold this up to the microphone so people can hear. Can you guys hear that? Okay, cool, cool. So people can just hear this for like 10 seconds. And you could literally set something like that to go for. I mean, like your sleep tracks, you can set them to go for 12 hours. You know, I suppose if you had a really, really long international flight or you just wanted to crush an amazing night of sleep to catch up on sleep or something like, these are not just like 15 minute tracks. Like you could literally play them all day.

And we have thousands and thousands of these tracks too. So what's cool about the technology is it's, as Kevin was saying, it's not just tones, it's actually genre agnostic. So we can do this to lo fi music, we can do this to classical, we can do this to country if we wanted to. Right. And really create that. You can listen to the music you normally would like to listen to, but then you can have all this amplified effects of the best science to make sure that you're always getting into the zone and getting, you know, from better sleep to better focus, you know, continuously every day.

That's pretty cool. So are you saying that like theoretically, and you can maybe tell me if you guys are actually looking into this as far as like, wide open opportunities in the music space. Could I take like my current favorite Spotify playlist, let's say, for workout, and somehow tie that into Brain FM Focus to still be listening to my track during a workout, but then have the Focus technology overlaid on top of that? Or do you guys have to actually get the royalty rights to be able to use the music and then download them to your app and do it that way? Like, how would this actually look?

Yeah. So right now, we make all of the music in house, and that's specifically because you can almost think that in the music, we have these gaps, and that's where we apply these different amplitude modulations. But what's really unique about us is we can actually tune it to knowing if you have ADHD or other different neurodiversity or different activities like Workout. So we've been trying to crack workout for a really long time. We can't disclose some of the advancements we've been making there yet publicly, but we're starting to understand what that is. And right now, no, we can't. And Kevin can tell you why we can't just take Christina Aguilera and make it focus.

And that was gonna be my pick, by the way.

Christina Aguilera.

Yeah, Right. But I'll let Kevin answer that. Why? But I think what's really unique about what we're currently doing is we take composers that, like, some of our composers toured the world with Ozzy Osbourne and other kinds of great musicians, and they're like, I just want to make music that impacts people. And then we basically give them the science and the rule set on how to make music that does. And. And then we measure to make sure it does work, and then we find out it works. How can we improve it further? So right now, it's music that we create that's specifically made for intention. And eventually there might be opportunities for us to do some of the things that you were saying. But, Kevin, do you want to go? Why? We can't just take a Taylor Swift song or Christina Aguilera song and make it the best focus for them. What are all the things that are standing in their way?

Yeah, yeah.

So this is a great point that people need to understand that the majority of music is made specifically to distract them. And that's so important that I'm going to say it again. If you're a great music producer, your job is to distract people or grab.

Their attention is probably even a better way of saying it. Right.

Those things are equivalent. Yeah, exactly. Thank you for the clarification. Grabbing someone's attention, distracting them, pulling them away from whatever they're doing so they sit up and listen to the radio and request that song again. Right. That's your job. If you're a good music producer and they use words like Punchy or, you know, make that drum hit harder or whatever it is. It's all about grabbing people's attention and, you know, more so in pop than other, other genres. Right. But Paul Music tries to do this. So at Brain fm, the point is to flip the script on that. Right. So we look at all the tricks that producers use to make things pop out and we say, let's roll that back. Let's actually not do that. Let's do the opposite. Let's do something to make the music sit in the background more comfortably and not distract people. So if you were trying to go from like Christina Aguilera to the best focus music, you'd have a lot of undoing to do. Right. For a start now, could we overlay heavy focus rate modulations on pop music and, you know, get it more focusy than it is right now? Probably. And there, there's, you know, all sorts of legal licensing issues and that kind of thing, but at its core, you'd be fighting, you know, you'd be fighting upstream. Right. If you started with something like pop music. Yeah, yeah.

The goal is really like, how can we make the best background music in the world? And instead of repurposing music that currently exists, it's like, listen. You're not even supposed to, like, listen to the music. You're supposed to listen to it. Find a track that you like, that you want to zone into. What's nice about it. Eventually, after five minutes, you're no longer really thinking about what you're listening to. You're in work mode, or you're already asleep, or you're in this great meditation where you. You've never been able to have before. Right. And the whole goal is for this to actually just mesh in the background, and then all of your thoughts or the activity you're doing becomes more and more foreground.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. One thing that I certainly run into when I've got an app like this at my fingertips and I open it up and I've got access to dozens of different grooves and forest and electronic and classical and drone and rain. Do you guys have a way for people to kind of know what the best of the best would be? Or is it just kind of like a choose your own adventure?

Yeah. So this is actually the next. So by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have that for everyone. So we basically understand that depending on people's preferences and also neurodiversity, we can actually change the music and intensity of those amplitude Modulations, we call it the neural effect level. So that's actually coming out. It's in our app right now, but it's coming out to all. All devices. And yeah, we want to be able to start creating a personalization. Personalization system that is music that you want to listen to, but it's also music that affects you.

Well, how do you know? Are you saying, like, I could have a wearable and it would sync with my wearable to know which of the tracks are shifting me into the state that I desire the best?

Yeah. So that's eventually where Brain FM is heading. And in the interest, in the interest of moving towards that, we. What we do is we've tested this on thousands and thousands of individuals. We have a baseline where we can estimate based on actually just different kinds of questions in a questionnaire on where someone is most likely to be. And then the next version of Brain fm, which we're currently working on with wearables, is able to look at different body markers and then adjust it in real time to be able to change it from. For what you need.

So I could tie it into Apple Health, for example.

That's the path that we're moving towards.

Correct.

Wow, cool. Cool. Well, obviously, the application of this is through the roof and I would encourage my listeners to start to experiment with this stuff because it's super cool. And by the way, I'm going to link to everything that we talk about. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com BrainFMShow as in Brain FM S H O-The Brain FM Show. And if you go to BenGoodFitness.com BrainFMShow I'll link to some of the studies and some of the other things related to Brain fm as well as I think you guys have some kind of a fat discount code for people because it's around, I think, six, seven bucks a month to access this. And then there's, I think, a 20 or 30% discount. But is there anything else that you guys are up to that you wanted to touch on while I still have you on the call?

Yeah. So, you know, I think what's interesting, you know, we talked about some of the papers we're doing. We have a paper actually in review, Nature right now, which is very exciting, talking about, you know, all the things that we're doing, we're actually using the same kind of technology in hospitals, which I think is interesting. And the reason why I bring that up is because the effects that we're talking about that we can measure in Labs can actually be seen in wearables. They can be seen because they affect us on a physiological level. We're redistributing blood flow in your brain and temperature changes in your body. And one of the really interesting things that we're currently working on is actually helping someone relax before surgery, before anesthesia, but also wake up after anesthesia very quick and being able to move. So we're actually doing a clinical study we're starting next week as of this recording. And we're looking to increase patient experience, but also the efficiency of hospitals to help more people. So it's actually all the same patented technology that we're using in our consumer app that we're also using and helping people in hospitals. And now it's just about how can we continually create a product that works even faster, even better, but more personalized to, to you as an individual.

Yeah. Which is super, which is super cool because like I can roll out of bed now, right? I already have my Apollo wristband scheduled to start onto its like focus vibratory mode, typically around like 5:45am or so. And then I can, I can put on like my light producing glasses like the re timer or the in ear human charger Slap Brain FM on in focus mode. And using kind of like the similar concept of bringing a patient who's been under anesthetic out of anesthesia induced stupor more readily. You can literally take yourself up from a sleep state and shift yourself into productivity and impact extremely quickly, using again just like sound, vibration, light as soon as you wake up. And of course you could do the opposite before you go to sleep. You could use magnetic or haptic technology to shift yourself into sleep state. Put the brain FM into like meditative or sleep mode. Perhaps use you know, blue light blocking glasses or some type of red light glasses to induce your body into, into thinking that it's, that it's dark outside or that you're looking at torchlight or firelight. And I mean this is, I mean, you know, some, sometimes people throw around the word biohacking. I think a bit too much. But I mean this is a perfect example like stacking a bunch of stuff to Biohack. And I just love the idea of throwing sound in there to shift the state even more readily.

Yeah. And it's something that's accessible. So personally for me, I wake up and I actually throw on headphones on the specific ones, the aftershocks that are waterproof and actually just put brain foam on. I take a shower with them. I get ready for the day I sit down in front with a coffee and by then I'm already in the zone and ready to kick ass. Right. And conquer the day.

Yeah. And those headphones, by the way, those are the ones that transmit sound through the bones in your face. Like the, similar to like underwater. They make like the underwater, like finis, the underwater swimming headphones. And you could do the same thing again. You could be playing Brain fm still have your ears, not have earbuds in them, still potentially be listening to or focused on something else. But the sound is literally transmitted through the bones, which is super cool.

Yeah, right. And it's about. So just like you were saying, it's about stacking things. And what's really cool about it is that everyone already has headphones, everyone already has phones. So this is a great place to start. Or if you're already doing this stuff, it's a great place to add. So it's really approachable. We want to make it our vision and mission. Why Brain FM exists is how can we make everyone the best version of themselves? But it doesn't matter what language you speak, it doesn't matter where you are in the diversity spectrum. It's that we're all human and we're starting to figure out through really bleeding edge science the things that help us and get to the next level. And we're on the ride to help people do that in combination with all the other fun things that we can apply to our bodies and our minds.

Awesome. And by the way, what were the bone conducting headphones that you like to use?

I like the aftershocks myself. Those are cool because they allow me to get started in the day. And they're waterproof so I can take a shower with them. But I switch between the AirPods, different kinds of things. It's really about having headphones that are comfortable to you. The cool thing is the way we modulate mostly bass frequencies and stuff. So it's cool if you want to use the bone conducting headphones, but it's something that just if you can create almost a sound cocoon, the better earphones, the ones that are comfortable, that's where you're going to get the best results. Because if you do this, Ben, you know more than I do. But like, if you do this once a month, you'll get some effects. But if you do this as part of your habit, where you're doing this every single day, that's when the effects really, really stack and you start seeing the results on a long term basis.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I'M actually going to need to get some new bone conducting headphones to mess around with it using that as well, because I've thought about trying the bone conducting headphones for example, sleep instead of in ear headphones just to analyze if I notice any effects. So I'll mess around with those too. And this is just super cool stuff. I dig this. And I'll open this up to everybody who's listening in to go and leave your own experience or questions you might have for Dan or Kevin or I or anything else that you want to add. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com BrainFMShow I'll link to Brain FM. I will also link to some of these other devices that I mentioned. And finally I'll make sure that we've got our discount code in there for you guys who want to save somewhere in the range of 20 to 30% on this app. And then I should mention, by the way, for those of you concerned about whether or not your phone can be used in airplane mode with this, all the tracks are downloadable and so that's important too. You can use it in offline mode. So Kevin, Dan, thanks so much for coming on and sharing this with us. It's just super cool technology I've been getting a big kick out of experimenting with and I'm looking forward to, after this discussion kind of diving in and trying out even more little tricks with this stuff.

So.

So I appreciate you guys.

Yeah, this was fun. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Well, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Dan Clark and Kevin woods signing up from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

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