Sound, Rhythm and Music As A Trigger For Flow State - Dan Clark & Kevin J.P. Woods | Flow Research Collective Radio

We've chosen sound as a neuromodulator first because, as Kevin was saying earlier, that it is something that is naturally sitting, that enhances what you're doing. So for example, with one of the more basic things that we do, we actually make the music feel like it's coming in front of you. So it's almost like pulling your attention in. And, you know, obviously there's many other things, but it's a natural enhancement.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio. And wow, I am excited for you to listen to this episode. It is one of my favorite that I think we've ever recorded. It was with a close friend of mine, Dan Clark, who is the owner and CEO of Brain.fm and his director of research, director of science at Brain.fm, Dr. Kevin Woods, who is a Harvard neuroscientist and an MIT neuroscientist and also a computer scientist and an incredible, incredible mind. And, to give you a little bit of quick background on Dan, Dan is an amazing world traveler. He's a martial artist. He's a technologist. He sold his first company at age 20 and has built many more technology companies. Since then, he was named by Forbes as one of those to make the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. And as I mentioned, he's also the CEO and owner of Brain.fm, which is an amazing peak performance company that you're going to be hearing much more about as we go through this full episode. And Dr. Kevin is the director of science at Brain.fm. As I mentioned, he received his doctorate from the program in speech and hearing bioscience and technology at Harvard. And worked within the lab for computational audition at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He's an expert in all things sound and peak performance. And, that's what we talk about within this episode. We talk about what Brain.fm is, how it works, whether or not it can drive you into a flow state, how to think about sound and audio as a tool for changing your state for neuromodulation and as its own category for neuromodulation as opposed to other categories or other ways of changing your state like substances or technology or even practices like exercise or breathwork. And, we go really deep on the benefits of using sound and using audio to alter your state and achieve peak performance. And also, of course, given that this is Flow Research Collective Radio, we talk about the neurobiological mechanisms that lie underneath that. So you're in for a treat. You're going to love this. We talk about things like the difference between art music and functional music. We talk about the fact that the brain does 3 things: perception, cognition, and action. And we talk about how Dan leaned into his chronotype and worked from 10:00 PM till 4:00 AM at night when building Brain.fm and why that is a wise thing to do if that's how you're wired also. So, you're in for a treat. Enjoy. Kevin, I wanted to follow up there and ask you about the historical context around functional music, which you touched briefly on, Dan, in terms of mentioning that everyone has noise-canceling earphones and earbuds are now a thing. But before we jumped online, Kevin, you mentioned that neuromodulation via sound has really existed since the dawn of time with the first lullaby being an example of that. So maybe you could give us a breakdown of the historical context around functional music overall.

Absolutely. So first, what we mean by functional music is music where the primary purpose is to drive a mental state or to get somebody to do something, to get yourself to do something, rather than what I call art music with a capital A, where the primary purpose of that music is aesthetic. So you can think of functional music versus art music. And the point I was making is that functional music is very, very old. Probably just as old as art music, going back to the first time a mother sung to her child to get the child to fall asleep. And if you think of a lullaby, the point of a lullaby is not to be beautiful. It's to put a baby to sleep. And similarly for, say, music that army might march to or that people might do physical work to that's rhythmic to get you to march in step. Those are all forms of functional music rather than art music, right? And such things have been around for a long, long time. But now I'm going to say this: it's different this time. But here's what we have to back it up.

I love it.

Yeah, yeah, that we're in a new era of neuroscience and we have the tools finally to peer into the brain and see what's going on. We have methods to test hundreds of people in an afternoon to figure out what works best, right? And we have now, you know, at least 100 years of neuroscience and psychology to build off of. Right. And back in the '50s and '60s, there was sort of a first round of functional music based on science, but then they didn't have fMRI and EEG. They only had essentially psychology. Right. And this was back in the day of, you know, behaviorism with B.F. Skinner and that kind of thing. And they said, okay, well, you know, we know that music is useful. So we're gonna try and figure out what kind of music to make people work harder. And that was a terrible idea because, for example, factories started installing speakers and playing music to make their workers work harder. And the problem was that it worked, and they started getting sued by their workers for mind control. And I love that.

That's fascinating.

And I love this story because it shows that functional music is real. The problem is consent. And what we have now, again, it's different, is that we have personal audio, that we have digital music, and everybody has earbuds, and you can you can control what you wanna listen to, rather than back in the day, the only audio was out of loudspeakers and would be listened to in a public setting, then now consent is no longer an issue. So can music still control your mind? Absolutely, but you do it to yourself now. So it becomes a tool for the individual to empower themselves rather than for an organization to take control of its workers or something like that. And of course now, because we can see into the brain, we can make it much more effective. We can make it personalized to the individual. We can see exactly what's needed and sort of separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of auditory features in music that are useful. And we can layer this onto any genre of music so it matches your tastes and you enjoy it. So it's a new era of functional music. You can call it functional music 2.0 or something as a result of digital audio removing consent issues and us having much, much better science than we had the first time around. But again, functional music goes all the way back to lullabies. It's always been a part of what music is and what music does for people.

And Brianne, I just want to take an opportunity real quick because I think Kevin just had a great explanation, but there's, there's some things that people may be hearing that I want to make sure we dismiss. So mind control, right, is something we've actually had people ask about. Can we do subliminal messaging? Can we all do this stuff? So I'd like Kevin, an opportunity just to kind of share that real quick. Can we control people and implant messages in their head?

Not in that conspiracy theory sense. No, I mean, I mean mind control in a very mild sense of, you know, making you work harder or shifting you into a different mental state, which we absolutely can do. The point is you choose to do it to yourself rather than having it imposed on you.

How do subliminal messages work via sound, or are they generally more effectively delivered visually?

Gee, that's a good question. If by subliminal messages you mean, say, like, you know, advertising with an actual semantic message, like, you know, drink Coca-Cola or something, I'm, I'm not convinced that that stuff does work. Honestly, I, I haven't looked into the research. However, it is well known that the subconscious mind processes semantics, right? So in other words, you understand the meaning of words even if they aren't conscious. A great example of this is if you're at a party and somebody at another conversation across the room says your name because they're talking about you, right? And immediately your attention switches over to that distant conversation. It's like, oh, somebody's talking about me. Well, the fact that you heard and understood your name and your attention switched says that the whole time you were processing that conversation. It just didn't get bumped up to the level of consciousness until it became relevant to you, i.e., you heard your name, right? But in order for you to have heard your name, you had to have been processing the conversation, right?

Right. That's—

yeah, exactly. So that's a very simple example that shows that the subconscious mind does do semantic processing. And so, you know, for that reason, it's not— it's not impossible that something like subliminal messaging does work. But that's more like understanding the content of a message even if you're not paying attention to it. And, you know, if we mean that by subliminal, sure, that can be the case.

Yeah, and just something that I like to bring up is the approaches that we're doing are not in that kind of realm. So, for example, like, our music doesn't have lyrics at all. So we're not using— the range and the effectiveness of Brain.fm is not to do from any kind of subliminal messaging or anything like that. It's actually mostly on these audio things that we're adding to music, like salience reduction and things like that. And then these patented processes of amplitude modulations that create those rhythms inside the brain.

There's no message hidden in Brain.fm. Not at all. No.

Stay subscribed. Maybe you guys should do that. So just to pull us back for a second as well to the distinction between functional and art music, Kevin, which is beautifully put. I'm curious what things that people may be familiar with fall into what category. So some examples are things like the didgeridoo, which is an ancient instrument used with circular breathing. I believe it's been around for about 1,500 years, developed by Aboriginal peoples in Northern Australia. Or another example from that side of the globe is the Haka, which is a rugby dance or chant and dance done by the All Blacks rugby team. Yeah, I'm curious if things like that or other maybe forms of religious chanting that can create kind of a trance, non-ordinary state of consciousness, would be seen as functional music or art music or some kind of bland.

Absolutely. I think those are both great examples of functional music. I think a lot of the music that's associated with shamanism is not only functional, but it also taps into entrainment. So a lot of shamanistic music involves beating a drum at a very steady rhythm. And after that's gone on for some minutes, the person falls into a trance-like state, and those effects are very real and they have to do with entrainment. Something like a haka or a war chant would be another example. Where the purpose of a war chant is not to sound beautiful. It's maybe to elicit a particular kind of emotion, but mostly it has the function of getting people pumped up and ready to do what they need to do. And you're right about a gray area. There's absolutely a gray area in terms of functional emotions. So you could say, well, this piece of music on Spotify, it was made by the artist to be sad. But what I really need in my life right now is to be sad so that I can do this thing. That's the case where functional music and art music come together because you're functionally co-opting something that was made to be art. But that's something people do for themselves. I would rather put the distinction at the level of the creator. Was this music made to primarily be beautiful and express the emotions of the artist? Or was it made to do something for the listener in terms of helping them to get something done? Functional music in that strict sense would be things like lullabies, music for marching, music for doing physical labor. If you think of people on a chain gang hacking away at rocks or whatever it is, chanting. A lot of chant type of stuff that's heavily rhythmic that enforces bodily movements would be another example. But something I was saying before about running to a beat, I think a lot of people people exercise to music without understanding the degree to which what they're doing is functional. And again, it probably wasn't made for that purpose. And under that strict definition, 99% of music in the world today is art music rather than functional music, which is— that's really one of the major reasons that Brain.fm exists is that there's a gap today between the reasons that people make music and the reasons that people listen to music. And that still there's this model of musician as artist and the vast majority of music on Spotify was made to be beautiful and express emotions. And yet it's being playlisted into music to cook to, music to work out to, music to X to. And that's all curated. Nobody's out there making music to help you cook better. And Brain.fm isn't either, to be clear.

Not yet.

Not yet. But it's an example of the way that people are thinking about music now is different than it used to be because of the way it's, you know, you can easily organize digital music. And so people just have this naturally sort of functional way of thinking about and relating to music these days that is dissociated from still the reasons people make music, right? And so Brain.fm fills that gap.

Yeah.

And I would even add to that another thing that Brain.fm is structured and how we're creating the company is it's not only to fill the gap, but it's also to make sure that it's effective and works. That's the whole reason why Kevin has a job here, right? Is because we want to make sure that, yeah, we're making focus music, but now let's back it up. You know, let's do EEG testing. Let's do fMRI testing. Let's track the blood flow in real time in the brain as you're listening to this music. Does this work? Yes or no? And, you know, getting back to that focus switch in your pocket, You know, the real subscription that we're offering is you come to a source that we created something with an intention, right? We've used all the knowledge in that we're, you know, able to look back on, on the eons of from chanting to psychology to the knobs that we can add to music. And then finally, the testing of that to make sure we can facilitate a response continually. So it's not a, oh, well, maybe this is a placebo and maybe this just works, or I'm going to do this because of X, Y, and Z. It's no. Every single music track that we have on our platform has been created with an intention, with a neural protocol that elicits a response across many, many individuals, not just once. And it's not something that you can get used to. It's actually every single time you listen to it. And that's really where we see ourselves in the marketplace and a responsibility to test our music because we're claiming that it does have these effects.

That's a great break down. Thank you for clarifying on that front, Kevin. I also, on the functional music examples, I like the, the example of shamanism is very interesting. And if people want to get a sense for how music is used functionally within shamanism, there's an incredible series called Hamilton's Pharmacopoeia by Hamilton Morris, who I believe is a pharmacologist. He spends time with, I believe, West African tribes going through an iboga ceremony. Iboga is a psychedelic plant originally used by pygmy tribes in Central Africa. And music is a massive, massive component. Of the way in which they administer it. And he, Hamilton, talks about the intensity of the experience, but the fact that kind of the rhythmic nature of the movement kept him going. It was a 4-day-long experience. I believe he was awake for most of it and actually physically moving also for most of it, which is tough to imagine. But yeah, he claimed that the music and the rhythm was what made it possible to be able to endure through an experience like that. And in his series, Hamilton's Pharmacopeia. There's just a really amazing visual breakdown in the episode that focuses on iboga. So people can check that out as well if they're interested in getting a real deep sense of what that looks like. Before we shift into talking briefly about the work Brain.fm is doing with anesthesiologists and some of the other really interesting functional applications that you're looking at, I wanted to just ask both of you really, but Kevin, feel free to just take the lead on this because it's a research question. If you have seen research specifically on flow state and music, often there's research on cognitive high performance, there's research on focus, there's research on attention that relates to flow state that's roughly within the wheelhouse, but the terminology is not specifically flow state. And maybe the state that they're referring to is not specifically flow state either, but a similar state. So I'm curious if you have come across research that looks at sound as a way to neuromodulate specifically into flow state.

Sure. Well, if by flow state we're talking about a mental state in which you can sustain your attention longer than usual, absolutely. There's a little bit of work that's being done there, and Brain.fm is taking the lead really on that now. If by flow state we mean something more specific in terms of, well, the task demands are in the sort of Goldilocks region where it's not too hard and not too easy and I feel confident and so I'm able to do my job better, that's a bit tricky to actually research, right? Because the task isn't gonna be a laboratory task. So I don't think I've seen research on music and flow states in that sense. Sort of flow states in the wild.

Well, it might be interesting. What about like optimal stimulation theory? Do you want to take a second to explain that?

Sure. So yeah, that's related to flow. Um, so optimal stimulation theory, or, you know, the Yerkes-Dodson curve, is the idea that optimal performance happens at an optimal level of stimulation or stress, depending how you want to think about it.

I'm just going to quickly interject for one second. It's definitely— if anyone is listening to this on a phone, it's definitely worth just doing a quick Google search for the Yerkes-Dodson curve. Curve as well. It's just a really nice visual curve also to go with, with this breakdown.

Absolutely. So you have an inverse U-shaped, upside-down U-shaped curve where on your up and down axis you have how well you perform, and on your left and right axis you have the level of stress or stimulation or pressure, mental pressure if you'd like, right? And the idea is that if there's too little stress or pressure, I'm essentially bored and I'm underperforming. And if there's too much stress or pressure, I start to crack. And I'm also underperforming. And that you have this Goldilocks zone where just the right amount of stress or pressure is gonna produce optimal performance. And that's Yerke Staats and optimal stimulation theory. And that's one way to describe, that's one, a level of description of what Brain.fm and music is doing for you functionally is that it's keeping your brain stimulated while not sort of pushing you into that zone of too much stress or too much intensity. Right. And it's an interesting point that different people start at different left-right locations on that curve. Right. And so I might come to a task very frazzled and overstressed, and I might need to be pushed leftward. I might need to relax to do my best work, whereas somebody else might come into a task very bored and they have to be stimulated to do their best work. Right. And that's, that's one of the things with ADHD-like brains versus less ADHD-like brains is that they start at different points on this sort of Yerkes-Dodson stimulation curve. That's a high-level way of explaining why music works to help you do tasks, is that it pushes you around on this sort of stimulation curve to get you to the optimal point for performance.

Yeah.

If we combine that with, you know, so I've met Steven before and he was telling me how, you know, I know he tests getting himself into flow state many different ways. And one of the things that came up for me was when he does, I think it's like cross— Rian, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like cross-country like running with his dogs and he goes down.

Yeah. Yeah.

With a white vest.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's like a little bit scary, but it's also not too challenging. And then he's able to get into the flow state to then start writing. And if you think about that as a mechanism that we're doing inside of music, you can kind of think of that amplitude modulation, which I think we keep kind of previewing and we'll go into that in a second, but these, these rapid on and offs. So what we're adding is we're adding like stimulation to the brain and not necessarily creating scariness or anything like that, but we're basically regulating almost like the speed of the brain, so to speak, to be in the perfect state between being bored and being overstimulated, finding that right value and then being able to prolong that value as long as the user would like. And I think, you know, what's interesting is combining that further is with things like, you know, that Stephen does. So this helps get you there, or once you're there, keep in the same state longer because of that mechanism.

A problem that Brain.fm has solved is how do you stimulate without distracting, right? Because in any other music, stimulation and distraction go hand in hand. And so if you have, you know, loud, annoying, heavy metal, whatever— sure, it's stimulating. It's also distracting and hard to work to. And so the Brain.fm solution roughly is to introduce these regular amplitude modulations at relatively fast speeds that are stimulating on a neural level but aren't going to distract you on a conscious level. And an analogy I really like to use is to say that Brain.fm is an auditory fidget spinner, that it helps people with this sort of sensation-seeking need, like a fidget spinner, but is also very easy to ignore, right, while being stimulating.

So that's actually a great analogy. That's really interesting. Let's do a breakdown then, Dan, to your point on amplitude modulation.

Yeah, so, you know, I'll intro it and then hand this off to Kevin, as we have been doing. But, you know, those are these rhythmic pulses that we're adding to music, right? And if you really listen to our music, you can hear this on and off of these different kinds of intervals, right? And if you listen to our focus music in comparison to our relax or sleep, you'll find that the focus music has more rapid rhythmic pulses than our relax and our sleep. And from a logic standpoint only, cuz this isn't necessarily how the brain works, that's, that's Kevin's job. If you think about it, if you're in a relaxed state or a resting state, For you to do more intensive work, your brain has to be moving faster. And if your brain's moving too fast and you're trying to fall asleep, that's where you're, you know, you can't fall asleep because you're, you're not getting into that state. So if you listen to our focus music, we're trying to bring you up, but finding that magic curve in the optimal stimulation theory. And the same exact thing for sleep because they're different stimulation curves. And this is a patented process that we have a few patents on and developing a few more and some interesting ways to bridge this. But yeah, it's really about that rhythmic pulsing. So Kevin, what's going on in the brain and what's happening in a user when they're listening to this?

Yeah, so as I said before, the rhythms in the brain reflect the rhythms in the world, right? But the rhythms in the brain also have important functions in terms of cognition and what you're able to do. Right. So one that people are very familiar with is slow waves during sleep. Right. And so, you know, many of us have heard of slow wave sleep. Well, what that is are delta rhythms in the brain. In other words, very slow rhythms, roughly half a hertz, something like that. So once every 2 seconds, that's about the speed of waves on a beach, right? And when you're sleeping, even when there's no sound around you, the neural activity in your brain is largely fluctuating at that kind of speed. And so the point is that if there's additionally sound in your environment that's driving the brain to do that, it'll enforce those rhythms, right? Make them stronger and helps the brain do what it's naturally doing while it's sleeping. Right now, the more interesting case is with focus, right? And there the rhythms are much faster. They're in what's named the beta band between 12 and 20 hertz. So if you can imagine loudness fluctuating 12 times per second, 15 times per second, it's like roughly the speed of a helicopter, right? And if you listen closely to Brain.fm, you'll hear that sort of in the background embedded in the music. And what that's doing, of course, is enforcing beta rhythms in the brain. And beta rhythms have lots of functions, but an important one is connecting distant regions so that they can talk to one another. And so that you can basically strengthen cognition by connecting functional networks that are in distant regions of the brain spread out from one another. You could roughly say that it lets the brain talk to itself more easily. That's probably a good way of putting it. And what is it about that speed? Well, that's the natural rate of communication of the brain when it's focusing. And so if you put in an auditory stimulus at that rate, again, you can enforce those rhythms. And get the brain to talk to itself more easily. That's the bottom line.

Great breakdown, Kevin. Thank you for that. Dan, I would love for you, and then Kevin, maybe again you can follow up on the neuroscience end of things, to give a breakdown of the work that you are doing around anesthesiology.

Yeah, so I'm happy to dive into that, but, you know, I think before doing that, I think it's an interesting thing to talk about something that we get a lot of questions on which is actually binaural beats. So the thing that we're describing is actually a completely different method than binaural beats because we're throwing through beta and delta. But what we are doing here is we're actually modulating instead of tones, we're modulating frequencies. Is that correct, Kevin? Yeah.

So we might start with an explanation of what binaural beats is for anybody in the audience who's not aware that if you put tones in the left and right ear, of slightly different frequencies that the combination of those tones in the brainstem produces an amplitude modulation. So let's say you have a 400 Hz tone in your left ear and 410 Hz in your right ear. Well, when those sounds combine at the level of the brainstem, you get— you have a 10 Hz difference, and so you'll hear a loudness fluctuation of 10 times per second. Even though the tone in your left ear doesn't sound like that, the tone in your right ear doesn't sound like that. It's this combination. Right. And so this kind of thing has fascinated people because it feels like this sort of magical auditory hallucination type of thing. Right. But importantly, from the level of the brainstem up, the brain doesn't care how it's getting amplitude modulation. Right. Whether it's from a combination of tones in the two different ears or. or if it's just embedded in the sound signal in both ears, the brain doesn't care. But binaural beats is tough because there's sort of an upper limit to how strong that modulation can be when it's coming out of the brainstem. And so you might say that Brain.fm is monaural beats, but nobody uses that term. It's a weird thing to say, but it's much more powerful than binaural beats because we have no upper limit in terms of the brainstem's physiology constraining what we can do. And also there are practical considerations, which is that with binaural beats, the signal in the left and right ear have to be completely separate. Whereas with Brain.fm, that's not the case. We recommend that people use headphones just for clarity of audio, but Brain.fm does work in free field over speakers. Again, we recommend headphones for clarity of audio, but unlike binaural beats where in binaural beats, once the signal's in the air and combined in the air, It's off, right? You're no longer listening to binaural beats. You're listening to essentially something kind of like Brain.fm, but it's terribly boring because with binaural beats, it's literally just tones. You're listening to like beep and beep, right? And you're going to listen to that for an hour. No, I don't think so. You want music that does the same thing at a much more powerful level. And that's what Brain.fm is.

To go in even deeper is, you know, the way I think about it is it's about different resolutions. So is there an effect from binaural beats? Sure. But it's like using a Polaroid camera or one of the first digital cameras. And because we directly apply to the functional networks, we actually have a much higher, almost like pixel count because we can have, we can fine-tune that to a greater degree than you can do through your brainstem. So I think that's just something fun I wanted to interject real quick because there is a difference between modulating the frequencies, which is what our pads and the thing that Brain.fm is special in, or modulating tones. And it's kind of, you know, mixed up sometimes.

Thank you, by the way, Dan, for reminding us to touch on that because that definitely would have been a question that would have been left begging for folks. It's a great breakdown. So yeah, would love then to transition to the breakdown around anesthesiology because I think it's super interesting the work you guys are doing there and what you're starting to see as far as results.

Yeah, so what's really interesting is, you know, as we stated that this is a science-first company, right? We heavily believe in doing science that we can validate and can, you know, help people. And, you know, we have a consumer product that's mostly where our business is. It's a subscription service. Again, you can try it for free, small plug. But we also do enterprise, so we sell to Fortune 100 companies as well for their employee wellness But along the way, we've asked, what else can we do? And it's part curiosity and it's also part, you know, wanting to help people and fully realize this tech that we can leverage. And we've actually investigated a lot of different things. Can't go into all of them, but we've investigated workout music, we've investigated different kinds of medical applications, we've investigated a lot of other functional usages to music that we're actually currently developing. One of the most exciting things that we came upon was adding music to surgery centers. You can think of it like— how it all happened was my girlfriend was getting her tonsils out, and I was dating her for 6 months at the time, and she signed her life away from me to make life-or-death situations. And I was a little terrified, and I wasn't even getting the surgery done. And in that moment, I thought about, you know, she's getting her tonsils out, but what about people that are getting open heart surgery? What about people that are afraid of, you know, checking if they have a cancer, you know, or something like that. And the whole health system is already scary enough. Is there a way for Brain.fm to make it better? And we actually devised this thing of using, of upgrading some of our relaxed music to this medical-grade version that's a little bit stronger, that has those higher degree of relaxing things. And we don't offer some of those in our consumer product because we don't want to make it too relaxing and has to be applied with things, and we can get into that. But we actually did some studies on that and found some really interesting results compared to actual anti-anxiety medication, which I'll let Kevin describe. But what was really interesting is we did relaxed music before surgery and then some different medical focus or wake-up music at the end of surgery coming off of anesthesia. And we're actually doing clinical trials or I'm starting those right now. So this is all preclinical or more like pre-pilot studies. But in some of those studies, we're seeing that people are waking up up to 200% faster. And what's really cool about this is that it's actually, again, this plus one product or plus one experience for everyone involved. So you can think of it as having a better patient experience where people can come in, they're a little nervous. Maybe there's anxiety running, and we have music that can be shown to reduce blood pressure and, you know, take some of that anxiety away and helping them fall asleep through anesthesia, but also wake up in a non-groggy state faster and being able to start recovery processes. And it's been linked to how a patient recovers is how they rate their experience. And even better is is if we can help people wake up faster, we can make hospitals more efficient, enabling hospitals to maybe do more surgeries and help more people. And it's something that is one of the degrees of things that we're experimenting with and studying, because again, the whole process and the whole reason why we're doing this company is how can we help people? And, you know, the consumer business definitely drives that and that's our primary product, but we believe there's a lot of really exciting things just along the horizon that we can use our patents and leverage in helping people have active recovery or better experiences.

That's a great breakdown, Dan. It's such a fascinating application to me. Is there anything, Kevin, that you would like to elaborate on there around the mechanism that is at play that is starting to produce those initial results?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the story behind our medical relaxed music is fascinating, and I'll just give it briefly, which is that a couple of years ago, there was a big fuss in the media over a study that came out saying that that music could relax people pre-surgery better than benzodiazepines, right? Which are an anxiolytic drug. And it was this one particular track of music that was made by an electronic music group in collaboration with some music therapists. But we knew that they weren't using Brain.fm's methods. Essentially, they were sort of doing things by feel, right? So it was functional music, but it was done in a relatively primitive way. But nonetheless, beat benzodiazepines in terms of lowering blood pressure and making people feel more relaxed subjectively. And so we said, okay, that's great, but I bet we can do better. So we took that track to our in-house composers and, you know, with the science layers on top of Brain.fm as well. And, you know, and we said, can we beat this? And, you know, after a little bit of basically tweaking our current relax music, we got to a point By the way, we ran the study online with 200 people, so it's very cool, highly statistically significant. We're trying to put it together with some other results before publication. But the point is that we beat not only standard radio relax music like Coldplay, that kind of thing, but we also beat this particular track that was put together for purpose for relax. And, you know, we knocked it out of the park. I think we reduced attention measure— this is a standard psychological questionnaire— we reduced attention measure by an additional 50-60% on top of what that King of the Hill track was doing, which is basically an enormous drop in tension by comparison. So we had relaxing music that we found on Spotify, and okay, that did something for people. Any music does something for people. And then this special track made by this other group, all right, additional drop in tension. And then the Brain.fm music, an additional enormous drop in tension. And so that, that was just wonderful to see that basically our methods for making functional music being directly based on what the brain is doing were yet more effective than just music therapists doing this kind of thing by feel. So that was really exciting to us. And, you know, we, we had those results and we found people in, in surgery centers that were really excited to have a look at that. But again, that's, that's just the pre-surgical side. And I think the thing that's really exciting is the post-surgical side, which is can we help people recover from being under anesthesia? Here, I don't want to go too far off the deep end of what's well understood, and we're very much on the cutting edge here, and that's why we're starting on this research. But very roughly, one might say that when you're under anesthesia and unconscious, the brain is unable to talk to itself. The oscillations in the brain are set up in such a way that the brain cannot talk to itself. And we know that what Brain.fm does is it guides your brain to have those oscillatory states where it can talk to itself. And so the idea is with the right Brain.fm music under the right conditions, we might be able to guide people out of that state of being under anesthesia, essentially with very similar music to what we're using to help people focus, right? For the same reasons. So it's very exciting. Again, we're on the cutting edge here. We're just looking into it, but it feels like a very good possibility that this is gonna work out.

Hey, yeah, it's really exciting, Kevin. Thanks for that elaboration. And just to stay on the topic of the cutting edge for a moment, you gave us a really, really nice breakdown, Kevin, before we jumped on around wearables. The two categories that I've always put them into for myself mentally is tracking and changing things that track what is going on physiologically and then things that change your state and what is going on physiologically. You described those two sides of the coin. As sensing devices and stimulation devices, which is definitely a more accurate and precise way to put it. So I would love if you could describe those two sides of wearables for people and then give a little bit of a breakdown of what work you're most excited about when it comes to wearables, neurotech, and different forms of neuromodulation.

Sure, absolutely. So wearables, it's a very natural direction for Brain.fm to move into, and we are moving in that direction. And I can't say too much about the things we have going going on there. But suffice it to say, we are very excited about the space. And as you were saying, there are sensing devices, right? Something like a heart rate monitor might be an example, right? That is picking up what's happening in your body and simply displaying it to you. And then you have stimulation devices, right? And these can be transcranial direct current stimulation. In other words, putting a 9-volt battery on your head. Don't really suggest it at this point. Magnetic stimulation, currently only done in the lab. Or things like vibrotactile devices, or more interestingly, acoustic stimulation like Brain.fm. So although you don't normally think of earbuds as a wearable, that's really what's happening here. And it's that music is the stimulation being provided by the wearable of earbuds. And so with a sensing device, you essentially close that loop. So if you have something like a heart rate monitor or something sensing galvanic skin response, which is the conductance of the skin that has to do with your excitability state, blood pressure, whatever it is, you can sense the state that the body is in. And you can close the feedback loop and you can provide the stimulation that's necessary to push the person into whatever state you want them to be in or push yourself into whatever state you want to be in. Right. In other words, in this case, the stimulation device is the music. Right? And so all that's necessary is the sensing device. And so, yeah, without saying too much more, we are very carefully looking into ways that we can close the loop with Brain.fm and sensing devices, right? An extreme example would be something like EEG, right, where you're able to directly look at someone's neural activity. That's a bit tricky because a lot of the devices that they have these days are just very awkward to wear. And, you know, you wouldn't want to have this spider on your head at the office, that kind of thing. But you know, that, that's sort of like the gold standard for a sensing device that would be useful is something that's picking up on your brain state directly. But even looking at someone's mental state indirectly through something like heart rate or blood pressure is still, you know, much better than nothing. And we're looking at doing a lot in that space.

Yeah. And how can we learn more about you and recommend music that's going to affect you based on what state you're in now? And who you are. So Rianne has his category of music with different kinds of attributes that's fine-tuned for Rianne. But then depending on the day and the state that you're in, Rianne, we can say, hey, we suggest using this 20% of Rianne tracks versus this 20% because we know where you are now and we know where you want to be. And that's what we're working on right now.

Exactly. And we can pull this back to our discussion about optimal stimulation theory. Which is that Goldilocks zone, right? That you don't want to be understimulated. You don't want to be overstimulated. Right. And now if you have a wearable device that's sensing the level that you're at, we can keep you in that Goldilocks zone, right? You're too far down. We bring you up. You're too far up. We bring you down and keep you in exactly the right zone for optimal performance. Right. That's one of the great things about wearables and closing that loop that we're excited about.

Nice. That's, that's a great breakdown again. Guys, so appreciate that. That's super helpful for folks. And I think it's helpful as well when shopping around for different wearables or hearing about different wearables or new neurotech that's emerging to have those two categories in mind and be able to ask yourself, is this a sensing device like the Oura Ring or the Whoop, which is, you know, a data gathering and feedback mechanism, or is this a stimulation device like, for example, you know, Halo Sport or Apollo and things like that, that actually attempt to shift your state. And yeah, my personal take has been that sensing devices are really great and very, very helpful in their current form. I wear an Oura Ring personally, for example. I look at the data multiple times a day and I find it very useful for decision-making. But I at least personally have not found a stimulation device yet that is more effective than 30 minutes of sleep or a yoga class or a nap or whatever the case may be for state change. So I think a lot of the neurotech that's out there, a lot of the wearables that is out there currently are not necessarily fully ready yet.

Are you including Brain.fm in that or are you saying besides Brain.fm?

That's a good clarifying question. I'm saying besides Brain.fm. Yeah, I'm talking neurotech as a category of neuromodulation versus auditory or sound. But it's going to be very exciting to see what comes out, I think, over the coming decade in terms of stimulation devices.

We see a lot of that stuff. Again, we can't talk a lot about it, but there's a lot of things that are very interesting that are in development right now. So it'll be really exciting to see how the market develops.

Right.

Yeah.

The last 5 years we've had, you know, Oura, Whoop, the Apple Watch, and all of those really go mainstream. Amazon has its new Fitbit competitor out. So I think the coming 5 or 10 years, we're going to start to see some really interesting stimulation devices that move the needle along with what you end up building around Brain.fm as well, which I'm personally very excited for also. So final question, gents, is what we like to call our genie question for Research Collective Radio. I'm going to insist that you both give different answers. Kevin, I'll start with you because it's a research ask question. The question is, if you could click your fingers and immediately have all the research be perfectly conducted to answer any question that you have, what would that question be?

Oh boy, this is fun.

It's a question about a question, just to clarify.

Sure. Are, are we, are we talking about Brain.fm and attention, or are we going really wide here and talking about Really wide.

What— yeah, we're talking, we're talking Kevin here.

Oh boy. Um, if we're, if we're talking about me as a person, then I'm gonna go back to the reason I got into studying the brain in the first place, which is understanding consciousness, which is what is the nature of subjective experience. If you know, and maybe this is a question for philosophy first, if that's a scientific question to begin with, it's not clear that it is. But if subjective experience is something that is produced by the brain, how does that happen? If the research could be done and conducted perfectly, that would be the question I would want to see answered.

Nice. Nice. That's actually my personal one also, is the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, which I think is just one of the biggest mysteries on Earth. Dan, curious what yours is.

Sure.

So Rhian, I think we've had these conversations late nights talking about this, but mine would be about the degree of nature versus nurture, because I believe both of them to take a play in many things of who— why am I the way I am, and why are people the way they are, and, and to what degree do different actions influence that. That would be a very big interest of mine.

Nice, nice. Another great one, Dan. Well, listen, thank you both so much. This has been just absolutely phenomenal. And I want to just encourage everyone who's been listening again to go to brain.fm, sign up for the free trial, test it out. I think it's an amazing service. It's also amazing value. It's a total no-brainer if you like your deep work and you want to get into the flow. And I'm sure everyone listening to this does. So test it out, run your own experiment, see if you find it useful. I'm sure you will. And brain.fm is the place to go, if I'm correct. Guys, is there anything else that you want to shout out though, as far as where people can learn more or sign up? Or anything like that?

Yeah, sure. So like you said, we have a website, Brain.fm. We also have iOS and Android devices, which are— you can use it on the go. And, you know, depending on what you're looking or doing, that can be great for your schedule. And then finally, depending on when this podcast airs, we're actually doing this massive rebrand. We're still Brain.fm, but we are really elevating where we are in the market So really excited about the next evolution of our product, about that focus switch in your pocket, being able to control your mental state on demand. And that's something that we're really excited about launching in the next category.

Super. Thanks so much for that, that wrap, Dan. And Kevin, anything you want to mention before we close out here?

No, I had a lot of fun chatting with you today. It's been great.

Epic. You guys are amazing. Thank you so much for your time on Flow Research Collective Radio. And we'll do, we'll do another one soon for sure.

That was great.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Hey there, Rian here again. And, just to give you a sample of Brain.fm and what it actually sounds like so you can experience it yourself, we have stitched on some of their focus audio within this podcast itself. So, it's going to cut to that audio in a moment and you can feel free to use that to test out Brain.fm and what we've been talking about through this episode for yourself. While you're working and while you're getting whatever it is done you got to get done. So enjoy. If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.