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

And what we do is we create functional music that's designed to have rhythmic pulses inside of it that emulate different neural patterns that we understand to be focus states or relaxed states or sleep states. And we add that to music. By listening to those patterns, your brain starts matching them and has a shortcut into switching into that mental state. And then staying there.

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This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2:00. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an entrepreneur for 23 years. It never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

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What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs. Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists 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, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Rhian 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 has 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. It's going to be a great one. It's going to span 2 episodes. So, this is the first one. and you will catch the second one separately.

Enjoy.

Alrighty, Dan Clark and Kevin Woods, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It is absolutely great to have you both here. On behalf of Brain.fm, really, really excited for our conversation today.

Our pleasure to be here.

Great to be on the show, Ryan.

Dan, so we've known each other now for I think about 3 years, and I've had the pleasure to develop a great friendship. And over those years, I've just heard more and more about your whole journey to date with Brain.fm, and it's an amazing story. I want our listeners and our community at Flow Research Collective to be able to hear it as a way to get to know you personally and also just as a way to get up to speed on what Brain.fm is, how it all came about. So would love to kick us off with a kind of an A to B story or a breakdown of your hero's journey, which is how I like to think about it. So maybe you could describe for everyone, Dan, how you got to this point with Brain.fm.

Oh, all right. Well, if we're doing hero's journey, then I have to give you the whole story because that's important. So I started making websites when I was 13, and I remember just being so excited that I could use technology where someone across the world could see and experience something that I created. And I really loved that. At the same time, I was a really shy and kind of chubby kid growing up. That's kind of why I found myself making websites. I was bullied very badly and my mom signed me up to do martial arts. And as doing martial arts and technology together, I came into confidence. I started doing more things. And it was around when I got my black belt that I started teaching martial arts. And I just loved doing it because you take kids like myself and help use martial arts as a vehicle to transform them to be their best self. And from there, I actually made the martial arts studio that I was in their first website. And they went from getting 20 or 30 leads a month to 100, 150 leads a month. Transforming the entire business. And before I knew it, I was making websites for all of the owner's friends. You know, fast forward a few years, I was just about 20 and I had a couple dozen clients of mine. I was, you know, I dropped out of high school, was making, you know, more money than my parents. And I go, okay, well, this is really great, but I want to go travel the world and ended up selling that business and kind of going around the world and doing things. Came back and said—

What age were you, Dan? Sorry, at your first—

20. It wasn't an exit that's probably, you know, amazing compared to today's standards. But when I was 20 and thinking that I got really lucky, that's something that I was like, wow, I made it, you know, let's go celebrate. And did. And I've traveled and I have some more stories for other podcasts about, you know, all the experiences I've gone on. I've been fortunate enough to hit all 7 continents. But came back and I said, "Hey, how can I prove I wasn't lucky and do this again?" And for a long time, I started really jumping into businesses, seeing them at that one level, and then using technology to accelerate them and getting a piece of the action. So one of my clients, for example, would be doing $200,000 a year, and 18 months later, they're doing $1.8 million. And I would say, "Thank you so much. Let's go to the next one." And I keep doing that. And As I did that, I started doing more technology and started doing bigger businesses and bigger challenges for myself and really just started going after financial success. I became digital director of a company outside of Boston and started getting into TV and radio sales, as well as apps and other kinds of integrated technologies with advertising. And if you looked at my life from the outside, I made it. I was like 24, 25 years old and I was making really good money and could have just followed that path for a long time. But I started, to be honest, feel empty inside. I was going to really doing deals at different clubs and doing all these kinds of things, but it got me so far away from helping people, which is really what I started with. And, um, actually was with clients at a club once, and we ended up like leaving the club and, um, we got robbed and I had a gun pointed at my face. And it wasn't— it wasn't— it was like Mexico was in a seedy part of it, and I just, I was convinced I was gonna die, to be honest. And, uh, okay, I didn't die yet. And then now I'm gonna die. Nope, now I'm gonna die. And It never happened. And I remember getting back in the car, jumping on the plane home, and not being able to sleep because I had this like life or death experience where I said, if I did die, all this money I made, what does it matter? You know, what's going to actually make me happy? And, you know, from then I quit my job and started looking on the hunt for things that I could use technology and the skills I developed to help people. Again. And I started doing, you know, different things, trying to play across different things, and, um, came across Brain.fm when it launched. And for someone that, you know, again, was never really good at school, my brain never turned on to like 11 o'clock or so. And actually normally staying up really late to get into that magic state where you could do anything effortless, which I didn't know was finding my flow state. But we can call that now, especially on this podcast. But, uh, but yeah, so I used to work from 10 PM to 4 AM most days of the week, and it wasn't until I tried Brain.fm at like 10 o'clock one day, I put the headphones in and I was like, this is probably not going to work. Things like this have been around, like binaural beats and things like that. Let me give this a shot. And I did it for 2 hours and I took my headphones off and said, I need to be part of this company. This is going to change the world. It was the first time I was ever able to get into flow state and like on demand. And I remember staying up for 24 hours trying to break it, doing different nootropics because I was very into that and still am to some degree and was really trying to break and make sure it wasn't anything else. It had to be this thing. And yeah, I was just so excited. I ended up calling them, emailed them. It was like 12 times before they got back to me finally, just to probably make me stop. And I said, listen, this is my track record. I can be part of this. I can help you guys grow. And they said, well, we're an early company. We don't really have any. I said, I don't care. I will work for free and prove to you that I can add value to the company. And let's do this.

Two things I just want to underscore there, Dan. Number one for folks is the value in knowing your chronotype, when you function best. Based on your biology. You know, for you it's 10 PM to 4 AM in the morning. Most people are ashamed to work those kinds of hours and, you know, or are unwilling to set their life up to be able to do so. But to your point, it just makes such a difference to your performance if that is how you're wired. And then the second thing that I personally just see as a trend, and this was my own personal journey actually with Stephen as well, is the value in working for free is just immense. And not everyone obviously has kind of the luxury to be able to do that. But I think if you're in that situation where you're younger and you've got, you know, low expenses and lower responsibilities, working for free for the right person or the right organization can be one of the most powerful, powerful strategies for sort of rapid advancement and development. So cool to hear that, that that's what you did as well.

Yeah, totally. I think, you know, at that point in my life, it was no longer about money. It was more about, I just want to be part of a rocket ship. Like, I want to be part of something that helps people and has the impact to help many people. And I saw that with Brain.fm because, and we'll get into this later with Brain.fm, but the really cool part is it doesn't matter what language you speak. It matters that you're human because it's all about the things that make us human on how Brain.fm works as effects. And I'll save that for later. But yeah, I ended up working for them for free, ended up becoming the lead tech guy and kind of leading their tech team. And then, you know, with that, I think, you know, looking back, it's actually— it's interesting to see because I kind of was just so excited that I threw my whole being into Brain.fm. I remember making out the first app, usually making apps as someone with experience, I would say it takes 6 to 9 months for being able to serve, you know, people on like hundreds of thousands of people in the right way from server and infrastructure and prototyping and design and all that stuff. And to give you kind of an idea of the intensity that I came into it, I ended up making that app in 3 months because I basically just wake up, work, and then go to bed and just keep doing that nonstop. And it was this thing where I saw us, if we can just push through, you know, we could help and keep moving, right? From that, there was this opportunity to buy the company, right? Some startups, some people that create companies, they're the great people to start it, but not necessarily the people to finish it. We started having different kinds of things. And I said, hey, I am so in on coming and growing. And at the time I ended up becoming CEO. They ended up taking every single dollar I've ever made, and I ended up liquidating everything to buy up the company. That's where we serve right now, is basically from being a first user to saying, this is probably not going to work, to being so blown away by the product in its first form, to saying, hey, I will risk everything I have on this because this is something that's greater than me. That's really where I see, and that's the reason why I tell you the story of when I started doing martial arts, because I actually see Brain.fm as a tool to help people be a plus 1 version of themselves, to be their best self on demand and whatever that means for them. And we do focus, relax, and sleep, and we can talk about those things in more detail. But if I can help someone be 1% better across millions and millions of people, what does that do for the world? And what does that do for the individual? I find that like my personal belief is that anyone can— is capable of doing anything, but they have to believe in themselves and they have to have a track record of success. And if Brain.fm can be part of that, we truly are the vehicle to do that, just like martial arts was for me. And what's interesting, and I'll finish up here, is that while I used to have flow state from 10 PM to 4 AM at night, I've been able to use Brain.fm to now be a morning person, and I wake up at 7 o'clock every day and I start flow state at 8 o'clock and I probably end around, you know, 11 or so to start doing things. But it's been a phenomenal tool in my life that has changed my life. And it's my quest to now enable the tool to change other people's lives and then use the company to invest further in science, which again, we have a neuroscientist here sitting next to me. We'll chat about that so that we can learn more and make a better product. To then invest in science even more so and keep spiraling this up to create a company that can truly make an impact. So yeah, it's been, it's been a roller coaster, but it's been a fun one.

Yeah, it's a great breakdown, Dan. Thanks for sharing that. And I think you're just a great example as well of what Stephen refers to as the habit of ferocity, just exhibiting that sort of tenacity and hustle and doing what most people are unwilling to do, and as a result of that, accomplishing what most people are not necessarily able to accomplish. So yeah, I think a big lesson in your story as well is just also in just the power of hustle and tenacity and the habit of ferocity. So I love that aspect of it. Kevin, I want to switch gears to you for a second. I've got some sort of questions around your background and your story as well. And then we'll start on the specifics of Brain.fm, what it is and how it works, because I know people are Feeling a little bit of a cliffhanger on that side. Kevin, so your background, I mean, you got your PhD from Harvard. I know you also worked at MIT, I believe, during your PhD or during that period of time. Would love for you to give folks a quick breakdown on what you did at Harvard and MIT. And then the paper, when I was doing research for this interview, that really caught my eye of yours is called Schema Learning for the Cocktail Party Problem. So after giving folks a little bit of a breakdown around your research and your work at at Harvard and MIT, would love if you could describe the cocktail party problem to everybody and share a little bit about that paper as well.

Sure, absolutely. I'll start actually just a little bit farther back than that. I studied neuroscience first as an undergrad at NYU. And the reason I got into the brain at all was that I was interested in consciousness and the nature of subjective experience. And well, it turns out that it's very hard to make a living in that field, and it's hard to be taken seriously unless you've done something else first. —so I decided to study attention, right? Attention being somewhat close to consciousness and kind of shaping your conscious experience. So I studied attention. In particular, I went into auditory attention, just generally fascinated by audition, always been a musician. Also, sound is something that's ephemeral and it has a sort of magical feel to it. You can't see it, but it's there and it's so important. And I had this question sort of from the very beginning of my educational journey of what is auditory attention, right? If you're listening to a piece of music and you're focusing on just the drums and all the other instruments fade into the background, and then you focus on just the bass and the drums fade away— what is that, right? What's happening in your brain? It's very different than moving your eyes around, right? Visual attention is intuitively easier to understand because eyeballs move and ears don't, right? And so I was really interested in this sort of the way auditory attention shapes your experience. And so I studied that first at NYU, and then that's right, I went on to Harvard and did actually my dissertation work at a lab at MIT. And in particular, I studied auditory cognition. So the way we think about the brain is that the brain does essentially 3 things, right? Perception, which is input; cognition, which is mulling stuff around, making decisions, what do you do with the input; and then action, which is the output. And people often think of hearing as a perception problem. It's about the sensory system and getting things into your brain. But the nature of ears basically is such that cognition plays a large role in hearing. And there's a huge problem when it comes to hearing things like one sound among many sounds. And that's what the cocktail party problem is, is how do you hear one sound among many? How do you use your auditory attention to focus in on one person's voice at a cocktail party? How do you use your auditory attention to focus in on one instrument in a musical mix? And so that's what I ended up studying in grad school. And the answer is somewhat complicated. Definitely glad that you looked at my papers. The schema learning paper in particular has to do with memory. Attention and memory are two core areas in cognition. Again, they have to do with the way the brain operates rather than just the sensing system. It's not about your eardrum or your cochlea. Attention and memory are about things that happen in your brain. Brain. And so what we discovered when I was in grad school is that, well, when you are solving the cocktail party problem, listening to one sound among many, a lot of that problem is solved with attention and memory. And when it comes to schema learning, what we mean by schema is a pattern that's repeated. So you're picking up on similarities across one person's utterances, right? So the way a person speaks, you may have typical prosodic contours. Prosody is sort of the lilt of your voice, the melody and rhythm of your voice. And different people have different prosodic tendencies. And you can pick up on those things to follow one person's voice among many. But that's just one of several mechanisms you use to solve the cocktail party problem. Again, which is fascinating because unlike the eyes, sounds mix in the air before they arrive at your ears. Again, this is the sort of central problem with auditory attention. Why it's fascinating is that everything arrives at your ears jumbled up, and the brain has this problem of how to split it apart. So that's what I studied in grad school for, you know, 7 or 8 long years or something. But where this gets interesting is that, well, at that point, the typical method for doing these experiments was that you'd have to drag people into the lab, throw them in a sound booth, you know, they wear your specially calibrated headphones and you test them one at a time. And so you can run maybe a handful of people in an afternoon if you're lucky, right? And doing things that way, it takes forever to build up the requisite number of participants you need to run a study. Well, at that time, people in linguistics and visual psychophysics were doing experiments online, right? And they could get 100 people in an afternoon. But the auditory community was extremely resistant to this because they thought everything had to be calibrated just so. It turns out that wasn't the case and that we came up with, you know, essentially tricks and methods for running online auditory experiments that made the data come out just as good as it was in the lab, right? You have to collect a few more participants to get rid of some noise, but the point is that, you know, the things that people were doing in linguistics and visual psychophysics were totally possible in audition with the right methods. So I developed some of those methods in grad school and used those to do that research on the cocktail party problem that I was just talking about.

I just want to ask one quick follow-up there, Kevin, because I love that breakdown you gave. The model of the brain, you know, essentially doing 3 things— perception, cognition, action— as input, processing, and output is just a really clean, nice way to put it. I'm curious if there's any elaboration that you have on that, on that model or that breakdown, or if there are any examples, simple day-to-day examples of the brain functioning in that sort of three-step process?

Sure. I think, well, A, it's logically the right way to think about what the brain does at a computational level, right? So if you think about the functions that the brain performs, they're of three kinds: it's perceiving things, deciding what to do with the input, and then doing things, right? But also, if you look into the structure of the brain, it's set up that way, right? So you have motor cortex, which is a strip going down the center that controls output. You have sensory cortices, that receive input, and much of the rest of the brain is devoted to cognition, right? So both in terms of the structure of the brain and logically what it does supports that breakdown. And that's a very common way of thinking about things at a high level within neuroscience. Nice, nice.

Yeah, I think that's, that's helpful for folks. Yeah, absolutely. You were just going to transition, Kevin, into the breakdown of how things ended up at Brain.fm. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, so having developed these online auditory methods towards the end of of grad school, right? I was happily collecting, you know, hundreds of participants in an afternoon, very excited about this. And so I was at the supermarket one day and ran into an old lab mate of mine who was a senior colleague, basically, in a lab that I worked in many, many years ago. And she, at that time, was collaborating with Bren FM. This is, by the way, Psyche Loui, who's now a professor, a cross-disciplinary professor of music and neuroscience at Northeastern. Brilliant researcher and still a very important academic collaborator with Brain.fm. And so I ran into her at the supermarket and I was so excited about my methods, I just couldn't stop myself. And I said, you know, "Psyche, I'm doing this great new thing. I'm collecting all this data, you know, people in audition haven't done this before, but I, you know, I'm telling everybody about this because I want the community to be using these methods." And she said, "Well, that's really interesting because," I'm now working with this company that has exactly this need, right, of how can you test large numbers of people without needing a lab, without having to bring in people one by one? How can you get data like that very, very quickly? And so she essentially hooked me up with Brain.fm, and I started consulting for them at first, skeptical as one would be, and I had to run the research myself before I believed it. And since then, we've done a bunch of studies, and we have something actually coming off my desk very, very soon. I'm not quite at liberty to talk about very exciting results, but the point was, you know, this was a perfect mechanism for essentially trying to find the perfect background music, which is what Brain.fm is, right? And so she set me up, I started consulting, and this was in the last year as I was wrapping up my dissertation essentially. And then I started full-time with Brain.fm as soon as I defended, which was fantastic.

Nice, nice. That's a great breakdown, Kevin. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So let's transition for a moment to the kind of nuts and bolts of Brain.fm. What it is. Dan, I would love for you to give the, the consumer breakdown, the high-level breakdown, and then Kevin, be amazing as well for you to elaborate on the, the neuroscience aspect of Brain.fm and how it, how it functions. So Dan, if you would give us that breakdown, that'd be super, and we'll go from there.

Yeah, totally.

And I, I think it's a great division, uh, on how you're asking for that, because if it's the opposite, may not be as, as precise. So Brain.fm, as I said, is a +1 product where we help people be their best self. And what we do is we create functional music that's designed to have rhythmic pulses inside of it that emulate different neural patterns that we understand to be focus states or relax states or sleep states. And we add that to music. By listening to those patterns, your brain starts matching them and has a shortcut into switching into that mental state and then staying there. So like Kevin mentioned, it's how do we make the world's most advanced background music? But what's really interesting about that is that we do it on two different sides of the house. We do it on how music sounds like, right? And the different genres that are associated with different moods. That you'd probably go onto Spotify or YouTube and say focus music. But we do that, and again, Kevin will go into the more intense structures of the brain, but we do that with all of the different methods that Kevin's developed to really figure out which knobs to turn. We do 3D sound and we do different kinds of salience reduction. But additionally, we also have these patented processes that are adding amplitude modulation to this music, which are these rhythmic pulses. And by listening to this music, you're able to switch your mental state in 5 minutes and then stay there as long as you're listening to the music. I like to think of it— it's like when you're running, when you're running and there's a wind on your back, it just feels effortless. It's just so much easier when it's probably not helping that much. It's just like a little push, but it's the push that you need to get into that running state. And that's what Brain.fm is.

It's that switch in your pocket. I love the way you've described it in the past as the focus switch. I don't know if there's anything more to say on that because that in many ways really sums it up. And I just want to suggest that everybody go to brain.fm, which is your URL. You got beautiful branding on there as well. And it's a nice way to get a deeper sense of things. And also, I know you guys do a free trial as well, so highly recommend. People actually try Brain.fm as well to really get a direct sense of how it all works?

What we do is we do free trials for sure. But this is something that what's really nice compared to other services that allow people to have different states is that ours take effect in that 5-minute period or actually sooner than that. It's something that how fast you hear music, do you want to dance? That's exactly the mechanism that we're using. But what's really cool is this is almost inactive participation. So instead of, you know, meditation or something like that, which is great and has purposes, this is something that you can do in combination of the activities that you're already doing. So it's a really nice stack on already what everyone's doing. And a lot of people, like 60% of people, are already listening to music. And the challenge with music and how it's created today is for entertainment purposes. It's not for specific measurement that has been tested for results. And, you know, there's some companies that are doing generative music, or, you know, you can go on and find study music, but those have always started with, you know, actually selling, right? And actually, you know, trying to be soundtracks for, you know, the Facebook movie and things like that, where what we've done is we've really broken things down in the different kinds of secret spices that you can add to something. And we understand the spices on a really in-depth level. And we combine that with the stuff that we know about the brain. And it's very well understood and documented on what focus states look like under EEGs and things of that nature. What we're trying to do is really unite science and the things that people have always tried to do with music and have done, And we're breaking those down and saying, well, this works. This can be done more effectively. This may not have any effect at all. Let's take it out. And really concentrating all of, you know, musical knowledge as well as all scientific knowledge into one focus point, this switch in your pocket that you can just press and get right into your flow state. And that's really our ultimate, ultimate goal. And to, you know, maybe expand on this further. What we're finding is that what's really, really exciting is that this can work for all people. And it just takes us to learn more about you. So, you know, for people with different neurodiversities, whether they're in, you know, the normalized range or they have more distinctive lean toward ADHD or autism or whatever it may be, once we learn more about you, we can actually personalize the music and that experience. I mean, we have some really incredible results that I don't want to take any of Kevin's thunder on, but it's really exciting because this is something that, you know, does work. We've seen a lot of data on that. And now from a consumer side and from, you know, the business side, our mission is how can we put this in everyone's pocket? So just like airplane mode on your phone, you can go focus mode on your phone and just click a button and then zoom in where you need to be.

Nice, nice. Was the phrase you used there, Dan, inactive participation?

Uh, yeah, I think that's nice. It's inactive in the, in the place where you don't have to be practicing it, right? Right.

Yeah, it's one of, one of the nice things about it as a tool is, is that, yeah, in a sense it's, it's passive. It's not like, you know, yoga nidra or mindfulness or breathwork where you are being guided but actively doing something with Brain.fm as a tool. You put it in your ears and do what you're going to do. It functions passively in a sense, which is, I think, one of the real cool things about it and which is why the focus switch analogy also just makes so much sense.

Yeah. And so that's the great thing about using sound, right, is that it doesn't take extra time or extra effort and that you can be doing this while you're doing something else. Which is why sound is a great medium for neuromodulation. You can also modulate the brain using, say, light, but how are you gonna get your work done while something is flashing in your eyes? Music is just a very natural sort of channel for something extra to sit in the background while you're doing what you wanna be doing.

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Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. Dan, that was one of the great points you made just before we went online, which is that at Brain.fm, you don't see yourselves as a sound company, but rather as a neuromodulation company with sound as your chosen medium. So Kevin, but maybe before we go into the more in-depth breakdown around how Brain.fm functions neurobiologically, maybe you could both speak to why sound is such an effective medium for state change as opposed to substances, or as you mentioned, light, or other forms of technology. Would love to get that breakdown because I think it's a really interesting categorical comparison point.

Yeah. I'm happy we're going into this now. I'm really excited because I think there's two approaches to think about this. It's not Brain.fm or the neuromodulation of sound compared to other things. It's just that 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. 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, right? So it's almost like pulling your attention in. And, you know, obviously there's many other things, but it's a natural enhancement. Now, there are things that you can do, which we can get into later, of combining, you know, sound with, you know, different kinds of nootropics or different kinds of other tools, we'll call them, right, to enhance things. But for where we are, I think the first thing is how can we really prove efficacy in one thing and do it the best in the world? And that's really our approach. You know, we do see Brain.fm as a neuromodulation company. So as Kevin will talk about what entrainment is and all these other kinds of mechanisms on how it works in your brain, you know, we're really seeing sound as one of the more sensitive things that you have with a high resolution and the way that we're doing it through our patented process. But combining that with how easy it is just to throw headphones in and unlock it, we feel like it's a very natural medium. And then as Brain.fm grows and develops, and we're currently investigating other ways we can neuromodulate with sound or without sound, which we can't go into detail right now, but ultimately we have so much range with just sound alone. When you think about from someone working at their desk to working out, to, you know, just relaxing. It's very natural just to change the environment and start mirroring it. Like you're going to a spa, you know, where you automatically start feeling relaxed because of that spa music you have on that's really emulating, you know, the jungle or whatever it may be that go to these deeper roots of being human. But yeah, it's really exciting.

That's right. So I think what we're touching on is that there are practical considerations as well for using sound, right? And it's absolutely the case, it's a great way neuroscientifically to get rhythms into the brain, but the practical considerations are just as important, right? A big one is that the delivery device, i.e., headphones, is something that everybody has, right? And many, many people walk around already with this on. Whereas if you want to start stimulating the brain with, you know, electricity or enormous magnets or giving people pills, that's something extra, right? That, you know, people aren't used to, may have strange side effects and You can do that with lab equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars that's enormously heavy and you'd have to go into a special clinic and that kind of thing. But sound is something that everybody understands and works very, very, very well. And so Dan was alluding to entrainment and we'll discuss it, I expect, a bit more later. But just very briefly, entrainment is the principle that the rhythms in the brain reflect the rhythms in the world. Right. And I'll say that again, the rhythms in the brain reflect the rhythms in the world. Right. And the rhythms in the brain are also important for getting things done. Right. They drive perception, cognition, and action. And so if you can set up your environment, i.e., incoming sensory stimulation in the right way, you can guide the brain into the right mental state. And that's the principle behind Brain.fm and doing it with sound just, just makes way more sense than any other method of delivery.

Kevin, what are some other examples of a train? I love the simple definition of it there that you provided.

Sure. Sure. Yeah. Again, something Dan alluded to previously is dancing. And I think that's a great example that everyone understands and sets a timeline for how quickly Brain.fm really affects you. That we say 5 minutes, but it's really much quicker than that. And if you hear dance music, how long does it take you to feel like dancing? Right. And that's exactly the same neural mechanism, which is entrainment. In other words, the activity of neural populations in your brain is locking into the incoming stimulus. right? And so if I was to clap my hands in a rhythm, your brain is firing off at that rhythm. And if it's something that has sort of a natural continuity to it, in other words, it supports a continuous oscillation, then neural populations will, if you like, resonate at that frequency. The right word is oscillation, right? You're driving oscillatory activity in the brain through stimulation. And again, this happens through any of the sensory systems. Well, not smell and taste as far as we're aware, but light, sound, and touch drive rhythms in the brain. And those rhythms spread from the sensory areas throughout the brain to set you into a different mental state.

Yeah. More basic example on what I like to explain is, you know, when you hear a truck backing up and it goes beep, beep, beep, you know what the rhythm is, right? And eventually you can almost like tune it out. But if it stops, you're aware of that, right? And it's these things that are all around us and they're built, you know, pattern recognition. We're actually, as we're talking, we're entraining to each other's voice. And that's if something is blocking my mouth or I don't know, static comes from the connection, you can infer the rest of what I was trying to say. So it's actually a natural mechanism that has developed in our brain as we've evolved to do a variety of different kinds of jobs, from voice and language to other kinds of pattern to danger. If you're walking in the forest and all of a sudden a loud crash happens, danger, run away. So what we've been able to do is use entrainment to facilitate, basically work with the natural way the brain works to enhance it.

Yeah, but in terms of common examples of auditory entrainment, the two big ones that people will be familiar with are dancing and running. So if you're running to a beat as well, that's auditory entrainment.

That's interesting. And then the truck, the beeping reversing truck example that you provided, Dan, actually reminded me of your breakdown on schema learning, Kevin, for the cocktail party problem. Could you speak briefly to just how this relates to what you referenced earlier around schema learning? And then we'll come back to some of the other kind of practical and neuroscientific benefits of of sounds.

Sure. Right. So that's an interesting case, right? So let's say I had a truck backing up in a noisy environment, right? So there are people around me talking, maybe there's other trucks backing up, maybe there's horns honking. Well, the fact that the truck backing up is rhythmic, right, is gonna help me separate that sound from the other sounds, right? So my brain says, okay, that beep that happens once every second, I'm gonna split that apart from everything else because I know it's happening at that rhythm. And if I was to pay attention to the truck, that's entraining my brain at that frequency, and my brain is using those oscillations to separate that truck from the other things in the scene. And that's actually really important for speech as well, right? So the rate of syllables in most languages is about 4 to 7 syllables per second, pretty much any language you look at, right? So when you count 1, 1,000, 2, 1,000, 3, 1,000, that's 4 syllables. And the reason that works in English is because we speak at approximately 4 syllables per second. That's a fun thing. And so when I'm just talking normally, if my voice is among other people, it helps if I'm speaking at a relatively steady, continuous rate, because then your brain is able to latch onto my voice rhythmically and separate my voice from other people. And that rhythmic latching on is entrainment. It's the same effect we're using, just in a different frequency range for a different purpose in the brain.

That's a great breakdown. I love that example, Kevin. So just to circle us back for a moment, are there other either practical or neuroscientific benefits or points of note that make sound, you know, a nice or even superior medium for neuromodulation as opposed to some of those other examples we touched on, like, you know, substances or life or other kinds of neurotech? I know, Dan, one of the things that I found really nice as a simple practical benefit is that there is generally less regulatory issues with sound as opposed to something like substances where you're just going to naturally run into much more challenges in that domain. So, yeah, curious if there's any other benefits around sound in general, either practical or neuroscientific that you guys would like to mention.

Yeah. So I'll let Kevin talk about the neuroscientific side, you know, and maybe comparison of visual as well as touch. But I think on a practical, like a other practical side is, is actually the revolution we're having in the world today. So, you know, 10 years ago, not many sound-canceling headphones were around and now every single person has Bose or AirPods or whatever you know, device they have, as something that's in their pocket, always accessible. If you look at podcast consumption, it's on the rise and has been because people have higher connectivity with their phones, where I can download a podcast episode by just clicking download rather than transferring it to my MP3 player. And I think as a practical thing, Brain.fm is like perfectly timed to start riding that wave of in the right time of where content is readily available. People are used to using this content on superior devices, you know, on sound canceling, which actually makes our effects even better because you're blocking out even more sound, right? And then secondarily, it's in this perfect timing before wearables As that's something we'll be integrating with in the future and we can dive into that later. But, you know, just sound from a practical standpoint, I think is just super easily accessible to everyone in this interconnected world that we have. And that's what's really exciting where you don't have to buy something. You just, everyone already has it.

You know, you don't have to ingest something either, you know, the difference between in terms of the sense of fear or just the friction between ingesting and listening. You know, it's like drastically different.

Yeah. What's really interesting about ingesting and substances in general is there's so much other noise going on inside of your body that it's really hard to like figure out. So for example, even just drinking coffee, right? If you drink coffee on an empty stomach, if you drink coffee with food, if you drink coffee, you know, and it's the first time you drank coffee in a month versus every single day or 3 times a day, There's just so much variability that it's really hard to sometimes understand what is the effect or how to know how much exact coffee to take to get to the place that you want to be. And because Brain.fm is using a different system, we don't run into those problems. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah, it's just, it's easier to isolate the variable when it comes to sound. You know, you're not digesting sounds you heard 24 hours ago. But whereas, you know, when it comes to food or substances, you are. So yeah, that's a nice way to put it then.

Absolutely. And we like to use the term non-invasive neuromodulation in particular, right? To separate sensory stimulation from things like magnetic and electrical stimulation of the brain or ingesting a pill, that sound is non-invasive neuromodulation. And it's through a medium that everyone already uses and understands, right? And, you know, if you talk about risk, well, are there risks from me listening to music all day long or listening to this, the same Britney Spears song over and over again for 10 hours a day? Ooh, there's probably risk there. Yeah, probably at that extreme, right?

But, but the point is people aren't really worried about it, right?

And for good reason, because people have been doing this for a long time. And as far as we can tell, there are no ill effects associated with listening to music as long as it's heard at a reasonable level, right? If you listen too loud, you'll damage your hearing. But other than that, right, it's a very sort of gentle way of guiding the brain to do what you want it to do.

On that point, outside of volume, are there any other risks from certain kinds of auditory input? Can you overdose on any kind of sound?

I've looked into this, and not as far as I'm aware. We were originally somewhat worried about epilepsy because light— if you flash light at particular frequencies, you can induce epilepsy as is well known. It turns out that's very, very rare for sound. It's like many, many orders of magnitude more rare. I think it's something like 1 in 10 million people.

Opposed to how many people are epileptic?

Oh, it's, I wanna say 1 in 10,000 or something like that. It's at least 3, 4, 5 orders of magnitude. I'll look up the numbers specifically, but essentially, you know, it's a teeny tiny fraction. Compared to people where, you know, if you did this with light, you would have a finite number of people having seizures on your app. And, and, and just isn't good. Yeah. And with sound, when sound does cause a seizure in the 1 in 10 million people or whatever it is, it's for reasons that are associated with the sound itself and sort of emotional connections to that sound. Like, you know, oh, the crunch of an apple sets my brain off because of something that happened with apples in my past or something like that, as opposed to with light, it's like light at a particular frequency will trigger an electrical storm in the brain, i.e., epilepsy, just because that's the way the visual cortex is wired up. That's not the case with auditory cortex at all. So flashing sound is not a risk. Flashing light is a risk. Yeah. Other than hearing loss, I can't really think of any ill effects of sound as long as it's heard at a reasonable level. You will adapt and habituate to things. And then once the sound is off, you switch back essentially. That's just about it. So no ill effects that I can think of.

Got it. No, it's really interesting to think of ill effects of sound in general.

Sound obviously has advantages over invasive methods like magnetic electrical stimulation. Now, if we want to compare sound to light and touch, which are other sensory modalities you can use for entrainment, Well, there it's really hard to compare because if you wanna say, oh, light entrains the brain more than sound does, you're really comparing apples to oranges and you have to start talking about, well, what level of brightness versus what level of amplitude modulation. And it's unclear how to compare power across the sensory modalities. So it's really, it's not even worth comparing in that way at all. But we do know that sound is very good at driving rhythms in the brain. And part of it may be that sound is connected with movement. Movement in the real world, right? Because other than sound coming out of speakers, which is a modern invention, sound in the real world is always associated with movement. Sound comes from the vibration of an object and objects vibrate when they move or are moved by wind or water or animals or whatever it is. So there is a sort of an innate connection between sound and movement and rhythm that comes from the function of sound in the ancestral environment, right? Whereas with something like light, you can perceive something without it needing to move. Right. And so there's just sort of a different association in the brain between light and movement versus sound and movement. Touch is an interesting one because touch is very closely related to sound. In fact, you can think of in a lot of ways, sound is touch at a distance. Both things are about detecting vibration and a lot of what happens when you touch a surface is that as your finger moves across the surface, you're detecting vibrations from the interaction between your fingers and the surface. That's how you detect textures under your fingers, stuff like that. So sound is touch at a distance, and you can really think of the two things as similar. Now, sound is much easier to use than a vibrotactile device, right? Because that's something that people don't have and can only operate at relatively low frequencies. And then there's just the general point that music is nice to listen to. And people do it already. And it's something that sort of music can sit there and be effective without being completely ignored. So it would be a risk with something like a vibrotactile device that if it just keeps on going at a steady rate, your brain eventually learns to ignore it. The brain is a change detector, right? It picks up on change. And so one of the reasons that Brain.fm is so effective is because our technology is embedded in music, right? And the underlying music, without being distracting, is still sort of poking at your brain and saying, hey, there's change here. Something's going on. It's a little bit fun. From one minute to the next, something is different. And that's just— that's normally what happens in music. And we're sort of piggybacking the science along with the music for the ride. Whereas with touch, there's no analogy, right? There's no way to sort piggyback on touch art that people already understand. Right. It just doesn't work.

And further is, correct me if I'm wrong, Kevin, but I believe the resolution that we're looking at with different kinds of frequencies and focus, which is very high, isn't as sensitive in the skin. So it's hard to enable vibroacoustics to have all the range that we have with sound. Yeah.

Well, touch is complicated because you have many touch sensors essentially. And, you know, embedded in your skin, I think you have 4 or 5 different types of touch detectors. Some detect pressure, some detect light touch, some detect deep touch. And with any vibroacoustic device, you're only gonna be, you know, really targeting a subset of those sensors. So, you know, the, the effect by the time it's at the level of cortex is somewhat unclear. It's not to say that touch in combination with music wouldn't be slightly more effective. I'm honestly not sure. But given the practical consideration, sound is by far the best way to introduce rhythms into the brain.

I love two things you said there. Sound is touch at a distance. It's just a fascinating way to put it. I also love the notion that the brain is a change detector. Not to take us off track, but I was reading a great article on Farnam Street Blog yesterday, which is a fantastic blog by Shane Parrish for anyone who's who's interested in checking it out. And I think the title was something along the lines of, when you hear it's different this time, you should be very wary. Or when you hear yourself saying it's different this time, you should be very wary because of the fact that, to your point, the brain is a change detector and we disproportionately weigh differences over similarities, which is a form of cognitive bias. So we believe someone's changed or that it'll finally be different this time. Or that because of the nature of this new technology, it's not a market bubble, it's actually going to keep going up or whatever it is. And we failed to see the similarity and overweight the difference. 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.