How Sound Waves Heal Trauma 🧠 Discover the device that builds resilience against stress and disease

And it's interesting because with your device, like this is a sound wave device, people don't realize this. Most people are used to, like, transcranial stimulation, things like that. This is way different than electricity. This is like a healing sound wave. How did you come across that scientifically and how is that shown to prove results for people? The actual sound waves in this tiny device, you can wear it on your wrist or your ankle. Share with us that story in the science.

Sure. So it is sound waves. Indeed. It's actually the best way to think about what Apollo is, is that it's music that's composed for the touch receptors of our skin rather than for our ears. So the music, if anybody who's listened to music, we were all. We all in our original research team at the University of Pittsburgh, we all had music backgrounds of some degree. So music was hugely influential for all of us. And we never really understood it. We never really got. Other than intuitively. We never really understood why different kinds of music have different effects on us. Certain kinds of music make us more energized, and certain kinds of music make us more calm. And we know this, right, because anyone who listens to music when they meditate or when they're calming down the other day or when they're falling asleep does not listen to the same kind of music when they're working out or going out with your friends. Right. You would never generally mix the music you work out with the music that when you're used, when you're sleeping, you're.

Not gonna listen to death metal when you're trying to be romantic with your partner.

Exactly. So the vibrations of the music actually shift our energy and our mood, and they do it through our ears. But there's another component of music that's in the lower frequency range that's somewhere between like 1 or I would say, like 10 and 200 hertz, which is about what comes out of your subwoofer that is more easily felt through our skin than through our ears, than heard through our ears. And what we wanted to do was to say, is it possible? And again, this was like 2016, after we mapped out the touch response system, was to say, is it possible that we can provide just the tactile component of music, just the bass part that you feel without the auditory part? And can you still get the same effect as with the auditory part? Right. With the whole concerto, can you just pull out one instrument, for instance, and have that be providing the benefits, or at least most of the benefits, without the whole song and Ultimately, that's what we proved in the lab. And so by lots of testing and lots of research from what other people had done for 70 plus years, we were able to figure out that there are specific patterns of sound that when delivered to the skin, actually anywhere on the skin, not just the wrist or the ankle, but that's the most convenient place to wear it. You can relatively reliably nudge the body and the mind into sync, into flow, and into goal states more effectively.

I'm visualizing, like the axon and the dendrite and the different communication systems in the body that like how we're actually fed. Like we're fed visual cues, we're fed, like you said, touch cues, auditory cues. But there's also something else.

It's all frequency.

It's all frequency. There's also something else that this device really does, and that is it brings people back to a center. Right? And whether you're like, scientific or spiritual, what is that center that I'm talking about from a clinical perspective and also just you personally, what do you believe center to be?

So I think the best way that I would define health, and particularly working in the psychedelic medicine space, the way we tend to define health the most effectively is not as subdivided into mental health and physical health. It's just health. Yes, it's just health because they're all interconnected. And it's about achieving balance, right? It's not about achieving one extreme or another. We're constantly bouncing back and forth between extremes. It's about finding balance in the middle. So balance is resilience, balance is homeostasis. It's the ability to not just mentally and emotionally and spiritually bounce back from stress quickly, but it's the ability to physically have our bodies recover and bounce back quickly from stress over and over and over again and maintain and sustain an incredibly high level of peak performance, which is actually achievable. There's lots of examples of that in humanity. One example is Michael Jordan, right? Look at that guy. I mean, a lot of people think that he is not human, but he is very human. And he's shown us that humans are capable of things we never knew we were capable of. Right? When we take that box off of us of what we believe ourselves to be capable of, all of a sudden our capabilities become potentially unknown and potentially infinite, right? We just don't know what we're capable of. And it's about stepping out of that box of fear and control that Apollo helps us to do by restoring us to center or balance is Restoring the locus of control back to us. So. So when we feel the most out of balance is typically. And we may not recognize this right away, but typically when we feel most out of balance, it's because we're spending more of our time every day spending our attention, focusing our attention on things we don't have control over. So the more we want to feel in control, the more we just have to simply practice, because practice makes perfect. Practice retrains our neurons. We just have to practice restoring our locus of control back to our center. As soon as we practice over time, showing ourselves that we have control over the way we think, where our attention goes, the speed of our breath, the depth of our breath, the speed and depth of our. The speed of our heart rate, all of these things are within our control. Then all of a sudden, we feel a hell of a lot better, and our balance and resilience is restored and then optimized.

It makes perfect sense. This is why I love podcasting, because I have breakthroughs with people like yourself. Just by doing the show, you made me remember something that I'd forgotten. And I think we all can feel this. We learn programs from our parents how to be, how to feel. Feel this way, don't feel that way. Our brain is plastic. It can change based on whatever behavior that we're consciously or unconsciously doing. And then really, like human potential. So it's like programs, plastic and potential. Our human potential can only come from center, without the presence of fear. And I just connected all three of those because it makes sense on a visceral level. Like, I can feel what you're saying, and also my mind can understand what you're saying. And I think that's. If you look at Hawkins work like he talks about, in letting go, like bringing the head closer to the heart. But for most people, the greatest distance ever is between their head and their heart. And this device brings people to shorten that curve, to shorten the connection between what's going on in their mind to what's actually present in this moment, like you said, in their body. And that's fantastic. I mean, that's fascinating.

Almost all the activities that we do to induce that balance are the same. I mean, they have the same basic result. So rubbing the inside of the outside of ear, as you mentioned, will induce a increase in vagal tone, because there's a vagal terminal on the inside of the outside of the ear. Putting pressure on our chest like this with both hands can do the same thing. Gently rubbing the side of our neck has A vagal terminal where you can do the same thing. Taking a deep breath and holding it and pushing down that will do the same thing. It's called a Valsalva maneuver. There are lots of techniques that will induce this. Deep breathing will do it. Soothing touch will do it. Right. So the difference is with Apollo is that Apollo doesn't require you to actively do any of those things. Right? All of those activities work. But if you've never been trained to use those techniques under stress or at all, then they are incredibly challenging to master. And particularly challenging to master if you've never, if you haven't practiced them. Sometimes they can take hundreds or thousands of hours for people to master them well enough to be able to use under stress. Even deep breathing is one of these types of things. So we designed this for those of us, even like myself, who never learned breathwork as a kid, who never learned to meditate, who never learned any of these self soothing techniques. So that even if you're a young child, an adult who doesn't know, or an elderly person who doesn't know how to activate naturally your body's natural calming systems, this can show you what it feels like to activate those systems. And then once you feel it, it's easier to learn how to do it on your own. And the device kind of serves Apollo kind of serves like a training tool. Over time, people have told us from thousands of reports, they continue to feel better over time with cumulative consistent use, and that it's a growth curve. So the more they use it, the more benefits they get. And those benefits are longer lasting. And they feel more autonomically toned. They're not as reactive to stress. They are better at appraising what is actual threat versus perceived threat that I don't actually need to worry about. And they are becoming less. They're using the Apollo more intentionally and less frequently over time. They still use it, they just don't use it 24,7. After a few months of use, they start to gradually taper off because they feel stronger on their own.