The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #198 - Dr. Patrick Porter

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Hi friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so, incredibly excited about the conversation that I am about to have. It is about one of my favorite topics in the whole world and that is of course, the brain and brain health, and ultimate productivity and just the best ways to tackle your life. Not only is it about that because I've done a lot of episodes on the brain, [chuckles] but this is not just the brain. This is about a way to I mean, honestly, it's probably the most biohacking-type device that I have come across as far as it goes with improving brain health. So, I am here with Dr. Patrick Porter. He is the founder of BrainTap, which I am just so excited to talk all about this and ask all my crazy questions because this device is so cool. It uses lights and sounds with personalized meditations. I guess we'll talk about what it actually does to potentially change your brain. I was really familiar with it. I had seen it. I feel like all the biohacking people are using it. So, I'd seen it everywhere. I was really excited when his people reached out about the interview. And then I remember I was talking to my cohost, Cynthia Thurlow on the Intermittent Fasting Podcast and was asking her if she was familiar. She was talking about how because she's in a Mindshare with a lot of people, and she was talking about how they all have BrainTap and we're all talking about it. So, it is the thing to have. So, I have so many questions. Dr. Patrick Porter, thank you so much for being here. 

Patrick Porter: Well. Thanks for having me and you can just call me Patrick. 

Melanie Avalon: Awesome. Thank you, Patrick. [chuckles] To start things off, I am super curious about your personal story. Were you always into this stuff? Did you have an epiphany one day? What led you to doing what you're doing today, because it's really next level, if I can use a really cliche phrase. [chuckles] 

Patrick Porter: Well, I was fortunate enough to be born into a household with an alcoholic, if you can believe that. When my dad got help, he got helped through something called the Silva Method back in the 70s. And that meditation technique, it helped him so much, he went on to become one of the first instructors in the US to share that. So, I grew up using Galvanic Skin Response systems or GSR systems to control my brain. And so back in the 70s and 80s when no one was really doing this outside of research, Silva figured out a way to do it. From there it went on to, I went to work for a company called Light and Sound Research. We developed the first portable light and sound machine. They brought me in because of my background is my undergraduates in electronics and then I have a degree in psychology. So, those two things helped us to create what we called the MC Square. I really love Einstein, so we called the first device that and then I've developed over 16 of these. This one, if there were epiphanies all along the way on what can work and what can't work, because back then there was no neurofeedback, there was only biofeedback. So, we're looking at respiration, skin temperature, heart rate. Now, we have technology that just is amazing. We can keep fine tuning and figuring out how to really maximize brain function in a very easy, basically put on a headset, press play and you're on your way. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. This is so, so fascinating. So, a question. Your original MC Square, what did it use exactly? What did it do? 

Patrick Porter: We didn't have the same technology we have today. So, we had to take a big unit. There was a clinical unit called the SILS, a Sensory Input Learning System where we would actually do this all by hand. So, I would change the light frequency and sound frequencies as I was watching their respiration, as they deepened their breathing cycle and as their heart rate slowed down. It was very laborious and it took a person to run it, a biofeedback machine or a neurofeedback machine. And then what we did is we took that and we miniaturized it into an EPROM chip, which is the first portable programmable chip. We basically built the first 500 units from RadioShack, which was an electronic store that some people might remember. We built those in our back room. We sold them, we tested them. There was a jack on it where we could jack in a cassette player and then I recorded sessions that went through the system, but it only had 10 different variations because they all had to be programmed onto the chip.

It was a few years later, actually not until 1999, that we're able to include the programming, what we call our neuro algorithm into the actual audio file. Now, we can actually sync up on all 2000 of our sessions a different neurofeedback program because the brain will listen to and respond based on the mirror neurons in the brain. It will actually guide the brain into those different states based on our research. Every one of our algorithms have been researched to prove that they actually move brainwaves. So, I'm very confident to say I could put anyone on this device as long as they didn't have a damaged brain. We could put them on and I could tell you exactly where the brain is going to be at any point in the journey, because everyone's brain follows this algorithm, because it's natural to our brain. 

Melanie Avalon: So, that leads me to a lot of nuanced questions. And I feel like I want to step back and get a bigger picture first, but just while we're talking about it. To recap what you just said, when you were developing it, you were seeing how people's brains were responding and then you were literally testing these lights and these inputs and seeing how they responded, and you were creating the algorithm. And now with BrainTap, out of all the algorithms, did it start that way? Like with humans creating it and then computers created it? or how are the algorithms created now? 

Patrick Porter: What we have is every series is different. So, we have to do-- because brain fitness doesn't happen when you just listen to binaural. This is the mistake a lot of people make. They'll go, I'm listening on YouTube to this binaural beat, whatever and as soon as you listen to it more than three times, the brain kind of treats it like wallpaper. So, the brain wants a challenge. So, what we've done in our 2000 sessions, that's why they're all different. You'll notice on our app that if you've listened to a session within 72 hours, it actually gives you a prompt that says, you've listened to this session in 72 hours. Because you need to have a washout period for the brain to reset and then re-expose it to a different algorithm to really get the brain training. Because just like us on a personal level, we only learn and grow when we're in a stress state. So, we have to stress the brain out a little bit. Once the brain learns, it's like learning a dance at first, it's stressful, but after a while, when you learn the dance, you just kind of go with the flow and the music guides you. That's what happens with BrainTap after three sessions. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, so is that also the reasoning for in the tracks when there's the overlapping voices? 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. What we wanted to do, because a lot of people weren't able to buy our equipment. I wanted to do something that could also engage both hemispheres and really bringing more neuroplasticity to play in the performance of each of the BrainTap sessions. So, when somebody hears something in the right ear, the left brain will light up. When somebody hears something in the left ear, and vice versa, it just goes back and forth. What we showed was, at first, the brain will try to shut down, because that's what it does under stress. It tries to shut it down so that it doesn't burn out. Once you do this, after about two or three minutes, the brain will stay awake. And then you'll basically start building those new neural pathways so you can handle greater amounts of information. That's one of the big things, that's one of the big biohacks that we actually talk about, is that, how do you handle this onslaught of information? There've been many quotes by people much smarter than me even that say, "If our grandparents were sat down in New York City today, they might die of neuro shock." There's so much information available just on that one corner, you know that our brain is processing all that data. So, we have to figure out a way to train the brain. This is a new time for our brain. We've never experienced this much technology, this much information and most people have never upgraded their hardware or software that they have inside their own human brain. 

Melanie Avalon: Two questions from that. One is when I was doing one of the sessions with the actual overlapping voices. Like one voice talking in the right ear and I think one was talking more center. Well, I was stressing out about this but I guess that's good since stress is required. But I was just thinking about how in a way you have to consciously choose which voice to listen to. And so, I was thinking, well that means there's probably almost infinite manifestations of how this track could play out because I could listen to just this one voice the whole time, I could listen to the other voice the whole time, I could switch back and forth but I would switch back and forth. So, what are the implications of that? 

Patrick Porter: That's perfect. That's exactly what we want you to do. So, that each time it becomes a different experience. I love it when I get probably two or three emails a month where people say, "I want to know what technology you're using, because each time I listen to those tracks they're different" but they're not, there's nothing changing. It's their brain changing the experience so that they have the experience they need at that moment. 

Melanie Avalon: Wow. I was stressing about it. I was like, "This can't be a good thing that I'm concerned about where to focus." So that's okay. 

Patrick Porter: What I tell people is I've taken ancient traditions and made modern technology. There's a shaman tradition. After a ceremony, everyone in the ceremony would line up on the right and left of the person and the person who just finished the ceremony would walk down. And each person would say something they felt was going to impact that person and they would say it at the same time in their right and left ear. And so, it's a way to integrate these higher mind experiences that we have with psychedelics. We're doing it without psychedelics because we're going to get the brain into the same brain state as the psychedelics. Without needing psychedelics your brain can start to rewire and fire around that new information. 

Melanie Avalon: That was my second question. It was because I had heard that psychedelics-- I don't know if this is true, I'd heard they make you just actually experience everything. Like not selectively look at something or experience something. Is that true? 

Patrick Porter: Right. I tell people that psychedelics are an aperture on a camera. That you open it up and you now get to see the whole picture and depending upon your perception of that picture you experience that reality. You bring with you your own set of values and beliefs and constructs. But then what happens is when you get into these altered states, those all pretty much get taken away. So, you enter into this new realm. We've done many studies now with psychedelics and BrainTap. What's interesting is that when we did the gamma series that we do, people are having a psilocybin trip without psilocybin. The brain has receptors for these things. In order for you to even experience it with even the plant-based medicines, you need to have the receptor sites in your brain. That's why we have these experiences and they trigger the brain to get into these. Let's say, superconscious states or these expanded states of consciousness where you seem to be basically connected to all things and you have answers to problems you didn't think you have. I've seen people say, that they felt like 20 or 30 years of therapy just washed down the toilet because this four-hour journey on a psilocybin took care of it all. So, it just depends on the person and their experience.

Melanie Avalon: In our everyday reality all of that information that we are not consciously seeing or experiencing, is it going somewhere and is it affecting us or is it not? 

Patrick Porter: Listeners, hold on for a second. So, you understand this. Our eyes take in 2000 pieces of information every second. Our brain processes 10 million pieces of information from our eyes. So, we're making this up. Our ears process 25,000 pieces of information every second, but we only process forty pieces of information. So, that means that even though we don't think we recall or hear something, we're processing everything. We did an experiment at our lab in New Bern, North Carolina, where we put a phone in the other room. We put a person on an EEG where it was live readings of the brain and then we rang their phone. Now, there's no way they could hear their phone it was on silent, so it just buzzed. Every time we pinged their phone, either through text or call, they had a cortical response, which means their deep inner brain responded. So, there was some kind of quantum entanglement between that person and their phone.

So, I think we're only on the tip of the iceberg. What this quantum energy is that's going on? Our brain is a quantum processor, so it's processing all of this information from the world around us and then we make sense out of it. It's not that reality makes sense. We make sense out of it. We put it into order. We give it time and space and duration, and then we function. If we talk like this outside of this podcast, we might get locked up or something. This is what neuroscience is talking about. Now, it almost sounds like we're talking to the rishis back 10,000 years ago in India because they're finding out that we're not this body that we think we are. Literally, we're light beings with frequency and duration. Basically, we know that energy doesn't die, so we don't have all the answers. But we do know that there's more questions than there are answers right now. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. Wait, those numbers, so for seeing because I think I wrote down the wrong numbers. So, we see how much and we process how much? 

Patrick Porter: We process 2000 pieces of information every second. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, that was wrong. We process 2000, but we see 10 million. 

Patrick Porter: Our brain gets information, they say 10 million bits of information every second from our eyes, from their auditory-- I mean the visual cortex.

Melanie Avalon: Okay, but we're literally processing 2000. So, we're adding in more information. 

Patrick Porter: Well, what they say is we only actually see about 20% of reality. The example I like to give is if you've ever been either at your home or at home of a friends and you're saying, "Hey, where's the salt and pepper?" They say, "It's right there on the counter." And you say, "No, it isn't." And then finally they come into the kitchen area and it's right there in front of you. They give it to you and you go, well, it wasn't there a minute ago that's neuroscience would tell us that-- they actually have a name for it. They call it a [unintelligible [00:14:37], which means, it's after the Bible quote where Jesus says, "You can't see the sin in another with a stick in your eye." What they're really saying, we all have blind spots. If that salt shaker happened to be in our blind spot, we wouldn't see it. Or if we didn't believe it was there, we wouldn't create it. It would still be there, but we wouldn't process it. It's almost like the--because remember, everything we're perceiving in the world is not outside of us. We're perceiving that inside of our own consciousness and our own brain. So, we have a relationship with the external world because we process it with our internal world. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. This is so fascinating. Actually, the last interview I did was Dr Loretta Breuning, and her books are all about the brain. She was talking about how there's, I forgot how many like 10 times more neural pathways going from the brain to the eyes then from the eyes to the brain. We're like really deciding [chuckles] what we see. I guess I've experienced this a lot with-- it's like when I know because I'll work with a lot of brands on this show and I feel like whenever I get a new brand, then I'll start a first sponsor, then I'll start seeing them everywhere where I never saw them before. Especially, if it's like a product in the grocery store. [laughs] I'll see it everywhere. I'm like, it's so weird to me that I didn't see it. The brain is like literally zoning in on things. So, that makes you really suspicious of people's memories. Like, how do we even remotely have the same memory of anything like that we experience together with another person? 

Patrick Porter: Well, yeah. Well, memories are reconstructions of experiences. So, it's all part of how do we interplay and how do we engage in activities. It depends on how we focus. Some people are so focused in the moment, they know where their attention is and they know where their feedback is to their information. But it's all about the hippocampus at that point in the brain and stress causes that-- If you're trying to get a memory of somebody or have a conversation with somebody, you're really engaging in the hippocampus activity. If it's stressed, that's why we don't remember names or dates or experiences, is that part of the brain gets basically handicapped. That's why there're so many different ways to engage the hippocampus and get greater blood flow and circulation. And then we find that people have better memories and better conversations and the brain functions at higher levels. 

Melanie Avalon: Gotcha. It's just so interesting though, because there's that whole issue of the actual memories and the hippocampus and how they may or may not be accurate, but then the original reality that it's based on could just be so different based on how your brain is interpreting that reality. 

Patrick Porter: Well, we believe in the training that I've been through over the years, is that nothing we have in our brain is real. It's been distorted, deleted, and changed so many times that what we think is our past is not our past. In fact, Dr. Richard Bandler, who was one of my first NLP instructors, he actually founded NLP. He would say that everyone deserves to have multiple past because then you can have a more productive future. If you think you only had-- Every time you bring up a memory, your brain reconstructs the whole experience and then files it away with the new information. Why not change it for the better? Give yourself a better past so you get a better future. 

Melanie Avalon: It's so funny. So, I actually think about this actively. Whenever I've had an experience where it's a memory that you're going to retell. I'm going to reframe based on what you just said, because I almost don't want to retell it, because I know that every time I retell it, I'm recrystallizing my version of it and I'm kind of getting farther away from the truth like each time [chuckles] I retell it, so that's a nice little reframe there. So, the actual frequencies or can we talk about the frequencies of both the Earth and the world and then our brains? 

Patrick Porter: Sure. Well, one thing, our brain is like our planet. So, if you and I were on a spaceship, we're heading toward Earth. Our Earth would have a resonant frequency between 0.5 and 100. Our brain has an evoked potential also of 0.5 and 100, which means it will mirror any frequencies in those bandwidths. These are called Earth frequencies and they have different names for them and we call them brainwaves when they happen in the brain. On Earth, we have things like the Schumann frequency. If we're around water, we would have 10 Hz frequency. If we're looking at a candle, that would be 10 Hz frequency. A fire is 10 Hz frequency. So, our body, these mirror neurons that we have and this cilia we have in our brain is always looking at our environment or listening to our environment, feeling our environment. All of that information is being fed into the central processor which is our brain and it feeds back through our system. In fact, through our biophotaic system which is our light system in our body, which most people don't talk about but is the newest one that people are really talking about, is that we change every 40 seconds, every DNA strand based on our environment. That's when you think about these frequencies, that's how we know. 

One of the stories I like to tell is, if you remember when the tsunami hit in Thailand and they showed pictures of it and people were saying "Where are all the dogs and cats? Where are all the animals?" Well, those dogs, cats, and animals are tuned into the planet. They were out of there. Where the people weren't tuned in and they're running after the wave. I mean, once we tune into our environment there's a lot of information that's being fed to us but we omit because there's too much information. We have to pick and choose what we're going to experience and what we're going to leave off the table because we can only process seven plus or minus two pieces of information at any one time.

Melanie Avalon: Wow. That makes you realize just how important or I'm assuming how important your physical environment is. 

Patrick Porter: Exactly. That's why there's-- like the ancient art of placement they call Feng Shui. We found that even people's minds there's actually a lot of self-help now moving into environments. Like if you improve your environment your mental state of anxiety or depression reduces or diminishes and could be gone just because you've cleaned up the world in which you live in. 

Melanie Avalon: Does the environment ever mimic the brain? 

Patrick Porter: I've not seen that but there are people that I'm sure that are better transmitters than receivers because our brain transmits and receives. Now, they know you've probably had the experience where you're sitting there and somebody's looking at you and they're behind you and you feel them looking at you. They now know that our eyes actually push light. So, our eyes have more mitochondria than any other part of the body per square centimeter. The brain has the most mitochondria but the eyes have 300 times more. You actually transmit and receive light from your eyes. That's one reason. It could also be that in that light is information. Like I'm thinking about you. If you're sitting watching TV and I'm walking into the room and I'm seeing you there, then you feel me. You go, "What are you looking at?" And you weren't looking you just felt it. So, we exchange information on levels that we're not consciously aware of all the time.

Melanie Avalon: Because I know I've had that experience where you feel like if you're in the room and there's somebody else that you want to get their attention, you feel like you can just look at them [laughs] really intensely and they will turn. [laughs] 

Patrick Porter: If you're a good transmitter, that will happen. They'll feel that because we're all generating fields of energy, it extends about 18 feet away from us. We can measure heart rate variability from up to 18 feet. That means that the field-- that the heart and there were fields within fields. We're not just one field of energy. We're multiple fields of energy and these different energies control how our body responds and how the world accepts us or rejects us.

Melanie Avalon: And speaking to that. So, something like heart rate variability, which I'm sure a lot of listeners are very familiar with, they probably have things like Oura Rings and stuff like that. The effects on that heart rate variability, for example, how potent is something like the environment versus something more internal determining that heart rate variability? 

Patrick Porter: I think it's a combination but what happens is if we feel safe, we're going to engage more of our parasympathetic system. If the environment tends to make us uptight or anxious or maybe even threatening, then it's going to turn our sympathetic system. So, depending upon how we function or how we feel that's why it's so important to feel safe within your own skin. You've probably heard that before. If you don't, then anything will upset you. There are people that, like, you drive in the car with them and you're driving normally, but as soon as you put on the brakes, they go, they get shocked. That might be their primitive reflexes, but it could be that they're basically not processing reality because they don't feel comfortable in their own skin, that everything is a danger. For instance, there's something called psychoimmunology, which simply means your psychology affects your immune system. And then they know people that are positive by nature, optimistic people, have a highly functioning immune system. People that are fear based by nature; they have an underperforming immune system. So, if you look at life as a series of challenges that's better than looking at it as a series of threats. So, internally and externally, they kind of work together in that way. 

Melanie Avalon: It's really interesting that I mean, it seems a little bit obvious because we talk so much about the importance of not being in a stress state and all of that. But just objectively, if you forgot that you knew all of that it seems like a fear-based system would be a stronger immune response because you'd be on alert mode. 

Patrick Porter: Problem is that there's something called the cell danger response. Every cell of your body is like a thinking brain. It's going to restrict to protect itself? And that restriction actually snuffs out the mitochondria because our body works best in a flow state than it does in a compressed state. Fear, think about when you're getting ready to fight or you're getting ready to run, you have to clinch every bustle and so you're basically restricting the flow. But if you look at Olympic athletes or pro-athletes, they function at that high level in a relaxed state. So, it has to be practiced. Some people do it naturally, but most of the time we need to practice that to get the body to respond in stress situations without the stress response. 

Melanie Avalon: Are any of the tracks or the algorithms specifically created to create a flow state in BrainTap? 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. They almost all are. When you hear the last four minutes of almost every track, what we're doing is we're doing an integration process because just having an experience doesn't mean much if it doesn't show up on your timeline. That's why, I have you imagine the next day, the next week, the next month, the people you're going to see. Think of your everyday world as the graphic user interface of a computer. Those things that show up in your life trigger different behaviors, attitudes. They actually engage new brain circuits. So, if you set up those brain circuits to be active to activate your best self, so you show up as your best self in those experiences, instead of your shocked self or your fear-based self, you're going to perform better. What we do have ones for-- We have, like, the peak performance program that we did with Julia Art that we took 1% at high tech companies and improved their skills by 19%. The biggest thing about that study, though, for the listener, is that when we had them do the-- we had them do a depression score before we started the study and then after. If they would have gone to a psychologist for assessment, they probably would have been put on some kind of drugs because we improved their what they call the Life Wellness Score by 70% because they felt like they got more out of life because we taught them to relax in the middle of the day and get rid of that stress. 

Melanie Avalon: How long was that study you said?

Patrick Porter: It was about 10 weeks. 

Melanie Avalon: Ten weeks, okay. How fast can people see effects from using BrainTap?

Patrick Porter: For sleeping, a good number of people will find out right away. I mean, we've had people-- we did a research project in Vegas one time, which isn't the best place to do a sleep study, but we did it with a group of doctors and we had everyone that had a problem sleeping fill out what's called The Pittsburgh's Quality of sleep score and then we had them do it at the end of the event and we had a 92% improvement in sleep scores over the weekend in Vegas at hotels. So, there is the potential that somebody, but a lot of people will start, like if it's about diet, they want to change. They might see themselves making better food choices or at least talking to themselves about better food choices. When you said that when you buy something, you start seeing it around or you bring somebody on the show, that's the reticular activating system. That's the part of the brain that basically marketers want you to have. They call it top of the mind awareness, but that part of the brain is things that we associate with or that are on our mind seem to show up more in our life because those are marked out if you will. So, the main thing about all this is how do we mark out reality so that we continue to grow and improve and get better than become stagnant or regress? 

Melanie Avalon: People will say that when they're like with technology talking about stuff, and then they start seeing it everywhere, like in their apps like Instagram and Facebook and stuff. I mean, so there could be something going on with that, but it sounds like it also could be that you're just more aware. 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. Well, remember, AI is going to mimic the human brain. They're trying to do everything the brain does. So, if you and I were having a conversation and we say something about containers for building homes. Now you and I are going to probably see containers building homes on [laughs] our social feed and even though they're not listening but it's going to show up. I think that there's of both going on there. 

Melanie Avalon: The actual waves of the brain, could you talk about that? Like theta, alpha, all the things? 

Patrick Porter: Sure. There're six primary brainwaves we work with all the time. And the four primary ones that people know about are beta, where we're talking right now. This is our primary prevailing brainwave and that should be about 45% of our brain activity while we're awake. This is our reactionary mind. We need that to interact, but we don't want to have too much of that because if we have too much of that, we can become too aggressive and we turn on too much of our sympathetic system. Alpha, which is one down from there, is our intuitive mind. That intuitive mind is where, like, if you and I were doing something that we enjoyed, time would fly. You know time is suspended when we get into alpha and theta. Now, between alpha and beta, which most people know about, that know about brainwaves, there's a brainwave called SMR, sensorimotor rhythm. 

This is the one that as we age, it starts to atrophy. So, when you think about balance, the vestibular system, it's controlled by this brainwave. Think of brainwaves like Wi-Fi networks that are positive, that are telling the body what to do. If we reduce or eliminate SMR, which happens as we age, we can't walk very well. We have to use a cane or maybe a walker. Maybe you eventually get into a wheelchair. We've shown at the lab that if we increase their SMR, their balance improves. We use a balance tracker to prove this. Those are the three that most people hang out in most of the time. If you drop down into theta, which is where most people dream about being in meditation and I can tell you right now, 99% of people don't go there because we've measured about 30,000 brains. In fact, most people, when they meditate, actually stress out their brain because they don't know how to do it. 

They're talking to themselves or they're falling asleep. That's a very different experience than having an awakened brain state like a Buddhist adept might have or something like that. That theta, though each of these brainwaves, by the way, actually triggers a neurotransmitter. When you're in beta, you're going to trigger dopamine. That's why almost every addiction is dopamine driven. And then when you get into alpha, it's acetylcholine, that's why when you fall in love, you feel timeless when you're with that person and you're basically having fun and giggling because these are the neurotransmitters that get released. Theta is the one that releases GABA. GABA slows down the brain's function, but also is the precursor to DMT, which when we talk about most of those-- the psilocybin's and things like that's what they're doing. They're increasing our theta or gamma, which I'll talk about in a moment, activity and they're producing DMT and there's the brainwave of delta, which is our deep sleep state. If we don't get that deep sleep that we need, we're not going to turn on something called the gliolymphatic system, which is something they found in 2015, that is something they didn't even have. 

There's no physiology book written before 2015 that talks about a lymphatic system in the brain, but they found it through deep sleep. In delta, the problem we have in our scans we've done over the years, the average person is walking around with about 60% of their brain in delta. So, that means that they are feeling like they're pulling a parachute behind them. This is caused by a couple of things. Number one, it could be a traumatic brain injury. But most of the time it just means a lot of inflammation in the body and the body wants you to go to sleep so it can fix it. But we're not going to do that. We're going to do coffee and sugar and all sorts of stimulants to stay going so we have to balance that out. And then, of course, there's the last brainwave. That's the newest kid on the block. It's called gamma. The gamma brainwave is more of a higher-level theta where you have this flow state that we talked about. When I've measured people who are professional athletes or creative people, healers, they always have a high degree of gamma activity. Our product, BrainTap actually has about a 21% increase of gamma when any session you listen to is going to increase your gamma with BrainTap, typically. 

Melanie Avalon: Wow. Okay, some questions. So, if people are on benzodiazepines, does that mean that they have more of a theta state?

Patrick Porter: They could, but remember, the reason they call it practicing medicine is everybody's different and they're just giving it to the person to see what kind of response they get. Because all allopathy does is it puts a chemical into the system and then how does the body respond to it. Not everybody, but you're trying to engage more alpha and theta. Science knows that that's the problem we have right now in our world is in fact to give you an example, when we did our study with autism, we found that they had almost no alpha activity. In one of the studies we did with JoQueta Handy out of Orange County, California, once we got the kids up to 23% alpha, 90% of them started speaking. So, that tells me that the brain uses that alpha frequency to instruct the vocal cords on how to move when you're thinking the thought because there's a lot that goes into speaking, we take it for granted. But there's a lot of physiological activity that happens to get us to speak even one word. 

Melanie Avalon: How do we compare to animals? How many, I know there're a lot of species, [chuckles] but do they have similar brainwaves? 

Patrick Porter: They do have brainwaves. In fact, we've been able to record the brainwaves and things on our NeuralChek with horses and dogs and cats. It's just a little harder to get it because they don't stay still as easily. [laughs] Sometimes we have to shave the area that we're going to be putting the probes on and what we find is when you find out what the brain is doing, you can really find out what the nervous system is doing. And for healing, that's really important because if you're not in a parasympathetic state, you're not going to heal. You've got to get even dogs, cats, and horses, you have to get them out of that sympathetic drive, which everything has. Animals have the freeze response. We have the freeze response. We just usually override that and it's so short. Like the possum has a longer freeze response, [chuckles] something like that. All brains, all mammals, and even dolphins. There's one of our doctors down in Miami, Florida, that does a Dolphin camp because he showed how when dolphins send their sonic waves to the brain. It actually can help heal some of these people's brain function problems. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow. That's so cool. [chuckles] What about AI? Does it exist in some sort of state and could it evolve different states, you think? 

Patrick Porter: Well, they say that Google's AI is sentient, but it seems [laughs] to be like you said, "I wouldn't put anything out of the realm of possibility, because what are we?" I mean, we're consciousness. What we had to do is we had to take these biological bodies that we have and make them sentient. How did we do that? How did it all happen? I mean, I believe in a higher power, in a greater source, but how did consciousness animate the physical body. You know when we die, they did a study years ago where they showed that when person dies, they lose three quarters of a pound.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, 3 grams thing. 

Patrick Porter: Yes. So, what is that? That's us. [laughs] I mean, because once you're not there, everybody believes in a life after death at a funeral pretty much. They always say, "Oh, Mom's not there. She's in a better place." If you talk to them two weeks before mom passed, they'll say, "There's nothing after this. This is all there is." I think that's changing because we understand the law of thermodynamics. That energy doesn't die, it just gets transformed into another state. So, I think it's possible that AI could become sentient. And some ways that's good, in some ways that's scary because Hollywood hasn't portrayed that advancement in a very good light. 

Melanie Avalon: [laughs] Not so promising. We can just listen to Elon Musk, I guess. One other question about the evolution of these brainwaves. Do you know if they evolved? Did they evolve one by one or did they all evolve at the same time? 

Patrick Porter: Well, what happens typically, like when you're a child-- when your baby is born, what happens is that baby is in a super state, which means that its brain is totally wired. As we learn, we actually unwire our brain. It's not the other way around. The brainwaves typically, they're going to be in delta most of the time up until 11 or 12 months. Some do it at different stages. Then they're going to start activating theta, they're going to activate alpha, then they're going to activate beta. By seven years old, they're going to now possess the capacity to pick and choose. Some people, it's five. I tell people, they go, "When do you know that happened?" I said, "What's your earliest memory?" When you remember like, "Hey, I'm here, I'm on Earth, I've got parents, I've got brothers and sisters, I've got to go to school." There's a point in time in everyone's life where they basically woke up. That's when you popped through the theta barrier and got into alpha.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, that is super cool. Okay. Do you think we will evolve a new brain state?

Patrick Porter: Yeah. Now we have Buddhist adepts that have been actually recorded at over 300 cycles per second. And so, in these higher states of consciousness, we have no idea when somebody says, "Are we using our full brain's capacity?" No, we're not even using a fraction of its potential. So, these frequencies, they change the structure of not only our physiology, but they change the structure of our reality. We're imbuing our reality with our energy. So, we have no idea. I believe that we're just touching the surface. Basically, we're like that baby that's coming out of into alpha. We're just waking up and realizing that there's something better and different about us. Of course, fear is the biggest deterrent to this. Fear shuts down all neurological functions. So, we need to get out of the fear-based model that seems to be out there, especially in our media and even our doctors, which have the best intent, but they're afraid they're going to get sued. So, they don't give us any good news, they only tell us the bad news. That's terrible because there's a lot of people out there that are very suggestible. In fact, the placebo effect is up to 40%. That means that when a doctor says something, it's almost like a medicine man. They not only predict the future, they can make the future happen. 

Melanie Avalon: With hypnosis, they'll say that some people are more susceptible than others. Is there something similar with meditation and also something like BrainTap? Like, are some people more susceptible to having their brainwaves changed more easily from external things?

Patrick Porter: Yeah. It's all learned, though. I mean, there are people they call somnambulistic, these are sleepwalkers. If anyone has walked or talked in their adult life during sleep, they're probably highly suggestible. They actually have a gene now that you can get on your DNA report, you can figure out if you have that gene. And the sad part about that is the pharmaceutical companies can now get rid of those people. So, they can actually put more drugs through because they don't have the placebo effect to deal with. The reality is that everyone can learn to be, "hypnotized or meditate." It's just some people start off I have a science officer; his name is Dr. Cidral. He speaks six languages. When we went to India on a university tour, I took him with me. By the time the three weeks were up, he's speaking Hindi. I said, "Francisco, when did you learn Hindi?" He said, "Well, we've been here for three weeks." His brain, he's like a universal translator. So, what we can do that's what I'm saying we don't even have a clue. But for other people that go, why is it so hard for me to learn a language?

Well, if you only learned one language, that circuit gets shut down. In meditation, depending upon how you were trained, if you were trained from a very early age that it's okay to imagine, create, daydream, all these things, you're probably going to be a better daydreamer, you'd probably be a better meditator. But there are people that are more, let's say we put them in the category of being left brained analytical people. They're not going to be as good, not because they can't. It's because they have this negativity in their mind because they always are trying to justify reality. You can't justify this reality, where a right brain person just, it is what it is, and they create everything, and it's okay. I say there's the California surfer and then there's a New York lawyer. Those are two different people and they're going to respond differently. Now, they can all benefit from meditation. They could probably all benefit from the right hypnosis. It's just a matter of finding what syncs up with their consciousness.

Melanie Avalon: Have there actually been studies where the pharmaceutical companies are selecting the population based on.

Patrick Porter: There's a really good book called Suggestible You. And I only don't like one thing he doesn't like-- I'm not a chiropractor, but I do appreciate chiropractors and I think they're very usable in this field of biohacking because they're pretty much the first biohackers. They figured out how to hack the nervous system and create health. For whatever reason, this guy doesn't like chiropractors so he might have been underwritten by the pharmacy company. But what he does is he talks about how now-- he even tells what the gene is that you can look for if you've ever had one of these DNA tests done. If you are susceptible or not.

Melanie Avalon: They would actually make the people in the study would they want them to be more susceptible so that they would more likely believe the drug that they're taking. 

Patrick Porter: They use it for whatever they want. They're going to use that information. If they want to prove that something is more susceptible and they can convince them of that. But a lot of studies, they don't say anything. So, once you know that and then you can structure your questionnaires to get the right person, who's going to agree that your solution. To give you an example, most drug studies are done with three different studies because only one typically works. We went against them actually just recently in Brazil where we're tested against fibromyalgia, against opioids, and BrainTap. We beat them in all three studies significantly because the opioids wear off before the end of the day. With BrainTap, if you do three BrainTap's a day, your own natural chemistry because the world's greatest pharmacy is not on the corner drugstore. It's within our own brain. We can activate that neurochemistry that's going to help you to stay pain free. Number one, because pain only happens in the beta brainwave. It doesn't happen in any other brainwave. 

Melanie Avalon: Whoa. So, if you were in a different brain state very deeply and then something painful happened to you, does that external stimulus switch you over to that state? Or can you sometimes be so deep in a different state like theta that you wouldn't even feel the pain? 

Patrick Porter: Well, my dad trained me to go through painless surgery with no anesthetic. They did shoulder surgery on me in 1981 and I did it without anesthetic. Yeah, so, he conditioned me for the surgery. Actually, every word in the surgery, everything that happened to surgery was designed to make me go deeper because there're no meanings in life until we give it meaning. The old expression when the guy slides into second base, is he out or safe? The home base umpire goes walking out, but the first base umpire says, "He's out, but he doesn't have a good view." The third base umpire says, "He's safe. He's got a really good view." The home base umpire says, "You're both wrong." Because he's neither out nor safe till I say he is. That's kind of the way our brain works. Nothing is or isn't until we say it is.

Melanie Avalon: Wow. My mind is blown. My mouth literally dropped open. That's crazy, because we haven't discussed what the BrainTap device actually looks like or what it has and all the [chuckles] aspects to it. It's like a headset, like the type where it's actually going over your ears. I'll let you tell more about the details, but there are LED lights in the actual ear pieces into your ears. And then also a visor thing that goes in front of your eyes that flashes lights as well and it syncs with your phone so that you can play the apps. And I did check. I remember when I was talking back and forth with your agent or whoever it was who I was talking to. I was like, is there the possibility to not use Bluetooth just because I get concerned about EMF and things like that so you can do it with an audio cord or you can use Bluetooth. What are the different parts of it? What's the purpose? 

Patrick Porter: Okay. I'll kind of take you through the evolution. First there was sound, we used Monroe Institute, which is probably the world's leader in they call it Hemi-Sync. But it's really-- what happens in the brain is we're going to put a 200 Hz frequency in one ear and a 210 in the other if we want to get 10 Hz because the brain always hears the difference between the two. These binaural beats are out there everywhere. So, what we found was that not everybody followed the binaural beats like everybody says, because you have to have perfect matched hearing to get them to work. So, we started using something called isochronic tones. Now, this is something Silva used back in the 70s. It's a weird sound. We don't make it available too much. There are sessions we have where you can hear these sounds. They're called pink noise or white noise and they're actually a rhythm and a cadence like the planet. 

We've layered it in there and then we put frequencies in, like solfeggio frequencies and [ unintelligible 00:46:25] frequencies. These all help us to represent a three-dimensional space, because now we can introduce light. So, sound is really important, and we get really good results with just our app. If people can't afford the headset, they can like our sleep study, where we help the coal miners get 70% improvement in sleep in just three weeks. When they use the app, it took six weeks. You can do it-- But what light does, because our brain, just like your last guest was talking about, is there's so much neurological activity that happens. Your eyes are not just attached to your brain. Your eyes are the brain. Because they have all these mitochondria, the mitochondria will absorb the light energy. When each cell is full of energy, our body shares that energy with the cells around it. They call this photobiomodulation. So, it will keep sharing that information back into the brain so we can give energy to the brain. That's important because it takes energy to meditate. Most people don't realize yoga. The most important yoga pose is corpse pose, because everything that the yogis did, all the rishis will tell you everything that they did up to the point where they relaxed, was to get their brain ready to meditate. But there are so many people that go to yoga and they don't get the neuroplasticity that they could get that they talk about. That's a real benefit of what's going on with yoga. You're doing all those physical exercises and breathing techniques to bring energy to your brain. Once you have that energy, you can meditate, you can visualize, you can realize things. 

Now, what we did with the ear lights, when people look at the ear lights, they always go, that's really weird, what's that about? Well, we did this also with the study with JoQueta Handy because were working with children, they could not understand my voice. So, I said, "What can we do?" Well, there are certain frequencies. Dr. Nogier found out there're seven frequencies, just like there're seven notes, seven sounds, seven chakras, all of these things. Well, our body resonates and makes noise, actually. So, if these frequencies are all present in our body, we're healthy, but if anything's out of balance, we're not healthy. So, what we did, because the body will take what it needs and discard what it doesn't. Every two minutes, those lights are changing their frequency to one of the other frequencies in the [unintelligible [00:48:45] spectrum. And then we're also sharing 810 nanometer light and 653 nanometer light. These are really important in the 470 nanometers, these lights what's going on is we're mimicking sunrise and sunset, but we're running the energy through the meridians and we can actually measure this. 

We're in Atlanta all the time, we should have you come over. We could do a scan with our NeuralChek, it takes about five minutes. We could do a pre and post and show you how your nervous system is doing. Because we show that with using lights during the meditation, you actually increase your energy. This is why all the biohackers are using it. They can measure it on all their devices and they see their energy change. And then what happens is you've upgraded your nervous system to have more capacity because you can't get rid of stress, but what you can do is you can build your capacity to handle stress. That's what's key in the world we live in today. Most people are trying to get out of stress. There's no way we're going to get out of it. We're being bombarded by EMF fields. By the way, BrainTap is the first line of defense that Dan Devon, talks about for radiation poisoning with the EMF, because even on Bluetooth, there's really no EMF. If you use an EMF meter and put on Bluetooth, your phone should be on airplane mode but you can have Bluetooth still on. Once that pairs, it's a direct link. Wi-Fi in your home is much worse than Bluetooth. 

We've tested it all and Dan Devon certifies devices and he put me on his board. Because everybody that they've put into, they have somebody like we have one doctor who if you turn on an iPhone around him, he passes out, he's so sensitive. So, some people are more sensitive. When you put these light and sound together, what they know about sound we did with light. So, the eyes aren't just flashing, they're flashing at a very specific Earth frequency, whether we want to get gamma or delta or whatever brainwave that's going to match up with the sound. Now, we're creating a three-dimensional space for them to visualize into. Now we can play music. The reason we introduce music is there's been a lot of science about music and how it improves the nervous system function. The main reason is that they found out that this 10-cycle music or what they call baroque classical music. We don't use that specifically, but we use music like that that's been encoded and that music makes you smarter. Just listening to that music they've done test after test. You don't have to learn anything new. It's just going to make you smarter by listening to it. 

Now, that we've got you in what we call a hypermnesia state or super memory state, now we have about 400 sessions with no voice. If people are worried about that, they can just listen to the sessions. But the reason you want to listen to voice, especially if you want to make a positive change in your life, is the words that you choose are going to change 2300 different gene expressions. So, we know that the average person has 80,000 thoughts a day and 60,000 of them are negative. We need an upgrade in our self-dialogue, so that there's a saying that says, "If you talk to other people the way you talk to yourself, you have no friends." So, we need to love ourselves, appreciate ourselves, have the right kind of communication within ourselves, and basically honor ourselves. It's okay to fail. What's the worst thing you can do is stop or stop trying. The key is to just adapt, improvise, and overcome. It's not just a Marine slogan. It's a way of life. 

Melanie Avalon: The music making you smarter. I was in a debate with a friend the other day about this. Can a person actually improve their IQ? Does their smartness or IQ at any given time is it fluctuating? 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. If you're under stress, you're not going to have as great IQ. That's why certain people perform better in test than others. They might be smarter in the everyday world, but you give them a testing scenario and certain people perform better. So, the key is to know what your performance levels are but I do believe anyone can get smarter. I mean, I did. I was held back in second grade and I became an honor roll student. So, that only happened because my dad taught me to do Silva and he never said one word about improving my school. We did it all about sports because that's what motivated me. But the brain will take whatever is working in other areas of your life if you allow, it will generalize it into the parts of your life where you need it, because the brain doesn't say, "Oh, wow, that works really good over here. I'm just going to use it in this area." We can generalize those improvements across the grid.

Melanie Avalon: But the photobiomodulation and that energy going from the eyes to the brain, does it also transfer to the rest of the body, the energy? 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. They actually have-- I've been trying to locate this because I saw it at a conference in Chicago. They showed a video done, I think it was at Harvard, where they started a laser on someone's index finger and that's all-- They just put it there and they traced the biophotaic change all the way through the body. So, it doesn't matter-- When we do it on the ears, we show the meridians improving throughout the whole body. Like people might have pain in their knee or their ankle, and when they get out of that stress state the body just basically takes care of that situation. 

Melanie Avalon: So, with what you're listening to, do you think there'll be the possibility in the future with the app to where there's benefit to your name being involved in what you're hearing or saying? So do you think there'll be the possibility in the future for tracks like maybe AI tracks where you can put in your name so it'll customize it to talk to you personally. 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. We have people working on that right now. I wrote a book, actually, years ago called The Power of Your Voice. It's only sold in the UK. It's not really even available now, but on Amazon, it's $200 if somebody wants to buy it. I can't believe it, somebody's making copies of it and selling it. Basically, I talk about how important it is for you to change your internal dialogue. So, even though you're listening to me, you're really changing my voice to your voice to hear it. You're not hearing my voice; you're hearing your example of my voice. But, yeah, if we could personalize it, my envision is that we're going to have an app soon where people can read my scripts in their own voice. 

Melanie Avalon: Or maybe I was thinking I probably shouldn't laugh because maybe a lot of podcasts are doing this. But one of the ad agencies reached out the other day about there's new technology now in the podcasting world, probably radio, too, where it's AI that will create your ads for you in your own voice. And I was just like, "Umm, no." [laughs] That's a hard no. I guess my question about that, could there be the possibility of and would there be a benefit to hearing the tracks in your own voice to yourself?

Patrick Porter: Yeah. What I believe is that there's a filter when you hear somebody else. You know up till about seven years old, like I was talking earlier, you basically were a sponge, you absorbed everything and then you had to start sorting it out. I tell people when your mom and dad tell you spit out that first bunch of food, you started to realize that you could make a choice. So, we have filters. Some people don't take advice at all. Like, you might have friends that you give them advice and they get angry at first, then they think about it, and then a few days later, they come back and say, "Hey, thanks for that information. I'm sorry I jumped on you." Because their first reaction is always negative, because it came outside of themselves. They needed to process it, put it into their own language, work out their own scenarios, and then it made sense. That happens all the time. 

Melanie Avalon: Yes, okay. [chuckles] I know somebody like that. I just had not thought about that. Oh, speaking of the voice, if you're doing, like, affirmations and things like that, I've heard you should actually say it out loud, because then a different part of your brain hears it than just thinking it. Is that true? 

Patrick Porter: Well, you want to put it everywhere you can, obviously. I believe that affirmations themselves need to be changed. As you notice, mine are not really true affirmations. They're questions most of the time. So, I'll give you an example. If I said, "I'm healthy, I'm healthy." And I look in the mirror and I got a pot belly and I'm just drinking a beer, my brain isn't going to believe that. If I say, "What would it be like if I was healthy? What would I see? What would I be doing today? How would I function?" Now, the brain, we made a statement into an action. Now, the brain loves action, so now it puts it on the timeline and you start activating it. So, I think affirmations are a good start, but you don't do anything because if you believe they're not true, they're not true for you, and they'll just fall silent. But if you ask the question, "You don't have to believe what I'm saying but what if you started using it and your life improved? How would you notice that? What would you see, hear, or experience?" Now, your brain is trying to figure that out because the brain is, they call it a servomechanism or a goal-striving organism. If we present the right information, it will give us the answer. And then because we asked the question, it thinks we want to apply that in our life. So, that's why I kind of turned the affirmation thing on its head. That came from my training with neuro-linguistic programming and all the other therapies over the years. 

Melanie Avalon: Well, I love that. Questions are my favorite things, [chuckles] so that's great. Something that I found really interesting and I'm going to ask you, when you refer to it, do you call it BrainTap or do you call it like The BrainTap? 

Patrick Porter: I just call it BrainTap. Sometimes I guess I probably would call it The BrainTap, but I don't want to be like The Ohio State or something. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay. [chuckles] It's true. Okay, something that I noticed while using BrainTap is that, well, it feels like a very experiential active experience, but it also feels very passive. What I mean by that is, at least for me, when I try to meditate or when I have tried meditation programs, it's felt like it's beneficial, but it's also felt like, I have to figure out the system. I have to figure out what to be doing here. I have to learn compared to using BrainTap, it's just like guiding me there. I just do it. So, two questions there. One, how much effort is required on the part of the person to actually use BrainTap? And, for example, if you find yourself momentarily zoning out, did you lose the benefits? I guess the lights are still going on. 

Patrick Porter: We've done this in front of audiences all the time and I usually do it after lunch. People are a little tired and I'll ask for the most skeptic person, and we'll hook them up to EEG, and we'll have it running live while I'm doing my lecture and they'll fall asleep. Some people are actually snoring, but their brain is still changing because this isn't for your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is just a passenger. So, you can be thinking other things, you can be doing other things. What we're doing is we're training the brain in these different brain states. What will happen eventually is that kind of monkey mind will go away. Some people just hear. Hello, this is Dr. Patrick Porter, then eyes open, wide awake, and that's all they hear between it and that's fine. You don't have to be present to get the experiences because of the subconscious. I tell people, you probably had the experience when you were on the couch, you're watching a war movie or something, you fell asleep, and then all of a sudden, you're in the war during the dream. That's the key here, is we want to engage the most powerful computer on Earth to start solving your problems. If we give it the right information before you go to sleep now, it's got whatever, six to eight hours or ten hours, however long you sleep to figure out the solution and incorporate it into your dream scenario, which then plays back as new behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that will improve your life. 

Melanie Avalon: Similar question and I'm not advocating this, it does beg a good question about the whole process of what would happen. So, when I was first trying out the different tracks, [chuckles] I was taking notes for this interview. So, I was like starting and stopping. What happens with that? Is it really important that you're on the whole timeline consistently or just for a normal person, say they're doing it and then they get interrupted. Can they come back to right where they were? Do they need to start over? 

Patrick Porter: That is okay. It's starting a track in the middle that's not good. Your brain will come back from wherever you're at. If it's let's say that-- Because we have some people doing this together, we show them how to daisy chain them, if you will, in clinics and they do 10 people at a time. We told them don't let-- Once the session starts, the person has to wait to the next cycle because you can't just jump in from a high beta state into deep theta. That's too big of a jump and the person would just get irritated. It doesn't really work the same way. You have to go through the whole sequence. If you get it interrupted or you wake up the brain knows how to wake up. That's why at the end it's only about two minutes, you'll feel the session speeding up to bring you back up and drop you off into high alpha, so you can wake up and come back. 

Melanie Avalon: And what about other things during it? Like I have a Sunlighten sauna, so my head is outside of it. Can I be laying in the sauna while using it. 

Patrick Porter: Oh, yeah. I do mine every morning. When I'm at home I do a-- We have a Sunlighten sauna at the office, a big one. And then I have one that I can sit in with that my head pops out of, and that's when I have at home. I do that every morning. That's my morning ritual when I'm at home. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, my goodness we match. Okay. [chuckles] Yeah, I've been doing it in my Solo, my Sunlighten and I was like this is great, but I got to make sure this is okay. [chuckles] That's awesome. How about -- Well, it guides you through breathing. Should people also do conscious breathing exercises or just go with the track? 

Patrick Porter: They could. We have a bunch of breathing exercises now. We're adding more with some Breath Masters that are coming on board with us because I think breath is a really important part of changing the brain. I was published the last two years three times in PubMed because we did breathing exercises that mimic what the BrainTap does. Like pranayama breathing and things and how it affects the frontal lobe. I'm always interested in what can we do without technology, but then how can we make technology for those people that don't want to spend 4 hours a day doing this? 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Okay. How do you feel about tapping? 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. We like that too. When I had my franchise company, we taught all of our therapists to do that but that's just the first step. A lot of people forget you've got to integrate that. Every time you have an exertion or every time you change the brain's function, the sooner you can begin to use that function, which means you put on the BrainTap after those tappings and maybe do a 10-minute integration session. The integration is what's going to make that last. Even though I've been through all the training and they say, "All you got to do is this and it's forever." I can tell you it's not because we've saw thousands of people and they'll come back, because the nervous system nothing's forever. Every 72 hours, your nervous system is going to try to go back. So, you got to do something long enough to reset the pattern of the nervous system so that basically those fears or anxieties or stressors don't show up again in your physiology.

Melanie Avalon: Okay. That is interesting. The 72 hours thing, because I heard on a different podcast, it was not about any of this, really. But it was talking about how when you have a reaction to something where you want to really react an email or something that somebody said. He was saying that you needed to wait 72 hours because that was how long it took the brain, like, the nervous system to reset. And then after 72 hours, you would know if your initial reaction was intuition or just reactionary. Does that relate to that? 

Patrick Porter: Right, 70% of your nervous system is in your brain. So, he's saying the same thing. Yeah. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, man. Okay, that is exciting. Because he said that, and I've been, like, little bit suspicious, [laughs] so this is really exciting to hear this. You talked about the evolution or what you're working on with the tracks and the AI or voices, or adding people's names and stuff like that. Are you working on anything new with the actual physical technology of it with the lights and all of that? 

Patrick Porter: We're always coming out with something new. I know that in the future we don't have a date yet, but we're working on having noise canceling for those people because a lot of people use it on the airplanes and things like that. But we're always upgrading. We're always trying to figure out new ways. We're actually working on a sleep mask that would block out all the light and it's a full spectrum. In the future, we will have-- all of our sessions are encoded for full spectrum light, which means they can change colors. We could have not just blue, and then at night, we could have a more green tint to it, then blue like the sky does as the sun goes down. We're going to mimic. Our sessions mimic more like the rising and setting of the sun that's already programmed into the sessions. We just need the technology to catch up with us so we can do that. We can do it in the lab, but it's just not feasible to do it in the device yet. That's on the breadboard, we're working on it. We have a group, actually, of researchers working with myself and Dr. Cidral to find out how we can make that happen. 

Melanie Avalon: That was one of my questions, because I talk so much on this show about blue light and stuff like that. And so, the sleep tracks are still using that blue light, but it sounds like that's not an issue with stopping. 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. The blue light that's bad is below 450 nanometers. Ours is 470. Ours is actually healing light and we need energy to sleep. That's the problem. We've all probably seen children that they were so wound up they couldn't sleep. That's because they expended their energy and they can't sleep. The brain needs energy. All of our sleep studies and every one of our sleep studies beat anything else out there, and they're using the blue light because your eyes are closed. We're using a very low-level light. We're only using eight LEDs, where your cell phone has over a million. It's such a low level of it that it's not going to bother you. I mean, some people there are 20% of the people that use BrainTap that we say, "Just don't use it at night if you're that sensitive." Or buy yourself some blue blocker glasses and wear those while you're doing the BrainTap.

Melanie Avalon: That didn't even occur to me. That's funny. Yeah. It's interesting that you close your eyes. The light still goes through when your eyelids are closed. 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. It's through photobiomodulation. The actual experience of BrainTap is using the cranial nerve, too. It's not even using the way you see. That's just another side benefit to what BrainTap does. We're changing the brain based on the nervous system not on what you're seeing. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. Okay. If you open your eyes, would you get the same effect, or no? 

Patrick Porter: It's very stressful to the eyes just because of all the flashing. When we do all the studies, especially with the autistic kids, they keep their eyes open and we still get a great response, but it's a lot of energy going into the brain, so closing your eyes just makes for a better experience. 

Melanie Avalon: What studies are you currently working on right now? 

Patrick Porter: Well, we just finished the one that I was talking about with in Brazil, but down in Seminole College right now. If you go to their website, you're going to see BrainTap there because they use it as a recruitment tool. So, that was because the study we did with the golfers who are now three-time national champions, they have the highest GPA in the school. We're doing a school wide study on accelerated learning using BrainTap, and some of that's being done with the app and-- most of it's being done with the app, I should say. A group is doing it with the headset so we can see the difference between what's happening there. And then we also have a dementia study based on our pilot study where we took everyone off the dementia scale in six weeks, and yeah, their brain had 39% neuroplastic change over the course of the study. And then when we checked them a month later to see what was happening, they called it a washout period. They actually improved it even more. So, the brain can learn and develop, of course, we had them go back to using it because if you don't do anything, you're going to go back to what you had before, we don't want them to. When they were taken off the dementia scale, they didn't want that to happen again. 

Melanie Avalon: Wow. Were these people that were I don't know much about the range of the dementia scale; did they have severe levels of dementia or were they just sort of approaching. 

Patrick Porter: They were somewhere in the dementia spectrum. We didn't take anyone who had Alzheimer's, so some were severe, some were mild. But we know the sooner you start working on your brain, the better. I tell people it's much easier to make repairs on your home when there're little things to do every day instead of waiting for a hurricane to come and blow it down. [chuckles] We got to take care of it now instead of later. 

Melanie Avalon: I just want to use this, like, every second of my life now. Can you use it too much? 

Patrick Porter: No, you can't use it too much, but if you use it more than three times a day, we found that there's really not a lot of neurological benefit. But if you're in the hospital, like, we have a program they use in several hospitals, and there're 10 sessions in that medical series, some people just listen the whole time and it speeds up their healing because they're more in a parasympathetic state. 

Melanie Avalon: Yeah. One question I did have. I don't know if it would beneficial, but when I was doing one of the sessions, I was thinking about how it would be fun if there was a mode where you could just play music you like and it would adapt to that. Would that even be beneficial? 

Patrick Porter: That's part of what we're going to be building into that app I was talking about is you could upload your own music for yourself.

Melanie Avalon: So, I can play like Taylor Swift? [laughs] No, I'm kidding. I'm not kidding, though. 

Patrick Porter: Hopefully, when you look online, LeAnn Rimes uses BrainTap. And we talked to her, about she came out with a series of chants, she calls them, and I told her, I said, "When the time's right, we're going to encode those to have them on there." We have different music and we're doing other chants too. Hers are more affirmations, but there are Indian chants, like they call them Bhajans that we're encoding. We're going to make it so that you can upload your own library just for you and then you pick the algorithm. And then it puts it into your locker and then you can listen to that however much you want on the app. 

Melanie Avalon: Oh, that's really exciting. Well, I was thinking because there are some songs where you get those, that's a lot of instrumental music, too, for me as well. I was thinking, wow, if I could pair this with this BrainTap, that would be like whole another experience. 

Patrick Porter: How people are doing it now. They get a mixer and you put your music you want in one track, in one part of the mixer, and you put the BrainTap in the other, and then you mix it out into your earphones. You can do it that way, but that takes another piece of equipment. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, very cool. This has been so incredible. I'm sure that listeners will probably all want a BrainTap now. And now I want to get it as a present for everybody that I know. I'll put links in the show notes to all of that. How can people best follow your work and all the things.

Patrick Porter: Yeah. Well, personally, they can go to drpatrickporter.com or @drpatrickporter, they can see me on social media. There's a lot of YouTube videos if they liked what we talked about here, there're literally hundreds of videos and talks that I did about different topics. But braintap.com is the main site. Everything on my site, besides my talks and things like that are driving people to go to BrainTap, and that's where they can buy things and try things out, and you'll put those links in the show notes, and then they can go there and check it out. 

Melanie Avalon: Something else that's really cool in the app for listeners, there's a section of-- it's a lot of people like in the biohacking world, a lot of guests I've had on this show, and so they have personal tracks, so it's pretty cool. Well, this has been absolutely amazing. The last question that I ask every single guest on this show and it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. What is something that you're grateful for? 

Patrick Porter: Like I said at the very beginning, I was blessed to be the son of an alcoholic because if my dad didn't go get help, I would be the one sitting on the bar stool today trying to find and struggle. So, I'm very grateful to my father and my mother, who got us into this field at a very early age. I don't feel like I ever work. I feel like I'm still doing fun things I used to do when I was growing up. So, it's great to be doing something that doesn't feel like work. 

Melanie Avalon: I love that so much. I agree. I just love everything I do so much. I often think about how amazing the world would be if everybody was just doing what they loved, be like whole another experience. But thank you so much. This has been so incredible. I so appreciate all of the work that you're doing and creating this incredible product that can change so many lives. So, thank you, thank you. Yes, please let me know if you're in Atlanta ever. [chuckles] That would be so epic and so amazing. So yeah, thank you. Hopefully, we can talk again in the future. 

Patrick Porter: Yeah. We'll do it. Thank you for having me. 

Melanie Avalon: Thanks, Patrick. Bye. 

Patrick Porter: Bye.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]