Flexing Your Mental Muscle without Breaking a Sweat! Introduction Early on in grade school, I was identified with several developmental delays, some called them learning disabilities. I was years behind in reading, writing and mathematical processing I was pulled out of class on a regular basis for speech therapy. The only thing that kept me moving from grade to grade was the fact that there was evidence that I was acquiring knowledge because once in a while, under the right conditions, I could demonstrate it. My parents being respected psychologists was a great asset to me because they were amazing advocates for me. They worked with the school and the teachers to create these ideal conditions whereby I could demonstrate that in fact...i was learning. After years of various therapies, interventions and special exceptions, I made little improvements in overcoming my disabilities. When I was 9 years old, my parents decided to bring me to a special lab where they were going put EEG sensors and subject me to hours of testing, I'll never forget it. I was traumatized not because of the poking and prodding they these strange men were going to do to me but because I had to miss my favorite show in the world...buck Rogers in the 21st century to make the early Am appointment. The other reason, I'll never forget it is because of what I overheard the doctors saying about me to my parents after the testing was complete They told them that all the individual parts of my brain were either normal or above normal. They made a point to emphasize that the right side of my brain as especially active and vibrant. The problem as they saw it, was that there were significant breaks in the way the individual parts of my brain communicated with each other.
NOW, I did not know it at the time, but those words would end up defining my purpose in life and the research and product development I do today. After that day, everything changed because to me and my parents, the solution was simple. It was all about communication. It was about getting my brain to function as a single unit instead of just a bunch of individual parts. After this diagnosis, my parents worked with me day in and day out with various educational activities that they believed would help increase communication between the right and left side of my brain and to all the individual areas. By the time I finished grade six, I started making some huge improvements and by the time I finished grate 8 I was ready for the advanced program in high school. Fast forward to today... I am forever fascinated and engaged with how information, electricity and blood flows moves, expand and contract in the various areas of the brain. I am in total awe and the sheer beauty and complexity of how the brain will bounce electrical signals from one side to the other and move blood flow into certain areas and away from others in efforts make sense of the world and adapt to its environment. After 15 years of curiosity and fascination, I purchased my first EEG machine and started to run experiments on a technology I discovered called Brainwave Entrainment. Brainwave entrainment caught my attention because through the use of light and or sound stimulation, people were able to get some amazing results ranging from stress relief all the way to helping children with learning disabilities improve their academic performance. That was the part that really hit home for me in a big way. I want to share with you some of the clinical peer reviewed research that got me so excited about this technology years ago. An average 33% increase in intellectual functioning among children with ADHD in 5 categories measured by the standardized WISC 3 intelligence assessment test. (6 weeks) Increase in GPA by.62 points as measured in the next semester the control was a negative.22 GPA as measured the next semester 81% improvement in focus and attention as measured by the WISC 3 Freedom from distractibility scale 34% reduction in fatigue.6 Grades reading level improvement in just 2 weeks the control was.2 Grades Significant and immediate reduction in stress and anxiety after a 40 minute session
After playing with this technology for some time, I observed increases in my own mental performance across the board. My stress levels went down and my ability to focus and attend to complex things went up in ways that I didn t even think to expect. Now the most popular explanation for why Brainwave Entrainment worked was due to a phenomena called a frequency following response. A Frequency following response is this thing that causes the brain match and then follow external frequencies (usually light and sound) that has a rhythm is similar to our own brainwave activity. So if you listen to a 10 Hz (cycles per second beat) long enough while we were looking at the electrical activity in your brain, we would start to see your brainwaves begin to sync up with that 10Hz beat. Once your brain was in sync with that beat, we could change that beat to 11Hz, or 12hz or lower it down to 8Hz and as long as it was done slowly and consistently, your brain would follow it. This effect is called entrainment. And the idea is that when we look at the brainwave activity of people when they are asleep, it looks a certain way, when we look at people when they are in a peaceful meditative state, it looks another way. When people are performing at the top of their intellectual capabilities, their brainwave activity looks a certain way. So the big idea is to use brainwave entrainment to shift and move the electrical activity in the brain so that it lines up with whatever valued outcome that you wanted to create for yourself. And it works!!! And because it worked for me, just like they said it would. I bought in to the idea that it was this Frequency Following Response phenomenon that was responsible for the results. It wasn t until a couple years later after I started making my own Brainwave Entrainment with extensive experimentation, I was starting to get really great results without getting a frequency following response. In other words, from time to time, I would create a Brainwave Entrainment audio that was designed to produce a specific effect and it achieved the desired result without actually entraining people. When I would create these anomalies, I would give them out to ever person that would take them just to be sure. A handful of them produced such great results with so many people that I got testimonials great testimonials from just about everyone that used those including doctors and psychologists. In fact, these anomalies were getting better results without getting a frequency following response then the ones that produced a result that did get a frequency following response. As happy as I was to get these results, it caused a big problem for me because If Entrainment was what made this technology work, then why where these anomalies producing results without entrainment?
It begs the question.. What else is going on? There must be something else that makes this type of technology work besides a frequency following response. I began to rigorously compare the audios that produced a frequency following response with the ones that didn t. Here s what I found. In the ones that produced the best results that did not entrain people, I was shifting and moving some of the background sounds in the audio in efforts to make them a little more interesting to listen to. This discovery took me down an entirely new path where I let go of the idea that entrainment was necessary to produce a result. I started to ask new questions and develop new ideas about how and why the auditory and visual system responds to certain types of stimulation. After years of research and development and what essentially amounts to a big pile of money, I created Passive Brain Fitness audio and video technology. It uses the same type of technology that is used to create brainwave entrainment but it does it for a completely different purpose. What Passive Brain Fitness does that is radically different from brainwave entrainment is that its primary purpose is to encourage the brain to bounce electrical signals back and forth between the left and right sides of the brain at specific rates and speeds.while getting as much of the brain involved in the process. Now when this happens, several important things occur in the brain: 1. Electrical activity expands in the brain 2. Blood flow expands in the brain 3. The overall electrical activity and blood flow in the brain trend towards a higher degree of balance and symmetry 4. And depending on the rate and speed we can get this cross hemispheric communication to occur, we can rev up mental performance or calm it down very quickly. Now why is all that important The quickly part is very important because when it comes to Entrainment most results take at least 35 minutes and in most cases upwards of an hour. With Passive Brain Fitness, we can produce better results in side of 10 minutes. Now the reason I call it Passive Brain Fitness is because the mechanisms that I use to get the brain to repeatedly bounce electrical signals back and forth between the left and right side of the brain causes several subconscious and automatic processes to do a massive amount of internal math.
So let me illustrate this point for you. Imagine that you are sitting alone in your apartment or house and maybe you re relaxing watching TV or reading a book. Suddenly, you hear a loud and unfamiliar sound coming from a corner behind you. What do you do without even thinking about it? You quickly turn your head to the direction that the sound came from. If you re like most people, you ve probably never given this automatic response much thought. Well let me tell what actually makes that process work because its actually very fascinating. Ears and all the associated organs that make that work are very unique when compared to all of our other sense organs. It takes in sound 360 degrees, up and down all the time and it never stops. Once a sound has relevance or meaning to you, good or bad or more information needs to be gathered to assign a meaning to a sound, you re brain automatically begins to track the origin of the sound, its location and movement of the sound in relationship to you. You re brain automatically does a form of triangulation. That s how you know which way to turn your head. Now depending on if the sound repeats itself, changes it s frequency and / or place of origin and / or movement in space in relationship to you, that internal math gets very complex and heavy. Probably some of you have had the pleasure of doing that kind of math by hand it can get pretty crazy. BUT, your brain along with the auditory system can do it really fast. The way it handles this math is it bounces electrical signals back and forth from the right and left side of your brain. Now, if I can put a set of headphones on you and though one method or another get you to assign some relevance or importance to a series of sound that you hear then begin to move them in a Three Dimensional space in ways that change their frequency, location and movement in relationship to you, and I keep doing it for 10 minutes straight, what I am essentially doing is causing your brain to a massive amount of mental math I m giving your brain a workout! And It happens passively because we are leveraging a natural phenomenon of the brain works mostly below the conscious awareness. The visual system is actually less complex when it comes to bouncing signals back in fourth in the brain but all light stimulus gets projected to roughly 40% of your brain. That s huge chunk. Not all light data that comes in through the eyes gets the full attention of that 40% of the brain. The visual system reserves much of its processing power for things like complex shapes, colors, movement and how objects change their position in space relative to one another and relative to you.
If this weren t true, people driving cars would have never happened It s this type of processing that the visual system does that keeps us from bumping in to stuff. Traditionally, the way light stimulation is delivered is through these special goggles that have all these little tiny led lights in them and the simply flash off and on at specific rates. While clinically proven and tested to produce a strong response from the brain, it really doesn t do much in the way of getting that 40% of the cortex involved in heavy processing. So what I decided to do is take these flashes of light, put them in various geometrical shapes that move on screen, change their position in space relative to each other and in some ways, in relation to the observer. Done this way, we get much more of that 40% of the brain working, doing calculations and responding to the stimulation. Again, we re passively exercising the brain. Now when we combine the Passive Brain Fitness Audio and Video at the same time, we re really putting your brain to work without you having to anything to make it happen. Aside from putting some headphones on and watching one of these videos, It is a virtually 100% passive workout for your brain that: Builds new neural pathways that build better connectivity thought in the brain It encourages and strengthens communication between hemispheres and various regions of the brain (helping to bridge any communication gap that may exist) It increases the capacity for you to process sensory information more equally using resources from the left and right side of the brain. (You don t need to be left brained or right brained any more you can work out your brain to be both) And, just like any good workout, you increased blood flow, which brings more oxygen, removes toxins and electrical activity in general. So beyond some of the obvious benefits, why is all of this so important? Well just like Brainwave Entrainment, it can boost your mental and physical performance except it does a better job in less time. I also believe it does a far better job of strengthening your brain in many different way that have many long term benefits. Different from active brain fitness that burns out your conscious energy, Passive Brain Fitness can actually increase your conscious energy and capacity to learn and be productive. And this is only the beginning.
If you use it strategically, with just a little bit of expert know how, you can use this technology desensitize or even completely eliminate unwanted and habitual stress, fear and anxiety and even depressions. I ve used it this way many times with great success. Including with my own mother. And let me share with you why I think it can be used to solve many quality of issues that so many people suffer from every day like stress, fear, and anxiety and overwhelm. Very simply, stress and just about every intense negative emotion, causes the electrical activity and blood flow to shrink away from very important parts of the brain like the pre frontal cortex. That s right up here. That s the CEO of the conscious brain. It s what allows you to think clearly, make good decisions and solve problems to the best of your ability. It s the part of the brain that helps control and choose your emotional state rather than just reacting to everything in your environment. You re brain, just like your body has many specialized organs and regions that do very important things for you and when the blood flow and electricity moves out of those areas, those organs won t be able to do their job to the best of their ability. Every single one of us has had some intense negative emotion like, stress, fear and anxiety complete tank our productivity and ruin our day. What would happen if you could take a couple breaths, use a bit of light and sound stimulation for 10 minutes and force that blood flow and electrical current back into those areas that help you solve problems, be happy and productive? Everyone has stress from time to time. It s natural but what happens when things like stress, fear and anxiety become a regular part of everyday life? Well neuroscience has taught us that whatever your do, over and over again, your brain will begin to simplify the execution of whatever it s even the feeling of emotions. If a bad feeling goes on and on day in and day out for a long period of time, brain will sometimes completely automate the process. If that happens, the brain will simply produce the bad feelings with the associated decrease in electrical current and blow flow that comes with it even if the initial reasons for the bad feelings are gone. And this is exactly what happened to my mother several years ago. Now, Im not going to go into detail about how and why it happened but I will tell you that it has taken a terrible toll on her physical and mental health and it almost took her life. What I am going to show you know is a series of slides of my Mothers brainwave activity as she is experience anxiety. Then I am going to show you what happens when she tries to use her brain in a focus and concentration talks. this will blow you away especially if you know anything about EEG readings because I have never seen anything like this. It showcases the true cost of fear and anxiety. Following that, You re going to see her brainwave activity while she is experiencing fear and anxiety, then you re going to see what happens in her brain as a result of using a 10 minute passive brain fitness video and then you ll see what happens when tries to use her brain on a focus and attention task.
(Through practice I am at the 12 Minute Mark at this point. Instead of playing the long 20 minute movie, I ve put together a 4 minute slide presentation that highlights all the important parts) Slide Show is finished and I am now at the 16 minute mark. Conclusion Listen, I want to be clear. This brand of light and sound stimulation, that I call Passive Brain Fitness is not a one shot Cure All and I can t guarantee that it will produce amazing results for every person in every situation not yet anyway!! I started to publicly test this technology with clients and customers in November 2013 and since then, I ve upgraded the technology based on what I ve learned 12 times since, making it better and better. I ve upgraded it 9 times since I initially used my mother on the slides you ve just seen. AND I have a lot more testing and research to do. BUT, I believe my team and I are close to creating a version of this technology that will work for just about every person for a variety of valued outcomes. I believe that sooner, rather than later, we will be able to offer long term, permanent solutions for chronic depressions, anxiety, fear, stress and overwhelm. With more research and testing, I believe we will eventually be able to make it so that children won t have to struggle as I did in school because of brain communication issues. We might be able to prevent and maybe even reverse some degenerative brain diseases. The possibilities are wide open and far reaching I hope you all stay tuned to what comes next because I think we re going to be able to help millions of people and possible even save lives. Thank you!