Entrain Your Brain with Dr. Patrick Porter

In this Episode

• [00:09]Stephan introduces his next guest, Dr. Patrick K. Porter, an award-winning author/speaker and the founder of BrainTap®, the leader in technology-enhanced meditation and a pioneer of the use of brainwave entrainment.
• [01:50]Stephan wants the listeners to understand technology-enhanced meditation and its advantages compared to meditating without any technology.
• [03:23]Patrick shares the beginnings of coming up with this technology and how it works.
• [05:02]Stephan asks if Patrick can quantify these technologies’ benefits and their impact on sleep and performance.
• [14:44]Patrick discusses the importance of balancing the hemispheres and the differences in alpha brainwave state and theta brainwave state in terms of the benefits.
• [27:00]Stephan talks about aphantasia and asks Paul how somebody could reduce the symptoms of aphantasia.
• [31:54]Stephan shares about his spiritual awakening in 2012, and Patrick discusses the transformation and scientific perspective of having higher vibrations of gamma, peace, harmony, gratitude, and love.
• [38:10]Stephan shares his 40 years of Zen, which leads him to return to remembering memories from his childhood, and asks Patrick about his brain science perspective.
• [44:18]Stephan wants to know about Patrick’s perspective on the truism of thoughts that create reality.
• [47:28]Download a copy of Dr. Patrick Porter’s book, Thrive in Overdrive and get a 15-day free trial of the BrainTap Pro App. Also, visit his website to learn more about his other research and projects.

Jump to Links and Resources

Patrick, it’s so great to have you on the show.

It’s great to be here, Stephan. Thank you.

Well, first of all, let’s help our listeners or viewers understand a bit more about technology-enhanced meditation. Why not just tsit on a rock somewhere and meditate without any technology anywhere nearby?

You can do it yourself if you have 30 years to meditate. The problem is that we have what’s called a monkey mind by most people. They don’t understand that meditation isn’t just closing your eyes and falling asleep, a lot of people do that. In our 30 years of scanning people, in the last 10 years, we’ve had technology where we can actually do live readings with people.

What we find is that most people, when they meditate, actually stress their body out because their best thinking gave them the idea, hey, I’m going to start meditating. But unfortunately, their best thinking, most people, their inner conversation is 80% negative. We need to upgrade that thinking to get them working better.

When somebody stares at a candle, they’re actually using a form of frequency following response.

There are assistance, let’s say, ancient technologies like candle burning. When somebody stares at a candle, they’re actually using a form of frequency following response because that candle flickers at 10 Hz frequency, which just happens to be alpha. So you can use music, which is also a technology-enhanced meditation.

In fact, they used to use singing bowls to create what’s called binaural beats. They put different size bowls on the side of the head and help people who had mental disorders even in ancient times. We’re taking ancient technology that they’ve used to accelerate the meditation process. We basically put it on supercharge using technology.

How did you come up with this and how does it all work?

I came up with it because my dad, when I was younger, got help using a process called the Silva method and then he became an instructor. I’ve been teaching or using it since I was 12 years old. Because of my interest in electronics, my undergraduate degree is in electronics, when I went to work for a company called Light & Sound Research, this was way back in the ’80s.

When the EEPROM chip, which is the first computer processing chip, came out, we were basically imitating what I was doing behind the scenes doing biofeedback. There was no neurofeedback, then, so if people are listening going, well, why didn’t they just do this or that? Well, we didn’t have that technology. We were looking at skin temperature, which is a sign of Alpha Theta Waves, breath respiration.

We’re monitoring all this then we realized, hey, when they got into the state of alpha, the pain would go away. So that’s really what started us on the journey. Then we said, wow, when you’re in this pain-free state, look at all these other things. And hey, this looks a lot like meditation because their breathing would become rhythmic, it’s almost a lot like prayer. When you look at the physiological state, I’m not saying the psychological state, of course, those are two different things when you’re praying or when you’re meditating. But the physiological state, really there’s not much difference. 

So within our research, we started finding, hey, when somebody downregulates their stress hormones or their fight or flight, all these beautiful things start happening in the body in our nervous system is self-healing, so if we can relax the nervous system, it can heal itself. What I mean by that is your brain because 70% of your nervous system exists between your ears. So we need to get the brain and body working together.

Got it. If you could quantify—which I’m sure you can because you’ve done lots of research and studies—the benefits of doing these sorts of technologies in combination with quieting that monkey mind, what is the impact tangibly on sleep and on performance?

Yeah, those are pretty incredible. First of all, I’m going to tell you about a few studies, but they can go to braintapresearch.com. We have 11 universities concurrently doing studies on the brain right now. We’ll talk about a few of them today, I’m sure. But the biggest thing we’ve noticed is just take for instance, the Seminole College girls golf team, they won the national championship. 

These were elite athletes to begin with. But when we did our study with BrainTap, we wanted to see if we could improve their focus and their concentration. Now it’s easy to improve a C student, but what about an A student? And we did improve. We improved their Alpha focus and concentration by 380%. That is out the door incredible.

That means their reorganization score—golf is played in about five minutes, but you’re on the course for four hours, so the whole key is when you’re addressing the ball and you have to be focused, can you reorganize and focus? That’s one of the things—being more present.

The biggest thing we find was sleep.

The biggest thing we find was sleep. We just finished a study that’s going to be published here from Western Australia and we were working with coal miners. These coal miners go to work in the dark. They work in the dark, they leave in the dark. Basically, if you’re going to have somebody that has seasonal affective disorder or SAD, it’s going to be these guys.

What we found was that after we first had to get them off alcohol—because I was amazed that 90% of them would drink before they go to work—they started sleeping. We had a 70% sleep score improvement over the course of six weeks. We did this with just the app—that means just sound—and we did it with light and sound to see what the difference was. 

What we found is that it took about six weeks for the sound-only group, which means they were using the binaural beats, isochronic tones, and the solfeggio frequencies and things to get them into that state. While the people with the headset, which uses light, what we call retinal flashing lights. When they used that, it took only about two and a half weeks to get the same result.

The key to sleep is not the length of time in bed. This is a misconception that’s out there in the world. When we do our sleep studies, and we’ve done a lot of them, that’s the main thing that our technology improves in people because it downregulates the stress hormones and prepares the body for sleep. We have what we call delta sessions which put you into that deep state.

The key to sleep is not the length of time in bed.

What we found was that when you do that, when you’re downregulated, the body is more prepared for sleep because we hold a charge. I don’t know if you’ve done any research into earthing, but Clint Ober, who is a friend of mine, did the earthing thing. What we find is when you balance the hemispheres, you also discharge energy, just like you would if you’re walking outside barefoot, and we can actually measure the energy in the body.

We should be at zero point. There should be no interference, but most people are running around with one to three volts of energy just surging through their body. So when you quiet the mind and balance the hemispheres, the body actually gets rid of that excess information because we’re information at its very core, 99.999 whatever percent solid, the rest of us is information. 

What we’re doing is we’re tuning up that information with a field of very specific light and a field of very specific sound, and when the brain matches that sound so the listener understands a little bit more. Maybe if you and I, Stephan, are on a spaceship moving toward Earth, and we could bring the Earth into the viewfinder and measure the frequency of the Earth, it would have different frequencies depending upon where you’re at on the Earth from 0.01 to 100.

For instance, the volcano that is going off, that’s at 100, but there are dead zones on the planet too that have a frequency of 0.05, so we have all this. Now most of the time, when we’re sitting near the ocean, it’s a 10 Hz frequency. So we get that alpha response, that acetylcholine release, which is a neurotransmitter; or when we’re in the mountains, we would get a 7.8 Hz hit, which is a theta release.

What’s important about those two brainwaves, and that’s the main two brainwaves we train to at BrainTap, although we train every brainwave. But those are the main because what we find is if you don’t have alpha, you’re going to have a lot of fear and uncertainty because that’s your intuitive mind. If you’re not intuitively gathering—and this happens from the brain when you look at the brain architecture, we are taking information from short term to long term memory and long term to short term memory all day long.

At the speed we do that, they call this neuroplasticity. If you don’t have the speed, you start to lose your memory, your focus, and your concentration. You get anxiety, depression, and fear. That’s why the other study that I want to talk about that’s really blowing the minds of the professors that we’re working with is the dementia study. We don’t have time to go through it all but I’ll just give you the high points.

We had a 49% neuroplastic change in six weeks which is unheard of. We took people that were on the dementia scale, we took them off the dementia scale in six weeks because they practice three times a day using the technology. I think the biggest improvement that we found was the reorganization score. Because the faster your nervous system can reorganize, meaning you can move from the parasympathetic to the sympathetic to the neurohormonal. 

Think of the neurohormonal like your backup generator, most people are running around using their backup generator. Most people spend all their time repairing the backup generator, which means they spend all their time with supplements, building their bodies, getting it all optimized. But then they forget the most important thing to optimize is the brain because if you don’t have the right brainwaves and you’re not relaxed, all those great supplements are just flush down the toilet just like your medical doctor was trying to tell you. 

The most important thing to realize about brain function is what we call the reorganization score.

But if you are in a relaxed state, so what we did, we had a group—and this would be the last study that we can move on. The most important thing to realize about brain function is what we call the reorganization score. So when you think about the reorganization score, we all know that people get upset in the morning, they’re still upset three days later. They just haven’t been able to reorganize around that event. I always tell people, it’s like what Mike Tyson said, he goes, everybody has a plan until they get hit. 

We need to prepare because we’re all going to get hit at some point, something’s going to happen. We have to prepare for our eventual future of what’s going to happen. Some people deny, deny, deny, then when it happens they’re shocked, and then their nervous system gets locked. When that nervous system gets locked, in a negative way or positive way, there’s something called heart rate variability that is very popular now. It’s in rings, it’s in watches, and it’s in all these. That can tell people if they’re wondering, “Gosh, am I regulating correctly?”

Well, very simply, we have a very sophisticated piece of technology called the Nueralink where we can actually put it on somebody for five minutes. It runs a low-level current through the body, but we get a resistance reading on every cell of the body. We can tell what part of the body is in resistance and then it feeds us back the data we need. What we find is that most people are operating in a high state of delta, and believe it or not, that’s what makes serotonin but at most, everybody has a deficit of serotonin. The problem is they’re producing too much.

Too much is also just as bad as too little. Then they take pills that are called serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac and things of that nature. It holds that into the brain, but our brain is the most powerful pharmacy on Earth. It can release up to 54,000 different neuro transitions, peptides, and everything that it can create with a simple thought.

When you think about your thoughts, you can produce healthy healing thoughts.

When you think about your thoughts, you can produce healthy healing thoughts, and those produce healthy healing chemicals in the brain that wash down through the body and heal us, or we can think negative destructive thoughts, and they do the same thing but in a negative way. When you think about what the technology is designed to do, we now know because of something called epigenetics. What’s happening is it’s actually affecting the 99% of a person. Every person on Earth is changing every 40 seconds.

Now, it’s infinitely changing or there’s a finite number because we have a finite number of cells, but every DNA strand has a burst of biophotonic energy that regrade your DNA based on the foods you consume, the water you drink, and the people you hang out with. It moves along the fascia like fiber optics and reprograms or optimizes the system. Depending upon if you’re doing things that are healthy or if you’re doing things that are destructive, it starts to break it down. No one is the same.

When they mapped the human genome in 2003, they actually pretty much lied to us because they couldn’t map the human genome because only 1% stays fixed. Ninety-nine changes every 40 seconds. The ancients once said that our bodies are like stepping into a river. You step into a river, you never step into the same river twice because it’s flowing. The same is true with our nervous system and our biological system. We’re always changing, adapting, improvising, and hopefully overcoming any shortcomings.

Yeah, that’s awesome. There’s a lot of great research at braintapresearch.com, you said?

Yes.

Awesome. So let’s dive in a bit more into some of these things that you talked about, for example, balancing the hemispheres. What is the benefit of balancing the hemispheres? I know a little bit about this. I’ve actually experienced Dave Asprey’s 40 years of Zen program, which is a week-long Neurofeedback intensive training. 

We’re always changing, adapting, improvising, and hopefully overcoming any shortcomings.

I remember hearing these gongs that would go off when the left and right hemispheres were in synchrony. Apparently, the subconscious part of my brain wanted more of that so I would aim to get more gongs going. You couldn’t consciously make your hemispheres balanced or synchronized, but subconsciously, it worked. It got us into more of a state of alpha and more theta. I’m curious to hear more about this balancing of the hemispheres and also about the differences in alpha brainwave state and theta brainwave state in terms of the benefits.

The balancing is important. They also call it coherence. As we’re awake and moving through our day-to-day life, our left hemispheres could be just slightly faster than our right. If it is, then we can have a conversation, we can drive our cars, and we can do everything. If it’s even off millisecond, then it starts doing what’s called neuro parsing, which means that it starts to disconnect those neuron activity because we think at the speed of light, sound, and thought, so our brain processes information. 

It processes across the hippocampus, and this part of the brain is so important because it’s transacting information with both hemispheres, but it’s organizing it in different spaces. Most people don’t realize, if I asked you to think of a firetruck, to think of that firetruck, you lit up six to eight places in your brain. So you brought in association, you brought in sounds, you brought in smells, you might even have thought of the dog in the seat. All those things, your brain recreated those things.

If your brain was not coherent or at least closed, and we’re talking about milliseconds, then let’s say that the memory of that fire truck wasn’t important. Basically, the memory is still there, just like the hard drive. All the notes are there, all the files, but let’s say that the file allocation table, the FAT table gets corrupted. Well, that doesn’t mean the files aren’t there. It just means you can’t get to them. Think of neurons parsing like you need to defrag the hard drive so you can get access to these memories.

Most people are never trained to do that. So what we can do is we can speed up one hemisphere. Now, alpha is super important in cognition. When we think about the frontal lobe, this is the part of the brain that separates us from animals. People will tell us that the primitive brain hijacked our reality because we’re so fearful, stressed out, or whatever, and this is causing a lot of negatives. Some people might feel like their bodies turned against them because they’re not cooperating. It really has to do with frequency and how the body is settling.

The alpha, especially as we age, is super important because if there’s a mismatch in alpha activity in the frontal lobe, that’s a good sign that you’re going to get dementia very quickly. If you don’t do something about it, it’s going to actually accelerate into full-blown Alzheimer’s typically. The good news is, I mean we do it with light side vibration, but I had two papers published this year in PubMed, where we did it with Kriya breathing.

You can also activate the frontal lobes because I’m always looking at ancient traditions and how I can take those ancient traditions and make them modern technology. What we did is we have a guy, Pavel, who’s pretty famous out there in breathwork. We had him put together a series of sessions for breathwork while people are using our BrainTap technology. The key is you can use breathwork, pills, or anything, but you can’t have the pill without the skill. 

You can do breathwork, but if you don’t generalize that and get it to actually become a meaningful part of your future technology in your own brain, which means future pacing, then the brain just thinks that’s just a nice experience. We want to train the brain to do more of that. When you get out of sync once, you can’t consciously do it like you said, but you will feel, once you tune into your own physiology, you’ll know when you’re not. You’ll know that, hey, my mind’s not so sharp, and that’s the whole point with the gongs.

I can only give you the example with Muse because I’m the Dean of brain-based medicine at Quantum University. We bring out some pretty big names out to Hawaii. It used to be every two years, but now we’ve been on delay for the last two years. But we brought out Dr. Randy Cale, who’s really big on neurofeedback, biofeedback, and using inexpensive devices.

We have the WAVi device at our clinic. We have the NeuroInfiniti. These are all between, $12,000–$30,000 machines. The average person isn’t going to go buy them. But the Muse you can, and so we like the Muse because it gives you some pretty good data. What happened in front of the group, he brought somebody up there. When you get to alpha and your brain is balanced on the Muse, you hear a bird. That’s the way they do it. 

We had one of our students go up on stage in front of a few hundred people and she bombed. In a 10-minute time period, she only got eight birds, which is really kind of sad. We picked somebody who meditated because we actually thought we would see a better result. So I said, you know what, let me take her outside. I’m going to do something with her. I’m going to bring her back.

So Randy kept talking up there. I took her outside. I had to do an alpha session on BrainTap. She went back in not even 20 minutes later—it was only a 10-minute session—and she got 48 birds. He said, how did you do that? I said, well, you just wanted her to go to alpha, I trained her brain to go to alpha. And as long as she can remember that feeling, she can beat your machine.

In fact, I’ve got over 200 birds in a 10-minute time period because you can wear it while you’re doing the BrainTap. We’ve done just different experiments with it. Neurofeedback or biofeedback are good training methods to get you to understand that you can control them subconsciously like you’re saying, but everything is controlled by the subconscious. 

Most people don’t realize, when Bruce Lipton says your only conscious mind is controlling only 5% of your reality and your subconscious is taking care of the rest. All you got to do is look down at your body and say, hey, who’s beating my heart? Who’s controlling my breath? Who’s changing those 50,000 cells per second? Who’s digesting that food? It’s your subconscious, that superpower that’s within you.

If we can tune into that superpower, life becomes easy, or at least easier. If we don’t and we deny it, it becomes stressful in that way. The biggest difference between alpha and theta is alpha is more of an intuitive consciousness. You can actually function in your everyday life in alpha. In fact, they claim that Einstein operated at 10 Hz frequency all the time, which would be very unusual. You have all the brainwaves all the time.

If you don’t have a good balance of brain waves while you’re awake. There’s a big difference between the waking brain and the sleeping brain. The awakened brain should be about 45% beta, about 30% alpha, and 10% theta. At least that’s what has been shown. Anna Wise, we used her with lights and sound research and she wrote the book High Performance Mind. She went out and did all the brain scans of actually more than even Dr. Amen who’s done brain scans differently, SPECT scan technology.

Alpha can be attainable by everyone. You can use music. In fact, they call it the Mozart effect. So you can put on classical Baroque music when you sit and relax, it will actually balance the hemispheres of the brain and actually make you smarter. The problem is we just did a study where we did a 45-minute session where we took that music and we had 15 minutes of just music, five-minute washout, then we had that same music but we put our encoding in the background because we wanted to see what happens to the brain.

We’re doing this in live readings with HRV and EEG. What we found was that when they listen to music, yes, they get what they call the Mozart effect. We got deep alpha training in all of that. But what we did with the encoding is we did theta training. You can’t get to theta on your own. Very few people can, unless you’ve been meditating a long time or using some other technology to do it. There are other technologies, we’re not the only ones.

What we did when we had that same piece of music, at the end of the first piece of music, their stress went right back, their brain went right back to what we call the default mode network. It went right back to its original state. When we did that same piece of music but we put the encoding in it with theta, we had a deeper experience, and at the end of the session, it didn’t go back. It basically stayed. What we want to do is we want to train to that perfect brainwave.

That study is also being done in Brazil, they have 150 students in that study, and we’re about four weeks into a six-week study there. We’re just seeing if people just do the music alone, can they effect change over time? Of course, people are using the equipment. We’re finding that just like we saw in our pilot study that people who use the encoding are getting better. We call it brain fitness. When Jack LaLanne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they all started talking pushing muscle growth, I was around then and people were talking about that stunting your growth like you shouldn’t build muscle. 

Everybody, they would think that’s crazy. But back in the ’70s, my high school didn’t even have a workout room. You did push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, you did all the old—I remember when they started bringing in weights and people thought, what are you going to do with those? And of course, my uncles that lived in Iowa thought that was just crazy that we were going to start working out because they were on the farm doing all the farm work, and of course, they were super strong.

Neurofeedback and brainwave entrainment should be a part of everybody’s life.

We live in a whole different reality right now. The way that we have to train our brains, I think neurofeedback and what we call brainwave entrainment should be a part of everybody’s life because you have to know what’s going on in there because of your sanity. Now theta, when we think about theta, theta is the most under-serviced brainwave in the adult population. We’ve seen some people with very little. In children it’s alpha, but in adults it’s theta. Theta is super important because theta is the brainwave that produces—it basically instructs the gut to make GABA. 

GABA is a precursor to DMT. Now, I’m not saying you’re going to take DMT as a supplement or something like that, but your brain creates DMT so we have cannabinoid receptors as well. When you get into theta, you actually start to trigger these receptors. It basically stimulates your dreams. If somebody out there is saying, I don’t dream. I’m going to tell you, I could do a scan on you. You don’t have theta. Everybody who has high theta has vivid dreams, lucid dreams, and that’s normal for us.

Dreams are part of the natural way to stay sane because like the great inventors, we can work out solutions to problems, we can visualize our future, we can release some stress and tension from the day. But if we never get a chance to do that, we still have all that pent-up stress and tension. Unfortunately, most people don’t sleep well. It’s really because they don’t have enough theta, not because they don’t have enough delta. It’s because the theta hasn’t produced the right neurochemical bank account.

One thing that we’re super excited about here is the Brazilian government—actually with their own money, $250,000—is doing a full-blown double-blind placebo-controlled study with BrainTap to prove that we’re a digital drug. We’ve shown that we upregulate 54 different neurotransmitters and downregulate the stress hormones. They want to be able to prescribe it and actually make it a part of their—they have a socialized medicine system, but they want to give people BrainTap instead of supplements, especially for pain control because we’ve shown such a great result with helping people with pain.

This is kind of an aside, but I think it might lead to some fascinating discussion. I have a friend who has a disorder called aphantasia. He cannot conjure images inside his head. He has had this his whole life. It was not until recently that it was diagnosed, so he just thought he was normal, right? 

We’re all normal until somebody tells us what you can’t differentiate between these different colors so you have colorblindness or whatever. How does that relate to all the research that you’ve been looking into and how somebody could, if he wanted to, reduce the symptoms of aphantasia?

We’ve never done anything specific with that so I’m just going to tell you in general what we would do. If I looked at his brain scan or if we did a study with him, a case study, we’d probably see that theta brainwave is not very strong. We also find a gamma which is now the newest brainwave on the block and people are all talking about it. We actually went to MIT. 

I would think that with him, if we activated more gamma, then gamma seems to be the reorganizational frequency. It’s like the bass drum, 40 Hz. It’s like the bass drum of a band that keeps everything else in order. The more gamma we have, it seems the more creativity, the more spontaneous, and you have these lucid dreams. We did a study with a doctor in Texas, his name is Dr. Rosenthal. He wanted to do a psilocybin study for PTSD. Some of the vets didn’t want to take the psilocybin, which I can understand. They might have been addicted to some other things and they didn’t want to be addicted to psilocybin.

I said, “Dave, go ahead and do some scans on people while they’re doing psilocybin. Let’s see what their brains are doing.” It was fascinating to me because we saw these high rays of gamma while they were going on these trips. When people say they were tripping, when you’re in that high state of gamma, we see that with healers or we see it with highly creative people. 

When somebody is a creative person or somebody is a healer, they generate these high frequencies of gamma. Now we know that the Buddhists adepts that are meditating, they’re also generating this. We stimulate gamma now. We went to MIT to see the research on blue light therapy at 40 Hz frequency breaking down amyloid plaque. 

Unfortunately, she just did it with mice that were published. When we visited her, I said, have you ever done this with people? She said, oh, no, that’s what the $10 million is for. Luckily, our CEO knows the guy who runs the brain lab there, and we left him with a couple of headsets. I said, we’ve shown that with this little headset, we’re able to increase gamma by 23%. She goes, that’d be fascinating because we’ve only been able to raise it by 6%. That’s with a $10 million room that flashes blue light at generous frequency.

Now, she validated what we said, BrainTap can increase gamma, and what we’re finding is that then it reorganizes the brain. I know that at any age, any brain can change. Now, if they have an organic problem, something happened or they have a birth defect, the BrainTap can’t make people, if they never saw the colors, I’ve never heard anybody doing that. What it is is there’s all the stress and anxiety that comes along with it, with any disease or disorder.

We want to balance out the nervous system so they have the best chance to live their best life now.

Now the body, which is self-healing, there’s a saying we need to get rid of the thoughts, traumas, and toxins around any illness, and then the body can heal itself. If they’re thinking about it as poor, they’re going to create toxic thinking. They might even start eating poorly because of stress and anxiety. We want to balance out the nervous system so they have the best chance to live their best life now. That’s kind of the key. 

We’ve seen some incredible things in the lab. I can’t wait to get our results back because we’ve already done studies for anxiety, stress disorders, and things like that. Now with the major university doing this, I think we’re going to be able to make some deeper claims once we get those results back because we’ve seen magic happen. I can’t think of a condition that once they balanced their brain, then you have to do the three steps three waves to wellness. First, you can’t outthink a bad diet, so you’ve got to eat healthy and. I always say there are  be healthy. I don’t know anybody who can do that. 

Number two is you’ve got to get your body moving, breathing, and building muscle. If you don’t do that, you’re going to start to mentally decline. All three of these have to happen at the same time really because you also have to exercise the brain and get those brainwaves going. Now you can do this on your own like we talked about before. You can go sit by the ocean for 20–30 minutes, an hour a day. You can take a trip to the mountains and get into theta, or you can use technology and just do it from the comfort of your own home. That’s the big difference.

Awesome. Now, I’ve shared this on my podcast before so I’ll just very briefly explain to you that when I got my first spiritual awakening in 2012, it was from a monk who changed his state like he was unrecognizable. He looked completely different when he was in this mode versus when he was just normally conversing with people and so forth.

He was in this high vibration mode, maybe fully gamma, or something. I have no idea what was going on inside his brain but he was in a very powerful state. Then he touched me on the head, gave me what’s known as a Deeksha, a oneness blessing, and I had what I equate to an LSD trip. I’ve never had any drug experiences before, so I can’t really equate it really to an LSD trip, but everything was in technicolor. Very vibrant greens and everything. 

When I went outside it was like a cartoon. It was incredible. I felt this deep, deep sense of peace. I guess I was in gamma. Although I didn’t have my brain scanned at that time either, it opened me. It changed my entire life. It was just in that short moment of him touching me on the head. I’m curious to hear what your take is on this from a brain science perspective.

You’ve got to get your body moving, breathing, and building muscle.

Also, the physiology of the body, we now know that the brain emits infrared light. You know who Tom Brady is, right? The athlete. He has a product called TB12. Our science officer actually designed the clothing that Tom Brady wears. It has ceramics in it. It actually reflects back infrared light. We all know the healing or at least most people know the healing of infrared light. Well, our body produces it.

They’ve also shown that people who are in these higher vibrations of gamma, peace, harmony, gratitude, and love like these Buddhists adept or whatever. He’s actually sharing over 200 times more light than the average person. You got dosed with a high frequency. Now our brain has cilia, little hair-like follicles on the brain. That’s what’s going to match. That’s why they call it frequency following response. Our brain is always matching its environment. It’s also matching people. 

When you went near him through biophotonic exchange—now this is happening even when they’re not a Buddhist adept. That’s why it’s important that people you hang out with because birds of a feather flock together. But when you get around some of these high vibrations, spiritual beings, you actually change. If he touched you, he knows how to transmit energy, which I’m sure he did. That’s what he did. He gave you this oneness blessing. You tuned into the oneness of the universe. 

The underlying fabric of all things is consciousness. There’s nothing else. Everything else they would tell you is a shadow dance. I’ve had many experiences and I’m very fortunate that I get to go to India when it’s open because we work with four of the major universities in India. I get to work with a lot of these gurus and get to see their brains operate. Some that aren’t really gurus, you can tell the pretenders because the reality is that they’re like the Maharishi when The Beatles gave him all those drugs. He went under the blanket for about an hour, came back out. There was enough LSD it should have killed an elephant. 

He says, “Well, that’ll get you to the doorway, but it won’t get you to the table.” He said, “If you really want to do it, let me show you how to do that.” These beings have done the work. Basically, I have a book cover that I created which looks like the Carnation chocolate milk, but it has a little Buddha meditating there. It’s a spoof, but it says two scoops tends to the enlightenment. Then it says just two scoops instant Buddha. That’s what people want. You have to do the work and part of that work is it’s breathwork. 

When you do vibrational therapy like chanting, we now know that that actually triggers the polyvagal system. The wandering nerve that really is the secret to health. While you’re chanting and you’re doing these things, your body gets this vibratory frequency and it just tunes up your body and your body lights up. When you’re around people like that, they raise your vibration. We know people that when they walk in the room, the room gets a little darker. We call those people energy vampires.

There are people that come in and they just suck—and they don’t do it on purpose. They just found out this is the way they get attention, but there are other people, when they walk in the room, people just want to be around. They just want to feel that energy. They don’t know what it is. They don’t understand it, but it’s the vibratory frequency of that individual. That’s why the one study that I’m still trying to find, they quoted it during a live presentation I was doing and I haven’t been able to find it, but they had it up, they had the citation up on the board. 

It’s one of those seminars you go to and I’ve been trying to locate it. They showed that people in gratitude and love are 200 times more light is flowing from their heart center than the person who’s in fear, greed, and things like that. You just got to be open. You were blessed to have that done. That’s awesome. People wait their whole life to have those kinds of experiences that happen. 

When you’re in my field, you get to meet some people doing that. A lot of times, that happens during the near-death experience. People will have those kinds of experiences and their whole life changes. They say if we can get one new thought into the brain, one new thought and the whole brain has to rewire a constellation of changes at the neurological level happen, and you come out of that experience different. That sounds like what happened to you. 

People will have those kinds of experiences and their whole life changes.

Like in words today, they’re able to change your blockchain. You now have a new order of thinking because you’ve experienced it. A lot of people get book learning, but the experience is where the richness is.

I’ve been blessed to have very powerful experiences such as that, and it just keeps getting better and better. It’s amazing. Let me actually share one more recent experience that I’d love to hear your brain science take on it. I did 40 years of zen, as I said, in Seattle for a week, maybe a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago. I had some memories surface, memories from my childhood that I had not had since my childhood that was really amazing.

Much of my childhood was not pleasant, so I intentionally (I guess) blocked it off. It was at the subconscious level. These were positive memories of my childhood. I was very, very grateful for that. That hadn’t happened since. I haven’t gotten back to do 40 Years of Zen. It did some kind of weekly neurofeedback sessions at Andrew Hill’s facility, Peak Brain Institute. Dr. Andrew Hill was also a past guest on this podcast. That was cool.

It was helpful in terms of stress reduction, sleep, and things like that, but it didn’t unlock memories from my childhood. I had a recent experience a month and a half ago. I was driving back from the Biohacking Conference, Dave Asprey’s Biohacking Conference, which you are also at, and that experience was incredible. I prayed for more positive childhood memories to come to me. 

As I was driving, everyone else was asleep in the car and I couldn’t play music because I just didn’t want to wake anybody. I was just by myself basically and my thoughts and I decided I’m going to have a conversation with God and it was really amazing. At one point I asked for some memories from my childhood and they came flooding in. It was incredible. I’m going to start crying now. I can’t even put it into words. It was really, really powerful. I’m curious—from your brain science perspective—what did you think was going on there?

When you’re in a state of beta or stress, you’re actually using up so much energy you don’t have the capacity to visualize or imagine. Think about it, you don’t want to be thinking alternative thoughts if you’re being chased by a saber-toothed tiger. These bodies really haven’t changed in 200,000 years. The physiology hasn’t changed, so our access to those memories. But when you’re at 40 Years of Zen, you’re in and out of those alpha states all day long. 

Basically, you created so much acetylcholine and so much GABA that now you’re hallucinating. You’re getting high in your own supply, in other words. When you’re driving down the road, it’s not unusual to be driving in alpha. That long drive, all the time you’re in alpha, you’re continuing to produce that. Then depending upon how close you were to even being tired enough to sleep, you were keeping yourself awake. You were basically keeping yourself in that alpha-theta rhythm while you’re driving. You got access to those, basically that GABA response, that DMT response. 

All the memories are there. They’ve done brain surgeries where they’ve opened up the brain, they touch different regions of the brain, and people will have full sensory memories. Memories of things that they didn’t even think they recall because they were things that were happening in a room they were in. Basically, your brain—to give everyone an idea, your ears are always collecting 25,000 pieces of information every second, but we usually only act on 40 of them. Our eyes are collecting over 2,000 pieces of information every second, but we only act on less than 40 of them. Our brain actually becomes a screener in a sense and our brain uses a lot of energy. These memories are good, but it still takes energy. 

That’s why when you settle down, you relax, you start getting into alpha and theta through a meditation process, these memories come flooding back. What I recommend people do, every night when you go to sleep—this is a practice I’ve been doing since I was a kid and I still do it every night—when I’m lying in bed, I don’t try to go to sleep. That’s probably the worst thing for most people. When you try to go to sleep you fight against yourself, especially if it’s an issue and you don’t want to fall asleep right away.

There’s a period of time where your alpha and theta become its strongest. It’s the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. What I tell them to do is make a review of your day, and in that review, think of the one or two positive things that happened to you. Make them colorful, bright, put a soundtrack in the background, and then add them to your success reel. 

You could start going back in time remembering every memory. As you go back through every memory, you go back to the earliest memory. What will happen is like beads on a string, those other memories will show up because they’re connected. There’s not one thought that isn’t connected to another thought. All those memories are there and then when you revive them or they call it reification in psychology, you make them real. 

When you take a negative memory, if it shows up, what’s blocking those positive ones is a few disappointments and these are normal in life. Nobody’s had the storybook life like Disney that I know of. It depends on how we reorganize after that. You take the negative memories, you make them black and white. You think about how did that make me stronger? How did that make me enjoy my life better because those negative experiences make the positives that much sweeter if you put them in the right perspective and you don’t dwell on them. We have to organize that way. 

If you do that, you’ll find that these memories are like beads on a string, it will come up and you’ll have your own little success reel. Use that energy because that energy will never diminish it. Those are powerful states. Of course, in NLP therapy, that’s like your treasure chest. Whenever you start to feel bad or something’s going on, those are the memories you’re going to go get because that’s going to trigger that great pharmacy that you have between your ears and get you feeling good again.

Awesome. I know we’re getting close to time, one more question before we wrap up and then we’ll have you share your contact info and how to get the BrainTap. This truism of your thoughts create your reality is something a lot of spiritual gurus and people who are spiritual will tell, and I believe it to be true. I would love to hear your perspective from powerful brain science research and all that.

In quantum physics, they have something they call a strange attractor. That means that what you focus on is attracting things to it. Just use the example of buying a new car. You drive the car off the lot, then you start seeing them everywhere. You didn’t see them before that because it wasn’t top-of-mind awareness. When they’re talking about creating your reality, there is heaven and hell here right now. You can choose to live in heaven or you can choose to live in hell. We can’t change the way the stars and sun set in the sky, but we can change our attitude about it. That’s what we’re talking about. 

If people realize opportunities come all the time. Even my opportunities in life, if I wasn’t open to those possibilities, I’ll give one example. I was sitting with my dad back in the ‘80s. I said, you know what, we really need somebody to help us out. This is the way therapists talk. We’re the greatest in the world. All we need is money, right? That’s not true, but that’s what we were talking about. 

We get a call from Dr. Paul Adams. He wants to put in a clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. My dad tells him no. He hangs up the phone. I said, dad, what did you just say? He goes, Well, we’re doing our own thing. We don’t want to work with Dr. Adams. I said, do you mind if I call him?

Long story short, we did the business with him. I bought that practice back in three years for $9000. Built 108 locations using positive changes as the cornerstone. If I wouldn’t have taken that call and been there and open to that possibility, who knows what I would have done? When opportunity knocks, you have to see it as an opportunity. I’m a big believer in looking outside myself for solutions but verifying within myself that it’s good for me. There’s a difference. I don’t think I’m the smartest guy in the world, but I want to associate myself with really smart people that can help me out in technology. 

We live in a beautiful time right now. I think that most people just don’t see the opportunity that’s right before them. In this case, it’s as simple as pressing play and making a change in your life. It doesn’t take a lot. Technology has made it so simple.

I think people like Dave Asprey—we were doing things like this in the ‘80s, but it takes people like Dave Asprey that are willing to be out there, be outspoken, put these things together, find out what works for him like the 40 Years of Zen. And then making people realize that there is something here. Then sharing it with the world. 

A lot of people keep all their great secrets under a bushel basket. Like you’re sharing this and the other people you have on the show, they’re sharing their wisdom and knowledge so we can improve the human condition and I think that’s commendable.

It is indeed. Thank you for all you do, all the light you reveal in the world, and all the people that you help. If our listeners wanted to learn more and maybe follow you on social media, maybe read some of your wisdom and watch some training and things like that, best yet, even to buy the product BrainTap, which actually my wife bought. She tried your device at your booth at the Biohacking Conference in September and she loved it. She bought the headset and the subscription. Where do we send our listener or viewer to?

They can follow me on social media, @drpatrickporter, they can find me there. Then @braintaptech. We’re kind of commingled, of course, because you can’t separate me really. But my website is drpatrickporter.com as well. All the links are there where you can go to all the different research and projects we’re doing. 

I think the biggest thing they can do is just use it. It’s one of those things where it’s like explaining the atmosphere to a fish. We need to get people in the water swimming and realizing that it works. They can go to braintap.info. It’s braintap.info, and for free, you can download a copy of my book, Thrive in Overdrive. You get to keep the book whether you do anything at all with us. It’s a digital book. You can put it into your Kindle reader. 

Then you get 15 days on our app that will let you explore some of the different like how to wake up in the morning through digital coffee, how to go to sleep by getting into deep delta, and how to reset your natural biorhythms in the middle of the day using the theta programs. They can have fun with it, play with it, and then at 15 days, if they decide to do something then they buy a subscription. If they don’t, it just goes away. No credit card necessary.

Awesome. It’s a great offer. Thank you so much, Patrick. This was very enlightening and inspiring. I’m going to start using BrainTap. It’s just sitting in the other room when my wife’s not using it. I need to give it a try. Thank you so much.

Congratulations and I look forward to hearing how you do with it. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Listeners, please take some action from this episode even if you’re not going to buy the product. Meditate more. Get out there and do something for your loved ones that is out of character and extra special. Get some gifts or do some act of service for the people you care about. We’ll catch you in the next episode. This is Stephan Spencer signing off.

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