Light, Sound & Vibration and reversing Alzheimer’s

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So, we were chatting a minute ago about neuroplasticity. Would you tell us what that means?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Well, it used to be, 20 years ago, they would have told you your brain was fixed. If something were to happen, you damage your brain, nothing could happen. But what we now know is the brain is changing and can grow all the time through something called neurogenesis. what that means is we can grow a new brain. If we get the right stimulus, which usually is blood flow circulation back to those areas, the brain and the intelligence, the body can reorganize. And the brain they now know is holographic in nature. Other parts of the brain can do parts that we didn’t think it could. But with neuroplasticity, we can take a snapshot now of these neuron connections. 

So think of it like a computer. When we upgrade our computer, we want a faster computer, the more neuron connections we have, the more computing power our brain has. Unfortunately, people think we grow our brain and we connect it as we get older. The reality is that we unplug our brain. When we’re born, it’s fully connected. That’s why we can learn languages. We can learn basically our whole universe before seven years old. You know, if you take a little child and you go: Wow. And then what happens is we unplug. And because the brain is so much of an energy hog, it’s gonna keep unplugging. 

And just one example for the listeners. If you speak more than one language, for instance, you have a brain circuit that never shuts down for your whole life, as long as you learn that language before the age of seven. So I always encourage people to have their children learn more than one language. Because if you don’t, you’ll be like me in college and you have to learn Spanish. And the only thing you take away is banos and cerveza you know, and cochina so you can go get your beer. All these things, it’s harder to learn. You know, when we’re children, we’re in a state of theta brainwave really, mostly. And we absorb a language. And just to give an example, just to put it in perspective, our science officer, he speaks six languages.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Wow.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

He was traveling through India with me. We were doing a university tour speaking to different universities. And by the time we left in three weeks, he’s speaking Hindi. And I said: Francisco, when did you learn Hindi? He goes, “While we’re here.” And I said: What do you mean? He goes, “If I’m around it,” he goes, “I’ve learned so many languages that all I have to do “is be around ’em and I’ll start doing it.” ‘Cause the way our brain, if you think about it, we have a super computer in our head. And if we don’t use it, we lose it. Again, because it’s an energy hog, it’s gonna keep conserving energy, conserving energy to our detriment. So that’s why brain fitness is so important in this day and age in what we do.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So you have a pilot program, a six-week program that you’ve been doing that basically guides people how to get that neuroplastic change at any age, right?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yes. We did the study with women 55 to 65. They were all diagnosed by their medical doctor. They have dementia. We had ’em take the Cambridge Science Testing, which is a cognitive skills test. They all scored that they had dementia. The unique thing that we found, and we find this with ADD as well, is the brain was out of synchronization. So it was not coherent, right, the right and left brain. The left hemisphere was actually moving slower than the right. And this is just the mechanical, the electrical functions of the brain we can measure. And so, we put them on a protocol that was three times a day. We have a morning session we call digital coffee. 

It’s about 10 minutes. And there’s a brainwave that most people think as we get older that we lose our balance. But really what we lose is a brainwave called SMR. It’s between alpha and beta. It’s a very small brainwave feature, but it has to do with cognitive thinking and balance. So we actually did a balance score test with them too, without doing any exercises, just the BrainTap. And when we ended the study after they did that three times a day. In the afternoon, we did a reboot, because we lose energy, we all do anyway. But if we haven’t trained our brain, it’s even more. Every day at two o’clock, our body drops in temperature two degrees. So these bodies are designed for the Serengeti. 

So we’re supposed to be taking a nap like the lions and the zebras. But what do we do? We drink coffee, tea, eat chocolate, whatever it is to stimulate ourselves. And we have this great electrical system. So we wanted to train them. We told them: If you really need coffee, do it after your BrainTap session, but try to do it without it just to regulate within our own innate system. And then we have a program that we had ’em do to put them to sleep. What we find, unfortunately, is most people are running around with their brain trying to go to sleep when they’re awake. And that means they a have high degree of delta activity, which is deep sleep. But at the end of that six-week study, to shorten the conversation here, they went back to their doctor. 

Before we tested them, we had ’em go back to their doctor. Their doctor said, “Wow, if you’d have came here like this six weeks ago, “we would not have diagnosed you with dementia.” We had ’em sit down and do the cognitive skills test. They scored that they were inside the normal range for their age group. This was 55 to 65 females. And then we measured their brain with a product called the WABI, which measures brain synchronization and things of that nature. We found out that their brain was now synchronized because it was coherent, in other words. And so, they’re doctors, you know. Of course, they’re not gonna take away the diagnosis, but they had no symptoms. We took that to Duke. Duke University is one of our research partners. And we said: What do you think of this research? They said, “I don’t believe it.” And I said: Well, here’s the research. They said, “Let’s do a bigger study.” So we’re in the middle right now. 

We have Seminole College and Valencia College in Florida that have partnered with us to get 100 people in Florida, women and men. We’re gonna do both. We’re gonna try to get 50 of each to do the study down there and see what we can do. And I think, I mean, we see this in our clinics. We’re lucky that we have 2,300 clinics across the country. And they give us feedback all the time. And while they had already told us this, because they put all their information up into a cloud. And the people at WABI contacts us and said, “What are you doing over there at BrainTap? “These people are getting so much better, faster.” And I had to explain it. You know, everyone knows how lasers work, at least in the field of medicine, right. But through vasodilation, blood flow and circulation, the innate intelligence of the body can take over. And I think any brain at any age can heal. We actually showed significant change, she wasn’t part of the study, but she was 102 years old. And we have the documents that show what happened after six months of using BrainTap. She improved her brain function by 30%.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That is incredible. This is so exciting. So we’re doing a clinical trial in my office. And we’re using both Cambridge Brain Sciences to track the data and then also WAVi. So it sounds like there’s a lot of synergy and overlap in what we’re doing there. We’re using kind of a Bredesen style approach. But I can’t believe we haven’t been also using BrainTap ’cause I can only imagine when we start to marry those, and we start to combine things that we get even more potential benefit for our patients.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Great, what we tell people, because a lot of our doctors are neurological doctors and chiropractors is we say, after you’re done with all of that work… Most people don’t know that even when you’re meditating or sleeping, your brain is still using 20% to 25% of the energy of the body. So it’s a workout. You know, when you’re getting that therapy, whatever that therapy is, your brain is getting a workout. So we want ’em to restore that, restore the brain function before they leave the office. And we do this also with chemotherapy centers and things like that because people get radiation or chemotherapy, they need to rebuild that. Really, for those familiar with the term ATP production, we need to get the brain producing more energy for rejuvenation.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So just to go back to the six-week pilot program, you had how many women in the trial? And then how many times per day were they doing a session? And how long were those sessions?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

This pilot was only six people. And that’s why we have to do more. When we did this numbers, it was significant, but we couldn’t publish. It’s not enough.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right, you need more.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

35 people to get the significant number that we need. So we figure we’ll get 100, you know, and then we’ll get that number because just the more you have, the better. We’ve done some case studies before that. But because we didn’t do the exact same thing, we couldn’t put ’em into the study. We actually designed a program for BrainTap that’s only available to our professionals because it actually speeds up the left hemisphere and slows down the right. So we designed that just for the study. And once we prove it out, we’ll make it available to everybody. Not the general populace, ’cause you need to measure the brain before you do that. We don’t wanna speed somebody’s left hemisphere up when they don’t need it.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah, don’t wanna cause new problems.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Most of the problems people have is the hemispheres are out of sync. So the first four minutes of every BrainTap session is a synchronizing session. And that has to do with right down to even heart rate coherency. I mean, we’re trying to get the whole body just coherent so the communication between the systems is happening the way it was designed.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That’s incredible. But those women that did that, they were doing three sessions a day?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yes. They were doing a morning, afternoon and evening session.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

About how long each?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Well, the morning session is 10 minutes. The afternoon session is 20, and the evening session can be between 25 and 30. But we had ’em do it with just the earbuds in so they could just fall asleep. Because the evening sessions, although 90% of our users use it at night, we didn’t wanna have the interference of the light. Sometimes the light at night, for especially blue-eyed people, they’re are more sensitive to light. So we don’t recommend they use it at night after six o’clock ’cause it can overexcite the nervous system.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Interesting. But there is a potential that for under an hour a day, doing something that probably feels good and helps you sleep better and helps you feel better day to day anyways can improve your memory, can improve your cognitive function.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yeah, because we do a lot with concussion care and with the sports teams, and we have a lot of different sports teams that put in 10, 20 chair stations where after their training ritual, they’ll go in with compression pants, you know, to get the bad blood out. Especially soccer teams and hockey teams, they seem to be the biggest users. And they’ll do this afterwards because they don’t realize the fatigue, a lot of that is mental. These are people that are running the whole time. Running in balance takes a lot of energy. You know, even if you’re just standing, you’re using a lot of energy to keep your position in space. And, you know, especially if you’re out of balance, you know, it’s gonna be hard.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Well then, I’m sure at the professional level or even collegiate level, there’s a lot of mental energy that goes into the strategy, into executing, into thinking ahead, into playing the game.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yeah, the biggest thing we find for professional athletes in their brain is how to disengage. And that’s when they get in trouble. They start looking at substances that are not really healthy for your body, like alcohol or drugs. Because they’re so high. You know, they’re buzzing up here and then they have to go back to regular life. You know, they’re not in front of 100,000 people or 30,000 people. And now they gotta go home and, you know, make their own popcorn or whatever.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Balance. So tell us about the role, and you mentioned it a little bit, but I wanna go more into depth about the role in brainwaves in reversing Alzheimer’s. So when we think about Alzheimer’s, I think a lot of people go to beta amyloid plaques and tau proteins and, you know, maybe the neurons and the synapses. But what you’re talking about are brainwaves. So tell me how those create memory, how they keep us from making memories, how they contribute to this world of dementia.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Well, if you get stuck into chronic low-level stress, if you’re just under stress all the time, that means… Let’s say you have a traumatic event in the morning. Maybe you get a text or a phone call and in the evening, you’re still ruminating about it, you probably have a nervous system that isn’t able to disengage. That chronic low-level stress is gonna influence your gut, which we all know in the field that that’s really important too because your gut makes all the neurotransmitters. So if your gut’s out of balance, and there’s a lot more to it. I’m sure you have some experts that are gonna be talking about that, the gut-brain connection, but if we don’t organize so that we can digest.

So I tell people that we’ve gotta calm down that beta brain. And you can do that a few ways. Of course, BrainTap is one way. But you can do it through breathing, through just body scans. Prayer is a way. When somebody says, “Why would we pray before we eat?” Well, obviously it’s a religious ritual, but really it’s so we digest our food. And we’ve had a study done in Provo, Utah, where we showed that when we put people on a session and got ’em into alpha and theta, they actually digested and metabolized more than 30% of the nutrients through an IV than they did when they were just doing it on their own, texting and looking at their phone. We did that to prove out when you’re doing other therapies at your clinic, you shouldn’t be using the technology. But the reality is that alpha and theta, alpha has to do with creative thinking. And that creative thinking, the reason you have to close your eyes usually to get into visualizing and meditating and doing those things is it takes a lot of power to do that. But what happens is in that state of alpha, most people shut down their frontal cortex, right, the frontal lobe. 

So basically, all reasoning goes out the window and they fall asleep. They go, “I’ve tried to meditate. “All I do is fall asleep.” But when you introduce light into the equation and that light frequency is at whatever Hertz frequency you want the brain to be, ’cause through entrainment, like a tuning fork in other words, the brain is gonna follow that frequency. And so, we’re imitating nature. So for instance, alpha is like going to the ocean. When you’re sitting by the ocean, you’re relaxing. Even if you didn’t wanna be there, you might’ve been irritable, but by the time you get there, you look out at the ocean, you’re there for a little bit, you start feeling good. Because your body will actually entrain to its environment. 

So in the ocean, you’re gonna get alpha. Alpha produces acetylcholine or instructs the gut to produce acetylcholine. You can’t be stressed and produce that amount of acetylcholine. Your body will try to do it. But what it’ll do is it’ll rob Peter to pay Paul. So something’s gotta give. So if you get time in that brainwave. Now we’re designed to take naps in the middle of the day, our bodies are, and to sleep, you know, longer than we are. You know, 100 years ago, we used to sleep 12 hours a day. You know, I haven’t seen that since I was a kid. But in the process of doing that at night, we’re going through these cycles. And the cycles all represent different brainwaves. So when we get into alpha, we’re creating that acetylcholine. When we get into theta, we’re producing GABA. GABA is the most researched drug on the market before COVID. COVID kind of pushed it out. 

But the reality is that most people are missing theta. It’s a very small brainwave, right before sleep. Everyone out there has been in that state before consciously because it’s when you wake up in the morning. At some point you hear a song, maybe you don’t really like it, but that song sticks in your head all day. Theta is known for its, it’s called hypermnesia, super memory state. So like the great inventors, when you read about them, they take these catnaps in their labs. And these solutions would come flying out of their subconscious to their conscious mind. 

That was the theta state. And so that’s really important to basically to make the jump from being in the awakened state, to the sleeping state. Then there is delta. Delta is really important. Now we should have very little delta while we’re awake. It should be less than 10% of our overall brain. When you look at, we call it a full spectrum brainwave because all of these brain waves are going at one time. It’s just where is the prevailing awareness. ‘Cause a proper brainwave when we’re awake is 45% of your brain should be operating in beta, 30% should be operating in alpha. If we have too much alpha, for instance, and not enough beta, we become attention deficit because we have too much energy and activity. If we have too much beta and too much alpha, I mean too little of both, we become just attention deficit. We’re just not there. Because theta arises. 

Now to put it into perspective, too, for people wondering about autism, we have a lot of luck, really good results with autism because we can encourage alpha activity. Alpha, I always tell people think of brainwaves like wifi networks but are healthy. You know, so they’re basically through electrical signals and also through light signals in the body through something called biophotonic exchange. We’re actually light beings, so our body at the site or level emits light pulses every 40 seconds. And that’s part of it. So we have redundant systems. We’re not just electrical. We’re light, sound and vibration. We’re information packets running around living our life. And what happens to an autistic child that we found, now we work with doctors that have a lot more, it’s not just BrainTap. So I don’t want anybody to think, Hey, just get the BrainTap and all this happens. 

We have clinicians like yourself that are doing other things. But what we found was when we can encourage, when we can after six weeks, most of our studies are about six weeks. So we did a study with 34 autistic children in Orange County, California, with JoQueta Handy, Dr. Handy. And what we showed is we could improve their alpha by 23%. As soon as they went over the 23% mark from where they were, which was almost zero, they were speaking. We had about a 90% speaking rate. And she’s a speech pathologist so it worked for her. So she was doing all of her work and she asked me, why did I think that was. I said: Well, you’re doing the exercises. 

And then we’re relaxing the brain so it can accept them. You know, if the brain is stressed out too, ’cause I believe all stress is brain stress. So if we can relax the brain, you’ve just taught them some… Maybe they’re doing the metronome or they’re doing other exercises and they’re all stressed out, and then the next day that all gets washed out. But we wanna take short-term memories and make them long-term memories as fast as possible so the brain can recall and actually feed it back into the system. And so what we found too in that study, if people are wondering, six months later, we checked it. They still had 23% alpha activity. So once the brain learns it and it’s normal, that’s a normal. And you had mentioned the amyloid plaque studies. 

We went and saw Li-Huei Tsai because our CEO is friends with the guy who runs the brain lab at MIT. So we got to meet with her and they had that, they had all the press about blue light and gamma and all of that. So we went there and we showed her our… She has a BrainTap now, by the way, and she’s using it in the… We showed her that with our device, we can encourage 23% or more gamma activity. We found that it doesn’t matter how many times you do it, you can only get so much advance. It’s kind of like weightlifting. It doesn’t matter how many times you go to the gym, you can only get so much muscle growth. You can only get so much brainwave change. 

So what we find is that gamma on the other side, gamma is kind of like a high frequency theta. When I’ve interviewed or scanned doctors, like I have a brother-in-law that’s a pretty famous maxillofacial surgeon, and he does just this intricate work. And I said: Carl, I wanna measure your brain while you’re doing that. And what we found is when he’s in his zone, he’s actually in gamma.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Would this be like a flow state, maybe?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yes, yes. And we’re finding that true with athletes too and creative artists, healers. Like when we meet healers, people that they don’t even think they’re healers, just people come to them and they heal people, they resonate this. And now there’s studies that actually show our gut biome actually attracts people to us or repels them. Because we’re creating this field of energy through the electromagnetic field. Even though the brain is very low, the heart is like six times more, and the gut is actually 12 times more than that. 

So you’re actually projecting this information out. When people say, “I got a gut feeling about that person,” really, it’s a brain. So all of this is kind of interconnected. But the real thing for what we found is the biggest secret weapon to helping with Alzheimer’s, to kind of bring it back to the summit, is that we need to get people sleeping. And we need to get them to have more level four or paralytic sleep they call it. Because that’s the only time the gliolymphatic system, which is a new thing that the medical community found in 2016, which has always been there, but they didn’t know it ’cause they never looked at it while people were sleeping. But that’s when it engages. And that’s when you detox the brain. So just everyday use, it’s like driving your car, you’re gonna have exhaust. 

You know, every cell has an exhaust system, right. And it’s all trapped in the brain all day long until you go to sleep. So if you’re not sleeping ’cause your brain is dysregulated, then you’re not detoxing. And now, they’re coming up with a lot of different medicines, if you will, or vitamins and nutrients that actually they do the pairing or they bind the toxins and get ’em out of the system. They didn’t have those before. So now, we can measure it and we can actually see the results. So there’s always a combination with what we do with some kind of nutrition or therapy and BrainTap to get the best results. But the study I was talking about, we wanted to just do the BrainTap just to see. So I think if somebody were to put other modalities in with it, it would just get even better results.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

I would imagine, yeah. So what is Photobiomodulation? Can you explain that mouthful of a word?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Well, what they found out was in our… You know, they mapped the genome, right, in 2002. They made this big fuss, “Hey, we mapped the genome.” But they didn’t. They mapped 1% of it. Could you imagine passing your boards, and you go, “I answered 1% of the questions. “Give me my certificate.” But what they found out was that other 99% is always in a state of flux. And it emits a light pulse. Every cell of your body, including the mitochondria, emits light pulses. That’s why I can see you and you can see me. 

We’re sharing our light, in other words. And so, what happens at the DNA level, they now know that when that pulse happens, it happens across the whole system of your body and actually rebraids your DNA. And that changes based on the words you use, the people you’re with, the food you consume. For instance, they now know that they’ve tracked 2,300 different gene expressions that change by the words we use. Foods can do it, environment, EMF. 

You know, that’s why some people who are sensitive. Now they also know the more fear you have, the more you shut those down. So people who are optimistic and more open-minded, they seem to tolerate things better because the body adapts. We are very adaptive in nature. And then the dura, in the fascia in the body, now science is showing that that’s like fiber optic cabling. That’s what carries these bio-photonic information. They also know, just as a side note, that they can only store so much information in silicon. So we’ve kind of run to the end of our silicon. How fast can we make a computer? They’re now storing it in two things, water. They can now structure water and they can hold all the information in the history of time in one, and they have a lot of room leftover, in one drop of water that’s structured. 

Now, they’re also storing data in light. So guess what we are? We’re light and water. So all that information is there and it’s redundant. When Dr. Emoto was still alive, he wrote a book called “The Secret Life of Water.” And he would come out to Quantum University and speak. And it just was amazing what you can do. They actually know that how you communicate, it shows up in the cellular memory of the water that you will carry in your body. 

So if you’re loving to yourself, if you’re caring about yourself. Now, some people as they get Alzheimer’s, what happens when the brain gets dysregulated, let’s imagine you’re trying to remember your son’s name. They just walked in the room. Well, that’s simple for us if our brain’s working right. Boom, it happens. But if not, there’s eight places or more in the brain where you have to go collect all that data. The brain stores it all over the place. And then it represents at one time, but it happens at the speed of light. Not at the speed of thought. Thought is even slower than light. I mean, it happens instantly. But let’s say that one side of the brain is just even a millisecond off, the brain will stop the program because it says: That’s too much work. So it says: That data’s not there. Let’s write it off because we’re used to, we only truly remember the very good times, like our first kiss, our wedding maybe, you know, different things like that, that first time we rode a bike, our awards, whatever those are. And then we remember the very bad times, right. And depending upon which one we focus on, that’s how we feel today.

So we wanna focus on those positives. But the brain is writing off most things. To kind of put it in perspective for the listeners, our brain, just as we’re talking here, our ears are processing 25,000 pieces of information while we’re talking. Now, that 25,000 pieces of information, we only act on 40 of them. So our brain has a really good way of sorting out information. And if you and I were at a restaurant and it was your favorite restaurant, we’re sitting there eating. You told me about this meal, it’s perfect. We’re having this great conversation. Then somebody two tables over says, “Alzheimer’s.” We’re gonna hear it, even though we didn’t hear anything else they said. Because this reticular activating system or our default mode network is always looking around: Is this safe for me? What’s going on? And so when people wonder what’s going on when they get older, that sorting system has been compromised. And so it says: Those aren’t the 40 pieces I wanna deal with. I wanna know the name, the person, you know. 

But it’s not keeping that information. It’s lost its hierarchy of needs as far as information goes. That’s why when you start doing the practice like what we’re talking about, and keeping the frontal lobe engaged… I should finish that thought, I guess. The reason we have light in the eyes, when people their eyes are closed, but the light pulses are actually triggering cranial nerve 2, so it doesn’t matter if you can even see as long as you have that nerve, your brain’s gonna synchronize. But when we introduce light into the brain, we actually keep the brain awake. When you close your eyes, the first thing that’s gonna happen is your frontal lobe is gonna start shutting down. 

This is evident when we watch a movie, right. We’re watching a scary movie and we go, “Oh, it’s just a movie, right.” We close our eyes and we remind ourselves we’re not really there because our mirror neurons are going crazy. We’re either Freddy Krueger or we’re being chased by him. So we have to decide. And then we have to say, “Wow, that’s just a movie. “That’s not really happening.” But when people go to meditate or relax, they think that when they close their eyes, the brain goes: Oh, it’s time for sleep. We wanna keep them in that. If you can keep them in that alpha theta brainwave, now they can really produce those neurotransmitters that our brain needs. 

I like to tell people the world’s greatest pharmacy is not on the corner. It’s not in Walgreens or Walmart. It’s in your brain. It’s between your ears. It can create 30,000 different neurochemicals with the right thoughts. Some of those are good and some bad. So if we can keep it going, then, you know, the brain will do its work for us. And it can re-regulate. It regulates because of like a tuning fork. Like I used earlier, the body just knows how to do that. You can’t really train the brain to come together. It’s gotta have the right stimulus. That’s why people do neurofeedback, different things like that to get the brain engaged.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah, I wanna share with our listeners some of my clinical experience with BrainTap. As I was telling you, Dr. Neil Nathan, also a guest on the summit, is a big fan of yours and he’s a former mentor of mine. So I have recommended BrainTap to a number of my patients. And clinically, I haven’t used it yet to its potential with Alzheimer’s and dementia. But I have been using it with the patients you were describing, who are highly sensitive. They don’t tolerate a lot. And many of them have mold toxicity. They find me, you know, because we focus on that at my clinic as well. And what I have noticed is that many of them have experienced early childhood trauma.

And so what you’re describing makes so much sense for why it really, really helps them. It’s regulation of the nervous system, maybe because it’s been maladapted early on. When we can regulate that, they become more tolerant to whatever the stressor is, whether it is a mold toxic environment or a relationship, or, you know, even like non-organic foods or flying. You know, travel is a little stressful. All of these things that we should be able to tolerate a little bit of, some of us, some people, many of my patients are unable to. And then BrainTap helps. I’m so excited to have you here. Like tell me exactly what’s going on and why.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Well, what happens is when, if you think about in the, and hopefully you remember these days. But it might be before you. But in houses when I was growing up, we had fuses. So if we were running the dryer and the toaster was going, then my sister would turn on the hairdryer, we’d blow a fuse, right. But nowadays, we just have a flip. We just go flip the switch. Well our body doesn’t have a fuse or a flip switch. It basically just resets, keeps resetting. That’s what they call stimming. Like when you have a child with severe autism that has stimming, you know. They’re really trying to get rid of the energy that’s built up in the system. They don’t know how to regulate the energy. 

If we have all those brain waves going in the right order, then we regulate energy. That’s really what we’re about. Our body takes in energy, even music energy. Like if you’re at a party, you don’t really wanna be there, but they start playing your favorite songs from your high school days. Pretty soon you’re tapping your toes. You’re smiling. You’re having a good time because our body converts that to energy. And we’ve gotta use that energy. So what’s happening is if their brain is dysregulated, all the information comes into the central cortex at the same time. There’s no space. This is a phobic reaction. They call it a synesthesia actually in psychology, which means overlapping sensory systems. So what we do is we’re gonna slow that down. Time in the brain or in the mind, however you wanna think about that, at the states of alpha and theta is not relevant. You know, everybody’s had a dream where it felt like it lasted forever. Then you finally wake up and go: “Whew.” Do you know how long the average dream lasts?

Heather Sandison, N.D.

No.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Seven seconds.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Wow.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

But there’s no time there. So it’s kind of like those Star Trek movies where somebody goes into a dream and has a whole lifetime.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Or an hour long massage and it feels like it’s been 10 minutes.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there’s no time when you get into that place. But what we can do is we can teach the brain to reorganize. As an example, professional athletes like baseball players, when we interviewed them and they do something called modeling, we wanna find out the best hitters in the world in baseball, how do they do it? Well, when they’re in the batter’s box, they’re not thinking: Oh no, that guy’s gonna throw the ball at 90 miles an hour across the plate. 

What they’re thinking is: I’m gonna slow down that ball so I can see how it’s spinning. Now, if you don’t have the experience or the brain capacity, you get freaked out. But they stand in the box. They literally see it leave the fingers of the pitcher in slow motion. They see the rotation of the ball. They know if it’s a curve, a screw ball, or a fast ball, and they make the adjustment. Now those are experts, right. Now we all do that to some degree. We call it anticipatory stress. You know, some people actually don’t get out of bed till they have enough stress. You know, they’ve thought of enough catastrophes that it’s time to get up, right. So we wanna change that.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

As you were sharing this about the baseball players, like I’ve watched my daughter fall and I see her falling in slow motion, right. Is that the same kind of thing going on in my brain?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Right, it happens when people get in car accidents too. They’ll say, “Everything just slowed down,” because you went into a hyper state. It wasn’t the everyday normal conscious state of reality ’cause you’re thinking: What am I gonna do? And I jumped to the worst thing that can happen. Like I have two grandchildren. And now they’re a little older, they’re eight and 11. But when they were little, I didn’t care if my kids hit their heads everywhere. But every time they hit their head, now that I know about brain health, I’m going: Oh my God, what am I gonna do? I gotta get ’em on the brain helmet, you know, do something to fix their brain. But I mean, everybody has fallen down anywhere between 3,000 to 5,000 times growing up.

So we all have some traumatic injuries. It’s just how did our brain remodel around it? Some people try to do a shortcut and then they start getting anxiety. And what happens is they then start to use affirmations like anxiety runs in the family. Anxiety doesn’t run in the family. The propensity does, but the reality doesn’t. You know, that’s why there’s always that person in the family that doesn’t have it ’cause they don’t buy into the family belief. Now what we know about epigenetics, only 20% of who you are is your parent’s responsibility. 80% is your environment and everything that you’ve done since that time. So what happens with this fear factor that’s happening in the brain is under stress, the brain disregulates. 

That’s why we’re told like if we get a divorce, we lose a job, we have to move across country, they tell you, “Don’t make any real life changing decisions. “Don’t do that; take some time.” Because we don’t make good decisions when we’re stressed out, right. So we have to go to an altered state to relax and do that. And most of it is that we are not trained to process our day. And if you remember back to some of my BrainTap sessions, I always have people do a review of their day. And when you train your brain to review your day, you’re not leaving anything on the table. You’re sorting it out so that basically it’s like if you worked at IBM during the 70s, you couldn’t leave your office until there was no papers on your desk. It actually looked like nobody worked there because that way they knew that you had finished up the task for the day. 

Well, we should consider that for our own brain every night. Now what happens is if we don’t… Or a better way to say that would be, let’s imagine watching your favorite TV show or movie and the actors and actresses never rehearsed. That would be ridiculous, right? We would never see that. But people get up every morning and do that in their own life. They never rehearse how to talk to their children. They never rehearse how to talk to their spouse. They never rehearse how to drive across town. 

They never rehearse how to do anything different. And then while they’re doing it, they get all upset about they’re not doing it right. Well, your time to practice is before you do it. That’s where the visualization comes in and the mental practice. So part of the process is just teaching them how to prepare. Because life happens quickly. I love what Deepak Chopra said years ago. I was at a training of his, and he said, “90% of what’s gonna happen to you tomorrow, “you know about today.” So what are you pretending not to know? There’s a lot of people running around pretending. 

Now, if that happens long enough, let’s say that they do it over seven years, 10 years, 20 years, that damage is accumulative damage. Like the amnesia. People pretend that that’s not happening. They pretend that that’s not going on. Well, the brain starts thinking: That’s a pretty good program, that amnesia program you’re running. Why don’t we start forgetting names and addresses and phone numbers. So that’s why you have to rehearse. My grandmother who lived to be 93 and had a great memory up to the day she died, I was for lack of a better word babysitting for her so my aunt could go on a cruise and I could go golfing during the day in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

And I came back from golf and I hear her talking out loud. I thought she was on the telephone. She was in there for almost an hour. And when she came out, she says, “Why didn’t you tell me you were here?” And I said: Well, you were on the telephone. She goes, “I wasn’t on the telephone.” I said: Well, what were you doing? She says, “I was reviewing all of my favorite vacations.”

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That’s great. I bet she was a happy woman too, because yeah, she spent her time thinking about her wonderful vacations. Your family history is really fascinating. And this is how you got into the brain space and the relaxation space and mindfulness and meditation was you have eight brothers and sisters. Is that right?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yes, that’s right.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

And then your dad was the one who introduced you. And I mean, this would be before meditation was cool, before it was something that people knew about in most families that would be talked about. So can you just describe what that was like?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yeah. Well, part of what I tell people is you have to reframe your past. So I always tell people I was blessed to be the son of an alcoholic. You know, at the time when I was 12 years old, I didn’t think that. But looking back, because the sister and the priest, we were Catholic, they came over. And Sister Mary and Father Fitzpatrick said, “Michael, we’re gonna teach you to do technology “during meditation.” It was something called the Silva Method. And it’s still in practice right now, people do it. He went there and he couldn’t relax. So he was using alcohol as his own personal prescription to de-stress. And it didn’t work very well. I mean, he would drink to the point of…

Heather Sandison, N.D.

We see this a lot in families. When people are addicted to any sort of substance whether it’s pills or alcohol or heroin, they’re really looking for an out. They’re looking to be more comfortable. And that helps us create some more compassion around substance abuse.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Exactly. There’s a really good book called “Find Your Perfect High” by John Marshall. And he talked about brain balance. This was back in the 80s. And we all had to read that book. My dad was really big on everybody reading, which was really good. You know, I read books that, you know, people going through midlife crisis were reading. But I read ’em in high school because we would have family discussions around them. You know, we had reading assignments. And his mother was a nurse, but she was addicted to prescription drugs. Because at that time, the nurses could prescribe for themselves. 

Around the same time, she was sent home from the hospital to die. And she lived to be 90, like I said. They took her off all her medicine and she lived. They told her she was too toxic, she was gonna die, just sent her home. And she began to live. So we went from being really a pharmaceutical driven family to a health. When my dad got the help, my mother got into nutrition. So we had kind of the double whammy, you know. We got all the sugar out of our house, all the dyes, everything. I don’t know if you remember Euell Gibbons, but I was voted to be the next Euell Gibbons by my high school class because I ate weird. 

I didn’t eat what they served. I brought my own food, ate healthy, not as healthy as I can eat now because we didn’t know that much back then. But it was healthier than most. And my dad had made a really big effort to say, you know, the reason he got in trouble was he didn’t know. And he wanted to make sure all of his kids knew. And out of all of my brothers and sisters, we only had one brother that for about 20 years decided to go against the grain, you know, and not follow the meditation, not eat healthy. And he paid for it with gout. He’s still alive, but he’s not in really good health. 

Now he’s trying to get healthy. You know, it’s a lot easier to keep your body healthy than try to repair it once it’s broken down. But I think that that really changed him. And my dad, it helped him so much, he decided to go back to school, got his degree in psychology and started working with people. And then, that’s how we began. I really wasn’t gonna do what he did. I didn’t really think that way. I went to school for electronics first. That’s why we have electronics. So my undergraduate’s in electronics. Then I went to school to get my degree in psychology.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Oh, that’s great. And BrainTap is really this like magical combination of the two, a very creative combination. I want to go back to sleep. You know, you talked a bit about how important that is for detoxing the brain. But there’s a lot of people who struggle with getting good sleep. So what are the brainwaves and what’s going on with the use of BrainTap when you are trying to get sleep and hoping to improve it?

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Well, one thing is they need to have a sleep hygiene program if they’re having trouble. That means about two hours before sleep, they need to start preparing: turn off any broadcast news, anything that’s gonna be over exciting, maybe watch some comedies or something like that if you’re gonna watch TV. There’s a lot of different ways. Start turning off lights in your home. Because what happens if they’re having trouble sleeping is the body doesn’t know it’s sleep time. You know, what used to happen… I’ve always thought about what is an ancient technology or an ancient tradition and how can we make it modern technology. If you and I were in the Serengeti again and it was nighttime and we were out hunting and gathering or whatever we were doing, we’d come back to the tribal village, we’re gonna have a fire. And that fire is going to be crackling at a certain rhythm and cadence.

That fire is actually at 10 Hertz frequency. When we built our first light and sound machine, we measured the frequency of a candle because there’s a meditation called the Jyothi meditation. And you look at it and what you do is you would breathe and try to move the candle. And the flickering of the candle would put you into a deeper state of relaxation and meditation. Then when they got LEDs, we could imitate that. So we could take people from a beta state and disengage, what is happening when they’re laying in bed and they do it. Most people too, that are having trouble sleeping think you’re supposed to go to sleep, close your eyes and you’re dead to the world. That’s not really good. The best way to go to sleep is to go to sleep, lay there, process your day, do some breathing exercises. 

I usually teach them two different breathing exercises. Now, of course, they’re gonna do breathing exercises when they do the BrainTap. But let’s say they don’t have it ’cause some of the listeners here might not have it. You lay in bed and there’s something called box breathing, which is pretty simple. Breathe in to the count of four, hold to the count of four, breathe out to the count of four, then hold it to the count of four. And you just keep doing that box breathing. While you’re doing that, you scan your body. When you focus on a part of the body, energy follows thought. So as you think of that part of the body, blood flows to that area, circulation increases. And with vasodilation and blood flow, relaxation follows. So you’re gonna move up through the body doing that. The other one that a lot more people like this one than the other. It’s the same process with the body. But you breathe in to the count of four. When you breathe in, you engage the sympathetic system. So that’s your survivor brain. And that’s probably already activated, but you wanna activate it just to make sure that your brain knows. And then when you breathe out, you breathe out to the count of eight. This engages the parasympathetic. So that’s your thriving brain. And as you do it, what I tell people at the end of it, just really try to get it all out. What happens then is we’ve all been in an experience where we were over frustrated and we finally went I’m just tired of it.

Well, that’s your body shaking it off. And if you notice pets, your pets like especially dogs, when they get nervous, they’ll shake. They’re doing the same thing. They’re trying to shake off that energy. And so with our bodies, if we do that at night, what’ll happen is eventually, you won’t make it up to your hips. Relax, and you’ll be out. But you’ve trained your body to unwind. Our body, for those that know what a capacitor is, like Elon Musk batteries are capacitors. They hold a charge and they discharge slowly. Our bodies are like a capacitor. They hold a charge, and then we have to discharge them. Now, hopefully, we discharge them by walking 10,000 steps a day, drinking half our body’s weight in water, eating healthy foods, all the things… You know, if we lived on the island with Gilligan and Mary Ann, you know, it would all be great. 

But because we don’t, our body keeps getting interrupted. These natural patterns keep getting interrupted, interrupted. So at night, we can at least bring balance back to our bodies. And what’ll happen is even though we’re asleep, your body will continue the process of relaxing. So when you wake up in the morning, you don’t have clinched teeth. You don’t have… We work with people that they wake up in a ball like a fetal position. They don’t understand it. And they’re telling me they’ve been doing it for years. And that’s because they’re going through trauma while they’re sleeping. Because the kinetic energy that has built up throughout their life has never been discharged. That’s why exercise. We all know people that were really negative or having a bad time in their life. They started an exercise protocol and pretty soon they’re all smiles and happy. Because your physiology does affect your psychology and vice versa, so it’s best to do both.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That’s great. A couple other people on the summit here have been talking about sleep apnea and oxygen at night. And I think the combination of both of these things, being able to really relax, get into the right state at night and then keep your airway open, you’re gonna get… You know, we don’t think of sleep as a very productive time, but if you can really harness the potential of the detox and of that resetting for the next day, your brain is going to be in a much better place in the morning.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Yeah. And I think too, unfortunately over time, especially during the 70s and 80s and 90s, people would brag about how much sleep they didn’t get. Like, “I only slept five hours.” “I only slept six hours.” I mean, in college, we can get away with that. As we get better looking and more intelligent with age, we have to sleep more. And so, like myself, it’s not always eight hours. We just finished a study in Australia. We’re writing it up to be published. But it was with mine workers who work in coal mines. And when we were doing our baseline studies, we were using something called the Biostrap. 

We partnered with them in the study. And during that, most of the people were sleeping seven to nine hours a night, but still scoring on the insomnia scale. And that proved to us something I already knew. It’s not time in bed. It’s depth of sleep. So you need one hour of deep sleep over time, it’s not all at one time, it’s over time, and then two hours minimum of REM sleep. And now you’re producing enough for those neurotransmitters to have the mood regulation. It’s normal to be depressed. It’s not normal to stay depressed. You know, it’s kind of like we flow in and out of these states of consciousness. And if we can do that, usually it’s measured by something called heart rate variability, for those that are listening. If you’re able to get stressed and then relax, that’s great. If you’re not able to do that, then you don’t have that regularity that you need.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That ability to adapt to the environment in front of you. Dr. Porter, this is so helpful. Really fascinating work that you’re doing and so beneficial. I mean, I have watched BrainTap transform lives in my clinical practice. And so, it’s really an honor and a privilege to have you here today. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Well, it’s great to be here. And we have a mission of bettering a billion brains. So we need to, at any age, we need to better their brains.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Spread the word. I want our listeners to know where they can find more about you and about BrainTap.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Well, they can go anywhere online at @DrPatrickPorter, Dr. Porter. They can check out my website. They can also, if they want, they can go get a free book and a 15 day trial on our app for 99 cents. And they get to keep the book, no matter what they do. They can download it. That’s over at braintap.pro. They can head over there and get a free copy. But pretty much, if they just do hashtag BrainTap, they’re gonna see thousands of reviews out there and people that are using it.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That’s awesome. That’s so great. Thank you so much again for creating this, for doing the work you’re doing to better brains and for being here with us today.

Patrick K. Porter, PhD

Thank you for allowing me to.