Gladden longevity — Episode #64

Steve Reiter: Welcome to Age Hackers with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC, Founder, and CEO of Gladden Longevity. On this show, we want to help you optimize your longevity, health, and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering three questions: How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? And how do we live well beyond 120? I'm Steve Reiter and, Dr. Gladden, we just had a conversation with Dr. Patrick Porter with Brain Tap, and I don't think I've ever heard of this product before, and as we're getting ready to record, I remember checking it out going, "This looks really interesting," and you have some experience with this. It's basically a headset with a visor that uses light and sound, and vibration to help train your brain into certain states.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, I think listening to this podcast, you're going to hear some really fascinating stuff about Patrick's journey into this, but then also about what Brain Tap can do from the standpoint of making your brain younger. Really fascinating, really improving neuroplasticity, improving blood flow, improving your ability to attain meditation states and flow states, learn a language, get a higher GPA, and sleep better. We didn't talk about sex, but it probably helps that too.

Steve Reiter: Yeah, I'm really intrigued with this. And for our Age Hackers Plus members, we get into some really exciting stuff that Brain Tap has coming that they're working on right now and in the future. And so, if you're interested, go to agehackers.com and learn how to become an Age Hackers Plus subscriber. I'm excited. This was a good one.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity - Age Hackers Podcast, I have the privilege to be here with a guy that I have a lot of esteem for, Dr. Patrick Porter, Ph.D. He's a brain function expert, really, and a lot of people know him through a device that he's developed called Brain Tap, which is quite fascinating. But he's got a history that predates Brain Tap that's fascinating in and of itself, and he's got some ideas about how to keep your brain young for a long time. So, Patrick, welcome to the show.

Dr. Patrick Porter: Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. So, tell us a little bit, how did you get interested in this area of brains and all this kind of stuff? Did you get knocked on the head when you were a kid, or what happened?

Dr. Patrick Porter: That happened plenty of times, but it actually happened when my father got help for his alcoholism, and I was getting in trouble with the nuns. So, I had ADHD pretty bad, and the rest of the family-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So your dad was a priest or what? I'm not-

Dr. Patrick Porter: No, my dad was an alcoholic, and the church came over and helped him.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay.

Dr. Patrick Porter: Basically said, "Michael,"- We had nine kids in the family; he would still find a reason to go get drunk and disappear for two or three days. And back then, you didn't do divorces like they do today. I'm sure that wouldn't have lasted long. So we were going to Alateen, Al-Anon, learning about my dad, and that really wasn't helping him. He attended one seminar where he relaxed, and he never drank again. He realized that he was drinking to relax, and that kind of started the whole family's journey of this whole thing.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay. Well, that's fascinating. Where are you in the birthing order of nine?

Dr. Patrick Porter: I'm number three.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Number three, okay. So, how old were you when your dad discovered that by relaxing in a different manner, he could sidestep the alcohol?

Dr. Patrick Porter: Yeah, I was 12 years old is what I remember starting to learn and take back responsibility for my own learning and getting better at school and sports and things of that nature.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, well, that's an interesting age because you're very malleable at that point. You're still very childlike in certain ways but also old enough to actually start to be putting the pieces together. So, that's kind of what happened for you. So you're 12 years old, your dad goes through this, and then was there an epiphany at that point or a direction, or how did it play out from there?

Dr. Patrick Porter: Well, what happened was he got into reading self-help books and things, and I got in trouble because my grades were still not up there. And he had me read a book called As A Man Thinkethby James Allen-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: As what?

Dr. Patrick Porter: It's called As A Man Thinketh, it's a book by James-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: As A Man Thinketh. Okay.

Dr. Patrick Porter: It's a really good book, and it's very easy. And what he did was one summer, I had to read that book every day, and before I got to go out and play, I had to go tell him how I was going to use the concepts in that book. And he kept that going all the way through high school. Every book that he wanted me to read, if you got in trouble, you didn't get in trouble like the old-school way; he said the whole problem was ignorance. So he was always educating us about our thinking, our acting, and taking responsibility. And that changed my world.

I didn't realize when you start to affirm things out loud, and you get accountable… One of the things I told him- Because he said- I was thinking, ‘what would dad want to hear?’ I said: "I'm going to be captain of the football team." And he says: "Hey, faith without works is dead." So, he put together a schedule for me, and I became a three-sport captain.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Wow.

Dr. Patrick Porter: And I ran, I lifted weights. He said: "The first thing is to make a commitment; the second thing is to take an action." So, I learned that very early on, and I literally never missed a day of working out until I was hospitalized when I was 24. And then I still work out every day to this day.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Beautiful. Yeah. That's great. So what's really heartwarming about this story is your dad sounds like a heck of a great guy once he was able to get rid of the alcohol, quite honestly. So, that must have been a beautiful transformation for your family, I would think.

Dr. Patrick Porter: Oh, yeah. He went from being someone no one wanted to be around to people used just to gather and hear him talk. It was great. I mean, my childhood was, every other weekend was, setting up hotel rooms or little meeting rooms for him to do his [inaudible 00:05:59] training. I kind of feel like I'm doing the same thing today that I did when I was a kid, still doing the same thing. But it's a lot of fun, so I enjoy it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay. Now is he still with us, or did he pass?

Dr. Patrick Porter: Oh, he passed away about seven years ago.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay, okay. Got it.

Dr. Patrick Porter: He went down too many dirt roads before he... You have to do the work early. You got to do the work early.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay, got it. So, he had a few miles on him by the time he got there, is what you're saying. Okay, I got it. Well, that's an important takeaway right there. If you're going down some dirt roads, you need to change the air filter frequently, and you also need to start doing something that's a little easier on the old car. So, interesting. So you came away with lots of wisdom from your dad, a real interest in sort of behavior optimization, if you will, is kind of what I'm hearing. And then how did that lead into the brain work?

Dr. Patrick Porter: Well, I was held back in second grade, so I had a problem with learning, although really my problem with learning is more attention, I had an art scholarship, so I was really into being more creative. And then my mother got into nutrition. I don't know if you know, but the first health food store in America was in Battle Creek, Michigan, my hometown. That's where they put it, so we got into nutrition around the same time. That's why I'm pretty fond of saying you can't outthink a bad diet. You can't just think your way to being healthy. You've got to do something; you got to eat the right foods.

So, my mother got us on eating the right foods, thinking the right thoughts, getting physically active. We would've never lasted in this day and age here. I mean, we were kicked out of the house in the morning and not let back in until sunset. And we were always active. And I think that what happened was we started to realize that we felt better. When I was an angry kid and upset and lashing out at people, I mean, I was a sugar addict. I basically was- I have a saying: “You want to see how sugar responds, just give it in a controlled environment called a birthday party. And then you see what happens a little bit afterward.”

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Right. No, exactly. It's fascinating that we gather our four-year-olds and our five-year-olds together and basically get them drunk on sugar, and then that's the party, but that's also kind of the-

Dr. Patrick Porter: [inaudible 00:08:17]. They don't understand what's going on, and they don't understand; as a kid, you don't understand dopamine. So, you're getting all excited and hyped up, and they give you sugar, and you get the sugar blues, and you got the brain fighting, just fighting with yourself all night long, and then you go to sleep, pass out and repeat.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, when did you crack the code on your sugar situation?

Dr. Patrick Porter: I was in high school and stopped eating. In fact, you might remember Euell Gibbons, right? I was voted to replace Euell Gibbons in the Grape Nuts commercials and be the next Bruce Jenner. So, my friends called me after Bruce changed his religion, right? And they said: "When are you going to have your sex change?" I said: "Nobody mentions Euell Gibbons, but they remember Bruce Jenner," all my friends from school.

So, early on, we never ate sugar at the house. If you came to our house, there was no white sugar, white flour, no dyes. Because we went to an iridologist, actually in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And I think it's kind of standard fare now, but they made it a big deal by looking at our eyes and telling us that we couldn't eat those. But I don't believe any kid can eat those things. But it really helped my mother understand, and she got into eating healthy. And then, for a couple of years, I did my thing at home, but then I would be out drinking my Mountain Dews and other things.

And then I realized in sports that when I would eat poorly, I performed poorly, and I wanted to be, once you get a taste of it, I had 10 varsity letters as a high schooler. So, I wrestled and ran track and got varsity letters from freshman to senior year and then two in this football. So I was an all-around, and then I played baseball in the summer. That's the kind of thing. We never got out of shape. And we could tell if you ate sugar right away. I mean, you knew-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, it was impacting your performance.

Dr. Patrick Porter: And I had a team, we had a really good mile relay team because I ran the quarter mile, and everything matters in that race because it takes a lot out of you. I taught everyone on my track team, and I became like the assistant coach; in fact, they gave me a coaching certificate my senior year because I learned from the UCLA coach how to train for the track. And I taught my team that, and we were awesome. We were a small Catholic school, but we had a really good mile relay team because everyone committed during the season not to eat sugar. I know that was a big thing at that time; most people were making a vow they were not going to drink alcohol or something in high school.

We're like, that was totally off the menu; the sugar was off the menu as well. And we found that everybody noticed their recovery. If somebody can just go- But I told them, I said: "Just go three weeks, and you're going to notice a big difference." Because that's the big deal there. And we used a lot of brewer's yeast at the time; in fact, my coach said: "Don't drink that yeast in front of people because they're going to think you're doing drugs because you get the niacin flush." And people were freaking out about it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. Getting all your B vitamins. Good stuff. Okay, so you did all that through high school. It sounded like you really had some nice behavioral control insights. And then what happened in college and grad school? I mean, you ended up with a Ph.D. What was the trajectory? Was that straight into neuroscience areas, or did you take-

Dr. Patrick Porter: No, I went to school first for Electronics, and I went to a school called Ferris State and learned about really, they said it was Robotics, but back in the early 80s, it wasn't Robotics like we know today, it was more like Solenoids, and this was more for factories because the big three automotive, everybody was getting working jobs so they could go work for the big three automotive.

And then, during that time, I started working with Dr. Paul Adams, and he was a graduate of, it was called Shreveport Baptist Christian at the time. He said: "I want you to get on these radio stations. I don't want to do it anymore, TV stations." He says: "I want you to go back to school." So I was very fortunate while I was working as a trainer with him and his group; it was called Positive Changes, and I was able to get my degree. It took me actually 13 years, but I did it. And so, it wasn't like I just jumped right out. I was working at the same time. And then, so that worked out. And this was before, and now you could just do it all from wherever you're at; I had to go to Shreveport and do classes, things like that. It was a little hard to do it all at one time.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay. So, what degree did you graduate with?

Dr. Patrick Porter: It's a degree in Christian Counseling.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay.

Dr. Patrick Porter: Yeah, Paul was a Baptist minister, actually, and we had addiction centers where we helped people with just different kinds of addictions. So, we didn't use a lot of the Bible in that or anything, but I had a short-term job with the church for a while. But I'm a big believer that those people have a big heart, but I had bigger visions for what I wanted to do and-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Nice. Okay. So really, I see your childhood kind of weaving into your 20s here. And then what happened?

Dr. Patrick Porter: Well, once Paul was wanting to retire, actually when I took it over, and I said: "I really would like to teach people how to do this." Because we were getting really good results in Stop Smoking, that's back when everybody was smoking. And so, I actually got to buy the whole franchise for $9,000, which was- When I sold, it was worth over $5 million at the time in 2002.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Oh, wow.

Dr. Patrick Porter: So, that's it for me, and then we actually, in '98 we realized that smoking wasn't a big industry anymore because a lot of people had stopped smoking, which is good news. We went from 55% of Americans smoking to 19%. So, that book, Who Moved My Cheese, kind of hit me at that time because we were used to running an ad and getting 70 calls. Everybody was wanting to stop smoking.

And then we started a weight loss program, and we got some training because I didn't have any training in that. And we got some nutrition in there as well and started. I knew a little bit about nutrition, but I'm not an expert at nutrition. But we brought in people who could help us. And that's when we really grew. We were in almost every magazine you could think of because we were showing people losing half their weight and keeping it off. I remember when People magazine did their report in 2006, I was still with the company, but I'd already sold it, but I was kind of working as an advisor as they worked through it. And we had submitted over a thousand people that had lost half their weight and kept it off for more than five years. And we didn't really have a diet. We had a mental diet because I'm very fond of saying, at times, it's not what you're eating; it's what's eating you.

So, we made the correlation between the stress that happens in people's lives, most people don't understand the liver produces as much sugar as a candy bar. So you have these stressful events, that's why people go: "I can't believe I'm overweight. I never eat any sugar." And you go: "Well, your body doesn't need sugar. You're producing enough of it on your own that you have this constant insulin drip," that they don't realize because they're stressed out. So we helped them destress. Now today, I think we'd be in an even more difficult situation because the food is so bad; at least back then, you could get healthy food, and a lot of people were still getting the farm-to-table kind of experience. Now I know the soils are worse, the food's worse.

So then, what happened was I was kind of semi-retired. I was just hanging out in California and doing some public speaking and doing some things. And then, because I sold the business on terms, my sister was still their CFO; she said: "Patrick, you better go back to work. This isn't going to make it." And so, for 12 years, I lived the high life of being semi-retired and golfing and having fun and speaking every other weekend somewhere and just traveling. But it gave me enough money to start the new business, Brain Tap. And at that time, I thought, ‘wow, how can I recreate this technology?’ And we added in the ear lights with the Nogier frequencies, and we added in a single unit; it used to be a bunch of wires and more like a component stereo or something like that, and we combined it all into one piece of equipment.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay. So, now your electronics background is interfacing with your behavior modification background. And where's the Ph.D. come in here?

Dr. Patrick Porter: Well, it basically came in more for when you're younger; Paul said: "You're not going to get on TV and radio and promote. Nobody's going to let you speak about your technology with a Bachelor's degree. You need to go back to school and learn." And what was fortunate for me was that I was able to do something called the non-contextual therapy approach, which was my Ph.D. And I actually wrote it into a book called Discover the Language of the Mind, where I took my NLP training and my visualization-guided imaging training, and I actually was able to use that to get my Ph.D. I-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay. So, just so people know, NLP is natural language processing; it's also neuro-linguistic programming. So in your case, it's probably neuro-linguistic programming. So, this is where people are using words to actually stimulate different responses in the brain, essentially, different cadences, different intonations, inflection points, and things like that.

Dr. Patrick Porter: One of the biggest distinctions I learned from NLP over just guided imagery is that the brain doesn't work as well as people think with affirmations, especially if the person doesn't have a belief system in them. But the brain works really well with questions. As an example for the listeners, if I said- If you say: "I am healthy”, but you're sick, your body goes: "What do you mean? You've got this illness," and that illness magnifies. But if you say: "What would my life be like if I was healthy?" Now the brain, being a servo-mechanism, goes to work solving that problem. It might have you read a book about nutritional supplements, it might read about activities you can do, you'll interface, and the brain is looking for solutions. The other is, I mean, there's a lot of evidence out there that affirmations do work, but you've got to believe in them. And the problem is that it's full of lies in the middle.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, great point. No, that's a great point because you could have somebody that doesn't believe something saying: "I'm going to be an NFL player," but it carries no weight.

Dr. Patrick Porter: It's the emotion that drives the behavior, not the words. The words-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: That's right.

Dr. Patrick Porter: ... create the emotion, and the emotion drives the behavior. So, that's what we're talking about.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And questions are cool because they also drive behavior, right? Because you get the brain kind of both consciously and subconsciously looking for the answers to those questions if that's what you tee up. So, that's why we like questions a lot. How good can you be? How do you make 100 the new 30? Because all of a sudden, it's like, okay, when you wake up, you're focused on the question. Now you're sourcing everything that comes across to answer that question rather than, "We are this," right? We never make that statement.

Dr. Patrick Porter: We find also when you're doing the EEG scans on people, and you give them an affirmation, actually one hemisphere of the brain collapses. And this happens under stress anyway. So when you say an affirmation, the brain is trying to judge you, but when you ask a question, the brain stays lit up. So, we show that a lot in our live classes and people because they don't believe you unless you show them some evidence. So you show them what happens in the brain.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Right. So, this is a really important point for the audience, I think, because there's a lot of self-talk out there, and people will be telling themselves things like: "Oh, I'm so stupid," or, "Oh, I'm this," or, "Oh, I'm not that," or, "Oh, I'm..." Right? And all these statements, to your point, these affirmations, these are negative affirmations, are kind of shutting down your brain and shutting down your capacity to actually create a new reality for yourself.

So, if you want to have self-talk, it seems like one of the most beneficial things would be to flip any statements that you might be making to yourself into questions. How do I become more intelligent? How do I become more whatever, affable, more loving, more anything, right? Rather than saying: "I'm not a loving person," or "I'm an asshole," or whatever. You're going to say something like: "How do I become?" Right? And so, that's very, very cool.

Okay, so we've got questions. We've got the brain teed up. We've got the brain lit up. And then I know that Brain Tap, let's just describe Brain Tap for people a little bit, so we know what we're talking about here. We've used that term.

Dr. Patrick Porter: There are five core technologies in Brain Tap, and they're all proven to work without each other. So, we'll just start with words since we're talking about it. We know that-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: I'm going to start even more basic. So, Brain Tap, if you're trying to visualize this, is basically a set of headphones. You put on a set of headphones, and then there's like a visor that comes down in front of you, it's attached to the headphones, and you roll this visor forward in front of your eyes. And now you can't see because it's not a visor like on a motorcycle helmet you can look through; it's a visor that's opaque, but it's going to have light signals that are coming into your eyes, whether they're open or closed actually. And you're going to have sounds coming into your ears now. So, now you're basically bringing stimuli into the brain, and now you're going to talk about five different things going on here. 

Dr. Patrick Porter: Yeah. What's going on there, people go: "Why retinal flashing?" Your eyes mostly are closed because it's a better journey, but it won't hurt you if your eyes are open because it's 470 nanometer light; it's very low light penetration to the eyes, but the eyes have the most mitochondria. So, if you want to bring light into the brain, the eyes are the brain. So, we can have that photo biomodulation, so we're delivering light because it takes energy to meditate. Most people don't know either that almost all the practices of meditation always had an exercise before, like yoga or Tai Chi or something. And people just sit down and wonder why they can't meditate, it's because, like you said earlier, they have all this negative self-talk. And then, who wants to listen to that? You [inaudible 00:22:03]. So the eyes are really important.

Now, because we are light beings, really, at a physiological level, and light is what really, as the cells make their transition and things like that, we're emitting light, something called [inaudible 00:22:18] exchange in the body. So we need more light into the brain to do this work. So we put the ear lights actually have red and blue light, 650 nanometer and 470 nano light, and then the chromophores, which are the little batteries in the cells, absorb that energy. So it's all about getting energy into the brain. So that's the light feature.

We have found that the light feature does add a significant amount of benefit, especially if you're talking about dementia or Alzheimer's and things like that, or concussion care. But the app alone, because of sound, we're going to use binaural beats, isochronic tones, and frequency response as sounds that we can- Because the advancement in our iPhones and Android tablets and all that, most of the technology's now right in those phones, we don't have to build it anymore. So, we can just send that signal through the headphones.

And what happens is that signal with light creates a three-dimensional space. In the brain we can activate different regions of the brain depending upon what we want to accomplish. We can also use earth frequencies like between 0.5 and 100, which are the frequencies the brain evokes to. So, if we walk into a room and they're playing a piece of music we like, our brain will actually synchronize with that music. That's why we use music, they actually have a whole science called the Mozart Effect, so we use 10-cycle music that's embedded into it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, you've got the human resonance also, which is what, about seven hertz? And then you've got the brain that seems to have 40 hertz as a sort of resonant frequency. So you're tapping into all these different things. In essence, what you're doing is energizing the brain. And I will say this about the meditation thing, sometimes I have a hard time meditating if I have a lot of energy, and it's like I almost need to go out and go do something to dissipate that energy to the point where I can actually now sit down and actually be present.

But by the same token, it's more mental energy. And I think sometimes doing something physical for me can dissipate that to the point where I can then do what I want to do. You're talking about using a yoga practice or other energy practices to actually build energy into the system to enable you to meditate too. So, there are kind of two sides of that equation. One is getting enough energy to meditate, one is dissipating the stuff that's distracting you, so to speak. So, yeah, interesting.

Dr. Patrick Porter: Yeah, think of the body like a capacitor, an electronic circuit. It's meant to hold a charge and then discharge. As long as you have healthy habits and you're discharging appropriately, you won't get angry, you won't get upset. But when your body has too much energy, you can't dissipate it. And 70% of your nervous system is between your ears. So a lot of people don't realize that. So, what's happening is you're dissipating that excess energy.

We have all seen children that say they're too wound up to sleep, they're too tired to sleep. So, usually, the body can get energized by eating junk. It can quickly do that. But if you're not doing manual labor, it quickly turns into sugar and is a detriment. So we need to deliver energy into the brain, which comes in the form of, of course, fats and water and different things like that and other nutrients. But because people are so used to being negative, that negative drain on the brain is incredible. And that's not their fault.

We are the genetic lottery winners. We're here because our ancestors didn't get eaten by that saber-tooth tiger. But all the history of fear, of survival, is still in there. So that's why people go: "Why are we so negative?" It's because we survived. All those protective mechanisms, now we don't need them all anymore, but some people have that over-vigilance, and that causes the nervous system to go haywire.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Exactly. They don't break down dopamine nearly as efficiently, four times less efficiently based on their COMT gene configuration. And so, they're running these hypervigilant areas of dopamine, and it served a purpose if something's coming over the hill there, but now we're just vigilant for no apparent reason. And so, the trick is being able to calm that down. There are some things that can boost that enzyme function, that COMT enzyme, like magnesium, and some other things, theanine, can help calm it down. But you're actually talking now, I think, about utilizing Brain Tap to help people calm down and then go into a meditative state. Is that what you're saying? Or-

Dr. Patrick Porter: What happens at first is we're going to match the brain. Typically, we start sessions around 18 cycles per second. That's high beta. We do have sessions for 40 hertz now, though, because we've done some research for Alzheimer's and dementia; we need that; that's the base drum. That's kind of the base drum of the brain.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: That's right.

Dr. Patrick Porter: So, there's actually a profile to the brain. It's not that any one brain wave is more important than the other; it's a mixture. So, for different activities, I'll give you two examples: If I'm meditating, I want to down-regulate beta, which is our reactionary mind or... And then we want to up-regulate alpha and theta to get more, and this is why it's a timeless place when you get into that timeless place. Your deep meditation could feel like a minute could feel like an hour, and an hour could feel like a minute. Those kinds of things happen because you're in that altered kind of state.

Beta is all-time regulated. And then, when we get into high gamma, it also becomes also dysregulated with time. There's no time anymore. That's the flow state. Most people, it's a little harder to measure while people are in activities, but I've had people imagine they're performing their surgeries, or they're my brother-in-law, who's a really gifted maxillofacial surgeon, I had him imagine he was doing one of his morning surgeries and he was just spiking gamma all over the place because it's very technical work.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Let me interrupt you for just a second because this is interesting because I've made the analogy to people that, for me, I found flow states to be very, very nourishing, and I think you know my mom passed recently and working through all that, one of the things that I learned from that is that there are very few people on the planet that love you unconditionally and there are very few people on the planet that actually nurture you in the way that a mom would nurture somebody. And so, in her absence, it's kind of opened up questions for me about, "Okay, well, we're just nurturing, come now." And so, it comes from many different sources, but one of the sources now is flow states for me. I find flow states to be very nourishing and very nurturing.

And so, I've described flow states for people as it's kind of like being in a meditative state because there is no time, there is no, right? You're only present; you're completely present. And yet you're in this flow where you're kind of in motion. Where with meditation, you're stationary, with the flow, you're in motion, either verbally in motion or kinetically in motion, riding your mountain bike or doing something else. I don't think I fully comprehended that flow was pure gamma. And I knew meditation was alpha and theta, but that's fascinating that you go into a timeless place whether you're on either side of that of the beta.

So, beta one and beta two, just so people know what we're talking about, are these letters, greek letters; are basically the brain has different brainwave frequencies in there, right? There's delta for sleep; then there's theta, then alpha, then beta one, beta two, and gamma. I think I got that right. And one waveform or the other will predominate. When you're asleep, it'll be delta. When you're in flow, it'll be gamma. When you're meditating, it'll be alpha and theta. When you're just going about your daily business, it'll be in the beta range. So, just so people understand that. But it's interesting, so have you found that you can use Brain Tap before you, let's say, do any activity, go play golf or anything else, and put yourself into a flow state so that when you go pick up the golf club, now your brain is basically teed up?

Dr. Patrick Porter: Yeah. Seminole College, we've done a three-year study with them now, and now we have the Brain Tap Neuroscience Center there because of what we showed. First of all, they've been national champions now three years in a row, and they look like they're going to win it again the fourth year. But we found their GPA was the highest in the school. So, we're doing the whole school now through the app. And what we-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And where is this? Where are you doing that?

Dr. Patrick Porter: This is down near Orlando; it's called Seminole College. If you go to their website, you'll see there's actually a whole page for Brain Tap. They use it as a recruitment tool because these kids in college, they have a lot of stress too. So we show them how to deal with stress. And what we did was we increased their alpha 90%. These were elite athletes, to begin with. And in golf, you really need that alpha score. We also do that with basketball. We have a basketball program; we have a pre-game routine. We have a football program that does the same thing. And really, in almost every professional sport that we work with, I'll tell you that the pre-game is what determines the outcome.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: 100%.

Dr. Patrick Porter: Your pre-game meal, your pre-game thoughts. And when we think about what happens in those flow states, by the way, for those wondering is, we have three areas of the brain; when we enter into them, we have what we call gamma and delta bursts. One is when we cross 10-hertz frequency. One is when we cross 7.8-hertz frequency. And one is when we're at 40-hertz frequency, which basically, if you had somebody on an EEG, you'd see this big band of energy that the brain lights up.

And when you get the big thetas and the big gammas, you're actually producing more GABA, and that's a precursor to DMT. So, if you're functioning with it, you have more lucidity. It's almost like the world has become more vibrant in colors and dimensions. It's almost like you did- We've done some studies with psilocybin in Brain Tap, and we had people that didn't want to do psilocybin, and that's where we found out about gamma because we mapped the brains. That was in Dallas, Texas, actually with Dr. Rosenthal; we mapped these brains, and we found out that while they're on a psilocybin, their brain was just in this high gamma activity. And so, we designed some sessions that triggered that part of the brain.

And because we have the receptors in the brain, we can trigger, not for everybody, but we've had a lot of people respond back and go: "Wow, what's going on?" Well, if you create enough of that GABA, you're going to have better dreams, you're going to have more lucidity, and just your capacity to visualize is going to improve because you have the materials at the point where you're going to just start visualizing.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Very cool. So, let's say somebody was going to do a therapeutic psilocybin journey, right? Because this has become a real thing. It's being studied at major universities now, Hopkins, and other places in terms of mental health optimization, and other people are micro-dosing with psilocybin. I just heard Paul Stamets talk about it at Next Health in San Diego. And they have an app, it's called Microdose Me, and they're collecting all this data from microdose users and things like this, but I'm just wondering if utilizing Brain Tap in conjunction with psilocybin or prior to psilocybin would augment the benefits of something like that.

Dr. Patrick Porter: Yeah. We have several researchers that- I'd never done it before, but then a couple of our researchers, I was there in California, and they gave it to me, and I didn't do the full hero dose or whatever, it's just a small dose. But those that were taking bigger doses were saying it was more like DMT when they were doing the trip. But I don't think we ever did that the first time somebody used it because we didn't know what their reaction was going to be.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Sure.

Dr. Patrick Porter: Once they kind of mellowed out and they got into it, and Dr. JoQueta Handy, she actually was so involved with it that she got excited and went and got certified to do more research, Dr. Rosenthal's doing it right now, we're just re-engaging in the study because COVID turned off that study and we were doing it for, how can we help these vets? Because the psilocybin alone can help the vets, Brain Tap alone can help the vets, but what we're finding is when you do it together, it kind of quickens.

Because we're going to build, what we find is that these plants in the right dosage under guidance, that you get a lot of neuroplasticity. Your brain is not the same. And so, that rewiring, there's a thought in neurophysiology that says, if we can get one new thought into the brain, the whole brain has to rewire around that thought because it's [inaudible 00:34:17] kind of string, there's no disconnection. The problem that happens with dementia and Alzheimer's is there starts to be this disconnection between information.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. And that's an end result, right? Basically, that isolation, disconnection, and it's built on a lot of different things; neuroinflammation, lack of energy in the brain. There's a lot that goes into dementia per se, poor blood flow, neurofibrillary tangles, and neuron senescence. I mean, there's a lot of things that go into that, but what's fascinating is that we tend to lose neuroplasticity as we age, and yet, if we're able to maintain neuroplasticity because I was just on your podcast two days ago or whenever it was, three days ago, and I was talking a little bit about youthfulness and how the way that I frame up longevity now is really a conversation about youthfulness. And when you think about youthfulness as being the antidote to aging and also how you maintain a healthy lifespan and health span as well as longevity, then you really want neuroplasticity. You want to be able to entertain new thoughts and new ideas.

And I find one of the things that happen for people in aging is they get "fixed in their ways." You've heard that from a million years, and then they get cranky about it. So, really, if you find yourself out there listening to this, and you're getting cranky, and you're getting fixed in your ways, you know you're going down the wrong path. So, maintaining neuroplasticity here is vital, and so even if you're not pushing the envelope with micro-dosing or therapeutic doses of psilocybin, are people using Brain Tap, it sounds like, just to augment neuroplasticity, and do you have ways of demonstrating that?

Dr. Patrick Porter: Yeah, we have a study where we actually took, it's in a bigger study now again at Seminole College, they're kind of our research partners in this because there's a lot of people down there that we can help. We found a 39% neuroplastic change in six weeks using Brain Tap. That was without getting supplementation. Once we added in the supplementation and physical exercise is key for the brain, but the brain is designed, unfortunately after a certain age, around 27, the brain starts unwiring. They call it neuro pairing.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: That's right.

Dr. Patrick Porter: And the brain is an energy hog, so it's always looking for ways to do it. But it's like muscles; if we keep the muscles active, they won't atrophy. And the brain is the same way. So, whatever you're doing, the [inaudible 00:36:38], like you said earlier, is doing the same thing. The guy that comes home, stops by Circle K, gets his six-pack, gets home, cracks one open, watches the news, gets up, eats dinner, drinks the rest of the six-pack, and goes to sleep. They've actually done studies in it. Maybe it was you who said this on my podcast, they had brains that were pieces of bologna, and they were still atrophying.

I know that they've done studies where there was actually no real brain present, but the family said: "What do you mean? They were functioning perfectly." So, it just shows us how much power each neuron has, and to keep it connected, I always recommend that's why even with Brain Tap, we have 2,000 sessions because we need to do a variety of different trainings. If you do the same training, the brain is really good about- I'll just put this in perspective for everyone. Our eyes see 2,000 pieces of information every second, and our ears,  25,000 pieces of information. Now our brain only acts on four plus or minus two or three. So, all that other information is being augmented by our subconscious. It's doing all the work for us.

And in fact, they say that our eyes actually feed our brain 10 million pieces of information every second. So that would tell us we're making this whole thing up anyway. So, what's going on in the brain? Now, if you are limited in your thinking, if you think there's only one way to do things, this is the way it is, then your brain is going to unwire itself because it's going to prove you right. But if you're the kind of person that thinks, gets up today: "Wow, I wonder what exciting thing's going to happen today, I've got a youthful brain." When the Zen Buddhists would say ‘beginner's mind’, that's what we're talking about, is when you wake up every morning and go: "Wow." It's not you drive down the road, and they have that SSDD, ‘same shit, different day’, but it's not the same. It's never the same.

In fact, those listening to this podcast, you have changed at a rate of 50 million cells per second. So you're not the same person that started. In fact, every DNA pair now they know through [inaudible 00:38:33] exchange has changed its formation. Every DNA pair, every 40 seconds, changes. So, we're learning so much now that we're not the same people, and we can't look at, I always tell people: "Think of a river. That's the Mississippi River, but that's not the one that was there yesterday. It looks the same, flows the same, but it's a whole different waterway." That's who we are. So, we need to update our thinking too. There's an old saying that Wayne Dyer had: "Never let an old person inhabit your body." That's super important.