Scientists are creating music to unlock your brain’s potential | Dan Clark | Big Think
[Music] So, from an evolutionary perspective, 10, 20,000 years ago, distractions actually kept us alive. When you're sleeping in your cave or in a village, it could be a tiger coming to eat you or a villager trying to attack you. And 10 or 20,000 years ago, those things—paying attention to the people that could understand those patterns—were the people that lived.
In today's society, fast-forwarding now, we live in so many distractions. We have so many things coming on us, but none of them are life or death. So, everything is accentuated because of that. And what a lot of our music does, it actually starts fundamentally in how to balance your brain or how to almost take advantage of those evolutionary principles. We use that as a starting point, and we layer our music on top of that.
From there, what's really important about our company is that we are science-first. So what that means is we take it seriously in every single thing that we do. We try to validate with science. One of the really exciting things about our focus product specifically is we have a grant from the National Science Foundation to help us evaluate if this can be a preliminary step, a combination, or a complete replacement for ADHD and ADD medications.
It's with the same kind of scientific rigor that we also apply for our relax, our meditation, and our sleep product. Basically, the ADHD and ADD studies contain how do we replicate the same kinds of intense focus that these drugs do, but on demand and in a more controlled environment. So, when you take these different kinds of medications, they last for a certain period of time, and that's not always needed. Sometimes you just need 30 minutes or an hour, maybe two hours, of intense focus, and then when you're done, you can stop.
Really, what we're doing is we're using fMRI and EEG data to help us validate that this is something that can peak that state on demand with no use of drugs, and just the neural phase locking in our music. The reason I'm passionate about it is because there are so many people in the world, and let alone just America, that are having challenges with ADD and ADHD right now. We prescribe so much medication to kids that's very close to cocaine, and what's happening is we're in the cycle of prescribing.
Now, I'm not trying to erase those drugs, and I’m trying to—what we're trying to do is actually give someone another option. Because right now, you have ADHD, you have these problems, you're a parent, you just want your kid to study, to focus, to do well. And what other options do you have? It's a really big deal because if we can help people have another option, we could be a preliminary step, we could be a combination, or we could be a replacement altogether.
Having someone able to control this advanced focus on demand is extremely important because of that reason. I think as we move forward as a culture, it's really about just having choices at the end of the day. And what Brain FM is, is a brand new choice that people have to be able to have that effect that they're looking for.
So, Brain FM—we create functional music to help you focus, relax, and sleep better. It's all backed by science, research, and evidence in the continual improvement of that. So, what that basically means is how do we produce music that is designed for mental states from the ground up? What we do is we actually start with a mental state in mind, and we have a brain protocol, and we craft music around that.
So, at the end of the day, you're just listening to normal music that has carried characteristics specifically designed to help you get your mental state on demand. So, when you listen to our music, you'll hear all different kinds of genres of music. We have electronic, we have Mozart, we have piano, we even have lo-fi.
What the seeker is, is actually the neural phase locking, which is a pattern process we've developed to create these characteristics that encourage your brain to arrive at that mental state as fast as possible. You can think of neural phase locking as actually a combination of a lot of different principles that create these characteristics in your brain.
What happens is when you're listening to music, or really just right now, your brain is firing almost like a Christmas tree. So, when you plug one in, it's all blinking at random different times. What our music does, it aligns all of those blinking lights to blink at the same time to get there into that state. And then, as long as you're listening to the music, you stay in that state for the rest of your period.
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So, I think building Brain FM, we have to be careful because what we're doing is we're introducing a new tool that has a capability to help a lot of people, but can also be viewed in a way that isn't really the intention. We're trying to help people, no matter what language you speak and how much money you make, to be a better person on demand. And there's a lot of regulations doing that.
Some are from critics saying like, "Hey, this is something that can't be done because it's been tried before." Some of it is maybe from the government, some of it is from all these different things. You know, we have a consumer side, but we also have a medical side.
I think it's really important that we view this in a way that is actually an indicator or a barrier that we have to rise up and meet and exceed. So, it's not just about, "Oh man, this is annoying." This is something that people are cautious of. I welcome that. I want to take someone's curiosity or skepticism and match that and explode it.
How do we use this as a way to conduct our company and our future company in a way that aligns with those principles? So that we're always testing our own product first before we're told. We're always offering information and data before someone is telling us to do so, and we are the ones leading the charge or the release of this information and really building upon it, because we know that that's going to make us better.
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