How to Biohack your Brain with Light, Sound, and Vibration
Ever wonder why lighting a candle or listening to the ocean instantly relaxes you and lifts your mood?
Brain health is a big buzzword in wellness tied to the emerging field of biohacking and our understanding of the gut-brain axis. Biohacking combines science, biology, and self-help to optimize health, well-being, and focus. Biohacking can encompass a wide range of activities including meditation, yoga, cleanse diets, and more.
The gut-brain axis connects the microbiome, the gut as control central for immunity, to the brain. According to the Global Wellness Institute, “70% of our immune system is headquartered in our gut–an extraordinarily complex,100-trillion-cell system of bacteria, viruses, and fungi.”
One way to boost your brain and your health is to entrain your brain. Entrainment is the body’s ability to synchronize or harmonize with other energies. Think of the body as a tuning fork that picks up surrounding energies. Entrainment describes the way the body naturally and unconsciously syncs with either a biological or external rhythm.
For example, when you sit next to the ocean and listen to the waves, you feel calm. That’s entrainment. The ocean resonates at a 10-hertz frequency, which is 10 cycles per second, known to stimulate our body’s production of the feel-good neurotransmitter Acetylcholine (Ach) that functions in both the central and peripheral nervous systems.
Dr. Patrick Porter, an award-winning brain scientist, pioneered the use of brainwave entrainment to improve mental clarity, sleep, and energy. “You can actually trigger neurotransmitter production through brainwave entrainment and this is a game-changer for mental and physical health,” says Dr. Porter, who been instrumental in the nationwide movement to optimize wellness through biohacking.
He is the founder of BrainTap®, a leader in brain fitness and technology-enhanced meditation. Dr. Porter uses light, sound, and vibration to balance the brain with a science-backed meditation app and a companion headset. The BrainTap app offers more than 1500 guided meditation and visualization audio sessions. Most sessions are voiced by Dr. Porter as he guides the listener to ultimately reach desired brain states of healing, rest, and productivity.
The BrainTap app guides you into deep meditative states training the brain to perform optimally and restoring balance in as little as 10 minutes. The guided meditation app uses binaural beats which are two tones in different frequencies that you hear simultaneously, one in each ear. As your right ear and your left ear hear frequencies in different frequency tones, the brain processes them as a single tone, known as a binaural beat. That binaural beat is the difference of those two frequencies—a process known as brainwave entrainment technology or soundwave therapy. Binaural beats in the alpha frequencies of 8 to 13 Hz encourage relaxation and promote positivity.
“Our app guides people with sound to an altered state, moving from the beta state which is the reactionary mind, to the alpha and theta states where your energy field increases,” Dr. Porter explains. The BrainTap app uses a specific algorithm using audio messaging and layered in music.
For an enhanced meditation practice, the BrainTap app pairs with a light and sound headset to amplify brain-boosting results. The BrainTap headset works by using earphones with LED lights in two different colors to deliver light to the ears. The LED lights vibrate at the same frequency as the sunrise and sunset. The headset also has a visor that creates flashing lights while the eyes are closed. This retinol flashing creates shadows of light and activates the brain.
“We are broadcasting a light frequency in the ears that tells the nervous system to turn off the fight or flight instinct and turn on the thriving brain. The light is absorbed by the hemoglobin as energy and circulates throughout the body to find a dying cell that absorbs the energy and returns to health. We use two different color LEDs because science shows that watching the sunrise and sunset, resets your microbiome or the gut where 95 percent of your neurotransmitters evolve,” Dr. Porter explains.
To maximize BrainTap’s benefits, Dr. Porter suggests using the app to meditate in the early afternoon, a time when we are biologically predisposed to rest.
Light as a Nutrient:
“Light is the most underprescribed nutrient on earth right now,” Dr. Porter says. Our body converts light, sound, and vibration into energy in our system. Dr. Porter’s clinical studies using BrainTap show an increase in ATP energy production at the cellular level through vasodilation blood flow and electric oxide release.
“Our bodies evolved to live in the Serengeti where we would be taking naps at 2 pm in the afternoon. The body reminds us to nap daily at 2 pm by lowering our temperature by two degrees. That’s why people go for coffee breaks or tea time to stimulate their waning energy levels. We found an 80 percent improvement in energy levels for those who did a BrainTap session in the afternoon,” says Dr. Porter, who has made entrainment his life’s work.
As a child of a recovering alcoholic father, Dr. Porter witnessed the life-changing benefits of meditation and soundwave entrainment which helped his dad get sober. As a teenager, Dr. Porter made his first affirmation recordings and assisted his dad with meditation seminars. After earning a degree in electronics, he worked as a light and sound researcher to develop the first portable light sound machine in the 1980s.
Today, BrainTap is making rapid advancements in improving mental, physical, and emotional health conditions while relieving symptoms associated with stress, insomnia, pain, and more. More than 3000 clinics use BrainTap to help people wean themselves off addictive prescription medicines.
“Our research has shown that BrainTap can reduce stress by 39.5% after just a single session. Ongoing use brings additional benefits as the technology works to train and bring balance to the brain. Braintapping every day for just 10 minutes builds your mental immunity to stress,” Dr. Porter says.
For more, check out Dr. Porter’s website, YouTube Channel, or follow him @BrainTapTech on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can also download the BrainTap app for Free in the AppStore or on Google Play.
