Journey into Brain Entrainment: Transformative Impact and Evolution with Dave Siever

Prepare to embark on an exhilarating expedition through the world of brain entrainment with Dave Siever, the mastermind behind the renowned Mind Alive initiative. Dave, an engineer turned brain entrainment expert, has a riveting narrative that takes us from his humble beginnings to his groundbreaking work in brainwave entrainment. His devices, utilizing sound and light pulses, have been instrumental in influencing brainwaves for enhanced mental clarity and overall well-being.

In this episode, we uncover the wide-ranging applications of brain entrainment. We delve into its potential in treating ADHD, anxiety, and cognitive decline and its utility in peak performance scenarios. Dave shares incredible success stories of individuals, from varied backgrounds and conditions, including autism and substance abuse, who have experienced transformative results through his brainwave entrainment devices.

We also uncover the fascinating behind-the-scenes narrative of the development of Dave's brainwave entrainment technology, the DAVID devices. From inception to their current iterations, the evolution of these devices is a compelling testimony to the blend of technology and neuroscience.

Join us and discover the power of brain entrainment to enhance mental and physiological states, reframe beliefs, and ultimately, elevate your life! You won't want to miss this enlightening exploration of the mind.

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LINKS
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Thanks to Where The Waves Take Us by Purrple Cat | https://purrplecat.com/
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Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/  

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:24

Welcome to Limbic Light Podcast Season 3. In this season, we'll be diving deep into the marvels of our subconscious mind light, sound, brainwave entrainment and so many other natural ways to help you become clearer, calmer and more potent in being. I've titled this season Deep Brain Retrain. I'm Manisha Blunchley, your host, with more than 40 years experience in the natural health field, ready to share with you my very best tips. Let's get on with the show. Hello everyone, today I'm having a discussion with Dave Siever. I consider Dave to be one of the leading experts in the field of brain entrainment, and so we're really truly fortunate to have him on today. Let me just introduce you to Dave and tell you a little bit about his background. Dave is the founder of Mind Alive. It's a company which was originally formed in 1984 and I hope I have that correct and was the first to sell affordable, effective devices using sound and light pulses to influence brainwaves, which is the art and science of brainwave entrainment.

Speaker 1: 1:59

Dave originally graduated as an engineering technologist in Alberta in Canada, and some of his early contributions included working within the dentistry area, conducting research with internationally recognised specialist, dr Norman Thomas, in the field of Temporo mandibular dysfunction and myofacial pain. During this time, dave realised that many TMJ problems were psychologically related and that prompted him to pursue his interest in biofeedback, and this led to the inception of the first, very original David 1 device, which was created in 1985 and was used in the Faculty of Arts to help acting students overcome stage fright. And since this time Dave has continued developing several different audio visual entrainment devices, as well as cranio electoral stimulation, transcranial DC direct current stimulation and other biofeedback devices. I can vouch for his products. I've been using them for several years.

Speaker 1: 3:18

His products are affordable, they're very easy to use and they're also very portable, which makes them very user friendly. But, most importantly, his devices have been shown to be highly effective for an array of conditions, especially things such as insomnia, dementia, study enhancement, adhd, ptsd, pain and even brain injuries. So Dave often lectures to dentists, chiropractors, medical groups, biofeedback and neurofeedback professionals, teachers and also the general public worldwide about using these technologies. So it's fantastic. Welcome, dave. Thanks for coming on to the show.

Speaker 2: 4:08

Hello Manisha. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's wonderful, and it's always great, seeing some of my friends from down under. Australia is a beautiful country and great people.

Speaker 1: 4:21

Thank you, and Canada's on my list to get to. I haven't yet been there, but it's high, high on my list.

Speaker 2: 4:28

Well, we're a lot like Australians, so, yes, we're all awesome.

Speaker 1: 4:32

That's fantastic, dave. I'm going to launch into some of the questions because our interview is going to be fairly short today, so I hope you're all right with that, but I thought that you could start by sharing with our listeners what a typical session with your brain entrainment devices looks like. Just so that they know what we're talking about. Could you do that for us, please?

Speaker 2: 4:59

Sure, well, we've got a device. This is our new premier that's going to be out fairly soon. You've got a pair of sunglasses and your pair of headphones. And the headphones, you can select some different sounds, but the one that we most commonly use is a tone that goes bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, kind of like that, and at different speeds depending on the brain wave frequency you've selected. Then there's also lights that are built into a screen in the eye sets and you close your eyes and the lights just flash through your eyelids and they can lull you into a pretty deep trance. You often will see all kinds of colors and patterns and some pretty amazing psychedelics.

Speaker 2: 5:43

The first few times you use it, until your brain adjusts to it, and then you lose the psychedelics, which a lot of people love the psychedelics. But really truthfully, what you want is to have a clinical effect, and so the psychedelics really are important. They're just kind of fun the first few times and then after that the sort of the clinical benefits really start to take over instead. That's basically it. All the sessions are pre-timed and you've got sessions in all the brain waves bands you know from Delta, theta, alpha, smrs and Beta 1, beta 2, beta 3, gamma. We have sessions in all the different bands and they're used for different things. We also do a real novel innovation with our gear. I mean, it's well known that the left leg is tied to the right brain and the right arm is tied to the left brain, but the right eye is not tied to the left brain and the left eye is not tied to the right. The left fields of both eyes go to the right brain and the right fields of both eyes go to the left brain and by nature this was a very important design because the left and right hemispheres process visual information very differently and it's very critical to have both hemispheres involved. So if you lose an eye, you'd hate to lose one hemisphere of processing on your visuals. So in this case you can lose an eye and both hemispheres can still process the visual information from the other eye. So we use that and we can flash the frequencies of the left fields of both eyes that say, at a different frequency than the left, than the fields on the right eyes, on the right fields of both eyes, and we use this ability to do differential stimulation just as you would with near feedback, like SMR.

Speaker 2: 7:29

Beta training is so popular for everything from ADHD concussions, cognitive decline in seniors, college students getting better at grade point average. Smr beta type protocols are used for a lot of things. And then there's the alpha beta protocols, and they're also used for a lot of things too. Primarily well, shouldn't see a lot of things the alpha beta protocols are primarily used for boosting mood, and so they use a lot for depression. Those are the two main reasons why we use what we would split the visual fields off.

Speaker 2: 8:06

But also just making the stimulation complex has an added advantage. In the old days we used to stimulate at a fixed frequency and the whole eye set would stimulate both eyes together at the same time, because that's where the research was. But then, as we started discovering that there's a dissociative element to this, you can not just stimulate brainwaves, but you can put people into deep trances, and the deep trances are very, very important. In fact, when it was used for the performing art students, that was the whole intention Once it put people into deep trances so the instructor could do hypnosis on his students, teach them to overcome stage fright. So we have found that a lot of people are pretty tense, and fixed stimulation is just too rigid and sometimes it can almost make them more anxious.

Speaker 2: 9:00

But by splitting off the stimulation with two different frequencies simultaneously, even if they're only like 0.3 or 0.4 hertz apart, so the right fields are going at a slightly different frequency than the left fields you just get this barrage of stimulation that is always changing and different and people will drift into deep trances and then it's a lot easier to work with them, either on a clinical level, like for talk therapy or such, or just makes the brain more malleable to the stimulation.

Speaker 2: 9:34

And in fact we randomized it now too a little bit.

Speaker 2: 9:37

We have learned that if we randomized the stimulation by up to plus minus one hertz and anything in between, and in different time allocations too, so the right side could be going let's say you picked alpha 10 hertz for your stimulation, the right side will be jumping around somewhere is between nine and 11 and the left side will be jumping around also, sometimes between or anywhere is between nine and 11, but they won't be synchronized with each other and the barrage of stimulation you get is very intense and it just drops you into a deep trance.

Speaker 2: 10:14

It's actually very relaxing and we have found that for ADD, for cognitive decline, for concussions, for relaxation, for worry in calling the students, for all kinds of things, randomizing it mildly, like that, actually works better, fair bit better. And we call it randomized audio visual entrainment, or RAVE, and some people you know, because it's not, it's still on an EEG, you will see, you'll see kind of a muddy pattern of entrainment still on an EEG, but it's getting pretty muddy. And we're almost tinkering with the idea of calling it audio visual engagement because in a sense we're engaging the brain more than we're entraining it. And that might be where some of the true beauty of audio visual stimulation is playing out, there you go Gee, that is fantastic, that is so much more than what I expected.

Speaker 1: 11:12

But you know, that just piques my curiosity so much. Yeah, obviously you've developed your products greatly since I last purchased one because that randomized feature was not available on one of the older models that I've got. I'm really excited about that. And when we think about the body, it's not fixed, is it? All of our rhythms are not always super fixed. We do. Our body is randomized. It's nature doesn't occur in really regular pulses, so I'm really glad you're going into that area. It's something I'd love to find out more about. But anyway, coming back to our lovely audience, who may be at the very beginning of their journey of getting to know about brain entrainment, perhaps you could explain a little bit about the physiology. What is actually happening in the body and the brain or the mind while these flashing lights and sounds are happening?

Speaker 2: 12:16

Oh sure, there's about 10 things that go on, and because when I got started on this way back in the 80s, we really only knew of one thing and that was the frequency following aspect, which is the word entrainment is meant to imply. So basically, you stimulate some organism through their senses and usually it's audiovisual, but kiddles be tactile and the brain will start to follow the rhythm of that stimulation, and that's the concept of entrainment. But then studies and that was discovered in 1934 and thousands of studies were done blinking lights in brainwaves out, pulsing tones in brain waves out, clicks in brain waves out. That was so much research was done on that. But then some observers, some clinicians or researchers started realizing that there was a subjective side to flashing lights and sound as well, how it affected the person. So there was a few big players who were looking at all of this, and one of them was William Kroger. William Kroger was really instrumental in bringing the subjective side of entrainment into fruition. He was a physician in the US military.

Speaker 2: 13:35

One of the things that they were having problems with is on the big battleships or even on bomber planes, where they'd be droning and droning engines for hours, hours at a time. What they noticed was that the radar operator would go into a trance and suddenly they'd be. They discovered they were driving into enemy territory and they're suddenly getting shot at. And they run back to the radar operator and here's the enemy on the screen. And the radar guy was in a trance. He watched the enemy come right on screen and he was just tranced out and didn't say a thing. And the old fashioned radars before we had modern computers and screens. You see this little wiper going around and around and around and the little blips would just pop up white when the wiper went through them and then they would disappear and so they were getting lulled into sort of a hypnotic trance and just let them drive into enemy territory.

Speaker 2: 14:33

Kroger realized that there was something really, really awesome about this and he teamed up with Sydney Schneider in Ohio in 1954. The Schneider Instrument Company and they developed the first commercial audio visual entrainment. Well, actually it wasn't even audio, it was only visual visual entrainment device called the Brainwave Synchronizer. Now I have one at home. I have one at my office sitting on the shelf. It's a big strung light. You can dial in the frequencies delta, theta, alpha, beta and flash away.

Speaker 1: 15:07

Wow amazing.

Speaker 2: 15:09

And that spurred quite a few studies, and there are studies now on hypnotic induction, studies on dissociative states, studies on creativity, that sort of thing started spinning up. Studies on altered states of consciousness, things like this started coming up. So these studies were being spun off.

Speaker 2: 15:33

And when I got involved with our temporal and ribular dysfunction patients. We took 10 of our worst patients. They had severe jaw pain for all of 10 years and their EMGs on their master's and muscle. So the jaw tension was really high in their jaws, probably seven or eight times higher than a relaxed person should be. And we put them on the gear at 10 hertz and in six minutes they were down below one microvolt and all their pain was gone. And their pain was completely gone for two days.

Speaker 1: 16:13

Wow, incredible.

Speaker 2: 16:15

Just a 20 minute session of audiovisual entrainment at 10 hertz and their pain was gone for two days. So it really demonstrated there was a psychological component probably playing out on these people. So we published that little study and I think that got more people interested. And then another gentleman named Fred Borsma, who was a psychologist at the University of Alberta where I was working, he wanted to try a pain study. So he did a little pain study with our gear and found indeed that it was very effective for reducing pain, and that was about 1991 or so. And then Carter Russell did a study on ADHD and learning disability kids. Then another study and another, and another, and another, and then suddenly 50 studies later or 60 studies later, over the next 23 years, started happening.

Speaker 2: 17:10

But anyway, I'll get back to the mechanisms. So yeah, the frequency was the course of where we started and then when it was discovered by Fox and Wrakely that they had dramatic and changes, or their dramatic increases, in cerebral blood flow, and it peaked at 7.8 Hertz, which is interesting, blood flow.

Speaker 1: 17:32

So did you say that 7.8?

Speaker 2: 17:35

Yeah, the human residents of the earth. These guys didn't know that, they just commented on it that that was where they found the peak and then other and so cerebral blood flow connection. So you can take someone with a slow brainwave at 8 Hertz, let's say, and you can give them 8 Hertz the exact frequency they should not have on a neurofeedback model and 30 minutes later on the EG, that that that is gone because you drove up the cerebral blood flow. The neurons are nourished and now it's all gone. They actually have quite a normal EG after that point. So that was a good proof of concept.

Speaker 2: 18:14

And then a sappy mariner came out looking at ATP and lactate. It found that a lot of people struggle with low lactate and ATP levels and they're tied to concussions, post inflammatory conditions such as like post viral conditions, and we're seeing a lot of this with COVID. Now, low voltage, flatlined low voltage, fast EG, or they're no longer making alpha rhythms and things like this. And it works remarkably well, but not in the alphabet. You use SMR beta to generate alpha. Strange as it is, but that's the beauty of audio visual engagement.

Speaker 2: 18:51

You engage the brain and it will turn itself back on. Another study was done I think they were using 8 Hertz on heat shock protein. Heat shock protein 70 or HSP 70 is a very important protein in the brain. It protects it from all kinds of things, especially like fevers, cancer and things like this abnormal cells, abnormal cell growth and it drove up heat shock protein. I think it was 160% in the course of two sessions.

Speaker 2: 19:25

On the lactate and ATP. They found that the lactate and ATP were driven up to 160% in a six minute span.

Speaker 1: 19:37

Six minutes.

Speaker 2: 19:38

Yeah, and there's an interesting six minute connection because most people don't slip away. They're kind of like they are their present mother on the device. They don't slip away into that trance till about six minutes and that also correlates with lactate and ATP production, which is interesting. Of course we know it's incredibly dissociating and we've, and the dissociating is is a part of the whole trick of making it work and dissociating people to the point of dropping into a trance where they just let all their flight or fight, all their sympathetic activity just go.

Speaker 2: 20:15

And we have so many people that military police will first responders and they're so tense and they're burning up in their own anxiety.

Speaker 2: 20:24

You put them on the gear and they're just crashed. You know, five minutes later, 10 minutes later sometimes they're a little slow to get them to crash and and then they would be calm for the next three hours. Then they have a cognitive connection. They go wow, I forgot what it was like to relax. Then they start actively pursuing a lifestyle and being more relaxed and using the gears a part of it, but also managing their life, managing how they interact with their families and loved ones, and stress at work, and everything becomes something now because they just when you slowly drift into a mind state, and it's over time. You're often not aware you are in that mind state and you need a reminder to tell you you're in that mindset. They go holy crap, I wish I wasn't there. Okay, I'm going to work on this. Other studies that are very important from the concussion side, the Alzheimer's side as well, because I think they're tied together in some ways is that entrainment has been shown to dramatically increase cerebral spinal fluid movement.

Speaker 1: 21:32

That's interesting.

Speaker 2: 21:33

Yes, yes, that came on just a few years ago. So, and then there's neurotransmitters serotonin and endorphins and are increased a fair bit with entrainment and norepinephrine is increased just a mild amount. Now that brainwaves signature is really interesting because flight or fight when you're going to fly or fight, because you have a you very quickly and only takes three seconds to crash all your serotonin in your brain. And if you feel threatened and it doesn't matter if the threat is someone coming at you with a gun or if it's a ridiculously huge phone bill or or or or being laid out, fired from your job, or there's all kinds of stressors nowadays that are not physically threatening. In fact, 99% of all our stressors these days are not physically threatening their lifestyle threatening mostly, and we have full blown flight or flight responses to those stressors nonetheless. Yes, so entrainment can shut down all those thought processes very, very quickly and a person get calm, can get relaxed and start to men men their lives, because that stress is devastating over time and on a neurotransmitter level, you see this crash and serotonin and you see a huge spike in norepinephrine and just within a few seconds of perceiving a threat, no matter what the threat is, and and that's that's not a good place to be. However, if you think about the Christmas brain, what would what would go on in your Christmas brain?

Speaker 2: 23:16

We're rolling into Christmas now and I'm getting excited. I'm buying presents, I'm decorating the house, I'm having some fun with it, I'm calling up friends I haven't seen for six months. So we got to go for lunch and we meet for lunch and we're excited to see each other and we're like, yeah, yeah, how's life, you know, and it's really good. So we are feeling really comfortable in the moment. We're happy and we're mildly excited, and that is increased serotonin, increased endorphins and mild increase of norepinephrine, because we're mildly excited but we're not flight or fight, and that's the Christmas brain. And then training just makes it.

Speaker 1: 24:00

So what you're saying. There are so many mechanisms at work with brain entrainment, how they're affecting the brain, the body, to bring about better mental health state, physiological states. I'm impressed at how much research there seems to be backing looking into this technique, because it's a technique that not so many people are really aware of. They don't even. Many people don't even know what what brain entrainment actually is. So I'm impressed. That's fantastic.

Speaker 2: 24:34

Yeah, thank you. Yes, and so many neuro feedback type people. What frequency should I do for this condition? My patient's got a condition. What frequency for this and what frequency for that? I go, guys, especially nowadays, now that we're using randomized entrainment because it works better. Frequency is like one-tenth of what's going on. It's really not very important.

Speaker 1: 25:01

What do you think it is? What do you think it actually is? If it's not frequency, is it the stimulation, as you said before, of the sound and the light which is somehow affecting the mechanisms of the brain?

Speaker 2: 25:16

Yeah, certainly. Like I say, for instance, a lot of our concussed people who have lost their alpha waves and their delta waves, the thalamus gets disconnected from the brain and when the brain starts to shut down after a concussion or after a virus and you have a low-grade fever for a long period of time, the microglia are heavily activated, trying to clean up chill pathogens in the brain or clean up damage in the brain and for whatever reason, there's a process that occurs with this reactive gliosis where the brain gets shut down, and it might be a protective mechanism. But you'll see this a lot with people who've, let's say, had an accident or a head injury, and you know they take a week off work and then they go back into work a week later and they're functioning reasonably well and they're expecting to get better. But another couple of weeks go by and they're struggling even harder, and then a month goes by and they're so dysfunctional that they're on employable now and they can't work, and then they have all kinds of other problems that go on in their life. So why is there this two or three months delay from an injury that mostly seems to resolve itself and then gets worse?

Speaker 2: 26:30

And it appears to be that it's this process of reactive gliosis and in the process of shutting down the alpha rhythm, and that's a big one if you think that there could easily be. I mean when you think that all the neurons of the cortex pretty much are engaged with the thalamus as part of the alpha rhythm. So, supposing 50 billion neurons go offline and there's typically more than one synapse to the thalamus and in more than one back. A lot of the frontal lobes have to sign apps down into the thalamus and then three sign apps back and there's there's several relay stations on the way heading down there. And so if you consider, let's say, 50 billion neurons that get taken offline and we've seen this, a lot of our concussed people and even some people post viral. They're flat lined, just flat lined.

Speaker 2: 27:28

Well, you're going to lose. You could lose easily 200 billion action potentials in a second and you lose quite easily. And if you lose all those action potentials, the first thing that happens is neurons emit calcium as part of their actual potentials. They're always emitting and taking up taking calcium. Well, that shuts down. Well, astrocytes in particular use calcium as a sin signaling mechanism to know what to do and to nourish the brain, the neurons and take care of them. Also, oligodendrocytes, which make myelination. They also. They must see action potentials and if they don't see action potentials they won't myelinate. So you get this cascading effect. And then also lactate and ATP shut down at the same time and when everything else starts going down with it. So you get this cascading effect of the whole brain shutting down. And we've got quite a few cases of you know guys post concussion and they are just train wrecks that they can't function at all and yet there is no sign of any damage to their brains, no physical sign of any damage to their brains. Fascinating CT scans and stuff, yeah.

Speaker 1: 28:56

Absolutely fascinating.

Speaker 2: 28:58

It's a metabolic shutdown and these are these are positively charged chemicals lactate, atp, calcium and I've been doing DC recordings on which are difficult to do, but I've managed to get some DC recordings on my clients and where you see really massive slowing in brain activity, like suddenly you'll see a patch of Delta from a brain injury On a DC recording you'll see it. In that patch You'll see two, three, four, five millivolts of DC potential sitting on their scale, not microvolts, millivolts. It's huge and it's representing a chemical imbalance that is shutting down the brain.

Speaker 1: 29:44

DC is your direct current stimulation transcrandly on the brain. Is that correct and you're monitoring and watching what happens. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 2: 29:54

I'm talking about a DCEG, are you?

Speaker 1: 29:57

looking at the brain waves on the DC level.

Speaker 2: 30:00

Then you see the scalp potentials based on the chemistry of the brain.

Speaker 1: 30:06

Oh, that's fascinating, Dave, what you've mentioned, how it can be particularly good for well, for anxiety, for brain concussion. What are some of the other conditions that you're seeing that the brain entrainment is particularly helpful for? Where are you seeing great results?

Speaker 2: 30:27

Well, you know, it's used for certainly a lot of clinical applications, but it's also used for a lot of peak performance applications. There's quite a few athletes that have used it to get better game. They have better performance. There are quite a fair number of commanders in the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq and such. At the time they're seeing, you know, some extremely traumatic stuff and they didn't want to get unwound in front of their troops and then demoralize their platoon. So they would use entrainment daily almost, especially after they saw something that was very traumatic. So it stops themselves from going into PTSD and just get calm, get relaxed, get the brain to let it go, and then they could take charge of their troops and still inspire their troops to be strong and forge ahead, because nothing worse than the commander coming into pieces in front of his troops, you know they can't afford to do that.

Speaker 2: 31:35

So that's another application that is. I don't know if you'd call it a peak performance application, but it kind of is. Other than that, we use it to a fair. I mean, originally we used it almost exclusively in the Alpha Theta Bands, trying to distress people and this and that and relax them and hypnotic induction. But as we started experimenting more and more in the SMR and Beta Bands we discovered that the real strength of entrainment is up in the faster frequencies. So most of the use for it is in the Beta Bands and now there's a fair bit of gamma stuff going on in the 40 Hertz band as well. But everything for fast, faster frequency stimulation, concussions, post viral issues like long haul, covid, adhd, cognitive decline, alzheimer's, improving grades in college students, treating depression All these types of things are all faster frequency applications and I'd say probably you know probably 80% of the time people are using it in a faster application.

Speaker 2: 32:47

Even with the concussions and such, these guys don't make alpha waves. So in the past, based on the frequency model, we would give them Alpha. But Alpha never worked very well. It worked some but it didn't work that well. And to try and reestablish their alpha rhythm. And then I came across some studies. One was a needle electrode study into the thalamus to re kick up the thalamus, and another one used ultrasound believe it or not, little speakers mounted above the ears to get target to thalamus and vibrate the thalamus to boost people back into functionality or struggling. And they were all using beta frequencies to do it. And I randomize it and work even better.

Speaker 1: 33:36

Hi there, I just wanted to briefly share some very exciting news with you.

Speaker 1: 33:41

I have developed a six week online course called Deep Brain Retrain, which comes live early next year.

Speaker 1: 33:50

This course is designed to help you free yourself from old limiting belief patterns and also to help you unlock your fuller, greater potential. You'll be learning topics like understanding brain waves, how they connect to certain mind states, how you can actually influence your mind using brain entrainment, and identifying and rewriting your own early beliefs, crafting personalized hypnotic scripts and, most importantly, you'll be creating your very own brain entrainment audio tracks using free software, binaural or isotonic beats, mixing primordial sounds, music and messages, so that you have a track which resonates specifically with you. You can register your interest in the link below the show notes. Below this podcast, I'll be offering a substantial discount to the first 10 people who enroll and I'll let you know when this offer and enrollment becomes live. So if this resonates with you, just pop your name down in the register your interest link below and I will be in touch. Okay, let's get on with the show. Dave, I wondered if you could share one memorable story that really stood out for you in regards to your experience in using a brain in wave device with somebody.

Speaker 2: 35:27

Oh boy, there are. There are so many, you know, from autistic kids, people who are not functioning at all, football players who were on million-dollar salaries and now they live in the streets and we get them right back functioning again. Again, it's a metabolic disorder, it's not structural. A lot of this concussion stuff. I don't think there's any one story that stands out, because we've just had hundreds. This one lady this is interesting. This has been about two years ago. This occurred. Well, actually there's a couple here that stand out.

Speaker 2: 36:12

I do document this one fella who is on my concussion video that's on our website, and this guy was. He was always really struggling, you know, and people I knew him through my caving club and other cavers who knew him just said he was a deadbeat, he was a drunk, he was an idiot and so on. But one of the cavers, one of my friends, didn't really quite believe in this fella and wanted me to do a brain map on him and see what's going on. So I brain mapped him and he was flat lined. Now when you do a brain map for concussion or post-inflammatory conditions where there's possibly a low-voltage, fast brainwave no alpha waves you have to make the room really conducive for alpha waves because it's easy to suppress alpha waves. Too much light, you have them thinking about stuff and other if they're uncomfortable, if they're nervous. So I make the room really comfy. I have dim lights, a giant easy chair, a foot stool. I give them a light blanket, I turn on a fan for white noise, I make the room really conducive to making alpha waves. And if they're still flat lined in that room, probably they have got now what I call a flammal cortical disconnect, so the cortex and the thalamus are disconnected and that's why they're flat lined in the catamethic alpha waves. Well, this guy was the flattest I've ever seen. He was just a flat line and it's no wonder he struggled in school and he struggled so much and he's a binge alcohol.

Speaker 2: 37:56

Now, when you can't make alpha waves, almost everybody resorts to some kind of a drug, whether it's prescription or whether it's on the street or alcohol, because they're going half mad in their brain when you can't make alpha waves ever. And also that same circuit is tied to delta waves. So these guys sleep three hours a night, three, four hours a night, and it's a lousy sleep on top of the room and they can't make alpha waves during the day. So clinically, their behavior is characterized by extreme general anxiety, severe insomnia, sleep disorder. But every single one of them shows OCD right down the singulate basal ganglion that's the word I was looking for earlier. So right down the singulate it's all in theta and so they don't have any brakes on their singulate.

Speaker 2: 38:50

So every single one of these people are hoarders, counters, cutters, ritualists, door closers, tapers, committed substance abusers and anorexics. Every single one has that personality profile and they're all the same. So I asked this guy have you been in a brain injury? And he said no. And I said well, you've got the worst head injury I've seen. And then he started thinking about it. He's like oh my goodness, when I was like six I fell off the slide, hit a pig or something that's sticking the ground and he pushed his temporal lobe on the right side of a full two centimeters.

Speaker 2: 39:37

And he had to be air vac to hospital so he didn't or he would have died and anyway, and that shut his brain down from the inflammation they said. Fortunately he didn't get any brain injury. He's at. The doctor said so his whole life, from the time he was six to 31. When I saw him, I mean he was in another detox. He couldn't have a relationship with a girl at all, couldn't hold a job. He lived in a friend's basement a week. He just paid enough rent to eat and binge and that's what all he could do. And he did odd jobs like moving furniture for people and stuff like this. So anyway I saw him and I was like wow, I put him on the entrainment. 15 minutes later massive alpha waves are coming out of his brain, Just huge. And he fell asleep, which a lot of them do after the session ends. There's, they fall asleep during the session because they're so tired. And he slept for another half an hour after. He had no urges to drink for 10 days.

Speaker 1: 40:42

Goodness, that's amazing. Yeah, just after one session drinks.

Speaker 2: 40:46

Yeah, and that was in the fall, that was like October. And then he had a few drinks, but never binged, and that New Year's resolution was to quit drinking entirely and he used the machine at home every morning, which is what you need to do when you have a phlegm accord to disconnect. They use it at home every day for about two months until the brain gets really reestablished in its rhythms again. Anyway, he quit drinking and he's not had a drink now for six years. I brain mapped him two years ago and he had a perfectly normal brain brain was perfect.

Speaker 2: 41:26

We just had to boot it up and get it running and it continued to run all this time. Another lady who I saw just the last year she's mostly paralyzed. She's in this, this crazy kind of a wheelchair with tracks on it. Now my brain room is upstairs in our office and this machine would just drive right up stairs with these tracks. She couldn't talk, she had shakes, she was, and she was an elderly lady of mine. She's in her seventies and her daughter is trying to get her better.

Speaker 2: 42:01

She was misdiagnosed as having Lewy body dementia, which I don't think she had. She was put on a drug that was just dreadful and on the EEG she was seizing every three seconds, massive discharges every three seconds, which is why she couldn't be cognitive. I put her on entramment around a 30 minute session in the SMR beta band in one of the light bulb ones probably the brain booster, and now her seizures were spread from 10 to 20 seconds and suddenly she was lucid most of the time and started talking and such. Anyway, they took the unit home and they've been using it on her every day and they have a care worker for her who started commenting about how different she's been. Then she started having whole conversations with her family. And then she started walking, and now she walks.

Speaker 1: 43:05

That's incredible, so when you're helping these people. The first chap that you mentioned he had one session every day for two months. And this particular woman how often was she having a session?

Speaker 2: 43:19

Well, she's having a session this once a day or twice at home. That's always at home. That's one of the nice things about the gear you can just take it home, it's easy to operate and it's portable and works well, fantastic yeah.

Speaker 1: 43:34

It's such a treasure trove. I think that you have there that if only people, more people, would know about this method, that so much suffering could be alleviated. Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 43:45

And the more psychological or mental health issues that people have, the less money they have, and so I've always taken pride in having technologies that are low priced. You can take them home, they don't need much of a clinical time, they can just take it home and use it at home and get better there. And I've had to really try to talk to clinicians about this, because so many clinicians want to see the patient in their office and I say yeah, but. And I said but they can take this home, which is going to work so much better. Yeah, but you know I've got a mortgage to pay or I got to practice to run or I got to put my kids to college.

Speaker 2: 44:30

I got to get them into my office and I say, yeah, but you know, if you can, instead of doing expensive near feedback for 5000 or 6000 dollars a person, if you can send them home with our gear, you'll still see them, maybe once every few weeks, maybe once a month do your checkups or inventories and that kind of a thing. But if you can cut that five or $6000 down to 1500, 10 times more people can afford you.

Speaker 1: 45:00

Exactly, and it makes it more accessible to a greater amount of people, which I'm all for that. I'm totally with you to help people to bring their own therapy into their own home. Inevitably, I always see that if people can consistently apply a technique regularly, they get huge benefit, such better results. So I'm all for that. Oh, that's fantastic. Can you tell us? We'll probably wrap up pretty soon, but I just wanted you to. Well, I have two more questions. One of them is actually, if you were to offer wise suggestions to somebody who's just wanting to embark on this brain entrainment area, what are some tips or what are some wise suggestions that you could give people?

Speaker 2: 45:50

Well, the best thing I can suggest is we're trying to tune a Ferrari. But if you put lousy old gas in the tank of a Ferrari, it'll never run right and you can tune it forever and it'll never run right. It needs good fuel. So I always say if we're going to tune up your brain, I need you to have good fuel in your body. Get on your B vitamins, Get on get definitely on a vitamin D program. Get all your nutrients. Get on your minerals. Don't eat white bread. Don't eat a lot of crap that's out there. Don't eat sugar. Eat your fruits. Eat your veggies, If there's. If you buy a product and you can't you can't pronounce the word don't buy the product, Right and.

Speaker 2: 46:39

And the fuel will make a big, big difference.

Speaker 1: 46:43

That's great, and also for people who want to know more. I'm going to refer to your website in a moment. But for people who would like to study this area other clinicians or Therapists do you actually offer any training? For people is, how would people dive deeper into this field?

Speaker 2: 47:00

Oh, the best thing is to go to our website, you know, mindalivecom, go to the training tab and there's webinars and click on the webinars and watch all my webinars. I must have 15 in there, including some good ones on EEG's and how to do a good EEG and other things buying a real beats. I've got all kinds of stuff in there and that's where they're going to get their best learning. I have a lot of written material but some of that is pretty old, whereas I typically keep my videos of fairly current.

Speaker 1: 47:35

That's fantastic. Just another quick question. I know that EEG Measurements, that whole field is really a specialist area, but if someone wanted to go into it in an affordable and introductory method, is there a method? For example, I've heard about the muse or the emotive, different devices that can be used. Do you have any thoughts on people using that type of technology or devices to measure what's happening in the brain?

Speaker 2: 48:06

You know they can be okay if you want to just learn how to engage Like your attention, which is alpha suppression, and Then close your eyes and bring up your alpha and learn to flex from mind state to mind state. That is a very good skill to have. Learning to turn on and turn off Outside of that, no, they're just expensive toys.

Speaker 1: 48:32

Okay, that's great advice. I'm glad you said that.

Speaker 2: 48:35

Yeah, would not touch them. In fact, there's so many people out there with these 10 channel systems that are sold as clinical devices and they're with a complete waste of money.

Speaker 1: 48:46

So you're better off doing the therapy with a device such as your brain entrainment and maybe Visiting someone who is a specialist and just every now and then getting a measurement done to see where you're at as far as the brain health goes.

Speaker 2: 49:01

Yeah, yeah, to reliably do EEG and a QEEG, you're gonna have to get a good machine and not a cheap one, and so you're gonna be out at seven, eight thousand dollars to start for the device. Then you need good software and then you need training and then you need to probably run a hundred people through and have a mentor that you can shoot their files to and get their, get them to write reports as you can start to learn. You're gonna be, you're gonna be investing thirty thousand dollars before you get good at doing EEG's.

Speaker 1: 49:39

And it's not necessarily Needed, as you say. You've got the devices that actually bring the results and you'll recognize pretty quickly when people are starting to change and Improve by their behaviors.

Speaker 2: 49:53

And they're yeah, they're living you know, yeah, no, if you're doing that senior feedback and I'm not against your feedback at all, I've seen some miracles with your feedback but if you're paying a hundred and fifty dollars per session, you want to make sure that they're gonna do it right and not discover they didn't do it right After you spend after 20 sessions in With the entrainment. The same way, people caught that want to get a brain map first because I got a concussion or I'm not doing well for some reason. I Want to get a brain map that I want to try your machine and I go well. Instead of spending the nine hundred dollars on the brain map, why don't you just try the machine, because I have a feeling, know what's gonna work for you and If you try in a month later it's not working, then we'll do a brain map. But and recorders, the time is gonna work well.

Speaker 1: 50:42

Excellent, that's great. Another quick question is I have been developing quite a strong interest in the ability to Self hypnotize, to change some of the belief patterns that are in our deeper subconscious mind, and I realize there's certain brainwave patterns that are beneficial for reprogramming our beliefs and I've often thought that, using the mind, the the David delight, your devices would be really a great adjunct, or they'd marry well together, work well together with Self-hypnosis, what, what do you think? Have you seen that being used for the application?

Speaker 2: 51:22

Yes, I've seen that's. That was all. The original research on entrainment was just exactly that hypnotic function, hypnotic induction and so on. But what we have found because that was all done with fixed frequency what we have found it's not necessarily about the frequency, it's actually more about the dissociation. For instance, the more jacked up someone is, the more likely Alpha theta is gonna fail. Because when a person is so high on norpern efferent and cortisol and serotonin shut down, they'll start to count flashes.

Speaker 2: 51:58

What do you think for 5, 6, 7? What do you think 5, 6, 7? What do you think 5, 6, 7, 9? And they'll drive themselves half mad during the session and they'll say I hate, that made me really tense. You take that same person, you give them randomized SMR beta. They fall asleep. So that is where we've kind of taken it to the next level. Is you just don't put everybody on alpha theta, because all the research says, well, that's where hypnosis is done and Isn't the alpha theta bands? No, you have room hard on randomized SMR beta. They're gonna make a lot of alpha theta as they slip into that trance, hmm, and you won't. You'll see a little bit of a signature of SMR beta, but not not very much.

Speaker 1: 52:40

So, getting on to your actual devices, I wanted you just to really briefly mention some of them. I'm not familiar with your R A V E. The randomized audio visual entrainment devices. Is that Incorporated as a new function in some of your David products?

Speaker 2: 52:58

Well, we've been experimenting with it since 2000. Oh, I find it really. Yeah, I finally got a patent for it last year. We can all we've always been able to do it. You can program that into our devices at any time and We've been programming it into certain devices.

Speaker 2: 53:15

Or someone had used the session and say it's not working very well, because all of our sessions pretty much now we rave them at the front end the first five to ten minutes. They are randomized because we want to get you into a trance state Because you're brain. It's not easy to work with the brain when you're in sort of this trance state. So they're already being done. But we were experimenting with randomizing the entire protocol when someone was running a session and that increased the effectiveness again and and we've been doing that for 20 years. So if First we did a bunch of some studies with some other psychologists, we found that it was more effective, and then what I would did over the last 20 years, pretty much Someone is using a session it's not working very well, I would just send them the fully randomized version of that session and they would just download it into their device and then try it and Almost always they said, yeah, this is working, working better, I like it, I'll try it, I'll use it. And so slowly collected research over 20 years on cognitive function, on on effect, depression, anxiety, on that kind of stuff, and Finally got to apply for a patent a couple of years ago for it. And so that's it.

Speaker 2: 54:35

But now we've got our new premiere. That's our new device. It's almost ready. It's not quite ready for market yet, but it has a display as an SD card in it, as so we can put hundreds of sessions in it. You can pair audio to it. We've got all kinds of really nice audio tracks that you can play. You like ocean waves, birds, wind, chimes, white noise, brown noise, pink noise there's all kinds of sounds you can pair into it. But also any session you have you can record an audio track and on our editor on the computer you can pair your audio track with the session that you design and Downloaded the place and when they play, your audio comes on.

Speaker 2: 55:20

Your voice comes on right automatically with the session, every time they play.

Speaker 1: 55:24

That's awesome. That's so good to hear. It's actually something that I'm developing is a course to help people do their own Recording so that they can use it in combination. I love that. So for people who don't know what David, david is actually an acronym, isn't it? What does it actually stand for? The David devices?

Speaker 2: 55:44

Yeah, a lot of people say, oh, you must be following yourself, name it after yourself. And no, I didn't name it, it wasn't my idea. The original instructor that I designed this for, for helping students with stage fright, he, he didn't know what you, what he wanted. He kind of half knew and half didn't know. So I would design it and he didn't like it that I'd redesign it, redesign it, and after a while I put several hundred hours in and between Roughly October 19, 1984 and July 1985 I Designed them for a dollar an hour. That's what I got paid, that's what I made, a dollar an hour. And I wanted him to pay me a few thousand more. And he says, I just sorry, I can't afford it, I don't have any money. But, and I? But he said, but oh, and I'm still gonna let him pick the name for it. He goes, well, but I'll name it such a way that you're gonna feel really honored. Hopefully that will make up for it. And I wanted to call it Neurosync, you know some kind of a techie brain name, right? And he came back a few days later and he said I'm going to call it the David, I go, oh God, no. And he said well, I've thought about it. He said digital audio visual integration device. So we're integrating brainwaves with digital audio visual stimulation and I thought, well, that is kind of a clever acronym. Okay, we'll do it, we'll do it.

Speaker 2: 57:17

I made two machines, one for him and one for me. But the panels, these are big gold machines. They were 10 inches by 10 inches and four inches high, with dials all over them and the artwork I had to. I'd made these panels that I've had to glue on to aluminum. There's these plastic panels I'm gluing onto an aluminum housing and by the time the, the silk screen company, gets it, it's all their equipment set up and everything.

Speaker 2: 57:46

It was like $1,500 to print one, but it was above $1,800 to print 100. Oh goodness, once the machine goes, it just goes, yeah. And I said, yeah, you better print me a hundred. And sure enough, I destroyed the first four or five trying to get these things glued on. So it was a good thing. So I made one for him, one for me. We did our study in dentistry there with TMJ patients, and then other people started buying the gear off me and I started making them in my basement and by the time we got up to a hundred devices and starting to wonder well, should I go back and change the name to NeuroSync or something like this? We had already been in, there'd already been several articles written on this in in different magazines and stuff like this, and people were phoning up asking for their David and the David started becoming the name that was known, so we decided just to keep the name.

Speaker 1: 58:46

Absolutely. I love it.

Speaker 2: 58:48

I changed my name to Dave so people didn't realize it had anything to do with me.

Speaker 1: 58:55

Oh, that's so funny. That's great. I love that. So you've got a few different David. You've got David Delight. You've got the pro version. Can you just quickly go through some of the different devices that are there and you know which one's suitable for who? Basically, yeah.

Speaker 2: 59:12

Well, the the the Delight is really simple. There's five categories of two, very easy to select. These are for people who just low budget are made with the SM cognitive challenges. They just need something easy. When you get into the David Delight plus, it's a little more complex now to select sessions and all that stuff and you need to refer to your manual often and there's 25 protocol or 25 sessions on that for five different in five different categories. Right, like energized, meditate, sleep, mood boost, brain boost, and so you have 25 you can pick from. The Delight Pro is basically a plus with craniolectro stim added, and so it takes you to that extra level with the craniolectro stim. And then we have now the premier, which is it's close, and that was what I just showed you here. It's close to market but it's not quite there.

Speaker 1: 1:00:13

What is?

Speaker 2: 1:00:13

it Pointed Premier, premier, premier, like the premier of your province, or something.

Speaker 1: 1:00:21

I've got you. I'm not quite sure. Okay, if that was Premier.

Speaker 2: 1:00:25

Yeah, we thought it had a nice sound to it being a premier being. It's a quality device. It's a high end device. In fact it's the most advanced brain machine ever made. This, this new one. Nothing comes close. But oh yeah. So the assets are called the spectrum assets. You can plug them into the computer and you can run them straight off your computer. You can design protocols on your computer and you can save them on your computer and then you can, you can then a program on this little SD card that plugs into the side and it's now on your device. And the neat thing about the spectrum assets they make 200,000 powers and you can see. You can run them on the USB of your computer and then when you, when you're done, you can plug them into your premier and they'll run off the premier also.

Speaker 1: 1:01:15

Oh, that's fantastic. So the premier doesn't have the cranio electro stimulation, though it's oh it does, oh it does.

Speaker 2: 1:01:23

It's got any TV cranio. That's your stem, a transgenic.

Speaker 1: 1:01:26

DC stem oh goodness, you can plug all of them. Oh, it's really high end.

Speaker 2: 1:01:32

Oh, it's high end. In fact we can do the. We can do the CES at different frequencies than the audio visual. And that's important for a few things, because there are times when you may want to be experimenting or you want to be using more than one frequency. Like, maybe you want to do the mood boost but you want them running at 100 Hertz, or you want to run them at a different frequency, so you can run the CES at a completely separate frequency from the audio visual.

Speaker 2: 1:01:58

And the one thing we're experimenting right now is we know that CES is quite effective for pain reduction and we know that entrainment is quite effective for pain reduction as well. Ces is probably working more on the endorphin side and entrainment is probably working more on the mind side, but both of them work well for pain reduction. So what if we did both simultaneously? Yeah Well, there are some really intriguing research came out about like in 1990. And these guys did really intricate biochemistry or biochemical research, experimenting with different CES frequencies, and one frequency generated huge amounts of endorphins and encephalons. The other one generated huge amounts of dinorphins and serotonin. But they have to alternate them every few seconds.

Speaker 1: 1:02:59

That's so interesting and I just wanted to do that.

Speaker 1: 1:03:03

You can do that. That's just fantastic. It's developed so much since I had purchased my device from you. I just wanted to let the audience know what CES is. It's cranioelectrostimulation. How I have it and I don't know if you still do it, but that's usually two clips placed on the earlobes and it puts a very small microcurrent through, I guess, the base of the skull from one ear, one electrode to the other and, yeah, it's very good, the brainstem for anxiety, insomnia. I haven't used it so much for pain, but that's great that you say that.

Speaker 2: 1:03:39

Yeah, it goes across the brainstem, and serotonin and dopamine and acetylcholine and dorfins are all generated in the brainstem, and so it hits that part of the brain. And what's unique about this, here too, is we can be now bouncing this back and forth for a maximal neurophysiological reduction of pain. But so many people with chronic pain also struggle with depression or anxiety. Absolutely yeah. So we can pair the physiological aspects of the CES with the mental side of the audiovisual entrainment and pair it with the depression protocol, pair it with an alpha protocol, pair with an anxiety protocol, and they get the best of both. So we're just experimenting with that right now.

Speaker 1: 1:04:27

So that's the premiere, okay, and that's not yet released, but will be soon.

Speaker 2: 1:04:34

Fairly soon. The next couple of months will be a hope.

Speaker 1: 1:04:37

That's fantastic. What does that retail for? Just to give us the this is will be in Canadian dollars or US dollars?

Speaker 2: 1:04:47

If you wanted it fully loaded. This is the best deal if you're going to fully load it, because you get the entrainment, you get the CES, you get the TDCS for 9.95.

Speaker 1: 1:04:57

Goodness gracious, that's incredible. That's such, oh, that's amazing. I think I might have to invest in that. Anyway, dave, we've been so generous with your time. I think we better wrap up this interview. It's been such a joy. I could go on for hours, but I won't do that to you, and so I wanted to make mention of your website once again. Is it wwwmindalivecom? Is that correct? Excellent. There's a trove of treasures on that website. You could spend hours learning, looking, researching. So, dave, dave's at the forefront of doing research in this field, so you can really benefit by getting onto his website. So thank you so much, dave. Merry Christmas to you and your family, and I'll get this interview out to you and out to the world before long. I just think the sooner we can get this information to people, the more people are going to be able to benefit. So thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 1:06:03

Merry Christmas to you, Vanessa.

Speaker 1: 1:06:06

Thank you. You too, dave, all the best. Bye, bye, Bye for now. Thanks so much for listening and being here. Bye for now.