Brain Fog, Poor Sleep & Fight-or-Flight After Concussion: Can BrainTap Help? | E67

How do you calm a brain that feels stuck in survival mode?

For many people recovering from a concussion, the injury isn't just about headaches or dizziness. It's the feeling that your nervous system is constantly "on"—poor sleep, brain fog, anxiety, sensory overload, and the inability to truly relax.

In this episode of Life After Impact, Dr. Ayla Wolf sits down with Dr. Patrick Porter, founder of BrainTap, to explore the science behind light and sound therapy and how multisensory brainwave entrainment may help regulate the nervous system, improve sleep quality, and support neuroplasticity after concussion. 

Dr. Porter shares the fascinating history behind BrainTap, from its origins in the 1980s to its use today in thousands of clinics worldwide. Together, they discuss how carefully synchronized light, sound, guided meditation, and breathing exercises work together to encourage the brain to shift from a chronic stress response into a more restorative parasympathetic state. 

The conversation explores why many concussion patients become trapped in persistent fight-or-flight physiology, why restorative sleep is essential for brain healing, and how improving autonomic regulation may positively influence memory, cognition, mood, and overall recovery. Dr. Porter also shares research on BrainTap's use in concussion rehabilitation, autism, first responders, athletic performance, and stress resilience, along with the growing evidence supporting brainwave entrainment and sensory stimulation as tools for optimizing brain health. 

In this episode, you'll learn:

•  Why many concussion patients feel stuck in fight-or-flight 
•  The connection between poor sleep, brain fog, and nervous system dysregulation 
•  How BrainTap combines light, sound, guided meditation, and breathing into one multisensory experience 
•  The science of brainwave entrainment and neuroplasticity 
•  Why deep sleep is critical for concussion recovery and glymphatic function 
•  The role of breathing in regulating the autonomic nervous system 
•  Emerging research on BrainTap for concussion, stress, athletic recovery, autism, and cognitive performance 
•  How recovery is often about creating the right environment for the brain to heal itself 

One of the most powerful messages from this conversation is that healing isn't simply about removing symptoms—it's about helping the brain rediscover balance. When we consistently create opportunities for the nervous system to shift out of chronic stress and into recovery, we allow the brain to do what it was designed to do: adapt, repair, and heal.

Dr. Porter Website: https://drpatrickporter.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drpatrickporter/

TikTok: @braintaptech

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Medical disclaimer: this video or podcast is for general informational purposes only, and does not constitute the practice of medicine or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and materials included is at the user's own risk. The content of this video or podcast is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice diagnosis or treatment. Consumers of this information should seek the advice of a medical professional for any and all health related issues. 

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Dr. Ayla Wolf 1:06

Welcome to Life After Impact, the Concussion Recovery Podcast. I'm Dr. Ayla Wolf, and I'll be hosting today's episode where we help you navigate the often confusing, frustrating, and overwhelming journey of concussion and brain injury recovery. This podcast is your go-to resource for actionable information. Whether you're dealing with a recent concussion, struggling with post-concussion syndrome, or just feeling stuck in your healing process, know that you are not alone. This podcast can be your guide and partner in recovery, helping you build a better life after impact. Dr. Patrick Porter is an award-winning author, speaker, and founder of BrainTap, a leading neuroscience-based platform designed to help people achieve optimal brain health and performance. For over three decades, Dr. Porter has been at the forefront of brainwave entertainment technology to adapt and thrive through neuroplasticity, balanced brainwave states, and deliberate lifestyle design. Dr. Porter's work is backed by over 30 clinical studies and is trusted by more than 120,000 users, including professional athletes, CEOs, and over 3,000 health and wellness clinics worldwide. His pioneering contributions have been featured in major outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Joe Rogan Experience. Through BrainTap and Brain Fitness Blueprint, Dr. Porter is leading a global movement to help people recover from stress, elevate performance, and reclaim their innate human potential, one brain at a time. Dr. Patrick Porter, welcome to Life After Impact.

Dr. Patrick Porter 2:45

Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 2:48

Yes, you're welcome. I met you a few years ago at a neuroscience conference, and that's where I was first introduced to BrainTap. And you are the mastermind behind this, I'm going to call it a sensory experience, not just a device. It's so much more than just a headset. And I would love for you to explain what BrainTap is, but also what led you to create this device in the first place and also how it's evolved over the years.

Dr. Patrick Porter 3:15

Sure. Yeah. Actually, if we go back in time, my dad was a Silva instructor. It's called the Silva method. And they had something called the Silva sound, which they would use in the room when my dad would do the seminars and would synchronize the brain waves to alpha. And this was back in the 70s. So when you think about a technology, we didn't have any LEDs, we didn't have what we're doing today. I mean, computers didn't even have CRTs. So I mean, when you when you think about it, so we were using sound to generate balanced brain waves. And of course, it helped me. I wrote a I wrote about this whole thing in Awaken the Genius, which is my first book, and how it started for me as a child. But in high after I got out of college, I went to school first for electronics. I wasn't going to do what my dad did. He's a psychologist. So, you know, you're not going to, I was kind of rebelling against that, but I kept helping him with seminars and I found I really liked it. And he let me do some teaching, and I kind of got bit by the bug. And I went back to school and got my degree in psychology. And then I was in its uh Christian psychology. So I was working for a church. And of course, you don't make much money when you're a psychologist for the church. And so I told Dr. Gilly that, hey, uh, I need to go find another job

The Origin Of BrainTap

Dr. Patrick Porter 4:24

because this isn't really cutting it. And I happened to, uh, through a series of events, I met up with a group called Light and Sound Research, and they needed a researcher, and I needed a job. So it was, so we started researching, and they were researching sound and light, but there was no EEG equipment like we have today. We had a bank of LEDs that showed, you know, brain dominance and things like that. We used a lot of biofeedback to kind of fast forward, we we realized there was a correlation between looking at a candle and relaxing the body because we were do, we were looking at skin temperature, respiration, heart rate, and all these things. And we noticed it was kind of universal. If someone was to just kind of look in in yoga, they call it uh IJOT meditation. But we didn't, these were non-meditators. These were just people sitting there. And what we noticed was their brain synchronized to it. So we knew we're on to something. The problem with a flame is, and you've probably been mesmerized by a fire before, you know, your brain kind of gets sucked into it because now we know in neuroscience that we have these mere neurons that are always going out into our environment and trying to match the environment or raise the energy of the environment or create homeostasis. In in the brain, what happens when you're exposed to 10 hertz frequency, like a body of water, a waterfall, a flame, your body will sink to alpha, which is where we are going. And then when LEDs came out, we started playing around because we could change the frequency, like the fire flickers, they call it frequency following response. So the fire which flickers at alpha, you can't really change that. But with LEDs, we could slowly change it. And over the years, we've developed an algorithm that matches sound with light. So anytime we can take the senses out of the current environment and put them into like a therapeutic environment, then the first attention is going to take over because the brain is designed to for danger, right? So if we if we if we look around and it says, hey, what is this light doing? What is this sound doing? And then now we've added frequencies to it over the years, and we do that in a few different ways. Uh, we can go into detail later, but in our ear lights, those aren't just lights. They're 470 nanometer light and 650 nanometer light, but they're actually flickering at a frequency that changes the body and based on uh nojet frequencies. There's seven of them in the body. So every session we do takes somebody through at least a what we call a balancing session of the nervous system. And then while the body is balancing through that, the brain's being trained to go through the different brainwave frequencies. And we were we're very fortunate. Although what happened to us in in 89, we got a big award at the Consumer Electronics Show as the best new gadget of the year because we had such a line of people who wanted to relax. And that wasn't even a health conference, that was an electronics conference. And but nobody knew what it was. You know, they didn't know how to use it at home. We didn't have the internet really. I mean, we had the internet, but wasn't available to the general public. And we we really didn't have a way to, and at that time we had no voice tracks, they were just sound tracks, you know, that would, and so people thought it was kind of weird. So I actually started a franchise company, ran it for 27 years. And that's how we really got the technology out there because we didn't advertise they were coming in to do at that time called the MC Square or Light and Sound or, you know, brainwave entrainment. We basically marketed uh addiction therapy, whether it be alcohol, drugs, weight, smoking. And so we were just talking about the benefit because when we tried to put anything about the technology in an ad, people would freak out because it wasn't as acceptable as today. Now, to kind of fast forward, I sold that company in 2002, and unfortunately, it only lasted like 12 years after I sold it. Um, but what happened in 2012 was my wife and I got together and said, hey, nobody has really upgraded this technology since the 90s. I mean, the the last device that I made, and I've made quite a few of them. So between actually 2008 and 2012, I created four different versions of what we have today. And then we tested them, and then we got the idea to do the earlights, and then we combined it all into one headset. And now we're in just under 4,000 clinics, and we have 120,000 users, so we're pretty well accepted. They they think we're doing biohacking in some uh aspects of the world because uh, but I didn't know I was doing biohacking in the 80s. I was just trying to balance the brain, and the real focus at that time was not all the things that we know it does now. We were just trying to get people out of pain because with biofeedback, if we can teach them to slow down their respiration, but do full breaths and get their heart rate to calm down, make their hands warm, headaches go away. So that was part of our, we were just looking for a way to make this better for people like myself who were working with stress clients and things of that nature. Now, through the research, I mean, we can talk about some of that today, but we have so much research now, and we have our doctors that have done so much out there in the clinical world that are proving how they use it because they can get creative with their, you know, with their practice and what they're doing. So quite a few of the clinics, this becomes a uh end of treatment kind of therapy to re-regulate the brain and nervous system and get that neuroplastic change that happens during neurotraining to stick.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 9:46

Right. I imagine that as more and more clinicians are using this, they're coming back to you saying, hey, I'm finding this is helpful for this and that and this. And so it's probably this never-ending feedback of wow, it's has so many applications that you probably never even imagined.

Dr. Patrick Porter 10:02

Yeah, well, one of them was autism. We didn't know that we could work with autism, but I'm also the dean of brain-based medicine at Quantum University. So people take my course in um, you know, learning how to be a therapist in the natural medicine world. And uh we give everybody a brain tap that joins the universities so they can do it for learning, because we found out it improves learning capacity. And one of the doctors, she was already a doctor, but she was learning some things with natural medicine, and she saw a lot of autistic kids, and she never used the device. She didn't think she needed it because so many people think that you have to be broken in order to have a breakthrough. I would say you don't need to have a breakdown to have a breakthrough. You can continue to upgrade your brain because we're going through something called neuropruning all the time. And sometimes we prune away some of the good stuff instead of just the bad stuff. So with intentional brain training, you can you can train the brain to prune out the negatives and keep the positive, you know, and and things of that nature. So, but she had a um uh a son that was having trouble in school, and she said, Well, I have this thing, let me see what happens. And of course, he's a really big advocate still. He works in her clinic now.

Autism Results And Independent Research

Dr. Patrick Porter 11:10

He really, this was years ago, and he he got the bug of helping people. And because when you're working under doctor's care, he didn't have to go to school to get his PhD, he could just learn a little bit about the technology work with his parents because his father's a chiropractor and his mother's um a natural medicine doctor. And then they said, Well, let's see what happens with autism. And my my staff contacted me and said, Hey, this doctor Joe Quita Handy continues to buy all these headsets more than what is usual for our doctors. You know, usually they'll sell anywhere, you know, one to five a month or something like that. They're not, it's not a big part of their business. It's just something they do for clients. But she was buying a lot. And so I called her up and said, I'm just curious and what you're doing because, you know, it's and she says, Well, when I put the kids on this, in the the parents say, I'm not leaving till I have one for home. Because what we were doing was we were down regulating the nervous system. So they they would go from stimming to total relaxation, and some of them even falling asleep in as little as 10 minutes. And the parents are going, wow, what's going on? And then they were calm for, you know, for a period of time when they went home. And so we did, we've done with her, we did a study with autism, and we found out that if we can get their brainwave up to 23% or more, 90% of those kids will start speaking that are nonverbal. So it kind of blew our minds. And so we're, we're doing more with autism and and we're always doing studies. And luckily, we have universities around the world that do it. And I'm uh I think we're going to do a bigger study, like a because in India they do really big studies. They can get the people out and they can do it. And we have Niman's Hospital, which is the world's largest mental hospital, has been doing some studies with BrainTap and showing how we work to either assist or replace neural feedback. And and we've done that. We've we've shown that what neural feedback does in 40 sessions we do in 15, and we actually train the brain. So we're always doing things like that to prove out the technology. And the nice thing is these are all being done outside of BrainTap. So they're not, I'm not doing the studies. These are being done by professionals at the university level, and then they publish them. We have 72 studies, I think, published on PubMed now.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 13:20

Wow. And for people who aren't familiar with what this device looks like or all the different features of it, can you talk about all the different elements and then also the how it interfaces with uh it's an app on the phone that you can kind of control the settings?

Dr. Patrick Porter 13:34

Sure. One thing is that all of these uh sciences have been proven that you know they all work independently. So when somebody says they do this or they do that, what we did is we put all these together into one device. So in biohacking, they call it biostacking. So, you know, we but we were we were doing it because we wanted to get the best result in the shortest period of time, because time is one thing we can't buy. You know, we can buy everything else. So we we started with sound. And sound, there's there's two different kinds of sounds we use because we found that binaural beats don't always uh work for some people in the way that we wanted to. If your hearing isn't perfect, then there can be a lag in that information. And how binaural beats work for those that don't know that is I might put a frequency of 300 in one ear and a 310 in the other. The brain doesn't hear either of those frequencies, it hears a phantom sound of 10 hertz. Now, what we found was we could, and we measured this through live readings, I mean, uh real time, through time readings, not just measuring before and after. We had people on the equipment. And we figured out how quickly we can move that from, let's say, 18 cycles per second, which is beta, down into the alpha, which is somewhere between 7 to 12, and then into theta, which is something you can't do on your own. I I've only met two people out of 30,000 brains, non-meditators now. If they were master meditators, they could probably do it. But the normal people can't get to theta. It takes them a lot of practice. But with this light and sound, which I'll talk about the light in a second, the brain is able to basically focus on just the rhythm. And we've we it's it's a very slow progression. It's not a fast progression. It's in so when some people go, they go on the internet and they go, I just did this frequency of binaural beats. And what happens is after about two to three minutes, if you're doing

What’s Inside The Headset

Dr. Patrick Porter 15:25

through time measuring, you're gonna see the brain disassociates from it. It's kind of like it's not a danger anymore. So you and so the brain goes, okay, uh, that's oh it's like wallpaper, you know, it's it's so it says I don't have to pay attention to that anymore. And so what we found is that anywhere between six to three seconds, we need to be changing up the frequencies because then the brain has to adapt. And that's what we really want to do because life isn't stagnant, you know, life is about flow and handling it. So what we did is with the sound, we we went ahead and added also in frequencies like rife frequencies, Sofigio frequencies. And remember, we have the noj frequencies in the ears. So frequency medicine has become a big thing. And every cell is vibrating, remember, to try to match the frequencies in the room, in the environment. Like if we went to the mountaintop, we would be at 7.8 hertz frequency. That's that's um, you know, high uh high theta. And what we find is when you create more theta, you create more gamma, which is now we know is a big thing with breaking down amyloid plaque and things like that in the brain. And we have gamma sessions too. But what we found was that if we match the lights, so in the same way the sound is working with those two different frequencies, the eye lights are actually different frequencies. Now they're just barely off. That's why people that use brain tap, once the brain synchronizes, they don't see the light anymore. Or they have to turn up the light to get a response. But you don't need a lot of light because we're not working with the optical uh part of the brain. We're working with the optic nerve. We're just trying to turn the brain on.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 17:04

Yeah, and so people with light sensitivity can still use this.

Dr. Patrick Porter 17:08

Oh, yeah, because we're blue light is so minimal that it doesn't even go through the eyelids. And we're only using eight LEDs. Like the screens we're looking at right now are millions of LEDs. So it's a very low-level light, but it's more the flicker that's doing it. And so what we found was if you're not using retinal flashing, about 30% of your brain will go dormant because your brain thinks you're trying to go to sleep. That's why when you're afraid, typically will they'll close their eyes and say, oh no, that's just a movie or whatever, because that shuts down that part of the brain and especially shuts down the frontal lobe. So when you close your eyes, that blood flow stops to the frontal lobe and goes back to the amygdala, which we all know is the monkey mind, that's where the primitive brain is. So all those fears come out, especially when you're not trained. You know, you're just you're just kind of sitting there, you don't know what to do. Your brain's not used to that. So what we found was in our studies that we actually put the default mode network into a state of abeyance. It just basically is neutral. It doesn't, there's not, that's not perceiving a threat. And then the lights in the ears are actually triggering the vagus nerve because inside the inner ear, and remember that frequency is going so, we've noticed that we have a very big parasympathetic interaction when people are using it. So by, and then what we do on top of that, we have about 600 sessions that are just like that for training. And a lot of doctors will use those. There's no words with them. And then we put uh music into it we call 10 cycle music. There's there's a science out there called the Mozart effect. And what they proved was when people listen to this type of music, they're just smarter. Now, we did a study in Brazil with a thousand students, and we had them listen to this broke classical music, and yes, they didn't get 10 cycle music, they became, you know, they relaxed. But when we were done, a thousand out of a thousand of them went back to their profile before the music started. No change. We put that same piece of music with my algorithm in the background. Some of them took up to 72 hours to re-regulate. And that makes sense because the nervous system, like when you work out with physical fitness, you need 72 hours for the muscles, but you're really retraining the brain. So the nervous system has to rewire around that physical exertion and the recovery time gives you the benefit. And so we we started showing that um these kinds of things are possible. And then what we did is now we have over 3,000 sessions with ver with words. And some people go, I don't need the words. Well, the average person thinks, you know, about 60,000 thoughts a day, and they estimate that 85% of them are negative. And I tell people, that's you're not wrong or broken. You know, we have our ancestral knowledge. You know, our parents and their parents, we we're actually the offspring of a bunch of paranoids that didn't die, you know, that that stayed alive. And our reticular activating system is always looking around at our environment, saying, hey, am I safe? Is this okay for me? And, you know, so and we're being bombarded all day long with so much stressors. You know, a hundred years ago, we didn't, we didn't really know about what was going on in another country unless a war broke out. You know, we didn't even know what was going on in the nation. We we would just know what was going on in our neighborhood. And now they scour the whole planet to give us an hour of bad news. And that bad news actually affects our nervous system because words will affect 3,200 gene expressions. It doesn't change your hair color or color of your skin, but we they now know that every 40 seconds approximately, every DNA pair in your body will rebraid based on your environment. And that means everything from the words you use, the food you consume, the air you breathe, the water you drink, um, you know, is there mold in the room? Are you under bad lights? Are you in an EMF zone? All these things affect the way your body shows up. Uh, just so the listeners know, we have shown that if somebody looks at life as a challenge, they actually upregulate typically. But if they, if they look at life as a threat, they downregulate, which means the body doesn't show up as its powerful self. It shows up at the at the lowest level because the body is in fear. It shuts down. The body works best when it's respirating and breathing, and basically the mitochondria is bringing in energy and transmitting that energy out to the body as resources.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 21:23

Well, and so many of the patients that I work with, they come in and they tell me that they feel like they are stuck in fight or flight and they feel that in their nervous system, and it's hard for them to get out of that. And so, how cool that you've created a device that people can use at home on a daily basis that actually retrains their nervous system to be in a more parasympathetic, calm, relaxed state where they then feel up for the challenges of life rather than, you know, feeling that sense of stress inside their body.

Dr. Patrick Porter 21:54

Yeah. Well, we found now, especially like working with TBRX, which is the Tom Brady group and Alex Guerrero, who's his PT, and Peter Cummings, who's his medical doctor, they actually have people wear the brain tap while they're doing their uh manipulations or stretching and all the things they do, because Tom Brady's really into recovery. And what he says is for every minute of exertion, you need two minutes of recovery. So we become part of their recovery. In fact, if you join their program, whether it's with the Oakland Raiders or Tampa Bay Buccaneers or wherever you're at with the, or just coming into the clinic, they say now that most of their clients are pickleball injuries, if you could believe that. And you, yeah. I see a lot of those as well. All these people playing pickleball, but um, they require that you get a brain tap if they're gonna work with them, because when you're at the office, they can only see you, they see them usually once, maybe twice, sometimes three times a week, unless they're on the team, then they'd see them every day. And they but they don't know what they're doing the rest of the time. And they say it's not about the stressors in your life. It's about are you getting recovery? We can handle a lot of stress, but we can't handle stress after stress after stress. And that and that's what you're saying, we call it. Neurological lock, people just start to predict that it's gonna the next event's gonna be more stressful. Like if they have back-to-back meetings, or if they're they have to handle phone calls, or if like a salesperson that's getting a lot of no's or something like that, they start to predict the bad news instead of predicting just being open to whatever's going on and letting the body adapt to it.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 24:21

Yeah. Wow. And so Tom Brady, I I listened to uh another podcast that you've done because you also have your own podcast. And uh

Regulating Fight Or Flight

Dr. Ayla Wolf 24:31

as you were talking to his his doctor, he was telling the story of how his trainer Alex had the brain tap and he basically just snatched it away from him, was like, I want to try this. And all of a sudden, you know, the story begins from there. Um, so I know that he had also talked about the use of brain tap for people with concussions and using it as part of the recovery there too. What um what stories have you heard or what feedback have you heard from people using it in that in that case?

Dr. Patrick Porter 24:58

Our doctors are doing that every day, but we have one doctor up in Gaylord, Michigan, Dr. Arkfeldt. He's a chiropractor, but he's a neurologically based chiropractor. And he's also the doctor for the school because they they realize that form over function, you know, it's not going to be a pill that's gonna bring these people back, it's gonna be getting their function back. So he would see in we have a study actually called the Gaylord uh concussion study, which is published, where we took every student in the school that got a concussion. And by the way, cheerleaders get the most concussions, which is crazy. You know, people think it's football. Of course, there's a lot of problems with football too, and even basketball. There's no safe sport. You know, if you're running at top speed and your your head hits the ground, that I tell people it's like having a bowl with a little bit of jelly in the middle of it, it's gonna hit against the walls and cause some problems. So what he did was everybody in the study got treatment. So, you know, nobody didn't get treatment. So we didn't have a baseline of people that didn't get help. But what we showed was at the end, when they were doing, they were doing these um uh boots that would uh stimulate the lymphatic system. So they had about a 20-minute time, they're just sitting there at the end of the treatment, and they're using these boots to um, they just slide into them and they use air, compression, air, and they push the lymph system to get more blood to the brain to get more circulation. Half the group at that, when they were doing that, got brain tap at the same time. The other half just did the boots. And then what we did, everybody went back to play. These are kids, so the brain, you know, they they rebuilt it. And when they were back to play, we we put them on the clock for one year. No brain tap for a year. We went back and did all the neurological assessments on them one year later. And what we published was the group that used brain tap were 30 to 70 percent in every neurological marker better from sleep to lack of uh brain fog to um, you know, basically the capacity to hold a conversation. And then also physiologically, we did all the tests that we need to, and that's what we published. And now Dr. Ackerfeld trains other doctors to do that, and not just brain tap. Brain tap's just the kind of the cherry on top after the therapy's done. He does

Concussion Recovery Study Outcomes

Dr. Patrick Porter 27:10

a lot of other things too, because there's neurophysiology now that we can do um in the clinic that I'm not gonna do with brain tap. Brain tap's kind of the after they get all what we found was we we've done some studies with people after their neurological training, and we found their brain was stressed because they had to do all this work and they didn't have capacity to do that. So sometimes doctors will have them do the session first because we show that we can build neurological capacity so they can get the therapy done. So it's up to the doctor. But we we we showed also that if they just walk out the door after their therapy, they can be a little tired. And and but if they walk out after they do brain tap, they have energy and now they can relive. We showed this in a study also with um a professional soccer team, um, the Kansas City sport. We showed them that if they go home and they after training session, which these soccer players are running the whole time. So their their body, their HIV looks terrible after their practices. But four hours later, if you're a professional, it should be back to normal. And it was. We showed that. And then the next day I said, tomorrow, what we're gonna do, we're gonna do the same measurements, but we're gonna have you do a brain tap, and then we're gonna measure you. What they were surprised at was over 50% of them actually were better after the 20 minutes of brain tap than they were when they arrived at the facility. Because we and this is how light side of vibration works to fill the energy stores of the cells. Because what we're really talking about is getting the mitochondria back functioning again instead of stressing it out because there's gonna be a lot of stress factors when you're running around, you know, throughout your whole practice. And and of course they recover between doing things, but soccer's a little bit more, you know, taxing on the body that you don't see too many overweight soccer players. I mean, you don't see any. I mean, you you know, so you're not gonna be running around with like a lineman with uh extra hundred pounds so they can push somebody off the line. These are these are all people that run around.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 29:08

Yeah, amazing. And the refs too.

Dr. Patrick Porter 29:11

Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 29:13

Incredible. And so how do people choose which programs to use once they have the the brain tap and the interface?

Dr. Patrick Porter 29:21

Well, if they do have an outcome, we do have outcome uh playlist, if you will. So if they have an outcome, they can look at that outcome, they can choose that, they can do it. We have bundles too. So, like if you were, let's say soccer, we're just coming out with a soccer program with TBRX. Uh uh Peter Cummings and I are putting it together. There's three of them available on the app as we're talking now, but eventually there'll be seven. And this is how to think like, because Tom Brady owns a soccer team over in the UK, so they wanted to have sessions for them. So, but whatever it is, maybe you want to lose weight, maybe you want to stop smoking, maybe you want to stop alcohol, maybe you uh, and we also have uh, you know, we've worked with different organizations. Like there's one for addiction that we hope we did with a with a group organization that talks about how loneliness uh is one of the forms of addiction. So some of them are very specific in what we do. So you can put down, you can actually write in what you're specifically going through, and the app will give you recommendations based on the time of the day. And this is what's so important about brain fitness. It's not just, are you doing it like meditation? You can do any time of the day, whatever. But in the morning, we really need to train SMR. And because a lot of clients aren't coming into the clinic at the morning time, that's why our doctors can give away the app for free. You know, just like you can give that app away if you want at the end of this podcast. And they they get to use it for 14 days. And we do have about 70% of the people that do that will sign up. And they listen about 27 times a week, I mean a month. So they're getting good value from it, and they they don't really ever leave, or less than 1% of the people leave because we're upregulating in the morning, in the middle of the day, and these are the sessions most people use during their clinical setting. They're about 15 to 20 minutes. It's a full reset, a full reboot, and it's either theta or gamma. Now, if somebody's working with dementia or Alzheimer's or these kind of things, we recommend switching off between theta and gamma because the gamma brainwave usually has been compromised. Um, this dysregulates as we age, unfortunately. So, uh, and

Picking Programs And Brainwave Targets

Dr. Patrick Porter 31:25

there's really no way to stimulate it other than um either having peak performance moments, which they don't really have when they have this, or if they have um, you know, deep restorative sleep. You know, when you when you get that deep restorative sleep, you see it seems like people wake up with more gamma available to them. And I I tell people gamma is like a bass drum. So if you don't have gamma, that's why amyloid plaque builds up. But just like the the old Memorex commercial, if you remember where she's singing and she breaks the glass, um, they say that gamma resonates in such a way it breaks down amyloid plaque in the brain, which you have to do something about the inflammation first. You don't want to just get rid of the amyloid plaque because it's protecting the brain. So once you teach the nervous system to regulate the inflammation and downregulate that, you can start to clear out the brain. The brain will do it naturally at that point because it doesn't need it anymore. It's the the problem is the inflammation, and everybody thinks it's you can't really do anything other than get into restorative state so the brain can can heal itself because the brain and body are designed to heal. But if something's out of alignment, whether it's physically, mentally, emotionally, or even spiritually, the body's not gonna function at its peak levels.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 32:36

Yeah. And have you seen data on the brain taps effects on sleep architecture and sleep quality?

Dr. Patrick Porter 32:42

Well, yeah, that's probably the biggest thing that we study. In fact, we just finished a study that's going to be published with the Phoenix Police Department, fire department, and first responders. And one thing that I'm the most proud of, though, is the mystery symptoms survey, you know, where people don't know what's going on with them. They keep going to the doctor and says, nothing's wrong with you. What do you mean you have a you're you're you have this fatigue and tiredness and you're irritable and you're not sleeping? Well, we were able to reduce that by 57% in six weeks. Uh, and along with that, their sleeping scores improved 43%. And so we always tell people we want to get you to having one hour of deep sleep, two hours of rim sleep in order to really get a good metric. And we track them all with uh something called the circle ring. So we have data about all that. We're we're getting ready to publish that that feature because we we had a nonprofit fund that. And now they want to take it across the country because we had such phenomenal results. We were and the main thing is imagine your first responder, you know, we might see bad news, hopefully to the level they do, maybe once every five years or 10 years, you know, something terrible happens to us. These these guys and gals, they will see it daily. So we were also testing stress resilience. Like when they we had one group that went out, and unfortunately, they couldn't save a baby that drowned in a pool, which is pretty traumatic. But it's not the first time that some of them have seen that. And usually they said it would take two to three weeks to get that out of their head because it's such a traumatic thing. You're trying to save the baby. Well, we were able to, we have a PTSD program for that. So we had them listen to it, and most of them said within two hours of the event after doing brain tap, it was still traumatic, but it didn't have a physiological effect on their body. And that's the whole key here is you can have memories that don't affect you physiologically, or you can have memories that are not even that major, but they're affecting your physiology and downregulating your nervous system. And so that those are the things we're looking at. And we've had great results with sleep. Uh every one of our studies, that's one of the kind of the cornerstones to what we do.

Sleep Data From Real-World Groups

Dr. Patrick Porter 34:48

We even did a study with coal miners. And so if you think about a coal miner, this is in Australia, Western Australia, and we had one of my graduate students who was getting his PhD, so he used it as his his thesis, and we published the paper actually. And what we found was the average coal miner before the study, we measured them for two weeks. The average coal miner was in bed 10 hours a night, but they only got one minute of deep sleep, two hours of RIM.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 35:13

My gosh, one minute of deep sleep.

Dr. Patrick Porter 35:15

Right. So they really weren't sleeping. They were just in bed. And so we wanted to blow the myth off the time that you need to sleep. In fact, uh, longevity says the optimum time is six and a half hours on average. So you might need eight hours, somebody else might need six hours, or maybe even five hours. But as long as you get that one hour of deep sleep, two hours of RIM, you're gonna score on all these sleep metric uh programs. We also had them do the Pittsburgh quality of sleep scoring, you know, that that for for research. But what we found out was within three weeks of uh teaching them to use brain tap, now three times a day, they let us set it up in the in the coal mine. We they set up four chairs, and during the day, they had it at home only to listen to as audio. But at the in the coal mine itself, we had the units set up with the headsets. And so they did it three times, three times a day, uh and once a day was done with the lights. The other two days were done with audio. Within three weeks, we had an uh the average coal miner was sleeping over 70% efficiency, which means they were better than about 80% of Americans. And they they kept getting better at it. They'd be in we actually have a program now with Dr. Eamon's group, Dr. Credo, who's a sleep doctor, we created something called sleep like a champion. Because I think people need to look at their sleep almost like a sport. You know, it used to be a luxury, and we used to, I mean, I'm I know when I was growing up, people I only I only got two hours of sleep, three hours of sleep, bragging about it. Now we know that's when we do all the neurological activity, really. I mean, during the day we're so busy being busy. We're not that's at night when we're doing that REM sleep, we're compartmentalizing, organizing our memories, creating our future, really, the way we're going to interact. And that that level for sleep that they found out about, most people know about it now called the glial lymphatic system. But imagine you were in medical school in 2015, they would be teaching you about the lymph system, and it would stop at the neck. And if you go on the internet, it's still that way. But then you're you're in Denmark doing a sleep study, and the doctor finds out there's a whole new system of the body that nobody knew about. I mean, that's pretty crazy. They just found out another system of the body that works with the fascia that all works like a pump to circulate the water that's in our system, the extra, the interstellar fluids. And that, I mean, they're just finding so we think they know everything that they know about the human body. They don't. You know, so we're we're finding that all of the time. And they find that your breath is a big link to this. I tell people your breath is the interface to your nervous system. And most people don't breathe right. They don't, they don't practice breathing, they just they they hold their breath all the time, and they don't realize that that breath is what's causing the nervous system to move between that parasympathetic and sympathetic state in preparing you to be ready for the next moment. But if you're holding your breath, you know, every negative emotional state has that in common. They don't, no breathing. You think of fear, anxiety, frustration, depression, it's lack of breath. You know, so and that's easy, it's free. Everybody can breathe, you know. So once you learn how to breathe again, so during brain tap, we we spend a lot of time focusing on breath work, even though I don't tell them, hey, you're learning this breath work. I just take them through it and they they get to apply it in their life.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 38:31

Amazing. So so many of these symptoms that patients with persistent post-concussion syndrome have, the poor sleep, poor memory, cognitive symptoms, it sounds like this is something that they can do at home to help improve cognitive function, improve energy, improve sleep. And by improving, you know, these basic things, it's like everything else can fall in line, especially if it's also simultaneously getting people out of that fight or flight.

Dr. Patrick Porter 38:58

Yeah, if we can remove the can the toxins really, or the trauma or you know, their negative thoughts, or get them not using technology so late at night, the the body can make the body does the healing. The brain does the healing, it knows how to heal. But as long as it has this interference, for instance, if they had a trauma and there's they're not aligning and they're, you know, they have a physical blockage, you can you can meditate about it, you can do all those things. But that's why we work a lot with functional neurologists because they know how to get the body to adjust. So the nervous system's there. Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna create that neuroplastic change so it it basically sticks longer. And then once the brain realizes that, the brain will keep the pattern that's the healthiest. It just will do it naturally. You don't even have to instruct it. The brain knows what coherence is and knows what balance is, it knows, you know, what down regulation is because we're designed to do that. We're designed for periods of high stress and for periods of deep relaxation. We're just not designed for the life that I tell people in my new book that our brain that we have today was not designed for the lifestyle we're living. It's designed more for the Serengeti where we can, you know, we have, of course, there's stress there and we're trying to get food and doing those things, but we would take a lot of time recovering back then. Nobody worked past two o'clock, you know, until we had the industrial revolution. So here we go, and people work around the clock now, you know.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 40:18

So yeah, so tell me about your new book.

Dr. Patrick Porter 40:22

Yeah. Yeah. What we did was I was I was doing a a class at Google in Microsoft, and um we did a study with them. And during that study, we found that if they took a 20-minute break in the middle of the day, and there's more to the study, we published it, it's a peak performance study with Julia Art, but the main thing that we for them was we showed that they got 26%

Why Breath Changes The Nervous System

Dr. Patrick Porter 40:43

more work done when they took a 20-minute break with Brain Tap in the middle of the day. So, and these are programmers, so they get paid by work. So the ones that didn't do it started doing it because the they they were actually getting paid another day and a quarter and they got to take a 20-minute break in the afternoon. So, but and then Rashika Sakri was the head of Google Wellness at that time, and she said, I want to do something with you, blah, blah, blah. And I said, There's no way I can afford you. You know, they pay them really well. She took a retirement from Google and now she runs a fund that funds uh startups and things. So she did pretty well. But she said, we should put some of the things you talked about into a book and start teaching people how to do this for themselves. They have a pretty cool program at Google, or they did. They, for some reason, they took all their wellness programs out of Google since uh it's weird. But they had one called Search Inside Yourself. So, because of search engines, you know, it's a pretty cool title for it. But they were doing some of the exercises that I was doing, you know, because they're out there in the general public, people can do those as far as balancing the brain. So we started writing a book, and then um my wife said, Well, this time we should just see if our agent can get us someone. So we we have I actually had a bidding war for it because the brain is such a big thing right now. So we got a pretty good upfront payment, and it's going really well right now. And we had the biggest thing we did in this one was every chapter has a summary at the end of it that gives the reader, you know, what they can do. And it's not you just using brain tap, you know, that that's part of it. It's it's a whole lifestyle. You know, we need to physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually tune in to get our we're we're electrical beings. The one thing the book says more than anything else is forming people is the electrical system, the electron transport chain is what needs to be dealt with first. The chemical

Brain Fitness Blueprint And Daily Habits

Dr. Patrick Porter 42:30

system follows the electrical system, not the other way around. Now you can force it, but then what happens is it doesn't regulate. And then you've if you miss out on your supplement. And then by the way, supplements don't work as well when you're in a sympathetic state. They work better in a parasympathetic state. That's why they call it the rest digested recovery state, right? So we wanted to show people instead of it. I've written several books for doctors, you know, that use our um, you know, like um your flourishing practice and things like this and how they do it. But they I wanted something I could write for just the general public, somebody who knows nothing about neuroscience. And they were really good at saying, you've got to change this wording because this is like PhD level, you got to bring it down. So it's written for the it's written for the general public, although I think that anyone could get some value out of it. And then what we did at the end was we put a 30-day action plan together where we give you the four to five key tips that are going to help you to activate your your better brain, because your better brain's just a breath away and in the next action. So you can either eat your way, think your way, perform your way to a better brain, or you can do the opposite. And unfortunately, a lot of people are letting life happen to them instead of through them.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 43:46

Right. Yeah. What is the title of your book?

Dr. Patrick Porter 43:49

It's called Brain Fitness Blueprint.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 43:51

Okay, perfect. And you mentioned the electron transport chain, and I know that light has a big impact on that.

Dr. Patrick Porter 43:59

Oh, yeah. Well, it is light. So what they found, what they MIT actually said this, he said that in the very core of who we are, we are light beings. Now, this isn't a metaphysical somebody saying this. This is one of the greatest, you know, they do a lot of research there. And they it all starts with the mitochondria, you know, broadcasting light energy. So what light does in the body, and the reason we use light is our we're designed to absorb light energy. That light energy circulates through the body, and then the mitochondria that needs that light will absorb it. It will create um a vasodilation, blood flow circulation, nitric oxide release, what they call the Krebs cycle. And then, like a little turbine, it starts to speed up and provide energy. You know, and that energy, and even if you're not using red light therapy, your body is designed for photobiomodulation. So, uh, and I tell people this happens not just with light, but with sound. You've probably been to a party before where you really didn't want to be there, but they started playing all your high school favorites. And pretty soon you're tapping your toes, you're swinging your hips, you're dancing, because sound gets converted into energy. Frequency gets everything gets converted to energy at the cellular level. And then so there are things that drain us. And that's why I say if it's draining you, stop it. You know, there's something about it that's your body's not. And we have people that do this too. We have what we call energy vampires. It's true. You know, they, you know, and some of them are our clients, right? So we we, you know, they they show up at five o'clock on Friday before the weekend or something. You know, and we gotta so I I tell every practitioner, you gotta you gotta work on yourself because we're giving away your energy. I would tell people, even the Bible where it says, you know, where two or more are gathered, there I am. That's the quantum field, you know, and it's there because there's a field. They they now know it's true that there's a field that is formed. In fact, NIH, if you go to NIH and type in biofield, you'll find in 1994 that our NIH said that everything in the every human has a field of energy around them that extends about three

Light Energy And The Mitochondria

Dr. Patrick Porter 46:01

feet. All illness starts in that field. They were talking about the electron transport chain because people, when you think about your electricity moving through your house, it doesn't go through the copper, it goes around the copper. The same thing's true with our cells. We have this energy. That's why energy medicine is becoming so popular now. And it started actually, when you think about X-rays, that's energy medicine. It's just can be destructive if used too often. But there's energy medicine is becoming more and more important because they realize that when we, if we can change at that electron transport chain level, start recruiting more energy. ATP, I tell people, is the currency of the body. So it's like if you want to cash a check, you better have money in the bank, and that's your body. So if you want to heal, you better have ATP going. So some people will use infrared saunas. Uh, we have a light helmet we use sometimes with dementia because we need more energy. We use lasers, of course. Lasers are that's the fastest way. I mean, you can do it in two minutes or maybe even 30 seconds, depending upon the laser you have. It's all about uh duration and dose. And so somebody asked me, what's the best light? I said, well, it depends on what you're doing. And but the cells will only absorb so much light energy. If not, we could use a laser on that spot for all day and then it would be healed by the end of the day. But the the the body accepts that light energy, then the the body has to adjust to that amount of energy. And that usually takes anywhere between uh 24 to 72 hours.

unknown 47:29

Right.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 47:29

There's that hormetic effect where a little bit is therapeutic, too much is uh detrimental.

Dr. Patrick Porter 47:34

Yeah, we found we've shown people that they go, you could just lay on this all day. And I go, you're gonna have a lot of inflammation. Because the the but the body cannot handle it. That's why when we get out in the sun too much, we if you if you if you actually filled your cell receptors before you went out in the sun, you wouldn't burn. That's what they in the Vedas, they would say, get out before two hours before sunrise, and then you can work in the field all day. Because there's so much infrared light hitting the planet during that time that this the receptors fill up and now they become reflectors instead of absorbers. You know, so the body's designed to do that, but but of course, we would rather lather on um sunscreen that's toxic. And there's some good sunscreens out there too, but it's better to just stay out there as long until you start to turn a little pink and then get it get out of the sun, you know, and absorb that vitamin D that we need.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 48:23

Yeah. Wow. Well, it's incredible. I mean, your your brain has been studying this science for decades. And do you ever do you ever still just feel amazed at like what we're continuing to learn as yes, yeah.

Dr. Patrick Porter 48:38

Every morning, there's there's so much more now. I mean, can you imagine when I first started, we were like aliens from another planet. Nobody knew what we were doing. You know, now we're very accepted out there. You know, we have, like I said, almost 4,000 clinics. We're getting ready to open up India and Brazil. And we have the university in Brazil, and uh universities in India are actually going to be our promoters, really, because they've seen so many benefits, and the government will pay for it because we've we've shown, and so different than America where you only get paid if you're sick, they actually get paid whether you're sick or not. So they really want you to be well. So there's some benefit. Now they're not getting. I I would still, if I get if I need emergency surgery, I want to be in the US, you know. But but they're they're catching up and they're using a lot of their ancient traditions because in Brazil they had the shaman and in India they had Ayvedic medicine. So we're trying to work with them because we're just shaman in the in the 21st century. You know, they you know, we're doing some of the similar things. They were doing it with ancient traditions, and we're trying to prove it out with modern technology.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 49:43

Yeah, amazing. Well, it must be such a good feeling to feel like rather than having to try to bang down doors now the doors are open and people are are welcoming you in.

Dr. Patrick Porter 49:53

Yeah, it's it's been it's been a surprisingly good. I mean, for the last actually, COVID was the tipping point for our company. We had our best year ever because we gave away the app for a year to help people with stress reduction. And then when they found the benefits, when we went back to a paid model, they joined us and and it's just been growing ever since then. Because I think that brought everybody's awareness to how dangerous it is, uh, not COVID itself, but just electromagnetic smog, their health. Everybody it seemed like people were taking back. I mean, 300,000 medical doctors are leaving the profession every year since then to become more natural doctors because they realize that the medical system is broken. It's not helping people, it's making people stay sicker, but they just don't know they're sick because they're taking medication that masks those symptoms.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 50:40

And so what is the what is the entry point for people who want to try this out? You mentioned you have the app, there's uh an ability to actually use that for free. And then what comes after that?

Dr. Patrick Porter 50:50

Well, once you once you download the app and use it and you like it, we usually recommend the headset. And the headset is it depends on the the pricing. Of course, how doctors can give a discount if they want, because they buy it at wholesale and they sell it to their patients. But online, I think it's $797 for the headset. So um, and I tell people, I go, if you were to see me as a psychologist, that'd be four sessions. You know, so but you get to own it and your whole family can use it. So we always recommend first doing the sound part of it because you're 90% of people that just do the sound will get better sleep. And if they're measuring it, for sure they're gonna notice better sleep. Uh, but if they don't measure it, they're still gonna notice hey, have more energy in the morning. I'm waking up before my alarm clock, I'm getting things done. And then of course, when they we have a lot of courses. Like when you join our program, whether as a doctor or as a uh end user, we have the integrative well-being institute where we have courses that teach people about energy medicine. And some are for the general public and some are for doctors. But we want to educate people, those are free for people that that are part of BrainTap. So we're we really want to educate people to learn that they can control the outcome of their electrical system. You know, it's it's not just determined by your genes and by your parents and things like that.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 52:09

Yeah, amazing. You know, there was a

How To Start With The App

Dr. Ayla Wolf 52:12

certain point, and it was like I I think it was when I, right when I turned 44, it was like something switched in my brain, and all of a sudden I cared about longevity. Before then, it was just kind of like I'm living my life, doing my thing, trying to be healthy, of course. But I hit a certain age and all of a sudden I started to really care about like how do I, how do I optimize my health as I age? And so I imagine this is a really big part of it is, you know, just keeping your brain as healthy as possible for as long as possible. And I love this idea of it's, you know, it's not another pill or supplement that you have to absorb. It's literally using light, vibration, sound, these things in our environment, but at a very therapeutic frequency. And um I think that's incredible.

Dr. Patrick Porter 52:58

Yeah, it's important to think of the brain also as a voltage generator. When we were born, that brain was 18.1 volts. 100 million neurobit processor fully wired. You learned languages, you learned how to move your body, you learned everything about your life. And then as we age, we do that neural pruning. And by the time we're 18 to 21, it regulates about 10.1 volts. When that brain drops below seven volts, you're gonna have dementia symptoms. If it drops below four, you're gonna have Alzheimer symptoms. It's an energy equation. So if we can get the energy back up, the brain has the power to heal. It doesn't matter what, you know. I'm here at Hippocrates, which is a great place for healing down in Florida, for and they do a lot with the physical body. Now they have an energy center. They do have brain tap here. I'm doing a talk here tonight. And they um, but they have shown that if they, of course, they're eating healthy foods, all live, you know, good foods. But if the brain doesn't have energy, it's not able to metabolize, digest, and use those nutrients. So we want to get that brain energy back up to around 75 to 80 percent, which we've actually shown you can do that even at 90 years old. So the brain, the brain doesn't wear out, it gets better. You have what's called neurogenesis. So the brain can improve. It's like the liver, I tell people, it can actually regrow. We've seen with Dr. Eamon with spec scans how different light therapies can get the brain that basically when they have a hematoma like a concussion, a lot of times that blood just stays in the brain and the brain rewires around it. And then for years, it might not show up this year, but in 20 years you have this big problem because you still have all this blood coagulated in your brain because you didn't have a gliolymphatic system that activated correctly to move those toxins out. So we we need to really work on detoxing and amplifying and, you know, giving nutrients. I'm a big one on nutrients too. You we need to give nutrients to the body because we're not getting them from the food we're consuming.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 54:53

Well, you've been able to work with so many phenomenal people. Uh, it's just exciting to hear how this is spreading globally and then also locally here. So I will happily share all of the links so people can find your app and the website and then also your book as well. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to mention before we wrap up? You've been very generous with your time.

Dr. Patrick Porter 55:17

No, I think that uh people review over this, but the main focus, just to leave the people with, is if you want longevity, they have proven that having a positive mindset actually they outlived the negative thinkers by six and a half years. So, what we can do with brain tap is we help you stay positive because it's something called frequency. And I always tell people it's what you frequently see. So if you need to get up your energy, you need to change your frequency. So, what are you seeing in your life? So when you start doing these kind of things, just naturally get better. You get physically fit, mentally aware, emotionally balanced, and then everything rises when you when you're feeling better and you have a positive outlook on life. I don't think people should stress about their brain. It it knows how to heal. We just need to get the stressors out of the brain so the brain can do what it does.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 56:04

Oh, lovely. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Porter, for sharing all that information, all this different the studies that have been done, the research behind it. Uh I mean, what an incredible track record.

Dr. Patrick Porter 56:17

Okay. Yes, thank you.