In this episode, I am speaking with Dr. Patrick Porter who is an award-winning author and speaker and the founder of BrainTap®. Dr. Porter has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, Entrepreneur, Inc, and on ABC, NBC, CBS as an expert in brain health and wellness. In 2020, he received the IAFNR Lifetime Achievement Award. We will talk about ways to heal and upgrade your brain health, energy, and performance.
Click here to get 15 days of free access to the BrainTap® app. The app can successfully be used without the BrainTap® headphones.
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Table of Contents
In this podcast, Dr. Porter and I discuss:
- Can you really hack your brain with brain entrainment technology in any useful way?
- What science tells us whether BrainTap® really improves sleep, performance, and stress levels? (And can it prove its claims with 3rd party research?)
- How does brain entrainment work?
- Why accessing different brain wave lengths is vital to how you feel and how much you achieve in the world
- How do brain waves relate to how much energy you have available to live your best life?
- How Dr. Porter’s BrainTap® device combines light, music, voice, vibration, and sound frequencies in isochronic tones to entrain you into certain states of expanded consciousness, with the goal of basically resetting, recharging, relaxing the nervous system
- How the BrainTap® system excelled in scientific trials with dementia patients and concussion patients, defying doctors’ expectation for improvement.
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Transcript
Ari: Hey there, this is Ari. Welcome back to The Energy Blueprint Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be talking all about how to hack your brain with this, the BrainTap®. This is my personal one I’ve been using for the last month, I’m very, very impressed with it and pleased with the benefits that I’ve been getting. I came into this whole thing very skeptical of it. In fact, I’ve seen this device around for at least two or three years and didn’t try it, because I was so skeptical of it. I basically thought the whole thing was BS. Then, several months ago, I had a friend who had one, who was raving about it, and it’s a friend who I trust and respect and has a lot of scientific expertise.
He let me try his out, and I was like, “Okay, I’ll try out your little BS device here.” I tried it, and I was immediately blown away by the benefits, and the state of physiological relaxation was impossible to deny. It wasn’t just placebo effect, because I went into it thinking that it was nonsense, not thinking that “Oh, my gosh, this thing’s going to be so amazing. It’s going to have all these benefits.” I came into this a few months ago as a skeptic. Now I’m a believer, and I even reached out to the founder of BrainTap®, Dr. Patrick Porter to have him on the podcast.
That’s what this episode is all about. We’re going to be talking about how this technology works, what it’s designed to do, and what the benefits are. A little bit about Dr. Porter, he is an award-winning author and speaker and the founder of BrainTap®, which is the leader in technology-enhanced meditation. He pioneered the use of brainwave entrainment to improve clarity, sleep and energy and he remains at the forefront of scientific research in this field. He founded BrainTap® with a goal of making this technology accessible to everyone. BrainTap® offers over 1,800 original audio sessions in 12 languages and serves a worldwide user base with its mobile app and headset.
Dr. Porter has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, Entrepreneur, Inc, and on ABC, NBC, CBS as an expert in brain health and wellness. In 2020, he received the IAFNR Lifetime Achievement Award. Without any further ado, we will get into the podcast now. One thing I do want to mention, he generously offered a discount on the BrainTap® headset, and you can get that at theenergyblueprint.com/braintap. We’ll have a link or a discount code or something there to help you guys get a discount on this, which will give you a cheaper price than I paid for it a month ago.
Enjoy that, and enjoy the episode. I think you’re going to get a lot of value from this. All right. Welcome to the show. Dr. Porter. It’s such a pleasure to have you.
Dr. Porter: Hey, it’s great being here. Thank you for having me.
Why Dr. Porter started brain hacking
Ari: Yes. First of all, I would love for you to talk a bit about how you got into this area of brain tapping, of brain hacking, of brain entrainment. How did this all come about?
Dr. Porter: Well, I’ve been doing it actually my whole life. When I was younger, my dad found help in something called the Silva Method, and he became a Silva instructor. We were using something called the Silva noise or Silva sound, however they would say it back then. I found out later that was isochronic tones, and you’d play that in the seminar room. Of course, I grew up going with my dad to do these seminars, at least twice a month, and so just over and over again. Then when I got out of school, I was not going to do what my dad did. There was no way. You don’t do that.
I went to school for electronics, but all the time I was going to school for electronics, I still kept helping with the seminars. When I got to be about 23, he started saying, “Hey, why don’t you want to do a little bit of the seminar?” I started teaching and I started liking it, and went, “Wow.” I didn’t think I would like it, getting up in front of people and having a conversation. Silva was pretty easy. They had certain things you had to do, and so we split off from that. My dad still was the instructor, but we did some other things. What happened to me was, I got involved with a group called light and sound research, and just things fell into place.
It’s a long story. I don’t want to tell it here, but it was like one of those divine meetings between myself and the group, and everything, the stars aligned and they needed help with electronics. I loved meditation, and they didn’t know how to get this thing to work. It was in my office in Scottsdale, Arizona when, I think I was 24 years old. We started building these things out of our back office and playing with them, and never in thinking that it would go as big as it is, because that wasn’t part of the vision, it was just to help my immediate clients. Then, we’re off to the races.
We couldn’t sell these, we actually got an award in 1989 as the best new gadget at CES show. If you can imagine landing with a piece of technology that’s from the future, because there was no cell phones, there was no CDs, there was no downloads, and none of these things, and here we are training people’s brains to go into alpha and theta. I remember we were on the cover of the Consumer Electronics Show. We had six chairs and the Rolling Stones were playing behind us, and the cover just said something about technology-driven meditation.
It looked like they were assassinated, because they were all laying there passed out, but we sold. What happened was, we realized that these weren’t products at that time that we could sell through the big box stores. That’s when I started a franchise company. I ran that for 20 years, and were very successful. I sold that in 2002, and semi-retired, just out there speaking and doing things. Then when that ended, because the company that I sold it to, they ran it for 12 years, and then they didn’t have the same philosophy I did. I have a philosophy of helping people and making money, they had a philosophy of making money, and if people got help, that was okay.
It’s a little bit different philosophy. I basically got all my materials back it was in 2012. I was living in the Bay Area, San Francisco at the time, and of course, you have access to a lot of high-end engineers, and I wasn’t in the field anymore. I hired some people, we got together, and I created the first BrainTap, which is where we put everything into a headset. Before that it was four different pieces. It was like one of the modular stereo systems where you had to put it all together, and it was a lot more cumbersome. Nobody liked to use it, but when we came up with that, we knew we had something there.
That’s really how it happened. I’m always an experimenter, a tinkerer, and I’m always looking for results. Even with my– my franchise company was called Positive Changes. Our slogan was, “I know you want to ask, do we get results?” Because everybody’s so skeptical about self-help, because obviously, it’s self-help, you’re supposed to be helping yourself. The problem is that, people don’t know what to do or how to do it. In my case, in my first book, Awaken the Genius I wrote about myself, because I was one of those kids that needed help.
In second grade, I got held back, and I realized, by the time I was in seventh and eighth grade, I was an honor roll student, I was considered super smart. I have no idea what happened, but it was a combination of meditation and reading a book called As a Man Thinketh, which is just a little tiny book by James Allen. I still carry it with me whenever I start– We’re all subject to negative thinking every once in a while. As soon as something happens that I’m going, “Hey, I’m using my mind, everything’s supposed to be working super great,” but that’s not the way life works. You got to remind yourself of some of these core principles, that something in my thinking was off to bring that piece of information to me in my world.
Why people may be skeptical of brain re-training
Ari: Okay. I think maybe this is a good time to mention, I have one of these BrainTaps myself. I actually went out and bought it about a month ago. I’ve seen it around for a couple years, and I’ve been skeptical of it. To be frank, I thought it was BS, and I said, “Yes, I think I really want to see some solid science on this thing before I’m ready to believe in it, before I’m ready to endorse it, before I’m ready to do a podcast like this. I want to try it out personally.” I had a friend, a good friend, a mutual friend of ours named Roland, who came and visited me and he was raving about it, and he let me try it.
I said, “Yes, all right, I’ll indulge you in this little BS.” I tried it, and it was very clear to me that it induced a very powerful state of physiological relaxation. I could feel my nervous system calm down very profoundly in just about 15 minutes of doing this. That’s when I went, “Okay, I’m ready to take a more serious look at this thing.” Then I went on your website and saw some of the research that you guys have conducted or other parties have conducted on the device. Some of that research is quite impressive, and I’ve been using it and enjoying it. Then at that point, I said, “Okay, can you connect me with Dr. Porter? I’d like to do this podcast at that point.”
For people who have no understanding of this field. They don’t know what brain entrainment is, they don’t know what isochronic tones are, binaural beats. They don’t know alpha, theta, delta, all these kinds of things. Give me a rundown first of, I guess, the different brain waves and what they’re associated with, why it would be valuable for someone to want to entrain their brain into a particular brainwave state.
Dr. Porter: Okay, yes, it’s not uncommon for people to be skeptical of things like this because it just seems there’s a saying, spirit is simple, but man, it’s complex, so they want it to be a lot more difficult. There’s five primary brainwaves that I’ll talk about, I might mention a sixth one, they actually break them down into more than 16 but we’re not going to go through all of them because they’re not in textbooks typically. Where we’re talking right now is primarily a beta state of consciousness, but all brainwaves should be happening at the same time. It’s just the amount of brainwave activity. Think of brainwaves like Wi-Fi networks, they’re telling, but they’re healthy, they’re telling the body what to do.
I’m going to explain what the brainwaves are, what their main responsibility and one of the main instruction sets that’s going on with the body. In beta, this is our reactionary mind, it’s also tied to dopamine production. When we think about most of the negative things that people are going for, like drugs, alcohol, whatever, pornography, all these things, those are dopamine. The beta brain here is an adjutant, so dopamine is an adjutant. It gets you to take action, you get to feel something. Especially if people are feeling numb, they don’t feel anything, they’ll go out and do something like, they’ll do a drug, or they’ll do a skydiving, they’ll do something to get their body to feel something.
Now, that should only be about 45% of our waking brain state because if we’re just reacting all the time, and this is where we’re at right now in our world. Most people have a disproportionate amount of beta activity going on so they create what’s called sympathetic drive or sympathetic overload, or sympathetic lock, it’s been called a lot of everything. Just think about it like, you basically got the gas pedal on, you’re going like crazy, and you don’t know where the brake is. You get anxiety stress disorders. If we drop down one, there’s a state called alpha, they consider alpha the neutral of the brain.
If you think about alpha, the planet itself actually has a frequency below this but when we go, most people when they meditate, this is where they’re going, they’re going to alpha, because that neutral 10-hertz frequency, which is 10 cycles per second, almost all of our electricity is 10-hertz frequency, that’s running through our homes and all of this. That’s because they thought it was the safest people stayed sane. If it was something different than that, we wouldn’t be able to handle that electricity going through our homes, and not that it’s all good for us.
That brainwaves shouldn’t be about 30% and it has to do with our intuition. This intuitive part, and this is why the reason we need about 30% of that is it really activates a part of our brain called the hippocampus. This is the part of our brain that takes short-term memories and makes long-term memories. It’s also the part that goes and grabs our long-term memories and gives us short-term information. We can basically learn our lessons from life, play it back through us, and we get these responses. That’s our primary brainwave state when we’re awake.
Alpha also triggers acetylcholine, which is the feelings of being in love, that’s just one of the neurotransmitters. Just think about our world, when we go into a big city, like LA, or New York, or San Francisco, and you’re hearing the honking and the busy, busy, that’s a beta state. That’s why some people feel so anxious, and especially if they lived in the country, or they’re used to being away from all that. Alpha, though, the same thing, if you’ve ever seen– like my wife used to work for the Phoenix symphony. We’d go to listen to a symphony and a half the crowd sleeping for $200 a night because they’re not used to being an alpha because that music actually has something called the Mozart effect.
It actually– they proven that listening to music makes you smarter but that’s because it integrates more alpha. That means your recall system. Every person on earth has a perfect memory. It’s the recall system that’s in trouble because they know that, like if we did a neurosurgery on somebody who could touch their brain in certain areas, they would have a full sensory memory of even the most mundane thing in their life because the brain chemically codes every memory, every experience. In fact, more than you think you know, your eyes are actually processing over 2,000 pieces of information every second, your ears, 25,000 pieces of information every second, but we filter it out.
It’s not important to us we don’t listen to it. Maybe we’ll get more into that a little bit later. We drop down a little bit below that, there’s a state called theta. Theta we call the inventive mind. This is because most inventors would have a strategy, if they had a problem in their lab, they would go to sleep, they’d wake up, the solution would pop into their mind. This is something a lot of self help gurus have used in recent times, too, like problem-solving. You write on a piece of paper before you go to bed, you have a problem you put under your pillow, you wake up the solution comes to mind.
That’s because you’ve triggered your subconscious, you’ve triggered that part of your brain. This part of the awakened state of humans right now on Earth, this is the brainwave that’s most critical because we don’t have it. Most people have very little theta activity. Now, theta is also the brainwave that triggers GABA production. GABA production is really important because it’s a precursor to DMT, and we have DMT in every cell. If we want to have dreams, and we want to problem solve, and we want to create a new life, we have to have this chemical in our brain, if not, what’s called neuro pruning happens.
Meaning that the more we’re in a fight or flight, the more our brain shuts off neural connections. It doesn’t want choices, it simply wants you to get the heck out of there. If we’re in an expanded state of consciousness, like alpha and theta, then our brain has to start to create that neuroplasticity or energy in the brain. Really, that’s what we’re measuring, is how much energy does your brain have? That’s really important.
Ways to measure your brain energy
Ari: Say that, again? In what way is it measuring how much energy does your brain have?
Dr. Porter: You can measure across the brain, the ATP production in the brain. We do it with two different devices, we have one called the NeuroCheck that I helped to create, and then there’s one called the [unintelligible 00:16:32] which is a QEG. Almost every QEG does it because what it’s measuring is an electrical stimulus but it’s very low level. Like our heart has a frequency that can be up to 18 feet away from us, but our brain, we have to put the probes right on our head so that we can get those sensors. The more energy we have in the body, the more it reads. Like if the brain has– they can’t measure every neuron connection, right now that’d be impossible for us.
What they can measure is how much energy is there and then using an algorithm, they can say well, if there’s like, say, across the frontal lobes, if you’ve have matched pair of 10.1 across the frontal lobes, you’re probably thinking really good, but if they’re off even one, like if one’s a 10.1, and one’s a 10, you’re going to start to develop Alzheimer’s, dementia, and things like that because these two energies have to match all the time. The brain has to match. If it’s not, then that’s when anxiety and stress come about. Now that energy they’re measuring can also, depending upon the amplitude of that energy, will tell us how much neuroplasticity they have.
Which means how can the brain change, it has to have the energy to change. Just like if you’re exercising and you had no energy, you can’t exercise. The brain is the same thing, that’s why we call it brain fitness now, so we want to get more energy.
The different wavelengths to support brain health
We’ll talk a little bit why we chose what we chose to bring energy directly to the brain because we can bypass the digestive tract and bring energy right into the brain, that’s what we did. Delta is the one that most people want because two third of the world isn’t sleeping right now and that’s because of a lot of different things, and depending upon your philosophies and reality that you’re looking at.
If you’re looking at mainstream media or the Real News, you know you’re going to have different ideas about what’s happening out there. If you don’t get deep delta, then what’s happening is you’re not detoxifying your brain. Before 2015, every neurophysiology book, every physiology book in the world, the lymphatic system stopped at the neck, which is virtually impossible because if you went to medical school, or even to physiology class, you learn that wherever there’s a blood vessel, there’s a lymphatic vessel. For some reason, the medical community up before 2015, before the March issue of American Scientific, when they released it out to the world, they didn’t believe we had a lymphatic system in our brain.
Ari: Well, because they couldn’t find the lymph vessels.
Dr. Porter: [chuckles] Yes. Because it didn’t turn on until they were level four asleep. Once the brain is in level four sleep, then the system comes on. Most people have experienced what’s called sleep paralysis. When you’re experiencing sleep paralysis, that’s when the glial lymphatic system is open, because it’s like you’re not going to work on the line in the Ford Motor Company if everybody’s working on it. You’re going to shut down the line, you’re going to do the work, they’re going to do the cleaning. The same is true with the brain.
Most people get scared about that and that’s just a natural– most people don’t wake up but they just this freaky feeling that they can’t wake up. When that happens, that delta, if we don’t get those deep level four sleep, and that’s what like the Oura Ring or different pieces of equipment they have out there. We want to measure our sleep because if you’re not getting a combined 45 to an hours worth of deep sleep, you’re probably not going to score too well on a sleep meter.
They know that because basically when they’re reading those rhythms, they know that every time you dip into that level four sleep, your body goes basically has microburst of this glial lymphoma system lights up and does its work and it doesn’t just open up and does it forever, just really short chi, chi, chi but if it does it correctly, then we clean out the brain. Every night when we sleep if we’re getting that deep sleep, our brain will literally shrink three-quarters of an inch every night. When we wake up in the morning, we have a couple of glasses of water. We have some mineral salt, we’re rehydrating our brain.
If you don’t do that, if you just have coffee, first thing in the morning, that’s not really good for the brain because coffee is a dehydrating substance too. Not that I’m against coffee. I like coffee myself but you want to have enough water. Delta is really important because Delta is when the rest recovery digest system of the body gets kinked on. What I find in sports, whether we’re talking about professional sports or we’re talking about enrolling who you’re talking about, we’re doing a professional sports study. The biggest thing that we show like with Kansas city sport and other professional teams is if you work on your recovery, you’ll get better gains from everything you’ve done. If you don’t work on your recovery, there’s no growth.
If you just stress through the recovery, like a lot of people go to the gym, they work out really hard, then they leave, and then they just hit the stress and they’re going, “I’m not getting any gains at the gym.” Well, that’s because you’re not giving your muscles and especially the brain time and I actually wrote a whole thing about this in Iron Man Magazine, where I talked about acetylcholine and the mind-muscle connection. We have a whole program about that, about building muscle with your mind because you have the greatest pharmacy between your ears. You don’t have to inject yourself with something because your brain triggers all those neurochemicals.
Arnold Schwartzenegger actually started in the ’70s when he was talking about using visualization and they now know that when you’re visualizing, you create more acetylcholine because you’re an alpha. When you’re weightlifting, if you can be more relaxed, you’re actually going to get better gains than when you’re stressed out screaming at each other like some people do in the gym. Now the other brainwave that’s the new kid on the block that’s getting a lot of notoriety right now is called gamma and this is what I’m really excited about because we’ve done several studies with this, with psychedelics, actually with psilocybin and DMT and things of that nature.
What we’re able to do is we’re actually able to trigger those without the use of the substance. Especially if somebody’s already been there and they’ve mapped those things in their brain, they have an experience and now we can just like cannabinoid receptors in our brain, the only reason that those give us our trips is because they’re natural to our body. There’s some receptors in our brain. With gamma, gamma also we find the main thing that it triggers is high levels of GABA.
Again, the DMT experience and when these monks are meditating in gamma and they’re melting snow around them, that’s because we know when you get into the heightened states of gamma and you get in the lower states of theta when you get to Delta, it shifts again but if you can stay in theta, which is a very small brainwave pattern between four and seven hertz, your body actually starts to collect energy. It’s a really weird phenomenon. When you go across 10-hertz frequency and you go across 7.8-hertz frequency, you get this massive gamma burst in your brain and you get a massive delta burst. It’s almost like across the spectrum of consciousness, you get this energy expansion and the reason that you want to be working on all of these, they all have something specific to do.
We used to think gamma was like schizophrenics and people like that but now we have tools that can measure it, number one, but before that, we didn’t know how to measure it, so it wasn’t useful just like muse which is a really nice little piece of technology but they remove theta from their equation because most people can’t get to theta. This always blows me away when I’m reading people’s things online where they’re saying they’re going to theta when they meditate. I’ve measured about 30,000 brains in the last 10 years and even gurus that I’ve measured in India at [unintelligible 00:24:18] Paul, they weren’t able to get to theta for very much at the time but we have people here in America that meditate every once in a while and they think they’re going to theta.
What they’re doing is they’re going to deep alpha which is still really good but theta is a power, it’s like the energy your body generates. If you’ve ever been around somebody that they just basically have healing energy around them, and there are certain people that I’ve scanned while they’re doing Reiki, which I used to think was total craziness. You’re going to bring energy but they do, and now I guess I should tell this story so that listeners know where I’m getting from but most people know who Tom Brady is. The football player. He has clothing called TB12. That clothing is called recovery wear.
How we emit light
That was actually designed by my science officer, Francisco Cidral. Because every person, every living thing, and inert things do too but living things emit energy. You and I are emitting infrared light right now between the frequencies of 18 and 86 nanometers of light. Now, some people they’ve actually done experiments that when somebody’s doing like these healing things, they can measure the forte energy from their heart. When somebody’s in a state of gratitude and love, they actually broadcast 200 times more light. Well, what Francisco did, not that Tom Brady’s in a state of perpetual love and bliss, but we all generate this energy.
We all know, especially in the biohacking world or in the world of wellness, a 10 nanometer light is really healing. The clothing has ceramics in it. I sleep in my shirt every night. It doesn’t say TB12 because I got the one that’s just Francisco’s but our body is always transmitting that light. If we don’t have– the more we know the more of this balance of brainwaves, the more light. Now, what does that mean? You’re not being a sponge for everything that’s happening, you’re actually pushing your light out, which means now you’re in more control of your own health and vitality and things of that nature.
When you think about what’s going on with the body back in 2003, when they map the human genome, you probably remember that or you heard about it. The reality is they only map 1% of it. Well, 1% doesn’t mean you map the human genome. I don’t even know why they could get in the news about that. If I only got one question answered on my entrance exam into college, they wouldn’t have let me in but these scientists got all this glory.
Well, the problem was that 99%, they couldn’t measure because it changes every 40 seconds. We now have the technology that tells us that epigenetic experience changes. Every gene pair changes every 40 seconds based on your environment, the people you talk with, the light you’re exposed to, the water you drink, everything in your environment. Your body is literally showing up as your best self or basically, the default mode network shows up and you basically make it through it. What we wanted to do with these brain waves is we know that when your body’s in the right physiological state, now you can address the environment.
You can address things like EMF don’t bother you as much because now you’re making your own weather as I like to tell people, instead of letting somebody say, oh, EMF and EMFs aren’t bad off the– but guess what? You can walk outside barefoot and they don’t even touch you. You ground them right into the earth. There is solutions but a lot of people are out there yelling from the mountaintops how bad they are, but they’re not telling you that there are solutions to these problems and I think the biggest solution we have is that our brain has been manipulated.
In fact, one of the documentaries I’m doing with a group called Red Pill Productions is assault on the brain because we have been programmed, since birth, to think, act, and respond the way we think, act, and respond and it’s not serving us anymore. We can’t just keep being consumers forever, and think that the world’s going to take care of us. There’s got to be some balance there and I think that we don’t have enough downtime in our reality, it’s all uptime. We’re Americans here, so we want it free. We want it fast.
We want a limo to pick us up to get our winnings and we don’t want to pay anybody any taxes on that. This is just what happens. It’s a philosophy. I think these brainwaves, each one, and we have sessions for every one of them, so we can measure somebody with a QEG, which could be as much as 72 channel QEG, just depending on which one we’re using and we can say, “Hey look it, you’re missing alpha, you’re missing theta. You’re missing gamma.” Now we can target that. iI the same way you might go to the gym and say, look, your legs are looking weak. We need to get you doing more leg work or we need to get you doing more arm work.
We can do that with the brain and that’s one of the big things about brain fitness. Then we can also find that there are nutrients. I believe that nutrition is the first step to wellness. You can’t out-think a bad diet so you got to eat well and then you’ve got to move and breathe. People have to be moving and breathing and then you have to do some brain fitness, but they all have to be done it. I think that’s the order I would put them in but I think if you don’t do any one of those, you’re missing out on the wellness equation and that’s really where we come in.
The best technologies for to train your brainwaves
Ari: Okay, so I’ve got all the other aspects covered but let’s talk brain fitness. In the BrainTap®, you are using certain technologies and train these different brainwave states that you just talked about. What are those technologies that are being used?
Dr. Porter: Well, we’re going to use sound, light, and we’re going to use vibration. I’ll break those down just so you understand. We’re going to use sound because right now sound has been very well researched for hundrends of years and we know we can put a binaural beat in which means we can put a 300 hertz frequency in one ear and a 310 in the other. The brain here is neither one of those. Here’s a Phantom sound of 10 hertz. What we’ve done over the years, we started working with [unintelligible 00:30:30] Institute back in the ’80s. They’re probably the world leader in brainwave entrainment but they only do one thing. They’re like a one-trick pony. They’re going to teach you to project out of your body and do these astro projection things, so, of course, science looks at him and goes, okay, but I believe it’s real.
They did the Stargate program and there’s all this stuff that’s fringe research now but what they found out was when you get into these expanded states of consciousness, you start getting access to other realms of possibility and some of them happen to be real. What happens is when you’re using just isochronic tones, you might not have perfect matched hearing, so we do isochronic tones. This is a mono frequency. Everyone who’s listening to this has been exposed to isochronic tones. It’s a waterfall, it’s a mountain. It’s the earth itself. If you and I were to apply to earth on a spaceship and we were to evaluate earth, it would resonate between 0.05 and 100, depending upon where you’re at on the planet.
What happens is our body, every cell is vibrating with energy and it’s matching the energy in its surroundings all the time. If we get bombarded with negative things like a negative smell or a negative radiation, whatever’s going on, our cells will go into what’s called the cell danger response. They’ll basically start to snuff out our mitochondria. Now what that’s really doing is, it’s stuffing out our ability to change our epigenetics because that mitochondria is the light that’s telling our cells what to do. If we don’t have that light broadcasting, then we have to go to the default mode network and we have to go to fight or flight.
When we’re in these expanded states so sound, if everything’s good, we’re going to have that. Now what we’ve done is we also use that music that I talked about a little bit earlier with the– so all that’s layered in and then we put frequencies in. Now what frequencies are is we can broadcast certain tones into the brain and if we put them in correctly, which we’ve done, we can actually activate different regions of the brain. When somebody’s going through our sessions, it’s not like we have one session for, let’s say, stress reduction. We have 13 because that’s a 13-track training. You can start with number 1 and go to 13.
By the time you get to 13, you’re actually going to theta in less than 3 minutes. We know what? 100% of the people are going to theta in less than 3 minutes. I can tell you every person I’ve never seen it not work after three visits. If somebody can use the equipment three times, their brain will learn the pattern because we as ourselves, our physiology is always matching its environment. This is what we did since the moment we were conceived. Just like mom, when we’re in the womb, we’re vibrating with energy and we’re going to match her frequency, so if she gets mad and angry, we’re going to feel that. We’re going to feel that as an emotion, energy becoming motion in the body.
The sound is really important but guess what happens when you close your eyes? You lose 30% of brain function. When people meditate, what they don’t understand is they just shut off 30% of their brain’s power because nobody taught them how to meditate. They didn’t teach them how to focus on the light.
We are meditating the wrong way
There is an interlight and there’s an external light but when you go to a guru and they teach you how to meditate, they don’t just have you sit there and think your old thoughts that you had yesterday and the day before, they’re going to give you new thoughts to think, they’re going to give you new ways, they’re probably going to have you do some physical exercise to get your body ready for meditation.
Most people think yoga is about physical fitness. Yoga was designed to get you to meditate. It wasn’t designed for physical fitness. Tai chi wasn’t designed for physical fitness. It was designed to get your body ready for meditation. Nobody’s doing that. They get done with their yoga, they roll up their mat. They jump in their car and they leave and all that neuroplasticity is waiting to happen, and they just let it go away because stress happens and the brain collapses on it. What we did, how do we keep the brain active? It’s through sight. How can we keep the rods and cones of the brain active and keep the brain awake? We’re going to put what they call retinal flashing. Now, this was actually designed from ancient tradition because just like sound, when you go to a drum circle or you go to doing chanting, all of those were designed to get the brain to synchronize.
Even though we don’t think about it that way like when you’re in a drum circle, after about three to four minutes, it becomes very synchronized and almost becomes a piece of music but in the eyes, what we know and everybody listening has probably had this experience. You’ve been at a concert or you’ve been at a church or a meeting. You couldn’t hear the speaker, but as soon as you turned your attention and now you could see the speaker, now you could hear the speaker, that’s because our primitive brain, those 25,000 pieces of information that we’re processing, we weren’t aware of until our eyes locked on to what we wanted to hear. It happens also if we’re in a restaurant, you and I are sitting there talking and somebody two tables over says, “Let me tell you how to get more energy.”
Because your podcast is about energy, you go, “Hey, I just heard that energy,” because that default network is always scanning for those, our buzzwords in other words, what’s on the top of our mind. We’re going to do is we’re going to use those same anchors with BrainTap® but what we’re going to do is we’re going to create a cortical response which means a deep primitive brain, the brain stem is actually responding to these signals, not the conscious mind.
The conscious mind has nothing to do with it. In fact, the conscious mind is a traveler. It only controls 5% of the show. What do I care, what it thinks? Everybody is out there running around, trying to change this 5% of their brain that doesn’t control anything. Basically controls that the moment you get to make a decision, do I want fries with that? That’s about the biggest thing that the conscious mind does.
The subconscious takes over and runs 95% of the show. We need to start to train that part of our brain, so by using light frequency now, so in the eyes, we’re going to use earth frequencies. These are low frequencies, brain frequencies that if I wanted alpha, I’m going to have to match some 10 between 12 and 7 hertz frequency. That’s going to be the frequency but in our algorithm, it never stays the same. This is one of the problems people have when they go online to YouTube and then somebody says, “I got a nice isochronic tone generator, and I made this great thing.” Well, did you even hook it up to somebody with a QEG and see if the brain is even moving? No, they didn’t. They made it in their backyard or in their bedroom and now they’re a mystical being that has a degree in whatever brain, somebody has that out there.
I was really blown away. They have a degree in brain waving coding. I’m going, “Really? Somebody has that.” I’ve never seen that and I’ve been doing it since the ’80s. There’s very few people. There’s probably a handful of us still alive like Jeffrey Thompson who’s in your neighborhood there in San Diego. He’s a master at it. We used to hire him when we first started, he’s got some really good stuff.
What we did is we said, how can we match them? What’s happening around binaurals? That’s been around for a long time. There’s no question, so I said, nobody was doing it with light but in ancient traditions, what did they do to meditate? Every holy place has candles. Everybody puts candles on to relax. That’s because a candle actually flickers at 10 hertz frequency, and our brain matches that 10 hertz.
That’s why if you ever been in a romantic relationship and you’re there and you have the fire going, and everybody gets a little risky and you get lucky, that’s because you’ve produced acetylcholine. Your body, you’ve made the environment like the setting they say when you’re doing some kind of these rituals that people have with plant-based medicine, you’ve got to have the right environment. That’s because the body has to be in tune to get those right brainwaves.
That’s why when I do work with– we do work a thing called Choose Ketamine, where they send the BrainTap® with them and they do ketamine with it or they do a [unintelligible 00:38:28] in these research projects because some people fear will drive the process negative instead of getting them into a state of expanded state where they’re open to having a more of a spiritual experience.
What we did with light is, we did that with the eyes. Now, up until 2014, we didn’t have the ear lights. When people look at online and they say, why are there lights in the ears? Well, every cell of our body has something called a chromo form. That chromo, the best way to say it is like a battery. When you walk outside in the sunlight, those chromo forms are being filled. In fact, even in ancient traditions written about in the betas, they talked about if anybody had a– about10,000 years ago, if you had to have mental disturbance, anxiety, stress, depression, they would have you wake up two hours early and sat outside for two hours.
The reason for that is there’s more infrared light hitting the planet two hours before sunrise than any other time of the day. How did they know that? Well, they know a lot of things. We have no idea how they knew. We’re reinventing what they knew in these ancient traditions and so what we thought was let’s put the light in but what we wanted to do was we wanted to match the light and frequency of sunrises and sunsets because there’s something to those experiences. There’s a reason. They’re beautiful, obviously, but they’re beautiful for a reason because we’re getting the right light that our body needs to encode. It’s not just Superman that gets his energy from the sun. Every one of us does. Every day at two o’clock in the afternoon, our temperature drops two degrees. This is telling us that these bodies were designed in the Serengeti. We’re supposed to be taking a nap, but we don’t. If we do, that’s where brain taps come in the middle of the afternoon to reboost your energy, because what you really want is you to recycle, you’ve to get that uptick.
Then in the middle of the night at two o’clock the temperature increases. This is why people wake up around two to three at night when they’re sleeping. This is just one sign of what happens with the sequence. If we can get the body back on it’s right time schedule with light, because we’re inside houses. We’re not outside like we used to be in our bodies. We need to really, for lack of a better word, biohack. We need to create the environment that’s going to have our body functioning in this experience that we’re in, so it’s not out of balance but in tune with our environment. That’s where the lights come in.
Now those lights actually change every two minutes to a different frequency. There’s seven frequencies called the Nogier frequencies. These frequencies if they’re all in tune, then your body will be healthy. We know that every person—
Leveling up your nervous system
Think about it, like every time you do a BrainTap® session, you’re just tuning up your nervous system. You’re taking it through like you would if you were a singer and you’re going through the octaves and you’re just making sure you can hit all those notes. That’s what we’re doing. We’re just making sure the body can hit all those notes.
You want to have nervous system flexibility. If you need to run pall-mall because somebody is chasing you can do it. If you need to stop running and just go to sleep, you should be able to turn it off and go to sleep. What happens is, people ruminate and their thinking gets in the way, so we’re using these technologies altogether. Then what we did on top of that, now we have all of those things going on all at one time for different frequencies. Somebody says I don’t want to hear anybody talking. That’s fine, but guess what? Your best thinking brought you here.
If we don’t change the way we talk to yourself, the average person has 80,000 thoughts a day 60,000 are negative. That’s not a bad thing it’s just genetic. When we were in the Serengeti running around, we didn’t know if we were going to be lunch or we were getting lunch. Everything was a danger. Everything was a fear. All of that genetic memory is inside of us and it’s driving our unconscious behaviors, but we can hack into it now.
There’s never been a time like today, we’re getting super states of consciousness that were only available to people that would meditate 20, 30 years, and people are doing it in two or three sessions. Now they’re there and it’s like, they go to this foreign land and they don’t know what to do because they don’t know. That’s why you go there. Well, I’ve been doing this since the ’80s, and I don’t think I’m finished yet. We still have to, because life comes at us, but we need to prepare our body for that, to handle that stress, or that stress is going to handle us and that’s usually not a good thing.
Because, for instance, those that are out there eating really good nutrition and I agree, I love– We need that. I grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, the first health food store in America was there. I know what’s going on. The reality is, that if you’re stressed out, nervous, anxious, and high beta, you’re just eliminating all that out of the system because the parasympathetic isn’t turned on.
How BrainTap® works
Ari: Okay. There’s a lot to digest in what you just said. Let me have you succinctly summarize everything in terms of what is the BrainTap® actually doing. We’re combining light, music, voice, vibration, and sound frequencies in these isochronic tones. In order to entrain the brain into certain states, with the goal of basically resetting, recharging, relaxing the nervous system. That’s how I would phrase it, how would you phrase it?
Dr. Porter: What we’re doing is kind of like if you were in sports and you had to do practice. If you practice well, you’re going to perform better in the game. Most people never plan or prepare for their game. They just hit it running. What we’re going to do is we’re going to take you outside of time. We need a moment to just get outside of time where we can relax. Instead of musing about our own thoughts, we’re going to introduce you to this field of energy, light, sound, and vibration, which our cells love, and they’re all healing frequencies. What happens, is the body then absorbs these frequencies, just like a sponge absorbs water. Then once we do that, we can start to use it to anticipate or rehearse our next activities.
We could do with– Any one of these are really good, there’s a lot of research about any one of these. What I did was I put it together into one system, and actually have science that shows that it works. A lot of these systems they have some science here and there, like you were talking about binaural beats or isochronic tones. These are two different ones, and if you read the literature, people who like isochronic tones say, “Oh, binaural beats don’t work,” and binaural beats say, “Oh, you don’t isoc–.” It’s like, no, they all work. They’re all really good.
It’s like going to the symphony, we could have the string section and that’d be a good thing to listen to, and we can have the horn section and that’d be a good thing to listen to, but why don’t we put together and have a full orchestra? That’s why we call it an orchestra of brainwaves, because we need to keep the brain going. One thing about our brain, it’s much more intelligent than anyone has told us about. I don’t know if you ever saw that movie with Rain Man where Dustin Hoffman says 1,113 or whatever toothpicks when they fall on the ground. We all can do that. Our brain is able to do that, but it’s not meaningful for us, so we don’t use it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
So many people are so quick to say, “Well, that’s not possible.” I’d rather take a pill. Well, a pill is basically the placebo, which a lot of people might know what that word means. Basically it means it’s an inert substance but the brain makes it work, and the placebos go up to 40%. Somebody goes, “Well, what if it’s the placebo?” I said, “So what?” If it’s working. Our studies show that 97% of people get a positive response every time, so that’s way above placebo. The reality is though, you can think your way out of a change, or you can think your way into a change, or you can just be neutral.
In this case, we just want people to relax. Don’t give it too much thought, just let the body do what it does and get the result. The result is first of all, physiological relaxation. If you can get the body out of its stress date, there’s an innate intelligence in the body. The same way if we cut our elbow when we were a kid and we cried about it, we go to mom or dad, they put a Band-Aid on it, we don’t think about it. A few weeks later, it’s healed. We don’t sit and fret about it. The body’s intelligence knew how to coagulate the blood scab over and heal.
That’s true with most of the physiology of our body if we’re giving it enough time. We don’t have that same strategy with our brain because we have thoughts. We need to realize that no one is perfect, that we’re going to have stress. It’s all about adaptation. It’s all about how can we do better than tomorrow. It’s not about perfection, it’s about improvement. If we can get people to have that philosophy about their own mind space, then we probably wouldn’t have all the mental disorders we have today. There’s a saying that Buddha said a long time ago, he said, “All unhappiness stems from unfavorable comparisons.”
I think that’s the biggest downfall we have in our world today. Is that just because, like I mentioned, Tom Brady, people think I’m going to buy this clothing and I’m going to be Tom Brady. Well, I don’t think so. You can look like Tom Brady, and you can smell like Tom Brady, but you’re not going to perform like Tom Brady, there’s only one Tom Brady, but you can perform to your highest level. I think people need to understand that we have the technology now like yoga and Tai Chi and these things. These are all technologies that are helping us to maximize our body’s ability to function in this space and time. If we use it correctly, the way it was intended, we’ll get those incremental changes.
What we’ve done is we put these sciences together to make it work. It’s actually called Leela Yoga, union of the mind. That’s really what’s going on with the BrainTap.
Ari: Okay. So how do you distinguish this from just guided meditation apps, or some of these other light and sound machines as they’re called, that are on the market?
Dr. Porter: Well, most of the light and sound machines were copied after mine. Some of them are good. Some aren’t. Some will give you headaches because they think it’s a flashing light machine. They don’t understand that there’s an offset. With the BrainTap® you probably notice this, as you’re listening, you think the lights went off, so you open your eyes, but you notice the lights are still going, that’s when your brain is balanced.
We know the exact difference in time. If they’re balanced, you won’t see the light anymore. Most machines don’t do that, because they don’t understand how the brain works. They basically made a bunch of flashing light machines. Now there are some that are good out there. Some are our old machines that we sold in the ’90s, they’re still being sold, but they don’t have the training protocols that we have, the 2,000 sessions that are part of our library. I think that the main difference between this and other apps are usability. With us, our average user uses it 28 times a month.
We only have 1% turn down our app. That’s unheard of in the meditation space. In fact, people like HeadSpace and Calm, they’re buying their membership, because they’re leaving so fast. That’s a boring process. People listen to that. At first it’s kind of novel, but that’s old school hypnosis, that’s not even meditation. That is like this guy named Dr. Kroger, you could read his books from the ‘1950s, they’re using his same techniques. These are really old technologies that they’re using, but they have money.
When you can spend $20 million a month on marketing, and you have a $1 billion market cap, you can look like you’re something big and bad. The reality is– Anything done to relax the body, I think is good, I’m not saying that, but they don’t have sticking power, because people aren’t getting the end result they want. You have to have an end result. You have to have something that they want to accomplish.
When we can show, like in our one study we did with NIH where we showed– Now it’s up to 500 people, but at the time we presented to the National Institute of Health, we did it with 100 people. Women 55 to 65, no meditation experience, they all had a 37.8% reduction in stress in one session. After 30 days of using it, that became their new baseline. Now they’re running around with that much less stress because they train themselves. Nobody has that. There’s no meditation app out there that can do that, but us.
The science on BrainTap®
Ari: Okay, so this gets into the last thing I wanted to ask you, which is what does the actual published science, published research, say about the efficacy of your device? You just mentioned one, but can you speak to some of these real world results and maybe some of the brain wave measurements that have been done as far as the real world efficacy?
Dr. Porter: Yes. Well, we have a pilot study that’s now in a bigger study now at Seminole College in Florida, that was done– And it’s written about in a book called Saving Your Brain by Dr. Kelly Miller. He has a chapter in there, BrainTap® to the rescue, because he was working with dementia patients and Alzheimer’s patients. We had them go to their medical doctors, they all got checked out, they all were diagnosed with dementia, these were not Alzheimer’s patients, these were dementia. It’s a little easier for us.
Then we had them take the Cambridge science testing, which is a series of battery of tests that you do online that will give you brain scores. They all tested, they were in dementia, they were in the spectrum of dementia. Everything they did, we measured their brain with something called the lobby. We noticed that the frontal lobe was off, it’s like as much as one volt, which is your brain won’t communicate. If it doesn’t communicate, it will have what’s called neural pruning, means the brain will start disconnecting itself. That’s what happens with dementia and Alzheimer’s.
We then took them through a six week protocol. They had to use the BrainTap® three times a day. In the morning to wake up a brainwave called SMR. That’s between beta and alpha. Sensory Motor Rhythm is a brainwave that as we age, that’s the one that atrophies. That’s the one that brings us memories, concentration and focus. That was the morning. The afternoon, we did a thing called brain fitness, which was more mental exercises, more deep alpha and the SMR training, but more Alpha activity to get them to relax and recover. Then we had them go to sleep with delta.
This is important because when you have a dysregulated brain like they had, and you go to sleep, you can have nightmares and different things happening, and that doesn’t help. At the end of six weeks, we sent them back to their doctors. Their doctors were blown away. If you had came to me in six weeks like this, I’d never diagnosed you with dementia. We measured their brain, we measured the energy output of their brain. After six weeks, 49% more neuroplasticity which means more energy in the brain. The biggest thing was they went from being a delta brain, over 70% of each of their brains was operating in delta.
The unfortunate part is almost everybody out there listening to my voice right now is over 50% delta. Very rarely do we– While they’re awake.
Ari: In common parlance, that basically means that they’re in a sleepy mode, their brain is not as alert as it should be.
Dr. Porter: Right. Their brain is trying to reboot. It could be caused by inflammation probably, and maybe a traumatic brain injury if it was a sport or something like that. This is what the brain does, it wants to reboot. Basically just like an old Microsoft System, it wants to reboot, and bring up the systems again, but it can’t because we keep stimulating it with coffee, tea, or chocolate, or sugar of some way.
Anyway, at the end of the study, everything lined up. They were off the dementia scale. Six months later, we tested them again. We gave them the equipment after the study. They could use it or not use it, we weren’t watching them. They could do whatever. They all kept doing it. They all had improved even further. They said there’s no way we’re going to stop doing this because of the improvement they had. That’s one.
The other one that I’ll talk about– We’ve had 11 studies that have been published in the last few years. I’ve had three others published with breath that I did with AIIMS Bhopal to show that you can do this with breath work to, it just takes a lot more time. I tried to prove that you can do it with ancient traditions as well, but modern technology is what people want to do because it’s easy, you just press play and do it. You can do it with breathwork, and different pranayamas and things like that.
What we did was, we took a high school in Michigan, and Dr. Ted Arkfeld was the doctor. Everybody who got a concussion in 2020, which wasn’t that many, because of course, remember it’s a COVID year. Every person went through this study. 50% of them got BrainTap® at the end of their treatment. They all got the medical treatment, exactly what you’d get for concussion, they all were returned to play. One year from their return to play date, they went back and did neurological testing with them.
What we showed was one year later the group– and they didn’t use BrainTap® between that, they only use BrainTap® at the time of their treatment. One year later, they had between 30 and 70% neurological function improvement over the group that didn’t use the BrainTap® one year later. What we’re trying to prove is that it’s not something that just happens at the time, we’re talking about changing the brain for the better going forward in time.
Now, what I do know if somebody’s wondering if it wasn’t dementia. If you had Alzheimer’s, what we’re finding with our Alzheimer trainings that we’re doing is, we need to add more energy. How we do that is, our science officer, Dr. Cidral, who made the clothing I was talking about before. He actually wrote the chapter for Dr. Hamblin of Harvard in Photobiomodulation in the Brain, that’s my science officer. He’s got a scholar cap that has lights in it. There’s a lot of people–
Ari: Is this Francisco Gonzalez Lima?
Dr. Porter: No, this is Francisco Cidral.
Ari: Okay, got it. Okay, there’s another photobiomodulation researcher with the name Francisco that I’m actually in contact with.
Dr. Porter: We do a lot. We have partnerships with four different universities in Brazil, he now lives in Orlando, but he’s still connected with the neural labs down in Brazil. They actually named the lab the BrainTap® neural lab now, just because they’re getting such great results. We just finished a study with them where we beat out music, because a lot of people are saying, “Well, it’s just working because of music.” Everybody knows music is so great, and it is, but we showed with significance that when you take any music and put BrainTaps algorithm in the background, we make it work better. We proved that out.
We’re constantly doing research. We have the research with what happened. The one with brainwaves, that was more significant to brainwaves was the girls golf team at Seminole College. If you go to their website, they actually gave us a page on their website, because we’ve helped out the students so much. These were already elite athletes, we improve their alpha score by 90%.
Ari: Wow.
Dr. Porter: Which is like impossible. Golf, as people who are golfers know, golf is a five minute game played in four and a half hours, so you’ve got to keep your head straight. You can’t talk yourself out of a good shot and things like that. The side benefit to that was they’ve been national champions now three years in a row.
Ari: Wow.
Dr. Porter: And they have the highest GPA of any other students in the school. Now we’re doing a student wide study, to show if we can use–. We did this with Duke University, because they’re a partner of ours, we have an app called Healthy Duke and they use it for mental wellness, especially during COVID. If somebody’s having problems, it’d say download your app, it was called Healthy Duke, but it was BrainTap’s app. They would see this sessions they need to use and they would do it from their dorm even without the headset. You can do this without the headset, you can do it with just sound if you want.
Ari: Okay. As I said earlier, I have to say, I came into this whole thing very skeptical and now I’m a believer. I’m using it every day myself and I feel the benefits of it. This is one of those things where my skepticism has been proven wrong through my personal experience. It’s amazing that you also have the real world research and published third party research to actually back it up, that this truly does work. Let me ask you a question. Are you willing to give my listeners a little discount or some little incentive to purchase the BrainTap?
Dr. Porter: Sure.
Ari: We’ll just put a link. We can do it at theenergyblueprint.com/braintap, all one word Braintap, T-A-P. It’ll be present on that page for people to click the link or get the discount code, whatever we set up.
Dr. Porter: Yes, there’ll be a link you can get that will give them a free version of the app for 15 days and my book for free.
Ari: Beautiful. Okay. Amazing. Dr. Porter, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. This is really fascinating stuff and amazing in terms of the benefits that people are getting, including myself now. Thank you for the work that you’re doing. I’m loving being the beneficiary of your multi-decade-long pursuit of brainwave entrainment.
Dr. Porter: Thanks for having me. What I mentioned a better a billion brains, so it’s great that you’re helping me get the word out there. Thank you.
Ari: Wonderful. My pleasure. Hey, this is Ari. One more thing before you go, I just want to remind you that you can get a discount on the BrainTap® headset by going to theenergyblueprint.com/braintap, we will have a link or a discount code there or something that you can use to get a discount while purchasing BrainTap. Again, that’s going to give you a better price than I paid for it. I paid full price when I got mine a month ago. Totally worth the value. I’ve received tremendous benefits from it already. I think it’s already given me that much value and I still have it and get to use it for years to come.
I’m a huge fan of this, and for anybody who struggles with constant underlying anxiety, difficulty sleeping, low levels of energy, low levels of alertness during the day, and who struggles to relax, to get into a state of calm and relaxation. Go get yourself a BrainTap® headset, this thing really will make a big difference in your life and I think you will get a huge amount of value from it. Again, go to theenergyblueprint.com/braintap. Enjoy. I’ll see you soon
Show Notes
Why Dr. Porter started brain hacking (03:14)
The 5 types of brain waves (08:24)
Ways to measure your brain energy (16:18)
How we emit light (24:55)
The best technologies for to train your brainwaves (29:45)
We are meditating the wrong way (33:25)
Leveling up your nervous system (41:10)
How BrainTap® works (43:32)
The science on BrainTap® (48:48)
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