 Hi, I'm Lynn and this is tuning your brain and thank everybody for coming there's a number of you So I'm just gonna pretend like there's five Makes it easier But unfortunately we're gonna end a little bit early today because my demo I got ended up getting the wrong part and Even though someone thinks that electrocuting people on stage might be much more exciting I just said it was maybe a bad plan. So I'm gonna skip that So to go ahead and start Just kind of about me and why I'm doing this. I actually have no background in neuroscience whatsoever Except that when I was about 18 like a million years ago I was actually a research assistant for the neuroscience grad students at my school and so I spent a lot of time Prepping the students or study participants For EEG's to get them prepped. It was actually my original major and somehow I ended up as an art major I'm not sure how that happened But I've been reading about neuroscience on and off for pretty much since then and It's like it has a personal reason for me. I have an anxiety disorder. I have some other issues and so for me I need Tools so that I can kind of get through my day and get through You know, whatever issues I have and so these are the tools I've found and this is kind of what works for me I actually much like the on rain can't take most of the medications available out there So I have to find another way But I've been a web developer for the last eight years and one of the things I've noticed is that music absolutely makes a Huge difference when I'm working Not just any music Trance or go or anything high beat per minute. No lyrics can't be lyrics. I know some people work in silence I have no idea how you do it. I just doesn't work for me at all. I'll sit there and I'll end up in a like black hole so I've actually what I've been doing since I've kind of realized this Is I actually use music as a cue so I've set it up so that when I hear certain music That presents I automatically react to it So I have music to wake up to in the morning, which is kind of poppy and kind of embarrassing And I'm not going to tell you what it is So But I find when I'm working industrial trance go a I Really concentrates my mind and actually makes the day kind of go better What I'm working out I actually find that the right music will actually cut out pain signals It'll get me moving Just a note because I'm going to talk about caring in this talk and just know you need to be a little bit careful because I'm also an insomniac. So I've trained myself not to To able to be able to go to sleep and so there's eight million little things I have to do I've turned the clock away and blah blah blah and nothing can happen like at a certain point at the night But what I've trained myself for is it's the only time of day where I have absolute silence is right before I go to sleep so I'm out running in my iPod dies and I'm sitting there and it's silent and I'm like, oh, this isn't so bad. This isn't so bad And then I realize I'm yawning as I'm running So I totally set myself up for this and I'm like, oh, oh, that's bad That's bad. That was that was a long day So Music to make art to I'm actually that's chick rock and really embarrassing too But So on to the next slide actually maybe I should tell you this first I'm gonna be going over some of this will be a little in depth I'm going to be going over how the brain works the brain structures neurons, which are the basic unit of the brain Neurotransmitters and How music affects the brain and different things you can do to help tune your brain So setting a cue Actually in preface to this Researchers actually had used an MRI to see what was happening in people's brains at the time a decision was made And this is fairly recent and one of the things they found is that Your frontal lobe which is a part where you think your personality is and where you think you make decisions Yeah, that doesn't fire off until after a decision is made so Think about that for just a second is that you're not really in charge as you think you are Because that's happening like way after what's actually happening when you think you made a decision is you're actually reasoning out Why you did something And at least that's what they think now so So all actions are not really based in your conscious mind, but being that this is the case It's entirely possible To use training as a mechanism to kind of get around this because if you can't use your conscious mind And you can't use logic to find your way out of the problem Then you have to find another route, you know like panic disorders are a completely obvious example of this is panic stores have zero to do with logic You'll sit there and worry about you know The road going up into the sky and never coming back and you know, it's completely ridiculous and But you'll panic over it anyway So just a show of hands how many of you are programmers. Oh Yeah, quite a few So how many of you have been stuck No, I don't need to go there yet How many of you've been stuck in sort of kind of black hole where you sit there for like two hours and you realize hey I'm you know four hours later. You come back to it. It's like oh, I'm missing a semi-colon Yeah, I'm not alone in that Such as me so Some of the things you can do to get out of that are some of its queuing And some of it is actually what's called an interrupt is you take a break You know how you'll walk away. You'll take a break and magically. Oh my god. I'm a genius and You come back and you feel like God until it happens again Really, it's not me Maybe it is I don't know So kind of what's happening is and they don't truly understand this but kind of the back cycles of your brain is doing stuff For you one of them like primary examples of this is catching a baseball, you know when a baseball is thrown There's a huge amount of math involved, right? You have the angle you have the parabola that you have to calculate plus you have force and mass and wind speed But your body does that in a split second catches it. So that's kind of what's happening Even though you don't consciously realize it So Because I've been using music to cue Oh, I skipped stuff. Anyway Basically, it's possible to trick your brain into doing that for you And I've actually been using music, but How that works is it entrains your brain directly Because you can't really do it from the conscious level. We know that it's not going to really work So you have to use tricks to train yourself Some of it's purely setting a cueing mechanism I know, you know when I hear certain music like it's time to do this But some of the music particularly trance and go or any high-beat per minute music is actually going to change Your brain waves. It's actually in a calm your brain down into a more relaxed state so that you can concentrate better So a little bit more on cueing a while back a friend of mine gave me a book called Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor It's really fantastic actually about how to click train animals But what she talks about there is how she actually trained her mother into being nice to her And she had actually even click trained her students So it is entirely possible You know to do this and you can't logic out of it if you've been trained to do something it's going to happen But and I can't say this enough. It's not your conscious brain that does all of the reasoning It can do some of it and it can make changes and you can train yourself But you're not as in charge as you think you are you're more of a committee of You know the entirety of your body than you are just a little part that you think you are and one of the things that happens and how Cueing mechanisms work is that when neurons which are the basic cells of the brain When they fire simultaneously enough times, they will always fire simultaneously. It actually creates a somewhat physical map in the brain That Basically is it's kind of indelible and it turns out that variable training actually is more Embed much more strongly And what that means is is You have like when you set a cue Is you set a sound or a visual cue or whatever at the exact same time an action happens and if you do it over and over again It happens It's also kind of how language is learned Like when you see a bird and like your mom or your dad goes Oh, look, that's a bird you see it and you hear it and you see it and you hear it enough times And it sticks and it creates an actual physical Trace in your brain, which is a mapping This is also how And an LP works and for those of you who pick up chicks with this, you know what I'm talking about Neuro linguistic programming Oops, sorry Anthony Robbins actually Anthony Robbins I don't know he actually talks about neuro linguistic programming and there's some kind of creepy guy who is like Oh, this is a great way to pick up girls But it works That's it totally works So and for me, it's where music comes in So how many of you listen to music? How many of you listen to electronic oven you could? Okay, anything specific trance Side trance side trance Goa Goa Industrial See comes up so I've actually I've actually queued myself up to deform which is industrial and Totally stuck on it now. I can't get rid of it. So I'm going to move on to brain basics And you kind of need to know this so that you can understand what's actually happening underneath and some of the Some of the ways that you can tune your brain actually require, you know a little bit of this information You can fall asleep for a little bit of this, but I'll wake you up when you need it So the neuron is the basic Cell in your brain. It's made of three parts There's the dendrite on one end and that actually receives information Then there's the cell body, which is kind of what keeps it alive. It's got all the nucleus and the basic stuff to keep it going And then there's the axon Which is actually a train it actually transmits It's kind of like a wire essentially and then you've got the axon terminal which actually transmits to the next neuron over So they kind of link up in a chain, right? Only there's a Hundred billion of them unless you've been drinking too much so far this year I May have a few less could be could be so Those are the basics of that and we have to go I'll get to that so we're going to go into neuro transmitters, which were first discovered by Otto Lowe I don't know who he is. Sorry um Neurotransmitters this sounds really gobbledygook they're released from the pre-synaptic terminal and crosses the receptor membrane of the dendrite what that is is in the Proceeding neuron It's actually going to fire off these little chemicals which are charged ions And it's going to fire them into the space between the two cells Which is between the membrane of the den dendrite of the next one and the axon terminal of the previous one And there's actually spray space there called a pre-synaptic gap and those chemicals are actually going to go in there and they're charged But the membrane is also charged and depending on the state of the Neurotransmitter that goes in and depending on the state of the membrane it either becomes hyper polarized and Sorry, I know this is a little difficult, but there'll be a quiz later so It's hyper polarized so if you actually change the polarization on the membrane It's an increased likelihood of firing on to the next one Which is actually going to create a current if you actually Hi, sorry hyper polar hyper polarize it then what's going to happen? It's kind of get stuck and that's kind of the end of the line really So next Major brain structures All right, so you've got your frontal lobe, which is where you think your personality is Well kind of is your consciousness and includes motor function problem-solving spontaneity memory language initiation judgment impulse control and Then there's also the parietal lobe which is kind of up here And that's pretty much the location for visual tension It's when you're paying attention to things when you're looking at something and noticing it And it's the location for touch perception also like what's going on when you touch stuff And it's also for manipulation of objects It's so you're seeing it seeing something and looking at something. You know, like you're solving the Rubik's cube, right? And then there's the occipital lobe which is in the back and that's pretty much for vision because vision is really huge for us It's actually why blind people actually have greater senses of touch and smell because The brain will actually remap itself if it's not using a part and it'll they'll just use that whole area there and it's huge The temporal lobe which is like kind of in here. That's actually for hearing memory and speech It's also for the catargo Catargoization of objects So we can move on This is actually the quiz part brain waves Brain waves are actually recordings of the currents that are going on inside your head when you're moving from from the dendrite along the axon those actually create currents and The brain waves are actually rec records from an EEG which is a It's a machine, but there's an electrode that actually sits on top of your scalp and actually reads the currents Brain wave frequencies are Separated into four basic states There is beta which is fully awake, which is 14 to 40 cycles per second That's pretty much where you're at now. Well, some of you some of you might be asleep Alpha is relaxed it's when you're just kind of maybe watching TV Theta is deeply relaxed. This is probably where you're at like before you fall asleep at night Delta is dreamless unconscious. That's actually when you're asleep, but before REM or if you're passed out drunk somewhere So why are we trying to get to alpha and theta? And this is actually kind of what you're doing with the music and it's what it's what you're aiming for Alpha and theta are kind of lower on the the frequency scale But when you're in beta, which is wide awake, you're thinking about everything around you And this has kind of an evolutionary purpose. So like our ancestors didn't get like eaten on the savannah So you're thinking about your grocery list. You're thinking about the guy behind you coughing You're thinking about everything else and you're not necessarily paying a hundred percent attention to what you're doing And the reason why you need to relax is so that you are you're actually cutting out some of that You're cutting out the extra things that are going on So you actually get a little bit more brainpower out of that because you're using more of your brain for what you're working on They actually it's funny They did studies in the 70s and 80s that showed that during moments of deep thoughts or creativity Brainwaves would actually slow down to alpha and as far as theta so they know that this happens and They don't they don't always understand why but it does So this is actually things that you can do to actually kind of increase this whole thing that you're getting from the music And it's things that other people have done one of them is actually binaural beats and What that is is when a sound of a particular frequency is Presented in one ear and a sound of the particular frequency that's slightly lower higher is presented in the other ear The middle of your brain is actually going to make the freak make a new frequency Which is actually the difference of the two now the importance of this is it'll actually entrain your brainwaves to that? Middle frequency so you can actually pick what frequency you want your brain to go to and By listening to these binaural beats By brainwave and training that's really frequency following response You know when you have the two tuning forks or wine glasses. It's kind of the same idea But So sorry There's actually a lot of stuff online you can actually go to YouTube and you can find Music and videos on there that actually have binaural beats embedded There's actually software you can also buy that will embed binaural beats in whatever music you're listening to I Personally don't use them because I find them kind of annoying but They also do require the use of headphones because you have to have either ear There is some suggestion though that binaural beats are actually fuzzy because they're created inside your brain and not necessarily coming from a direct signal in your ear And So they may not be as good as any strong beats. So what you're listening to now may It may be made better with adding binaural beats to it or may not So it's something you kind of have to find out for yourself through experimentation So let's move on to the next So how does this relate to electronic and trance? High beat per minute music is approximately 100 130 to 160 beats per minute It can still entrain the brainwaves because there's still that frequency following response there And it roughly roughly translates to alpha and theta. In fact, it's actually a little bit slower And it doesn't require headphones trance is actually pretty aptly named Modern trance actually originated in Germany in the 80s or 90s and then go inside trance for Israel and India, so they're a little bit older, but It's actually arguable that modern trance is actually more of an offshoot of you know Some more like shamanic type music or tribal drumming. I mean, it's really just the modern version of that and so There's kind of a long history of that. There's the dream machine, which is actually the visual version of it Staring into a candle any sort of pattern related item is going to do the same thing But what you really want is something that's going to help you while you're having your day and going around your day and headphones are the Most wonderful invention ever iPods are fantastic. So you can wander around your whole day You don't actually have to sit in front of a dream machine So and another reason and this is going to be a little bit more boring, sorry This is another reason why I think the headphones actually really are amazing is there's what's called stochastic resonance and It's the long explanation when noise is added to a system and increased performance is exhibited What that really means is that there's a little bit of noise going on in your brain like there's what you're doing and what you're thinking about and there's kind of extraneous stuff kind of like there is in every other system and What happens when you add noise to a system and there's a lot of very complicated Explanations that include words like sinusoidal and What happens is it actually cancels out some of the noise so that the line strength is actually much much better and the reason why I bring this up is one they've actually found that That neurons are actually directly affected by stochastic resonance stochastic resonance And the other is there's actually been experiments in the medical field where they've had people who've had problems with balance And so they've put in cochlear implants implants in the ear that Stimulate the inner ear and what they found is what these little vibrating implants is that people actually their balance would improve they've also found people with Heart variability problems and they've done the same thing only they've actually used a little galvanic Electrodes in there to kind of vibrate and it's actually helped them and this is a little bit less than scientific But this kind of my hypothesis and it's something I really want to test next year when My EEG isn't going to electrocute anybody is If it's just if the vibration in the ear actually does this are the headphones actually increasing The throughput that you're getting Why you're listening to them so even if it was static which is something I need to test But I really think that maybe that That vibration in your ears since they've already done studies on it I think it probably also works and that's kind of the next thing I'm working on So now we're kind of on to the EEG oh This is finding optimal music actually if you have an EEG This is actually kind of a good way to go is you can kind of listen to music and watch your brainwaves as you're as you're doing it I did that this is kind of an EEG visual representation looks like So you can kind of see it's got all that It's got all of the I figure what they're called all the lines there telling you where you're at But you can actually build your own From opening open EEG at source forge net actually has online schematics and They have all the schematics all the digital boards. They actually have a bill of materials They kind of have everything you need to put together one of your own Unfortunately, I do want to say that if you if you don't really have a huge amount of experience in Soldering boards or any sort of EE experience the last EE experience. I really had I was like ten years old my dad had me soldering boards because you know, we were free labor and We're so great so I kind of jumped in blindly and wildly and it turns out the oaring parts is a lot of work And you have to spend a lot of money on tools One of the things is olem X actually carries these boards and it takes a couple of weeks But they carry the boards fully built So there's a lot less that you have to do and the boards honestly fully built are going to cost you less than the tools So if this is something you want to do all the time great build yourself a lab and have at it It'll be really fun But if you really just want the EEG you're better off buying the boards and it's still going to be a lot of work You still have to make the programming cable And attach the leads and there's quite a bit you still have to do But if you're going to do that one of the things Rip Hades and Joe Gray I'd actually have a great to great how to solder video podcast on make comm and it's actually really really helpful to make sure that you're not Making a lot of cold joins and if you're if you're not actually testing The board as you go You'll have no idea where they are. Trust me. You'll have no idea where they are later So this is actually an image of the boards that I stole from open EEG. Thanks But there's actually quite a few parts. There's there's something like 200 odd parts on there This isn't actually even all the parts on So it's it's quite a project is more of a three month project than a three week project Well, if you're me and have no idea what you're doing Let's see So the last thing that I do Want to go over is Electrode placement so if you're going to do this it's If you don't play some correctly it's garbage in garbage out, you know You could drop them on your head, but you know, you're getting a bunch of static or a bunch of stuff That's not working particularly if you're using differential electrodes, which is what's open EEG actually is So it's really important So basically What you want to do and this actually is a picture coming from the top of the head So it's looking down And there's a lot more on there than you're probably ever going to want unless you buy the electro cap Which saves you from all of this you just drop it on your head So when you're actually doing the 1020 system, you're actually going to measure from the nason Which is actually right around the bridge of the nose and you're going to measure from there all the way back To the observable bone, which is not the observable. Sorry. It's the Indian Which is actually the bump right on top of the observable Area of the brain and you measure from there to there and then you're going to measure above your jaw Like you drop your jaw that little gap that little gap right there You're going to measure from there all the way to there Now all of those placements are going to be at 10 and 20 percent some of them will be on your forehead And they'll move 10 to 20 percent as they go This little slide is actually really nice this This graphic because it's actually got everything pointed out as to which lobe you're looking at You don't actually have to do all of them. You can actually pick a lobe if there's something you're interested in if you want to Do some neurofeedback? Then maybe you want to actually concentrate on the area of the brain that actually works with what you're working with And this kind of will help you to do that. It's really kind of important to Check out the right area of the brain and you know, you don't want garbage. So it'll make it a lot easier But that is actually kind of the end of my talk and mostly summation, you know, the music you're listening to that's working for you You're right. It is and Good to go Are there any questions Yeah, is there any music that brings you to a beta state? I'm sorry The holy awake state I would actually suggest maybe pop I mean, I'm just making a suggestion what you're really looking at is you want to look at the beats per minute And you want to translate those to cycles to per second is what you're looking for. So you want something that's Well, maybe that doesn't really work because that's that would actually be faster than high-beat per minute music I Don't know that you really want to be in beta be wide awake Actually, what I use is I use poppy music because music will actually also affect your heart rate And so what you want is something to actually increase your heart rate and that works kind of differently and to be honest I don't actually fully understand how the heart rate part works with your brain yet. Oh Sorry, go ahead. Oh, I'm actually thinking earbuds, but the full canisters may actually I could see where they would also work Because it's just pounding noise directly into your inner ear Yes, that's a really good question. I I don't really know I'm I'm going to actually guess that has something to do more with our evolution rather than Rather than something that was specific, I think it's kind of more of an accidental thing because noise is actually so important For like animals, it's very important. Most animals have way better hearing than we do so they can survive in the wild So not get eaten. It's good point Yes Not my research. I don't know actually. I haven't actually Gotten into the into the why as far as that I actually am pretty interested in evolutionary psychology And I think that would be you know a really interesting vein to kind of go in and check out Yes, I don't think silence would do the same. No, I can see where a direct silence would actually change your brainwaves But I don't see how it would do it through stochastic resonance Stochastic resonance actually requires that noise be introduced Specifically or it may I mean I suppose it may sound like silence It might be you know some sort of vibration that you can't hear I could see that but actual dead silence is There's no noise. There's no frequency. So it wouldn't be through stochastic resonance. But yes, it could also work Yes You're neuro linguistic programming is actually Yeah Yeah, some guy wrote a book on picking up chicks with it But neuro linguistic programming talks about talks about interrupts that I talked about at the beginning But it also talks about How to set cues with other people's related what it is I've set these cues with music on myself But it's actually completely possible like the don't shoot the dog chick with training her mom not to be mean to her Same exact thing only some guy actually put it together and figured out how to use it to pick up girls And he actually used Variable response which means sometimes you get a reward and sometimes you don't get a reward and that embeds way deeper There are books on it if you want Anyone else? Yeah, I actually just divided Yeah Yes, you know, that's actually math that I don't know and didn't go into I think any volume that is Lower than what would actually hurt your ear is is probably good. I think too low It's not going to be enough because it's not actually going to get there I think you actually have to find a mid-range of volume I think too low It's not going to actually in train your brainwaves because you're just not it's the signal is not actually going to even Pass through the auditory nerve as strong enough as you need Anyone else? Yeah, thank you so much for coming