 In the end it's the experience, the experiential side, where real transformation need to happen and can only happen, because we are shaped by our life's experiences all the time. And if we experience traumatic experiences, we are shaped by that. If we experience wonderful, meaningful experiences for us, we are also changed by that. So with WaveBats we took that and we realized that if experience is the foundation for personal change, personal transformation, we can work and we need to work with what we call the masters of experience, the therapists, the artists, the architects, the designers, and unify that and provide the experiences that are healing and are changing. Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyun. We are still at Consciousness Hackings Awaken Future Summit. We are now going to be speaking to Mendel K. Lenn. Hello. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You're welcome. I really appreciate it. I'm very excited to talk to you. Mendel is the founder and CEO of WavePaths. You can find them at WavePaths.net. They merge immersive media with advances in intelligent technologies and psychedelic science to improve global well-being. Alright, who are you? What do you represent? Who am I? Great question. I studied neuroscience with a real interest in psychedelic therapy or more generally speaking more essentially in interest in mental health care and the question, how can we change people? How can we facilitate positive change? And looking at psychotic therapy I realized there's a really interesting new paradigm here that is emerging. So as a neuroscientist I studied that and looking into the way psychedelic therapy is being practiced I realized the important role that music is playing in at Modality. So I studied the interaction between psychedelic therapy or psychedelic drug and psychedelic therapy and music to understand what's going on. And that led me to publish several articles and eventually to found WavePaths as well as a company afterwards. So that's where I'm right now. And have you been in London the whole time doing this? Yeah, I actually moved to London to do that. From where? From Holland. Okay, cool. So then you started studying neuroscience in Holland or in the United Kingdom? I started studying, actually started off as a biologist first then I pivoted to neuroscience in Holland and I did an internship, my final internship in my master's degree in London for eight months. That's where I met Robin Carter Harris and David Knott and that eventually led me to do an RA with them, a research assistantship, a PhD and then stayed on as a postdoc for a while and then I pivoted away from academia eventually as well. So teach us about what the studies were initially in neuroscience. Sure. So we basically did two things I would say. One is looking at the interaction between the drug and the music on the neuronal level. So how do the psychedelic drug interact with the music? What kind of changes in brain activity, brain connectivity and information exchange do we see when they are provided together? And how does that relate to these changes in emotionality or a mental imagery that people report in that interaction? What are the brain mechanisms at play so to speak? But I've always been working on these questions from different angles, different disciplines if you wish. If you look at my bookshelf you see a lot of psychotherapy books for example, that's really where my kind of key interest is. So with these studies we also looked at phenomenology, the richness of the experience in a patient population that was receiving psilocybin to be treated for their depression. And now there's other music players for that and we looked at how the music was experienced and how we may improve the way we work with music to improve the experience of the patients and thereby enhance the therapy outcomes for them as well. This seems so synergistic with what East Forest is doing with his newest album and also what Synthesis is doing with their center. Right, enrollment center. Your research, interesting. So how the neural architecture is impacted by both the use of psilocybin as well as music? Yeah, that's correct. And what were your findings? We looked at mental imagery in the first study and we found that in the interaction between in this case LSD and music we saw an enhanced information flow from an area specialized in personal memories towards the visual cortex. Interesting. You need to understand that brains don't only specialize not only regions that are specialized but these are networks that interact with each other and we found changes in the way that information is being exchanged between those regions and a degree to which it happened correlated with the degree to which people reported more vivid mental images or personal memories even. Then we also looked at the different acoustic properties that make up music, right? Music is not mere sound. Music is structured sound in time. It has tonalities, it has rhythm, it has all sorts of acoustic qualities that change in time. So we looked at these different acoustic properties and we found that under LSD we saw significant changes in language areas interestingly enough enhanced to the timbre or the tone color in the music and the degree to which it happened correlated with emotions associated with peak experience so emotions of wonder and awe for example. So that was quite interesting and made us like typical for science ask many more questions. In the clinical study with the patient population we found an interesting polarity I would say like some people responded really well to the music and some not and there are interesting truths to be found when looking at both stories. So one thing that we found for example is that in the experience of the music some people described that music was able to carry them on this journey inside of themselves they experienced enhanced emotionality and imagery and when they were able to really surrender to that experience they described it as a journey as if they were transported on this adventure of discovery which is in essence the discovery of aspects of oneself it's a journey inside. That also correlated with the attitude of openness to the music and a degree to which people reported a sense of union between themselves and the music or a sense of harmony. Now that was on one side and the other side we had people who described the music as feeling very dissonant and out of tune with their inexperience and these individuals didn't want the music to be there and were rejecting the music. Now people who reported this resonance with the music these were also individuals that reported showed the stories improvements weeks after the stories of corruption and depression afterwards. People who didn't had that experience with the music these were the individuals who didn't show these improvements in their mental health afterwards. The more resonant the experience is with them the decrease in depression of others. Yeah, exactly. Now there's a caveat there because it's a small study just 20 patients we looked at but when I delved into music therapy research I came across something called the isoprincipal and this is a well-established concept in music therapy the isoprincipal means matching your emotional state with music. So having music convey a similar emotional state as you are currently experiencing and using that as a starting point for other therapeutic work with music. And so finding that convergence we made me confident there's something at play here and that's what we're currently expanding on as well. I love it, I love it. Okay, so there's also a specific potentially music therapy that resonates most deeply with each individual that then can be tuned to their life that can then help them get through some of the most difficult moments of their life. And then to be able to assist that music therapy with potentially psychedelics and see how people can transform through those experiences this is your research this is what you care about. Okay, and it's really interesting thinking about all the applications like you listed to take someone that may feel depressed and then have them feel like they're transformed afterward and that they have these deep feelings of unity. I like how you explained the processing of especially something that to become more visual a personal memory, things like this. Okay, let's jump into your move to London to pursue wave paths. Okay, so how long ago was this founded? What is wave paths? It was founded about a year ago and the mission of wave paths is to make transformative experiences with music and all the immersive media more widely available. One outcome of the research and the psychotherapy research in general is if you look at how psychotherapy is currently practiced I sometimes conceptualize it as a form of music therapy but it's a drug-enhanced form of music therapy. So then the question is what is so different about the experience of music in that psychedelic state? And could we maybe access that without a drug as well? Not because we don't want psychotherapy to be there but how can we help prepare people for these experiences how can we help people integrate these experiences afterwards and also can we find a way of engaging with ourselves that not always demands us to take these psychedelic compounds? And I believe there's a real opportunity for music to fill that void, this thirst that people have to engage with their inner worlds in meaningful, constructive ways. There's a lot more to say about music but almost everyone has some relationship with music. It's ancient. Music is one of the most ancient human inventions. There's one of the most ancient technologies being invented. Music has come to play many different roles in our society. It can be a social glue, it can be an aid to relax, it can be entertaining, it can be fun, it can be beautiful but something more profound can happen when you listen so deeply to music that in essence you're deeply listening to yourself. We could call this deep listening. So this question that we are asking with WaveBats is can we invite people to listen to music in such a way that their relationship with music becomes so intimate that music can become their friend, a companion, a healer, a therapist that people have access to at any moment in their lives. That is the essence of what we're trying to do. And we are in essence working to develop a new approach to well-being that ignites our innate capacity to heal through music and other intelligent technologies. You mentioned the word transformation, right, and depression. Really important question there is what is transformation in essence like what we're talking about. Transformation doesn't mean per definition that if somebody is depressed that that will be transformed into some beautiful, wonderful peak experience that maybe some really painful emotions and memories that need to be processed first. Often if not always healing involves reconnecting these parts of ourselves that we don't really wish to be connected with because they can be frightening or overwhelming or painful but that's a really real healing happens. So it's not that in psychotherapy and in WaveBats we only play music that has these wonderful, positive emotional soundscapes to it. Sometimes the work needs to happen by actually allowing difficult emotions to surface. Okay, so I love the music is such an ancient technology and the way that it can be fully actualized and its fullest potential to be a friend, healer, all these words that he used with humans is so beautiful and it seems like we're only still scratching the surface with music's potential, ambisonics, all this crazy stuff that's coming. Okay, so drop us into what this is like right now because it's kind of like the commercialized application of your research or also the democratized application of your research. So am I coming in physically to the WavePaths center? Am I able to just make a download and play at home? Yeah, how does it work? We do both. We develop mobile technologies, mobile tools that allow this approach to be widely available but there's a real challenge with trying to encapsulate this process into an app. For example, you do not have control over the ritual, the attention that the process really deserves and needs for those effects to take place. Most people don't have a good enough sound system at home as well. So all of these things we have much more control over when we have a physical space. On top of that, I believe that the current mental health crisis we are witnessing won't be solved by another digital technology. The solution will be found within human communities coming together in real lived experiences. So what we aim to do with our WavePath spaces is offer our technology which is an adaptive generative music system. So it's music that is generating music through a computational system adapted to where you are in this moment emotionally and with your therapeutic intentions. So the music meets you where you are and this is based on what we just described with resonance. We try to enhance this sense of resonance with the music. How do you know where the person is and how to tune the music? Mental input by a user at this situation and on top of that you work with some biosensors. So we combine both to provide this achievement with the music. So do they wear EEG or what do they do? We have a multimodal vision there. At this moment, what we did in our space, we worked with a radar sensor built in a wall. You don't even see it. It emits high frequency sound and it's able to track movement in a micro millimeter range and we trained it to measure breathing and body movement. And then what it does in this space, you mentioned ambisonics, we implement a sound system called an ELISA elacoustics sound system. 22 speakers, 8 rings on ear's height, 8 rings above you and 4 speakers on the ceiling itself. And the music is generated in response to your biophysiology and the spatialization of the music is informed by your breathing pattern, the depth of your breath, the frequency of your breath. So the space that free-breathes with you with the music and it's done in a subtle way. We don't want it to be gimmicky but all of these are experiments in our effort to enhance this degree of resonance and the immersive sound technology allows you to forget that you're in a space. You lie on a chair, you have an eye mask and the only thing that's there is your mind and the music and all the interactions between your mind and the music that occurs in there. So I'm in a chair, I have the eye mask on and you have a somewhat of an ambisonic system. It's a lot of speakers and it's 360. It's not ambisonic, it's close. It's a similar 3D technology. It's a 3D technology with sound and then you have this radar technology that's able to add a millimeter. Micro millimeter. Add a micromilometer? Wow, okay. Be able to sense my heart, my chest moving, my breathing. And so then if my breathing is maybe shallowing or it's deepening, whichever, you're changing the music, adapting it to my breath and how I'm kind of replying to it. And you're aiming to make these experiences as healing and transformative for people as possible. And right now they have to come in. Is there also a visual? No, there's not, because they're... Well, there is. Yeah, that's a good question. So what I want to emphasize is that this experience, this introspective experience of the music with this technology is embedded within a human relationship and all of that is embedded within a ritual. So the current space that we have in London before you enter this music space, you enter what we call the light space. And it's literally a space to be. Nothing that distracts you. You're just present in this world of color, basically. And you meet a guide, who is a trained psychotherapist and you already are invited beforehand to be able to reflect on your intention and experience. And you have certain tools that allow you to figure out what's present, what's alive in you in this moment and how you would want to work with that. And you meet your psychotherapist guide in this light space and you spend around 20 minutes exploring your intention. Then you go to the music space, the second room. The guide will do an induction, a meditation. It helps you to be and feel more safe and open to the music. Then you go on this journey alone by yourself. Afterwards you return to the light space, you are spending another 20 minutes or so with your guide integrating and processing the experience before you then go home again. Wonderful, yeah. You have the whole pre and post. Yeah, well done as well. Okay, so in terms of the wave paths being able to get out as a digital download, yes, you said that it's difficult because how do you know about how the person feels and how do you make sure that they have the adequate sound system that's high quality. So where are you guys at with taking it to the democratized? Yeah, we are kind of reconsidering our strategy with that a lot at the moment. Because from a business perspective, of course this app could be an easy way to scale up our business relatively quickly. Also from a therapeutic standpoint, it could be a way to democratize this experience more widely. What we did for now is we are only releasing the app that we have right now to people who have visited our space. So it's almost like an initiation. You have the space experience, those guests get the app afterwards to continue their practice at home. But you are considering to release a version of this app by the end of the year. That's what we're currently working on. And that app will also have these different contexts in which you can engage with the music, different types of meditations, different types of inductions, guidelines and ways to process the experience afterwards as well. You could potentially get quite good at targeting specific ailments, emotional ailments. That could be interesting. Yeah, that's the vision. We right now focus on well-being as a broad construct and we don't focus right now on severe mental health conditions. Also because we don't want to make any medical claims when we don't really have them. This is an experimental technology, right? But we have that ambition for sure. And we partner and we offer our technologies to institutions. For example, people doing psychotic therapy research in Holland with MDMA at the moment. They will have a prototype of our app to support our patients going through their therapy sessions treating severe PTSD with MDMA. Excellent. So you are already doing the partnerships with maps and that type of... Wonderful, wonderful. And then... Okay, so let's go to the... Again to what could potentially come from this. You're looking at all of the different styles of exploration with transformation of well-being. There's potential also work with some neurodegeneration that you could offset maybe. There's also work with neuro-augmentation. You could go in and get a potentially... Similar to what we're doing with East Forest here in the mornings. You come in, you get the awakening experience and then you go on the rest of the day. So what about on the augmenting side and also on the degeneration side? Have you had thoughts about that? Yeah, I thought thoughts about that. Yes, there's some really fascinating research out there that shows that certain aspects of sound can be useful for treating Parkinson's symptoms, for example. And dementia, people with dementia respond really powerful to music and it's becoming more and more recognized as a tool to support these individuals. And the list goes on. I am... We are with wavepads not per definition interested in sound itself, but more in music. And that's because with music you have the psychedelic grow richness that is essential for psychotherapeutic work. So we're not per definition interested in sound therapy. We actually don't like that term, although some journalists started to use it to describe what we do because the healing doesn't happen in the sound. It happens in your engagement, your conscious engagement with the experience that is unfolding in the dynamic process. So we're very much inspired by psychotherapeutic concepts here where it is, you don't lie there and have a passive experience of sound that does some healing, although some of that may be true. We believe that much more interesting and important work can be done in that richness of the mind that you can work with in these experiences. Beautiful. It's the dynamical interplay between the human and the music therapy that is actually occurring. We think of music as a language, but it's a non-verbal language. It conveys emotions and sensations and images. And it can do so without activating the intellect. In fact, it does so by bypassing the intellect, and that's why I believe it has such therapeutic potential. That's where talk therapy can run against its limitations because you keep engaging with talking and analyzing if you're not carefully contextualizing your problems. And in the end, it's the experience, the experiential side where real transformation need to happen and can only happen because we are shaped by our life's experiences all the time. And if we experience traumatic experiences, we are shaped by that. If we experience wonderful, meaningful experiences for us, we are also changed by that. So with WaveBats, we took that and we realized that if experience is the foundation for personal change, personal transformation, we can work and we need to work with what we call the masters of experience, the therapists, the artists, the architects, the designers, and unify that and provide experiences that are healing and are changing. Is there a specific style of music that bypasses this gatekeeper and gets to this subconscious? To the unconscious, is there something specific that does it most effectively? Yeah. Music is... Our emotional response to music is really a combination of innate capacities, innate tendencies to respond to sound and music in certain ways that are based on our evolutionary heritage. And I would argue for a much larger degree, our upbringing of our culture are what I call a musical personality that we acquired in time. So I may burst in tears by this song, but you may not feel anything, right? But then at the same time, there are certain interesting commonalities there as well at play. But in this therapeutic work, that's why we believe that you need to meet the person where he or she is in this moment, and that includes taking into account the musical personality of the individual, not because you want to give the individual an experience that he or she likes. It's not about liking, it's not about pleasure. It's about finding ways to engage the individual. It's working with the ego to some degree as well, rather than trying to fight it. Interesting. So it's a personalized experience based on what both the ancestral lineage of that human, plus what they themselves have absorbed and stimuli throughout their life to gain that personal touch on what they find most profound in the music and then the responsibility on the end is someone like Wave Paths to be able to figure out what that is for that individual. Interesting. So it potentially is some sort of a process, maybe then through the democratization where there could be a feedback mechanism for you to learn about the person's individuality. Oh, that's exactly what we're doing. That's exactly what we're doing. To build a bridge to our research, we had some clues about different categories of therapeutic functions of music, but it's only based on a very limited sample size. So rather than trying to mold people into these different categories, we allow people to score and rate their musical experiences. So in time, we have a fully data-derived bottom-up categorization of these different experiences. And in doing that, we can become more and more precise in actually prescribing music as a medicine to each individual. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yes, yes, very beautiful. Okay, I want to do a couple other thoughts on the way here. What is the percentage of time that you think that there's going to be people that are experiencing Wave Paths without psychedelics versus with psychedelics with psychotherapy? Hmm. Oh, that's an interesting question. It was founded with the idea to support psychotherapy but then realizing the therapeutic potential of music and realizing that there are all of those people out there that don't have access to psychotherapy. We want to offer music as psychotherapy, right? Music as a psychotic experience. Music as a mind-revealing experience. So what I hope is actually that all of that will happen that people who are seeking psychotic medicines either because they're suffering deeply from depression or PTSD or you name it in a clinic or whether people seek these for their own personal development and they have access to these tools to support them in the best ways possible. But at the same time, there is not all about the psychotic drug experience, right? You have, apart from the preparation, you have homework to do afterwards. And like I mentioned earlier on, there is, I feel, when I speak with people, I really avoid their to be filled. How can I work with what happened in this psychotic experience? How can I continue to engage with that? And I think with the approach that we are developing, we are offering a very safe, effective and engaging way to do that through music. In addition to that, I also think that psychotic therapy won't be for everyone and there could be other approaches that are also very powerful but maybe not as disruptive as a psychotic experience can be. And music and our approach and other approaches could play a role in that as well. So my hope is really that both will happen in time. And what's the ideal future where is it ambisonics 360 degrees plus visual, plus the feedback loop to the personalized taste in music and visuals. Is that kind of the ideal future? We will see. You know what a data tells us. So right now we run four different scientific research projects with our current space, with our approach, including a neuroscience study. And that's our intention, is to keep refining our approach fully empirically, keep challenging our assumptions, and then in time we will find something that really works. With the music and the sound system, that's definitely something we will keep replicating and keep exploring. The role of light is something that we actually just are sure about. It's more of an experiment as well. We are researching the light art that we work with, for example. Optogenetics is a very interesting field. Optogenetics. Neuromodulation through light. Right, but that happens with genetic modifications in animals, right? Optogenetics. Optogenetics is a method where you, to my view, genetically modify a gene, making it responsive to light, and then you flicker light to the nerve cell to make it fire or make a receptor, change its shape, or you name it. And there's potentially some interplay with what? If you remove the eye cover, and then you have the visual stimulation as well, the musical stimulation. Completely, apart from genetic modifications, there's something in light, right? That is, as music, something we respond to very powerfully, absolutely. And that's what we notice in our space. We have this light space, and people respond to it really profoundly. And it's something, again, we don't really understand yet, but it's something we are experimenting. As part of our larger mission to ask ourselves, how can we engage the senses, not only music, but also light and smell and touch? Oh, those are great. Our social interactions to provide a unified framework to facilitate these transformative experiences. Oh, that's excellent. Lavender sprays, and there's so many cool things. Touch, the touch, as through the process as well. That's great, that's great. And then, also, just all the testimonials, all the people afterward that tell you how important it was that they went through your experience and what the transformation that they had was and being able to maybe have some EEG or some sort of a way to have the biosignals captured before and after that type of thing. This has been very interesting. Let's do a couple of quick questions on the way out. Do you think we're in a simulation? Do I think we're in a simulation? My God. It's a field I haven't given, it's an idea I haven't given that much thought to. I know that our serious physics will make an argument for it. Do I feel like I'm in a simulation? I don't, but it could be a very effective simulation. But do I believe we're in a simulation? I don't, but it's an entertaining and interesting philosophical question for sure. And what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? What I think is the most beautiful thing in the world. A few things come to mind. Nature or human beings being honest with each other and authentic with each other. Why do you say that? Because that's really beautiful and important and missing a lot in our society at the moment. I think that's where a lot of this thirst for these approaches come from is rather than having created a society where technology is being used to remove suffering and bring us closer together. We have created some kind of mega machine that is there to track our data, tailor advertisements to us, make us more efficient at work, replace ourselves at work more and more. And I think a lot of the fears in society are based on that lack of an increasing sense of disconnection from other people, from meaning, existential meaning, all those things. So it's beautiful when people are able to find that and when you feel that they're being a part of that. Thank you so much for joining us on the show and teaching us about all your work. You're really welcome. Thank you. Huge thank you to everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Go and talk more to your friends, your family, your coworkers, people online on social media about this powerful process of music and the transformational potential that it has. Check out WavePaths.net. The link is in the bio below, also the rest of Mendel's links. And go and support Consciousness Hacking. Their links are below support simulation. They're below the organization's entrepreneurs, the artists around the world that you believe in. Support them. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace.