[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness.
Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and Optimal HRV. Check us out at optimalhrv.com Please enjoy the show.
Welcome, friends. The Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I'm Matt Bennett here with one of my new friends in the HRV space, Cameron Allen.
We already had a session, Cameron, that I. We probably should have hit record on because there was probably at least one, if not two podcasts in there talking about your work, our shared passion with HRV and how I'm so excited we're making this official as maybe we already talked about our next potential episode as well. So this is one of the joys of my work, is connecting with people like you.
So before we just nerd out about heart rate variability and our shared passion for it, I just love to get an introduction of yourself and I always love the question of when did you first hear about heart rate variability?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me on and I really enjoyed our last conversation and this opportunity.
I think to answer that, I'd have to go way back. I guess it was probably a little better than 20 years ago.
There was an integrated neurotherapy program that both myself and my brother had gone through.
And in that there was the early heartmath sensor and you know, the, I believe it was the game might have been even before their game where the, you know, the, the horse appeared and you got like the, the coloring in the garden and the water and all of that stuff. And, and it was just kind of one of those things that was an interesting practice in, in kind of that resonant breath frequency and just kind of getting used to, like, what did that feel like to actually drop out and into your body and experience just that state shift. And I.
And it was just a really, it was a really cool experience to see that intentionality, to be able to have that, that very clear, distinct felt shift. And I was, I was young then. And so it's one of those first times where it was like, wow, you can actually authentically change your own state. You don't just respond to what's coming at you in life. That's fascinating.
And, and part of this program that actually led me to where I am now, where I focus primarily in the, in the field of Translational neuroscience. Neuroscience now. So looking at what does the hard science say? What, what are, what are we seeing in all the published literature? And then how can we actually translate that and create something usable for individuals to use that's practical in their daily life to authentically change the way that their brain and their nervous system responds to life? And so had time in publication and research and time in setting up programs and creating programs, had a time about 11 years of working in therapeutic programs with adolescents and young adults by bringing in a lot of different brain based interventions. And it could have been anything from neurofeedback, vestibular and proprioceptive training, ocular motor training, the now virtual reality, biofeedback interactive metronome, a gamut of things. And so over the years I really just have been looking at, okay, what's the most accessible tool that's going to get down to the key metrics? It's not going to measure everything, but what's the most stable and useful.
And that's really what led me back to heart rate variability and all of the different submetrics of heart rate variability. And so, yeah, that's a nutshell of kind of what, what brought me to where I'm at now.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: I love it. So I'm curious about some of that, that in between time, because being curious as somebody who also went on that journey in the last decade or so, you know, that, that going through it sounds like neurofeedback yourself, exposure, early heart math. Like I'm just curious about what, what either in the environment, something that was missing or something you thought you could contribute. I'd love to just get a little bit of information on what turned an interest into something that, hey, I can really add something of value to this space and to the communities that you serve.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I appreciate you asking that.
I think that pretty much everybody that's in this space and has been in it for a little while recognizes when anybody new comes into it and they say this is the next big thing, how do people not know about this? And then it's like, yeah, yeah, heard that before.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: That before.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
And so I think, you know, as I believe when I was first engaging with it, I was 17 just to turn 17 and so didn't, didn't comprehend the novelty of it. It was just, you know, here's this thing.
My brother had been dealing with kind of post concussive syndrome and all of the fallout that comes with that and just had a ton of internal turmoil for him. I was dealing with learning disabilities and all kinds of other just nuanced stuff that nothing seemed to really touch. And so going through this integrated kind of model was really useful. And the lights came on and all of a sudden things went from being pretty challenging academically and socially and all of these things and for him, for my brother, with mood regulation and that kind of thing. And all of a sudden things shifted overnight that we were three to four months into this program and then the perception finally caught up with the neurophysiological change and then the lights kind of.
And so when that happened, it was like, okay, there's something here. But you know, I found it relatively young, so it wasn't like, oh, here's this spectacular new technology. I thought everybody knew about it. So I went on my way and went to school for aeronautical engineering. And while I was in school, I was talking to my biomedical engineering professor and I was telling him about this experience and he was like, oh, that was all placebo. You can't change the brain. There's nothing that we can do. We don't have the technology to actually change the brain. You can teach coping mechanisms, you know, there's behavioral therapy, there's these other things, but you cannot actively change the brain without doing some sort of deep brain stimulation.
I was like, well, I'm pretty certain that's inaccurate. And so started looking at it and doing some more research and realized it was horribly inaccurate. And a disservice to the scientific field in general of looking at how do we go from traditional psychological paradigms into integrating real hard neuroscience and technological advancements to then be able to shape the nervous system in a really productive way. And so from there I, I really started examining what do I want to spend my time doing. And two things came up. One, that program that I went through was about $30,000 per person, and so not very accessible. My parents mortgaged the house to send us through it. It was their last ditch effort. I mean, if we had not done that, I would have lost my brother for to suicide. And the. And so it was like, okay, this needs to, one, have more research behind it. Two, it needs to be affordable. And you know, three, it needs to be something that is accessible outside the clinic. It cannot just be something that, because of the, and the repetition that's needed in order for neuroplasticity to actually engage and hold.
It can't just be going to the office.
So I spent 20 years.
Well, I spent about 15 years trying to figure out, okay, how do we actually make this cheaper? So did that. But I was still using a dozen different providers, equipment integrated into a protocol. And so there was never any way of taking that and saying, okay, let's, let's put this inside somebody's home and they can do it all themselves without guidance. And of course there should be oversight, of course there should be some when it, when it's kind of clinically sophisticated.
But then as I started actually doing factor analysis of each of the individual components, whether it was neurofeedback, it was biofeedback, the different types of biofeedback, different types of neurofeedback, looking at all of the infralo neurofeedback, the low energy neurofeedback, neurofeed, all of these different modalities on that side.
And then looking at, getting into the occupational therapy kind of arena of looking at Robert Melillo's work and looking at the CAREC Institute's work, which they're all doing really good stuff. But it's all very much, it's not communicating across the board a shared language. And especially in the brain based intervention realm, in neurotechnology realm, people invested so much money in the development of the technology that there was a lot of motivation to make claims that may not have been completely accurate. And so there were a lot of technological or technologies that came out that had fantastic marketing and saturated the market, only to then fizzle out as a fad a few months later or a year later, which then overshadowed all of the technology that actually worked. So I really spent my time in my clinic buying new equipment, doing the factor analysis, integrating into care plans, and really strategically tracking which technologies are authentically doing something really good. And then, you know, I could get crucified for this. But the like with neurofeedback, traditional neurofeedback, and pretty much every type of neurofeedback that I, that I trained in and used, we would have some folks responding extraordinarily well and it would hold and it would last and we'd have some really great outcomes. Then we'd have some folks that it would hold, but then it would fall off and then we'd have some folks that didn't really get much of a result at all. And depending on what was going on and the piece that really started, I started seeing is when we're doing anything that's primarily looking at the perceptual systems of the brain and the processing systems of the brain, it's really about what is it processing and what is the information being handed to the brain.
And then that's going to determine a whole lot of how much these more kind of brain based interventions are going to impact.
So then looking at nervous system in kind of regulation and nervous system therapeutics and this can bridge over from vestibular and proprietary receptive therapies to the biofeedbacks, to even some of the other bilateral stims and some of the vagus nerve stimulators and that kind of thing that those all had a really good kind of impact.
But then I was seeing a lot of those fall off as well. And so it was really just about what's the right combination of input. And when we clean up the sensory signaling coming from the body and we're actually able to innervate the, the vagus nerve, innervate, you know, the thalamus, cerebellum, get the sensory motor strip online, while retraining the brain on how to process that information, then things held really well.
But again, it's hard to put that into somebody's home in a reliable way with all of the artifact of EEG and all of the, you know, the, the difficult technology.
And so when in the factor analysis, one of the things that was really cool is looking at all of the different metrics of heart rate variability and saying, okay, they all are giving us really good insights into the nervous system.
Can we extrapolate out what's happening in the brain when we're measuring certain aspects of heart rate variability? Can we measure what's happening within the sensory system? Can we extrapolate what's happening in the vagal nerve tone? Can we extrapolate what's happening in the somatic? And so as we started really looking at each one of those pieces, it was fantastic to see. Yes, there is a lot that we can extrapolate.
And then it was like, but it's still not holding what's going on. And the thing that we, we came to realize was we're not getting enough sensory motor pairing with the training in order to actually engage long term potentiation. So when we started really looking at okay, what is it going to take to do that, that's what caused us to land on the virtual reality biofeedback, which is a new LIVE software, does virtual reality training with a desktop unit and all of that. But the trouble is, again, it's expensive, it's something that's hard to actually get people to use. The connection was unstable. There were some things that when we were using it, I think it's come a long way since then that, and it's an incredible Software, I endorse it. I think people should use it. It's a good one. But the.
But what we really were looking at is that we needed to be measuring and giving feedback to multiple metrics simultaneously.
And we also needed to use something like virtual reality that has the secondary effect of activating the hypothalamus to get the brain and body scanning so we can get a positive feedback loop between the body innervating the sensory motor and the cerebellum and the eye and the vagal nerve tone, while training both resilience and reliable state shifting. And that both of those things are needed in order for true engagement in everyday life. I would love it if we all just engaged in a resonant breath frequency and were able to just calm down and our nervous system drop in and we could engage every state from there, but we can't. We have to be able to shift in and out of that state. So how do we make that more flexible? So that's kind of long winded way of kind of where why I ended up kind of where I'm at now.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: So. So I mean, you took on such an easy challenge. You know, you want to engage many areas of the brain. You want to engage the autonomic.
I'm curious with the VR solution because VR has been interesting to watch in the HRV space because, you know, I'm. I'm old enough to remember. I think it was like five, six years ago. We were all going to live in the metaverse. So, like.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: That's right, that's right.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: You still see like this just rushing. I was doing like a call or two a week with VR solutions with this and the research. I think some of the research is hitting now too, so it's been a nice continuous.
But I think we're left with the people like yourself who, like, okay, we might not all be living in Zuckerberg's metaverse universe. Thanks God. In my personal opinion, even though I'm an Oculus 1 and 3 owner, so I'll go and take my bow and arrow into hell and shoot some demons from time to time.
But I think the folks who found the science in this, because there's something really powerful there's about VR, you know, and I'm just kind of curious about with all these ambitious, you know, goals that you were going. Going after.
Well, I just loved when did VR come into kind of your thinking as a possible solution? And then sort of how have you kind of validated it as. As reaching some, if not all of those goals that that you set for your. Your solution?
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So the, you know, life has an interesting way of unfolding and creating a path that you wouldn't expect. And along the way I was contracting, helping facilities get set up. And I was working with this neurosurgery practice and they, they do incredible work. They, They're a fascinating group that has integrated a ton of different modalities. And I brought in brain based in hyperbaric oxygen therapy and a bunch of other therapies. And, and I was having a conversation with their leading neurosurgeon who truly brain surgeon, not just spine. And.
And she and I were just kind of nerding out on like, you know, what happens after concussion, what happens after head injury. What happens after brain surgery? How does the brain actually recover? Because when the brain experiences a lot of these impacts, we end up getting this disconnection between the brain and the body. Our vagal nerve tone goes down. We end up seeing a lot more hypercognition. More dopaminergic pathways activate in the brain. You see more of the hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal axis that ends up over activating and creates this reverberation between the brain and the body.
And it ends up really creating the body to. Or causing the body's receptors to shift over to receiving more norepinephrine than oxytocin or some of the other chemicals that allow for that connectivity.
And so it's like, how do you, how do you deal with that? Because, you know, certainly brain surgery is traumatic. It's not just like, you know, it's not a. Just like, oh, we fixed this thing. No, you fix something by destroying something. So how do, how do you reintegrate? And she said her protocol was to have them drink a gallon of orange juice every day for like three days or something like that. And then she had. They. They had to promise that they were going to go to Disney or Universal Studios. This was down in Tampa, and go to Disney or Universal Studios for a week straight and ride all the virtual reality rides. So this was before virtual reality was really starting to kick up. And I was like, that is a very odd answer.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: I don't know about the orange juice.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: I'm sure the sugar is something there, but if insurance covers it. That's right, I'm there.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: Sounds like a decent week, you know.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know if my job could cover a week at Disney at this point, but yeah.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: So I really, that. That stuck with me. And I asked her More questions about it. And I was like, you know, why? And she said that she had found a paper years before that showed how the mismatch of sensory information, of audio and visual being very granular and high fidelity, but there being no tactile or somatic experience that really linked with that stimuli precisely what on earth is going on? And so there is this reverberation where it's constantly scanning between the brain and the body, which then cleans up kind of a whole lot of those pathways and makes those pathways more robust and actually helps with interoception, which then, you know, downstream is helping with all kinds of connection between thalamocortical activation and cerebellar cortical activation activation into the insula and also impacting kind of default mode network salience, network executive networks. And because of the activation within the preoptic hypothalamus, that there's some level of increased oxytocin release which then does become a neuroprotective factor, inhibiting the tonic dopamine cycling and actually creating more of that positive feedback loop between the brain and the body. So hypothetically, at the time, I was like, okay, I could, I can I see that there could be something there, but there really wasn't a lot of literature to support it. And so fast forward a few years and, and I. So there was that. That was kind of sitting in the background that was like, okay, VR might have something here. I don't know. The L is not there yet. There were a few initial papers that showed some promise. But then there was the other aspect of it that's just from a practical standpoint. How are you going to give multiple feedback, multiple feedback modalities within a flat screen environment that you can't really do that much. You can do some, but you really can't. There's not enough fidelity to it for the brain to be able to pick up on four or five different things. And we saw that with a lot of technologies that were doing neurofeedback, biofeedback, and trying to integrate in galvanic skin response and heart rate variability, or respiration, EEG and heart rate variability, that it really didn't produce any profound increase in outcomes compared to just using one of the modalities individually.
So in the virtual reality environment, being able to, in our scene, sitting by a lake and having a fire on a rock, and as your heart rate variability is fluctuating, the fire is going to get higher or lower depending, and start smoldering. If your resilience is Dropped out and then having fog roll in across the lake. And then now we're kind of tinkering with integrating EEG with it. Where now clouds roll in, lightning and thunder, rain. That kind of, it is such a immersive felt sense experience and activating kind of that sensory motor response as well as the hypothalamic thalamic function, we're able to see that fidelity of feedback actually affecting multiple networks simultaneously.
And because we started out with being very traditional or research approach, and we started off with not giving a ton of information to the first few folks that were kind of going through it and just get in there, notice what's happening, you know, figure out how to, how to change the environment. And we looked at the, at the Pre and post EEGs, we looked at pre and post pupilometry vestibular balance assessment where we looked at kind of the standard, the vision, the proprioception and the vestibular. And then we looked at, you know, a lot of the cognitive ability scores. We looked at functional intelligence. We looked at, you know, all of these different things and then, you know, went from one feedback to two to then adding in others to adding in other kind of factors and watching to see.
How much is this changing versus feedback measuring the exact same things using the exact same algorithms.
What we found is that within 21 days of doing 7 to 10 minute sessions per day, that we ended up seeing a neuronal regulation average increase of 78%, which is up there, if not higher than a lot of other, you know, four to six month in clinic programs.
So then we started just kind of tweaking the algorithms and kind of playing with it. And we're still kind of seeing our numbers come up. And so the, so there's some internal validation around it. And I have a high degree of skepticism and I'm really good at, you know, burning the boat and moving on. Like if something isn't actually useful that, yeah, I can't continue to, to endorse it or can't continue to, to utilize it. And so it's, so there have been a bunch of the, you know, little brain children of like, hey, this is going to work really well. No, it turns out it doesn't. Let's move on. Let's, let's go into this. So, so the progression of the, of using virtual reality has really been, initially there was some scientific promise, then it was more about utility.
And now the research is actually demonstrating the sensory motor activation, the hypothalamic activation, the increased thalamic cortical looping, all of these other mechanisms that we have mentioned and I think we're going to just continue to have more and more research that comes out about it.
And then the other complaint with virtual reality is that most people want these action packed games and you're going to gamify and we're going to have all this movement. Awesome. And the technology and the refresh rate within the headsets are nowhere near where they need to be in order to not actually cause if there's any level of oculomotor deficit or vestibular issue that it's going to cause some level of vertigo or some level of motion sickness. And so there's a long ways to go on that side of it. But one of the other really cool things that just serendipitously happened for us, we worked with so many developers and the developers just really were not very good and they didn't understand how to integrate biometrics in with, you know, virtual reality.
And it just kind of mixing those media were really challenging. And then there was a gentleman that we ended up hiring who had trained under a Disney imagineer who specialized in place making and specialized in cognitive neuroscience of what the place making is and creating an emotional environment and that kind of thing.
So there's that aspect of it too where really good design matters in virtual reality. And not a lot of people have gotten that and so they actually overstimulate the system rather than giving it what it needs in order to foster that shift and then by integrating other modality or pardon other design features to actually spike the nervous system. So that if you're staying in a comfortable state a while, how do you nudge it out so that there can be more active kind of recovery and that kind of thing that can generalize to daily life.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: I love that because you know that that's where I think the promise of VR really lies, is that you, you, you can change the environment, you can add some challenges. Again, you know my, my frustration with the sensitivity of HRV is hey you, you want to introduce artifacts move, you know, right. So there, at least with HRV there, there are some, there's some really constraints there. But like yeah, to introduce, okay, now we're going to add a little bit of stress. Now we're going to take a little stress away, those sort of things. And what I like about your approach too is you're not trying to, from what I understand, introduce a psychedelic trip of any. So most of the meditation app that, that I played around with in VR are I mean they're visually stunning.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: They are, yeah.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: You know, it's like you're trying to like, you know, visually recreate a mushroom trip which isn't, you know, is a nice way to spend a few minutes if you can.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: I get sick. But at the same time it's, it. I don't think it's like necessarily it makes people think, hey, I'm just trying to reach this enlightened state of being through these visuals and not necessarily doing real training, which I really think are too distinct.
I don't know if you can in enter like a psychedelic. I mean I'm very fascinated in that research.
Yeah, you just stimulate that visually.
But, but what I love about your approach is it sounds like you're really focused on that, that, that neurological HRV training side of things and avoiding, you know, the experience of a fish concert y joy and love that that can bring so.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, I think you bring up a really good point that you know, I, I differentiate it as, you know, you've got your, those things that out there that are useful. Like I think a lot of these things are useful, but they're a practice. Even you know, an unstructured meditation or I attend yoga a couple times a week or I, you know, I, you know, engage in breathing exercises or even just, just, you know, generally I like to do cold plunge and sauna every now and again. Amazing practices that allow you to experience a shift and genuinely do change kind of metabolic function temporarily. But we really need to look at what's the protocol. And a protocol is not that thing that you feel an ecstatic change in the moment. You don't feel that, like that palliative, like I feel delightful. Now generally you don't feel a protocol. The protocol is something that is repeatable. It's something that through repetition and through kind of standard practice, it becomes this layered activity for long term potentiation and that then can authentically change the inner state and the inner substrate of our nervous system to where now we can carry a completely different capacity. And so it's really like choose your adventure. What do you want? Do you want to just in the moment have this like shift of state and it's just like, oh, that was delightful. Now I'm going to go about my day, but every time you want that back, you've got to do it again. Or do you want to train the system to be able to have access to multiple states on demand and to reliably shift between those and to have authentic resilience within your nervous system. And I think it's a personal choice that some folks prefer going that route for more of a practice and then some folks prefer more of the protocol effect. And so I'm focusing more on the protocol and you know, it's not for everybody.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: Right. Well, Nate, I think you bring up a great point too of the states versus traits shift. And obviously I, I would, you know, I assume you agree with the protocols also shifting states.
What I love about like HRV biofeedback and some of the neurofeedbacks I practices I've been exposed to is what we're really looking at is, you know, changing how your nervous system responds to a stressor or, or with the concussion protocol really helping to, to heal that the damage. Then if we don't heal it could cause long term issues for, for folks and turn into TBI long term. So that's what I love about these, these protocols. And where I, I'm just so fascinated with VR is like in my world of yeah, we're trying to do a lot of stuff on this, this screen alone, you know, how do we keep people engaged for 20 minutes? You know, which is I, I think it's a little bit of a myth that it's just a nice round number that maybe it should be 40 but two minutes is better than zero. So yeah, it's this interesting like yeah, let's do 20 because it feels good. And there's probably a little bit that you know, that's helping but like trying to get folks to experience enough of the state shift where they'll keep practicing to gain that, you know, that heb effect of what eventually fires together in those sage starts to wire together in a long term resiliency, where comes that trait shift or stress regulation becomes that trait. And that's again where I've been really fascinated with VR of hey, I can stay engaged in this. And that's where the gamification is tricky because boy, if I'm, you know, sit on the ridge with a sniper rifle, that's just my personality.
That's entertainment for me. Judge me as you will. Sure, I'll do that in real life. But in VR do these things. I can fly.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: The lovely thing about VR, I can
[00:35:20] Speaker A: move things with my, I got the force, you know, which I usually don't have in real life as much as I like it. So you do have things. But if you and I care about the quality of the data we get, you know, we got to get good data.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: So, so there's this really Interesting piece that.
I think the work that you're doing with having it available right there on your phone and having it accessible at any time is huge. And I think that when we look at the research that there's a lot of research that shows that, you know, 22 minutes of flat screen training is effective, that that is, that is a good number. That and of course there's a standard deviation to that and above and be each individual. But overall, 20 to 22 minutes, awesome. That's a really solid training time period. In virtual reality research shows that we actually learn 300 times faster than on, than on a flat screen. And so cool. Useful, awesome. And like not as accessible. And so being able to have your phone in your pocket at any given time, pull it out and be able to do training while you're sitting on the, on a train, while you're, you know, you know, wherever you are, you can be training. And I think that is so incredibly valuable.
And to be able to be in a real life situation and have that, have your sensor on and to be able to watch how are you responding during a zoom call, how are you responding during a sales call. And you know, in some of the earlier research that we were working on, we looked at individuals who are in sales that are able to monitor their HRV while kind of looking at the call or while on a call.
By measuring the sentiment of the buyer on the call and the heart rate variability of the seller. It was fascinating to see that when intonation would change or sentiment would change, that the nervous system of the individual who's selling would tend to drop. And when that happened, they would lose the sale 35% more of the time. But when you could actually see that in real time and turn it around, all of a sudden you could recover that. Because of the way that our nervous systems align for trust just through those non verbal social cues. And so I think having access to what you've built is so incredibly valuable to have in just daily practice. And the more that you can get data points on that in a daily, in a daily practice, I think it's fantastic. I think it's so useful. And I find it so interesting how these days so many people are talking about, I'm analytical, I like to make data driven decisions. Okay, so are you actually measuring the thing that's making the decision? And the thing that's making the decision isn't necessarily your brain, it's actually the impulse coming from your nervous system and how your mind is interpreting that, that and so you have access to that in your pocket, which is such a cool thing.
[00:38:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So I have a kind of off the wall question for you and I just, I'd love to get your opinion because as you're talking, you know what the VR gives you. And there was a really interesting study I saw a couple weeks ago that made our this week in HRV where they looked at like zoom trainings versus in person trainings versus VR avatar based trainings. And actually the VR training was, I mean, obviously in person, I think everybody would guess was the best for building psychological safety and trust. But the VR experience was way closer to the real experience than the zoom training was, which absolutely is like that 3D visualization. What's going on sensory. Because I'm looking at an avatar, which.
Okay, like for me, maybe I'm just old. Like that's not really you. Like that's a version. But, but there's something about that, that visual sense in space. Like I wonder too, like, are like, what if we included like smell into that? Like, like, like I think what you're engaging, which I think is, is really, really powerful is another sense. Right. It's not just hard, it's not just breath, but now you're bringing that visual synchronization to some extent as well. I want to be careful with what, what I, I say, you know, I haven't seen research back up, but like how many, you know, we, we know the, the, the power of SID too is like, so it's just like how do we bring these different senses into that? So I don't expect you to answer that question, but I just like, well, this is where like aromatherapy could really hit with that campfire.
[00:40:17] Speaker B: I agree. I mean the fact that the olfactory right there and has, you know, neural connections directly into the amygdala. And so there's the, I think the other really interesting piece of it and we've done some research around this and I've seen some published research around it that actually creating cognitive dissonance is really valuable by having this, this activation of, you know, you're sitting in a scene next to an ocean and now you smell something that shouldn't fit that scene. Like, you know, you can smell a piece of cake or you smell something else. And all of a sudden the fact that your brain has to figure out the difference between that actually is really valuable and creates a lot of cognitive and psychological flexibility over time. And so it's so interesting that just creating microstate shifts and creating kind of irrational contradictions that are not over activating. I think that's where a lot of the VR has gone too far with a lot of the exposure therapy and heights and all of that. We know from traditional literature that exposure therapy doesn't work in the long run. It helps out in the short term to do some things, but in the grand scheme of things, it actually creates more aversive networks and more scanning. And you're actually using more metabolic energy to process that thing rather than just creating subtle cognitive dissonance and teaching the nervous system how to have state flexibility.
Then a lot of those other things can resolve with time. But one of the. I think without going too far down this rabbit trail yet, the.
One of the things that I think is so fascinating is that we can see the neurophysiology change.
And it takes an average three months for perception to shift after that. And so I think so many of these traditional therapeutic modalities were like, no, let's go ahead and get this to shift right now and let's have a real, in the moment change so we have a measurable, reproducible outcome.
But really, did that actually work? Well, it's like behavioral therapy works great up until about, you know, 12 years of age, but once we move into abstract processing, it starts inhibiting some of the relational networks. And so it's kind of like, yeah. Huh, that's fascinating. So, like, what are we. What's the trade off with some of that? I think, but I. I think absolutely being able to, you know, bring in something like smell, bring in something like even haptic stimulation or warming and cooling. Yeah, that is dissonant with the environment.
[00:43:00] Speaker A: EMDR has taught us a lot about that too.
[00:43:02] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. There's so many cool things when it comes to that. That's coming along really well.
It's fascinating though, I think that there's just so many applications with virtual reality that we haven't tapped into. And you mentioned the avatar piece that.
Have you ever played with the Apple vision?
[00:43:23] Speaker A: I haven't. I couldn't afford the big expenditure.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: It's one of our developer, when we were jumping in and actually doing some.
In avatar playing of mini golf and in some of the scenes that he had developed for other software companies, that it was really, really cool that because of the eye tracking and facial recognition, the avatar mimicked the facial expression that he had.
And so even though obviously it was a cartoon, within three or four minutes, you felt a connection with that character because there was this. The facial expressions that mimicked and matched. And I think we're Gonna get closer and closer to that. And it really is fascinating how quickly our mind jumps into believing that the virtual reality environment is the environment. I remember one of the first times that I ever used it, there was a desk in the environment, and I. We had been playing in there, flying little airplanes and, you know, doing all kinds of stuff. And I was ready to get out of the environment, and I went to set my controllers down, so I went and just like, set them on the desk that was right there in front of me, and they just crashed to the ground. And.
And how quickly our minds can. Can absorb.
Here is reality. This is what is actually real. And I think that that is a.
It's so powerful in a positive way and in a challenging way. And I think it really speaks to a lot of, you know, life as a simulation. We don't need to go down that. That rabbit trail, but just how much our minds are creating reality constantly and painting the picture of it. It. Which circle back.
If your nervous system isn't regulated, if we're not focusing on heart rate variability, if we're not focusing on kind of active state shifting and interoception, then our minds are going to create a reality of its own that's going to make sense of everything we're experiencing. That may not be accurate. And now we're making a ton of decisions about our life and about our relationships based off of getting close enough to the emotional cue or close enough to the emotional experience to be. To fit, but it's not accurate. And then we just layer all of these inaccuracies of perception on top of each other, and then we're feeling disconnected. We're not able to make decisions clearly, we're not able to recover as quickly. And life gets heavy.
[00:46:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember. I'll share my first real VR experiences. I got my Oculus one and went straight into. I think it was Creed. Was the game based on the boxing movie?
[00:46:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: The. The demo had Mr. T in it, I think, and I'm. I'm 6, 7, so I rarely look someone in the eyes when I'm standing up. And Mr. T was like, 3 or 4 inches taller than me. And obviously, if you look at me, much more robust, let's say, and muscular than I was. And I'm like.
It just like, was a shock. It's like, I'm gonna. This guy's gonna punch me in the face. And how quickly that my world shifted into that space. And then my wife will get mad at me sometimes because I'll forget that the Bookshelf really exists in reality and punch the bookshelf.
[00:47:04] Speaker B: That's right. That's right.
[00:47:06] Speaker A: Yeah. You gotta be careful about, set your boundaries. Good. But it, it is, it is really fun to engross yourself in these different, you know, realities. And the therapeutic. Absolutely Value of that and how that can mix with some of the more advanced gaming things that, that I've experienced in a way that's therapeutic and not just trying to engage. I think the gamification can be an in and of itself with a lot of these solutions because the more integral the psychedelic visual is of the fractals floating around, like, the more you're probably going to come back, which again, if you're breathing at some regulated rate is probably a decent thing for you. But, but really that mix of training and engagement can just be, I think, such a gift to a lot of people, especially with attention disorders or again TBI or those sort of things that may make, take real focused attention for that 22 minutes. Maybe not impossible, but it may take me weeks and weeks to get up there where put on a VR headset.
You know, maybe I can't do 22 minutes right away, but I, I can get to 12 minutes. And you know, that titration up there can be much quicker and so are the therapeutic benefits.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: I agree to a large, A large extent. There's, there's a few things that I'm still, I'm still trying to parse out around that piece of it because when we look at our training trends, everybody in the first three to five sessions in IT are functioning really well. There's kind of this initial curve, learning curve up. They stay there for a few sessions and they're doing really well. And then we just start seeing that taper down and to where their, their scores start bottoming out. And so we know that, okay, we've gone through the novelty cycle. Novelty's worn off. Now we're getting the place where it's like, wait a minute, this isn't entertaining anymore. I'm actually having to work at this. And that norepinephrine that's released, we know is kind of the preliminary action for neuroplasticity to occur.
You got your norepinephrine and then you go in your REM cycle and then that kind of helps to kick off the, the neuroplasticity. And so as we then we see kind of this trending upward after that. That's kind of the normal hockey stick curve that happens between day, you know, 7 to 21 and, and it's interesting to me because when we look at the nature of traditional video games and traditional video games, you know, give a lot of norepinephrine adrenaline and dopamine response and so they can become very, very addicting.
But what, what's the thing that inhibits the dopaminergic system and inhibits the norepinephrine adrenaline and kind of the hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal axis and it's oxytocin. And so if we are getting that feedback loop the way that the literature is beginning to explore it, it then that means that we're actually inhibiting some of the tonic dopamine or pardon, some of the phasic dopamine and we're actually increasing the tonic dopamine. So rather than getting these kind of spikes where it's like, oh, this is novel, this is fun, I want to keep going back to that. We're just increasing the overall access to that motivating, mobilizing dopamine that allows us to have interest and to have be more values driven and be more passion driven rather than just that temporary buy in. But then it's an active choice. Most people that get their virtual reality headset, if you look at people who get an Xbox versus getting a virtual reality headset, they're going to spend far more time on that Xbox than they will in the virtual reality headset because it actually has a naturally kind of addictive, resistant quality to it because of the way that it activates the.
But to your point, I think that initially it definitely is like, okay, I'm going to jump into this thing. It's novel. I've never done this before and it does help. And in the environment we also place, you know, when you sit down, you pick up your matches, you pick up a match and you strike the match and you light your own fire. And so you've got something you're interacting with there. And then a scroll shows up and you throw it in the fire and it pops up. Kind of a daily prompt that allows you to, depending on, you know, if it's more of a contemplative track that you're in or if it's for the business leadership or if it's, you know, parents like each one kind of fits differently, but it hits whatever phase of their process they're in so that they can understand the neuroscience of the shift that they're experiencing and what they're kind of going through at that time. And then once they, you know, contemplate that and now their mind is back into wandering and they're and getting the feedback and all.
Then there's a stick in the game, just a simple stick. And with that, people start to, you know, take the matchbox and try and bat the matchbox with the stick or throw it out into the lake as far as they can. And it'll respawn back to right back to where you are so you can grab it again, you can put it in the fire, light the end on fire and wave it around and see the embers and see the smoke trails. So it's really, really cool to see when people hit that point where they are no longer able to be a novelty. They haven't learned to sit with discomfort yet, how much they reach for something for play. And so they play and then they are starting to get that dopamine response. They're starting to build curiosity, they're starting to build more of this, this state where they're able to shift. Of course, they're also getting sensory motor movement. And so that allows us to drop more into regulation. So we have a little bit of that happening. And then towards the end of training, you know, anywhere from 21 to 36 sessions, depending on how far somebody wants to go with it, that all of a sudden you notice, wait a minute, like they're not having to pick up the stick. They're not batting the box around as much anymore. They're not doing all these things that were distracting them. They are now just in there and their fog is staying rolled out, or they're intentionally pulling it in and out. And which is that LF HF ratio that we were talking about earlier or that heart rate variability of intentionally increasing the fire and taking it back down. And what's really fun to see is that a lot of folks, when they initially start doing the training, they'll have more sympathetic tone in general.
And then we'll also see that they've got more resilience, they've got more heart rate variability. And when that sympathetic tone drops down, parasympathetic rises that we end up seeing, their resilience goes way down. It's a much more fragile state. And so by the end, they can be in any state state and still hold that resilience. So it's not state dependent anymore. They can be able to fluidly shift between an activated, focused flow, relaxed state, you know, whatever they, whatever is being demanded of them and still stay in that embodied alignment. And that, that's just so fascinating to me to see how our nervous system has the capacity to distinguish and over a period of time without a lot of cognitive effort, it will naturally figure it out. And I just think it's so fascinating.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: Yeah. That adjustment to homeostasis and you know, and then we do that just throughout the day of shifting roles, shifting energy needs is such. I mean it's amazing how we evolved and how integrated the human. Human system is. So I, I want to kind of end our great. Our first podcast of I. What I hope is several of just talking a little bit about the company, your product. Obviously we'll throw a bunch of stuff in the. The show. Notes, links for folks but you know, talk. We've talked a lot about it.
Talked a little bit about what if somebody's interested in reaching out.
Just. Yeah, just give us the. The. The little bit. The escalator. We'll. We'll make it a little bit longer than an elevator.
Just tell us about the product.
Yeah, your market, your audience love to learn more.
[00:56:00] Speaker B: Cool.
So the company is Neuroprogeny. And you can find
[email protected] and it's, you know, there's a few different tracks that we offer. One is, you know, more on business leadership and kind of for that use case and then.
And performance in general. And then we've got one that's more of a contemplative practice. And the. And the way that it's structured is that you got your headset and you'll receive your headset in the mail along with an armband.
And then there will be an onboarding kind of meeting where we get together on Zoom and walk through other folks that. That are kind of coming in and it's a rolling admission. And so you come in and then you're part of the community where you'll be able to have access to the curriculum, learn more about the nervous system, learn more about why this actually is impacting your nervous system and then move into kind of the daily prompts and journaling and be a part of the community chat. So the way that we have structured it and the why behind it is really, you know, we've got to link a number of different things. Neurophysiology changes pretty easily, actually. We can get the brain and the nervous system to shift and hold, but then getting perception and interoception to be able to match that pace is really important. And so going through daily reflections where you're actually experiencing what that state shift is and then bringing awareness to it and then to be able to intentionally take that into the session so that you can feel that connection, feel that alignment is incredibly powerful. And then engaging in the online community really does help support embodied integration by getting that oxytocin built, getting that connection built. And so we're hitting a lot of the primary networks of the brain simultaneously.
So the overall process, you know, you can go to the website, there's a quiz you can take there and you can set up a discovery call with me.
And then if it's something that makes sense and you want to do it, you can reach out and we can get you set up. You'll get your headset, your armband and you'll roll into a five week kind of training protocol. And then if it's something for some folks they want to continue doing it longer, you can either, you know, just purchase the subscription to continue doing it or join into kind of the longer term performance protocol that we've got where it's a six month protocol, you're in a cohort of folks and you're going through and looking at kind of your why looking at kind of how to bring a lot of these skills into everyday life and having some accountability from other folks that are going through it. And it's so cool to see how, when people really define their why at the beginning of the program of what drives you in life, what are your values that most of the time they're values that are in response to the nervous system state that they're dominantly in, whether it's their anxiety, whether it's their performance, whether it's identity based. And then after there is this redefining of like I got to space that to really explore who I want to be and what do I want to become.
So let's find that out and let's explore that and go there. And so it really is building the community around that, that piece of it as well.
[00:59:27] Speaker A: Well, thank, thank you for sharing that. I just like said my hrv, my, my neurosystem journey has been. It's just so great to one just surround yourself with a bunch of nerds who, who just are as in all of the science and what we're learning about ourselves and others and then applying that to real life solutions to help people and address specific needs with that. So I mean it's just such a fun and I know a lot of our listeners are in this arena whether they're getting services for themselves or providing to others. And so I am so glad that our paths have crossed. I think that there's probably about six different follow up episodes we, we could do and we will do in the future. But Cameron, thank you so much much for joining me today. I I just love learning about your work and how you think about this. I think it's really, really cool what you've discovered on on your 20 plus year journey into this now.
[01:00:35] Speaker B: Well thank you so much again for having me and and for all the stuff that you have done, all the work you've done, your book, the podcast, what you've done to build awareness around this has been huge and I've talked to so many people over the past past few weeks like you know Matt better you and I I am fortunate to say yes I do now and just so grateful to know you and and for the conversation. Thanks for having me.
[01:00:58] Speaker A: Well thank you so much my friends and again we we will cram the show notes with information on the product on Cameron and the company but as always thank you for joining us this week and we will see you soon. Thanks so much.
