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Hi Folks -
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Centerpointe Research Institute
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A Psychology Of The Future
Bill Harris, Ken Wilber, Dr. Rick Hanson, Dr. Daniel Siegel, Dr. Rich Fernandes, Dr. James Hardt, Jun Po Roshi, Rabbi Joel Bakst, Diane Musho Hamilton, Dr. Cheryl Fraser, Michelle Gale, Graham Hancock, Dr. Rick Strassman, Dr. Peter Pearson, Dr. Ellyn Bader, Lori Petro, Dr. Gay Hendricks, and Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, and more.
Bill Harris of the
Centerpointe Research Institute
Brainwaves & Holosync
Erik: "Hello" to everybody listening, and thank you for joining us at A Psychology of the Future - The Online Summit. I'm your host, Erik Lenderman, and I'm introducing Bill Harris, the director of Centerpointe and the developer of Holosync. Please remember to take a look at the link below for a free copy of his newest book, The New Science of Super-Awareness. Bill, welcome to our summit.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, thank you very much for the introduction. I really appreciate it. Glad to be here.
Erik: Great, Bill. So I'd just like to introduce you to our audience. Many people may not know who you are and what you've done or you maybe legend to some. So if you could, tell us a little bit about Centerpointe and the Holosync program and just your life's work.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, Holosync is a little bit difficult to describe in just a few sentences. But basically I created Holosync based on two different pieces of research, which we can go into a little bit more deeply in a few minutes. One of them is the discovery in the 1970s of what brainwave patterns meditators were making when they were meditating. And there are tremendous benefits to being able to make more of these brainwave patterns. But at any rate, in the 1970s they knew what those brainwave patterns were.
About the same time but completely independently a researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York published a rather obscure article in a scientific journal that described a characteristic of the brain that allowed one to change brainwave patterns using certain combinations of pure sine wave tones, using sound in other words. And I looked at that. I was a long-time meditator and I looked at that and said, "These are the brainwave patterns of meditation. This is the way to change brainwave pattern, supposedly. Could we change them to those of meditation?" There are also brainwave patterns of creativity and accelerated learning and even brainwave patterns of anxiety and depression and things you don't want.
And so I gathered together some equipment I didn't know how to use, this was back in 1985, and I began to experiment with this. And it turned out to really be quite amazing, what it did. Not only did it put us into really deep meditation, my friends and I as we were kind of in my basement doing this little kind of mad scientist thing with our brains. And over time though it created some huge positive changes in emotional health, in mental clarity, and all kinds of other beneficial things.
And then some people said, "Hey, you should create a structured way to use this and sell it." And I had almost no ambitions in terms of a business. And actually, by that time, we had about 150 people using it; this was like four years after we started playing around with it. We had about 150 people in the United States and Europe using it and a lot of them came to me and said, "You need to create a structured way to use this and make this available to people." And I thought, "Wow! Maybe I could make $30,000 a year or something like that doing this."
And it turned out to be a big phenomenon as a result of this. I've shared the stage with the Dalai Lama. I was invited to speak to the United Nations Values Caucus in, what, 2003 I think. I've shared the stage also with Stephen Covey and Jack Canfield, and a lot of these people have become good friends of mine and so on and so forth.
But the part of the story that I kind of skipped really because I was kind of focusing more on the Holosync is that I grew up really, really unhappy, angry, difficult to get along with, I drove lots of people away in my life. And the whole reason that I even started to meditate in a traditional way when I was about 19 was because somebody said, "You need to do this because you're screwed up and you need to mellow yourself out." And so I began to meditate. And being a type A personality, I was very disciplined about it and did it. I'd been meditating for 16 years when I ran across this research that I just described.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, thank you very much for the introduction. I really appreciate it. Glad to be here.
Erik: Great, Bill. So I'd just like to introduce you to our audience. Many people may not know who you are and what you've done or you maybe legend to some. So if you could, tell us a little bit about Centerpointe and the Holosync program and just your life's work.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, Holosync is a little bit difficult to describe in just a few sentences. But basically I created Holosync based on two different pieces of research, which we can go into a little bit more deeply in a few minutes. One of them is the discovery in the 1970s of what brainwave patterns meditators were making when they were meditating. And there are tremendous benefits to being able to make more of these brainwave patterns. But at any rate, in the 1970s they knew what those brainwave patterns were.
About the same time but completely independently a researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York published a rather obscure article in a scientific journal that described a characteristic of the brain that allowed one to change brainwave patterns using certain combinations of pure sine wave tones, using sound in other words. And I looked at that. I was a long-time meditator and I looked at that and said, "These are the brainwave patterns of meditation. This is the way to change brainwave pattern, supposedly. Could we change them to those of meditation?" There are also brainwave patterns of creativity and accelerated learning and even brainwave patterns of anxiety and depression and things you don't want.
And so I gathered together some equipment I didn't know how to use, this was back in 1985, and I began to experiment with this. And it turned out to really be quite amazing, what it did. Not only did it put us into really deep meditation, my friends and I as we were kind of in my basement doing this little kind of mad scientist thing with our brains. And over time though it created some huge positive changes in emotional health, in mental clarity, and all kinds of other beneficial things.
And then some people said, "Hey, you should create a structured way to use this and sell it." And I had almost no ambitions in terms of a business. And actually, by that time, we had about 150 people using it; this was like four years after we started playing around with it. We had about 150 people in the United States and Europe using it and a lot of them came to me and said, "You need to create a structured way to use this and make this available to people." And I thought, "Wow! Maybe I could make $30,000 a year or something like that doing this."
And it turned out to be a big phenomenon as a result of this. I've shared the stage with the Dalai Lama. I was invited to speak to the United Nations Values Caucus in, what, 2003 I think. I've shared the stage also with Stephen Covey and Jack Canfield, and a lot of these people have become good friends of mine and so on and so forth.
But the part of the story that I kind of skipped really because I was kind of focusing more on the Holosync is that I grew up really, really unhappy, angry, difficult to get along with, I drove lots of people away in my life. And the whole reason that I even started to meditate in a traditional way when I was about 19 was because somebody said, "You need to do this because you're screwed up and you need to mellow yourself out." And so I began to meditate. And being a type A personality, I was very disciplined about it and did it. I'd been meditating for 16 years when I ran across this research that I just described.
Types of Brainwaves
And what happened to me between the time when my friends and I started playing around with this and when we actually started the company in 1989 was that my anger drained away, I stopped being depressed, I stopped being so reactive to people. People started coming up to me in the grocery store that hadn't seen me in saying, "You seem so mellow." And usually what they had said is, "You seem so intense." So it had a tremendous effect on me and those other 150 people that were doing it.
At this point we've had over two million people in 193 countries use this. And it started off as people wanting to meditate in a more accelerated way because this, not only does this make meditating really easy and it allows you to meditate literally like someone who's been meditating for 30 years the very first time. There's no learning curve and all that. But even beyond that it really accelerates the whole process and getting all the benefits of meditation, which we can talk about as we get more into this.
So I really got into doing this because I was a mess and I was doing it for myself. And it turned out to have such a profound effect on me and the other people who were informally using it that we started a little company, another guy and I, who's not involved anymore. And then it just, over time, it just became a really huge phenomenon and spread all over the world. And the list of people, for instance, in the personal growth industry and doctors, celebrity doctors, therapists, thought leaders, etc., etc., who have endorsed this is like 20 pages long or something. I mean this has become quite an amazing big deal, which I had no idea that would happen.
So anyway, that's how it got started. And as a result of this, and my helping people to understand what was happening as they used it, how to deal with it, how to get the most benefit out of it, I gradually became known as a teacher, not just a businessman who had this technology. Which, by the way, is called, I think you mentioned it, Holosync. That's how it started. So what else would you like to know?
Erik: Well, it's very interesting that you say that before you started using Holosync you felt that your life was a mess, emotionally you are very reactive. And I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about that. I know I read in your book that you went from making, I think you said, $3,000 a month to having a very successful business and I'm wondering how that was for you.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, it didn't happen overnight, but I was always pretty good at things that I set out to do. And I graduated second in my high school class and I was pretty smart, but I was just emotionally really stupid. And now we know in the brain what's happening when people are doing that. My limbic system, what some people call the reptilian brain, the part of your brain that wants to get it now and make snap decisions and is easy to react emotionally and everything. If that's in control, you often and especially if you've been traumatized in different ways as I was growing up as a child, then you're going to do a lot of things, behave in a lot of ways, feel a lot of negative feelings that you don't want.
And it turns out that meditation in general and Holosync in spades creates changes in the brain that allow the prefrontal cortex part of your brain to exercise supervision over the emotional part of your brain. So that even if you have strong feelings about something, you don't necessarily act on them, there's a part of you that's able to say, "Whoa! That wouldn't be a good idea." And so instead you behave in ways that are more directed toward creating the outcomes you want for yourself and for the people that you love.
So there's a lot of ways to go at this, but the prefrontal cortex is associated with long range planning. It can also be associated with being more calm, in other words overwriting that limbic system. There are certain brainwave patterns that are involved, which we can talk about those, that would probably be pretty interesting.
At this point we've had over two million people in 193 countries use this. And it started off as people wanting to meditate in a more accelerated way because this, not only does this make meditating really easy and it allows you to meditate literally like someone who's been meditating for 30 years the very first time. There's no learning curve and all that. But even beyond that it really accelerates the whole process and getting all the benefits of meditation, which we can talk about as we get more into this.
So I really got into doing this because I was a mess and I was doing it for myself. And it turned out to have such a profound effect on me and the other people who were informally using it that we started a little company, another guy and I, who's not involved anymore. And then it just, over time, it just became a really huge phenomenon and spread all over the world. And the list of people, for instance, in the personal growth industry and doctors, celebrity doctors, therapists, thought leaders, etc., etc., who have endorsed this is like 20 pages long or something. I mean this has become quite an amazing big deal, which I had no idea that would happen.
So anyway, that's how it got started. And as a result of this, and my helping people to understand what was happening as they used it, how to deal with it, how to get the most benefit out of it, I gradually became known as a teacher, not just a businessman who had this technology. Which, by the way, is called, I think you mentioned it, Holosync. That's how it started. So what else would you like to know?
Erik: Well, it's very interesting that you say that before you started using Holosync you felt that your life was a mess, emotionally you are very reactive. And I'm interested in hearing a little bit more about that. I know I read in your book that you went from making, I think you said, $3,000 a month to having a very successful business and I'm wondering how that was for you.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, it didn't happen overnight, but I was always pretty good at things that I set out to do. And I graduated second in my high school class and I was pretty smart, but I was just emotionally really stupid. And now we know in the brain what's happening when people are doing that. My limbic system, what some people call the reptilian brain, the part of your brain that wants to get it now and make snap decisions and is easy to react emotionally and everything. If that's in control, you often and especially if you've been traumatized in different ways as I was growing up as a child, then you're going to do a lot of things, behave in a lot of ways, feel a lot of negative feelings that you don't want.
And it turns out that meditation in general and Holosync in spades creates changes in the brain that allow the prefrontal cortex part of your brain to exercise supervision over the emotional part of your brain. So that even if you have strong feelings about something, you don't necessarily act on them, there's a part of you that's able to say, "Whoa! That wouldn't be a good idea." And so instead you behave in ways that are more directed toward creating the outcomes you want for yourself and for the people that you love.
So there's a lot of ways to go at this, but the prefrontal cortex is associated with long range planning. It can also be associated with being more calm, in other words overwriting that limbic system. There are certain brainwave patterns that are involved, which we can talk about those, that would probably be pretty interesting.
Two Branches of the Nervous System
Everybody has kind of two branches...There's more than this, but the two branches in the nervous system that are involved in what I'm talking about are called the sympathetic nervous system, which is the source of what people call fight or flight, the stress response. And there are a whole bunch of different hormonal changes that happens when you go into fight or flight and your limbic system, this emotional center, is very enlivened and hot when you're in fight or flight and you do dumb stuff. You do stupid things, you say stupid things, you act in stupid ways or you fail to act.
I don't know how many people are listening who have taken courses on how to do something and never took action or you intend to work on a business or something else and then you find yourself procrastinating and not doing it. It's because your limbic system is in control, your prefrontal cortex is not developed enough. Meditation and especially Holosync makes that prefrontal cortex much bigger. In fact, more brain real state gets turned over to your prefrontal cortex and those sorts of things.
The other side of the coin from the sympathetic nervous system in fight or flight is what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. Harvard researcher Herbert Benson wrote a very famous book in 1975 called the Relaxation Response. He found that when people meditated and when their parasympathetic nervous system was enhanced, they felt relaxed, that they felt calm, that their prefrontal cortex was in more control, that they were healthier, that they felt more oneness with other people, they felt kinder, they felt more compassionate and so on.
So what we're trying to do is calm the sympathetic nervous system and the limbic system and we're trying to enhance the parasympathetic nervous system, the source of the relaxation response and the source of being able to plan for the future. And there's some other really interesting things that happened in the prefrontal cortex, too, that we can get in later since I understand we have plenty of time.
Erik: Yes, yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Any questions spring to mind so far on what I'm talking about?
Erik: Yeah, I'm interested in, I know that the underlying technology of Holosync is based on something called binaural beats. Could you tell us more about binaural and how that creates coherence in the brain?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, it is a form of binaural beat. Now before I talk about this, I just want to make something really clear. That Centerpointe and I actually created this whole field of binaural beats. I mean I'm not saying nobody was doing this before, but we're the ones that made this so that many, many people know about this. And we have many, many knockoff artists that are doing this. And I have to say that there maybe somebody out there that has paid their dues and knows to some degree what they are doing with using this kind of technology, but almost none of them actually do.
And I sort of liken this to maybe I'm a famous heart surgeon and everybody comes to me because they know I'm the best. And then there's other people that bought a used book in the college book store on how to do surgery and they're claiming that they can do the same kind of surgery that I can do because they read it out of a book. Or maybe another metaphor: I am the world's greatest pastry chef and my pastries are just absolutely stunningly delicious. And then somebody else bought a copy of The Joy of Cooking and they're saying, "Well, these pastries are just the same as what Bill Harris is doing because they have flour and they have sugar and they have butter and they have this and they have that."
I don't know how many people are listening who have taken courses on how to do something and never took action or you intend to work on a business or something else and then you find yourself procrastinating and not doing it. It's because your limbic system is in control, your prefrontal cortex is not developed enough. Meditation and especially Holosync makes that prefrontal cortex much bigger. In fact, more brain real state gets turned over to your prefrontal cortex and those sorts of things.
The other side of the coin from the sympathetic nervous system in fight or flight is what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. Harvard researcher Herbert Benson wrote a very famous book in 1975 called the Relaxation Response. He found that when people meditated and when their parasympathetic nervous system was enhanced, they felt relaxed, that they felt calm, that their prefrontal cortex was in more control, that they were healthier, that they felt more oneness with other people, they felt kinder, they felt more compassionate and so on.
So what we're trying to do is calm the sympathetic nervous system and the limbic system and we're trying to enhance the parasympathetic nervous system, the source of the relaxation response and the source of being able to plan for the future. And there's some other really interesting things that happened in the prefrontal cortex, too, that we can get in later since I understand we have plenty of time.
Erik: Yes, yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Any questions spring to mind so far on what I'm talking about?
Erik: Yeah, I'm interested in, I know that the underlying technology of Holosync is based on something called binaural beats. Could you tell us more about binaural and how that creates coherence in the brain?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, it is a form of binaural beat. Now before I talk about this, I just want to make something really clear. That Centerpointe and I actually created this whole field of binaural beats. I mean I'm not saying nobody was doing this before, but we're the ones that made this so that many, many people know about this. And we have many, many knockoff artists that are doing this. And I have to say that there maybe somebody out there that has paid their dues and knows to some degree what they are doing with using this kind of technology, but almost none of them actually do.
And I sort of liken this to maybe I'm a famous heart surgeon and everybody comes to me because they know I'm the best. And then there's other people that bought a used book in the college book store on how to do surgery and they're claiming that they can do the same kind of surgery that I can do because they read it out of a book. Or maybe another metaphor: I am the world's greatest pastry chef and my pastries are just absolutely stunningly delicious. And then somebody else bought a copy of The Joy of Cooking and they're saying, "Well, these pastries are just the same as what Bill Harris is doing because they have flour and they have sugar and they have butter and they have this and they have that."
Sound Stimulation
And we've been doing this now for, counting the research period before the company started, for 29 years. We've had a huge laboratory of over two million people and we have spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how to do this. There are literally an infinite number of ways to do three or four aspects of this kind of technology. And it's easy for somebody to just throw some together, somebody listens to it and they say, "Wow! I feel something." But that doesn't mean that you're going to get the same results. So at any rate, I just, I didn't . . .
Erik: And so this sounds a lot like some of the attempts to create digital drugs that I've seen on the web.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, I suppose. Yeah, that's kind of bullshit, quite frankly.
Erik: Yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): What happens when you're exposed to this, especially if it's done well, is that it stimulates your brain to make a whole number of neurochemicals and beneficial hormones. And so you, when you finish listening to Holosync, for instance, you are high on your own neurochemicals. And there are some very health-inducing and very positive...
You know those days when you feel really good, you get out of bed and you don't know why but you think, "Wow! And I feel so great today"? It's because your brain is making a lot of this feel-good neurochemicals. And you can actually make a lot more of them than you even feel on those days, and you can train your brain so that pretty much all the time it's making them, so that you feel really good and you're operating kind of on all cylinders and kind of acting at the top of your game and more able to go into flow states and things like that. So that's kind of really what's happening.
Now I mean we could go all the way back to the 1800s, there was a guy named Dove who discovered this phenomenon. That if you have sounds of slightly different frequencies going into each ear, there are these two little organelles in the brain called the olivary nuclei which are part of your auditory processing center and they have to speak to each other to reconcile the slight differences in frequencies that you're hearing through different ears.
If people listening have ever heard two musicians tuning up, like two clarinets at the symphony tuning up but they're not quite in tune, you kind of hear this "wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa" while they're playing these slightly different notes. That is actually not the same thing as a binaural beat, but it's the same idea. Because in a binaural beat it's happening inside your brain. There are interference patterns in the air, but there's no sound going through the air when you put it into your head through headphones. But it's the same sort of a thing, what's called a standing wave is created in your brain. And then a phenomenon called the frequency following response causes the electrical patterns in your brain to follow that pattern, which is called brain entrainment.
And all this sounds a little geeky. I mean the long and short of it is that it's a way that you can alter the brain waves. Now maybe it would be helpful to go through the different categories of brainwaves so that people can understand a little bit more about this. Because 24 hours a day the neurons in your brain are creating electrical impulses. And they tend to happen, particularly in a healthier nervous system, in very regular patterns.
And these patterns have a lot to do with how you feel, how intelligent you are, how well you can think, how focused you are, how creative you are and all kinds of other things. And most people are unable to make some of the best, most beneficial brainwaves. And you can either spend 30 years meditating in the traditional way and teach your brain to do this or you can use something like Holosync and dramatically accelerate the brain.
Would you like me, Erik, to go over these brainwave patterns?
Erik: And so this sounds a lot like some of the attempts to create digital drugs that I've seen on the web.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, I suppose. Yeah, that's kind of bullshit, quite frankly.
Erik: Yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): What happens when you're exposed to this, especially if it's done well, is that it stimulates your brain to make a whole number of neurochemicals and beneficial hormones. And so you, when you finish listening to Holosync, for instance, you are high on your own neurochemicals. And there are some very health-inducing and very positive...
You know those days when you feel really good, you get out of bed and you don't know why but you think, "Wow! And I feel so great today"? It's because your brain is making a lot of this feel-good neurochemicals. And you can actually make a lot more of them than you even feel on those days, and you can train your brain so that pretty much all the time it's making them, so that you feel really good and you're operating kind of on all cylinders and kind of acting at the top of your game and more able to go into flow states and things like that. So that's kind of really what's happening.
Now I mean we could go all the way back to the 1800s, there was a guy named Dove who discovered this phenomenon. That if you have sounds of slightly different frequencies going into each ear, there are these two little organelles in the brain called the olivary nuclei which are part of your auditory processing center and they have to speak to each other to reconcile the slight differences in frequencies that you're hearing through different ears.
If people listening have ever heard two musicians tuning up, like two clarinets at the symphony tuning up but they're not quite in tune, you kind of hear this "wa, wa, wa, wa, wa, wa" while they're playing these slightly different notes. That is actually not the same thing as a binaural beat, but it's the same idea. Because in a binaural beat it's happening inside your brain. There are interference patterns in the air, but there's no sound going through the air when you put it into your head through headphones. But it's the same sort of a thing, what's called a standing wave is created in your brain. And then a phenomenon called the frequency following response causes the electrical patterns in your brain to follow that pattern, which is called brain entrainment.
And all this sounds a little geeky. I mean the long and short of it is that it's a way that you can alter the brain waves. Now maybe it would be helpful to go through the different categories of brainwaves so that people can understand a little bit more about this. Because 24 hours a day the neurons in your brain are creating electrical impulses. And they tend to happen, particularly in a healthier nervous system, in very regular patterns.
And these patterns have a lot to do with how you feel, how intelligent you are, how well you can think, how focused you are, how creative you are and all kinds of other things. And most people are unable to make some of the best, most beneficial brainwaves. And you can either spend 30 years meditating in the traditional way and teach your brain to do this or you can use something like Holosync and dramatically accelerate the brain.
Would you like me, Erik, to go over these brainwave patterns?
Brainwaves: Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta
Erik: Yeah, if you could tell us about the slow ways and the fast ways. Tell us about the whole range.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, most people are walking around in what's called a beta brainwave pattern. Beta brainwave patterns are relatively faster waves. And so when you're thinking about something, you're doing some kind of linear thinking, you're having a conversation with someone, you're figuring something out, your sort of daily rock and roll of going about your business, you're making beta brainwaves. In the higher levels of beta you begin to feel some dis-ease, you begin to feel a little bit anxious. It doesn't feel so good.
So when you slow yourself down into lower beta, then you are able to think more clearly and everything. If your brainwaves slow a little more than that thing, then you go into an alpha brainwave pattern. And the alpha is really a remarkable, amazing brainwave pattern. Alpha is the brainwave pattern you're in when you're just falling asleep. You're not really asleep yet, but you're really not fully awake yet. That's an alpha brainwave pattern.
When you're really absorbing something like you're reading a book, watching a movie or something and you've really blocked out your surroundings, you're just not aware of your surroundings anymore you're so absorbed, that's an alpha brainwave. When you're feeling joyful, you're making alpha waves.
Erik: And is that the same thing as flow?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Flow is a little bit more complicated, we should save that for later. But there's some very interesting combinations of brainwave patterns that are happening in flow. Alpha waves prepare you to enter flow. So if somebody has trouble making alpha waves, which most people do, it's difficult to get into a flow state. But we'll probably be able to understand that better if we go through all these brainwave patterns.
There was a Bulgarian psychiatrist, Georgi Lozanov, who coined a term called "superlearning" because he used some fairly primitive ways to put people in alpha brainwave patterns. And he found out that these people could learn 20 times as much information and about five times faster by being in this alpha brainwave pattern, this superlearning kind of state. So enhanced learning happens when you're making alpha waves.
So people are happier in alpha, they exhibit more of their natural intelligence when they're in alpha and the two sides of the brain begin to talk to each other more. There's a little bit more synchronization between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, so that you begin this process of what I like to call thinking in stereo. You're kind of, you're using both sides of the brain simultaneously to look at information or to deal with whatever is happening.
So alpha is also the brainwave pattern that they found when they first looked at meditators, that they were making mostly alpha waves. Now some of the more advanced meditators though...and you're also very relaxed, of course, in alpha and you feel very good. And so to bring in some of the things I said earlier: you're stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxation response; you are calming the limbic system; you're calming fight or flight when you go into an alpha state.
In the higher ends of beta, as I said, when you're feeling anxious, you're stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, you're beginning to feel some of that fight or flight stress response and your limbic system is a lot more in control. You're a little more prone to be kind of freaked out and to be more reactive and so on. So at any rate, they found that when very advanced meditators were meditating, they had these little excursions for a few moments where they were making theta waves.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, most people are walking around in what's called a beta brainwave pattern. Beta brainwave patterns are relatively faster waves. And so when you're thinking about something, you're doing some kind of linear thinking, you're having a conversation with someone, you're figuring something out, your sort of daily rock and roll of going about your business, you're making beta brainwaves. In the higher levels of beta you begin to feel some dis-ease, you begin to feel a little bit anxious. It doesn't feel so good.
So when you slow yourself down into lower beta, then you are able to think more clearly and everything. If your brainwaves slow a little more than that thing, then you go into an alpha brainwave pattern. And the alpha is really a remarkable, amazing brainwave pattern. Alpha is the brainwave pattern you're in when you're just falling asleep. You're not really asleep yet, but you're really not fully awake yet. That's an alpha brainwave pattern.
When you're really absorbing something like you're reading a book, watching a movie or something and you've really blocked out your surroundings, you're just not aware of your surroundings anymore you're so absorbed, that's an alpha brainwave. When you're feeling joyful, you're making alpha waves.
Erik: And is that the same thing as flow?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Flow is a little bit more complicated, we should save that for later. But there's some very interesting combinations of brainwave patterns that are happening in flow. Alpha waves prepare you to enter flow. So if somebody has trouble making alpha waves, which most people do, it's difficult to get into a flow state. But we'll probably be able to understand that better if we go through all these brainwave patterns.
There was a Bulgarian psychiatrist, Georgi Lozanov, who coined a term called "superlearning" because he used some fairly primitive ways to put people in alpha brainwave patterns. And he found out that these people could learn 20 times as much information and about five times faster by being in this alpha brainwave pattern, this superlearning kind of state. So enhanced learning happens when you're making alpha waves.
So people are happier in alpha, they exhibit more of their natural intelligence when they're in alpha and the two sides of the brain begin to talk to each other more. There's a little bit more synchronization between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, so that you begin this process of what I like to call thinking in stereo. You're kind of, you're using both sides of the brain simultaneously to look at information or to deal with whatever is happening.
So alpha is also the brainwave pattern that they found when they first looked at meditators, that they were making mostly alpha waves. Now some of the more advanced meditators though...and you're also very relaxed, of course, in alpha and you feel very good. And so to bring in some of the things I said earlier: you're stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxation response; you are calming the limbic system; you're calming fight or flight when you go into an alpha state.
In the higher ends of beta, as I said, when you're feeling anxious, you're stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, you're beginning to feel some of that fight or flight stress response and your limbic system is a lot more in control. You're a little more prone to be kind of freaked out and to be more reactive and so on. So at any rate, they found that when very advanced meditators were meditating, they had these little excursions for a few moments where they were making theta waves.
Theta waves are even slower than alpha. Everybody makes some theta sometimes because theta is the brainwave pattern of dreaming sleep. So when you're dreaming and you're having these visions, visionary things in your mind, you're making theta waves. When people are meditating and they're having some kind of visions, they are also making theta waves. But, because they're not asleep, it seems more remarkable to us if you do that while you're meditating because you're awake than if you're asleep doing it. But it's kind of the same thing. The wave patterns don't look exactly the same.
Now theta is also the brainwave pattern of creativity. When you make a connection that you didn't see before, when you learn something, when you actually go, "Oh, I get it. I get it," and suddenly something makes sense. You solve a problem, you make bursts of theta waves in the brain. So you can see that if someone has trained themselves to access that part of the brain and to make those kinds of alpha and theta waves, they're going to learn more easily. They're going to...also things you've learned in alpha, in theta get turned over to long-term memory.
There's also something that happens in theta called integrative experiences. This is when you have, maybe for a long time, seen something in your life or someone or some problem or some situation in a certain way, and then suddenly something shifts and you go, "Oh, I never thought of looking at it that way."
I mean one example of this: you fall in love, you get married, you're fairly young, you're not that experienced with the opposite sex and all that kind of stuff and you got along for a while. But after several years something happens, you start to not get along and you end up getting divorced, and this is the last thing you ever thought would happen to you. You thought it was forever.
And so now you're faced with something that you hadn't anticipated and had never really thought about, it was not part of your thinking about life and how to navigate through it, "Wow. You can get really attached to someone, and then they leave you and you feel really terrible." And then you go through a period of kind of chaos. And then, at a certain point, your whole way of seeing things reorganizes in a new way that integrates that that can happen, and the other things you've learned from it, into your way of looking at things. And that's called an integrative experience. And again, that's another burst of theta waves where you suddenly go, "Okay."
When people are resilient and they can get over something bad that's happened, some loss or some tragedy or something, it's because they've learned to have these integrative experiences. That's another thing that happens, in fact, when people learn to make more alpha and theta. They become more resilient. They can take the ups and downs of life and get the wisdom from them and move on and not be stuck in being miserable because a certain thing happened to them.
Erik: Yeah, I have a question for you on that. I understand that Holosync is designed in a progressive manner with kind of seems to encourage these integrative experiences over time. Is that correct?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, yes. I mean one of the things we do is we are kind of pushing the brain. So is regular meditation, just much more slowly. We are giving the brain a stimulus of a very precise kind that it can't handle the way it's currently structured. And so the brain responds to that by creating new connections between the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain which brings more of that coherence and brain synchronization and thinking in stereo thing that I said.
And it also creates all kinds of new connections between the limbic system, the emotional fight or flight stress response, quick to react part of your brain, the part of your brain that does dumb stuff. It has a positive role, too. But if something happens, you need to respond really quickly to a danger, that's the part of your brain that helps you out. But it does causes to do a lot of stupid stuff and get ourselves into trouble.
Now theta is also the brainwave pattern of creativity. When you make a connection that you didn't see before, when you learn something, when you actually go, "Oh, I get it. I get it," and suddenly something makes sense. You solve a problem, you make bursts of theta waves in the brain. So you can see that if someone has trained themselves to access that part of the brain and to make those kinds of alpha and theta waves, they're going to learn more easily. They're going to...also things you've learned in alpha, in theta get turned over to long-term memory.
There's also something that happens in theta called integrative experiences. This is when you have, maybe for a long time, seen something in your life or someone or some problem or some situation in a certain way, and then suddenly something shifts and you go, "Oh, I never thought of looking at it that way."
I mean one example of this: you fall in love, you get married, you're fairly young, you're not that experienced with the opposite sex and all that kind of stuff and you got along for a while. But after several years something happens, you start to not get along and you end up getting divorced, and this is the last thing you ever thought would happen to you. You thought it was forever.
And so now you're faced with something that you hadn't anticipated and had never really thought about, it was not part of your thinking about life and how to navigate through it, "Wow. You can get really attached to someone, and then they leave you and you feel really terrible." And then you go through a period of kind of chaos. And then, at a certain point, your whole way of seeing things reorganizes in a new way that integrates that that can happen, and the other things you've learned from it, into your way of looking at things. And that's called an integrative experience. And again, that's another burst of theta waves where you suddenly go, "Okay."
When people are resilient and they can get over something bad that's happened, some loss or some tragedy or something, it's because they've learned to have these integrative experiences. That's another thing that happens, in fact, when people learn to make more alpha and theta. They become more resilient. They can take the ups and downs of life and get the wisdom from them and move on and not be stuck in being miserable because a certain thing happened to them.
Erik: Yeah, I have a question for you on that. I understand that Holosync is designed in a progressive manner with kind of seems to encourage these integrative experiences over time. Is that correct?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, yes. I mean one of the things we do is we are kind of pushing the brain. So is regular meditation, just much more slowly. We are giving the brain a stimulus of a very precise kind that it can't handle the way it's currently structured. And so the brain responds to that by creating new connections between the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain which brings more of that coherence and brain synchronization and thinking in stereo thing that I said.
And it also creates all kinds of new connections between the limbic system, the emotional fight or flight stress response, quick to react part of your brain, the part of your brain that does dumb stuff. It has a positive role, too. But if something happens, you need to respond really quickly to a danger, that's the part of your brain that helps you out. But it does causes to do a lot of stupid stuff and get ourselves into trouble.
Transformation and Delta Brainwaves
But new pathways are created between that part of the brain and the prefrontal cortex. And in fact more brain real estate, more neurons are turned over to the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and you live more from having long-range planning. You don't just do what you feel like doing in the moment, you have this more supervision over yourself.
And after we get done with the brainwave patterns I could tell you a little more about this because there's just some amazing research about this, about willpower and self-regulation. Which a lot of which started with something that was very charming, this thing called the Marshmallow Test where they tested all these little preschool kids. But I'll save that for just a minute.
Erik: Okay.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): So theta, another thing that happens in theta when you have a power nap and then you feel better, your brain fogged toward the end of the day and you have a little power nap, you make theta waves and you feel revived. And part of what happens in theta is that the potassium-sodium balance in your brain gets out of whack from a lot of focusing. And then when you go into a theta state, even for five or ten minutes, it renews you. That's why after power nap you feel really good.
So you become way more creative, you learn faster, you have these integrative experiences, your brain gets renewed. Let's see. Well, I keep thinking of things that I want to make sure that we cover. So at any rate, there's a lot, even more than that, to theta. But theta is really quite amazing.
Then if your brainwaves slow even more than that, you go into a delta brainwave pattern. Which is ordinarily associated with dreamless sleep, very slow waves. Now what we found, it's a very advanced meditator that would be able to make a lot of what we call waking delta waves. I have a big long thing that if I thought of it I could have held it up where I made waking delta waves for about 45 minutes straight when I was in a biofeedback chamber where they have these electrodes all over my head and everything.
Erik: With Dr. Hardt?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yes, with Dr. James Hardt. Which he's going to be a guest, isn't he?
Erik: Yes, he is.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): On your show, yeah. He's a mad scientist. He is. He is a very smart guy, but he is a mad scientist. People should definitely listen to his presentation.
So when you make delta waves, delta waves are associated with several things that people might know about. First of all, and this is something that Dr. Hardt told me after I got out, and he said, "Do you ever have Kundalini experiences?" This is an Eastern philosophy when all these chakras are opened up and the spiritual energy flows through you. There are more scientific ways to describe what's happening, but that's what it is in Eastern philosophy. That is associated with making waking delta waves.
Dr. Hardt also told me that the people he had seen that could make a lot of waking delta waves were very persuasive and they were very strong leaders. In fact, when he's teaching people to make those waves using biofeedback, which is a different method than what we do, he won't teach anybody to do that until they have handled their emotional stuff. Because if they hadn’t handled their emotional dark side stuff and they had this ability, they would be sort of like Darth Vader or something. They could be dangerous to people because they have all this persuasive ability and charisma and everything, but they're a giant asshole and an evil person. I hope it's okay to say "asshole."
And after we get done with the brainwave patterns I could tell you a little more about this because there's just some amazing research about this, about willpower and self-regulation. Which a lot of which started with something that was very charming, this thing called the Marshmallow Test where they tested all these little preschool kids. But I'll save that for just a minute.
Erik: Okay.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): So theta, another thing that happens in theta when you have a power nap and then you feel better, your brain fogged toward the end of the day and you have a little power nap, you make theta waves and you feel revived. And part of what happens in theta is that the potassium-sodium balance in your brain gets out of whack from a lot of focusing. And then when you go into a theta state, even for five or ten minutes, it renews you. That's why after power nap you feel really good.
So you become way more creative, you learn faster, you have these integrative experiences, your brain gets renewed. Let's see. Well, I keep thinking of things that I want to make sure that we cover. So at any rate, there's a lot, even more than that, to theta. But theta is really quite amazing.
Then if your brainwaves slow even more than that, you go into a delta brainwave pattern. Which is ordinarily associated with dreamless sleep, very slow waves. Now what we found, it's a very advanced meditator that would be able to make a lot of what we call waking delta waves. I have a big long thing that if I thought of it I could have held it up where I made waking delta waves for about 45 minutes straight when I was in a biofeedback chamber where they have these electrodes all over my head and everything.
Erik: With Dr. Hardt?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yes, with Dr. James Hardt. Which he's going to be a guest, isn't he?
Erik: Yes, he is.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): On your show, yeah. He's a mad scientist. He is. He is a very smart guy, but he is a mad scientist. People should definitely listen to his presentation.
So when you make delta waves, delta waves are associated with several things that people might know about. First of all, and this is something that Dr. Hardt told me after I got out, and he said, "Do you ever have Kundalini experiences?" This is an Eastern philosophy when all these chakras are opened up and the spiritual energy flows through you. There are more scientific ways to describe what's happening, but that's what it is in Eastern philosophy. That is associated with making waking delta waves.
Dr. Hardt also told me that the people he had seen that could make a lot of waking delta waves were very persuasive and they were very strong leaders. In fact, when he's teaching people to make those waves using biofeedback, which is a different method than what we do, he won't teach anybody to do that until they have handled their emotional stuff. Because if they hadn’t handled their emotional dark side stuff and they had this ability, they would be sort of like Darth Vader or something. They could be dangerous to people because they have all this persuasive ability and charisma and everything, but they're a giant asshole and an evil person. I hope it's okay to say "asshole."
Brainwave Stimulation
Erik: I think it is. Do you use your powers for good, Bill?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I try to. I try to. We have helped a lot of people with this. I was an asshole myself when I was growing up, and this really transformed me. And when I started seeing that this was helping tons and tons and tons of people, it took me a while to get used to it.
My self-image was that people didn't like me and that I was not a very nice person, and it took me a while. We used to do retreats for a week and at the end of the retreat everybody would stand up and thank the people in the room, the other participants, and people on the staff and whoever they wanted to say something. And people would say nice things about me that were so foreign to my lifelong self-image that I would start to cry because I just couldn't believe it that people were thinking, "Wow! You saved my life, you did this for me, you helped me changed this. I'm so grateful to you," and all that sort of stuff.
So let me see, is there anything else I want to tell you about delta? There are actually much more I could say about this. And if people get a copy of my book, it goes into this in lots of detail. I think that people will find it extremely interesting because it's all about the latest brain research and how it relates to all this stuff.
So there's one more brainwave pattern we should talk about, and it's actually faster than the beta brainwaves. Now you would think that faster than beta brainwaves would be causing the sympathetic nervous system to go nuts and therefore you'd feel all this fight or flight, but that doesn't happen to be what happened. And here's how they really started to find out about these.
These are gamma brainwaves. You have to know the Greek alphabet, I guess, to do this. But Dr. Richard Davidson, who's at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the most prominent researchers about the brain and especially as it relates to meditation. He had a whole bunch of these monks that are around the Dalai Lama in his laboratory and they did these brain scans and measured their brainwave patterns and so on. And they found that these monks were making lots of alpha and theta and delta brainwaves, but also they were making lots of gamma brainwave patterns. And they discovered that what these gamma brainwaves were associated with was kindness, compassion and almost unavoidable impulse to help other people. So gamma waves have become associated with compassion.
Some of these monks had done up to 50,000 hours of meditation in order to achieve this. One of them, Matthieu Ricard, who was a Frenchman, has been called by the popular press the world's happiest man. And I talk about him also in my book, and he had done 50,000 hours of meditation and it was reflected in his brainwaves and in his brain scan. And he had a hugely active prefrontal cortex and had all kinds of control over his limbic system.
It's human to feel a whole variety of feelings, some of which are "negative" feelings. But if you have a strong prefrontal cortex, you are able to just observe yourself having them. If there is something to grieve, you go to the grieving process, but you don't stay there. And it doesn't completely grab all your attention and throw you into this horrible fight or flight.
So at any rate, those are the brainwave patterns that are really important. There's a few others that people talk about from time to time, but they really aren't of any significance to what we're talking about. And the thing is that you can spend decades teaching yourself to make these brainwave patterns, and even people that do that generally only can make alpha and theta. It's unusual, not impossible, but unusual for people to make delta waves on purpose. But there are many, many...you see, if you take yourself every day through the spectrum of all these brainwave patterns, what happens is that your brain turns over more neurons, more brain real estate, more neural connections to be able to make these brainwave patterns.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I try to. I try to. We have helped a lot of people with this. I was an asshole myself when I was growing up, and this really transformed me. And when I started seeing that this was helping tons and tons and tons of people, it took me a while to get used to it.
My self-image was that people didn't like me and that I was not a very nice person, and it took me a while. We used to do retreats for a week and at the end of the retreat everybody would stand up and thank the people in the room, the other participants, and people on the staff and whoever they wanted to say something. And people would say nice things about me that were so foreign to my lifelong self-image that I would start to cry because I just couldn't believe it that people were thinking, "Wow! You saved my life, you did this for me, you helped me changed this. I'm so grateful to you," and all that sort of stuff.
So let me see, is there anything else I want to tell you about delta? There are actually much more I could say about this. And if people get a copy of my book, it goes into this in lots of detail. I think that people will find it extremely interesting because it's all about the latest brain research and how it relates to all this stuff.
So there's one more brainwave pattern we should talk about, and it's actually faster than the beta brainwaves. Now you would think that faster than beta brainwaves would be causing the sympathetic nervous system to go nuts and therefore you'd feel all this fight or flight, but that doesn't happen to be what happened. And here's how they really started to find out about these.
These are gamma brainwaves. You have to know the Greek alphabet, I guess, to do this. But Dr. Richard Davidson, who's at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the most prominent researchers about the brain and especially as it relates to meditation. He had a whole bunch of these monks that are around the Dalai Lama in his laboratory and they did these brain scans and measured their brainwave patterns and so on. And they found that these monks were making lots of alpha and theta and delta brainwaves, but also they were making lots of gamma brainwave patterns. And they discovered that what these gamma brainwaves were associated with was kindness, compassion and almost unavoidable impulse to help other people. So gamma waves have become associated with compassion.
Some of these monks had done up to 50,000 hours of meditation in order to achieve this. One of them, Matthieu Ricard, who was a Frenchman, has been called by the popular press the world's happiest man. And I talk about him also in my book, and he had done 50,000 hours of meditation and it was reflected in his brainwaves and in his brain scan. And he had a hugely active prefrontal cortex and had all kinds of control over his limbic system.
It's human to feel a whole variety of feelings, some of which are "negative" feelings. But if you have a strong prefrontal cortex, you are able to just observe yourself having them. If there is something to grieve, you go to the grieving process, but you don't stay there. And it doesn't completely grab all your attention and throw you into this horrible fight or flight.
So at any rate, those are the brainwave patterns that are really important. There's a few others that people talk about from time to time, but they really aren't of any significance to what we're talking about. And the thing is that you can spend decades teaching yourself to make these brainwave patterns, and even people that do that generally only can make alpha and theta. It's unusual, not impossible, but unusual for people to make delta waves on purpose. But there are many, many...you see, if you take yourself every day through the spectrum of all these brainwave patterns, what happens is that your brain turns over more neurons, more brain real estate, more neural connections to be able to make these brainwave patterns.
Explicit System and Implicit System
So that means that if you're in a situation and you have a problem you need to solve, you need to be creative, you just instantly begin to make the brainwave patterns that will help you do that. So all kinds of things. If you want to be happy, you begin to make alpha waves. If you need to learn, you make all kinds of alpha waves, and you focus and you concentrate, and all this sort of thing. So it just makes all of this available to you so that whatever you need to do...it's not like you say, "Okay. I think I need to make some alpha waves." It's just that here's a task at hand, something you need to do and you make the required brainwave patterns. You see someone that is suffering or in distress, you're probably going to make gamma waves and feel a lot of compassion and empathy for them and want to do something to help them.
One of the things that I've done as I have really been changed by doing this, and a part of this is because Centerpointe has been so successful, I have given millions of dollars to charities that help inner-city kids. And I think Centerpointe has built about ten schools now in Kenya to help kids get, that would otherwise not get an education, to get an education. But part of that, I mean a lot of people make a lot of money and they don't give any of it away. But when I see suffering, I really, I feel a strong urge to do something to help people.
And part of that is what drives me to...I could just stop working. But when I see the letters I get from people and all that, I'm just...it really tugs at your heart to see. And, you see, I was one of these people that was lost and unhappy and all this myself. I know exactly what it's like to be in that position and then to find something that really works.
So people not only get over their emotional challenges, but their mind becomes clearer, they learn better, they stop procrastinating. They look for challenges because a lot of the juice in life is having a challenge that seems just out of reach and then figuring out how to get there. And when you...we should talk a little bit more about some of these parts of the brain. One of the aspects of the brain I want people to know about, it's the difference between what's called the explicit system and the implicit system.
The explicit system is also part of your prefrontal cortex and there's a value to it, but it's when you're doing regular linear thinking and you're kind of thinking through something. But if you're learning to drive, you're using your explicit system. If you're trying to figure out what to say, you're using your explicit system. But your explicit system can kind of hold you back sometimes.
Because let's say you're in a job interview and your explicit system is evaluating everything that's going on, explicit system is where you do second-guessing. So when you're sitting there talking to the person that's interviewing you, if you're going, "Do I look okay? Was that a stupid thing to say? God, I hope I don't make an idiot out of myself. I hope I don't do something wrong." And you're kind of, instead of being totally focused and just being in a flow state, which would be the other side of the coin, you're second-guessing yourself constantly. And I think most people know what I'm talking about, everybody has done this.
The other side of that coin is called the implicit system. That's when you do things naturally, you do them intuitively. It's when something is going on and then you know what, you just know what to do. There's another part of your brain that's kind of outside your awareness, for most people. When you meditate enough, it becomes something that you do also with awareness. But after you learn to drive, your implicit system takes over because you don't think, "Okay. I've got to turn the wheel a little bit here because..." When you're first driving you're going, "Oh, God. I've got to turn left here. I've got to change lanes. Oh, God. How do you do that? What do you do first? I've got to look over my shoulder." There's all these things you've got to do and you have to think your way through it, which is explicit system.
One of the things that I've done as I have really been changed by doing this, and a part of this is because Centerpointe has been so successful, I have given millions of dollars to charities that help inner-city kids. And I think Centerpointe has built about ten schools now in Kenya to help kids get, that would otherwise not get an education, to get an education. But part of that, I mean a lot of people make a lot of money and they don't give any of it away. But when I see suffering, I really, I feel a strong urge to do something to help people.
And part of that is what drives me to...I could just stop working. But when I see the letters I get from people and all that, I'm just...it really tugs at your heart to see. And, you see, I was one of these people that was lost and unhappy and all this myself. I know exactly what it's like to be in that position and then to find something that really works.
So people not only get over their emotional challenges, but their mind becomes clearer, they learn better, they stop procrastinating. They look for challenges because a lot of the juice in life is having a challenge that seems just out of reach and then figuring out how to get there. And when you...we should talk a little bit more about some of these parts of the brain. One of the aspects of the brain I want people to know about, it's the difference between what's called the explicit system and the implicit system.
The explicit system is also part of your prefrontal cortex and there's a value to it, but it's when you're doing regular linear thinking and you're kind of thinking through something. But if you're learning to drive, you're using your explicit system. If you're trying to figure out what to say, you're using your explicit system. But your explicit system can kind of hold you back sometimes.
Because let's say you're in a job interview and your explicit system is evaluating everything that's going on, explicit system is where you do second-guessing. So when you're sitting there talking to the person that's interviewing you, if you're going, "Do I look okay? Was that a stupid thing to say? God, I hope I don't make an idiot out of myself. I hope I don't do something wrong." And you're kind of, instead of being totally focused and just being in a flow state, which would be the other side of the coin, you're second-guessing yourself constantly. And I think most people know what I'm talking about, everybody has done this.
The other side of that coin is called the implicit system. That's when you do things naturally, you do them intuitively. It's when something is going on and then you know what, you just know what to do. There's another part of your brain that's kind of outside your awareness, for most people. When you meditate enough, it becomes something that you do also with awareness. But after you learn to drive, your implicit system takes over because you don't think, "Okay. I've got to turn the wheel a little bit here because..." When you're first driving you're going, "Oh, God. I've got to turn left here. I've got to change lanes. Oh, God. How do you do that? What do you do first? I've got to look over my shoulder." There's all these things you've got to do and you have to think your way through it, which is explicit system.
Implicit system is like unconscious competence, where you just do things because you know how to do them. But it also means, and this is what happens to long-time meditators or people that have used Holosync for quite a few years. Is that in any kind of a situation, as life throws you a curve in some way, somebody says something weird to you or something unexpected that you don't like happens or whatever. If you're implicit system has been really strengthened, which is also part of your prefrontal cortex, you know just what to do.
If you've ever been around somebody that's really confident and really relaxed and whatever happens, it doesn't throw them. Even if something really bad happens, let's say there's a car accident or something, there's somebody there and they just calmly go about taking care of business, knowing what to do. As opposed to the person that freaks out.
I mean what happens is you try to use your explicit system to think through things, but your amygdala, your limbic system is so freaked out that all the blood has flowed away from your brain, you can't think clearly. But the other person who is mostly in that implicitly system, they are calm, they are collected and this intuitive part of them puts together what to do without having to have linear left-brain kind of thinking. Does that make sense?
Erik: It's interesting you say that when people feel threatened, their amygdala acts up and they have blood actually leaves the brain.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yes. When they have done brain scans and they have ways of doing...a lot of the ways they scan brains, and this will probably improve and get even more precise, but they can see what parts of the brain are lighting up or active because more oxygen is flowing to them and there's ways that they can see that on the brain scan. Obviously for the oxygen to get there there has to be more blood flow.
So in some cases they scan people's brains and if they are freaked out and in that limbic system, the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight is really active, there's less blood flow going to the prefrontal cortex, there's more going to the reactive reptilian brain and so on and so forth. What's really interesting to me is that a lot of the recent research shows that in some cases it is very valuable for the brain, some parts of the brain to turn off though. In fact, when the implicit system is active, it is turning off a part of the brain that does all this second-guessing, for instance.
Now if you don't know what the heck you're doing because you've never done something before, it's probably good that you're trying to think about it. If you were in the car and you tried to drive the very first time without thinking yourself through what you're doing, you'd probably run into something and then get in a wreck. But once you've practiced something a little bit, then if you still...I know someone, for instance, that when she's driving, she's worried the whole time. And so her driving isn't very good because she's worried so much. And if she would just sort of realize that she's been driving for quite a few years now, her body and her mind knows how to drive from the implicit system, she doesn't need to think through everything.
You know when you're talking to somebody, you're not thinking what the next sentence is and how to put the words in a certain order and everything. Sometimes if you are really nervous you do that, but most people just talk. That's your implicit system that knows how to talk. I mean this isn't anything really magical, it's just a characteristic of your brain. But a part of the brain, and I won't get into the names of these because it will get really confusing, but I do have some of this in the book.
If you've ever been around somebody that's really confident and really relaxed and whatever happens, it doesn't throw them. Even if something really bad happens, let's say there's a car accident or something, there's somebody there and they just calmly go about taking care of business, knowing what to do. As opposed to the person that freaks out.
I mean what happens is you try to use your explicit system to think through things, but your amygdala, your limbic system is so freaked out that all the blood has flowed away from your brain, you can't think clearly. But the other person who is mostly in that implicitly system, they are calm, they are collected and this intuitive part of them puts together what to do without having to have linear left-brain kind of thinking. Does that make sense?
Erik: It's interesting you say that when people feel threatened, their amygdala acts up and they have blood actually leaves the brain.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yes. When they have done brain scans and they have ways of doing...a lot of the ways they scan brains, and this will probably improve and get even more precise, but they can see what parts of the brain are lighting up or active because more oxygen is flowing to them and there's ways that they can see that on the brain scan. Obviously for the oxygen to get there there has to be more blood flow.
So in some cases they scan people's brains and if they are freaked out and in that limbic system, the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight is really active, there's less blood flow going to the prefrontal cortex, there's more going to the reactive reptilian brain and so on and so forth. What's really interesting to me is that a lot of the recent research shows that in some cases it is very valuable for the brain, some parts of the brain to turn off though. In fact, when the implicit system is active, it is turning off a part of the brain that does all this second-guessing, for instance.
Now if you don't know what the heck you're doing because you've never done something before, it's probably good that you're trying to think about it. If you were in the car and you tried to drive the very first time without thinking yourself through what you're doing, you'd probably run into something and then get in a wreck. But once you've practiced something a little bit, then if you still...I know someone, for instance, that when she's driving, she's worried the whole time. And so her driving isn't very good because she's worried so much. And if she would just sort of realize that she's been driving for quite a few years now, her body and her mind knows how to drive from the implicit system, she doesn't need to think through everything.
You know when you're talking to somebody, you're not thinking what the next sentence is and how to put the words in a certain order and everything. Sometimes if you are really nervous you do that, but most people just talk. That's your implicit system that knows how to talk. I mean this isn't anything really magical, it's just a characteristic of your brain. But a part of the brain, and I won't get into the names of these because it will get really confusing, but I do have some of this in the book.
Flow States with Holosync & Bill Harris
Another thing that happens when you meditate is not only does the part of the brain that does all the second-guessing and worrying and so on, it shuts off, but a part of the brain that helps locate you in space. It helps you to feel kind of where you leave off and not-you begins. And because that part of the brain can turn off in meditation...it doesn't always, but when you're really deeply in meditation it does. That's when people feel that feeling of oneness with everything and they start to feel this blissful feeling like, "Wow! It's all one thing. It's all one interconnected thing and that's what I really am, is that whole thing. I have been thinking of myself as ending at my skin, but I'm connected to everything." And that's a very blissful life-changing experience that people have.
And also in a flow state, I don't know. Let's see, we have quite a bit more time left. I don't know if you'd like me to go through flow states. Maybe you have some questions now. I tend to be motormouth when I get started talking about this.
Erik: It's great. It's great, yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): One thing leads to another.
Erik: Yeah, yeah. We're covering a lot of ground, I think.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I also want to talk a little bit more about the limbic system and how it works, and self-regulation. So let's make sure I talk about the Marshmallow Test and self-regulation and flow state. So why don't you...if you have some questions now, let's do that, and then we can forward into those two things.
Erik: Yeah, absolutely. I think one good question that a lot of people may be wondering about is if our limbic system is acting up sometimes, and this usually happens when we feel stressed, we might react to our relationships with others in an aggressive way.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yes, I think there's a few people out there that have done stupid things vis-à-vis their partner, once in a while, where they have said something that they shouldn't have said, where they have reacted to something their partner did. A lot of times you'll react to something your partner did because it reminds you unconsciously of losses or traumas that you felt when you were a child. And some of those are things that the adults around us don't even know are traumatic.
I mean, for instance, let's say that you come home from school and you're in kindergarten or the first grade or something like that and you drew this picture. And you go in and say, "Mom, look what I made." And she's very interested in what you made except that right now she's really worried about something. She is worried how she's going to pay the bills or she had a fight with dad or there's something going on, and so her mind is somewhere else.
And so you can tell she's not really looking at your picture and so you think, "Wow! I'm not very valuable. I must not be a very good at drawing. Mom doesn't care." There's all kinds of conclusions that, as four-, five-, six-year-old, you can easily draw based on hardly any real information and that can be really traumatic. And if you have a mother, as I did, who is semi-hysterical a lot of the time and having these interactions with her, that becomes traumatic. Then you always have losses in your life because everything in the world isn't permanent.
And also in a flow state, I don't know. Let's see, we have quite a bit more time left. I don't know if you'd like me to go through flow states. Maybe you have some questions now. I tend to be motormouth when I get started talking about this.
Erik: It's great. It's great, yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): One thing leads to another.
Erik: Yeah, yeah. We're covering a lot of ground, I think.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I also want to talk a little bit more about the limbic system and how it works, and self-regulation. So let's make sure I talk about the Marshmallow Test and self-regulation and flow state. So why don't you...if you have some questions now, let's do that, and then we can forward into those two things.
Erik: Yeah, absolutely. I think one good question that a lot of people may be wondering about is if our limbic system is acting up sometimes, and this usually happens when we feel stressed, we might react to our relationships with others in an aggressive way.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yes, I think there's a few people out there that have done stupid things vis-à-vis their partner, once in a while, where they have said something that they shouldn't have said, where they have reacted to something their partner did. A lot of times you'll react to something your partner did because it reminds you unconsciously of losses or traumas that you felt when you were a child. And some of those are things that the adults around us don't even know are traumatic.
I mean, for instance, let's say that you come home from school and you're in kindergarten or the first grade or something like that and you drew this picture. And you go in and say, "Mom, look what I made." And she's very interested in what you made except that right now she's really worried about something. She is worried how she's going to pay the bills or she had a fight with dad or there's something going on, and so her mind is somewhere else.
And so you can tell she's not really looking at your picture and so you think, "Wow! I'm not very valuable. I must not be a very good at drawing. Mom doesn't care." There's all kinds of conclusions that, as four-, five-, six-year-old, you can easily draw based on hardly any real information and that can be really traumatic. And if you have a mother, as I did, who is semi-hysterical a lot of the time and having these interactions with her, that becomes traumatic. Then you always have losses in your life because everything in the world isn't permanent.
And so now you're with your partner as an adult and they do something that reminds you of some big loss and all those feelings from being a powerless five-year-old come flooding back into you, courtesy of your limbic system.
Erik: Right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): And suddenly you completely overreact to what's happening, you completely overreact to something they did. And they may have done it for a completely different reason; it may not even have had anything to do with you. And so now you're pissed off. And now, because your prefrontal cortex is sort of off in neutral and can't help you, you're saying nasty things to your partner or whatever. Is that a reasonable scenario?
Erik: I think it's pretty common.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yeah. I mean I've done those things many times. When I said I drove lots of people away in my early life, up into my late 30s, that was certainly one of the big categories. I desperately wanted to be loved, and I'd find somebody that would love me because I was charming part of the time. But then this kind of stuff would happen.
One of the things that happens when you strengthen the prefrontal cortex and you learn to calm the limbic system is that it isn't these things never happen, but they happen much less often. And many of the traumas from the past, as a result of these integrative experiences I described earlier. When you think about them, they seem as you remember them and you remember the pain of them, but it seems as if it happened to someone else. In other words, it doesn't have that emotional charge. Or if it does, it's so small that you're now much more robust, in-charge prefrontal cortex can exercise some supervision.
And maybe you're saying, "Wow! I'm having some really strong feelings as a result of you saying that. I know they are not about you, but I need a few minutes to cool myself out." Or it just passes right by. Matthieu Richie that I mentioned, the so-called world's happiest man, one of these people whose brains were scanned by Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He wrote a book called Happiness where he talked about most people being thrown: when the good things happen and they feel high; when bad things happen, they feel crappy. And he said that when you make these changes to your brain, you're more in this middle thing and these things don't, the highs and the lows don't affect you so much. You just stay in this state of equanimity where everything is fine.
And what just popped into my head is when people are using Holosync and they've been through a few of these levels we have, they get to this one point in it. I have three interviews with people, long-time Holosync users in my book, and I think I ask all three of them, "At what point did you get...when did you get to the point where you found yourself saying, 'Everything is fine. I'm fine, other people are fine, the world is fine.'" It's not that you don't see the problems in the world or you that you don't have challenges in the world, but you just calmly handle them. And everyone would say, "Yeah, that happened to me." And it's about the same time in the program where people get to that point.
This is when you start to make it on to the short list of the world's happiest people. When you start to say, "Wow! Everything is okay. Everything is fine." Even the bad stuff that happens in life, even when you suffer a loss, even all this. That's when you say, "Well, that's what happens in life and whatever I can do about it right now I need to do it." But you don't spend a lot of times being miserable about it. You might momentarily feel bad, but it's really not helpful to feel miserable for a long time about all this stuff.
Erik: Right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): And suddenly you completely overreact to what's happening, you completely overreact to something they did. And they may have done it for a completely different reason; it may not even have had anything to do with you. And so now you're pissed off. And now, because your prefrontal cortex is sort of off in neutral and can't help you, you're saying nasty things to your partner or whatever. Is that a reasonable scenario?
Erik: I think it's pretty common.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yeah. I mean I've done those things many times. When I said I drove lots of people away in my early life, up into my late 30s, that was certainly one of the big categories. I desperately wanted to be loved, and I'd find somebody that would love me because I was charming part of the time. But then this kind of stuff would happen.
One of the things that happens when you strengthen the prefrontal cortex and you learn to calm the limbic system is that it isn't these things never happen, but they happen much less often. And many of the traumas from the past, as a result of these integrative experiences I described earlier. When you think about them, they seem as you remember them and you remember the pain of them, but it seems as if it happened to someone else. In other words, it doesn't have that emotional charge. Or if it does, it's so small that you're now much more robust, in-charge prefrontal cortex can exercise some supervision.
And maybe you're saying, "Wow! I'm having some really strong feelings as a result of you saying that. I know they are not about you, but I need a few minutes to cool myself out." Or it just passes right by. Matthieu Richie that I mentioned, the so-called world's happiest man, one of these people whose brains were scanned by Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He wrote a book called Happiness where he talked about most people being thrown: when the good things happen and they feel high; when bad things happen, they feel crappy. And he said that when you make these changes to your brain, you're more in this middle thing and these things don't, the highs and the lows don't affect you so much. You just stay in this state of equanimity where everything is fine.
And what just popped into my head is when people are using Holosync and they've been through a few of these levels we have, they get to this one point in it. I have three interviews with people, long-time Holosync users in my book, and I think I ask all three of them, "At what point did you get...when did you get to the point where you found yourself saying, 'Everything is fine. I'm fine, other people are fine, the world is fine.'" It's not that you don't see the problems in the world or you that you don't have challenges in the world, but you just calmly handle them. And everyone would say, "Yeah, that happened to me." And it's about the same time in the program where people get to that point.
This is when you start to make it on to the short list of the world's happiest people. When you start to say, "Wow! Everything is okay. Everything is fine." Even the bad stuff that happens in life, even when you suffer a loss, even all this. That's when you say, "Well, that's what happens in life and whatever I can do about it right now I need to do it." But you don't spend a lot of times being miserable about it. You might momentarily feel bad, but it's really not helpful to feel miserable for a long time about all this stuff.
Relationships
So as a result of this, relationships do improve. I was just reading a letter from somebody the other where they were, where this woman was saying, "My husband said to me, 'You don't yell at me anymore. We don't have these big fights anymore. I have this woman that I love back again.'" And the things like that. So I don't know. You have more questions about the relationship aspect of this? We could go on about any of these for a long time.
Erik: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things to look at is couples calming down, and then families, as well. And I'm wondering if you know of any children who have used Holosync.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, we have had a lot of children use Holosync. We used to tell people, we've been doing this for 29 years. In the early days, probably the first 10 or 12 years at least, we would say, "Maybe their nervous system is developing. Maybe you shouldn't do it." But people did it anyway. Had their kids listen to it and nobody ever reported anything except for tremendously positive things. We had people that...
One woman, she was actually a grandmother of this little six-year-old boy. But she was living with her daughter or whatever, they were three generations living together. And she was using Holosync every day, and she was putting on headphones once a day and sitting there and listening, doing her meditation. And one day this little boy, was about six, I believe. He was like 500% ADD. He was bouncing off the wall all day. He would wake up at 5:00 in the morning and he would go like a Whirling Dervish until 10:00 or so at night and he was driving everybody nuts.
And one day he said, "Grandma, can I listen to your music?," or whatever he said to her. And so she put the headphones on him and I think, if I remember correctly it was around 7:00 at night or something, he nodded off within about ten minutes. His limbic system was calmed and all this. He went into this relaxation response, the enhancement of the parasympathetic nervous system. And the next day he was quite different. He was way calmer. And so they said, "Hey, I think we're on to something here," and they started having him listen to this every day. And within a couple of months he was a totally different kid.
We've also had lots of people who had autistic children use Holosync with them and have tremendous results with that, although I don't know that we have time to go into every category.
So yes, children have used this. And we've also had people who as adults had reconciliations with their parents because they had been using Holosync and because they could . . .
Erik: That's wonderful.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I mean it's almost a cliché that people go home to their family for Christmas or Thanksgiving, something like that, and then they just spend all this time arguing and fighting and they realize, "Boy, am I glad I don't still live with my parents." But the Holosync users that went home, in a situation like that, they had become so much calmer and so much more in control of themselves, they had so much more ability to self-regulate. That when dad started telling them what he thought about politics or whatever it was, or the mom started scolding them about whatever she tended to scold them about for their whole life. They would just say, "Well, that's dad. Well that's mom." And they would just be calm.
Erik: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things to look at is couples calming down, and then families, as well. And I'm wondering if you know of any children who have used Holosync.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, we have had a lot of children use Holosync. We used to tell people, we've been doing this for 29 years. In the early days, probably the first 10 or 12 years at least, we would say, "Maybe their nervous system is developing. Maybe you shouldn't do it." But people did it anyway. Had their kids listen to it and nobody ever reported anything except for tremendously positive things. We had people that...
One woman, she was actually a grandmother of this little six-year-old boy. But she was living with her daughter or whatever, they were three generations living together. And she was using Holosync every day, and she was putting on headphones once a day and sitting there and listening, doing her meditation. And one day this little boy, was about six, I believe. He was like 500% ADD. He was bouncing off the wall all day. He would wake up at 5:00 in the morning and he would go like a Whirling Dervish until 10:00 or so at night and he was driving everybody nuts.
And one day he said, "Grandma, can I listen to your music?," or whatever he said to her. And so she put the headphones on him and I think, if I remember correctly it was around 7:00 at night or something, he nodded off within about ten minutes. His limbic system was calmed and all this. He went into this relaxation response, the enhancement of the parasympathetic nervous system. And the next day he was quite different. He was way calmer. And so they said, "Hey, I think we're on to something here," and they started having him listen to this every day. And within a couple of months he was a totally different kid.
We've also had lots of people who had autistic children use Holosync with them and have tremendous results with that, although I don't know that we have time to go into every category.
So yes, children have used this. And we've also had people who as adults had reconciliations with their parents because they had been using Holosync and because they could . . .
Erik: That's wonderful.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I mean it's almost a cliché that people go home to their family for Christmas or Thanksgiving, something like that, and then they just spend all this time arguing and fighting and they realize, "Boy, am I glad I don't still live with my parents." But the Holosync users that went home, in a situation like that, they had become so much calmer and so much more in control of themselves, they had so much more ability to self-regulate. That when dad started telling them what he thought about politics or whatever it was, or the mom started scolding them about whatever she tended to scold them about for their whole life. They would just say, "Well, that's dad. Well that's mom." And they would just be calm.
The Marshmallow Test
I would get these letters where they would say, "I've had really a breakthrough with my dad suddenly. We'd fought for years, now he wants to do things with me." So some of these things just kind of make you choked up when you read these things because, I mean, my parents aren't alive anymore. But I didn't get along with my dad very well and he kind of died before I could get to the point where I could have this kind of a relationship with him. But that's what I see happening with people.
So how about if we talk about self-regulation and the Marshmallow Test? I think people will enjoy that.
Erik: Yeah, tell us about what is the Marshmallow Test.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, this researcher at Stanford, Walter Mischel, back in the '60s I believe it was, he decided to bring these little preschoolers in. They were actually from this, I think it was the Bing Nursery School or the Bing-something Nursery School, which were the kids that were of people that worked at Stanford, the staff at Stanford. And he would put them in an isolated room with a little table in front of them, and on a plate he would put some kind of a treat, one of the treats were marshmallows. And so this became known as the Marshmallow Test.
And he put...I want to find this list here that I pull this up because there's a whole list of things that I'm not going to remember. But at any rate, he put a marshmallow on this plate and they said to the children, "Now you can eat this marshmallow right now if you want to." Or it could have been a cookie or a lot of other things, but we'll just use marshmallow. "You can eat this marshmallow right now if you want to. But I'm going to leave the room now for a little while. And if you can wait until I come back, you can have two marshmallows."
You can go online and watch videos of these kids doing this and it's very, very charming to see them doing this. Some of the kids just pop the marshmallow into their mouth and ate it immediately. Others though figured out ways to resist the urge to eat it: they distracted themself, they played with their toes, they picked their nose and ate it, there's all kinds of stuff that they did and they were able to wait.
And then they did things like they put the marshmallow under something and told them it was there, showed it to them then covered it up, to see if not seeing it affected how long they could wait. They showed them pictures of it instead of the real thing, and they did all kinds of variations on it. Again, I go through a lot of the stuff in my book. And they just wanted to see how many of these kids were able to wait, to regulate themselves so that they didn't just...if their limbic system was in charge, they would just eat it right up. But if they have some prefrontal cortex stuff going on, they would be able to wait.
And at any rate, and here's where I want to read this list, later they followed these same kids until they were into middle age. For all I know they may still be studying them. The ones that had the greatest delay ability, this is what happened to them. They had better grades and higher SAT scores. In fact, an average of 210 points higher in SATs. They had a higher income. They had a lower body mass index. In other words, they were less tending to be overweight. They had better social functioning. They had better cognitive functioning, greater intelligence, more self-control in frustrating situations.
They had a greater ability to resist temptation, they were less distractible, they were more self-reliant, they had more willingness to trust their own judgment. They had a lower likelihood of being rattled and disorganized. They had fewer instances of being sidelined by step backs. In other words, they had greater resilience and adaptability. They had a greater ability to pursue and reach long-term goals. They had less drug use, less addictive behaviors and a greater ability to maintain close relationships. I mean who wouldn't want everything in that list? It was all related to the ability to self-regulate, the ability to defer gratification.
So how about if we talk about self-regulation and the Marshmallow Test? I think people will enjoy that.
Erik: Yeah, tell us about what is the Marshmallow Test.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, this researcher at Stanford, Walter Mischel, back in the '60s I believe it was, he decided to bring these little preschoolers in. They were actually from this, I think it was the Bing Nursery School or the Bing-something Nursery School, which were the kids that were of people that worked at Stanford, the staff at Stanford. And he would put them in an isolated room with a little table in front of them, and on a plate he would put some kind of a treat, one of the treats were marshmallows. And so this became known as the Marshmallow Test.
And he put...I want to find this list here that I pull this up because there's a whole list of things that I'm not going to remember. But at any rate, he put a marshmallow on this plate and they said to the children, "Now you can eat this marshmallow right now if you want to." Or it could have been a cookie or a lot of other things, but we'll just use marshmallow. "You can eat this marshmallow right now if you want to. But I'm going to leave the room now for a little while. And if you can wait until I come back, you can have two marshmallows."
You can go online and watch videos of these kids doing this and it's very, very charming to see them doing this. Some of the kids just pop the marshmallow into their mouth and ate it immediately. Others though figured out ways to resist the urge to eat it: they distracted themself, they played with their toes, they picked their nose and ate it, there's all kinds of stuff that they did and they were able to wait.
And then they did things like they put the marshmallow under something and told them it was there, showed it to them then covered it up, to see if not seeing it affected how long they could wait. They showed them pictures of it instead of the real thing, and they did all kinds of variations on it. Again, I go through a lot of the stuff in my book. And they just wanted to see how many of these kids were able to wait, to regulate themselves so that they didn't just...if their limbic system was in charge, they would just eat it right up. But if they have some prefrontal cortex stuff going on, they would be able to wait.
And at any rate, and here's where I want to read this list, later they followed these same kids until they were into middle age. For all I know they may still be studying them. The ones that had the greatest delay ability, this is what happened to them. They had better grades and higher SAT scores. In fact, an average of 210 points higher in SATs. They had a higher income. They had a lower body mass index. In other words, they were less tending to be overweight. They had better social functioning. They had better cognitive functioning, greater intelligence, more self-control in frustrating situations.
They had a greater ability to resist temptation, they were less distractible, they were more self-reliant, they had more willingness to trust their own judgment. They had a lower likelihood of being rattled and disorganized. They had fewer instances of being sidelined by step backs. In other words, they had greater resilience and adaptability. They had a greater ability to pursue and reach long-term goals. They had less drug use, less addictive behaviors and a greater ability to maintain close relationships. I mean who wouldn't want everything in that list? It was all related to the ability to self-regulate, the ability to defer gratification.
Brain Scans
Then later in life they took a lot of these people into a lab and they did these brain scans on them, which they didn't have back in the day when they first started doing this. They found out that the amygdala, which Walter Mischel often refers to as the hot system, was really enlivened in these people that had no ability to delay gratification. And what he called the cool system, the prefrontal cortex, was really enhanced and active in the people that could delay.
So the thing is that later, by the way, they showed that this had nothing to do with income level. They went into schools, in really inner-city schools where the people were really poor. They did it in other cultures. This had nothing to do with cultural background or income level or anything. There were some kids that were poor, uneducated, etc., but they had great delay ability and they had similar. And it turns out that when you meditate, you calm the part of the brain that makes you eat the marshmallow right now and you enhance the part that makes you have a cooler way to evaluate it.
And so there's a lot more information about this in my book, but the one thing I think is really interesting to talk about is how the limbic system works. Its secret weapon is, something that a lot of people probably heard about, dopamine. I think I first heard about dopamine is because people that have...God, what is it that Muhammad Ali has? Where they shake?
Erik: Parkinson's.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Parkinson's, yeah. I better do some Holosync or enhance my memories.
Erik: Your dose for the day. Yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): So when your amygdala is active, you make a lot of dopamine. Now dopamine creates desire. Dopamine is a brain chemical that makes you say, "I want it. I want it now. And I'm pretty much ready to do anything to get it." When you fall in love and you have that feeling of you'll do anything for your beloved, and you're thinking of all these ways to...you see someone across the room and you immediately start to make dopamine. You're thinking, "How can I talk to her? How can I talk to him?" And then after you've talked, "Oh, God. Now I want to go out on to a date. Now I want to kiss her. Now I want to make love. Now I want to get married." All this is desire.
But you know how, when people are in that state, it's this kind of wonderful anticipation? But there's also kind of this anxiety, too, because you really want something really badly. And there are many times where the outcome is not something as benign, although falling in love is not always benign. But it could lead to problems as we talked about earlier. But it's also what happens when you see those doughnuts or you've already had one and you see that there's two more and you're making all this dopamine about those doughnuts and then you, "Oh, screw it," and you eat the doughnuts.
It's also dopamine that causes you to say, "I'd rather stretch out in front of the TV tonight than go do my exercising or my meditation or something." These days more and more people know that we need to meditate, we need to exercise, we need to eat a certain healthy kind of diet so that we can live longer and be happier and have our brain work better and all. There's all these lifestyle things that now we know more about than we ever did. But most of us don't do them; it's very easy to blow them off. And it's this dopamine production that causes us to not do what we know is good for us and instead do what we want to do right now.
Now one really interesting experiment they did with dopamine with mice.
Erik: Yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Really illustrates this. They put these little electrodes in the mouse's brain so they could give them a square of dopamine. And then they taught them if they pulled a lever in the cage, they'd give them a squirt of dopamine. So they would just pull the lever, pull the lever, pull the lever, pull the lever over and over and over and over. And so what they did is they put a lever on both sides of the cage and in the middle of the cage they put this electrified grid so that the mice had to go over this electrified grid to get to the lever. They'd pull one lever and then it wouldn't work until the other one is pulled.
So these mice actually ran across this electrified grid, even though the shock was painful. And, in fact, they did it over and over and over until they actually burned their feet off.
So the thing is that later, by the way, they showed that this had nothing to do with income level. They went into schools, in really inner-city schools where the people were really poor. They did it in other cultures. This had nothing to do with cultural background or income level or anything. There were some kids that were poor, uneducated, etc., but they had great delay ability and they had similar. And it turns out that when you meditate, you calm the part of the brain that makes you eat the marshmallow right now and you enhance the part that makes you have a cooler way to evaluate it.
And so there's a lot more information about this in my book, but the one thing I think is really interesting to talk about is how the limbic system works. Its secret weapon is, something that a lot of people probably heard about, dopamine. I think I first heard about dopamine is because people that have...God, what is it that Muhammad Ali has? Where they shake?
Erik: Parkinson's.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Parkinson's, yeah. I better do some Holosync or enhance my memories.
Erik: Your dose for the day. Yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): So when your amygdala is active, you make a lot of dopamine. Now dopamine creates desire. Dopamine is a brain chemical that makes you say, "I want it. I want it now. And I'm pretty much ready to do anything to get it." When you fall in love and you have that feeling of you'll do anything for your beloved, and you're thinking of all these ways to...you see someone across the room and you immediately start to make dopamine. You're thinking, "How can I talk to her? How can I talk to him?" And then after you've talked, "Oh, God. Now I want to go out on to a date. Now I want to kiss her. Now I want to make love. Now I want to get married." All this is desire.
But you know how, when people are in that state, it's this kind of wonderful anticipation? But there's also kind of this anxiety, too, because you really want something really badly. And there are many times where the outcome is not something as benign, although falling in love is not always benign. But it could lead to problems as we talked about earlier. But it's also what happens when you see those doughnuts or you've already had one and you see that there's two more and you're making all this dopamine about those doughnuts and then you, "Oh, screw it," and you eat the doughnuts.
It's also dopamine that causes you to say, "I'd rather stretch out in front of the TV tonight than go do my exercising or my meditation or something." These days more and more people know that we need to meditate, we need to exercise, we need to eat a certain healthy kind of diet so that we can live longer and be happier and have our brain work better and all. There's all these lifestyle things that now we know more about than we ever did. But most of us don't do them; it's very easy to blow them off. And it's this dopamine production that causes us to not do what we know is good for us and instead do what we want to do right now.
Now one really interesting experiment they did with dopamine with mice.
Erik: Yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Really illustrates this. They put these little electrodes in the mouse's brain so they could give them a square of dopamine. And then they taught them if they pulled a lever in the cage, they'd give them a squirt of dopamine. So they would just pull the lever, pull the lever, pull the lever, pull the lever over and over and over and over. And so what they did is they put a lever on both sides of the cage and in the middle of the cage they put this electrified grid so that the mice had to go over this electrified grid to get to the lever. They'd pull one lever and then it wouldn't work until the other one is pulled.
So these mice actually ran across this electrified grid, even though the shock was painful. And, in fact, they did it over and over and over until they actually burned their feet off.
The Nervous System
Erik: Wow.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): That is how powerful dopamine is. And if you think about it, think about the dumb-ass stuff you've done in your life that even while you were doing it you knew it was dumb. But you felt compelled to do it, you felt compelled to yell at your husband or your wife or your friend or whatever, even though you knew it wasn't going to get you the outcome you wanted, etc. There's all kinds of things that we do that don't serve us about: what we eat...a long list, I don't need to go through it.
So one of the chapters in this book is called Foiling the Dopamine Devil on Your Shoulder. You know, the little devil on your shoulder that tells you to do?
Erik: Yes. How do you do that?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, in that chapter one of the things I go over is the strategies that these little preschoolers used to delay gratification. And because some of them involved pulling stuff out of their ears or their nose and eating it and things like that, I said, "I think you should use an adult version of these strategies." But they distracted themselves, for instance. That's one strategy. They looked at someplace else. That instead of looking right at the marshmallow, which caused more dopamine to be made, they would look at their hands, they would look at their feet, they would make up little songs, they would turn around, they would try to go to sleep, they would close their eyes, they would distract themselves. But then they also did things like think of it in a more abstract way. Believe it or not, four, five, six years old.
For instance, if you were thinking of a marshmallow, you could think of it as being sweet and chewy and imagine how it would taste in your mouth and all that sort of thing. Or you could just think it's white, it's fluffy, it's small. You could think about it in a more abstract way. So you could think of the doughnut, you could say, "That's got a lot of sugar in it. It's going to raise my blood sugar and then that's going to cause my pancreas to make more insulin, and insulin signals my body to pack on weight and to store fat and I'm going to feel crappy later. And I don't..." But, you see, if you don't have much of a prefrontal cortex, you're not going to think of that.
So there are various strategies that these kids actually figured out how to use. But after I go through those strategies, which are certainly worth knowing about, then I say, "But why don't you make it easy on yourself? If you enhance your prefrontal cortex and teach yourself to exercise supervision over your dopamine-producing amygdala and the other parts of your limbic system, then the whole thing becomes a lot easier."
So there's just a ton of interesting...you could say that, we talked about the parasympathetic nervous system, that's kind of the cool system: that's the prefrontal cortex, that's delayed gratification. We could talk about the hot system: that's dopamine, immediate reactivity, doing what you want to do right now.
See, the limbic system has zero, and I mean zero, zero ability to consider long-term consequences. Your prefrontal cortex can think about long-term consequences, but not your limbic system. Your limbic system just wants it now. I mean that's why a lot of young people get pregnant out of wedlock, because they're bathing in dopamine and they don't have a very highly developed prefrontal cortex yet. The prefrontal cortex generally is not fully developed until at least 25. And by "fully developed" they mean the way the ordinary person's prefrontal cortex.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): That is how powerful dopamine is. And if you think about it, think about the dumb-ass stuff you've done in your life that even while you were doing it you knew it was dumb. But you felt compelled to do it, you felt compelled to yell at your husband or your wife or your friend or whatever, even though you knew it wasn't going to get you the outcome you wanted, etc. There's all kinds of things that we do that don't serve us about: what we eat...a long list, I don't need to go through it.
So one of the chapters in this book is called Foiling the Dopamine Devil on Your Shoulder. You know, the little devil on your shoulder that tells you to do?
Erik: Yes. How do you do that?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, in that chapter one of the things I go over is the strategies that these little preschoolers used to delay gratification. And because some of them involved pulling stuff out of their ears or their nose and eating it and things like that, I said, "I think you should use an adult version of these strategies." But they distracted themselves, for instance. That's one strategy. They looked at someplace else. That instead of looking right at the marshmallow, which caused more dopamine to be made, they would look at their hands, they would look at their feet, they would make up little songs, they would turn around, they would try to go to sleep, they would close their eyes, they would distract themselves. But then they also did things like think of it in a more abstract way. Believe it or not, four, five, six years old.
For instance, if you were thinking of a marshmallow, you could think of it as being sweet and chewy and imagine how it would taste in your mouth and all that sort of thing. Or you could just think it's white, it's fluffy, it's small. You could think about it in a more abstract way. So you could think of the doughnut, you could say, "That's got a lot of sugar in it. It's going to raise my blood sugar and then that's going to cause my pancreas to make more insulin, and insulin signals my body to pack on weight and to store fat and I'm going to feel crappy later. And I don't..." But, you see, if you don't have much of a prefrontal cortex, you're not going to think of that.
So there are various strategies that these kids actually figured out how to use. But after I go through those strategies, which are certainly worth knowing about, then I say, "But why don't you make it easy on yourself? If you enhance your prefrontal cortex and teach yourself to exercise supervision over your dopamine-producing amygdala and the other parts of your limbic system, then the whole thing becomes a lot easier."
So there's just a ton of interesting...you could say that, we talked about the parasympathetic nervous system, that's kind of the cool system: that's the prefrontal cortex, that's delayed gratification. We could talk about the hot system: that's dopamine, immediate reactivity, doing what you want to do right now.
See, the limbic system has zero, and I mean zero, zero ability to consider long-term consequences. Your prefrontal cortex can think about long-term consequences, but not your limbic system. Your limbic system just wants it now. I mean that's why a lot of young people get pregnant out of wedlock, because they're bathing in dopamine and they don't have a very highly developed prefrontal cortex yet. The prefrontal cortex generally is not fully developed until at least 25. And by "fully developed" they mean the way the ordinary person's prefrontal cortex.
The Learning Process
You see my book is called The New Science of Super-Awareness because there are...this all started really with these, what some people are calling, the Olympic Athletes of Awareness, these Buddhist monks, Zen monks and so on. Being able to beat such extraordinary people emotionally, mentally and all kinds of other ways. But there are ways you can get to that place without having to meditate hours and hours and hours a day for 20, 30, 40 years.
In fact, maybe this would be a good time to go through the little math problem that I did. Because when I heard that Matthieu Ricard had meditated for 50,000 hours, I said, "Well, what would that take?" So I took out my calculator and I put in 50,000 and I divided it by, I said, "Let's say he did it over 30 years." I later found out he actually did it over 32 years, but I was a pretty close guess. So 30 years, that turned out to be 1,667 hours a year. And then I divided that and it turned out to be 4 hours and 34 minutes a day, day in and day out, for 30 years. And I thought, "Well, who is going to do that?" I mean that's quite a commitment.
Now you don't have to do it 50,000 hours. There were some of those monks that had only meditated 10,000 or 15,000 hours, but still it's a long time. Now there are plenty people that are meditating a half-hour a day or something. I think I figured out that if you wanted to get in your 50,000 hours at a half-hour day, it would take 274 years. Not so [inaudible 01:17:57]. If you only wanted 10,000, and I'm pulling these out of my head so I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that it's 10,000 hours, it only is 84 years at a half-hour a day.
Erik: Wow.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): But what we have found is that Holosync, for various reasons, one of them is that you completely skip the learning curve and day one you're meditating as deeply as someone who's been meditating for 30 years or more. But also it takes you into this brainwave patterns that even these 30-year meditators are not able to go into all the time. But at any rate, based on the two million people that have used this over the last 29 years and had a lot of feedback from them, we guesstimate that an hour of Holosync is worth about eight hours of crucial meditation. So by doing Holosync for an hour a day, which makes you high anyway and is easy to do and very self-reinforcing, it's like you're meditating eight hours a day. That's more than the 4 hours and 34 minutes a day that I figured.
And even with people that know nothing about Tibetan Buddhist monks or Eastern philosophy or any of that kind of stuff, they start telling us about things that are happening as they are using Holosync that are the exact same things that super long-term meditators are reporting, and they don't even know anything about it. It wasn't like they read it in a book or something and now they're talking about it. They didn't even know that this was what happens when you meditate, but they're saying, "Hey, the weirdest thing is happening to me. I'm starting to see these really bright lights when my eyes are closed during my meditation," or, "I'm starting to have this experience," or that experience or whatever happens to be.
Now I've gone off in a tangent . . .
Erik: And that's the theta state.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): . . . and I don't even remember where I was going.
Erik: And that's the theta state, seeing those lights, the luminosity.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yes, that generally happens when you're making theta waves. Now it's maybe we should talk a little bit about flow states because something very interesting happens. In the flow state there's whole combinations of things that happens when you're in a flow state, brainwave pattern-wise. Because when you...to get ready to go into a flow state you need to be able to make alpha waves. When you're in a flow state, they found that people were often making...they were making theta waves. I wish I had the picture of this to show people. But inside these theta waves were gamma waves. And so it was a very complex wave form.
So for people that don't know what a flow state is, in a flow state you are kind of firing on all cylinders. Whatever you're doing feels really, really, really good and you seem to be really good at it. And there's no second-guessing, that part of the brain that we talked about that second-guesses and worries and all that is completely shut off. And, in fact, one of the things that happens in terms of your brain is that most parts of your prefrontal cortex actually turn off in a flow state, and only the parts of them that are necessary for doing whatever you're doing remain on. And what that means is that all the bandwidth is laser-focused on one thing and people do really extraordinary things.
In fact, maybe this would be a good time to go through the little math problem that I did. Because when I heard that Matthieu Ricard had meditated for 50,000 hours, I said, "Well, what would that take?" So I took out my calculator and I put in 50,000 and I divided it by, I said, "Let's say he did it over 30 years." I later found out he actually did it over 32 years, but I was a pretty close guess. So 30 years, that turned out to be 1,667 hours a year. And then I divided that and it turned out to be 4 hours and 34 minutes a day, day in and day out, for 30 years. And I thought, "Well, who is going to do that?" I mean that's quite a commitment.
Now you don't have to do it 50,000 hours. There were some of those monks that had only meditated 10,000 or 15,000 hours, but still it's a long time. Now there are plenty people that are meditating a half-hour a day or something. I think I figured out that if you wanted to get in your 50,000 hours at a half-hour day, it would take 274 years. Not so [inaudible 01:17:57]. If you only wanted 10,000, and I'm pulling these out of my head so I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that it's 10,000 hours, it only is 84 years at a half-hour a day.
Erik: Wow.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): But what we have found is that Holosync, for various reasons, one of them is that you completely skip the learning curve and day one you're meditating as deeply as someone who's been meditating for 30 years or more. But also it takes you into this brainwave patterns that even these 30-year meditators are not able to go into all the time. But at any rate, based on the two million people that have used this over the last 29 years and had a lot of feedback from them, we guesstimate that an hour of Holosync is worth about eight hours of crucial meditation. So by doing Holosync for an hour a day, which makes you high anyway and is easy to do and very self-reinforcing, it's like you're meditating eight hours a day. That's more than the 4 hours and 34 minutes a day that I figured.
And even with people that know nothing about Tibetan Buddhist monks or Eastern philosophy or any of that kind of stuff, they start telling us about things that are happening as they are using Holosync that are the exact same things that super long-term meditators are reporting, and they don't even know anything about it. It wasn't like they read it in a book or something and now they're talking about it. They didn't even know that this was what happens when you meditate, but they're saying, "Hey, the weirdest thing is happening to me. I'm starting to see these really bright lights when my eyes are closed during my meditation," or, "I'm starting to have this experience," or that experience or whatever happens to be.
Now I've gone off in a tangent . . .
Erik: And that's the theta state.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): . . . and I don't even remember where I was going.
Erik: And that's the theta state, seeing those lights, the luminosity.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yes, that generally happens when you're making theta waves. Now it's maybe we should talk a little bit about flow states because something very interesting happens. In the flow state there's whole combinations of things that happens when you're in a flow state, brainwave pattern-wise. Because when you...to get ready to go into a flow state you need to be able to make alpha waves. When you're in a flow state, they found that people were often making...they were making theta waves. I wish I had the picture of this to show people. But inside these theta waves were gamma waves. And so it was a very complex wave form.
So for people that don't know what a flow state is, in a flow state you are kind of firing on all cylinders. Whatever you're doing feels really, really, really good and you seem to be really good at it. And there's no second-guessing, that part of the brain that we talked about that second-guesses and worries and all that is completely shut off. And, in fact, one of the things that happens in terms of your brain is that most parts of your prefrontal cortex actually turn off in a flow state, and only the parts of them that are necessary for doing whatever you're doing remain on. And what that means is that all the bandwidth is laser-focused on one thing and people do really extraordinary things.
A lot of the research on flow states, the original research was done by this guy with a really difficult-to-pronounce name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And his name has about 45 letters in it or something. But he wrote a book called Flow and then he wrote some other books, and they're definitely worth reading about. But then some other people began to do research on this and they were using extreme athletes. They were studying extreme athletes, like these skateboarding stars that here they are over this concrete surface and they're doing all these flips and everything and then landing. I mean they are risking their life. And sometimes some of these guys get really hurt.
Or there are these people that have gotten to the point where they are surfing on 50-, 80-, 100-foot waves doing things that people never thought were possible. Or that they're jumping off with these parasailing things off 100-storey buildings in the middle of Manhattan or doing all kinds of really intense things. And it turns out that the sort of death defying thing throws you, in many cases, into a flow state and allows you to be so laser focused that everything slows down, you know just what to do in order to manage to do whatever you need to do to not die.
Erik: So the brain gets into high gear.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Very much so. It shuts everything down but what you need. And there are really six characteristics of flow state, I'll go into it in just...well, let's do that now.
Erik: Yeah, yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): There's six characteristics of a flow state. The first one is intense and focused concentration on the present moment, you totally go into the present moment. And remember I was talking earlier about worrying and about second-guessing and all that. I mean all of that stuff is turned off. You are intensely focused. And part of the reason you're able to intensely focus is because all the other things that the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain might do are turned off.
So for instance, part of the prefrontal cortex has to do with linear thinking, planning for the future and all that kind of stuff. You're not planning for the future when you are in a flow state. You're just totally in the moment. And so you...I'm a jazz musician. I've had a couple of albums that have been . . .
Erik: Right, right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): . . . really...like launched at number three and number four nationally in radio airplay and everything. So I'm a very good jazz musician, saxophone player. There's no way to improvise well in jazz without going into a flow state because you can't think your way through it, it's going by so fast. Again, this is implicit system versus explicit system. So the explicit system, the linear thinking, planning for the future part of you shuts off because there's so much going on. I couldn't talk right now and say all this stuff if I wasn't in a flow state. Because you can't say all this stuff and be thinking about, "Well, how is this coming across?," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Second-guessing yourself, "What am I going to talk about next," and everything. I'm just sort of kind of letting it come out of me. So the first one is intense and focused concentration on the present moment.
The second characteristic is emerging of action and awareness. A flow state requires you to have immediate feedback, instantaneous ongoing feedback about what you're doing. So your action and your awareness have to merged because all that exists when you're in a flow state is what you're doing and the feedback you're getting about how it's going. And if your mind becomes laser-focused, then everything else is gone and it's like you turned your mind up 500 times in its ability to know exactly what to do.
This is like Babe Ruth used to say, that the fast ball coming up to the plate looked like it was going in slow motion, he could see the seams on the ball. Or Michael Jordan saying that that last second shot, that the whole thing just seemed to take several minutes instead of three seconds. Because when you get into this merging of action and awareness, the second flow characteristic, your mind is so laser-focused that what it can do is easily handled just in the blink of an eye. And anybody can learn to do this. These are changes you can make in your brain that allow you to be one of the kind of people that can do this.
Now the third one we've talked about a little bit already, it's a loss of reflective self-consciousness. When you lose yourself in a task, a part of the brain called the superior frontal gyrus begins to deactivate. It also turns out that it gets deactivated when you're meditating, which is why if you meditate, and of course it's easier to meditate when you use Holosync, you teach your brain how to do this. There's something in your brain that allows you to deactivate that. And if you do it over and over again, you get good at doing it.
Or there are these people that have gotten to the point where they are surfing on 50-, 80-, 100-foot waves doing things that people never thought were possible. Or that they're jumping off with these parasailing things off 100-storey buildings in the middle of Manhattan or doing all kinds of really intense things. And it turns out that the sort of death defying thing throws you, in many cases, into a flow state and allows you to be so laser focused that everything slows down, you know just what to do in order to manage to do whatever you need to do to not die.
Erik: So the brain gets into high gear.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Very much so. It shuts everything down but what you need. And there are really six characteristics of flow state, I'll go into it in just...well, let's do that now.
Erik: Yeah, yeah.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): There's six characteristics of a flow state. The first one is intense and focused concentration on the present moment, you totally go into the present moment. And remember I was talking earlier about worrying and about second-guessing and all that. I mean all of that stuff is turned off. You are intensely focused. And part of the reason you're able to intensely focus is because all the other things that the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain might do are turned off.
So for instance, part of the prefrontal cortex has to do with linear thinking, planning for the future and all that kind of stuff. You're not planning for the future when you are in a flow state. You're just totally in the moment. And so you...I'm a jazz musician. I've had a couple of albums that have been . . .
Erik: Right, right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): . . . really...like launched at number three and number four nationally in radio airplay and everything. So I'm a very good jazz musician, saxophone player. There's no way to improvise well in jazz without going into a flow state because you can't think your way through it, it's going by so fast. Again, this is implicit system versus explicit system. So the explicit system, the linear thinking, planning for the future part of you shuts off because there's so much going on. I couldn't talk right now and say all this stuff if I wasn't in a flow state. Because you can't say all this stuff and be thinking about, "Well, how is this coming across?," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Second-guessing yourself, "What am I going to talk about next," and everything. I'm just sort of kind of letting it come out of me. So the first one is intense and focused concentration on the present moment.
The second characteristic is emerging of action and awareness. A flow state requires you to have immediate feedback, instantaneous ongoing feedback about what you're doing. So your action and your awareness have to merged because all that exists when you're in a flow state is what you're doing and the feedback you're getting about how it's going. And if your mind becomes laser-focused, then everything else is gone and it's like you turned your mind up 500 times in its ability to know exactly what to do.
This is like Babe Ruth used to say, that the fast ball coming up to the plate looked like it was going in slow motion, he could see the seams on the ball. Or Michael Jordan saying that that last second shot, that the whole thing just seemed to take several minutes instead of three seconds. Because when you get into this merging of action and awareness, the second flow characteristic, your mind is so laser-focused that what it can do is easily handled just in the blink of an eye. And anybody can learn to do this. These are changes you can make in your brain that allow you to be one of the kind of people that can do this.
Now the third one we've talked about a little bit already, it's a loss of reflective self-consciousness. When you lose yourself in a task, a part of the brain called the superior frontal gyrus begins to deactivate. It also turns out that it gets deactivated when you're meditating, which is why if you meditate, and of course it's easier to meditate when you use Holosync, you teach your brain how to do this. There's something in your brain that allows you to deactivate that. And if you do it over and over again, you get good at doing it.
Flow States
So when you do this, you act without hesitation, you're getting this immediate feedback so you know just what to do, your implicit system takes over, and whatever you do just flows right through you. And this is a state of extreme happiness, extreme bliss, you feel wonderful while you're doing it. It's amazing.
The fourth characteristic of the flow state is a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity. And this is sort ironic in a way because, when you're in a flow state, you don't really feel like you're doing it. It really feels like it's just flowing through you. You think, "God, I don't know how I'm doing this." But, on the other hand, you do feel this sense of control because you know just what to do.
And the fifth one is there's the distortion of time. This isn't always the same, but usually it seems like time either stands still or slows down, although other things can happen. But it's really being in the moment. And since there really is nothing but the moment, anything else is your ideas about something. When you're in the moment, you feel totally alive. It's the essence of being and feeling alive.
And so the sixth characteristic is I think my favorite. It is that whatever you're doing is intrinsically rewarding for itself. You may have had a goal when you started doing it. I mean I have a goal in talking to you today and so on: I'm parting information to people, I'm letting them know about an amazing tool I have and so on and so forth. However, once you’re in a flow state, whatever you're doing is intrinsically rewarding.
Csikszentmihalyi, in the book Flow, talks about people on assembly lines, where day long they are putting a bolt on something and tightening it and doing something over and over again. And yet they were going into a flow state and were totally happy and enjoying what they were doing. They would create little games about how they would do it. So it doesn't matter what you're doing. So at any rate, you're doing it for itself, you're not doing it for the goal. There may be a goal, but that's not why you're doing it. So those are the six characteristics.
Now to get into a flow state there are...Now, ironically, the first thing you have to do is you have to have some sort of a purpose or a goal. Although it sort of dissolves once you get into it. Second, you have to have this feedback. And the third one, I think, is very interesting and it's probably been the most studied thing about flow, is that there needs to be a balance between the perceived challenge and your perceived skill level. If you do something where it's very challenging, but you don't have the skills because you haven't practiced. In other words, to go into the ultimate flow state, you have to really practice the fundamentals of whatever you want to do.
Like for playing jazz, for instance. The only reason I can go into a flow state when I play jazz is because I practiced for 50 years just about.
Erik: You know how to play.
The fourth characteristic of the flow state is a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity. And this is sort ironic in a way because, when you're in a flow state, you don't really feel like you're doing it. It really feels like it's just flowing through you. You think, "God, I don't know how I'm doing this." But, on the other hand, you do feel this sense of control because you know just what to do.
And the fifth one is there's the distortion of time. This isn't always the same, but usually it seems like time either stands still or slows down, although other things can happen. But it's really being in the moment. And since there really is nothing but the moment, anything else is your ideas about something. When you're in the moment, you feel totally alive. It's the essence of being and feeling alive.
And so the sixth characteristic is I think my favorite. It is that whatever you're doing is intrinsically rewarding for itself. You may have had a goal when you started doing it. I mean I have a goal in talking to you today and so on: I'm parting information to people, I'm letting them know about an amazing tool I have and so on and so forth. However, once you’re in a flow state, whatever you're doing is intrinsically rewarding.
Csikszentmihalyi, in the book Flow, talks about people on assembly lines, where day long they are putting a bolt on something and tightening it and doing something over and over again. And yet they were going into a flow state and were totally happy and enjoying what they were doing. They would create little games about how they would do it. So it doesn't matter what you're doing. So at any rate, you're doing it for itself, you're not doing it for the goal. There may be a goal, but that's not why you're doing it. So those are the six characteristics.
Now to get into a flow state there are...Now, ironically, the first thing you have to do is you have to have some sort of a purpose or a goal. Although it sort of dissolves once you get into it. Second, you have to have this feedback. And the third one, I think, is very interesting and it's probably been the most studied thing about flow, is that there needs to be a balance between the perceived challenge and your perceived skill level. If you do something where it's very challenging, but you don't have the skills because you haven't practiced. In other words, to go into the ultimate flow state, you have to really practice the fundamentals of whatever you want to do.
Like for playing jazz, for instance. The only reason I can go into a flow state when I play jazz is because I practiced for 50 years just about.
Erik: You know how to play.
Jazz
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yeah. But if I'm trying to think while I'm doing it, my playing isn't very good. But if I let the implicit system take over and I go into a flow state, then...so at any rate, when the challenge is just a little bit more than your skill level, that's sort of like being in that situation where you might die. You see? Bu, you see, you could go into that same...you don't need to face death. When I'm playing in front of somebody, I'm not facing death, but I do want to want to make an impression on people. It could be that you see somebody you're attracted to across the room and it kind of scares you, but you're going to go over there and you're going to approach them anyway. And so the challenge and your skill level in approaching this person and talking to them, if there's a balance in that, you can go into a flow state.
If you have more skill than what you are doing, then it just becomes kind of boring. It could be easy or boring. Or if you don't have the skill for something, you could end up being quite anxious. But when you're in that sweet spot where you have high skill level and high challenge level, then, and you've practiced because that's why you have the high skill level, you can go into a flow state.
I tell a story in my book about flying my airplane and getting into this hugely turbulent thing going over the Rocky Mountains and the plane just going like a leaf in the wind. And I'm doing all these things to correct that I never could have thought my way through, they were all automatic. And I lived through it because I went in to a flow state. But it was like I was barely up to the challenge because I had done all this practice and I was able to go into a flow state and here I am today. Here I wouldn't have . . .
Erik: Well, thank goodness you made out through that storm.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yeah, I'm glad about that. So let's see. Well, you must have some questions by now; I've covered a lot of ground.
Erik: I think one of the things we haven't covered is heart rate variability.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Heart rate variability is also related to a lot of the stuff we've been talking about. Another thing we haven't talked about is neuroplasticity. Let me say a little bit about that first, and then we'll talk about heart rate variability. All of this is based on something that is a reasonably new viewpoint of science.
Up until a few decades ago scientists thought that once you're an adult your brain could not change and that you're stuck with the brain that you were born with. It turns out though that your brain is very plastic and that your brain can change in response to your thoughts, your sensory impressions, movements you make, any stimulus. Including meditation or Holosync. Any stimulus that you have repeatedly causes your brain to change, it causes your brain to turn over more brain real estate to whatever it is.
There was an early study that they did where they wired these monkeys up and they made them press this lever over and over with one finger. And then the poor monkeys, they killed them, and they looked in their brains and they found out that the amount of neurons that had been turned over to this particular process of pressing the button was a huge amount compared to monkeys that hadn't had this happen. This is one of the early studies that began to prove that the brain was changeable.
If you have more skill than what you are doing, then it just becomes kind of boring. It could be easy or boring. Or if you don't have the skill for something, you could end up being quite anxious. But when you're in that sweet spot where you have high skill level and high challenge level, then, and you've practiced because that's why you have the high skill level, you can go into a flow state.
I tell a story in my book about flying my airplane and getting into this hugely turbulent thing going over the Rocky Mountains and the plane just going like a leaf in the wind. And I'm doing all these things to correct that I never could have thought my way through, they were all automatic. And I lived through it because I went in to a flow state. But it was like I was barely up to the challenge because I had done all this practice and I was able to go into a flow state and here I am today. Here I wouldn't have . . .
Erik: Well, thank goodness you made out through that storm.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Yeah, I'm glad about that. So let's see. Well, you must have some questions by now; I've covered a lot of ground.
Erik: I think one of the things we haven't covered is heart rate variability.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Heart rate variability is also related to a lot of the stuff we've been talking about. Another thing we haven't talked about is neuroplasticity. Let me say a little bit about that first, and then we'll talk about heart rate variability. All of this is based on something that is a reasonably new viewpoint of science.
Up until a few decades ago scientists thought that once you're an adult your brain could not change and that you're stuck with the brain that you were born with. It turns out though that your brain is very plastic and that your brain can change in response to your thoughts, your sensory impressions, movements you make, any stimulus. Including meditation or Holosync. Any stimulus that you have repeatedly causes your brain to change, it causes your brain to turn over more brain real estate to whatever it is.
There was an early study that they did where they wired these monkeys up and they made them press this lever over and over with one finger. And then the poor monkeys, they killed them, and they looked in their brains and they found out that the amount of neurons that had been turned over to this particular process of pressing the button was a huge amount compared to monkeys that hadn't had this happen. This is one of the early studies that began to prove that the brain was changeable.
Neuroplasticity
So for instance, if you took a concert violinist. And we wouldn't want to kill him, but if you could look at his brain...they probably have ways you could look now. But if you look in his brain, you can see parts in the brain that are involved in moving his fingers to play the violin, hearing the sound, moving the bow with his arm, hearing the other musicians so he can play along with them and all that. And way more real estate in the brain is turned over to those things.
So, also, on the other side of that ledger though, if you get pissed off a lot, you're going to turn over more brain real estate to being pissed off. You'll be really good at getting pissed off and you'll be more likely to do it. If you give in to temptation a lot, more brain real estate involving your limbic system will be turned over to that. So the non-resourceful things that you do, you can also cause your brain to change so that you do more and more of them or you can change your brain so that you could do more and more of the things and behave in ways and feel in the ways that you want to do. So the underlying premise of all of this is that your brain can change.
And a number of years ago I interviewed one of the big experts on this, Dr. Norman Doidge, who's a professor at both the University of Toronto and at Columbia University. And he gave me an interesting metaphor about neuroplasticity. He said when you're first growing up your brain is sort of like a ski slope when there's been a new snowfall. And so as you start to ski, as long as you avoid the rocks and the trees and everything, you can go just about anywhere you want. But the second time you go down, you're more likely to go down the same way you went before. And pretty soon there are tracks that you're more likely to follow, and the tracks eventually become ruts. And some of those ruts might be good ruts.
If you learn to be polite and say "please" and "thank you" and be kind to other people, those would probably be resourceful ruts. But a lot of times we have traumas and losses and things happen and the ruts aren't s good. The good news though is that it was your brain plasticity that allowed you to create those ruts in the first place, but you can recreate them, you can do it over. And the research on the brain and tools like Holosync allow this to be much, much easier. I mean it used to be that people would go to therapy for decades to try to get away from being so reactive in certain situations and so on. Now we can make that happen in a much, much easier way and much more quickly.
So anyway, there's a lot more in the book also about neuroplasticity and, as we said at the beginning, anybody can just get it for free if you look here on this page you're watching this.
So heart rate variability. I have known about heart rate variability for some time, but I hadn't ever really thought about it much in terms of Holosync and these things about the brain. Heart rate variability, it starts off by most people assume that your heart should be beating in a regular way. But it turns out that the more regular your heart beat is, the less healthy your nervous system is. And that right before people have a heart attack, their heart rate becomes really metronome regular and then they die. Not always, but that's what happens right before a heart attack.
So, also, on the other side of that ledger though, if you get pissed off a lot, you're going to turn over more brain real estate to being pissed off. You'll be really good at getting pissed off and you'll be more likely to do it. If you give in to temptation a lot, more brain real estate involving your limbic system will be turned over to that. So the non-resourceful things that you do, you can also cause your brain to change so that you do more and more of them or you can change your brain so that you could do more and more of the things and behave in ways and feel in the ways that you want to do. So the underlying premise of all of this is that your brain can change.
And a number of years ago I interviewed one of the big experts on this, Dr. Norman Doidge, who's a professor at both the University of Toronto and at Columbia University. And he gave me an interesting metaphor about neuroplasticity. He said when you're first growing up your brain is sort of like a ski slope when there's been a new snowfall. And so as you start to ski, as long as you avoid the rocks and the trees and everything, you can go just about anywhere you want. But the second time you go down, you're more likely to go down the same way you went before. And pretty soon there are tracks that you're more likely to follow, and the tracks eventually become ruts. And some of those ruts might be good ruts.
If you learn to be polite and say "please" and "thank you" and be kind to other people, those would probably be resourceful ruts. But a lot of times we have traumas and losses and things happen and the ruts aren't s good. The good news though is that it was your brain plasticity that allowed you to create those ruts in the first place, but you can recreate them, you can do it over. And the research on the brain and tools like Holosync allow this to be much, much easier. I mean it used to be that people would go to therapy for decades to try to get away from being so reactive in certain situations and so on. Now we can make that happen in a much, much easier way and much more quickly.
So anyway, there's a lot more in the book also about neuroplasticity and, as we said at the beginning, anybody can just get it for free if you look here on this page you're watching this.
So heart rate variability. I have known about heart rate variability for some time, but I hadn't ever really thought about it much in terms of Holosync and these things about the brain. Heart rate variability, it starts off by most people assume that your heart should be beating in a regular way. But it turns out that the more regular your heart beat is, the less healthy your nervous system is. And that right before people have a heart attack, their heart rate becomes really metronome regular and then they die. Not always, but that's what happens right before a heart attack.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
And it turns out that having a certain amount of irregularity between the beats of your heart...not a ton of irregularity. But instead of having beat 1 second, 1 second, 1 second, it might be 1 second, 0.8 seconds, 0.85 seconds, 1.02 seconds, there's some irregularity. And the people that have the greatest heart rate variability they have found are...I'm going to take off my glasses. The people that have the greatest amount of heart rate variability they found so far are elite athletes. Not all of them have high what's called the HRV, but many of them do. So a lot of the study of HRV has been with these elite athletes.
At any rate, this has to do with something we've already talked about, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. When you breathe in, you activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight and so on. It's not all bad. The sympathetic nervous system is focus, alertness, that sort of thing. It's just in an extreme case it becomes fight or flight. When you breathe in, you stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. When you breathe out, you stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system.
Some people, for instance, will breathe in, do a kind of yoga breathing thing where they breathe in for like 4 seconds and then breathe out more slowly for 16 seconds, something like that, so that you're more enhancing the parasympathetic nervous system. And if you do that, you actually become much calmer. Certain meditation schools have people do that for a while before they meditate to begin the calming process.
So the heart rate variability is sort of a give and take between parasympathetic and sympathetic. When your heart beats faster, it's the sympathetic nervous system being increased. When your heart rate slows down, it's the parasympathetic relaxation response part of your nervous system.
So I spoke, I gave a keynote address at...is Dave Asprey one of your guests on this thing?
Erik: Dave is not in this conference at this point.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, you should get him sometime. He is the guy most associated with something they called biohacking, which is really the idea of enhancing every part of your life: your brain, your diet, your exercise and all this sort of thing. And boy, you get around a group of people like I saw at this conference and they all look healthy and there's no people that are fat. But anyway, I gave this talk there. And they had kind of an expo floor where there were these biohacking tools; you could call Holosync a biohacking tool.
Erik: Right.
At any rate, this has to do with something we've already talked about, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. When you breathe in, you activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight and so on. It's not all bad. The sympathetic nervous system is focus, alertness, that sort of thing. It's just in an extreme case it becomes fight or flight. When you breathe in, you stimulate the sympathetic nervous system. When you breathe out, you stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system.
Some people, for instance, will breathe in, do a kind of yoga breathing thing where they breathe in for like 4 seconds and then breathe out more slowly for 16 seconds, something like that, so that you're more enhancing the parasympathetic nervous system. And if you do that, you actually become much calmer. Certain meditation schools have people do that for a while before they meditate to begin the calming process.
So the heart rate variability is sort of a give and take between parasympathetic and sympathetic. When your heart beats faster, it's the sympathetic nervous system being increased. When your heart rate slows down, it's the parasympathetic relaxation response part of your nervous system.
So I spoke, I gave a keynote address at...is Dave Asprey one of your guests on this thing?
Erik: Dave is not in this conference at this point.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, you should get him sometime. He is the guy most associated with something they called biohacking, which is really the idea of enhancing every part of your life: your brain, your diet, your exercise and all this sort of thing. And boy, you get around a group of people like I saw at this conference and they all look healthy and there's no people that are fat. But anyway, I gave this talk there. And they had kind of an expo floor where there were these biohacking tools; you could call Holosync a biohacking tool.
Erik: Right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): And somebody that was going to have...this one company that had a heart rate variability monitor...although I didn't really pay that much attention, I didn't even know that's what it was until they said, "Will you wear this monitor that we have while you're at this conference to measure this stuff?" And I thought, "Uh-uh. What if I don't look that good? What if I'm exposed as...I'm supposed to have all this brainwaves and all this sort of stuff. What if this shows me to be a total fraud?"
Erik: Right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): So anyway, when I got there, I went to their booth and they hooked me up with this little heart rate monitor and gave me this app that they have which is called SweetBeat, I believe, and it measures your heart rate variability. So then at the end of that thing they...about three days later they took me aside and said, "Well, we thought at first we we're going to have to throw away this data, it looks so weird. We haven't seen really data that looks like this, some of these." But it turned out that I was the only that they had ever measured, other than these elite athletes, that had this super, super high heart rate variability. So I thought, "Oh, I'm not exposed as being some sort of a..."
But then I found out that the woman who owned this company, Ronda Collier, that she had been a Holosync user for several years and that's why she wanted me to measure this with me. Because in my book I show some screenshots of some things from this app where somebody is meditating, an experienced traditional meditator, and I don't even remember what these units are. But their heart rate variability increased to about 695. 695 what, I don't remember.
Erik: Right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Although I should find that out. Then she had a person listening to Holosync, I think it was her. And hers was, I think it went up to about 6,000 or something. Considerably higher than the regular meditator. And then she showed me mine, which went up way over 12,000. It was 18 times higher heart rate variability than the traditional meditator. And not only that, actually the readings I had even when I wasn't meditating were super high. They were way, way, way high. And so I didn't even realize that Holosync had any relationship with this.
Now it turns out that what this measures is resilience, it's your threshold for stress. In other words, what does it take to throw your limbic system into high gear so that you're over your threshold, you're freaking out and you're not doing things based on your ability to self-regulate? So it has to do with here's your prefrontal cortex regulating things. And as long as it has little more power than your limbic system over here, you feel pretty good and you can override the dumb stuff that your limbic system wants to do. But when you go over your threshold, and this would be your heart rate variability being lower, too. Then your limbic system is more in control.
So it turns out that when your heart rate variability is high, you have a high threshold for stress, you are more resilient, you can bounce back from things that happened. And overall, the way the people that are experts on this describe it, the higher your heart rate variability, the more healthy your nervous system is.
Erik: Right.
Erik: Right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): So anyway, when I got there, I went to their booth and they hooked me up with this little heart rate monitor and gave me this app that they have which is called SweetBeat, I believe, and it measures your heart rate variability. So then at the end of that thing they...about three days later they took me aside and said, "Well, we thought at first we we're going to have to throw away this data, it looks so weird. We haven't seen really data that looks like this, some of these." But it turned out that I was the only that they had ever measured, other than these elite athletes, that had this super, super high heart rate variability. So I thought, "Oh, I'm not exposed as being some sort of a..."
But then I found out that the woman who owned this company, Ronda Collier, that she had been a Holosync user for several years and that's why she wanted me to measure this with me. Because in my book I show some screenshots of some things from this app where somebody is meditating, an experienced traditional meditator, and I don't even remember what these units are. But their heart rate variability increased to about 695. 695 what, I don't remember.
Erik: Right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Although I should find that out. Then she had a person listening to Holosync, I think it was her. And hers was, I think it went up to about 6,000 or something. Considerably higher than the regular meditator. And then she showed me mine, which went up way over 12,000. It was 18 times higher heart rate variability than the traditional meditator. And not only that, actually the readings I had even when I wasn't meditating were super high. They were way, way, way high. And so I didn't even realize that Holosync had any relationship with this.
Now it turns out that what this measures is resilience, it's your threshold for stress. In other words, what does it take to throw your limbic system into high gear so that you're over your threshold, you're freaking out and you're not doing things based on your ability to self-regulate? So it has to do with here's your prefrontal cortex regulating things. And as long as it has little more power than your limbic system over here, you feel pretty good and you can override the dumb stuff that your limbic system wants to do. But when you go over your threshold, and this would be your heart rate variability being lower, too. Then your limbic system is more in control.
So it turns out that when your heart rate variability is high, you have a high threshold for stress, you are more resilient, you can bounce back from things that happened. And overall, the way the people that are experts on this describe it, the higher your heart rate variability, the more healthy your nervous system is.
Erik: Right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): And the only reason that I have all this geeky stuff in my head right now because I just finished writing this book and kind of right on the tip of my tongue.
Erik: Right, right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): We'll see how much the details last as the months go by. But some really fascinating stuff about how the brain is related to all these states of enhanced emotional health, enhanced focus and concentration, enhanced performance, lower stress levels, feelings of oneness, getting along with people better, feeling lots of compassion for other people, all these things. And then the methods for creating those enhancements in the brain, and the age old one is to meditate in a traditional way. And then we have this way that we figured out how to recreate the same changes in the brain using technology which really accelerates the process.
And so I'm kind of an evangelist for...here's what I'm trying to do. I haven't even used this word in this, I can't believe it, in this presentation. The overall term I use to describe all this stuff is "awareness." That's why I say The New Science of Super-Awareness. When you are aware while you're doing something, you see what you're doing, you see the potential consequences, all of this as it's happening. When you're unaware, all of this stuff happens on autopilot, depending on how your brain is programmed by your prior experiences.
So if you're eating crappy food or blowing off your exercise, or doing this or doing that, or getting pissed off or whatever you're doing, or doing positive things, it's if you're not...if you don't have this kind of awareness, it's all happening on autopilot. Now your brain is designed to work on autopilot, it's supposed to work on autopilot. And the stuff that is resourceful that works well, then leave it alone. But the stuff that doesn't work well, once you start observing yourself, creating it with awareness, it becomes a choice. In fact, the thing I say most often is awareness creates choice. Which is another way of saying if you're aware enough, your prefrontal cortex will exercise intelligent oversight over what you do, what you say, what you feel, all those sorts of things.
So I've kind of become an evangelist for this. My good friend Dr. Daniel Amen says he wants to cause people to have brain envy. He does all these brain scans on people. And then if you have your brain scanned, which I have had it scanned three times actually by Daniel. And then you can see the parts of your brain that aren't as good as some of the other people that have even better brain scans, then you get brain envy.
I'm trying to have people have awareness envy. Because, as far as I'm concerned, awareness provides the solution to all human problems that have a solution. Some don't. There are some things about life that we can't do anything about. You can't do anything about weather. I mean wear or take an umbrella. But the sun, gravity, all those things, earthquakes, whatever, you can't do anything about that. You can't do anything about what most other people do and you can't do anything about the fact that everything comes into being, exists for a while, and then falls apart, goes away, ends in some way. Everything is in [inaudible 01:51:46]
So there's a lot of things to suffer over built into life, it's just the way it is. And so what we're really interested in doing is creating choice by changing the brain over the things you can have a choice about. As I'm telling you this, this is very interesting to me because this is the part that I usually start with, and I'm ending with it. But there are four things I found that you could have a choice about if you have enough awareness to see yourself create them as you do it. And the reason you could have a choice about these four things is because they come from you, you create them. They originate through internal cognitive events that come from you.
Now if they're coming from you but they are happening outside your awareness, you have no choice about them. Awareness creates choice, but autopilot is not a choice. That doesn't mean that everything that happens is bad. If you have some things on autopilot that were set up in a good way, like you were taught to be polite and kind and so on, then that's great. So at any rate, awareness creates choice. And would you like to know the four things that you could have a choice about?
Erik: Right, right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): We'll see how much the details last as the months go by. But some really fascinating stuff about how the brain is related to all these states of enhanced emotional health, enhanced focus and concentration, enhanced performance, lower stress levels, feelings of oneness, getting along with people better, feeling lots of compassion for other people, all these things. And then the methods for creating those enhancements in the brain, and the age old one is to meditate in a traditional way. And then we have this way that we figured out how to recreate the same changes in the brain using technology which really accelerates the process.
And so I'm kind of an evangelist for...here's what I'm trying to do. I haven't even used this word in this, I can't believe it, in this presentation. The overall term I use to describe all this stuff is "awareness." That's why I say The New Science of Super-Awareness. When you are aware while you're doing something, you see what you're doing, you see the potential consequences, all of this as it's happening. When you're unaware, all of this stuff happens on autopilot, depending on how your brain is programmed by your prior experiences.
So if you're eating crappy food or blowing off your exercise, or doing this or doing that, or getting pissed off or whatever you're doing, or doing positive things, it's if you're not...if you don't have this kind of awareness, it's all happening on autopilot. Now your brain is designed to work on autopilot, it's supposed to work on autopilot. And the stuff that is resourceful that works well, then leave it alone. But the stuff that doesn't work well, once you start observing yourself, creating it with awareness, it becomes a choice. In fact, the thing I say most often is awareness creates choice. Which is another way of saying if you're aware enough, your prefrontal cortex will exercise intelligent oversight over what you do, what you say, what you feel, all those sorts of things.
So I've kind of become an evangelist for this. My good friend Dr. Daniel Amen says he wants to cause people to have brain envy. He does all these brain scans on people. And then if you have your brain scanned, which I have had it scanned three times actually by Daniel. And then you can see the parts of your brain that aren't as good as some of the other people that have even better brain scans, then you get brain envy.
I'm trying to have people have awareness envy. Because, as far as I'm concerned, awareness provides the solution to all human problems that have a solution. Some don't. There are some things about life that we can't do anything about. You can't do anything about weather. I mean wear or take an umbrella. But the sun, gravity, all those things, earthquakes, whatever, you can't do anything about that. You can't do anything about what most other people do and you can't do anything about the fact that everything comes into being, exists for a while, and then falls apart, goes away, ends in some way. Everything is in [inaudible 01:51:46]
So there's a lot of things to suffer over built into life, it's just the way it is. And so what we're really interested in doing is creating choice by changing the brain over the things you can have a choice about. As I'm telling you this, this is very interesting to me because this is the part that I usually start with, and I'm ending with it. But there are four things I found that you could have a choice about if you have enough awareness to see yourself create them as you do it. And the reason you could have a choice about these four things is because they come from you, you create them. They originate through internal cognitive events that come from you.
Now if they're coming from you but they are happening outside your awareness, you have no choice about them. Awareness creates choice, but autopilot is not a choice. That doesn't mean that everything that happens is bad. If you have some things on autopilot that were set up in a good way, like you were taught to be polite and kind and so on, then that's great. So at any rate, awareness creates choice. And would you like to know the four things that you could have a choice about?
Erik: Yeah, what are they?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I bet you would. Well, the first one is how you feel, your feelings and other internal states. Those are actually generated by certain internal cognitive events that you're doing all the time. And if they are happening outside your awareness, they just happen and they seem like they're just happening. But if you're creating them with awareness and a feeling or other internal state starts to come along that you know is not resourceful, it's a choice and you choose not to do it. It's as simple as that.
The second one is your behavior. I mean how often do we fail to behave when we know we want to or we behave in ways that we later regret? As long as your behavior is being generated outside your awareness, you kind of take what you get. So how you feel and how you behave can be a choice. The more awareness you have, the more they are choice.
The third thing is which people and situations you attract or become attracted to. Almost everybody notices that they keep attracting the same sort of person that they don't like. "Why do I keep running into these kinds of people? Why do I keep running into dishonest people?" If you have a thing, a trauma that had to do with certain human characteristics, like I've always attracted people that would scold me because my mother and my grandmother both scolded me and I had a lot of traumatic stuff from being a little kid being scolded. And so I got, "Why do I keep running into these jerks who are always scolding people?" But that's what happens.
So anyway, I also want to make the point though: every single person that comes into your life isn't someone that you "attracted." Sometimes people just randomly come into your life. But there are things that you do that give off cues to people that draw them to you, and there are ways that you pick up cues that other people are giving off. So when that's happening outside your awareness, who you end up with is not a choice, and which situations you end up in. So the more aware you are, the more that becomes a choice and the more you end up with the people and the situations that are resourceful that you want.
So the fourth thing is which meanings that you assign to what happens. Some of you probably already know this, but nothing really means anything. We assign meanings to things. Which is why you can be in a situation and it means one thing to Erik, but it means something different to me. Because we have different nervous systems and different experiences. So meanings are not intrinsic to whatever is out there.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I bet you would. Well, the first one is how you feel, your feelings and other internal states. Those are actually generated by certain internal cognitive events that you're doing all the time. And if they are happening outside your awareness, they just happen and they seem like they're just happening. But if you're creating them with awareness and a feeling or other internal state starts to come along that you know is not resourceful, it's a choice and you choose not to do it. It's as simple as that.
The second one is your behavior. I mean how often do we fail to behave when we know we want to or we behave in ways that we later regret? As long as your behavior is being generated outside your awareness, you kind of take what you get. So how you feel and how you behave can be a choice. The more awareness you have, the more they are choice.
The third thing is which people and situations you attract or become attracted to. Almost everybody notices that they keep attracting the same sort of person that they don't like. "Why do I keep running into these kinds of people? Why do I keep running into dishonest people?" If you have a thing, a trauma that had to do with certain human characteristics, like I've always attracted people that would scold me because my mother and my grandmother both scolded me and I had a lot of traumatic stuff from being a little kid being scolded. And so I got, "Why do I keep running into these jerks who are always scolding people?" But that's what happens.
So anyway, I also want to make the point though: every single person that comes into your life isn't someone that you "attracted." Sometimes people just randomly come into your life. But there are things that you do that give off cues to people that draw them to you, and there are ways that you pick up cues that other people are giving off. So when that's happening outside your awareness, who you end up with is not a choice, and which situations you end up in. So the more aware you are, the more that becomes a choice and the more you end up with the people and the situations that are resourceful that you want.
So the fourth thing is which meanings that you assign to what happens. Some of you probably already know this, but nothing really means anything. We assign meanings to things. Which is why you can be in a situation and it means one thing to Erik, but it means something different to me. Because we have different nervous systems and different experiences. So meanings are not intrinsic to whatever is out there.
Meaning and Awareness
A lot of times we share meanings because we have a similar cultural background, but meanings are assigned. And if you assign meanings, something happens and you say, "Oh, that means I'm stupid," or, "That means I'll never succeed," or, "That means I should probably quit trying to do this because I'm just not good at it." Many people unconsciously outside their awareness assign meanings that are not resourceful at all. And it seems to them that they are saying something that's true, that it is an intrinsic quality they have or that some other person has or that the situation has.
I have a friend who thinks that all public gatherings where they have to be around other people are scary. But that's a meaning she's assigning to it. But to her it just seems like, "What are you talking about? They are scary." So when that becomes a choice, then you, again, choose not to assign meanings that are not resourceful and you stop sabotaging yourself.
So the four things, again, that you could have a choice about are how you feel, how you behave, which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and what meanings you assign to what's happening. And so that's the goal, is to have the maximum amount of choice in your life, and you do that by increasing your awareness. And you increase your awareness by changing your brain, and you change your brain by enhancing your prefrontal cortex.
I'm simplifying this to some extent, but by enhancing your prefrontal cortex, calming your amygdala, creating new pathways between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and between the two sides of your brain so that you are looking at the world and your situation from an aware perspective. From a higher spot on the mountain, you might say.
So that's pretty much it.
Erik: Bill, thank you so much. I just I really want to honor you and acknowledge everything that you've done and bringing this technology to the world, helping so many people and for sharing all this information with us. It's really been wonderful. I've been kind of quiet and listening because you have so much to say and so much that people want to hear.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I'm a chatterbox. It's hard to get a word in edgewise.
Erik: Oh, it's wonderful. It's wonderful.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): People that heard this, you might want to listen to this more than once. I know you have a way that people can get the whole package of all these talks and I know this is only the first one, but I'm sure there will be a number of these that people would benefit by listening to several times. There's so much information in this. And get my book, too. I mean it's free, what the heck. And I'm giving it away because I just want to get this out there. And it will make way more sense and sync in when you read the book.
Erik: That's great. And you also have, we're providing a link to your website where folks can learn more about Holosync. And how do people get started with the Holosync program if they want to learn to use this technology?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, you can go and find out more about it on our website, and the link is there with the link to get the book. Also in the book there are links to other videos that I have about flow states and heart rate variability and different things. And there are links to go to to listen to a free demo of Holosync so you can experience what it feels like. And if you're already saying, "Hey, I want to do that," just click on the link. I don't know where it is on the screen, but just click on the link there and you can go and get started right away. And it will be very valuable to you to read the book, too, as you get started.
I have a friend who thinks that all public gatherings where they have to be around other people are scary. But that's a meaning she's assigning to it. But to her it just seems like, "What are you talking about? They are scary." So when that becomes a choice, then you, again, choose not to assign meanings that are not resourceful and you stop sabotaging yourself.
So the four things, again, that you could have a choice about are how you feel, how you behave, which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and what meanings you assign to what's happening. And so that's the goal, is to have the maximum amount of choice in your life, and you do that by increasing your awareness. And you increase your awareness by changing your brain, and you change your brain by enhancing your prefrontal cortex.
I'm simplifying this to some extent, but by enhancing your prefrontal cortex, calming your amygdala, creating new pathways between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and between the two sides of your brain so that you are looking at the world and your situation from an aware perspective. From a higher spot on the mountain, you might say.
So that's pretty much it.
Erik: Bill, thank you so much. I just I really want to honor you and acknowledge everything that you've done and bringing this technology to the world, helping so many people and for sharing all this information with us. It's really been wonderful. I've been kind of quiet and listening because you have so much to say and so much that people want to hear.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): I'm a chatterbox. It's hard to get a word in edgewise.
Erik: Oh, it's wonderful. It's wonderful.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): People that heard this, you might want to listen to this more than once. I know you have a way that people can get the whole package of all these talks and I know this is only the first one, but I'm sure there will be a number of these that people would benefit by listening to several times. There's so much information in this. And get my book, too. I mean it's free, what the heck. And I'm giving it away because I just want to get this out there. And it will make way more sense and sync in when you read the book.
Erik: That's great. And you also have, we're providing a link to your website where folks can learn more about Holosync. And how do people get started with the Holosync program if they want to learn to use this technology?
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, you can go and find out more about it on our website, and the link is there with the link to get the book. Also in the book there are links to other videos that I have about flow states and heart rate variability and different things. And there are links to go to to listen to a free demo of Holosync so you can experience what it feels like. And if you're already saying, "Hey, I want to do that," just click on the link. I don't know where it is on the screen, but just click on the link there and you can go and get started right away. And it will be very valuable to you to read the book, too, as you get started.
Erik: Well, Bill, thank you again. It's been a privilege and an honor to speak with you and so thank you for joining us at Psychology of the Future, and thanks for helping to promote the conference to your community, as well. We're looking to have a lot more folks learn about other folks who will be in the summit, and so you and I will be in touch after our call just to check in.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, I appreciate the invitation.
Erik: All right.
Bill Harris (Centerpointe, Holosync): Well, I appreciate the invitation.
Erik: All right.
