Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 6 - Neurohacking Your Way to Heavy Sleep with Pete Herzog
51 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of CyberPsych, Dr. Stacy Thayer talks with Pete Herzog, co-founder of The Institute for Security and Open Methodologies, about the release of his new neurohacking album, Heavy Sleep, for insomnia and anxiety-induced sleeplessness and how AI, neurohacking, and music can help you get better sleep.
Heavy Sleep Album can be found on Spotify
Contact us here: https://netography.com/contact/ #Netography
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Cyber Psych and Autography podcast, where we talk with industry professionals about the human side of technology and how it relates to security and how it impacts your overall business. I'm your host, Dr. Stacey Thayer, and I'm a cyber psychologist and senior manager of research and engagement and photography. I'm really excited today to welcome our guest, Pete Herzog.
00:00:34
Speaker
Pete is the co-founder of the Institute for Security and Open Methodology user, isetcom.org, urban.ai, research and development, the invisibles.cap music, AI music, and creator of OSSTM. He's a discreet problem solver, a straight shooter, security researcher, and hacker. He lives by the motto,
00:00:54
Speaker
hack everything, but arm none. It's over 30 years of security experience and is applied as hacking techniques from everything to AI and Zero
Pete Herzog's Background
00:01:02
Speaker
Trust. So obviously has no social life by doing all of that. So we're really excited to welcome you here today. Hi Pete, how are you? Hi, finally great to get on your podcast. It's something I've been waiting for and bugging you about. Well, I'm super excited to have you and I'm really
00:01:21
Speaker
Fascinated to learn about what it is that you're even working on which has been this biohacking album So you can describe it far better than I can so tell us what you're what you're working on and what it's about
00:01:33
Speaker
Okay, sure. So, it's neuro-hacking is what we call it. Neuro-hacking. And it started about 2009, I think we started looking into it, playing with neuro-hacking and sort of spin off from social engineering. How do you make people react biologically to sounds and lights and things like that? We're looking at how can you change brain chemistry, not necessarily through drugs, right?
00:01:57
Speaker
So we were looking at all sorts of stuff, mostly because what we found was that there was this huge push for security awareness that just wasn't working. And billions were being spent on security awareness training that was going
Challenges in Security Awareness
00:02:10
Speaker
nowhere. They weren't patching humans at all. They were just sort of...
00:02:15
Speaker
you know, checking a box that said, okay, we trained them. And you can see this now because really fishing is the main attack vector always of some sort, some kind of social engineering or fishing. And of course, cybercrime itself on average people, on your regular citizens is through the roof.
00:02:40
Speaker
And this all comes down to how we react to things, right? How we handle ourselves in stress and danger and things like that.
What is Neuro-Hacking?
00:02:50
Speaker
So again, most of your listeners probably know enough about social engineering to know why it works and how it works. I'm not going to dumb this down and try to explain anything.
00:03:02
Speaker
This is the direction we went. And so we sort of did this deep dive and we created this thing called SALT, Security Awareness Learning Tactics, which was how do we improve security awareness? And what we found was it was more about changing your environment, which makes absolute sense. I mean, restaurants do it, how they paint the walls, what color are the chairs, things like that. And you see that prisons do it. There's real method to what you do in the environment.
00:03:28
Speaker
Then we still hadn't gotten to music yet. Then COVID happened and we were, you know, some of our, actually all of my travel stopped, right? And I couldn't do any of the assessments that we usually do, you know, couldn't do any consulting.
Impact of Distractions on Performance
00:03:47
Speaker
And we had some time and of course distractions was a big problem.
00:03:51
Speaker
And I started researching distractions because I was working from home and I have family and there's noise and neighbors and stuff. So I was looking up what to do and I came across a study that they said in the UK, they attributed 40% of mistakes made at a specific hospital was contributed to distraction. And so doctors, nurses making mistakes and I thought,
00:04:19
Speaker
can't be, you know? And so they were talking about measures that they could make, you know, checklists and things like that, that they would follow and, yeah, all good things, you know, do a routine. But of course, that doesn't help when, you know, the craft fits the fan, right? So once that happens, normal processes and reasoning kind of go out. And of course, distractions happen. And they were also talking about background chatter of guests and
00:04:45
Speaker
visitors and things like that. So I was thinking, yeah, how would they change their environment, which is exactly what I needed. And so we started talking about it and I did a deep dive into focus. We had some AI tools that we had developed through Ervin.
00:05:01
Speaker
Which allowed us to take now this is preach at gpt craze right so we could take i can download tons of documents about you know focus attention psychological diseases behind this and and i would just read it.
00:05:19
Speaker
And I could just ask it questions and it would come back with the answers for me. And then I could go through a lot more studies than I could, which, you know, reading on my own, which is what we always did before. So I could accumulate lots of information, just downloading from Google Scholar and PubMed and stuff and throwing it in there.
00:05:41
Speaker
And it turned out that sound was something you could address and something you could
Can Music Enhance Focus?
00:05:45
Speaker
do. And of course, there's a, you know, if you go to Google, there's a ton of pseudoscience and, you know, the god sound and all this, you know,
00:05:55
Speaker
a lot of myth. I mean, there's always a fraction of truth to it, but it's always, they build it out around this kernel of truth and into this bigger myth. And so we dove into it and I started building a template of what it should sound like. And of course, it sounds like crap. It sounds like static and cat screeches and stuff. So it's absolutely terrible. And I was friends with
00:06:23
Speaker
the lead singer-songwriter from a local band here. Well, they're pretty big, actually, here in Spain. And I was telling him about it. And I said, what do you think we could make music from this? And he said, well, let me look at the template of what the range of sounds are, what we have to do, and the rhythm, the tones, the beats, the instruments. So I said, all right, yeah, see what you can do. And he took a look at it. His name's Chabi.
00:06:52
Speaker
He spent some time and he came back with some songs, with some sounds, you know, that sounded nice. And I was like, huh, this is interesting. So we spent a lot of time tweaking it and going back and forth, and we decided to build an album so that you had something to put on headphones and sort of get away.
Creating Focus Music with Musicians
00:07:12
Speaker
And it was, we had talked to neuroscientists about it, and if we were going in the right direction, because obviously I didn't want to make claims, I didn't want to be, you know,
00:07:22
Speaker
like a, what do they call them, Jim Bros, you know, who's just like, oh, take the supplement. And, you know, like, I didn't want to do that, right? I wanted to have some substance behind it. And yeah, we went back and forth and we talked to, I knew a couple of neuroscientists that we had talked to and shared it around and yeah, really just tested
00:07:49
Speaker
the hell out of it, you know, with everybody we knew. And they were like, this is amazing, this is amazing. And the thing is, like, it's not just a sound that you do, like, there's a process to it, you know, it's, there's a lead in and there's what happens. And what we found was that
00:08:05
Speaker
One of the biggest distractions means you're attentively always seeking dopamine. Do I hear that sound? Is that somebody I know? Is there something more I could be doing? Is there something more fun? So distraction means losing focus. And of course, we're always being pulled away by...
00:08:23
Speaker
you know, hormonally by wanting this dopamine hit of something we know. And normal music, obviously successful or what you would call, I should say successful pop music, feeds that dopamine, right? So it makes you want to move and you like it. But of course you get sick of it after a certain amount of time. Like there's only so many times you can hear the song happy, you know, before you want to...
00:08:45
Speaker
blow your head off, and that's probably wrong to say, but figuratively, I'm saying. Yes. When it gets stuck in your head, you have that earworm. How do you get it out? Yes. It turns out for focus, you want to starve the brain of dopamine. You want the only joy you get to be from the job you're doing. That is what you're sucking up. You block out other sounds,
00:09:12
Speaker
And then you just suck with the dopamine. And to do that means your brain can't get reward from the music.
Personal Experiences with Focus Music
00:09:19
Speaker
And so what ends up happening is if you've tried writing a paper or you've tried doing some kind of works even with house cleaning, if you have a task that you have to do, you put on the music. And I don't know if it's half a minute, minute, two minutes, but at some point you stop hearing the music. Like it doesn't
00:09:42
Speaker
It's not enjoyable to you. You just do your thing. And the music sort of fades away. I've done this for driving in the rain. So I had a long drive once to do and we're driving in the rain. And I only put it on because my son had to study for an exam when we got it. So he had this long car trip and he had to study for the exam before we got back home. And so I put on the music because he couldn't focus.
00:10:08
Speaker
and he studied. But what I found was that the rhythm of the rain when you drive and the sound of the tires, it puts you to sleep. And for me, all that time just passed. It was just
00:10:21
Speaker
I have no recollection in that sense of the droning and the sleepiness of the lung drive in the dark rain. It's zoned out, as they
Overstimulation and Tradition
00:10:31
Speaker
say. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really powerful to change your environment and its effect on your behaviors. I mean, this is not new. Most people remember Muzak, right? That was playing in restaurants and elevators. Elevators, yeah.
00:10:49
Speaker
They have tons of data.
00:10:51
Speaker
on what makes you buy more chewing gum or what makes you order more food or based on the songs that we're playing, you know? Well, in the world today, right now, everything, the technology that we have, it's designed to distract you and to give you that dopamine hit. I mean, your phone, just your very phone is a little dopamine making machine, like every notification, every ding, every, you know, Slack messages, email. Like when I hear you talk about, you know, imagine no distractions, I'm like,
00:11:22
Speaker
What would that be like? I mean let alone you know, then of course, you know life of kids running through and and You know, you're just your own life. I want my drink of coffee. I want water It that's it's I almost kind of can't imagine what that's like and then especially also we become really addicted to the dopamine so
00:11:45
Speaker
to turn that off and to not crave it, to not seek it. And I know we'll get into the sleep part too because I have trouble sleeping and I listen to audiobooks and I have questions about that and everything.
00:12:02
Speaker
It's fascinating to me and also as you tie it back because it's so true. Here we are as security professionals who our computers are designed to distract us. It's one distraction right after the other. So as people who are responsible for security,
00:12:19
Speaker
Getting distracted from the ability to focus or writing code, being able to write secure code, being able to write good code takes that amount of focus. I've always known a lot of people work really well late at night. Why? Because it's quiet, because people aren't calling because there's some sanity to it at that time of day or night.
00:12:41
Speaker
You're full of whatever attention, alertness, chemicals in your body. At the end of the day, you don't care. That's why you don't check your phone as often at night usually because you're just done with the day. Overstimulated is my word of the day. Sorry, I can't. My brain literally, I feel it. I can't cram one more thing. By the time my husband says, what do you want for dinner? I'm like, food.
00:13:10
Speaker
I want food to magically appear because I lack all executive function right now. See, that's why I believe tradition became a thing because tradition, like as a kid, you're like, oh, we're eating that again on Christmas or we're eating that again. And as an adult who just can't anymore, right? You just can't. You're just like, no, we're doing the same thing, same exact thing we did every year. So I don't have to think about it. I still have the shopping list. Let's just use that, you know.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yeah, yes. Yeah. I don't
Office Version of Focus Music
00:13:40
Speaker
want hot dogs. Tough. That's what we have. That's what that's what's there.
00:13:44
Speaker
You know, it's not a menu restaurant. Yeah, no, no. Yeah, because we are overstimulated. And yes, we do it to ourselves. Yes, the job does it to us. And so one of the things we ended up doing was we made an office version of the of the focus one that lasted two hours. So it was extended versions of the songs. And so the normal album is what, I think 50 minutes and
00:14:08
Speaker
But this was over two hours. Their extended versions of songs do the same thing. And the idea was to play in an office setting to help minimize distractions, especially, let's say, a sock or a place where you really order a hospital, where you have to have people focus. It's built for speakers. You know, you play it in the background and you just let it do its thing. You change your environment. The thing is, is that
00:14:37
Speaker
Even though it is used in some places, I think people don't embrace it because it seems like magic or pseudoscience. And I get that. It's hard to grasp at new things. I don't know. I use it. I pipe it through the house sometimes on Saturday cleaning days. There's things you do, and I write with it all the time.
00:15:05
Speaker
And I don't really get sick of it because you don't really hear it after first few songs. When you have to train the brain, you know, it's like that Pavlovian response almost, you know, the first time the rat heard the little bell, it didn't know what was going on, right? It took time.
00:15:21
Speaker
for the brain to learn behavior. It's why we don't make change easily. And so I imagine then this is something that maybe it takes a little bit to train your brain to turn off or what not to do, but that your brains are amazing. They can learn how to recognize and response even if our consciousness isn't making the choice.
00:15:46
Speaker
Right. I mean, there's so many brain scan studies that show that your brain is making decisions without you, you know, like how you follow things, what you do. I mean, we're just meat puppets, right? So stay to our brains. So I don't know. I always thought that changing the environment and people were like, well, you want to play the same two hour song in a loop in an office. And I was like, have you ever worked in a restaurant? I mean, if you've ever been a waiter or a cook or
00:16:13
Speaker
You have to hear that same song, that same two-hour track, the whole shift, that same horrible musack or whatever it is they play. It's very normal. I said, this is the thing. I don't know. It's worth trying. We played around with putting in training videos. As the background music, we played around with a little bit. I'm putting it into TikToks and things like that.
00:16:43
Speaker
Like you said, I'm doing a lot of different things and you've just scratched the surface of all the things we try. That's the one thing I do love doing is building new tech. We do a lot of that. I just don't follow up with marketing and sales like I should at all. We just have this tech that just sits there. We have so many cool things that are just sitting there.
00:17:07
Speaker
Yeah, and then we get a new idea and we try the next one. But we're always building things and then they just, we put it out there and we don't let people know that's the biggest problem, you know? Yeah, the awareness. Yeah, the awareness of getting
Neurohacking vs. Neuroscience
00:17:20
Speaker
around. Well, so now when you talk about neurohacking, right? And how do you differentiate that from neuroscience or biohacking or neurohacking? I mean, all of the kind of different words. How is it that you define that niche?
00:17:38
Speaker
I think in neuroscience, and again, I talked to a few neuroscientists. We don't have to make a hypothesis and try it out. And then if it fails, there's no loss there. So in real neuroscience, you're hired to do a job.
00:18:05
Speaker
and you try for an hypothesis and you take it where you can and as far as you can and
00:18:10
Speaker
And of course, they don't want things to fail. So if they do, you have to spin it into some way that it's a success. In neuro hacking, failure is just part of learning. And you say, okay, let's try it again. Just like in real hacking, you just keep trying, you keep going at it. And real hacking is real hacking. But that's the thing, is learning, I mean, hacking is learning. Learning is not failure. In hacking, it's just something else not to do next time, something else not to try.
00:18:40
Speaker
And we have a lot of, well, huge margin of error to just try things until we succeed somewhere, some way. So we don't have, you know, I don't have a board that I have to report to, you know.
00:18:57
Speaker
There's no crazy ideas in that sense. You can try stuff. And believe me, we tried some
Experiments with Brain Stimulation
00:19:04
Speaker
dangerous stuff. We played around with transcranial direct current stimulation. I don't know if you know TDCs. As a matter of fact, I was telling somebody about it. So TDCs allows you to put a current through your brain and you can do various things. When we started, there was maybe 100 studies on it. Now there's probably tens of thousands.
00:19:25
Speaker
And they use it for a lot of things, for curing things, for helping people change. Well, I was interested in learning. So how can I learn faster? How can I do things faster? And we found a study on learning physical skills in a faster way. And I had a friend who was just like, oh man, I've been trying to learn tennis. You think it would help me with learning tennis? And the thing is you have to jolt your brain, which at maximum you can do half an hour, and putting this current through your brain,
00:19:54
Speaker
And then in a very specific place, right? So there's specific places you put it. And you practice the sport while doing that. And then you remove it and you have up to three hours. So you get about an hour per 10 minutes that you have residual effect. Yeah. So you can keep practicing. So we ended up building it into a ball cap.
00:20:14
Speaker
so that he could wear it. This is a TDCS device that we built at home. And it has little lights so that you can see one light shows that it's on. And then when you have connection, you have another light, which I don't have connection. We use tin plating and sponges from the sink, you know, those durable clean your sink sponges, because you have to put saline on them. And we put into a ball cap so that
00:20:42
Speaker
Well, I practiced basketball, he practiced tennis. And we just did a whole bunch of different things with it. And then eventually I started using it for writing and researching. So I haven't used it in probably half a year or maybe a year, just because obviously as you get older, you're like, eh, maybe I shouldn't put a vault through my brain. But it works on neuroplasticity. That's the whole point of it.
00:21:11
Speaker
similar kind of to electroshock therapy a little bit, or just that kind of shock to the brain, which will do a reset. It does different things. I think what it does is it helps the neural pathways open up and traverse easier, which means you can build more pathways. So it allows you to spread because as you get older, they get more static, right? You get fewer and fewer pathways to get used.
00:21:33
Speaker
which is why you become a starchy old man or an old woman with blinders on. You only see one way and this helps you learn and open up and be open to new things. So for learning things or of course curing things and stuff. But again, at a university, imagine you're just like, hey, I want to put this volt to our brains and we want to do this.
00:22:02
Speaker
There's ethics committees and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, no, no, no, not so much. And you have a group of hackers who are just like, yeah, let's
Academic Constraints vs. Experimental Freedom
00:22:09
Speaker
do it.
00:22:09
Speaker
What could happen? That's the difference. Unpopular opinion on my academic side, because I teach research and ethics in the cyber psychology track at Norfolk State. And so we actually talk about the studies not to do and how to do the IRB review and everything. And the funny thing is, though, is that when you look back
00:22:35
Speaker
the foundations of which psychological research is based on young and Freud and all of them that we, you know, basically the founding fathers of what we understand about the mind, they never had an IRB. Here's some cocaine, let's find out what happens. I'm not advocating to do that. Times have changed. They don't do lobotomies anymore. You know, all of that. We evolved as scientists.
00:22:59
Speaker
But undeniably, there's some bureaucracy. And as you said, I mean, I've been on that research side where it's like, you go through the year of doing the research, getting the approvals, you get the results, you analyze it, and there's no statistical significance. And if there's no statistical significance, it feels like you might as well have not done the study. And my heart breaks with my students when they talk about that. I'm like, no, the data is still good. Let's talk about what it still says.
00:23:26
Speaker
Uh, and then yeah, if you did something like that as a psychologist, you get your license revoked. I mean, it's a whole bureaucratic thing. Uh, so I like that. I like the, the, the narrow hacking because it does, I mean, you know, can do your research, be safety. And I think, uh, you know, I, most people know that kid that tried to build a rocket when they were young and you just hope they didn't blow up. Right. And so, um, but it does release some of the shackles to be able to invent and create.
00:23:56
Speaker
the bureaucracy of academia does not give you. Right. So most of those people just become parents and try on their own kids, right? Isn't that how it works? Here I am. Yeah. So true. Especially because I have the twins. I'm like, okay, that works with one and not the other. What happened there? No, let's keep notes. Let's keep the data on this.
00:24:17
Speaker
They'll hear this when they're older. Man, if I had twins, I'd be really dangerous. Wow, the things I could learn. It becomes really fascinating.
Testing Music Projects
00:24:28
Speaker
The Invisibles website has a lot, and I know you have this new album. I saw a lot of the psychological research, behavior, and social engineering research. Can you talk to us more about the process, that testing process? You said you tested it on a bunch of people, and I know there's existing research that you read.
00:24:46
Speaker
But can you tell a little bit about... So we're not as formal, right? So we didn't go out and we tell people what we've done. Usually people know us and they're actually waiting for us to invent new things so they can try it. We have these private groups of people that are interested in this stuff and I have my hacking and gossip group and things like that. And these are people who
00:25:12
Speaker
are used to us doing these things they're waiting for the next thing to come out and i'm like hey we've got this music tested out hey we've got this you know whatever test it out and um
00:25:22
Speaker
And so we get decent feedback, honest feedback, somebody who says, I hate this kind of music, so it's not going to work for me. But I don't have to find statistical significance. I only have to take the feedback where they say, OK, so I know that these are people who just hate that music and it will never work for. I get that.
00:25:49
Speaker
Whereas in real neuroscience that becomes, you know, it doesn't work for this person, that then all of a sudden becomes a statistic, right, from the whole. Whereas for us, we're just like, yeah, if you can deal with this kind of music, it's like the new music for the heavy sleep, heavy metal sleep music that we do, heavy sleep.
00:26:10
Speaker
There's people who say, I absolutely hate metal. I hate it. I don't want it. At the same time, there's also people who say, I hate nature sounds. I don't want to listen to static. I don't want, you know, I,
00:26:22
Speaker
I like metal. I can listen to it. When I write papers, I listen to metal. This is something I like, it calms me, you know? And you see that there's, yeah, there's, I mean, I could do the same thing, the focus music in country. I could do the focus music in, you know, in electronica. I mean, that's the thing you can do. Promise I have to go with the artists that I have, right? I don't have,
00:26:48
Speaker
unlimited musicians yet. But I am open to sharing the templates and building this out with other musicians if they want to try it because it's not impossible. For instance, the sleep music, when we first played the tones, what we heard was, the first thing that came to my mind was Rammstein, the sort of electronic heavy metal. And other people have said it sounds more like
00:27:17
Speaker
Some said prodigy, some said primus. People have an idea of what it sounds like, but again, it's not your traditional heavy metal in some ways. There's purists for everything. For example, sometimes we couldn't use guitar sounds because the pitch was too high. For sleep, you can't go as high as a human pitch because we listen for voices.
00:27:45
Speaker
So you have to be careful about that. And if you do it, it has to be very early on to distract people. So that's the thing is why we say it's anxiety related because when people have anxiety insomnia, it's because their brain is thinking about things and they're worrying about things and they're trying to plan. And then of course you worry that now you're gonna forget because you're gonna fall asleep and then, which keeps you from sleeping.
00:28:10
Speaker
You are in my brain. Yeah, it's a vicious cycle. Yeah. So it is. So we started looking into that. And the idea here is, yes, you have to distract. And while you're distracting, then you switch and you take them to a place where you match their heartbeat and then you lower their heartbeat and then you know, and they're breathing. And because you will sync up with the music, which is what's going to happen. And, and again,
00:28:38
Speaker
I am not, I mean, I like some of the, I love classic heavy metal. I am not into some of the newer rougher stuff. I'm not big into electronica, although, you know, Rammstein's okay in my book. You know, there's certain things, but
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah, I wasn't going into this thinking heavy metal. It was just the first thing I heard, but you could technically do it with any kind of music. It's just that the musicians we had, because the other guy, Chavi, was touring. So we went with the other guys who actually were heavy metal musicians. And so they were able to put this together.
Heavy Metal for Sleep and Relaxation
00:29:22
Speaker
And the same process, right?
00:29:24
Speaker
They make songs according to the template. We go back and forth. We tweak it. We adjust it. And then in the end, it gets polished and released. And it has to be instrumental, right? Because we'll listen for voices otherwise. For the things we're doing now, yeah, for sleep, it has to be instrumental. For focus, it has to be instrumental. I mean, I don't know if we're going to come across something where it doesn't have to be. We're looking at tackling maybe OCD next, but we're not sure if that's where we want to go.
00:29:55
Speaker
I thought it might be too complicated, but I thought the same about sleep, and we figured that out. So maybe it's worth trying. And again, we're happy to work with other artists as well. There's no end to that. I like using real music. I hate the noise. The static sound just makes me dizzy. I don't like that. Nature sounds are OK, some of them.
00:30:23
Speaker
I don't know. I thought the metal was good. But the funny story behind this is so that the first four songs, like we had Bill Simel and I said, policy's up and send them to me when you have them. And it was about 11 at night and they came. I was putting my phone to sleep actually before bed. I saw they're there and I was like, oh,
00:30:44
Speaker
And I said, hey, let's listen to him. We were already in bed, my wife and I. And like I said, it's, you know, being parents, you have your anxiety, insomnia, you don't necessarily always fall asleep right away. So I'm listening to it. And the first song finishes, I move to the second song. And I'm really trying, like I'm closing my eyes, I'm like seeing if this is gonna work.
00:31:10
Speaker
And I'm like, yeah, it's okay. I'm like, this is pretty good. It's actually, I feel something. And I turned to my wife and she's out. And I was like, oh, okay. And the thing is, is that I think the problem was, is that I was focusing on hearing the music to evaluate it, to tell this guy. And this was my second problem too. Like when I had insomnia and I played it,
00:31:36
Speaker
It was at like five in the morning and I played it. And all I could think was, oh no, we have to get this music ready to get out. Like the music reminded me of the work I had to do. So I was the worst test subject for it because it brought work things to my head. And then, so again, we sent it out to everybody and we were getting all this great feedback. And my daughter,
00:32:03
Speaker
college she's like I went four nights in a row couldn't sleep and I thought I'll try the music it's on Spotify now so she said I give it a shot she says every night in a row I can't get past the song the second song she's like I'm out every time and she's like I don't even like heavy metal so we're getting a lot of good feedback a lot of good tests there's people who just don't like heavy metal but
00:32:28
Speaker
What are you going to do? You can try other things. I mean, so I take forever to get to sleep, right? They always say in every marriage, there's one person who falls right asleep and the other person who doesn't, I'm the one who doesn't. And if I listen to, I don't know, whale sounds or classical or the sleep meditation songs, all of the stuff,
00:32:54
Speaker
I have to still be in my head and talking to my body, like relax your body, chill out. Okay, it works. What I found then works was I love listening to audiobooks at night. And I've done that. I started listening to, I think it was the Harry Potter book.
00:33:13
Speaker
20 years ago, basically. And I would just do that on repeat because then I would get so used to it. And then I started changing out now. Right now I'm listening to the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe, which that's a weird bedtime story, but whatever it works. But what happens, um, I get really lousy sleep. I wear a Garmin watch, attracts my sleep. It's like poor sleep. You got eight hours, poor sleep, poor sleep. And, um,
00:33:38
Speaker
You know, a friend of mine is like, it's because you listen to those stories. Your brain is still connecting, because I do, I'll wake up, and I'm like, oh, what's going on? Lord of the Rings is the most annoying, because they'll sing, the hobbits sing all the time, and I'll wake up to some weird obnoxious song, and I'm like, ugh. Anyway. And I'm always stuck in this loop of like, the stories put me to sleep, because I don't have to think, I can listen. But I'm connected, so I never let go.
00:34:06
Speaker
I think to fully sleep because there's always some part of my brain that's still listening to the story and aware of what's going on so I don't go into a deep sleep. And the way that I would imagine your music allows you to let go and if it's messy, if it's not messing with the brain, but it's doing things with the brain to zone it out. Maybe you don't have to train your body to do it. You don't have to tell your body because your brain is taking, your subconscious is taking over.
00:34:33
Speaker
Yeah, basically. So the first thing we do is we distract you. So we use discordant sounds and complicated sounds. And when you listen to the beginning parts of it, it lulls you in and then it gets very complicated. And your brain tries to decipher what it's hearing, tries to focus on, well, what is this? What are they doing? Because that's what you try to do is try to hear the music.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yeah. And then we make the music simpler and simpler and simpler. And of course, like I said, we change the tones, we change the beats, we change the rhythms and everything, but not all at once. It's a very complicated process that we go through. And then you start going down. And then of course, if you're still kind of in your head,
00:35:25
Speaker
Uh, the next song comes on. Uh, I usually don't have to play it. Like if we, if we put it on a timer, um, usually 15 minutes on average. But like I said, I, I, most people don't make it past the second song. Yeah. Wow.
00:35:43
Speaker
I'm trying this. I should have tried it already. I'm trying this. I'm definitely trying this. You used AI as well. You mentioned that a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about how you use AI with this? In the beginning, we were
00:36:00
Speaker
We were thinking of using AI to make the music, right? And AI is all the crazy. Well, then Chet GPT happened, which just exploded everything about AI and what we were doing. And so we sort of stepped back from that and we just used AI for the research, not for actually making the music. Also because
00:36:21
Speaker
It's just not the same yet. You're better off having a musician with an ear with some experience and professionalism and they know what they're doing. They can add instruments, they can do it electronic or with instrument. You get a good producer, they know what they're doing. They know how to change the levels and to get what you want. It really takes some hacking to get
00:36:50
Speaker
the sounds to fit the formula. That's really what you're doing. Like we're not going into it saying, so originally we were really keen on sentiment. We did a big study using AI to learn sentiment. And we had some projects with some companies where, you know, can you tell if this is a threat? Can you tell if, and we're trying this with music and we weren't the only ones. There's a lot of research online for that. How do you pull out sentiment for music? What does it make you feel? And
00:37:19
Speaker
And but a lot of that was studies where they've asked people how the music makes them feel, you know what I mean, and then they train the AI from that. So it wasn't like the AI took lots of music and learned sentiment from it so it was sort of
00:37:35
Speaker
I don't know. It didn't seem to really fit. It was better for us to do the research, find out all these different ways that sound affects us towards a goal, and then sort of bend it that way to what we want. That's really the best thing we could do with AI, I mean, to take thousands of research papers and
00:38:00
Speaker
and be able to get through them in a few weeks and build out a template. That was what was important. Yeah, that's a big help.
Sound and Mental Health Benefits
00:38:10
Speaker
Here, let me track 40 different research papers and cite them. And again, that world of academia. That's one of those technologies that is just sitting there we're not using. So we built it out. It's called Rabbit Hole. And we were using it for some universities we're using. You can throw in videos, sounds, any kind of document.
00:38:30
Speaker
It has a fully made PDF ripper in it. You can throw in PDFs. It'll show you the tables. It can search video. It can read the text in videos. It transcribes. It's this really amazing thing. We use it for investigation sometimes, but mostly it's just
00:38:48
Speaker
We're not selling it, right? So we're mostly just using it internally. We're going to start using it for Hacker High School, I think, to teach kids. We'll put them in the rabbit hole and be like, OK, follow this thread about port knocking or something. And then they go through and they can ask questions and interact with the AI to learn things. But for the most part, though, it's just one of those texts that we're sitting on just because we
00:39:18
Speaker
don't do sales much, and there's just so much to do. Yeah, and you've done so much. How long does it take you to do these songs? Well, let me start with that. Yeah, how long does it take you to do a song? You said I'm going to start a new song now that's going to be, like you mentioned OCD, right? How long would it take you to do that research, make the music? How long did it take you to do the heavy metal sleep one? We do this in between, right? So we do this in between investigations, in between work,
00:39:48
Speaker
if we're things that we're building, stuff like that. So, I mean, this is, I don't know, this takes six months, I think, just because we don't really focus on it. The biggest focus is on getting the research downloaded into the rabbit hole. Then we go through, we ask the questions, make the template. And then once we have the template, we give it to the musician and say, what does this sound like? And they pull out the sounds from it.
00:40:16
Speaker
And then we start thinking about what we want to do. And it just sort of works like that. We have a goal, and there's a process. And then, of course, the musicians work on building unique songs from it. And then we tweak it and go through the process again for each song.
00:40:40
Speaker
The implications of how this can help like neurodivergence and for me as someone with ADHD, the ability to concentrate. It was always hard for me, so I would sit through like a three-hour course. I would have a class in graduate school in three hours and the only way that I could survive was to be doing something else too. It had to be
00:41:05
Speaker
Something not I think I used to do like time sheets or grading papers for my TAs and of course the professors would hate it But that was the only way that I could sit there and learn was to multitask at the same time And I remember one of the students coming afterwards coming up to me and saying so you see we noticed that you do other work during class That's really you know, it makes us feel like you don't care. Could you stop doing that? And I was so like Like I do care. It's not that this is just my life with ADHD because sitting there for three hours
00:41:35
Speaker
hanging on a teacher's every word will not work for me. I'm just different and neurodivergent wasn't a word that we used 20 years ago or so.
00:41:45
Speaker
You know, the ability, even if you've got those headphones where nobody else can hear it, the bone, you know, where it just hits it on their own and it vibrates the music, I was reading actually, they make a pillow that does that. You know, just these ways as we become more neurodivergent, except in society, what this could do for people and helping them is amazing. Yeah, it's amazing how little has been done on changing environment towards mental health.
00:42:15
Speaker
I mean, we know this for your home, right? I'm going to get this wrong. I want to say which direction your door is facing or your bed. I forget the term now, but I think it's Japanese or Chinese.
00:42:37
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't even want to try to pronounce it. But yes, that's the idea. But this idea of changing your environment holistically for your health, but the idea of changing it for your mental health. And we do it already. We were like, I don't like the
00:42:54
Speaker
the living room bothers me. We need to move the sofas or we need to paint the walls or it's become unsettling. We do that, but we don't think as a whole like, hey, let's change our environment. Instead, we're like, let's go on vacation and then come back to this dump and stare at our broken walls some more. Yeah, it's amazing. And of course, sound is always all around us. So I think that's really a way to go.
00:43:22
Speaker
There is research on painting walls, certain colors and things like that, but that's small compared to how much really is your environment. It's light and sound and perspective and yeah, just lots of things. And this is easy to do.
00:43:42
Speaker
I mean, I can say I work best when my desk is clean. If you could see a picture of my desk right now, you'd be like, how does this woman work? Because my kids are coming. I've got, you know, little stuffy here that my kids drop on me. I've got all this.
00:43:53
Speaker
stuff. I look around at it and I'm like, this is not the environment that I would put together for my mental health, but I don't have the time, energy, effort to spend an hour just cleaning it up right now. I'm too busy yelling at my kids to clean. But I can take a minute and just put on headphones or put music on. It's such an easy
00:44:17
Speaker
solution for the moment. Again, there's a social stigma that you are separating yourself. There's this whole idea, both in a relationship, a family, or even at work, that you are isolating. And again,
00:44:33
Speaker
Now there's more information about neurodivergence and all that and that it's getting more accepted. I guess Gen Z sort of forced that by just wearing headphones everywhere. But the point is that, and I want to say back in the 80s, that people who are hard of hearing would actually wear headphones so that you had to tap them to get their attention to talk to them, right? So if they were working at their desk, they would have headphones. So you would just assume they were isolating. Yeah. And I think
00:45:03
Speaker
That's a good idea in the sense that we can bring that back into neurodivergence. People can separate themselves. They can isolate. People do need different environments besides their cubicle or whatever they have. There's economics of how you can make your place look or what kind of place you can even afford to work in.
00:45:25
Speaker
if you don't go into an office. Changing your environment is something that you do have some control over, especially sound.
Music for Neurodivergent Focus
00:45:34
Speaker
I think we do have to work as a society on not being upset with people who isolate when it needs to be done.
00:45:49
Speaker
I don't know, but I have no idea what we should study next. I'm open if any of your listeners want to tell us what music they think, what ailment we should address. I'm very open. We haven't decided.
00:46:06
Speaker
Well, I'd like to play just like a few seconds, you know, not enough to put me to sleep or anything like that, but if that's, you know, of your newest, so Heavy Sleep, which is on, I found on Spotify. I'll also include links to everything when I put this up. It's on Apple Music, Amazon, everywhere. We just gave it out everywhere, yeah. Okay, so let me hit play so we can... So it starts, it starts smooth, right? Yeah. It's a lull in.
00:46:44
Speaker
So it's not going to make you sleepy now. The point is you have to be wanting to sleep, right? Yes. As far as, you know. I'm just going to dump over. But it's nice. It's nice to hear. Tones lower than the human voice. A little bit complicated, interesting. And then it gets to metal. Wow.
00:47:09
Speaker
And it's a mix and clash of instruments. I'm hearing a little, like, Metallica almost-esque. Guitar is what I'm hearing, but... So now it's at its most complicated, and then it's over time, it gets simpler and simpler. Is it okay if I fast forward a little bit to some of the end? Sure, no, go for it, yeah.
00:47:50
Speaker
All right, this is another one actually just went to another one. I'm Spotify challenged apparently but This is really cool
00:48:06
Speaker
I mean, musicians know how challenging it is to make different songs. Yeah. So I think they can appreciate at least the effort. This is really neat. And I know a lot of heavy metal fans. And I mean, even just as... All right, listen to what's happening now.
00:48:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:47
Speaker
I'll stop there because I could keep listening to it. I mean, that one in particular, which the one was spiral was when I was listening to, I could kind of hear the, I don't know, trans-iness. It brings you down. That was the point, right? I had to stop it because I'm like, wait a minute. I'm staring at this. I'm liking this, yeah. I'm liking this and I'm staring at this music. Wait, I've got a podcast that's recording. Hello.
00:49:13
Speaker
Yeah, Logical Flight, which is the first album on Focus, you're going to get a certain feeling of that as well. Again, there's different sections. It's not just a song, like there's a lead-in and then there's points to it all, right? So it's all very well thought of and thought out in order to fit the template. There's no random chance for somebody to say,
00:49:43
Speaker
on that journey and that the album does. Yeah, so the new album, you're going to see something similar. There's a pattern to it. Because we're not looking to get a hit out or we're trying to emotionally connect with our audience or whatever you know about music, we're actually just looking to change the environment
00:50:06
Speaker
to make a point to do work and of course we know this from movies right they look for certain music for certain scenes you know and it's. It's not unlike that but instead of just looking to make simple emotions happy sad tense whatever we're looking at complicated mental.
00:50:29
Speaker
issues that we want to address, you know, things in your brain. So it's going to be more complicated than what you know from movie sounds, but it's still the same idea, right, where we're just trying to make, to get a job done, you know.
00:50:50
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's really amazing. Thank you so much for coming on here and talking about this because this is the comment. I love this stuff in the science and the brain and the possibilities to help people where neurodivergence, insomnia, all of it is
00:51:11
Speaker
really appreciated from my angle. I hope so. We put it out there. I hope it helps people, all of it. That's why it's there. It helped me. It's that idea that if you need something, make the tool and you can be sure there's a thousand other people who need that tool as well.
00:51:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, it has been fantastic to have you. Everybody is heavy sleep and I'll post all the links and everything and happy sleeping. Hope it helps. Hope this doesn't put you to sleep. I hope the podcast is fine. All right. To my listeners and viewers, I'll see you next time. Pete, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. It was a real pleasure. Thanks.