The Science of Sound and Focus with Brain.fm's Dr. Kevin J.P. Woods
Music isn’t just background noise—it can be a tool. This week, we’re joined by Dr. Kevin J.P. Woods, cognitive neuroscientist and Director of Science at Brain.fm, to explore the science behind audio designed to do something: improve focus, enhance rest, and support attention regulation, especially for ADHD brains.
Dr. Woods breaks down the neuroscience of “functional music,” explaining how Brain.fm uses phase-locking, neural oscillations, and lab-validated protocols to guide your brain toward desired cognitive states. We dig into why ADHD brains might respond especially well to this kind of auditory support—and how students and adults alike can use it to manage study sessions, reduce overwhelm, and even fall asleep more easily.
If you’ve ever tried to study to lo-fi beats, felt overwhelmed by silence, or needed a reliable way to shift your brain into focus mode, this one’s for you.
Links & Notes
🎧 Brain.fm – Get a special 30-day free trial to give it a real spin!
🧠 Follow Dr. Kevin J.P. Woods on LinkedIn
📝 Learn more about how we support students with ADHD at Take Control ADHD
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Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody. And welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright. I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh, Nikki. Today, we have a thing. Actually, let me just tell you, I kind of got in trouble and that's why we're doing this episode today, because I made a comment on a past show looking at tools to aid focus. And somebody at this company heard that comment and said, "Hey, love the show. Pete needs to talk to our guest today, because he might have been a little cavalier in how he discussed how this tool works." And I regret the comment. I may have been a little bit loose about it. I think we'll get specific into why I was a little bit loose about it. But I'll tell you, we have a banger of a conversation coming up, because we're going to learn the ins and outs of Brain.fm, which is music and sound for focus, for relaxation, for all kinds of incredible things. And it is backed by peer-reviewed science and the scientist behind it is here. It's going to be great.
Before we jump into [inaudible 00:01:26], you know the drill. Head over to takecontroladhd.com, get to know us a little bit better. Listen to the show on the website or subscribe to the mailing list and we'll send you an email each time a new episode is released. You know where to find us, on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Bluesky at Take Control ADHD. And jump into the Discord community, takecontroladhd.com/discord. There's a lot of people there who are just hanging out looking to live better life with ADHD. It is a great, great community and a very safe space. So, if you're curious and you want to know how other people are getting things done with ADHD, this is a great place to do it.
By the way, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast is the number one best, super way to support us. Few bucks a month gets you access to secret channels in Discord. Of course, there are always secret channels, but also weak early access to the podcast and access to the live streams as we record. And so, we would love you to hang out with us there, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. And now, on with the show. We are diving into the fascinating world of sound and the brain, specifically how audio can be engineered to support attention, focus, and cognitive function. Whether you're a college student staring down a stack of assignments or an adult juggling work, life, and executive dysfunction, this conversation I hope is for you.
Our guest is Dr. Kevin J.P. Woods, Director of Science at Brain.fm. He's a cognitive neuroscientist who works at the intersection of brain science and audio technology. And he's here to help us understand how functional music is created and how it might support brains just like ours. Dr. Woods, welcome to the show.
Kevin Woods:
Thank you so much for having me. It's really nice to be here.
Nikki Kinzer:
You're welcome.
Kevin Woods:
And thank you for accommodating me around my schedule, as you were saying before.
Pete Wright:
It is absolutely our pleasure.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
I'm glad we could make this work. So, I'll start with my cavalier comments. I have been a subscriber of Brain.fm for a while, and I like it. And I happen to say in the past episode, Brain.fm is great. Your mileage may vary. And I think I said out of school that I think that the... is the science back on this? Do we know exactly how it works with every brain? I was probably cavalier about it and they called me out, which is awesome because it does generally work for me. I find that it's a very satisfying experience. And I wish I didn't have to edit podcasts all day because I would just play it all the time. But I want to make sure that people understand just how sort of vetted the technology is. So, let us set the table. How did you get into this? And what does it mean for you to be the director of science at Brain.fm?
Kevin Woods:
Sure, sure. So, I spent a long time in school. I did my undergrad in neuroscience and then I did a Ph.D. specifically in auditory neuroscience. And in the last year of graduate school, funny story, I was actually at a supermarket. And I ran into an old colleague of mine who was in the lab previously. And at that point I had just published a paper on a new method of doing online experiments, where you could test 1,000 people in an afternoon, which had never been done before. This was a little while ago, and so proper scientists were just starting to use the internet to run experiments. And this had been done in language, it had been done in vision, but it hadn't been done in auditory science. Because there was still this old notion that, well, I have to bring you into my laboratory, and put you in my soundproof box, and wear calibrated headphones, and blah, blah, blah.
And doing things that way, you can only test two people in afternoon or something. It turns out that if you do things online and you use the proper controls, you put people through screening tests and such and such, you can get a massive number of people. And you get the same results and you can do things much faster. And it was a very exciting thing to me. And so, I ran across this person, I said, "Wow, I'm doing all this amazing work and I have a way to run experiments so fast using these online methods." And she said, "Well, you know I'm consulting for a company called Brain.fm and there's a small startup, but they have something really cool in terms of their audio technology. And they're looking for exactly this, a way to do experiments quickly and efficiently." So, I said, "Okay."
I started consulting for them. And I was skeptical at first, is where this is all going. Is that I came into this through networking, and through somebody I knew, and I dipped one toe in the water and I said, is this real? And it wasn't until I ran my own experiments that I said, oh, there's something here because I saw the results. And so, I consulted for about a year, where I was doing this kind of thing. And the day that I defended my dissertation, I signed a full-time employment contract with Brain.fm.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's great.
Pete Wright:
That's that's an awesome story.
Kevin Woods:
So, in terms of how committed I am to the company, there you have it. And I haven't looked back and it's been seven or eight years since. And we've done really incredible work. And this isn't a one person show. I've had a lot of help from Psyche Loui at Northeastern University and other collaborators. So, the paper that we published last year, for example, I think we have five or six authors on that paper who did work with me. And that's really incredible work. However, I want to say the comment that you made that I heard you recount, I wouldn't consider cavalier. I really wouldn't, because that's the way that a scientist would describe the state of things. You'd never say, "Well, we've 100% proved X, Y, Z." What we do have now is much better evidence than we used to of what is happening. And we have some sense of why what is working is working.
We have very good evidence that this audio technology helps people. And the question is, what is the mechanism? How are we going from the sound to the behavior? And so, we do the neuroimaging, we do FMRI, we do EEG, we do behavioral testing to try and figure out the mechanism. But as a scientist, I'm allowed to be completely transparent that there's a lot of unknown there. And so, the paper we published at the end of last year, for example, shows that we are affecting brainwaves. I mean, I don't want to go too far into the sense of Brain.fm before we carve out space for it. But basically, we show that we are influencing the brain in a way that other music doesn't. We show that this is affecting functional networks in the brain. In other words, the large areas that control the things that you do. And we show that behavior is affected.
But within that, there's still so much work to be done. And that's even just in the domain of focus. But we also have music for sleep, meditation, relaxation. We're working on other mental states. And in each of those domains, we're going to have to figure out how it works. So, I wouldn't consider your comment cavalier at all. And in terms of your mileage may vary, that is literally one of the results of the paper, is that there is individual variability-
Pete Wright:
I feel redeemed.
Kevin Woods:
... in particular, depending if you have ADHD or not. And so, there are many sources of variability. That turns out to be one of them. But I think that your comment was well-spoken and perfectly valid.
Pete Wright:
Okay, I'll take it. I'll take it. And I appreciate that. So, again, stepping back or remaining back behind the fence around Brain.fm, specifically. I do want to talk a little bit about what is going on in the brain that both allows it to be susceptible to these sound patterns that you're sort of injecting into it, and how you figure out what the sound pattern is that's going to allow us to do it. Because I know there are other competing, or I guess I should say, are there necessarily competing technologies? What is the language that you use around this? I've heard words like binaural beats thrown around. Is that what's going on? Can you illuminate how the brain and the sound are working together?
Kevin Woods:
Love it. Love it. So, Brain.fm is not binaural beats, but ultimately relies on a similar mechanism in the brain. This mechanism is called entrainment. And what entrainment means is that the rhythms in your brain reflect rhythms in the world. However, the rhythms in the brain are also responsible for controlling mental states and things you can do, your brain state. And so, people often hear about delta wave sleep, slow wave sleep. That's probably the most widely known form of brain waves. And those are about the speed of waves on a beach... And so, when you're sleeping, your brain is dominated by that kind of thing. Well, it turns out that if you listen to sound that is at that speed, those brain waves are enhanced. They're made stronger, and that has benefits for sleep.
That work has not been done by us. It's been done by other people. In the domain of focus, however, that's where we're pioneering similar methods. I will say that brainwave entrainment is not an invention of Brain.fm. We're very much standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of this. And it's been understood since the '60s and people have been working on it. What we've pioneered is the method of using music to deliver brainwave entrainment specifically for focus. And we have patents on this and everything. And so, the trick is, how do you inject these patterns into music in a way that is not annoying, yet still effective?
Pete Wright:
That was my next question. I can't rationalize a way to inject those sounds without music. It seems like it would drive me absolutely crazy.
Kevin Woods:
And that's the problem. And so, what people have done in the past is use something called isochronic tones, which sounds like a truck backing up, beep, beep, beep, beep. You don't want to listen to that when you're working or sleeping, or doing anything. But that's the way to entrain the brain. It's a very steady rhythm. And that will create the brain waves that you want, but it'll also annoy the heck out of you. Another method, other than isochronic tones, is called binaural beats. What that is, is putting a slightly different frequency in the left and right ear. And what happens is that in the brainstem, those slightly different frequencies mix together and create an amplitude modulation. So, without getting too technical, I say a 400 hertz tone and a 405 hertz tone. And what happens is that if you overlap those, you get a five hertz, the difference of the frequencies, amplitude modulation. You hear something that sounds like.... It's just a property of the way the brainstem works, because it combines sound across the ears for localization.
This is a cool auditory illusion that was discovered several decades ago. And people discovered, well, that's one way to drive brain waves. However, it's not necessary that you use the binaural illusion to do that. It's a cool thing, because you listen left side and it's just a tone. It's like an E, and you listen to the right side and it's like an E. And then you put them together and you hear this whooshing and you're like, wow, there must be some magic happening. But it's completely unnecessary as a delivery method. However, it is getting at the same sort of mechanism of using amplitude modulation. In other words, these quick changes of loudness to drive brain rhythms. And so, what Brain.fm does is we take music, and we look at where the beats are in the music, and we align the modulations to the beats or to the metrical grid in general.
So, if you're a musician, you can think of it as being 16th notes or 32nd notes, or 64th notes, something depending on what speed or modulation you want. And you just make sure that those modulations overlap with the notes as much as possible. And also, that they're in frequency ranges where there's a good amount of energy in the music. What you end up with is music that just sounds like it has an extra sort of thing in it, like a helicoptery sort of thing, but it's aligned with the beats. So, it almost sounds like another instrument, but it's not a beeping or an extraneous sound. It sounds like it's woven into the fabric of the music. And then you get a dial where you can increase or decrease the intensity of that. And you set that dial to a level where it's not annoying, yet still audible and effective.
And that's basically what all our research has been about, is, well, where do you set that dial? How fast should the modulation be? And we think we have a pretty good formula on that. However, people's brains differ so much. And if there's one thing that I do want to drive home today, it's what you said of you say your mileage may vary. I say different brains need different things. And so, in Brain.fm, there's a huge emphasis on personalization, of saying, "Hey, take our onboarding quiz. Figure out what your setting should be, because we're not going to tell you that one size fits all, because it doesn't."
Nikki Kinzer:
That's nice.
Pete Wright:
So, when you're talking about different brains need different things, the ADHD brain is a mystery to those of us who have it still. It's a constant veil, is being just pulled back. It is full of counterintuitive. Why does a stimulant help me chill out and focus, those kinds of things. So, I'm wondering if your research has actually done any work specifically on the ADHD brain or if you have a sense of how this entrainment works on ADHD. Do we have any of those weird cognitive dissonance moments in using this with the ADHD brain?
Kevin Woods:
Absolutely. So, one of the big findings is that for more ADHD-like people, and I want to be careful with the way I say this, because in our paper we didn't look at clinical ADHD versus the other 95% of people. What we did is we took the general population and we split them 50/50, in terms of are you more or less ADHD-like. So, they took the standard ADHD screener. And the people with more symptomatology, we put in one bucket. And the people with less, we put in the other bucket. And the higher ADHD-like bucket would include people that are clinical, but it's a small slice.
Pete Wright:
But this was by an assessment that they took, not a self-reported thing?
Kevin Woods:
Exactly. And so, what we found is that the more ADHD-like people did react differently to the music in the following way that is very interesting. They actually needed a higher level of stimulation and activity in the music. And you might think, well, ADHD, doesn't that mean you are distractible? And so, doesn't that mean you want music that is less involved, and less interesting, and less exciting, because won't things in the music just distract you and you'll squirrel over there? No. It turns out it's very much the opposite. It turns out that ADHD brains need stimulation in order to focus.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. That totally makes sense. To me it makes sense, because I mean, I know so much about ADHD.
Kevin Woods:
Right. And if you think about fidgeting. When people with ADHD fidget, it's not a bad thing and it shouldn't be discouraged. What that is, is your brain looking for that stimulation so that it can focus. You look at things like fidget spinners or bouncing your leg, and what have you. You want that to happen. And exactly why that is, we are still trying to understand. But you could explain it at some level as being, well, you're absorbing excess attentional capacity. You're using some part of your brain to do this so that you can focus on what you need to do. But it turns out that the Brain.fm we're delivering was kind of like a fidget spinner for the auditory system, if that makes any sense.
Nikki Kinzer:
It makes a lot of sense.
Pete Wright:
That's fascinating.
Kevin Woods:
Really cool results.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. And just when you were talking about that, I can see where you might get bored and sleepy if you don't have something that is pulling your interest in that focus.
Pete Wright:
For sure.
Nikki Kinzer:
So, yeah, that's great.
Pete Wright:
Or anxious. And actually, that's a bit of a separate question. We're talking about focus, but what about emotional regulation? Do you get a sense for how the technology works around overwhelm, anxiety, frustration? Where does that work? Where does that set?
Kevin Woods:
So, then we're getting a little bit more into the aesthetic realm. And so, what you want is music that has the right emotional valence, where if you're somebody that's likely to get anxious, you don't want music that's dark or brooding, or melancholy. You want music that's uplifting, maybe in a major key, that kind of thing. And that's where the art comes in. I terms of the added modulation in the music, I think the key is, well, you want something that's stimulating, but also not annoying or anxiety-provoking for that matter. And for people that are less ADHD-like, having that heavy level of stimulation does annoy them or cause anxiety. And actually, one of the early things we found in Brain.fm is that we get a lot of people writing in, saying, "Oh, I can hear the Brain.fminess in the music and it's actually bugging the heck out of me, and giving me anxiety, and I don't want to listen to it."
And we realized that these were the people that were less ADHD-like. And so, what we did is, in the app, we split the music into levels of modulation intensity. And so, now we have a dial that you can self-select. And we say, "Well, if you know have ADHD, crank the dial up to full and we can deliver that stimulation. But if you don't, you know what? Turn it down to low so it doesn't bug the heck out of you." And so, that's really the trick. And how do you make something that's stimulating yet not annoying?
Pete Wright:
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Brass ring stuff right there. How do you address people who say this is just placebo? You think this is a thing that's going to work and so it must work or just expectation effect?
Kevin Woods:
Well, first, I would say please read our paper.
Pete Wright:
Noted. And I recognize I'm giving you a platform to say that. I think it's important to say it out loud.
Kevin Woods:
Yeah. Next, I would say read our reviews, read what people have to say about it. And could this be accounted for by placebo? Maybe, but we have a lot of users and a lot of good reviews. And we have very few people that say the opposite. And it's really amazing. And inside of Brain.fm, we have a Slack channel that's just love letters from people that are writing directly into the team, not just reviews or Twitter feeds, or whatever. It's people that write us emails or send us DMs, that are saying how this changed their life. And it makes it just a great job to have. But the impact of this on people is it's totally undeniable. And we're way beyond thinking that this is a placebo effect.
What I will say is that if you use Brain.fm, we want you to be trying to do the thing that you need to do. So, you're not going to be in a situation where you're like, "Well, I'm finding it hard to work, so I'm going to put on Brain.fm, and Brain.fm is just going to make me work." No. It's like, please sit down at your computer, and start on your project, and listen to Brain.fm. It's like there is an element of, well, we're going to help you, but you have to do something.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. It's not a magic pill that's all of a sudden going to be, "Oh, I'm so productive." I mean, it's the same thing with medication.
Kevin Woods:
Exactly.
Nikki Kinzer:
The medication can be helpful, but you also have to have those skills and initiation. Yeah, I get that.
Kevin Woods:
It's the wind at your back, but you have to be at least on your own two feet to get that push from us.
Pete Wright:
In your research, what is the best case expectation? When people start using Brain.fm, how do you recommend they use it? How do you recommend they get the most out of it in terms of just the overall listening experience? Do they just pipe it through their speakers in their room, or do they need to have headphones? What is your recommended use case?
Kevin Woods:
I would like for them to use headphones and not speakers. The reason, it's kind of twofold. One, of course, the sound quality is better through headphones. But particularly with Brain.fm, you have these rapid modulations. You have... That's 12 to 20 hertz. 12 to 20 times per second, you have modulation. That's a very fast rate that doesn't really happen in regular music. And if you have sound bouncing off the walls, God forbid you're listening to Brain.fm in a tiled bathroom or something, right?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. That would mess you up.
Kevin Woods:
It's going to mess those things up and make everything very muddy. Also, you shouldn't be working in the bathroom probably.
Nikki Kinzer:
Good point.
Pete Wright:
Hey, we don't bathroom work shame here.
Kevin Woods:
You're right.
Pete Wright:
You do you.
Kevin Woods:
Whatever works for you. Different brains need different things.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's right. That's right.
Pete Wright:
Yes. 100%.
Kevin Woods:
But anyway, in an acoustic environment with a lot of reverb, is what I'm saying. Brain.fm is particularly susceptible to getting muddy due to reverb because we have rapid modulation in the music. And so, that's why we say, especially for our focus music, try to use headphones, because then those modulations will come through really clean and crisp. And you hear the edges in the music, which is what your brain needs, instead of having them be washed, smeared over time, which is what happens with reverb. Now, with something like our sleep music, the modulations are much slower. And so, really, we don't mind if you're listening, if your speaker's on your bedside table. In fact, that's probably what we recommend, unless you have really good sleep headphones that aren't going to mess with your head.
Pete Wright:
Hard to find.
Kevin Woods:
Yeah. And in general, headphones are definitely recommended for all those reasons. In terms of what are other best practices if you're using Brain.fm. Like I was saying, the personalization is huge. Take the onboarding quiz, figure out what you need, and don't leave it there. Continue to tweak. It is the case that our recommendation algorithm will improve the music over time for you. But in order to do that, you have to cooperate by favoriting things. Skip things or dislike things when you don't like them, favorite them when you like them, and that way our algorithm can figure out what you need.
And if you discover that the onboarding quiz gave you a genre that really you don't like, turn off that genre. Go into the settings and turn off that genre. So, the onboarding quiz really gets you, I don't know, 70%, 80% of the way there, but we do rely on the recommendation algorithm through favorites and dislikes, and then your own personal tweaking to really get you 100% of the way there. And then it's just about building a habit.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right. I bring that up, that sort of setting up the best case, because I'm curious around how you track baseline arousal over time for people who have to deal with rapidly fluctuating cognitive load, and task switching, and people who are moving from writing a paper to making a video, to having to attend long, boring lectures. And how Brain.fm can help adapt across those different tasks-switching scenarios that might involve a lot of friction.
Kevin Woods:
You are asking all the right questions. I absolutely love it. So, not only do different brains need different things, different tasks need different things when it comes to music. And if you're doing a very boring task, you can take music that is a little bit more distracting, for lack of a better word, exciting, musically involved, complex. But if you're writing a philosophy paper or something, you really need music that's easy to ignore. And lyrics are completely out of the question. Guitar solos are completely out of the question if you're writing a philosophy paper. For the record, Brain.fm has neither lyrics nor guitar solos in any of our music, but that's an extreme example. And so, what we've done is we've added inside of each mental state, so inside of focus, for example, we'll have different activity modes for what kind of focus you're doing.
So, we'll have a deep work mode, we'll have a creativity mode, we'll have a learning mode, light work, which is like for chores and such. But those all have different levels of musical complexity for what you need to do. So, our deep work mode has very little variation. It's a lot of repetition. It's all musically brilliant. We have four in-house composers. We don't use AI for this stuff. AI music is junk. But they do pay really close attention to what is the task that people are going to be doing when they listen to this. So, for the deep work music, it'll be repetitive. You'll cut out a lot of the treble range. You won't have these bright and shiny things. You'll minimize dramatic chord changes.
But then you have something like a creativity mode, where the music can be more exciting. And it can break you out of a train of thought every once in a while, and maybe you want that. And so, we do have these different modes, but you have to change that yourself, because we have no way of knowing what task you're doing. So, if you go from writing a philosophy paper to doing the dishes, we hope that you would go into the activity selector and go from deep work to light work, for example.
Pete Wright:
It might end up taking you seven hours to dry the dishes, but you'll do it very thoughtfully.
Kevin Woods:
Exactly. Or you might get a little bit bored if you're using the wrong type of music.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Sure.
Pete Wright:
As a musician, I have to just take a sidebar question on how they come up with the music. Do you find you give them guidance on we want to have this catalog of music and it needs to be aligned to the science? Or do you just say, "Hey, I need you to compose tracks that can play forever and we're going to inject the science into it, we don't really care?"
Kevin Woods:
It's the second thing. The only way I ever get involved in the music composition process is by being the really annoying dude that tells them that their music is too good or too interesting.
Nikki Kinzer:
And tone it down a little bit.
Pete Wright:
As a musician, you're a nightmare.
Kevin Woods:
I'm an absolute nightmare.
Pete Wright:
That's the worst. This is the only job as a composer where you're doing well if you're doing worse.
Kevin Woods:
Yes. Yes. And isn't that fascinating?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kevin Woods:
So, this is actually a major point I wanted to get to, is that I really want people to understand that the vast majority of music in the world is made to grab your attention. I really want to highlight that. And if you're a great music producer outside of Brain.fm, you use words like punchy or bright to explain what you're doing. What does that mean? It means that if I'm listening to Spotify while I'm trying to get my homework done, it's active self-sabotage. And that is really, really important to understand, that a good music producer is trying to distract you. They're trying to make you turn your head, and listen to the radio, and request that song [inaudible 00:30:23].
Nikki Kinzer:
Song along.
Kevin Woods:
Yeah. All that kind of stuff, which is wonderful if it Art with a Capital. But if you're trying to get things done, it is really, really counterproductive. And so, what we do at Brain.fm, at the level of composition, is to flip the script on all of that. And we say, okay, let's not make things bright and punchy. And how do you maintain musical integrity and make something still sound good, without relying on those tricks? And they do a great job.
Pete Wright:
Oh, it's legitimately fascinating, the whole process. And it gets to why you hear this all the time. I listen to music when I work. But don't worry, it doesn't have lyrics, as if lyrics are the thing that distracts you, which is true. Lyrics can be distracting when you're trying to focus. But the other side of that is even if I put on an instrumental playlist, I still find I like the music. And often, will seek out songs that are on that playlist later because I've attached to them, which I am now realizing is a sign of distraction. And I have never once gone to Brain.fm and thought, when can I hear this again? Never once have I said, I wish I could add this to a playlist. And I gather that's the point.
Kevin Woods:
Enjoying the music is good, but actively listening to the music is bad, because that's taking intentional resources. And we do encourage people to use the favorites in Brain.fm and cultivate a list of your favorite tracks. And do listen to those repeatedly, because music that you're familiar with is easier to ignore. As you hear it over and over again, it sinks into the background much more easily. And so, we do encourage people to use favorites. But last thing we want is that you actively listen and stop working.
Pete Wright:
I want to dig into context switching, this idea that we're talking about writing the philosophy paper and go and do the dishes. How well do you find brains that are entrained are able to make transitions with or without changing the actual mode in Brain.fm while they're listening?
Kevin Woods:
That's a really interesting question. I mean, frankly, we haven't done research on exactly that question. I will say that entrainment and disentrainment happened very, very fast. And so, people often ask me, "Well, how long does it take between me hitting the play button on Brain.fm and my brain waves changing?" That's the question we get all the time. And my response to that is, well, how long does it take between you starting to hear dance music and feeling like you might want to dance?
Pete Wright:
Oh, that's really good.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, jeez, yeah.
Kevin Woods:
Because it is the same mechanism. In that case, you're talking about the motor system, but it's entrainment. It's auditory entrainment. So, the basic process is the same. And the answer is, well, it depends if you're paying attention or not. But in any event, it's pretty fast. It's like under a minute.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, seconds.
Kevin Woods:
20, 30 seconds. Second. Second.
Pete Wright:
I could play ABBA on this podcast and we'd lose Nikki for an hour.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, for sure.
Kevin Woods:
Yeah, me too. Me too. And it would happen in five or 10 seconds or something. So, that is the answer to how quickly it works.
Pete Wright:
Listen, regular listeners know that context switching is my cause celeb. It's the hardest thing for me to do. And I've never done this, but I wonder with Brain.fm, after I finish a deep work session, and it's the end of the day, which is when I struggle the most, if I just switch to creativity and just rock out for five minutes, if that will help me want to go in and make dinner. If that'll re-engage my brain in a way that, again, reduces friction for that switch. That mode switch.
Kevin Woods:
I would say change the activity mode, but also change the genre or even change the mental state completely. Maybe try some of our relaxed mental state music, which doesn't have the same modulation rate. It's not the focus modulation rate, it's the slower thing to kind of calm you down. But that'll be a bigger shift. So, you want to basically move to the opposite end of the musical space, and you want change every switch you can to do that.
Pete Wright:
People who use white noise, brown noise, how do these noises, the family noises relate to the same sort of focus or relaxation, attention modes that we're trying to achieve with our brain?
Kevin Woods:
Sure. So, by analogy with light, noise in sound basically refers to different levels of energy at different frequencies in the spectrum. And so, white noise has the same amount of energy going from bass to treble. If you were to look at a spectral breakdown of white noise, you get a flat line, whereas something like pink noise falls off with frequency. So, you have more energy in the base, less energy in the treble. And you have all the different colors in between that have little bumps at different frequency points by analogy with light. This is a separate domain from modulation. So, when we talk about 12 to 20 hertz, or I talk about adding modulation to the music, that is a different thing from sound frequency.
When we talk about sound frequency, we talked about tones from say 100 to 20,000 hertz. And that we're in different locations on the cochlea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when I talk about modulation, I'm talking about things that are getting louder and softer at rates of one hertz to maybe 20 hertz max. So, they're two completely different domains of sound. Now, could I get noise, like a white noise and add amplitude modulation to it? I absolutely could. And we've had requests for that. Maybe we have something in production. But frankly, we find it kind of annoying. Let me simulate amplitude modulated white noise for you. If you want to listen to that all afternoon while you're doing your homework, be my guest.
Nikki Kinzer:
Don't worry. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Honestly, it feels like I'm cross-country skiing really fast.
Kevin Woods:
Sure. And it's easy to ignore. It has its benefits in that sense. But the evidence that it's "good for your brain because it is noise," in that sense there is none. The major benefit of having something like white noise is that it masks other sounds around you in a very even way. But the natural world is not white in terms of its frequency distribution, and so that makes white noise really annoying. And it sounds tinny. When you hear true white noise that's flat across frequency, it has a really harsh syllabics kind of quality to it. And that's because it has a lot more treble than the brain expects from a natural sound.
And that's why people tend to gravitate towards pink noise or brown noise, which has more bass, and less treble and more closely approximates the natural world in terms of frequency distribution. But it still has no structure. It's void of information. It's just static on a TV screen, if you will. And so, you can amplitude modulate that, but its main benefit is that it has no information, so it's super easy to ignore and it masks other sounds, but that's pretty much it.
Pete Wright:
Just watching you talk about it, it looks boring to you. So, of course, it doesn't look very exciting to hear you talk about it, just to watch your face.
Kevin Woods:
I have my feelings about it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, for sure. As we get to wrapping up, I want to know what you've heard in terms of user feedback, that is the weirdest or most exhilarating user feedback that you've gotten, how people are using it. And frankly, what excites you the most in terms of unexpected outcomes of your research?
Kevin Woods:
Wow, that is a great question. I don't think I've ever heard that question before. Unexpected or unusual feedback, we get people using Brain.fm "off-label" for things that we don't expect.
Pete Wright:
Wow. Okay.
Kevin Woods:
One, for example, is working out. And although we are developing workout music specifically made for that purpose, people currently use our focus music at the gym. And they claim that it's amazing, and helps them hit their personal best in weightlifting, all that kind of stuff, which is surprising, because we didn't make it for that purpose. And yet we hear that from a lot of people. So, right now, we're trying to integrate our focus technology into music at a musical level will be better suited for working out. And that means it's more exciting. If you're working out, you're allowed to be distracted, maybe you even want to be distracted. So, it can be very musically interesting off the scale in terms of musical interest.
Maybe we even have lyrics for the very first time, so all that. But at the level of the science and technology, people believe it works for that, so that's absolutely fascinating. I can't wait to do the research on that. Another one recently that was fascinating was people on the autism spectrum that said that they use it to regulate, to self-regulate. And again, we've not done the research on this and I don't want to make any claims for it. But we've heard this from several people, including a couple people that say that when they have to go to a party, and they know they're going to be in some loud, noisy place that might bother them, what they do is they bring headphones and Brain.fm. And if they start to get overwhelmed, they'll go into a corner, they'll flip on their Brain.fm and just chill out for a minute. And that'll give them a nice reset.
Nikki Kinzer:
Which might be why you would be in a bathroom with tile walks, is you need to take a moment to yourself from a party.
Pete Wright:
That's a call back.
Kevin Woods:
I haven't tried working in the bathroom, but you're making it sound more and more tempting. So, maybe that's where I'll be with that. I don't know.
Pete Wright:
If that doesn't end up in your research, you're doing something wrong. That's all I have to say.
Kevin Woods:
[inaudible 00:41:01].
Pete Wright:
More bathroom harmonics.
Kevin Woods:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Look, it makes me think, I mean, you talk about going to a party, you have people with legitimate social anxiety issues. I can see it as even a pregame. I can see sitting in the car with the headphones in for five minutes on creativity, and motivation modes, and get myself ready to be an extrovert in a way that is hard to do when you're looking at intrinsic emotional motivation. That's fascinating. I've never considered that.
Kevin Woods:
Exactly. Exactly. And it works particularly well for that, because if you try the same thing with Spotify, every three or four minutes you'll get a track change and you'll get a different vibe, and you'll have these lyrics that are kind of semantically messing with what's going on in your head. And there's too much of the artist and what the artist is trying to communicate in the context of something like Spotify or YouTube. When really, if you're saying, "This is about me. I'm trying to emotionally regulate myself. I want something that's going to just do that at a aesthetic musical level without having to think about the lyrics or guitar solos, or whatever it is."
And the tracks in Brain.fm go on for a very long time, so I can choose when I want to turn things on or off. I can choose when the soundscape changes, instead of every three minutes having things switch over on me and having to say, oh, I want to skip this one, or I'm going to skip this one. So, I think there's many things that work really well for that.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I don't think you answered my second question, which is what personally most excites you about sound and cognition right now? You've been there for seven years. Got your doctorate in this stuff. What is it that you are most exhilarated by with this work right now?
Kevin Woods:
It's several things. One answer is that as a digital medium, we can transmit Brain.fm to people around the world, including places where they don't have access to ADHD medications or support places where psychiatry is not culturally accepted, for very little, frankly. And our goal is that Brain.fm is essentially the price of a sandwich per month, no matter where you live in the world. If you live in Indonesia, price of a sandwich, you get Brain.fm. And we're most of the way done with making that a reality. But the idea is that we can really provide worldwide support for the 8 billion people plus. And most of those people, unlike in the US, just don't have the support that we have here.
I don't know maybe the right way to say that, but in most places around the world, you don't have access to stimulant medication, psychiatry or the cultural environment that allows you to understand and say, "Hey, this is okay." And so, having a tool that you can get through your smartphone, which everyone has, and all you need is a smartphone and headphones. And we provide that tool for people. And suddenly, you can pass your exams, yo can get your work done. I think that's a really beautiful thing, just the availability.
Pete Wright:
It is.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, absolutely.
Pete Wright:
How much consideration right now are your composers putting to culturally diverse music?
Kevin Woods:
Interesting question. I would say that our music is sufficiently broad, that we don't have huge bottlenecks there. But you're right that they're not going out of their way to make music that appeals to people in other parts of the world. So, we don't have a Middle Eastern music genre, for example. We don't have a world music genre. But our leading genres are quite general in terms of their appeal. We have stuff like lo-fi, electronic, which are internationally popular.
Pete Wright:
This has been fascinating, Kevin. Thank you so much-
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Thank you for your time.
Pete Wright:
... for joining us and illuminating this for us. Pretty easy to find the tool, Brain.fm. Go there now, those of you listening. Check it out for sure. Is there a trial? There's a trial that you can sign up?
Kevin Woods:
There's a trial. You get seven or 14 days free. We also have a newly released desktop app, which now I use almost exclusively our desktop app because it just sits on your toolbar. Makes it really convenient to access. But please check us out. Thank you so much, guys. I've had a really fun time chatting with you.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
It's been a real treat. And thank you all for downloading and listening to this show. We sure appreciate your time and your attention. On behalf of Dr. Kevin Woods and Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright. We'll see you next week right back here on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
