Photobiomodulation at 40hz for Altered States and Enhanced Meditation

Sanjay Manchanda: So I actually got into this field to deal with myself. I had anxiety disorder, depression. I started meditating. That seemed quite helpful. I studied bodywork, energy healing, and found that I had a desire and talent for working with people. So I changed from being an engineer, computer scientist, to working with people in different ways, teaching meditation, doing therapy, and really I had chronic fatigue. I had everything in the book.

So along the way, I’ve discovered stuff that really can be helpful, different tools, that can all work together. So this is just another one of those tools that I found helpful in recovery as well as now we are exploring it for meditation and we want to help people to be fully awakened and to be deeply engaged in their life simultaneously, and for their brains and bodies to function well and yet be fully awake to what their true nature is. So that’s my overall aim. And light therapy is one part of it that seems to be promising that we are exploring deeply right now. So I’m happy to share something about that with you.

So I titled this talk Electromagnetic Signaling of the Brain For Meditation. And so we’re going to talk about how we can provide certain kinds of signals to the brain and the body that’s supported to move into different states, hopefully for healing and learning.

So the idea is that we provide a low energy. So I’m interested in low energy, nothing like beating the body with a hammer of any kind, a low level of energy at low frequency as a signal to the body. And when we do that, the idea is that we do it in such a way that we move into a beneficial state. And then if we repeat this process, then the state eventually becomes a trait and we don’t need the intervention anymore. And the input is going to be electromagnetic. So it could be a current of various frequencies or an electromagnetic signal or light, which is also as you know, electromagnetic.

So here are some examples. We can put infrared light directly into the cranium on the top left. We can pulse light into the eyes. This, of course, has been used for a long time, and we can have electromagnetics that pulse electromagnetic frequencies into the brain directly. We can have a tDCS device, which is transcranial direct current stimulation, which is like hooking up a battery to the head in a controlled current manner. We can have alternating current on the top bottom, and we can even have say ultrasound, transcranial ultrasound, ultrasound directly, and being input into the brain to alter the brain function, which also the ultrasound converts to electrical activity as well.

And just a small caveat about state change versus learning. So we can have a change of state by doing a behavioral intervention such as yoga and meditation. We can have a change of state by doing a chemical intervention such as taking a certain kind of pill or drug. We can have a state change with applying some electromagnetic energy to the system. And what we are interested in is not just a state change, but learning, which means that the state moves in the direction we want it to move in and there’s learning in the system. And so that kind of state change is facilitated independent of the intervention.

So you can have a large state change in a very small learning or you can have a small state change, a large amount of learning and so on. You can even have a large state change and negative learning. That’s what happens when you take a drug to change state and then you become dependent on the drug. Chemical dependency. That’s negative learning. The system is not learning to go there on its own. It’s becoming dependent. What we find is that when we use these electromagnetic interventions, there is a decent amount of learning and after a while the intervention is not needed anymore. So that’s a positive point.

I’m going to start talking about something simple. Basically hooking up a battery to the head in a controlled way and certain locations, and that’s called transcranial direct current stimulation. The current is controlled to be a constant current of a low value. And then, you put in the positive pole and the negative pole on the head and the current flows from the positive to the negative. And what we find is that this can bias the brain towards a certain kind of operation. So the DC current doesn’t directly make the neurons fire, but it potentiates them to fire. So basically if you apply a voltage across the neuronal membrane, then what we are doing is increasing the possibility or decreasing the possibility of its firing depending on the direction of the applied electric field.

So when the brain works, neurons in the brain fire. And that firing happens because of a shift because of a certain voltage gradient across the membrane. And when you apply a DC voltage as an electric field on the brain, then that affects this voltage gradient across the membrane.

The mechanism of tDCS is that it affects the potential for neurons to fire, and then you typically combine it with some task and the task stimulates firing. So as you repeat the stimulation, you actually potentiate certain kinds of firing or you inhibit certain kinds of firing. And in this way, direct current stimulation modulates the plasticity in the brain.

So here’s a couple of devices that I started using way back in the nineties before even some of the research came out. So here’s an adapted multimeter device. Here’s some things I bought from RadioShack when it still existed. And so I’ve been playing with this for a really long time.

And when the research started coming out, that’s when I started to use it with currents. And it turns out that tDCS and the currents that we use it as is extremely medically safe. So we only use up to four milliamperes of current, typically less than two. And here’s a review paper by the leading authors in the field pointing out that different studies have shown that applying these low levels of current is extremely safe, and doesn’t cause any major medical issues.

So one thing that’s interesting to note when you apply these low amounts of current to the body, here’s a study from Cheng in 1982 showing that electric currents applied to rat skin at a very low level, 10 to 500 micro amperes increase the ATP production in the cells by 500%, increased the protein synthesis by 70%, increased amino acid transport by 40%, generally increase cell signaling.

So that’s a pretty awesome result where basically, it’s like adding energy to the cell. So a lot of beneficial activities in the cell go out. And the ATP is the energy molecule. More energy is available in the cell, more proteins are being synthesized. And we find that this is a general principle in applying electromagnetic at low levels to the system of any kind. We generally find that it acts like food and upregulates cellular activity. And there is a bell curve effect like with a lot of these things, which means that as you apply more energy, the effect increases up to a threshold, and then after the threshold, the effect actually goes down and then becomes injurious at a certain level. So you want to apply the right amount of energy and the right amount of low level of energy.

Here’s some interesting clinical effects of tDCS. Lots of studies show that tDCS can be beneficial in improving mood and by applying the positive electrode on the left side of the brain and the negative on the right. And I have used it successfully for more than a decade in my practice. And you can buy a cheap tDCS device and I can send people home with it and supervise use and have them use it regularly along with the therapy I do, and I find it’s extremely successful.

So if we compare this with say, RTMS, which is also becoming popular for treating depression, which is repeated transcranial stimulation that uses very high magnetic fields of the order of one Tesla and it’s very expensive and you need to go back to a clinic to administer. Here we are using a very low energy intervention that’s also very inexpensive and yet very beneficial.

So my friend Dr. Bashar Badran at Medical University of South Carolina discovered that you could use tDCS for meditation as well. In a way, you reverse the placement that you would do for depression and you get a meditation effect. And so he has a site, I think it’s called Zendo, E-Zendo, something like that. And you can buy his device as well and use it for meditation. So that’s applying DC current to the brain very briefly. I talked about that.

What about applying AC current? So with AC current, you get a huge parameter space. You have a lot of choices. You can apply current in different waveforms. The current is alternating and it has different waveforms that can be sinusoidal, sway wave, sawtooth. It can have different frequencies. So that opens up a whole new field of investigation as to what is the effect of different types of shapes that the current makes as it moves through the skull, and what are the effects of different frequencies of oscillation per second.

So we can vary the frequency, we can vary the current. We can also apply these frequencies as electromagnetic fields from a coil, not just as current. And it turns out that these frequencies can have major therapeutic effects. Here’s an example. So these are some treatments I do as part of my practice, and I won’t be focusing on them too much right now, but here’s a great example. You can treat fibromyalgia very effectively with a modality called frequency specific microcurrent in which you apply these low levels of current, typically half a milliampere at two frequencies, 40 hertz and 10 hertz simultaneously.

So here this patient is lying on a table and there’s a wet towel at the neck and a wet towel at the feet and electrodes are clipped to the towels. Or you have two channels of current going from the hands to the feet on the right picture, and you apply 10 hertz on one channel, say from the right hand to the left foot. And then 40 hertz in the other channel, say from the left hand to the right foot. So this current crosses the body simultaneously two lines of current, and this has extremely powerful effects of reducing inflammation in the spine and treating fibromyalgia, and there’s a good paper on that as well.

So we could go into more detail with that. But I’m going to move on to talking about applying electromagnetic energy in the form of light, specifically with the idea of supporting meditation. So infrared light is being used widely to support healing, and it has solid, as we know, photobiomodulation has some solid research as its basis, and you can buy different devices now for home use because it’s so safe. So this kind of low-level light therapy, the basic mechanisms serve to repair, restore, and enhance activities in the cells. The infrared light is absorbed by an enzyme in the mitochondria, which is the energy factories in the cell, and this enzyme cytochrome oxidase takes this infrared light, releases an electron in the respiration chain supporting the release of ATP, the energy molecule, and which leads to beneficial cell signaling, some beneficial reactive oxygen species being created, and providing more energy in the system, which in turn releasing nitric oxide from the cell into the blood, which ends up in waking up the cell, giving it more energy, reducing inflammation and blood flow, and increasing blood flow to the underlying tissue.

So in particular, we’ve been interested in transcranial photobiomodulation, which is applying infrared light in particular at certain wavelengths to the cranium so that it can move through the cranium and go to the skull. In fact, did you know that the skull is pervious to light? Actually light can enter the skull enough to impact the tissues inside the skull, so the brain can be affected by light.

And in this case, we are using infrared light typically in the 600 to thousand nanometer wavelength range. With infrared LEDs. You can also use laser LEDs. And this particular device, the Vielight 810 nanometer device uses LEDs with a power density of a hundred milliwatts per centimeter square. So this is an example of the Vielight NeuroGamma that I’ve been using for more than a decade in my practice. And it also has a nose piece where you put it in the nose and the light goes through the nose into the blood as well as the base of the brain.

Here’s another device that we have recently been looking at that has more power, that has a bunch of infrared LEDs that can be programmed at different frequencies. I’m also an advisor in a company called SENS.AI that is this year coming out with this headset that combines the detection of heart rate and the training of heart rate variability with EEG electrodes in the center line for training, doing biofeedback with the EEG, along with infrared LEDs that can flash to support and stimulate the brain to help to train it in the right direction.

Lorne Brown: Do you recall with the SENS.AI, how many LEDs in their power stuff for that one?

Sanjay Manchanda: Yeah, so I think it’s seven LEDs.

Lorne Brown: Thank you.

Yeah, I could be wrong with the exact number. It’s in that range. So when we start talking about photobiomodulation, and we want to also talk about the MIT research in 2016, Sai and her group showed that just by flickering the light in rats cages, and these rats were bred to have Alzheimer’s just by flipping the lights in their cages at a certain frequency, in this case, 40 hertz, they could actually affect their Alzheimer’s. So these 40 hertz activated the microglial cells, which are the garbage collectors in the brain among other things. And there was a decrease in plaque in the visual cortex of these mice.

So other frequencies didn’t work. It was quite frequency specific. It was 40 hertz that worked. Something about 40 hertz that we saw earlier reduces inflammation in the spine and supports fibromyalgia. Something about 40 hertz is interesting here. And so, they have since then also done research in applying 40 hertz tones to the ear and shown that 40 hertz tones in the ear reduce plaque in the auditory cortex as well as the hippocampus, which as we know is a primary operator in memory in the brain.

So in the study, they were applying 40 hertz to the eyes. So then the question we were looking at is what about the flickering infrared light directly through the skull into the brain? And so the Vielight gamma, which is the device that Vielight makes, actually flickers at 40 hertz. Originally they made the alpha, which flickered at 10 hertz, then they came out with the gamma, which flickers at 40 hertz. And there’s research showing that that has beneficial effects.

So for example, the NeuroGamma at 40 hertz has been shown to reduce symptoms of PTSD after 12 weeks. Certain cognition scores and mood scores improved in the PVM group, but not in the control group. And then there’s now a study going on sponsored by Vielight on revitalizing cognition in older adults at risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and they’re looking for FDA approval.

So research shows that both direct current stimulation and photobiomodulation in the way we talked about can increase the speed of learning new tasks as well as the ceiling of learning. So you can learn faster and better. Especially, in other words, when you stack it with other interventions. I’ll give you more of a personal example actually from my practice. So I was working with a client who had some serious brain injuries and I sent her a Vielight NeuroGamma as part of the treatment, and she started using it and found a clear benefit. But then she said that she was having a minor issue that her kids were using the Vielight Gamma while playing video games, and they wouldn’t give it up because they got higher scores when they used the Vielight NeuroGamma while playing the video games.

And in fact, this is borne out by research. So the University of New Mexico, Vince Black did this research, DARPA Wars a video game simulation of detecting terrorists in drone pictures, and they showed that applying the NeuroGamma while learning this task of detection improved the learning for that game. So obviously they were being supported by DARPA for this research.

So in general, we can look at what happens when we try to entrain the brain at various frequencies, say using light or current, or even just doing neurofeedback and emphasizing certain frequencies. So as we know, the EEG case is for our purposes is often divided into various bands such as the delta band at the lowest end, the theta band, the alpha band in the mid-range, and the beta bands in the higher ranges and the gamma and then gamma in the ranges higher than beta.

So the first question to ask is pulsing infrared light into the skull? Does it actually entrain the brain? Which means does it actually influence the EEG? And so here’s the study by people at VieLight showing that pulsed near infrared trans-tranial and intranasal photobiomodulation significantly affects the neural oscillations in the brain. In other words, when they applied 40 hertz stimulation with their headset, they showed that the EEG activity went up in the ranges of alpha, beta and gamma. So it significantly affected the power in those bands.

In general we know from our work in neurofeedback that if you increase the frequency of stimulation, the energy level in the system goes up, the body awareness goes down, the arousal goes up, and the focus gets externalized.

Lorne Brown: Can you elaborate a bit on… When you say increasing frequency of-

Sanjay Manchanda: Yeah, exactly. So next step, next exercise will be clearer. Next slide will be clearer. So if we look at the frequencies from 1 to 12 hertz, 12 to 15 hertz, 15 to say a 100 hertz, then we see that when you increase the power in the low frequencies like theta, delta, then there’s a slowing in the system. The focus gets internalized, the energy gets lower, the body awareness gets higher, the state gets more relaxed, the emotions can be more peaceful or even sad. So we normally, in the past, when people have talked about meditation, they talk about going into theta states, for example, in which you have more internal imagery. The state is more internal and maybe the body’s more relaxed. So they somehow associate that with meditation.

Now, if you look at the mid-frequencies, then in the mid-range, you have a more balanced focus. There is balance between the inside, feeling the inside, noticing the outside, the energy level is more medium, and the state is alert and present and neutral. At the higher frequencies, the focus tends to move out of the body and can get more transcendent, it can get more externalized, and the mental activity can increase, and the state is more activated, joyful, or even agitated.

Then we discovered it recently, because in earlier decades, the very high frequency activity of the brain was not easily detectable because the skull acts like a filter, and you can’t pick up enough power in the high frequencies at the skull using EG electrons. But since recent advances made it possible to detect this activity better than before, and there’s number of studies showing that gamma is a significant factor in meditation. So here’s a paper showing that gamma power is increased versus control in three different meditation traditions. And this gamma power is shown to be higher in long-term meditators, as well as high functioning people such as mathematicians and musicians, both at rest and during tasks.

So actually, the brain does produce very high frequencies, and these can be detected in cortical recordings. So during surgery, when electrode patches are placed directly on the cortex, it’s easier to detect these very high frequencies. So even during normal functioning, you can get high frequencies. Then there’s been studies showing that some psychedelic ingestion is associated with higher gamma power and higher gamma synchrony, higher synchronization in the brain, in the gamma range.

So what I’ve found in just playing around with this for many years is that one interesting way to think about the effects of frequency on consciousness states is that we can think of the mid-range as being a usual narrow band of functioning, social functioning. So in this sort of narrow range of frequencies of being emphasized in the brain, we have the usual intellectual activity, our conscious self, our usual personal self, rational self that we operate with each other and in our world with.

And then as the emphasis changes or frequencies, we get into more altered states, what we call altered states. So as there’s more power in the low frequencies, we are more connected to the body, the more connected to the instinct, more connected to the unconscious and pre-personal, pre-rational realms of experience. So in these kinds of states, there’s more power in the low frequencies in the brain. And then there’s also, when there’s more power in the high frequencies in the brain, then there’s typically more experiences of spirit intuition, the super conscious, the transpersonal and the post-rational.

Lorne Brown: So on your charter, is that a 100 hertz that I’m looking at when I’m looking at

Sanjay Manchanda: You? Yeah, it’s a 100 and above. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s approximate. It’s in the range of 80 and above. Yeah. So here’s a device that we made for us that has more LEDs than the gamma and also has programmable frequencies. So we can play with the effects of training the brain at different frequencies. Now, this is easier to do through pulsing light into the brain than trying to do neurofeedback because it’s hard to pick up the very high frequencies to do biofeedback on. But here we can just feed them into the brain and see if we can affect the neural oscillations and the state.

So what we found with high frequency stimulation, 40 hertz and above typically, is increased self-observation, increased equanimity. At 80 hertz, we start to move into positive emotions such as joy, feelings of expansion. At 100 hertz and above is expansion of the sense of self-shifting. And we try different kinds of frequencies such as musical notes. And different people, of course, do report different results. Some people have discomfort at high frequencies. They get agitated or dissociated or have sleep issues that night, and some people report nothing. They’re just not that sensitive to this low-level stimulation. But typically, there’s sensitive people. There’s also people who’ve been meditating for a while, and they tend to have generally more increased self-observation and more effect from these kinds of simulations.

Lorne Brown: Can I ask you, regarding the 440 hertz up to 528, what are they experiencing? So the 40 hertz and above, I get the equanimity, increased self-observation. And there’s been research using the 40 hertz. And then even higher gamma, you’re into 80, you’re seeing positive emotion, joy, feeling expansion. And then a 100 and above, just seems like you’re amplifying what you saw in 80 hertz even more so. Can you describe what’s happening in that range 440 to 528, what they would be experiencing there?

Sanjay Manchanda: Right. So what we find is that there are these, you get into different states, and some of them are easier to describe than others, but for example, 432 hertz is interesting. Typically, people have feelings of want, and it’s a very embodied feeling. It’s like the body likes it. That’s a common kind of example. So what would be interesting here is to try to get some constellation of frequencies and descriptions that people tend to commonly report.

So this is a very open field and we need to do a lot more research in that range. And partly I picked these frequencies because there’s talk about it in the general culture, but we don’t really know. So we have to make this connection between the frequency stimulation and the subjective kind of states that they’re creating. And I’m currently doing a study in which we’re stimulating the system at different frequencies and trying to get reports from people.

And what we find is that it’s also individual. That long-term meditators like the higher frequencies and they are comfortable with them. And people who are typically not long-term meditators or don’t have a lot of psychedelic journey experience, find it uncomfortable to have the higher frequencies. And people seem to have a threshold where there’s a certain frequency that helps them to get to more subtle states. And then beyond that, it’s too much for their system, and that can change over time. So it’s almost like the frequencies showing a place where you’re working to access as an index to these more subtle, expanded states of consciousness. And different people are more comfortable at certain levels than others.

Lorne Brown: And if you were to guesstimate the psychedelic frequency from what you’ve seen clinically and in your research for people that have used psychedelics, what would you be using for that?

Sanjay Manchanda: Oh, I wouldn’t say that there’s a single psychedelic frequency. What I would say is that, for example, we ran people through a sequence of frequencies, and I’ll explain more why we do that as well. Typically, all the way from 2 hertz to a 1000 hertz and 1,024 hertz, and then in the middle range similar around 440 or 500, the person would say, “Oh, I’m back in a psychedelic journey experience. I’m having a version of that experience right now.” And so it’s high frequency. I don’t know what particular frequency I would say, but it’s high frequency for sure.

Lorne Brown: I asked selfishly because in full transparency, I’ve never done psychedelics. I’m curious, but I’ve never wanted to do them for no body residue. And I thought this would be a nice way to experience what I hear some people share and in a controlled way where with some people psychedelics, sometimes the trip they have is not the trip they wanted. I figured this would be a nice way to keep it in a good state. So selfishly, I asked that question.

Sanjay Manchanda: Yeah, I think so. I think that’s right. I think that’s right. So this is going to give us a reconversion of that experience, and it typically will actually. I think you’ll find that. Yeah. And so I think going above, I don’t know what number, but going above certain numbers would do it. And we are certainly doing that already in the ranges we work with.

So our idea was, okay, so we want to support meditation, and then there is a balance in a meditation. There’s a balance between calmness and energy, between equanimity and bliss that comes with meditation. There’s a balance between the activity of concentration and focus and then the ability to pay attention to what’s actually happening. We want to investigate our experience. We don’t just meditate to get calm. Typically, if for purposes of true awakening, we want to investigate, use that focus on income to investigate what is the nature of self and what is the nature of experience.

And they’re kind of opposing forces. So calm versus energy, equanimity versus joy, concentration versus investigation. And a balanced meditation is what we’re looking for. And what we find is that the lower frequency supports the factors on the left and the higher frequency supports the factors on the right. And what we find is that ultimately a balanced meditation state is a combination of high and low frequencies. And if it’s an altered state, it’s not so much in the middle ranges, but it’s a combination of low frequencies outside the usual range and high frequencies outside the usual range. And this is actually born as true by looking at normal brain activity, which combines low and high frequencies.

So there’s a phenomenon called cross-frequency coupling in the brain. And in this case, the high frequencies ride on the low frequencies, almost like radio programs ride on the long waves of radio or high frequency of the content of the program rides on these slow long waves which are broadcast in radio. Similarly, a similar idea here. The slow frequencies are these long wavelengths that support the timing and synchronization of timing in the brain. And then the higher gamma frequencies are phase locked and right on top of the peaks and troughs of the slow frequency waves and actually represent connecting to the actual content in the brain.

So here we show an example in the hippocampus of a rat of the theta-gamma coupling like this, where the actual memory retrievals are done at the gamma level when there’s a peak in the theta levels, in the theta wave. So this big wave is the theta wave, and the smaller waves are the gamma waves riding on top of them.

So the idea then was to sequentially or simultaneously stimulate the brain at various frequencies to create an optimal meditation protocol. So that’s the question we looked at, okay, how can we create a high functioning mind with high mindfulness that helps us to release the grip of the narrative self. And what we found is that by combining different combinations of low frequency delta, theta, and high gamma frequency stimulation of the brain, we could get more beneficial effects without some of the side effects. So we would get expansion, clarity, joy, reduction in thought, these kinds of states. And typically we have people meditating along with it. So we are combining a meditative activity with stimulation.

And so if you go back to the previous slide, our purpose there. This kind of stimulation is to help people to get into auto-states more easily. And so we want to help to increase the depth, the breadth, and the flexibility of access to different mind states by employing different combinations of frequencies. That’s what we’ve been looking at and playing with. And right now I’m doing a study which has two phases.

The first phase is to just show that it does something, which is that we have people, long-term meditators come in just because they’re more sensitive to this and we need less sessions with them that within a session we can show that as they do their favourite technique and we stimulate them at various frequency combinations that they find a beneficial effect, as opposed to a sham session in which they’re not being stimulated and that they can tell the difference. And we do certain measurements, do pre and post EG, and look for meditation, mood, and sleep measures. And then the next phase of the study we try to look for is there an individualized frequency that’s most beneficial for each person to deepen their practice.