JIm Poole (Neuroscience, Stress and the Healing Power of NuCalm) - Episode 806

Jim Poole is the CEO and President of Solace Lifesciences, a neuroscience company focused on personalized evidence-based wellness and performance and the creator of NuCalm.

Dr. Blake Holloway, the inventor of NuCalm, spent several years immersed in the intriguing and exotic research of bio and neurophysics. His objective in inventing NuCalm was to design a software that would have direct physiological outcomes to combat stress and anxiety in the brain.

He believed that focusing on the brain’s electrical activity and finding a way to entrain the brainwaves to a particular frequency, such as alpha or theta, could be a targetable physiological phenomenon that would aid his mission of combating anxiety. He began by researching bio and neurofeedback training, which are therapies that require patients to train, in a reward-based manner, their breathing, heart rate or brain electrical patterns to reach the desired therapeutic levels. This type of training was shown to be very effective in lowering heart rate, respiration rate and brainwave frequency, but it required active effort and more time from participants.

In search of a more passive way to entrain brainwaves, Holloway researched evoked potentials. These are spikes in brain electrical activity observed in response to the presentation of a stimulus, whether it be visual or auditory. Multiple stimuli delivered a certain amount of times per second, mimicking the desired brain frequency level, could create evoked potentials in the brain at that same frequency level. For example, Holloway tested the effect of flashing a light 10 times per second (10Hz) and saw that the brain would sync into the alpha rhythm (8-12Hz). This research led him to finally implement auditory evocation to obtain a frequency following response with binaural beats.

The Advent of Neuroacoustics

To create an auditory evoked response at a frequency range between 4-12Hz (from theta to alpha), it is a little more difficult because human ears cannot receive sounds delivered under 20Hz. This is where the binaural beats become a critical part of the equation. This method involves simultaneously delivering two tones with different frequencies into the left and right ears (ex. 250Hz to right ear, 255Hz to left ear). These sound waves will initially meet in the superior olivary complex, a structure in the brainstem, where they will interfere constructively and create a resultant beat frequency calculated by the difference between the two tones’ frequencies (ex. 255 – 250 = 5Hz beat frequency).

The beat frequency at any level can then be transmitted to and perceived by the auditory cortex of the brain. Repeated presentations of binaural beats will create repetitive auditory evoked potentials which will induce a frequency following response in the brain, meaning multiple neural networks will begin oscillating at that specific beat frequency. This brainwave synchronization has been verified in electroencephalography (EEG = brain electrical activity imaging) studies conducted by Holloway and Solace Life Sciences. This is the applied NuCalm method to entrain the brain to flow from everyday beta brainwaves of consciousness to deeply healing and restorative theta brainwaves. The creative collaboration with music producer Dan Selene adds a further level of complexity to the tracks, integrating music to the neuroacoustic physics to augment the outcome.