Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and recede so that you can create life on purpose.
Today my guest on the Conscious Fertility Podcast is Garnet Dupuis. He’s a fellow Canadian from on Ontario. I’m over in bc living in Thailand now, and full transparency. We did an interview several weeks ago, maybe over a month ago, and we geeked out. We went about two and a half, almost three hours, and he’s been so gracious for us to get on again rather than having my team edit out three hours of content down to about an hour, we agreed to have another conversation to make this material and information, which I think is really important available to our listeners. So Garnet, welcome back.

Garnet Dupuis:
Thank you my friend. Thank you very much.

Lorne Brown:
And for our listeners, welcome to Garnet. It’s the first time you’re meeting him. I know Garnet, you don’t really like to hear about yourself. It’s an uncomfortable thing, but I am going to just let our audience know so you can plug your ears and just tell them a little bit about yourself here. So Garnett, he’s an integrative and complimentary wellness professional with a career that has quietly spent several decades. Back in the 1970s, I was alive then he has been on a journey of exploration, delving into the fields of light, sound and consciousness. I think that’s what’s drawn me to you, Garnet as well. I’ve always had an affinity, an appetite for spirituality, consciousness, I don’t know what you want to call it, altered states, extraordinary states. And Garnett’s work initially has been inspired by the human potential movement journeys, academic years in Canada. And that inspiration has continued to guide his path.
And today he serves as the chief creative officer and co-founder of Luc Studios in Thailand. So he gets to live in beautiful Thailand where he focuses on developing the visor. And these are instruments designed to foster positive neuroplastic changes in the brain, which we’re going to dive into. He views life as a spiritual journey. Again, this is why I’m drawn to want to talk to you, placing a deep emphasis on compassion and personal awakening and outside his professional work. He’s dedicated to wildlife, rescue and conservation. I’m in eastern Chiang Mai, Thailand where he manages a given sanctuary. These are apes, right? Right. I learned something. So for our listeners, when we met last time, I called them monkeys and I almost lost Garnett. He almost left the podcast. And his academic background is diverse, including studies in classical and clinical homeopathy, Chinese medicine, psychology and other fields. And basically he believes that breakthroughs in mental health and wellness technologies like the neuro visor, which we’re going to talk a bit about today, can help individuals lead richer, more fulfilling lives making by making extraordinary mental states accessible and integrating their benefits into everyday life. So welcome to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, Garnet.

Garnet Dupuis:
Thank you very much. Yeah, whatever you call it, consciousness, spirituality, wellness. Inside all these words for me, I’ve tried to find out what’s common in the simple word or language and it’s special. Then I have a second word, the word change. These two things from my earliest memories to this moment now with you here, motivate me, magnetize me, mystify me, what makes special, special, and what relationship does it have with the experience of change. So that’s a perspective and according to your perspective, there are perceptions. So how do we perceive all of this? That’s my lofty, maybe philosophical view. So I was driving and I have an office here in Shang, Mai, Thailand, as you’ve mentioned, and I keep an apartment nearby. My main home is up in the mountains a little bit too far away to drive every day. And I was driving in zing, zing, zing, and I was thinking, hmm, about change.
And these days there are more and more devices, even personal or consumer devices that can measure different kinds of change. And although I’ll say our interest in this case is generalized to the whole being in this case, let’s target in on the brain. Let us not spend another three hours exploring what is mind. We’ll kind of put that aside, but we have a brain and the good news is that science is right in declaring that science has been wrong. I think one of the purposes of science is to investigate when science is wrong. And one of the things that science has been wrong about that has changed is the idea that the adult brain, when you get it, you got it and all it can do is die. You might remember information saying as an adult you have a limited number of brain cells and they just die one by one.
Something like that. We know that’s not true. Well, it’s partially true and partially wrong. We call it neuroplasticity, and I think most of us are generally aware of something about keeping your brain healthy even when you’re an adult and how that’s really important. So let’s first look at the simple concept of brain change there. Short-term change, long-term change that can either be positive or negative. So change to me, change is like fire. It is what it is, and you can cook food and keep warm or you can burn your hand. Or in the tragedy of Southern California right now, that same fire can destroy a community. So fire is fire, change is change. So how do we know if we can change in a good way? I have a concept that a brain that can change when change is required is a healthy brain. I don’t believe that there’s an idealized state.
Once you get that state, you’ll be fined forever. I don’t believe that. I think that there are a multitude of states and for our brain being able to navigate changes is critically important. So I was thinking, okay, without getting too fancy, as you say, geek out, which to me is not geek’s like poetry, but okay, I was thinking three kinds of basic change. There’s this state called awake and there’s this state called asleep and we need to make the change from waking to sleeping and sleeping to waking on a very regular basis. Can we make that basic change? I’m tired, I’m going to close my eyes, I’m going to sleep now. I’ve slept a lot. I’m okay. I’m going to open my eyes and be awake. A lot of us have problems at that fundamental circadian shift from wake to sleep, sleep to wake. What other kind of basic metric can we use without a fancy device to measure ourselves? Now I’m focused, I’m doing a task, now I’m relaxed and breathing deep and letting go. The ability to focus and relax and then focus again and then relax again. That ends up being a bit tricky. I think that one of the things that I’ve noted in my personal life, in my professional life over time, because I’ve been a meditator my whole life, whatever that means, and the ability to deeply relax and remain lucid or remain conscious, that’s pretty tricky stuff.
Like, okay, right now or just relax, okay, we’re talking, but that’s okay. And get more relaxed, let go more. But stay lucid, aware and awake, stay conscious. And that’s actually pretty difficult. I’m going to go over sit in a chair. Now whether you call it meditate, maybe you think it’s about focusing or meditate, maybe you think it’s about letting go. So the first big can you change thing is awake, asleep, asleep, awake. The second is focus in a task, do it, relax, kick back, don’t do it. That kind of change. Then the third kind, which is a little bit more kind of ephemeral I guess is the change in emotions. Can you be calm then concerned, then worried, then angry, and then relaxed again. Can we move in and out of different emotional states? Can it be a flowing experience as opposed to a cemented experience?
Are we getting stuck in a certain mood? So I thought it’ll be fun. I like being with you and speaking with you, and I thought what can we explore? We’ll put special on the back burner for the moment and this thing called change. So that fascinates me and the device, thank you for mentioning it. The neuro visor is a light and sound brain stimulation device. And I would say why use it? Well one, it’s a lot of fun. I can say I enjoy it quite a lot and maybe because there’s something special, I dropped that word again, but what’s the purpose of it? The purpose fundamentally is to exercise the brain in making changes going into the change out of the change short-term or building changes over the long term. So we have short-term state shift or long-term trait shaping, state shift trade shaping. One is more, I guess you could say momentary or short-term, and the other is more long-term.
The last thing I have to say, and I want you to talk with me so I just don’t lecture, is that we have to remember our brain is physical. Whatever concept we have of mind, and I have plenty of concepts like you, but we know that our brain is as physical as our heart and our hamstring. So just about everything, maybe not everything but just about everything we need to know about our brain. We’ve already learned with our, so with our body as a whole, that what we do repeatedly. Basically the body says, okay, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do. Okay, so that’s my semi thoughtful drive to the office reflection t=o start with you

Lorne Brown:
On special. So I’m going to kind of summarize or repeat back what I’ve heard and share with you, which is of great interest because a lot of people that seek me out, some literally say I want to change these patterns. I have these patterns, emotional patterns, I’m always triggered or I’m always irritable or I can’t focus. I’m looking to have creativity. I don’t sleep well. So the neuro advisor has been interest because I like to, I’ll take a Star Trek reference here, like the Borg. I find things and I assimilate them into my life.

Garnet Dupuis:
Awesome, awesome collection of episodes of the Borg.

Lorne Brown:
Yes, absolutely.
They assimilate. And so I look for any tool or device, safe, noninvasive as much as possible that can support this kind of change that people are looking for. And so this idea that if you can do something like the neuro visor, which is noninvasive non-drug and fun, I look forward to using it and the clients that I see to use it, right? It is entertaining for the brain at some point, at some points of the process, people have described it as Heaven’s entered my brain. I feel like something’s tickling my brain. For those that have done psychedelics say, wow, it feels like I did a psychedelic trip there for a moment at a certain time. So they find it quite entertaining, but they’re looking for that. They’re looking for more focused clarity so they can have that creativity. They’re looking to find some sleep and that deep relaxation that you’re talking about where they’re really into that relaxation. And this is the idea that you’re sharing about this neuroplasticity, if I’m understanding it correctly, is one is our brains can become unstuck. We have a stuck brain that can be unstuck. And the other thing that you, so I’d like you to elaborate on that. And the other thing you were sharing is the way you described it, if I say it back correctly, is a brain that can change as a healthy brain

Garnet Dupuis:
When change is required,

Lorne Brown:
When change is required. So being adaptability is key, flexibility is strong. The bamboo, it’s flexible enough that you can bend it without breaking it. And so it’s got to have that flexibility to be healthy. And I’ve heard you say in the past comparing it to heart rate variability, right? A high heart rate variability, a heart that has variability not just is a healthy heart, less chance of morbidity through heart attack. And it sounds like the term I’ve learned from you is brain signal variability. The brain also needs that. And so it sounds like the device that you’re using that does sound and light, and I’d like you to kind of geek out a bit on this, is exercising the brain, it’s giving it some adaptability. And my metaphor when I sometimes explain it to the clients that I share this with in my practice is because you talk about brain prime brain time.
So I want you to go into that as I share you out. So you’re working out and then after your workout, that’s when all the muscle building happens, the repair and stuff. And so I get the sense the way you’ve set this up is the experience with the nerve visor, that’s you call brain prime, that would be going to the gym, you’re working out and then after it ends, there’s a couple of hours where you can have great focus. Like today I use one of your programs before we go on to get me into good focus mode. So I guess my question for you is what’s the science behind it and why does this work? Because when we see these flickering lights, the lights are white, there’s nine of them in the device. I have that the neuro visor current. I never know when people are listening. Maybe you have 20, 20 years from now when somebody’s listening to this right now, there’s nine legs on there and they’re late s of

Garnet Dupuis:
You on Mars

Lorne Brown:
And they have a frequency and it seems like our brains interpret that and people see fractals shapes and colors. So I get the intention is to help unstick the brain and by unsticking the brain, it makes it a healthier brain, a brain that can adapt when needed to and there’s focus and calm and sleep. My question is how is this doing that for the brain? I’m curious about that part.

Garnet Dupuis:
You got three hours. No, we don’t. Okay, so thank you because yes, you have been listening and learning the different terms and concepts are key to a lot of what we’re doing here. Brain signal variability is not discussed much. It’s a relatively new and critically important understanding about us about the organism. You refer to heart rate variability, which more people know there are devices that measure it these days. You’re correct. The time between each beat should vary some amount as a reflection of how responsive is your autonomic nervous system, sympathetic and parasympathetic. Maybe you’ve been, this is the lead into the BSV by the way. Maybe you’ve been to a doctor, maybe Lawrence done it. I don’t know where they put a stethoscope on your back. I said, what my back, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. It’s like, well that’s weird. Usually it is for whatever what’s happening here because when you inhale your heart rate should increase and when you exhale, your heart rate should decrease and there’s a particular fund that they’re just checking out.
Do you have a heart that is at least able to respond to stimulation of inhalation and the relaxation of exhalation? So heart rate variability and now we’re quite sophisticated with it is a measure of the degree of adaptability. When change is required, your heart is making a change because your nervous system is making a change. Okay, wow, that’s different. We have been putting mechanical physics of machines and trying to put it into understanding the organism. My car, it’s fuel, not electric. The pistons should be at a regular rate or if you have a sub pump, a basement and it’s flooded, you have a pump to pull it out. You don’t want the pump sound to be or my pistons in my car. We want it to be very regular. So if we think that our heart is a pump, there’s a good mechanical analogy, we think, well that pump should be regular.
Guess what? Science was wrong. Now we realize it should be variable. That is also true of the brain except it’s a lot more complicated. There are lots of different aspects of variability in the brain. So the heart needs to change when change is required even at simple. And our brain needs to change when change is required. I’ll give you a quick analogy. I like analogies. Let’s imagine that our brain is a 20 story building. You own the whole building, it’s called your brain. That’s where you do work. It’s also where you have your bed and relax 20 floors. It’s an analogy, it’s not mathematically true but pretty good as a concept. The low floors starting at one are very ordered. They have a lot of stability there. And you go all the way up to the top floor, maybe the penthouse and there is a lot of dynamic shifting and changing.
It’s a lot of flexibility. You go from the first floor of stability to the highest floor of flexibility. There’s an elevator fortunately, and you can go up and down according to what you want to do because you have your business in that building. You have tasks to do. You have also places to kick back and relax and then you’ve got places to explore and experiment, problem solve. So I think, I don’t know if we did this little game, but let’s pretend we didn’t. If we didn’t that whole building, there was one of the floors where you live, it’s your bedroom, it’s your living room, what floor from one to 20 do you think should be your home? What would you guess?

Lorne Brown:
If it’s my brain and it’s the bottom floor is very task oriented, ordered, it’s not very ordered, very

Garnet Dupuis:
Ordered habituated, very predictable, very repetitive. And the 20th floor is the opposite of that. Very loose, experimental, non-committal, curious,

Lorne Brown:
Depending if it was a stairs or elevator, it may make a difference how easy it is to go up and down, but I’m thinking in my brain there is no from hearing you earlier, I’m speaking as I’m thinking. Some people would probably want to be in that high state, but I think it’s about flexibility. So you want to be able to go up and down. So I’m assuming you want to be somewhere near middle, and I think flexibility has strength over rigidness fixed. So if it’s 20 floors, somewhere between 10 and 20 and maybe 15. So I have some room to go up and down.

Garnet Dupuis:
Alright, so you’re a mind reader obviously, or you’re a smart guy, maybe you’re both. Yeah, in the analogy, let’s not mistake this for actual brain measurement, but this has been measured quite a lot. Yeah, 15th floor, not in the middle.

Lorne Brown:
Okay,

Garnet Dupuis:
Were you? Well,

Lorne Brown:
Because it’s too far to go up and down, you’re right in the middle and I kind of want to, the reason I chose 15 is I value more the flexibility than I do the rigid part, but I need the rigid part. So that’s my thinking. I don’t know why did they choose 15 or why do you say 15?

Garnet Dupuis:
Okay, first of all, let’s not use switch the word stable to rigid. Okay, so we’ll look more closely at that. That’s important. Yeah, the lower floors have increased stability, which means that they are reliable. It’s more predictable, it’s the result of a lot of things that you have learned.

Lorne Brown:
So

Garnet Dupuis:
That’s positive. It also can be negative in terms of habitation or misconception or protection. If you are low in the stable, too much too long, that stability can become rigidity. So you’re right, but stable is not bad. Stable is like you need that. Otherwise you’re insane, you’re crazy, you lost it. We need a good reference of learned behavior

Lorne Brown:
And a good example is our world when you look at politics, does not look very stable and it does not feel good. So yes. Now I understand when you say stability is good, we want stability. Got it.

Garnet Dupuis:
Yeah. Okay. And then on the top, when you go to flexibility, if you are up there too much or push it too far, the flexibility becomes, volatility is volatile, it’s hyper reactive and very unpredictable. When somebody is flipping out, their behavior can be quite unpredictable. They can jump out a window, they can run at you, they can throw their arms and kiss you or stab you and what’s happening here. So we want to not have the extremes. We don’t want to be so stabilized that we become rigid. Also, we don’t want to be so flexible that we become

Lorne Brown:
Volatile.

Garnet Dupuis:
So in most things, up and down the elevator is important. However, you don’t want to be fixed or stuck in neurofeedback. It’s called fixated. I like to say stuck because it’s kind of easy to imagine there is no brain state, there’s no floor that you want to be on forever.

Lorne Brown:
I want to touch on that point, but before with your analogy, can you explain why it was floor 15 then? Because if you want balance and not extreme, then why not 10? Why 15 versus 10? Okay,

Garnet Dupuis:
The only time we’ll get balance is in death to get into systems theory. We’re called complex adaptive systems. Living forms like you and I and everything else are described as a far from equilibrium state, far from equilibrium, that equilibrium, AKA balance is actually in tropic death that the yin yang symbol, which is dear to you, is not just a circle divided into half. It has that teardrop and within the black is the seed of the white. Within the white is the seed of the black. What that shows is the dynamic relationship. Okay, a little, just a minor bit of geek because it’s actually poetic. This 20 floor building brain analogy. This range relates to what’s called critical critical criticality, and that’s borrowed from physics. Critical is when there is a significant phase change water at room temperature and then it starts to get chilled and keeps on going.
And when it’s cold enough, when it reaches a critical point, the fluid becomes a solid, the water becomes ice. So critical is the point of change is critical. So this whole thing is called criticality and the 15th floor is called again, that’s an analogy. The 15th floor is called the sweet spot of criticality. So there’s a geeky term that’s kind of poetic, the sweet spot of criticality and why? Because the environment internal and external, let’s call it the metabolic terrain or the external and environment can change at any point in time suddenly. And we need to be closer to flexible change adaptation than we are to stable habit. So how we respond to the demand of change requires that we be disposed a little bit more towards that ability to change, hence the demands of the control freak common term, the control freak that typically immediately responds with rigidity when it comes for a demand or a challenge ends up being not very adaptive.

Lorne Brown:
Can I digress on that point for a second?

Garnet Dupuis:
Absolutely. It’s

Lorne Brown:
Really practical. My patients, my clients get to experience the neuro advisor quite a bit
And there’s three experiences. One that I, which makes me think of it is some of them are like, I don’t like this and they want it off right away. They do not like it and they tend to be that type a person. So I’m just curious, have you observed that since you’re in contact with a lot of people using your device, that person that doesn’t want, it sounds like the nerve advisor’s kind of pushing you, giving you a little bit of a, I’ve heard you use the word marginal demand, but somebody wants to be in control may find it difficult. Is that a generalization that you have seen or am I missing the boat on that?

Garnet Dupuis:
No, I think you’re generally correct. There’s a lot of nuance there and then the other

Lorne Brown:
People love it. That was the point. There’s people

Garnet Dupuis:
That was, I think, yeah, it’s reasonable to accept the fact that we are all different but also pretty similar. I think as a person gets older, now I’m speaking for myself in this case, you start off thinking there’s that word that you’re special, then you realize actually you’re pretty average. Most of the reactions and responses and challenges and joys that I have are shared with you. You kind of get it. So with the neuro advisor, because it is provocative in the sense that it is a device that is designed based on neuroplastic methodologies, fancy stuff, what does that mean? Whatever the methodology for enabling the brain to change, whether short term or bit by bit long term typically has three basic elements. We might’ve discussed it, three basic design principles and then a kind of fourth secret sauce. The first thing is it requires, and this is not just the neuro advice, you can reflect in an open sense on this method. It requires attention that this primal psychoactive agent called attention has to present itself for the method to say that it’s a focused attention makes it sound like there’s effort, but that’s not really, if the attention is more like magnetic detention, like a mother looking into the face of her newborn baby, I don’t think she’s having to make effort to do that. It’s a magnetic quality. So I’ll say attention has to visit that process. The second thing you’ve already mentioned it, it’s called marginal demand.
So there has to be just a little bit of something. Let’s say weights. If you can live 20 kilos, I’ll give you 21, I’m not going to give you 30. There has to be a little bit of demand that is just marginal to your ability. So attention, marginal demand, an open-minded willingness, a faith or a belief that this is a good thing to do. As I say, oftentimes knowing what it’s like in some marriages, but that shit, I’m doing this. My wife said I got to come and do this thing with you. Okay, whatever. Just let’s do it. Let’s get it over with. That attitude doesn’t work very well in the process. So attention, marginal demand, I’d say open-minded willingness and then the secret sauce that makes all of those work better. That very complex neurochemical state called enjoy.

Lorne Brown:
If

Garnet Dupuis:
You actually enjoy this, those three work better.

Lorne Brown:
So I want to unpack that or just repeat that again. So focus attention and so when you said there’s not big effort, the music and the light show, I feel like sometimes it’s just drawn to it. Is that what you mean? It seems like the device is grabbing my attention.

Garnet Dupuis:
Yes. And it’s designed to do that because of uniqueness. Our mind, our attention is drawn to uniqueness that even though pattern repetition is beautiful, your eye will catch when a pattern is broken, your eye will go there, wait a minute, what’s that?

Lorne Brown:
So

Garnet Dupuis:
This is where we’ll resist the other two hours on one hour of the detail. It’s really elegant. This meant for me and for a lot of us, this is elegant information because we humans, we think in terms of stories we put together connect the dot all the time because we’re intelligent and we have concepts. So we make stories and the story of neuroplasticity, the story of consciousness, the story of attention is just really elegant, sensitive, beautiful information because, well, it’s us thinking about us consciousness reflecting on consciousness. So the neuro visor is meant to elicit those elements because I want that elevator in your brain working. I want you to be able to go up when you need to go up, down, when you need to go down, be stable and habituate. Listen, when you go up, the whole point of going up is to explore, let’s just call it learning. Some of us have a real appetite for learning. Some of us maybe resist learning if it challenges our concepts, but the idea of learning is you encounter something new and different and hopefully that information can then be incorporated into the lower floors of your 20 story building. Now you’ve got something you didn’t have before and you want to use it.

Speaker 3:
So

Garnet Dupuis:
Go up, go down, go up. That elevator is really, really important and hopefully that’s what different things, physical exercise does it too. There are lots of things that help you go up and down. And the neuro visor happens to be one using what I call first language, the sound and light. It’s not brain entrainment. For those that have experienced that, it’s brain engagement. It has a different principle. It does not use repetitive signaling to entrain the brain entrainment, which is not a bad or a good thing. It just is what it is that it brings the brain into a particular more narrow corridor and attempts to help you stay there. Well, the benefit of brain engagement is that you get to choose the corridors that you want to visit, but you’re not going to be stuck there. My last little image is sleeping in bed.
I like to lay in my side and I start off on my right side frequently and it’s really good. It’s cozy, I love it. Weirdly, after a while what was good becomes uncomfortable and I want to go to my left side. And in between laying on my right and laying on my left is this fascinating, highly flexible kind of unpredictable experience called rolling over and rolling over. You start off, well that’s pretty easy, but then you do it, your leg gets stuck in the blanket, your pillow doesn’t move, then it moves too much and you go around in these upper floors in the 17th, 18th, and 19th floor and then finally end up on your left side and then you go back down. Oh yeah, I’m going to hang out on the eighth floor for a while. Yummy, yummy. So the ability to change when change is required is not only true of the soma as a whole, but it’s especially true of the complexity of the brain.

Lorne Brown:
And in this process, when you talked about the principles to be able to have the adaptability and go up and down with our analogy in this 20 story building an elevator, the way you do this with the visor, and there’s other ways to do this, but the visor is focus attention and then you have some marginal demand. So you push the brain a bit. Is this why it was my very first experience and other people have had this experience that when I first used it, I felt a little bit of anxiety came up and claustrophobic for a few moments and then it went away and then at the end I call it an amusement part for my brain. It felt like that. But is that the marginal demand then where you’re pushing my brain a bit so you’re exercising

Garnet Dupuis:
It? Yes. Okay. I’m older and I don’t exercise as much as I should. Duh, what a surprise. And I don’t do back bends. And then if I’m in my car and this is experience and something drops behind my seat into the floor of the backseat and I have to reach to get it a little bit of, sometimes the sound comes out of my mouth as I’m doing it because I’m not used to doing it. So there is some marginal demand there. And if I would do back bends more often, it would probably be easier. I could change the position of my back when that position needs to change as required. That’s the brain. So the initial elements, if a person can appreciate that this, I mean it’s a kind of exercise for my brain and hopefully it’s somewhat entertaining once you kind of get what’s happening there.
But there can be resistance. It brings up guardedness vigilance, it does all of that. But then once she’s like, oh, this is, yeah, I don’t do psychedelics anymore. I did in the past had a great, I never had a bad experience in my life, so call me lucky or something. Okay, maybe again, I’ll wax poetic here, but I’ve sometimes thought that I would like to approach my death in the way that I remember dropping a hit of acid and waiting to get off. I was so delighted. I was so in love with wow, it’s just going to happen. It’s just going to happen and I get to explore and enjoy. And so I hope, I mean that’s kind of an odd thing to say perhaps, but I hope that I can approach death with that same delight of discovery. For me, that was my experience. So I’m not saying good or bad, but change can be provocative. Change can be provocative. And one of the beauties about yeah, I’m not pumping of the neuro visor is that it’s quite controllable. You can turn it on, you can turn it off. It’s not molecules in your bloodstream. They’re going to go wherever they want to go. And I think that’s an advantage is it’s kind of on, well, you have to let go to learn and change, but it’s kind of on your own terms.

Lorne Brown:
So

Garnet Dupuis:
Earlier you mentioned brain prime and brain time. I like to talk a little bit about that

Lorne Brown:
Because

Garnet Dupuis:
Brain prime is when the light and the sound thing is happening and brain time is the period immediately following that. Sometimes I call it the lesson and the learning, the lesson and then the learning. The other more simple analogy is the light and sound is like eating food and when you stop eating, you start digesting. So the famous word around psychedelic therapy these days or even just general is the concept of integration that if you don’t integrate, if you go to a psychotherapist, a psychologist, and you have a session and then you walk out the door and you just negate and forget everything that happened, that’s not the point. The point is not just for me using the neuro advisor for fun. It’s awesome, it’s great. I’m boring. I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t smoke weed, I don’t do cigarettes, I don’t. It is like what do I do when I feel like I want just quick relief? People would take a shot of tequila or something. I tasted it once, it was disgusting, I don’t understand it. But anyway, what can I do? So sometimes I’ll just use it like that, but it may seem paradoxical or ironic or confusing, but I’ll say that the real effects of a neuro visor session begin when the light and sound end,

Lorne Brown:
Which will cause the integration of it.

Garnet Dupuis:
Well, yeah, at that point, if you keep your eyes closed and you’re just there, you’ve been shifted into a highly desensitized neurological state. It’s called hyper plasticity. So plasticity meaning change that you’re at a sensitized information processing point and the direction that I give without being specific is right then and there simply feel what you feel. Feel. I’m not saying feeling, am I saying sensations or emotions or thought, whatever. Just feel what you feel and importantly, now follow that feeling. Follow me. You’re conjuring attention. You’re going to, pardon me, you’re going to be experiencing a subtle, complex but very attractive body of sensation that is always there, but you’re not normally aware of it. It’s the substratum of information processing. It’s the substratum of metabolic processing going on. Feel what you feel and follow that feeling and follow it wherever it goes. Imagine that you’re blind or your eyes are closed and somebody just takes you by the hand and they say, just follow me and you’re led. And at that point, people that have never been able to meditate find themselves in the depths of conscious experience that they may never have had before or they did. And it’s a revisiting but with no effort. So right now, that brain prime or brain time, the lesson, the learning that you get to feel what is there that is like a snake and tying its own knot, you’re going to feel yourself like body scanning and autogenics and all these things that happens and it’s almost irresistible if you just give it a chance.

Lorne Brown:
It sounds, I don’t know if it’s exactly or there’s a parallel relationship, but it sounds like the priming using the visor and then the moment it ends where you say just, I’m not sure the words you use, but be aware, feel your feelings. Is it possible then that the neuro visor gives you the possibility or probability to enter the present moment, what it sounds like too?

Garnet Dupuis:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I don’t like it to sound slick or something, but I’ll say that with the neuro visor, I try to trick you into the present moment.

Lorne Brown:
Okay, well that’s cool because in my practice I use this tool technique called notice, accept, choose again, and in the surrender part is to get you into that present where all potential is. The magic happens where resistance drops. So another reason why I’ve been drawn to this tool, this device, the neuro advisor, why I like it and use it in my practice then because again, when people say, what are you doing with my NAC approach, I always say, have you ever read the book at carto, the power of now? Well this is how now. So

Garnet Dupuis:
I dunno, okay, that’s good, that’s cool.

Lorne Brown:
And I was like, that book’s great. Now how do I get there?

Garnet Dupuis:
Precisely. I mean that is like awesome. How,
Yeah, here’s a nice little slick thing because with the neuro visor following neuroplastic principles, the slogan is engage, enrich, enjoy, engage, enrich, enjoy. So I have another one with the ch and it starts off with change. If you change, you have a chance to make a choice. I had a pamphlet when I was in practice, I put on the front of the brochure, if you want things to be different, you’re going to have to change. And you know that in practice that your clients or your patients come in and they want something to be different, but they may not want to change. Well, listen, I’ll change when things are different. No, I’m sorry. It’s the other way around. If you change, things can be different.

Lorne Brown:
The external world will change based on your perception of it when you change inside. And Joe Dispenza, he’s written a few books, runs workshops of consciousness, and I really like it the way he said it or the way I understood it is your personality creates your personal reality. If you take your current personality to the future, you’re going to get the same reality. So you have to have a personality shift, you got to have a state, a trait change in order to have a different reality. Otherwise you’re just going to keep creating the same thing over and over again.

Garnet Dupuis:
Like that. To me, I’ve not spent much time in his work, but just the title of the one book, I don’t know if he chose the title, but I think it’s summarizes the

Lorne Brown:
Breaking

Garnet Dupuis:
The Habit of Being Yourself.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, perfect title. Yeah,

Garnet Dupuis:
Breaking the Habit of being. So this is the neuro advisor to get slightly neurological is predominantly what’s called a bottom up stimulation, bottom up, sometimes called outside in, but bottom up correlates to what’s called top down and both are real. You can’t have one or the other. They exist together, but it’s a question of dominance. Another way of saying it is that there are many neuroplastic techniques that are psychological where the neuro visor in its neuroplastic techniques is neurological. It’s not psychological top down. This goes into Card Harris and in Tropic Brain and all these elegant theories. But that the bottom up, you could say it’s a lot of these sensory input and the top down is a lot of cognition and thought and thinking. So the neuro advisor tries to bypass the thinking brain, what I described. Sometimes it’s a way of knowing without thinking that you arrive at a state of something kind of understanding. You get it maybe from you grok it, but it’s not because you conceptualized it. It’s like musics or something like that, that it exists without having to think about it. As a matter of fact, many times if you think about it too much, it gets in the way.

Lorne Brown:
A couple other questions around this topic then, or a little shift. You were talking about the shot of tequila or this brain break.
I think in one of your booklets that I have, help me now is the title of it, and I’ve seen it in our practice where our practitioners, and we use this for some patients before their treatment, they come in in their head and they’re overloaded, they’re mentally overloaded, and we wanted to help them get into more of a relaxed receptive state. So we’ll start with a neuro visor, the habituation situation program for example. But just in general, if you could talk a little bit about, there’s the state change or state shift. So like you said, it could last maybe a couple hours. You come in mentally overload, you come in really angry, and it’s just to give you a shift before you come home and see your family and then to differentiate that between the trait change, if you could talk about that a bit.

Garnet Dupuis:
Yeah, yeah. The terminology that I normally use is short-term state shift, long-term trait shaping. Again, an analogy again to my back. Yeah, I broke my back when I was a young farm boy throwing heavy hay and cracked vertebrae. So my low back, I use it because it’s real for me. If you feel your discomfort in your low back, you could get up and do a couple of stretches and maybe a couple of twists or something, and it will relieve the discomfort in your low back for a short period of time. So you have created a short-term state shift in terms of the mechanics of your low back. However, if it’s a problem chronically and your little quick back bends are not really giving you enough relief or not for long enough, then you go to somebody, a physio or a yoga therapist or something, and you go into a program of gradual change, you will shape the trait of how your low back functions.
So you’re going to have to move. You go in the elevator up to higher floors mechanically where your low back, yes, the brain is physical. That’s why it’s the same analogy. You twist and turn in ways that you don’t normally do for short periods of time. And bit by bit that new information is ordered into the 10th floor and the fifth floor of how you sit and how you walk. And it is not a surprise that that incremental demand slightly more than your normal behavior will over time inform your body so that your alge horizontal and all these things improve. And to return to an earlier statement just about everything you want to know about your brain, not everything but just about, you’ve already learned whether you believe it or act upon it or not. Like my non-existent exercise program, that’s how the brain is.
So what we do repeatedly will habituate us and where we stretch our limit, where we explore will also inform us, inform, inform us. So that this beautiful oscillation, you own the whole building. Every floor serves a purpose. These terms are used pathologically, and I don’t mean them in that sense. The lower floors are described in terms of being autistic and the higher floors are termed schizo typic. Now we talk about autism and schizophrenia, but these words exist before pathology. Autism is a high reliance on repeat habitual predictive behaviors and learning how to ride a bicycle. Once you learn it, those patterned responses will serve you. So you can ride the bike and chitchat at the same time. You’re not consciously aware all the time of the exactly. However, when riding the bike, if you hit a pothole or a car zooms by, you better be able to swerve and slide or hit the brakes or do something.
So autistic is the lower range schizo. Typic is the higher range. Now it becomes pathological if a person is more stuck in either of those ranges because they become extremes. So this brain signal variability thing, there are lots of different forms like amplitude and frequency and network, skip all that. There’s a recently released study, I don’t remember, I think it’s MIT in any case. So they plotted starting in birth youth all the way to 90. So if a person does nothing about it, the variability ability to shift and change dynamically goes up and up and up and reaches an apex, a peak on that curve at around 45 and then to 90 goes all the way down to boom, boom, boom, like holy shit. So if we don’t do anything about it, we can expect that we have to move our home from the 15th floor down to the 10th floor down to the seventh floor. Holy shit, I’m living on the fifth floor. This isn’t the same view I had before. That. We move from a more adaptable, flexible discovery state into a more highly ordered predictive and restrictive state neurologically with the brain, our ability to move up and down the elevator. The elevator doesn’t go up to the higher floors anymore, and that drop becomes precipitous with dementia.

Lorne Brown:
Has anybody approached you then? This was a tangent here, but Alzheimer’s, autism, schizophrenia, that population to see if the neuro advisor can

Garnet Dupuis:
Make you choice. Yeah, informally, yes. We have to tread cautiously here because the neuro advisor is not a medical device wellbeing. So both legally and ethically, we resist and cannot make claims or promises, but I get a lot of

Lorne Brown:
Personal, no, thank you for that. I’m going to clarify the question. Not somebody contacting you say I know or I have or autism. Can I use it for that person? I mean a actual institution that says they want to study the device in this population?

Garnet Dupuis:
Not yet.

Lorne Brown:
Okay.

Garnet Dupuis:
I have sort of a last minute reference and maybe a conceptual challenge out of MIT. Many people are all hot now about 40 hertz because of the rodent studies and now a replicated in humans at is reasonable level that 40 hertz light and sound actually seem to improve the garbage collecting of amyloid plaque. So that it seems to be really good. I would make a challenge to that. If anybody’s listening, the idea of a perfect integer brain frequency of 40 hertz I think is a mathematical lie of convenience that the brain is more like shimmering and algorithms will pick up this rainstorm of electoral activity and anything that is in and around 40, the algorithm will average it down to report a 40. So we discard decimal points. I bet. And if anybody’s willing to fund a study, let’s do it that I bet that a range in and around, say from 35 hertz to 45 hertz with at least two decimal points, I think it would outperform pure exact 40 hertz.

Lorne Brown:
Oh, so you like the idea of having even gamma, which is 40 hertz, there’s a range for it. So rather than just sending 40 hertz, you like the idea of the range. That is kind of how the brain is. It’s shimmering. It

Garnet Dupuis:
Isn’t is exactly the way the brain is,

Lorne Brown:
But the brain doesn’t just have it.

Garnet Dupuis:
Gamma is a range,
Is a range. I looked at a study recently where if I can remember the numbers a person say of your age, the response to the gamma range networking is around 36 to 38 hertz. And for my age, because I’m older than you, that it’s around 32 to 35 hertz, 32 to 34 hertz. So 40 hertz is the kind of regal concept of a gamma stimulation. I could be wrong. Anyway, that I think we’re learning a lot and I think that we may be averse to decimal points because we want things to be simple, but all these sound synthesizers and music programs, if you chose violin, it kind of sounded like a violin, but it really didn’t. Why? Because it was too perfect.

Lorne Brown:
There’s

Garnet Dupuis:
No violin in the world. That is exactly that whole integer frequency even pitch perfect people. How many decimal points do you want to throw away to be correct? So I think that adaptability, complexity and change is the game. But listen, you’ve got all 20 floors of the building enjoy them.

Lorne Brown:
So before we wrap up, I do have one more question on this big, our whole topic, and I’m curious, how do I explain the difference? It’s come up a couple times where I introduce the neuro visor and somebody says, oh, I did this though. I think it was called the Lucia. It’s a spinning disc. What’s the difference? I tell them, I think that one’s more of an entrainment versus an engagement device, but I’d like to be able to give them an accurate, and I’m putting you in a position where because you have your company, that’s a different company. I’m not asking why is it better, I’m asking why it’s different. People can decide whether it’s better or not, but what’s different between these devices? Because people say, I’ve already done that. I know what it’s like.

Garnet Dupuis:
Yeah, everything is what it is, and you can have that be positive or negative. It’s kind of up to you. A hammer is great with a nail, but for a screwdriver probably doesn’t do the same job. They’re both great tools. So forget about brand names. When it comes to signaling, oh man, it’s a big topic. You can have classic entrainment where it repeats and the better and the simpler the repetition, the better it works. And you get entrainment. You get coaxed towards a certain state. How you respond to it is another issue. Then you’ve got randomized where any sort of signaling will create dissociation and kind of a separation from how you normally process information. It kind of puts you in a limbo state and you shouldn’t do that too much because dissociation is when you begin to distance yourself from your experience. So even psychologically, it’s a bad state do ketamine is classically dissociative.
It’s not really a psychedelic. So at one end you’ve got highly ordered. On the other extreme, you have highly disordered, then you’ve got in the middle, which is where the storytelling starts. So I can say with the neuro visor, the difference is the story that is told is based on a neuroplastic principle that it introduces and then it disorient yourself to get attention. Then it drops in the main driver, then it tests the main driver, then it rewards it. If you come back to the driver and then it’s reinforced, it’s actually a neurological story. It isn’t that it is like a story. The way we make stories is because of our neurology. So the Lucia is not a great storyteller by my estimation. What it does is it moves into a little bit more of a dissociative state, and it’s very easy to create a temporary hypno gogia, the hypnogogic state, which is like a one foot in the known and one foot and the unknown, and it’s beautiful.
It’s an elegant device. As hardware, it’s very big. You can’t put it on your head, and it’s quite expensive. That is what that is. And there are other similar, so I came up with the term brain engagement because of the principle from neuroplastic processes where you have to first engage the brain with attention and then you go into the enrichment process where with attention, what do you do? I could walk up to you and probably I wouldn’t. I could walk up to you and slap you one in the face. I can get your attention. Now that I’ve got your attention, what do I do? What’s the purpose? So just because there is flickering light, it’s like okay, sound. Let’s make it really simple. There is sound that we would call noise. Then there’s sound we would call music. And once you go into the music, there are different types of musics.
Some will make you want to dance, some will make you want to lay down and relax. So it’s the construct of the flickering light that makes the message or the effect. So just because it’s flickering anywhere from incredibly ordered classic brain entrainment or purely randomized dissociative states, then you’ve got what’s the story that it’s telling? The story that the advisor tells is one of neuroplastic change short and long term. It’s a really big topic and we’re only beginning to learn about it. That just because somebody bangs on a drum will say, well, I’ve heard drumming before. Well, not like this drumming,

Lorne Brown:
And I appreciate that they both have flickering light, and that’s where there’s a lot of similarities, but then there’s a lot of differences. And so thank you. I just wanted to have some language to explain when people, I think I’ve done this already or I’ve done this before and I’ve done the Luda, is that what it’s called? I’ve done that where it’s

Garnet Dupuis:
Lucia or Lucia, depending you want to get class now they have a lesser, smaller model because the other one is massive and was like 21,000,

Lorne Brown:
24, I think it was at one time us

Garnet Dupuis:
24. I mean Canadian, I don’t even know.

Lorne Brown:
Okay. So again, just as you said, there’s a place for that and yours is different. I know when you build something or you have something, if they’re not the same, you don’t want them to be considered the same if they’re different, yours. And I just want to understand the difference. So yours, as you use the term brain engagement, what you’re doing in your,

Garnet Dupuis:
I would say,

Lorne Brown:
On sticking up brain. And so this idea again is the intention for this wellness device is to give people an opportunity for focus and clarity. So I think have some creative flow, feel calm and relaxed. So improve your mood. And with sleep, I know we’re kind of at our time, but I have one more personal question and I’m curious. Go ahead. Is I’m trying to understand my brain and I think other people have had this experience as well, or my personal experience. There are times when I’ve done this where it feels like I dissociate, I’m in the prime, I’m in the experience, and it’s like I’m gone and I come through at the end with the bird chirping, whatever, or just throughout. I’m doing my best to focus and I’m just having weird hallucinations. And part of me at one point was like, oh, this is cool. I’m having ultra states. And then I’m like, you know what? I’m a lazy, my brain’s getting worked out here. This is probably the trainer’s really pushing me and I’m trying to run away and get off the bike. So I was wondering, what’s

Garnet Dupuis:
That?

Lorne Brown:
What do you think is happening when there’s that disassociation or just really going into some weird memories during some of these sessions?

Garnet Dupuis:
Yeah, you’re slipping into a hypnogogic state

Lorne Brown:
And

Garnet Dupuis:
That’s not a bad thing. And I experience it sometimes for me, there is a reflection of the degree of vitality and or fatigue that the recognition of state is really elusive because we oftentimes have learned to not pay attention to how we feel. And I’m not getting too touchy feely, but many of us are fatigued, maybe sleep deprived or sustained stress states. And we don’t realize that our body, including our brain, would just like to stop it. And this is not the only reason that happens, but that’s one of the reasons that I noticed is that if I’m in a more lower energy or actually fatigue state for any number of reasons, usually sleep, if the sleep isn’t adequate or if there’s sustained stress that there’s a fatigue and that as the session is going on, you just go. And to me, it reflects more of a vital state than a temporary vital state, more than a consistent process.
Now I’ll use another two terms, and I’ll go back to physical exercise as the analogy. There is neuroplastic capacity and neuroplastic demand. And think of lifting weights that we have a certain weightlifting capacity and then comes the weightlifting demand. At a certain point we realize, I’ll say, I realize I’m not as strong as I thought I was, or I used to be muscle memory and all of that. So partly it’s a conditioning process and conditioning processes. Now with sports medicine, we realize that more is not better that high. The high level athletes will have hard days, easy days and off days in their training. And the off days are also training. They’re integration periods or recovery periods. So in the same way that you are, if you are exercising your body, you’ll get to learn about your body and you’ll start to see what kind of exercise I used to get asked What’s the best exercise. I said, it’s easy. They say bullshit. What is it? I said, the best kind of exercise is the one you’re going to do.

Lorne Brown:
Excellent. I love that.

Garnet Dupuis:
So it’s the same thing with your brain. What kind of brain demand, brain exercise. And you’re going to find that on certain days you can power lift or you can do legs really good. And other days it’s like, why is it hard? Well, because of all the stupid things you’ve been doing, or it’s not stupid. It’s just that there are circadian, undulations,

Lorne Brown:
Seasonal,

Garnet Dupuis:
And all of that. So my recommendation to myself and others to not idealize yourself to not idealize performance. Some days you’ll just be there in a neuro visor session and it’s crisp and you love it. And then you go into the brain time and you’re in deep meditation. Other days you’re just like a dope. And there are dopey days. Don’t worry about it too much. However, incremental training makes incremental change and incremental change will compound into big change in that way. I call it life on Earth.

Lorne Brown:
Life on earth. I love it. Garnet, thank you so much for taking the time with me today. And again, we already had our interview, so to do this again, I appreciate it. I enjoyed the first time and I really enjoyed this time. Hope our listeners enjoy this. They can.

Garnet Dupuis:
You’re really easy to be with, but I got to tell you, it’s really easy hanging with you, so thank you for that.

Lorne Brown:
All right. That’s the Canadian thing maybe. Maybe.

Garnet Dupuis:
I don’t know.

Lorne Brown:
Alright, because I nerve, it’s

Garnet Dupuis:
Not that ideal.

Lorne Brown:
I nerve advisor before I got on. Okay. I want to let you guys know that I have a few blogs about the neuro visor, so I’m having fun blogging about it. And you can go directly to the neuro visor.com website as well, and we’ll put that in the show notes to learn about the device. And Garnett’s really good at putting out articles, blogs regularly. I’m signed up so I get to read the research he’s reading and he summarizes and he shares the news and podcasts he’s on too. So if you really want to do a deep dive in neuroplasticity and more information about the neuro visor, you should follow him.

Garnet Dupuis:
Yeah, we have this circle community thing that we’re developing. Yeah. Yeah. And right now I think we’re going to flip that. In the beginning it was for people that have a neuro advisor, I said, well, come on. I love learning. Let’s share. So I don’t know if they’ve triggered it yet, but I’ve asked, just open it up. Anybody can not only go to the website that they go into the advisor circle community. If you don’t know how to get in there, neither do I. You can ask customer support, but yeah. And the most recent one that I’m having a good time with part of a course is the prehistoric Brain. Have you bumped into that one yet?

Lorne Brown:
Is that the course or is it a post that you have?

Garnet Dupuis:
Well, okay. I did the course on basic concepts, engage, enrich, and enjoy. And there’s a new course I’m developing called Basic Science,

Lorne Brown:
But that’s not in the circle yet or is it?

Garnet Dupuis:
I don’t know. I have to ask.

Lorne Brown:
I know as we’re talking, I’m going to look.

Garnet Dupuis:
Okay. Yeah, because there’s a new course I’m wanting to put into circle called Basic Science. We have basic concepts and now a new

Lorne Brown:
All that’s in there right now I see is basic concepts right as of this recording.

Garnet Dupuis:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we’re building it inside. But yeah, basic science is the prehistoric Brain. That’s one section. Then we have the 20th Century brain, and then I’m working now in the 21st century brain to give us the science background. Yeah, the nerd stuff. But I’m totally engrossed by the section, the prehistoric brain. It’s so cool.

Lorne Brown:
I’m looking forward to reading. I love that you distill it down too. So I appreciate you doing that kind of work. And obviously you love it, you’re passionate about it, so I’m sure it’s fun for you. The effort you put into that, it’s kind of you’re doing what you love, which is, you can see that.

Garnet Dupuis:
Yeah, that’s true. I do love it. I love it. Alright. Okay buddy.

Lorne Brown:
Until next time.

Garnet Dupuis:
Bye-bye.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you.

Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family contact Acubalance Wellness Center at Acubalance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic medicine. Download the Acubalance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to Acubalance dot ca. That’s acubalance.ca.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites, Lorne brown.com and accu balance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.