Change Your Brain Every Day - Happiness, Music, and The Brain With Barry Goldstein

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Dr Daniel and Tana Amen sit down with Grammy Award Winning Producer Barry Goldstein to talk about entrainment and how music can affect one's mental state.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome everyone. Tan and I are very excited about this week. We have our friend Barry Goldstein on with us and we're going to talk about happiness, music, and the brain. Barry has been our collaborator for four music albums. We're pretty excited about that. He's co-produced Grammy award-winning tracks. He's worked with best-selling authors and physicians and has composed and produced for television film, major record labels, top 10 recording artists. But mostly, Barry's passionate using music to heal. And Barry and I have been working on using

music to heal your brain and your mind. And our new album is called Your Brain Is Always Listening, which I love that title.

And you never let me forget all the times you guys have what made the top 10 on billboard pretty cool yeah so it's very cool um so welcome barry well thank you guys for having me it's great seeing both of you again and i'm really excited about the launch of this new album in collaboration with you and our continued joint vision of helping people move to those beneficial brain states. So let's start in this first podcast by telling people your story. How did you get involved with music and healing? Well, that's really interesting because I always say if you would have told me that I would be doing this type of music 25 years ago, I probably would have laughed at myself because, you know, I was a rock musician. I was doing a lot of hip hop and house music, you know, type a New York city music producer.

And I really just kind of got burnt out on taking 50 to a hundred hours to produce a four minute pop song. And so I started to create this ambient music with, with looking at how I can get back to my heart. And so I typed in the internet, music and the heart, and I remember reading that our heart was at a relaxed state between 60 and 70 beats per minute. So I said, what would happen if I started composing

with my metronome set to 60 beats per minute? And I just started taking these hour long journeys of really more decomposing than composing. It was for my own stress and anxiety and sleeping challenges. And I realized that during these compositions, I was moving to a very meditative state or what we call the zone.

And I didn't know till later on that this is what we call the zone. And I didn't know till later on that this is what we call entrainment, where we're actually synchronizing an internal rhythm to an external rhythm. And I didn't think I'd be putting these pieces out, but I was urged by a girlfriend of mine, who is a massage therapist. And I started putting these out and we all of a sudden, we started getting testimonials of how people were using them from everything from sleeping challenges to anxiety to birthing children into the world, helping loved ones with dementia and agitated behaviors and sleeping at night. And that really created a curiosity that made me further research the healing aspects of how music can be used as medicine. So that's kind of it in a quick story in a nutshell. That's awesome. I use them for

meditation. I think they're amazing. They actually really do help you get into a meditative state. I agree with that completely. So let's dive deeper into entrainment. And while you were talking about that, I began to think about Tana. I always think about Tana. And when she listens to the news, she gets anxious and upset and angry. And it's entraining her to notice what's wrong rather than what's right. And entrainments, basically, your brain picks up the rhythm in the environment. But if your environment's negative, you're going to feel bad. But you can purposefully put your brain in a healing environment. Yeah. And I mean, that's, I think something people don't realize is that in our day,

we are constantly emotionally entraining to people as we encounter specific things that go on in our day, our challenges, our phone calls. I mean, have you ever gotten off the phone and you feel like, wow, something, you know, didn't feel right in that conversation. And I think this is where what we're doing can be really powerful because we can utilize music literally as a tool for energetic management. And I think this is really the next steps and the levels of that when we are emotionally

entraining to something that doesn't feel great. Can we get a little red flag that comes up and say, wow, I need to kind of shift this feeling now before my day snowballs into something that I don't want it to. And so if we begin by asking ourselves the question, where am I now emotionally? Where do I want to go? And what piece of music will take me there? We can actually navigate our whole day energetically to where we want to take it. So in that instance where you're listening to the news and you become more anxious, you know what would happen if you put on a piece like we just created called New Day, which is actually geared towards music for reducing anxiety and just took five to 10 minutes to, you know, slow down, slow your heart rhythms down to more coherent states and slow your brain waves down as well. So you can move out of that busy mindset and move into a state where you're less anxious. And then we

can begin to utilize our energy for what we want to use it for which is creativity and our vision and inspiring people. I love that. And so new day is on Your Brain is Always Listening, our new album. Where can people get our album? Yeah, well, now we can get it pretty much everywhere where music is being sold. It will be on iTunes, Amazon. It will also be available on Spotify and Apple Music as well. So people can really, will be able to plug it into their day

a lot more easily now. I'm a huge fan of playlists. It's like playlists for energy, playlists, you're a big fan of playlists for working out. Because it changes, completely changes how you move, how you function, how you feel.

You know, if I listen to meditation music while I'm working out, it's a little bit different because I'm trying to calm my brain when I'm meditating. But I listen to extremely uplifting music, maybe with more bass or something when I'm working out, and then that gives me more energy. I totally move differently. Yeah. And that's, again, you know, where it comes into listening to your body and what your body needs to get you there. So, you know, where am I now? Where do I want to go? And if you want to get that heart in an elevated state, you know, you're going to plug in something that is going to accomplish that. And, you know, you want to get out of your mind patterns when you're working out and get into that zone.

Yeah. What I think is really exciting, Daniel, that I was thinking about as well is that we now have four CDs or I'll say albums because people are using a lot of things digitally as well now. But we really have created a great body of work to create playlists. You know, if you wanted to create your own playlist now for sleep, you know, using our four albums that we've put out, you can put together a longer playlist of

all those and have a great, you know, hour and a half worth of music before you go to sleep at night. And the same for, for other States as well. So that's one thing I would encourage people to do is not just think of it as one album, but the body of work that we've created is really, really beneficial for people at this point. Well, and I love how we started with brain warriors way, you know, it's just the call to action. You know, the podcast is called The Brain Warriors Way because we believe we're in a war

and all warriors have music to go into battle, right? And, you know, not only are we coming out of the battle of the pandemic, we're, you know, not only are we coming out of the battle of the pandemic, we're, you know, we have this battle for our brains. Barry, I have a question because that was a good point. So when warriors go into, if you think historically, people go into war, they've got these people sometimes pounding drums, they, you know, they do war cries. Obviously that must do something to their psyche. Gets them into a state. Right. It gets them into a state, correct? I mean, that's, that's, yeah,

evidence right there. There is. And you know, they played it, I'm sorry, but in church, they play different music, because they're trying to put you in a different state. Absolutely. And you know, there's a lot more research now, behind drumming, you know, and how drumming can actually induce, you know, more alpha brainwaves because people are moving and in training with the drums. So while drums started out as a form of communication, you know, villages used to play drums to, to the inter, um, inter villages between each other to let them know something was going on. It was a message that we're going to war or that we're going to peace, whatever it might be. Now drumming is even being

used for Parkinson's disease as well. And showing that over a 10 week period of group drumming, that Parkinson's patients were actually able to improve their walking, their gait. And, you know, when you have Parkinson's, you know, your basal ganglia is compromised because of it's our motor center. So drumming can actually help and improve that. And also moving PTSD veterans to a point where they're doubling their alpha brainwaves from the beginning of a session to the end of a session when they're doing group drumming. So drumming can be really therapeutic. Let's talk about some of the therapeutic uses of music,

especially those that you have been involved with. You're listening to The Brain Warrior's Way. If you love it, we hope you do, leave us a comment, question, or review on any of the podcast sites like Apple Podcasts, or you can go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. Stay with us. If you're enjoying The Brain Warrior's Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe www.brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating

as that helps others find the podcast. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.