First and foremost, for people who don't know what Sensei is, you've brought the product here with you. It's easier to show than to tell. Easier to show than tell.
It is a headset with two ear cups on it, and it's very special. What does it... do?
What kind of product is it? How do people use it? Sure. So Sensei is brain training for the regular user to take home. So we've basically taken some of the best technology that's been used for the last 60 years, originally in medical applications, and the last 20 years, more for peak performers.
So for athletes and for executives. And it's been relatively inaccessible. Both from a travel perspective but also from a cost perspective. And so we've just made it smaller and more accessible for the regular person to use at home and regularly to develop new habits. You know it's said that necessity is the mother of invention.
I would say catastrophe can sometimes be its great great grandmother. I know that you found your way to this treatment modality with a pretty terrifying experience. Yeah, I mean about eight years ago I had a motor vehicle accident and I got rear-ended and I ended up having neck surgery.
I had a concussion and I had PTSD from it. So interestingly I think the PTSD part was the most impactful to my life. And it was really a matter of not being able to enjoy life anymore.
Everything was more of a struggle. I have a son and he was six at the time, you know, and my husband and him were really having to pick up all my slack, right, around the house and really tippy-toe around me because I was stuck in this fight or flight, hypervigilant state. And so it was this modality, this neurotechnology that I came across that really made an inflection point in my healing. that ignited this passion for neurotechnology and making it more accessible. Now, I know that after that you spent some years bringing your experience with neurofeedback into this headset.
What did you learn about the way that our brains work in that time investigating neurofeedback and how to bring it into people's homes? Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing is when I first, I had an experience in these various clinics and the experience was one. of reaching non-ordinary states of awareness. So the kind of states that you might be able to reach after decades of meditation, the kind of states where you would go to do deep healing, which is what I needed to do. And I was able to see those brainwaves in like EEG, so like the electroencephalograph.
And they were quantified and they were tangible. My educational background is electrical engineering. And so a lot of... My background came together and made sense.
What I was able to learn was, you know, basically what the brainwaves are. Like, there's a lot of... We have neural activity, right, in our brains, and if we measure that at the scalp level, it's electrical activity that we can see.
And so the brainwaves, you know, are all present. All these various frequencies are always present. But there's signatures that are associated with different states of being, right?
So, for example, right now we are in a beta dominant state that is very much focused on our senses. It's much more, you know, analytical, right? And so let's say that's, you know, 15 to sort of, I don't know, 40 hertz, right? That's cycles per second. So that's a relatively fast brainwave.
And... That's actually where we predominantly spend our time until we go to sleep at night where we're in like low, like less than four cycles a second delta states. And, you know, what I realized is that the juice of life is in between, right?
That is the alpha relaxation states, the theta, you know, deep meditative states. And even higher than the beta, the gamma states where you find epiphanies, right? Where you find creative insight. And that we could actually train and stimulate into those states in relatively, it's non-invasive technology. So without pharmaceuticals, without even psychedelics, you could do that on your own.
And without decades of meditation. And without decades of meditation. So I will say, Sensei, you can try in the... The wellness room here at House of Rob, I've done it twice now. There are different modes, but one that I have tried and I've actually gotten a lot of impact out of already is the social boost.
And so I'm wondering if you can talk in particular about what you wanted this device to do, how it works, and how it can sort of, what are the use cases? What can, you know, using this device regularly? do for its users. For sure.
So what we, we talk about it as doing boost, train and assess, right? To kind of train and assess. Right.
And so what you did was a boost. And so the boost uses light therapy. So transcranial photobiomodulation, which is just infrared light through the skull. And we can modulate the frequencies of your brain waves doing that.
So we can help you shift into a different state. Right. And so the one that you had was 120 Hertz or thereabouts, right? Because we personalize the frequency for your brain. And that is a third harmonic of gamma.
So gamma is considered 40 hertz or so, and it's about three times that, so 120 hertz. So in addition to the social boost, what are the other... How else can you, like, help your brain into a shifted state with Sensei? I mean, there's so many...
If you think of, like, we talked about the beta state, and then we talked about the delta state for sleep, right? And so in the beta state... There's actually a couple of really nice sweet spots that are actually very positive. So there's a low beta, referred to as SMR, and that is a very relaxed attention.
And the higher beta is very intense attention. In both cases, training those is a very positive thing for you. That's how you get things done, right? For an entrepreneur, for an executive, right?
You need to be able to focus on tasks, not be distracted. And to do that, you need to be able to train. and like harness your beta brain waves.
If you go too high into that, that becomes your inner critic, right? That becomes actually, it could become burnout if you stay and don't know how to shift out of that state for months on end, for example. So other ones that you would want to train would be like alpha brain waves.
Alpha brain waves are associated with relaxation, right? So we have a chill boost that was also available in the demo. And the chill boost looks at your alpha brain waves. So let's say it's like eight to 12 Hertz.
And then we find your particular resonant frequency, and then we tune to that. So a little bit higher or a little bit lower, depending on what we're trying to achieve. And then we keep moving with you throughout. One of the unique things about Sensei is that we have electrodes in addition to the photobiomodulation.
So we're reading your brainwaves, and that's why we personalize the frequency of the stimulation with the lights. How is this manifesting for people? I know the product launched about six months ago.
Yeah, we started delivering about six months ago. I mean, it's been five years in R&D, you know, through the pandemic, with all the manufacturing woes. And what are people telling you about, like, what are, like, some of the changes you've heard from your users? Yeah, I mean, that's ultimately the most rewarding part, right?
And maybe the scariest part as well, at the beginning. I had, you know, conversations with especially the early users just to see how it was going, how they were using it. I guess a couple stand out. One is, you know, one gentleman and he was an advanced meditator and he was actually on sabbatical but what he was saying to me was that he probably hadn't really realized how much, you know, how distracted he was during his meditations and that now he was able to really dial in and so he felt a real shift.
But in his life his wife had said to him that he was a good listener. He said, I've never been accused of that before. And that's ultimately what the true measure of it is. Are your relationships better?
Are you showing up better for the people in your life? He also said that his kids irritated him less, so he was less reactive, right? So this is actually really profound.
So what you were saying is we have a way to change our brains to make us nicer to the people closest to us. Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, like, sensei's... It's a game.
It's a gamified app. And we talk about the me level unlocks the we level unlocks the all level. If we don't look after the me part, we can't really expect to be present in our relationships and be mindful creators. So it makes sense. We start feeling more focused.
We start feeling more relaxed. We show up better. So that's just early days. That's like the first month.
How many people are using the headset now? About 3,000. About 3,000, okay.
And what are the sort of like other use cases? You know, you talked a little bit about getting to sleep. You know, you talked about being able to pay. and a sharper attention, being able to be more engaged socially. What else can this technology do?
Well, I'll share. I have an investor group that's been really great with me, really loyal through the years, and they're all avid golfers. So really, it depends on your goals like anything else. So one of my lead investors... He has been playing for decades.
He plays in tournaments. He's got memberships at golf courses. And he was able to take three strokes off his game, which was 25% for him, which was remarkable.
That's not nothing. I hope anyone who's in the PXG room right now is listening to this because that's a material difference in your game. He was pretty braggy about it. I heard anecdotally people were like, he's unbearable. He's unbearable.
I've got to get one of those. But it also, you know, it's not just your brain. You have a mode, I was looking at the app earlier, you have a mode that also trains your heart rate, like conditions your heart rate variability. Yeah, I mean, when we were looking at designing the system, I thought this technology is so powerful, and in particular neurofeedback. And I thought, why hasn't it scaled, right?
And so part of that was what's missing from this system. And part of it was the body. We needed to bring the body in, the nervous system in, as part of that experience.
It's actually step one, the gamified experience. We have to balance the nervous system, and we do that with HRV training. And so everybody's measuring HRV with the aura, with the whoop, right?
And it's become very known and mainstream that this is a great correlate for our nervous system's ability to handle stress. And so what we're doing, you know, we're not the first to do it. HeartMath has been doing this for some time.
We've been able to integrate into into this system but and show that we can train HRV with resonance breathing and be able to move it in a very short period of time and especially when people are having like I had a very low HRV when I had PTSD so when people are really stuck in that fight or flight it's just it's just a great alternative to medication. I'm very curious to know where AI plays in. The naming, if you haven't seen the name of the brand, is Sense, S-E-N-S dot A-I, Sensei.
How does AI work within this program? Yeah, I mean, we always had AI in mind, even before all the pop culture mention of LLMs. And it's because we started five years ago. But, you know, it's about personalization. If you're going to do a system like this, and you're going to make it mainstream and go to everyone's home, we had to understand that.
First, we don't know everything, right? We're standing on the shoulders of giants without a doubt, and there's been a lot of research done and a lot of clinical work done, but there's a lot to be known and a lot to be learned. So it's a learning system by its design, but it's also personalizing for you across all your sessions, and so that's a big part of the learning system.
Another piece, and this is more of the roadmap and long-term vision for Sensei, is that the data set that we're collecting from this healthy population is a correlate for detection and treatment of dementia, insomnia, ADHD. There's quite a number of things that we're collecting biomarkers for with the help of our very strong science board. We have a lot of optimism and a lot of great early data showing that we can probably achieve those goals in the medical realm to inform future products.
How can people know? We've had... some biohackers here.
We had Dave Asprey last night, Dr. Dave Rabin with Apollo Neuro, who's also in the wellness room. How can people know and trust that this is not electronic snake oil? Yeah.
I mean, the placebo effect is real and it's not a bad thing. But no, I mean, I thought about that in terms of transparency. Right, so for me, even if I go to clinics where they're doing neurotechnology treatments, I find it incredibly unsatisfactory, even just saying, you know, you've improved your gamma brainwave power. It's not meaningful into my life, necessarily, right? So for me, it was important to include, and this is, you know, I brought this on stage, to include a lab-grade test that is capturing numerically changes in your brain biomarkers.
And so we designed that with a neuroscientist, Dr. Tato Sakadze out of Duke, and you know it's patent pending, etc. But it's basically a 10-minute test from hours to those 10 minutes, and it's self-guided. be with a clinician and you can do it like every month as you progress and then it's done to one millisecond precision so essentially you're pushing you're pushing two buttons here on a test called the flanker test which is part of a event related potential standard methodology for lab testing and we're measure we have your headset on and you're measuring while you're doing the test to one millisecond precision your various responses to new information so what it looks like is you perceive new information, you classify it, is it important, is it not? And then it's like you make a decision, I'm pushing right button or left button. And these are all 100 milliseconds, 200 milliseconds, 300 milliseconds.
So it's faster than the speed of thought. Wow. What are the gains that people have made? Because of course, you're testing maybe when you start using the headset and then testing again at some regular interval.
What? What are the changes that have come out of that data? Yeah, I mean, it's been actually quite remarkable how quickly the changes have come.
But we can move reaction time reliably. Like even in a month, we can see like 7.5% increase in reaction time. Same in the P300, which is the speed of thinking, which is something that usually just declines with age.
So we can see that that's moving up about 7.5% rough numbers. And error rates are going down something around 35%. right there's another one called inhibition control similar range 35% improvement I'm very excited about those numbers and more importantly this the people who are they are reporting that they're sleeping better they're reporting that their brain fog is decreased right and they're less anxious so we do qualitative testing as well just like is this working for you how how is it going and those numbers are like you know 80s you know like yes in the month it's improved and which amazing and these are you know kind of crazy percentages for people who are already healthy people who you know want to make a you know a non-insignificant investment in making their brains better all tend to already have pretty good brains yeah so you know really this speaks to you know uh uh reaching that that next level uh getting to that sort of like peak performance territory yeah i i think so i think it resonates right out of the gate with peak performers so executives entrepreneurs um because they are They're measuring those percentages and they see it right away in their work.
However, I do feel like in our society right now, we are over-medicated, right? Which is a symptom of general unhappiness. Like we have a lot of fear-based media. We have a lot of stimulus from our devices, etc. I think we all know we're capable of more.
I think there's a wisdom in us that is like, I could do better than this, right? Even if... if we're average at the moment or above average. So really this is about training your brain for the future of everything, like work, life, taking three swings off your golf game, being nicer to your kids, being nicer to your partner. It's a pretty profound shift to be able to give to people.
Yeah, I mean, I think people are more and more interested in non-ordinary waking states, right? I think that's what I'm saying. why there's such a surge in interest in psychedelics.
People want to go deeper. They want to explore the depths of their subconscious with awareness, with being deliberate. And this allows them to do that in a non-invasive way.
So ultimately, more creative as well, making decisions more from intuition because we're developing those skills. It's actually all very trainable. Paola, thank you so much for sharing this technology. with us.
We really appreciate it.