Healing At The Speed Of Sound With Alex Doman

 

Nowadays, there are so many methods and techniques that various practitioners employ in order to initiate or sustain the process of healing. But one technique that’s often left out of the conversation is healing with sound. Alex Doman is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, music producer, podcast host, and TEDx speaker with twenty-five years’ experience in neurotechnology. Alex speaks to Timothy J. Hayes, Ps.D. about the potential of using sound and sound-related technologies to get a person into the process of healing. Learn more about this unique new technique with Alex and Timothy!

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Healing At The Speed Of Sound With Alex Doman

Alex Doman is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, music producer, podcast host and TEDx speaker with years of experience in neurotechnology. The third generation in a family of pioneers dedicated to improving brain performance, Alex is the Founder and Chief Product Officer of Vital Neuro, Founder of Advanced Brain Technologies and Sleep Genius. His bestselling book, Healing at the Speed of Sound is published in five languages. He’s contributed articles to peer-reviewed scientific journals, magazines, and books and is the host of the Advanced Brain Podcast. His production credits are extensive guiding teams who’ve created cutting edge solutions that have helped millions of people worldwide including The Listening Program, a music listening therapy and audio streaming service and Sleep Genius, which is trademarked, an audio-based sleep aid built from NASA research, which achieved the number one global health and fitness app in the App Store.

His focus is on launching Vital’s Leonardo, a mobile cloud-based neuroscience platform for brain wellness to help the masses manage their stress and mental health. He has been interviewed by NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, Today, NPR Marketplace, Wall Street Journal, Self, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, Fast Company, MoneyWatch, ESPN Radio and more. A global keynote speaker, Alex has been on stages in Europe, Asia, Australia, North and South America and was recognized as one of the 50 most important human behavior experts to watch. Stick around after the interview for my final thoughts, this talk is going to be packed with good information.

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Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the Healing at the Speed of Sound?

I’m the third generation in a family that has been in the field of neurorehabilitation and development of neurotechnology programs and child development methodologies to help people achieve their greatest potential. This work started with my grandfather, who was a Doctor of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation, who helped pioneer treatments for brain injury recovery starting back in the 1940s. The tradition of that work carried through with my father, Robert Doman Jr. at The National Academy for Child Development where I started working over many years ago, researching sound and music modalities to help improve brain performance.

Coming out of that in 1998, I started an organization called Advanced Brain Technologies to bring evidence, scientifically-based music programs to the world to help a whole range of neurological disorders but also to enhance and optimize performance across the lifespan. That work is moved into my work with Vital Neuro, a startup that I have with colleagues. It’s working to reduce mental health issues across the planet with innovative neurotechnology as well. I was raised in the brain business. I’ve always had a love for sound and music in its applications and improving people’s lives and mental wellbeing. Here I am 25 years into a career.

You mentioned Vital Neuro. Tell us a little bit more specifically about that because that’s the one you mentioned directly in connection with mental health issues.

Vital Neuro is a company I cofounded with a dear friend and colleague, Dr. Kamran Fallahpour, who’s a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist. What we did is we took the work we’ve been doing in Advanced Brain Technologies for over twenty years and blend it with his psychology and neuromodulation practice New York to address this massive global epidemic of mental health problems. Where we’re starting is that the foundation of where we see a lot of mental health challenges and that’s the ability to regulate stress and to build stress resilience. We find when stress levels are high in individuals, that the symptomology of their mental health issues is exasperated. When we can help people shift out of a fight and flight response and their sympathetic nervous system and help them cross over and live more in the parasympathetic system. Where they can recover and then reach a state of homeostasis that we see dramatic improvements in mental health issues reduction in stress as well as burnout across the population.

Is that movement from the fight or flight area into the rest and restore the area, are you facilitating that with sound?

We’re facilitating that with a combination of modalities. We start with scientifically designed music that’s been proven in clinical trials to reduce stress, depression, burnout and anxiety. That music is listened to through wireless headphones for fifteen-minute daily sessions. During that fifteen minutes session, at the first minute using our wireless Smart Headphones, which is called the vital one, the headphones have embedded EEG sensors that are dry electrodes that are reading brain activity in real-time. We take a one-minute baseline of brain activity looking at known stress markers in the brain. We get a baseline for that individual. A training session begins combining the scientifically designed music with an advanced form of neurofeedback training. That neurofeedback training is providing feedback to the brain about its stress level and helping it self-regulate.

What’s happening is in those fifteen minutes, the music is designed to entrain your brain to a more relaxed state, shifting from sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system. As the brain gets more successful at doing that, a personalized reward sound is added to the music, which tells the brain that it’s getting into the correct state of recovery. The more that it does that, the more it’s conditioned to do so through a method called operant conditioning. It gets better at it over time. Every time the brain relaxes, it gets rewarded with a feedback sound. There’s a dopamine response, which has the brain feel good. It gives it a signal that it’s doing the right thing and it continues to do that over the fifteen minutes session.

The Vital Neurotechnology is adapting to your brain activity and changing the music in real-time to help you get more successful at stress reduction. As we do this daily, the brain gets better with it over practice. It can access this state of homeostasis with automaticity, which is what we’re designed to do. In society, we have many stressors and many things coming at us that many of us are living in a heightened state of stress and aren’t even consciously aware of it. We’re seeing it through mental health symptoms and issues with obesity. Issues with fatigue levels, challenges with emotional regulation that people have, attention and focus and sleep issues. You know the impact of stress on our mental and physical health.

When you’re talking about the system and Vital Neuro, you mentioned the EEG neurofeedback, it sounds like the systems I’ve heard of and seen where there are a visual stimulation and the visual and the audio change as the brainwave entrains to the right level. What you’re talking about is the auditory with the EEG feedback. Is that correct?

Yeah, there is also a combination of visual feedback. The real dynamic shift in the Vital Neurotechnology is what’s under a patent review is the sound based algorithms that are providing that feedback reward sound based on your brain signature in real-time. There’s also a visual component of feedback that’s happening that lets you know if you’re in or out of relaxation response. For the stress reduction and relaxation protocol portion of Vital Neuro, that’s primarily a closed-eye session. Your eyes are closed during the session. We’re aligning on that audio feedback reward system. People can look at the visual reward for reference to begin to correlate the visual and auditory feedback timing, which is helpful when you begin training. We moved to audio-only where the eyes are closed by a protocol for stress reduction and relaxation. There are also protocols for a calm focus, which are eyes open that are combining auditory and visual but have a little more visual orientation as well as optimal performance protocols that have the same auditory and visual feedback design.

In my practice, I have a tremendous amount of time in the startup trying to get people out of their agitated state. They come in with a problem and they’re all nervous about talking to a professional. Where does it go from there? After you’ve built this facility for the individual to move out of that stress mode or a fight or flight into a more relaxed rehabilitating mode, then what?

 

We know the movement around meditation. Meditation has been around for eons and yet now, it’s pervasive in popular culture. The question about that is, “Why?” The ‘why’ is meditation allows us to access different states of internal reflection and external access. It helps improve the dialogue from the internal self to the external world. Vital Neuro is facilitating a neuroguided meditation process that allows us to more readily access those states. When do you ask about what’s next? That becomes a daily practice that we continue with and become part of the lifestyle choices.

Once we’ve developed that practice, we’ve begun to shift our nervous system to where we’re accessible and receptive, a whole world of opportunity begins to open up that we can layer in other processes and other modalities that we’re more receptive to because we’re in a completely different emotional, mental and physiological state. Much of what we’re beginning to explore with the optimal being program where we have participants that are doing Vital Neuro. As well as other music-based modalities from advanced brain technologies called The Listening Program. Before optimal being sessions, we’re priming the brain and the nervous system to open up its receptivity to then-new material in contexts that we may be experiencing.

The Listening Program is separate from Vital Neuro. Can you help me understand the difference? 

The Listening Program is part of what is the foundational science behind Vital Neuro. It’s a music-based listening therapy method. Also, evidence-based backed by numerous independent research studies that train the brain through specifically sound frequencies, structured music programs listened to through headphones. That’s also a daily practice, 15 to 30 minutes, five days a week. It’s designed also to help reduce our fight or flight response, help us go into homeostasis and provide a foundation for more receptive learning, emotional integration and mental health. That program was initially developed focused on a neurodiverse population of children with pediatric special needs. It ranges from autism to ADHD, brain injury recovery, stress and anxiety disorders to helping veterans with PTSD and even working with athletes and other individuals across the age spectrum and across the level of functionality from severely impaired to peak performance states.

That program for over several years has been refined through a network of over 9,000 practitioners that apply it worldwide. It is used in all use cases to change the plasticity of the brain, to change the interconnections, to improve the functionality in the synchrony of brain performance to allow us to more optimally perform in all areas of our life. The research behind The Listening Program served as a foundation for what we’re doing in Vital Neuro, but it’s available independent of the Vital Neurotechnology through Advanced Brain Technologies.

To access the Listening Program, what equipment does one need?

There are a couple of options. It’s a practitioner-guided protocol. You work with a certified Listening Program provider who’s gone through extensive training to guide and coach people through the methodology. That training has a minimum of twelve hours per practitioner. There are two options for how you access technology. You can either have a preloaded digital media player that has a personalized library of music programming on it or you can subscribe to The Listening Program online platform. With a monthly subscription, you can have a personalized program designed by that system online. Either system is overseen by the trained practitioner. You use a pair of approved headphones in combination with that music as you proceed through the protocols.

The foundation of a lot of mental health issues is stress and the ability to develop stress resilience. Click To Tweet

The idea with the taking it to the next level, it seemed as when you were talking about the Vital Neuro program that has different equipment that reads the brain signals and gives feedback. Is that correct? 

That’s right. That’s the added element. Timothy, we’ve envisioned this since 2000 and knowing that if we can get real-time neurophysiological information that is then guiding the music protocols, that we would take their efficacy to the next level. Vital Neuro is the realization of that vision that we had twenty years ago to take this technology to this point. It doesn’t make The Listening Program less relevant, but when we add the Vital Neuro component, it takes the results to the next level. What we get in The Listening Program is the benefits are long-term. They built sessions over sessions. As you do the program, you’re building the neural pathways and the system is getting stronger, our neurological system is getting stronger. We’re better able to receive, respond and use the information that comes to us in our world. With Vital Neuro, we get episodic benefits that are demonstrable within a single session significant stress reduction or improved focus within fifteen minutes. Then we get the cumulative building we get with The Listening Program over time. It accelerates the outcomes.

How do most people find out about your work?

It a number of platforms. We’ve been around for a while. If you search Advanced Brain Technologies, Vital Neuro, The Listening Program, Alex Doman, my book title, Healing at the Speed of Sound in Google, you’ll find all references. Our products have been used by millions of people worldwide over the years. Most people find us generally from a referral or a word of mouth or they’re searching on the internet for autism or ADHD or stress reduction. They come across our programs with a network of 9,000 practitioners in over 40 countries. The programs are widely used internationally, across different institutions, hospitals, schools, clinics, the VA, various hospitals as well as learning centers and home users. There’s a pretty wide word of mouth given the time that we’ve been here.

Can you give me some sense of the percentage of people that are home users?

All of the programs, Timothy, are designed to be portable. The environment they can be used in is self-determined. The same programs we use in a school or a hospital are also available for home, but the majority lead to home-based views.

What symptom patterns or problem targeting areas do you find most responsive to these two techniques?

 

If we start with The Listening Program, where we have a deeper experience, we initially develop programs to help children with pediatric special needs. The populations that we were serving were a large proportion of the autism spectrum from mild to severe autism symptoms. Children with attention deficit disorder or learning disabilities and dyslexia, individuals with chromosomal anomalies like Down Syndrome. What was interesting, Timothy, is we are training practitioners to work with these populations of individuals. They began using the programs for themselves. The parents of the children began using the programs for themselves. We began to see the stress-reduction benefits. The lowering of depression symptoms and reduced anxiety and improved emotional wellbeing. Resilience greatly improved.

People may not realize how stressful it can be to have a child with special needs. Economically, time-wise and emotionally, to serve many of these children becomes the primary role of the parent beyond their career as it should be. Often, it takes a toll. There are great rewards in our children, but there are trying times with our children. The autism population, over 80% of married couples with a child with autism, those marriages end up in divorce. Higher than the 50% rate we see across society. We often forget the family as a whole when we’re focused on that individual. That goes to the first proof of concept research we did with Vital Neuro. Looking not at the child as the beneficiary, but the caregiver.

A caregiver’s study was designed by our team along with a neurology group in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Where for two weeks, while children with autism were receiving intensive neurologically based therapies including the Listening Program, the parents receive fifteen minutes a day of Vital Neuro training. What we found in the stress of the standardized assessment of anxiety, depression and sleep, that all four areas were greatly disordered at the start of the pilot. We saw statistically significant results even in that small group in 10 to 14 days of training across this population. These experiences have helped us to see the benefits of these technologies for individuals that have mental health and stress-related issues where we started with severe neurological problems. What we’re seeing our benefits across the spectrum. One of the areas that we’re looking at an application for a Vital Neuro is with Olympic athletes to help reduce their stress and as a result, optimize their performance in their particular sport.

I appreciate all of that and I had the thought as you were talking that in your book, Healing at the Speed of Sound, one thing I want to mention about the book is that it’s wonderful. It has these wonderful little notations with an eyeball or an ear and then you can get on your mobile device or the internet and listen to a clip or watch a video. It’s beautifully done. I imagine in a connected environment to have a digital version of this book would be even easier. It enriched my experience working with the book. Congratulations on that. The thing that came to me as we began talking about almost at a clinical level for people with problems was one of my experiences of reading your book was that it’s an education in how I can pay attention to sound in my everyday life. Look at a diet, if you will, or creating a sound environment. In a more general sense, could you say something about that for our audience?

That’s what Healing at the Speed of Sound is all about. When I wrote the book with my dear late friend, Don Campbell, who wrote The Mozart Effect, which popularized the idea of music for health and wellbeing and education, our goal was to help educate everybody on the benefits of sound in our life and also the dangers of noise within our life. We are surrounded by sound 24/7, 365. We weren’t born with ear lids. Sound is pervasive and it’s constantly coming into our nervous system, through our ears and also vibrationally through our body. Our auditory sense is one of the first to develop in utero. As one of our early forms of learning as a fetus, after 16 to 20 weeks of gestation, we’re taking in and processing sound and creating a foundation in our neuro audiological system that’s going to form the basis of our interaction with sound throughout our lifetime.

What do I mean by our interaction with sound? Our ability to understand language into express language, both written and verbal. To understand the dangers of sound in our environment, to appreciate the sounds of nature and to be bathed in the beautiful benefits of nature sounds and to engage and listen and express ourselves musically. Sound is a rich tapestry of sensory information for our nervous system and because we don’t see it, we don’t often think about it in our lives. It doesn’t have this visual presence within us.

The idea behind Healing at the Speed of Sound was to help us understand how we could use sound in utero to end of life, how we can use the sound from morning to night and how we use sound in different environments in the classroom, in the workplace, during our commute and during family time. To help the aging, to help in the dying process, to ease that transition from this life to the next. It’s a practical guide of research-based information and then tools and tips to help us use sound differently in our lives. One example, each morning there’s something that we all do. We all wake up at some time and we have different ways that we wake up.

Meditation allows people to access different states of internal reflection and external access. Click To Tweet

The way the brain was designed is that the light was designed to activate the area in the brain through the retina to tell us to rise for the day. When the sun sets and when we moved into more complete darkness, that was a trigger to the brain to go to sleep. That’s what sets our circadian rhythm, our 24-hour body clock. Many of our body clocks are out of sync for a number of environmental reasons, including the stressors in our lives. We have to use aids to wake up. Rather than waking with the sunrise and the sounds of birds chirping, some people need to start themselves with an alarm clock.

Based on the alarm clock that we’re using, people may not recognize that our cortisol levels, which is our stress hormone, are highest when we wake in the morning. If we take these elevated cortisol levels and then add in a buzzing alarm clock, what have we done to set the tone for our day? We’ve set stress as the tone for our day. Why not wait to the sound of recorded bird sounds or lovely music or something that’s nurturing and it completely changes our day before we’re even out of bed. More ideally, we wake with a sunrise because we’ve trained our Circadian cycle to be able to do that.

One of the things that struck me as I was reading your book is that many years ago in school, they talked to us about how nerves in the body are the only things that don’t regrow and heal. Five or six years later, they said, “We were wrong about that.” If you have damage to the nerves in your brain, they can’t heal and it’s irreparable. Five or six years later they said, “We were wrong about that.” Now, they’re saying there’s a tremendous amount of what they call neuroplasticity or the ability for the brain to learn and grow all through our lives. I was thinking about that as I was reading your book, Healing at the Speed of Sound, as you recommend that people get proactive and conscious about what they’re putting into their sound environment throughout the day.

I understand the value of turning off the news, turning off the talk radio and the constant sports with all of the advertisements. Finding a playlist that either picks my mood up and gets me ready for the day or helps me calm down at the end of the day in a simplistic approach. Your book guides me into a much more informed and structured system that I can create for myself. It’s not creating a nice sound, it’s having an impact on how my mind and body are going to interact with whatever else I have to interact within the day.

What you’re talking about is the process of entrainment. This concept of entrainment is that the external rhythms in our life, they superimpose and entrain the internal rhythms within our body and our brain. What’s happening in our external environment is affecting our internal environment. We all recognize that, but what we may not recognize is how powerful the sound of music is as an entrainment device. In the book, Healing at the Speed of Sound, we break this down into gears: first gear, second gear and third gear. First gear we call Low and Slow. These are lower frequency sounds, more bass tone of the music and that music gets slower tempos generally under 60 beats per minute like you’ve listened to during a massage. That type of music, which is similar to what we’re using in Vital Neuro for our relaxation protocols entrains the body to slower, deeper, more relaxed states when we need to be calm and centered.

If we go to second gear, that second gear is the mid-range of frequencies. They have more energy. They are at faster tempos, generally 60 to 90 beats per minute. They support calm, focus and flow, integrate to use during the workday when we need to get into the zone and focus on what we’re doing. We have third gear, where we shift up to faster tempos, 90 to 150 beats per minute. We’d move out of instrumental music and into maybe music with lyrics. It could be rock, pop music, classical. It could be any genre, but it has a lot more energy in it. You’ll find that I’m sure, Timothy, if you broke down your playlists that you would find, you could categorize gear 1, 2 and 3 and match those to your daily activities and that you’re automatically doing that. You found what works for you. That’s true most with their playlists. In the book, we give a little more structure as to how to do that.

I like the way the book is clear in its presentation. You don’t have to be an expert in anything to start conceptualizing and then doing a little bit of an improvement in the sound escape, that sound environment that you’re living in.

 

One of the pieces we haven’t touched on, which is truly important, is the impact of noise on our nervous system and our stress. While the right sound of music can be incredibly beneficial. There is also an importance to quiet. I don’t say silence because achieving true silence is difficult to do in this world. We need periods of space with quiet where we’re not processing sound or any sensory stimulus that we’re with ourselves, to be conscious of the noise in our environment. If we think of noise, it is the unwanted sound that makes us feel stressed, uncomfortable or sometimes even unsafe. What we may not recognize is that there are noises in our environment that are pervasive that we’re not attentive to that are elevating our stress levels. Even the sound of an HVAC system in a house running, the sound of traffic noise in our environment.

It was unfortunate that this came out after the book was published but the World Health Organization published a massive health research initiative, which looked at the impact of noise on health in the European Union. What WHO identified is that the second leading cause of environmental ill health in Europe was traffic noise. Traffic noise in some instances created cardiac arrest. People can die from noise exposure even though that direct link isn’t made the cumulative effect on noise on our stress level, day in and day out can and the worst-case scenario end our life.

We need to be aware of the environment that our pregnant mothers are in when they’re carrying their unborn child. The noise exposure and the impact of stress on the mother and that’s transferred to the fetus and our children in loud, noisy environments. What’s the noise levels in our classrooms, in our workplace and during our commute? It’s one of the reasons we see many people shut off and wear headphones because they are extracting the noise from the environment and replacing it with something hopefully more positive that gives them that shield and protection while they hopefully are nourishing themselves with something positive. We’re going to that naturally because we’re recognizing those impacts. It’s important to recognize music and sound can be beneficial. Noise can be harmful and we need quiet and space in between both.

As you were talking about that, it reminds me, I believe it’s in your book, you talk about the bone-conducting headphones. Can you say a little bit about that, the pros and cons?

At Advanced Brain Technologies, we developed an audio system specifically for The Listening Program, which is called Waves. The wave system is a high-quality headset. In the headband of the headset is a vibrational unit, which is called a Transducer. There’s a headphone amplifier that attaches to that and that plugs in either to an iPod or your phone or your computer, whatever your sound sources for The Listening Program. Rather than experiencing the music through the headphones, which is rich, full in a surround sound, simulated mode, you feel the vibration of the sound through your body. We hear as living beings through two natural sound pathways, the bone conduction pathway and the air conduction pathway.

We tend to think about the air conduction pathway only of sound coming through the ears, but sound also travels through our entire body from our environment. When we were in utero and we were first learning about sound, we were in a fluid-filled world. Our earliest learning with sound included listening to the sound of our mother and our external world was entirely through bone conduction. Anyone that swam underwater and heard voices in a swimming pool has had that experience. One exercise we can do is if we cover our ears and we hum for a moment and then uncover our ears and keep humming. You’ll notice a difference in the sound level in the sound quality between the covered and uncovered, “Hmm.”

What we’ll notice with our ears covered with sound seems louder and more resonant and clearer. That’s because that is how we perceive our voice in daily life. As I’m speaking to you, I’m hearing myself primarily through bone conduction within my body. That’s my internal listening sense. I tune in to what’s happening in our environment through air conduction, which is external. The reason why we developed a combined air and bone conduction technology for The Listening Program are to train internal listening to connect to self and external listening to connect our environment and begin to improve the dialogue and the relationship between the two.

People may not realize how stressful it can be to have a child with special needs. Click To Tweet

There are also certain applications in which bone conduction can be helpful, including those that are hard of hearing individuals that have had serious chronic ear infections over time. There’s been a compromise to the internal system. Most importantly, what we find is that bone conduction provides emotional grounding and it allows us, again, to access that parasympathetic nervous system. We get more vagal nerve stimulation happening through bone conduction and air conduction only. It allows us to get centered, be grounded and be at home, if you will. When we combine those modalities, we get a deeper, richer benefit as we do with a program like The Listening Program.

You dropped in the vagal nerve reference there. The short version for the non-scientist, this is a major nerve that goes through the face and down the neck and into the stomach. It connects my gut sensations with the mirror neurons in my brain and the eyeballs. It’s the thing that if somebody starts singing The Star Spangled Banner and I tear up or I feel tingling through me or if I see somebody on the television or in a movie and they’re crying and tears come to my eyes right away, that’s all vagal nerve response. This is this deep internal connection from head to heart to the gut.

It’s the communication pathway is what you’re describing. That vagus nerve, which is our tenth cranial nerve, connects to every organ, meet every major organ in our body except for the spleen. It is that gut-brain connection which has over 100 million neurons in and of itself to this brain in our head that we think of as our brain. It creates that dialogue. There’s a crucial symbiotic relationship between the vagus nerve and connection to our autonomic nervous system. It’s access to the autonomic nervous system for we have our sympathetic fight response and flight to rest and digest and recovery and parasympathetic allowing us to access a homeostatic state more readily through that pathway.

What have we not asked you about that you’d like our audience to hear about?

It’s why. Why do we do the work that we do as a family for many now in three generations? Why is our team at Advanced Brain Technologies and Vital Neuro doing what we’re doing in the world? The why is this. We live on an amazing planet and an incredible universe with infinite potential as a society and as individuals. As I’m looking at the world, the world as it is not the world that I want my children and my future grandchildren to live in. It’s a place of stress and of chaos that is counterbalanced by these incredible movements and opportunities. I truly believe we can’t solve the great problems that we’re faced with as a global society with the level of function that we are all operating at.

Our goal, our mission is to optimize people’s performance and life so that we can make better decisions for the planet and society and our families and ourselves. That with the growing epidemic of mental health issues. I am candidly concerned, if not worried about the future state of society unless we shift people out of their fight or flight response into a state of homeostasis so that we can make better decisions about our lives and for our world. We’re on a mission to impact billions of people. It’s a lofty mission, but it’s what we’re here to do. As a family for many years, this has been our commitment. Those that we’re working with at the National Mental Health Innovation Center,  Powerful-U and Optimal Being share this vision and this drive to make a massive dramatic change. An answer to your question, that’s our ‘why.’

I thank you for that and for being here. I would like to have you summarize if you had a preferred way for people to reach out to you through a website, Facebook. How do you prefer that people access more information about these programs?

 

I make myself accessible. Anyone is welcome to contact me at any time. I have a personal website, which is AlexDoman.com. There’s a Contact form you can reach me. I’m on all social media platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, @AlexDoman. You can contact Vital Neuro through VitalNeuro.com or Advanced Brain Technologies at AdvancedBrain.com. Those organizations are also on social media. Whatever is convenient for you, reach out and engage and will help support you in any way we can.

For an individual who might hear this and want to explore this, is there a price point that you can give them for looking at either the Listening Program or the Vital Neuro?

The Listening Program is a wide range of available options. The lowest cost of entry is a monthly subscription of $34.95 per month and an investment in a pair of headphones and working with a practitioner. Somebody for less than a few $100 with a practitioner, with equipment and a monthly subscription to the Listening Program can get started right away. With Vital Neuro, we also have worked to make that accessible. When that comes to the commercial market later this year, we’ve got a target price of $350 for the Vital One Smart Headphone and a $30 a month subscription for that.

Thank you so much for your time. It’s a delight to learn more about you. Thanks for the book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I look forward to our next contact.

I do too, Timothy. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have to reread that one several times to get down everything Alex was talking about. One of the things that impressed me the most was that his work is researched and verified at so many levels. With that level of investment in research, I fully expected the cost of his programs to be much more than they are. I am looking forward to starting the listening process. The other thing that impressed me when I was reading his book is how he’s been weaving these ideas about sound health into his personal life and his family life. There’s even a segment in the book where they talk about how he and his wife used sound from the beginning of their pregnancy with the child they had together and then moved that into the delivery room. Even though they chose a hospital where natural childbirth was a priority, the people working in the hospital hadn’t heard about the importance of sound in the environment. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did. I hope you join us again for the next segment of our show. Thanks for being here.

 

Important Links

• Vital Neuro
• Advanced Brain Technologies
• Sleep Genius
• Healing at the Speed of Sound
• Advanced Brain Podcast
• The Listening Program
• The Mozart Effect
• Waves
• Powerful U!
• AlexDoman.com
• Contact form – Alex Doman
• LinkedIn – Alex Doman
• Facebook – Alex Doman
• Twitter – Alex Doman
• @AlexDoman – Instagram
• VitalNeuro.com
• AdvancedBrain.com

 

About Alex Doman

Alex Doman is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, music producer, podcast host, and TEDx speaker with twenty-five years’ experience in neurotechnology. The third generation in a family of pioneers dedicated to improving brain performance, Alex is founder and Chief Product Officer of Vital Neuro, founder of Advanced Brain Technologies and Sleep Genius. Alex’s bestselling book Healing at the Speed of Sound® is published in five languages. He’s contributed articles to peer reviewed scientific journals, magazines, and books, and is the host of the Advanced Brain Podcast.

Doman’s production credits are extensive, guiding teams who’ve created cutting-edge solutions that have helped millions of people worldwide including; The Listening Program® music listening therapy and audio streaming service, and Sleep Genius™, an audio based sleep aid built from NASA research which achieved the #1 global Health & Fitness app in the App Store. His focus is now on launching Vital’s Leonardo, a mobile cloud-based neuroscience platform for brain wellness, to help the masses manage their stress and mental health.

He has been interviewed for; NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, Today, NPR Marketplace, Wall Street Journal, Self, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, Fast Company, MoneyWatch, ESPN Radio, and more. A global keynote speaker, Alex has been on stages in Europe, Asia, Australia, North and South America and was recognized as one of the 50 important human behavior experts to watch.

 

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