Shining a Light on Brain Health with Liam Pingree: Key PBM Researchers

Lisa: Hi everyone, Lisa Tamati here. Welcome to a new edition of Pushing the Limits. Today I have Liam Pingree, who is the CEO and founder of Neuronic, and he is a repeat guest on the show. We are talking about photobiomodulation in regards to neurodegeneration. Photobiomodulation is like red light therapy or infrared light therapy, and he has developed a device along with his company called the Neuradiant 1070 that uses 1070 nanometres as its therapeutic range, and that it uses for things like Alzheimer's, concussions, Parkinson's, just brain optimisation, and training your brain to be more focused, that type of thing, and all of the incredible studies and how red light works, etc, etc.

Lisa: I've done quite a number of podcasts now on red light therapy in general. I'm a huge fan of it. I have it in my clinic in Taranaki, the panels, and the Neuradiant is coming shortly, and I'm really excited for this technology and how it can help people with dementia, and Parkinson's, and multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's, especially so, and post-concussion syndrome as well. So I hope you enjoy this episode. We've got an avalanche of these things coming at us, so you really need to know about these things. And the exciting thing is this device that they've been working on for a number of years now — this is a new iteration, and it's cheaper and more accessible for people. So that's always exciting, because some of the stuff that we like to get is very expensive, and this is now coming down in price. So I hope you enjoy the interview with Liam. It's over 11 o'clock in the evening in Dubai where he is, so it was very kind of him to jump on a show at such a late hour.

Lisa: Before we head over to the show, AAM Labs is now launched, and we have our flagship product, Rejuvenate Pro, on the market, and you can check it out on my website. If you go to shop.lisatamati.com, you'll find AAM Labs and Rejuvenate on there, or you can go to our main website, aamlabs.co.nz, and check out all the science and the details. And I encourage you to go and listen to the couple of episodes that we've already released about this formulation and some of the ingredients in the formulation. It's a real powerhouse when it comes to reversing immune ageing and giving you back the function of our younger immune system. That was the goal that we set out to do two years ago. It's over 15 years of clinical research behind this product. We have a world-class scientific advisory team and we've been working very hard for the last couple of years to get this to the market, and it really works.

Lisa: It's a foundational immune product, and you think of the immune system as just being something that you don't want to get the flu or cold in winter, but the immune system is so much more. It's at the basis of all ageing, and all the 12 hallmarks of ageing are influenced by the state of your immune system. And as we get older our immune system ages and we get something called immunosenescence. You'll hear me talking about this over and over again in different episodes; we'll be covering the subject a lot now. I encourage you to also go and listen to the episode I did with Dr David Furman, who has been studying immunosenescence for the last 15 years in relation to how it affects your rate of ageing and why it really affects all of the hallmarks of ageing.

Lisa: So our formulation, Rejuvenate Pro — go and check it out. This is something that you should all be on, and it's a very safe product. Now, we do say don't take it if you're pregnant, and don't take it for children, just to be on the super safe side, but it is very easily digestible. It's going to protect your tight junctions in your stomach, it helps with transfer factors, it helps with growth factors, it helps with immunoglobulins, your tight junctions, your barriers in your body. It is a real powerhouse and it combines four key ingredients: Immune Defence Proteins and Immulox, which is a colostrum whey extract, and Immune Defence Proteins is a suite of 50 bioactive whey proteins. And then native kawakawa, which has traditionally been used by Māori for centuries as a tonic for so many things — for gut health, for immune health, for cellular health. And we also have kojic acid, which is a very powerful ingredient to upregulate your own endogenous antioxidant capacity, as does kawakawa, and it also has antimicrobial, antibacterial properties, and it's also very protective from a neuro perspective, from neurodegeneration.

Lisa: So go and check that all out at aamlabs.co.nz, or head over to my website, lisatamati.com, hit the shop button, and you can buy our Rejuvenate Pro there. Get on the subscription for this, because it's the sort of thing you want at the base level of your supplement regime to help cover all the things. Now we're coming into winter, even better time to do it. But if you're dealing with autoimmune or anything like that, gut health issues, then this is something that you want to be paying attention to and learning a bit about the science. Right, without further ado, now over to Liam Pingree.

Lisa: Hi everyone and welcome into Pushing the Limits. This week I have my friend Liam Pingree to guest, and you may remember that name — he's been a guest before on the show. So welcome back to the show, Liam. Fabulous to have you with updated information. We're going to be talking red light, and red light helmets, and photobiomodulation and all of that good stuff. So Liam, what have you been up to this past year since we connected last time?

Liam Pingree: Yeah, thanks for having me. We actually had some exciting events. Only yesterday we had the official launch of our new product, which I'm going to be able to show and tell you on this call. It's been a busy, busy year for sure. We had our team summit where we flew everyone into Istanbul only last week as well, so that was 20 team members getting to meet a lot of them for the first time. So really exciting to get to work together in place, because we are a remote company.

Lisa: That's amazing. Yeah, I know what it's like when you're trying to coordinate your team and they're all over the world. It's pretty difficult. So to actually get together, I bet that was great. Last time when we talked — and this is for everybody listening, this is about red light therapy and photobiomodulation, or low-level laser therapy, whatever you want to call it — you have a company called Neuronic. Neuronic is the company and Neuradiant is the device. Can you give us a bit of a snapshot, so that for people that haven't listened to the first episode, they get a bit of a picture: how did Neuronic happen? How did this all come about?

Liam Pingree: So Neuronic is a company that develops photobiomodulation devices for the head, specifically for people's brain, and we developed this company over five years ago. The product, the Neuradiant 1070, as you referred to, has been on the market — this is the fourth year. We officially released the Neuronic Light yesterday, and that's our second product. We can get more into that later.

Liam Pingree: But essentially, a long time ago I had seen this video on Facebook of a guy called Max Burr — you're familiar with him. He essentially had Parkinson's and he noticed the tablets weren't working anymore as well as they should, so the side effects were coming back. And he'd seen this trial done on mice, and in the study they shone light on the mice and they got better. So Max thought, well, if it works for them, why not me? So he went to his local doctor and he asked the question of, hey, why can't I use this and help with my Parkinson's symptoms? And the doctor said, under no certain circumstances should you use this, there's no human trials — this is years ago. But heck, Max being the guy he is, he did it anyway, and in the video it reported nine out of 10 symptoms improved. Max is playing the piano again.

Liam Pingree: And when I'd seen this, it was like on Facebook, I was like, oh, this is fake news, you know, no way is this true, light therapy. And so naturally I went to Google Scholar and I started looking up all the research, and I was blown away, because not only was there research on Parkinson's, but such an array of different other conditions and symptoms, and I thought, there really is something here.

Liam Pingree: I was in college at the time, so I kind of parked the idea up, between study abroad and then having actually a family member go through cancer and eventually having memory loss issues to the point where she couldn't recognise you anymore. That affected me. So when the time came around, COVID, knowing about this idea and how it helped someone with Parkinson's, having this personal story and just being a bit entrepreneurial, I thought, this is something I want to do.

Liam Pingree: I looked back at the research — I don't know if it was a couple of years later — and the amount more on the PubMed NIH database... and it was only a few months ago that it hit over 10,000 publications when you put in the search term photobiomodulation. So I think it's just a fascinating time and there's so much more research coming out. So this is essentially where the company started. I then sent the same video to Marvin Schoner, my co-founder. He had the same idea. He thought, hey, we can develop a helmet here that's more accessible, more affordable, put in some research and development and make this a device that everyone can use at home.

Lisa: Wow. I mean, what a vision, and there's such a need. We've talked about it on the last show — we've got an avalanche of neurodegenerative diseases. Alzheimer's is coming at us like a bus. The amount of people is just growing exponentially. We've got an ageing population around the world, we've got Alzheimer's on the rise, so is Parkinson's, so is multiple sclerosis and dementia of all types. So we really desperately need answers, and billions and billions of dollars... And I've interviewed many, many scientists and doctors at the forefront of research in brain rehabilitation, obviously because I have a family member with some issues, shall we say. And I am just blown away by the amount of research that has been done now, and that it's not been translated into the local clinics, right? So that people here in New Zealand, in my hometown, when they get a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, they think it's all over. They think this is the end of the road. They think with Parkinson's maybe they've got a couple of years and then it's the end of the road. And it's so sad, because there is so much more research than what they know about.

Lisa: And so my mission is to try to bring that research and get people like you that are at the cutting edge doing this sort of stuff and developing these incredible technologies to share, so that we can hopefully lower the suffering. Because the suffering is horrendous. Having lived with someone for 10 years now with brain damage of various sorts, from aneurysms and strokes and brain cancer and all of these things, I know the strain on the family. I've lived it. If I can help prevent people, or even reverse some of this, and have people have longer, healthier lives with their brain intact, this is gold, right? And so this is a non-invasive way too, because a lot of the drugs that have been developed are horrific — they've spent billions and gotten basically nowhere, because they've been up the wrong tree basically. And I've interviewed people like Dale Bredesen at the forefront, and Dayan Goodenowe, and it's just millions...

and billions of dollars — billions of dollars actually being wasted on pharmaceuticals to rip out the amyloid plaques and stuff. And we have at our fingertips this thing, red light therapy, photobiomodulation, that is doing incredible things when you start to research. And like you said, there's 10,000 papers studying various things — there's human studies, there's animal studies.

Lisa: So what is red light doing on a cellular level? And I know you're not a red light or photobiomodulation scientist per se, but you've been in the space for years, you know all the big players in the space, you know all the research. Tell us what's happening on a cellular level in the brain. How does it actually affect the brain? How can light affect anything?

Liam Pingree: Well, I think the simplest way to explain this is thinking about it from the sun, and we can get down to the cellular level after. The sun's light — actually 50% of the sun's light is near-infrared light, and at certain times of day it can actually penetrate through the atmosphere better, through the different angles, usually at sunrise and sunset. People typically are not getting outside as much as they used to in the past, so they're actually having a deficiency. Seasonal, they're usually experiencing a lack of sunlight. Everything else on the planet grows and gets energy — like plants, trees — from the sun, and we're just not getting enough of it.

Liam Pingree: So what we've done with this helmet, it's not all that innovative, because it's actually a natural source. It should be something that you're getting naturally from the sun anyway. Of course, it's more concentrated when it's applied directly, as close as it is, and you can add pulsing in and different things — okay, it's a bit more advanced — but essentially it's just giving the body what it needs, giving the brain what it needs, that natural near-infrared light to actually react with the mitochondria to produce more ATP. And that's what it's doing on the cellular level.

Liam Pingree: So when you shine your phone and you have the light on it, and you put it through your finger, your finger glows red. That's visible light that you can obviously see. But with the near-infrared light, it's at a further level on the spectrum, so the near-infrared is actually invisible to the human eye. When you turn on the device, you won't actually see any of these lights — we've actually put an indicator light inside. And the light is able to shine through the skull and actually target the cells inside, targeting the mitochondria, to start this reaction and produce more ATP. So it's increasing the blood flow, it's increasing your cellular energy and reducing inflammation.

Liam Pingree: And when you were talking earlier about the rise of Alzheimer's and all these other diseases — well, actually it's a symptomatic issue, where people are eating unhealthier diets that are usually with more processed food and higher sugar, and it's building up all this inflammation. And that inflammation then just tries to get out in so many different streams, and that's Alzheimer's, it's Parkinson's, it's other issues. So I think it's all related to the fundamental things that we're often forgetting. We have the labels on the different conditions, but essentially once you reduce that inflammation, you give the body back the energy that it needs to really function, you're kind of alleviating all the different conditions at once. You're just becoming back to the healthier self that you once were.

Lisa: That's so good, because I interviewed Dr David Furman, and he is a professor at Stanford University and the Buck Institute, director of the 1000 Immunomes Project. I interviewed him because we were working on an immune formulation for my company, Avea Labs — we have a longevity biotech company. He has spent 15 years on immunology, and the thing that they came up with is the biggest influence is the immune system going awry as we get older, and the ageing, or immunosenescence, is at the core of all of the hallmarks of ageing. So we're going at a level lower, if you like, or higher, however you want to see it, than the hallmarks. So rather than tackling each one of the hallmarks of ageing, he says let's get the immune system going right, because we are going to affect all 12 at once.

Lisa: And that's going back to that pathways thing, right? I totally agree. When I'm working with a client and they come and they say, "I've got Parkinson's disease, I've got multiple sclerosis, I've got whatever," that's a label. For me, that does not tell me what is actually happening. It is the end effect, the symptomology of what's happening, but at the basis is a dysfunction at the cellular level. It's inflammation, and it's systemic chronic inflammation that is causing all of these diseases. And that's what Dr Furman and his team came up with as well — systemic chronic inflammation is the base of all of these ageing-related diseases.

Lisa: So if we can attack it at that level — and that's what's so exciting about red light and photobiomodulation, is that it attacks it at that level, it's lowering inflammation. We have chromophores on our cells that can receive light, and it helps the electron transport chain produce more ATP. Often we have mitochondrial dysfunction when we have these diseases, and often it's complex one and two that has issues, and so this is sort of bypassing all of that, going to that cytochrome c oxidase part of the electron transport chain and producing more energy and lowering inflammation, lowering these cytokines of inflammation, all of these sorts of things. So this is without it being a drug and without it having any downsides, really.

Lisa: And this near-infrared range — so tell us what nanometres are classified as in the near-infrared versus the red light ranges, and what do the different nanometres do?

Liam Pingree: So typically in the red you see kind of maybe 650 and lower. From 650 to kind of where we are at the 1100 is near-infrared, and then you get into the infrared and far infrared after that. So the difference that we've seen typically is red is better on the dermal level, so it doesn't penetrate as far, so it's helping with a lot more skin conditions, exactly, and everything like that. And then you have the near-infrared range, which can actually penetrate further.

Liam Pingree: A lot of research came out with the 810 nanometres, and I think it's very efficacious, and it's why a lot of research was done on it. But then they thought, hey, that was the peak of where the penetration could go while actually having these reactions — until it was kind of found that the 1064, and sometimes it's rounded to 1070, so you'll see research on the two, they found actually can penetrate further. And a study done by Hanli Liu showed that actually not only can the 1070 penetrate further, but it can have longer-lasting effect. And that's why we used that one in our device, going off that kind of research.

Liam Pingree: I think both wavelengths — I think all light therapy, I'm a very big advocate for all light therapy. Some seem to have certain effects that others have but maybe just not as much of. So it's a really interesting time, and I think we need to have more cross-comparison, looking at the wavelength. And we could get into a whole other topic about dosage, frequency — even when you put the devices on and you think, hey, I'm measuring this one and this one, and someone said, hey, this is what the output is on that one device, go test it with another few devices and you might get a different answer. This is what we're finding in the industry: actually the hardest part is to measure the light and get a very accurate number that everyone can agree on. I remember we did this as a workshop at the summit last week, and we split up in teams and we had five different measurement devices, and we all got different numbers. There was no one number that was the exact same. So it goes to show, we got averages and you could put together that, hey, we had some consistency, but there was no number that was the exact same.

Lisa: Yeah, and there's so much research that needs to be done because of all these different nanometres, because of the pulsing, which we can get into a little bit later about — when you turn the light on and off and have a pulse situation and brain entrainment and all of that — and then you've got the actual power of the light itself. But the 1064, 1070, that range, goes deepest into the tissues, which when you're dealing with the brain... we think of the brain like it's in this head of ours and we've got hair and we've got this thick skull, and you think, how can it penetrate through the skull and through your hair? How does it, and why is the 1064, 1070 that much more powerful when it comes to getting deeper into the brain, into the deeper areas of the brain?

Liam Pingree: I actually don't know specifically why that wavelength is. I just believe it's a longer wavelength, and through the physics of it, it just manages to actually penetrate further. But I don't have another answer to tell you exactly why that is.

Lisa: I think it's something to do with the water — it actually interacts with the water, doesn't it, when it's at that 1070 range, more so than the 810 sort of range, from what I understand. So there's a water element and it conducts it further into the brain, from what I've researched on it.

Liam Pingree: Yeah, there's Professor Paul Chazot, and he has a great webinar on this, and I do recall him talking about that, that the water acts like a magnifying glass inside the skull. There's so much water inside the brain, so it actually makes it more effective. But I don't really know the full details of how that happens.

Lisa: We'll try and get Paul on the show, that'll be good. Or Dr Hamblin or one of these other luminaries in the space. I have managed to get Dr Lew Lim — that was really awesome — from Vielight, a couple of years ago. But there's a handful of professors and scientists that are really at the cutting edge of this.

Liam Pingree: So Michael Hamblin would be happy to come on the podcast, I believe. He's on our scientific advisory board, so I can put you in touch, and he can definitely go way further into the science.

Lisa: I love geeking out, right? So yes, please hook me up.

Liam Pingree: And I think it's great as well, because we have these experts on the team, and this is why it is a team — because we all have our fields of knowledge.

Lisa: Absolutely, absolutely. And you're the visionary behind the whole thing, and that's the most important thing really, because you've got to have the researchers, but you've got to have the person who wants to make this thing in the first place and has the drive and the determination. So well done.

Lisa: And you've iterated. So last time we spoke, one of the problems is the cost of these helmets, right? And as with all technologies, they start out hugely expensive and they get cheaper over time. Tell us what you've been doing on that front, because when we spoke last time I think it was around the $35,000 or somewhere thereabouts, which is a great impediment for a lot of people to get this device. You've been working really hard because you want to democratise the accessibility for this device. What have you been doing on that front, and also tell us what the new model is about and show us the new model.

Liam Pingree: Yeah, okay, great. So just to recap on the last

Liam Pingree: The previous device was the Neuradiant 1070, and it's still a very good device. People are still purchasing that one over the new one, because it comes with a control box and you can have section control, meaning you could turn on the lights just at the front of the helmet, the back, the left or the right, so different areas. It also comes with a 30-minute free consultation. That goes for $3,400. Clinicians typically have loved that and at-home users have liked it, but sometimes what we've heard is, "Hey, there's so many wires," or, "There's a big control box, so it's not the easiest to move around with."

Liam Pingree: So we built a consumer advisory board. We emailed anyone that had bought the device to fill out a kind of survey, we did interviews, and then we've built this group of people that are the voice of the people, if you will. They've been giving us all this different feedback. We have a call every now and then and we'll hear firsthand what they've experienced, why they got the device, what were the biggest pain points, what were the best bits. What we've been able to do is obviously produce a new device, and you said cost at the start — we've managed to reduce the cost. And this is the device.

Lisa: Watch this on YouTube, for those that are listening on the podcast. We want to actually see the helmet Liam's showing us. That looks space age.

Liam Pingree: Space age, kind of space age. And what we've done on the back, what you can kind of see here, is there's further coverage, so it can target the cerebellum on the back. So if I actually put it on, you can see there that it's going down quite low.

Lisa: Oh, that's gold, because the cerebellum is — well, that's an important one for Mum, so I'm glad about that.

Liam Pingree: Exactly. And so this is how easy it is to use, right? You have the USB-C in the back. That USB-C is literally plugged into this little portable battery pack. So I just plug that back in, button on the side, and that's it, turns it on. And the second button is a quick start, so if I press that, three bleeps, and you'll see inside the helmet turns on. The white is actually the indicator light to tell you it's operating — you can't see it, it's not in the visible spectrum.

Lisa: Yeah, perfect.

Liam Pingree: And so that's working right now. Then you can press the button again and it pauses the programme, and you can turn it off. It's really as simple as that. Inside you also have an adjuster, so this is like a bike helmet adjuster. You can literally screw this and unscrew it, and it basically just pulls this frame in so it fits your head. There's a foam pad on the back and on the front as well, so it's quite comfortable to wear. We've had people pretty much wear it while they were doing yoga, upside down, hands off. I'm not suggesting one does that, but you can if you're that type. So it's really easy to move around.

Liam Pingree: This is the whole setup. You can plug it into the mains or a wall adapter as well, if you want and you prefer. We have two cords, two USB-Cs, so one's longer than the other. And inside the device, again, there's 300 LEDs. In the previous generation there was 256, so more powerful. We would say it's about two to three times as powerful as the previous device. Not because there's more LEDs, but actually because we've inserted nine ultra LEDs. So there's different LEDs that are circled in here — you can see them indicated — and those ultra ones actually have 20 times as much power as the normal LEDs.

Liam Pingree: With this device, not only is it more powerful — and ironically we've called it the Neuradiant Light — but it connects with your phone. So if you do connect it with the phone, you have an app, and in the app what you can do is, once you start a session, it can actually log and record your session. Each person has their individual account and you can see, "I've just used the Glow programme for 10 minutes," or, "I've just used Focus," and then it keeps a log for you so you can see exactly when you use it. You can also adjust the time, the intensity and the pulse rate, all via the app, creating custom programmes that you can use and save. So we've made it really effective that way. And with that we have a Learn section, and we also have the ability to do research now. So we have the PROMIS-10, which is a standard questionnaire to see how people are getting on. It's 10 set questions, they rate on the scale of one to five or 10, and with those answers they do the quiz weekly, and over time we can see the improvements that people are having with the device.

Lisa: Yeah, that's amazing from a research and development point of view, what a brilliant — because we've been looking at ways to get feedback from customers for our companies, and how do we do that? It's really hard. You've built it into the app, that's pretty clever. So you can actually do that on a weekly basis, get feedback from your clients, how they're actually doing. Because this is the thing, right? A lot of people — and I see this not only with neurodegeneration but across the board — they forget how bad they were, and so they think, "Oh, I'm not that much better." But if you do a really in-depth questionnaire, or you do something based on symptomology and things, then you see the difference, right? And then they're scoring, then you can look at different scores. I use different questionnaire systems to get that sort of feedback sometimes, and it surprises me. The human brain is wired for negativity, sort of thing. We forget immediately when we've made a gain, we just see what we haven't got. And so it's really good to see the progress.

Lisa: I did this with Mum in the beginning when she had her aneurysm, because I was recording and videoing and doing that type of recording and diaries and things like that. When I got frustrated, I would look back over that old footage and go, "Oh hell, we've come a long way." But in the moment you're like, "Why am I not getting anywhere?" You've got to remind yourself. I think it's really crucial to use that feature of it and use that app to get that feedback, because especially with something like neurodegeneration, you have good days and you have bad days, and it's quite hard to give an absolute measure. But you know that over time your brain's not functioning like it was, and you can't remember.

Lisa: And I also think for prevention this is a really good thing. Or if you're like me and you want to be optimal and you want to be firing on all cylinders, you want your brain absolutely in pink condition for the work that you're doing, or whatever that takes a lot of brain power, having this proactive approach is really gold. And the price point now — just repeat the price point now.

Liam Pingree: Yeah, it's $1,795 this time, so it's actually nearly half the price of the predicate device.

Lisa: That is amazing, in the space of a year. Well done, that's just awesome. Because this is about democratising health, right? So many things cost a fortune, and yes, that's still an investment for a family to do. But you know what it costs to put a person in an Alzheimer's unit, like a dementia unit? Over here it's like $8,000 a month, and that has to come out of the family's budget. That's what people don't actually know. If you put your loved one in one of these dementia units, that's what you're going to be paying. And then the care is not what you want for your loved one either. So this is a very cheap investment when you put it in that sort of perspective. So even if you're having any sort of degenerative signs, get in now.

Liam Pingree: Absolutely. I think it's not even the cost. I truly believe if this was sold for $10,000 and someone bought it and seen the results, it's worth every penny. I've just come off a call before this with someone who was talking — they'd submitted a testimonial for the website and I had an interview, and we'd actually already spoken with Christina and she doesn't mind sharing the story. Her dad went under surgery for some back injury quite some time ago, and after the surgery he just wasn't himself. Right before it, doing bills on his laptop online, 89 years old. After surgery, a ghost. And you have that stage, within the 24 hours, maybe you're coming off the drugs, the painkillers, everything like that, but this was a completely different story. Christina realised it was something up, and she had tried pretty much everything — natural foods, vitamins, magnesium, making sure there were no toxins in the environment, everything like that. Then a few months later she went down the rabbit hole, photobiomodulation, looking at everything, found the company, started using the Neuronic device. And then after that realised, after one month he started coming back; two months, things were getting to the stage where he was joking again, watching the news on the TV; and the third month he was putting the device on his own head, using the controller and making sure he was using it daily — which at the start he just had to be told how to use it and given it and put on the head. So to see that recovery in such a short amount of time, I don't think you can put a price on that.

Lisa: No, you can't. You can't.

Liam Pingree: I know it's still an investment and you're a bit unsure and you never really know — it's like trying anything for the first time — but honestly, when you hear people coming to you and saying those things, it's really...

Lisa: Yeah, it is. And I've seen Mum's brain come back, and I've used different devices, and I'm about to get this new one from you guys, and it's game-changing. I've got colleagues who are using the Neuronic Neuradiant with their parents and it's just been game-changing for them. So there are testimonials up the wazoo. And I think it just gives you that quality of life. Who wants to lose their brain? They call it the long goodbye, because you're losing your loved one inch by inch.

Lisa: And surgery is a major insult to the brain, for all of us by the way. It's a brain injury of sorts. People think a brain injury is only being like when you hit your head somewhere or you're in an accident, but brain injuries come in all sorts of forms. They can come in the form of viruses and pathogens, they can come in the form of leaky gut getting all those pathogens into the bloodstream and affecting the brain, it can come from toxins, it can come from heavy metals, it can come from the build-up of amyloid plaques and the things that we know cause those sorts of things. But these are all brain injuries that are all going to be helped in some way, shape or form by this device. And you know what I'm

Lisa: ...excited about, because I'm a "go too far" person, is stacking this device with some absolute key other players, like plasmalogens. They're one of my favourite things, of Dr Dayan Goodenowe, that really help the brain heal, regrow neurons, remyelinate the sheath. Now you put those two together, and this is where I think stacking really could have some benefits, with things like that, with things like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which obviously I've got a clinic in. And you stack all of those things up and then you start to see massive results.

Lisa: I've seen them with my mum over the last decade. Losing her completely, like nobody home, gaga, like a baby, to fully functional, getting a driver's licence, to losing her again through brain cancer, through having brain surgeries and so on, getting back, then having emboli, then having hip fractures, each one of these an operation, on and on. The latest bout last month was sepsis, three times, because she had a port cath inserted and she got sepsis, because the port attracts different bacteria and it got infected, and so she went into sepsis three times within a month.

Lisa: Now usually I would lose her every time. In the past, every time she got any type of infection, UTI, anything like that, she would go what I call offline. She would be like that when the infection was raging. Why? Because she had no reserve capacity in the brain. Now, because of all of the things I do, including the red light, including the hyperbaric, including progesterone nasal sprays and peptides and plasmalogens and all of these things, we didn't lose her. That was interesting, right? And she was in ICU with sepsis and we didn't lose her cognitively. So that showed that the resilience of her brain was coming back.

Lisa: And there's always something else that I'm looking for and researching, and I'm just so stoked to be able to get this for her, because I think that will be the next level. We've had an 810 device that we've been using, but this one is going to go the next degree. And when you stack these things together with different supplements and therapies, you can get extraordinary results. And I have got extraordinary results, absolutely. This is an N of one, unfortunately, not a clinical study, and nobody could replicate exactly what I've done, because it's so unique.

Liam Pingree: Honestly. Have you tried methylene blue? I'm a huge fan of methylene blue, and that operates similar to the red light, right?

Lisa: So methylene blue, yes, she's been on that for the last year and a half, and that's kept the UTIs pretty much at bay. We were getting constant UTIs, and interestingly enough, the methylene blue actually... yeah, she's on it twice a day now. I'm on it for athletic performance. And methylene blue, of course, and red light therapies have crossover, because they bypass those first two complexes in that mitochondrial electron chain.

Liam Pingree: Yeah, you explain that further to me, because I know you're interviewing me here, but I'm super interested in the methylene blue piece, because I've had a few friends actually talking about it. I've tried it once, actually don't know how it works.

Lisa: It's actually similar. Well, it's similar because it's bypassing those first two complexes, right? So it's producing more ATP just like the red light therapy does. So it's getting past that — when you have mitochondrial dysfunction, it's usually in those first two complexes that you have the issues, so you're bypassing those issues. And this is off the top of my head, I'd have to go and read. Actually, I will send you a couple of lectures that are brilliant on methylene blue from Dr William Clearfield, who's done a lecture on it, just absolutely brilliant.

Lisa: What it does is more of the point. Athletic performance, so you're going to get more ATP, you're going to get better athletic performance. It's antibacterial, antimicrobial, antioxidant. I use it for the UTI situation, which a lot of elderly people face, because it collects in the urethra and stops the adherence of the bacteria. That's off the top of my head, so I'd have to go and check that. And you get blue wees, so your wee turns bright blue, which is normal, so don't panic about that. But that's actually showing that it's gathering there and getting rid of the bacteria there and keeping it at bay.

Lisa: It was the original antibiotic before antibiotics, and then once we had antibiotics, of course methylene blue got shoved to the side, because it's cheap and it's easy to do, and we can't have that. We've got to have the new shiny antibiotics, which of course now we're having issues with antibiotics, right? So some places that are more enlightened are going back to it. It was originally used, I think, for malaria as well — don't quote me on that one.

Lisa: They use it in operations as well, to tell the surgeons which... they pour it on surgical areas to tell them which places, where the mitochondria are, because they use it for thyroid, for example, when they're doing thyroid operations, so they can actually see what's what. Because it stains different tissues differently, and so that helps them differentiate. So there's a lot of uses for it. It's also used in sepsis cases. So yeah, we used it. It's an amazing thing that you need to look into. And Dr Scott Sherr is another expert on methylene blue, so I've had him on the show a couple of times. He explains it way better than me, so I'll send you a couple of resources to listen to, and for people listening, if it's piqued their interest in methylene blue, go and have a look at those. I'll put that in the show notes too, with Dr Scott Sherr.

Lisa: But similar, and they're all in that oxidative medicine family, right? You've got ozone, you've got red light therapy, hyperbaric, and I believe methylene blue sort of fits in there as well, because of this electron transport chain and the mitochondrial piece of the puzzle. So they're all sort of related. And vitamin C infusions as well.

Liam Pingree: It's interesting when you were talking about the methylene blue being used to target in surgeries. I actually recall — and I don't know if it was methylene blue, but it sounds like it could be in this case — there was a study recently put out where they were showing people that were going under brain surgery, they put the dye in, maybe methylene blue, and actually they were using it in this case to see the lymphatic drainage system.

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Liam Pingree: So lymphatics have been around for quite some time, everyone understands that, but then when it goes obviously up the neck and into the brain, that region is called the glymphatic system. And it's very interesting for us as a company, because what has been recently shown is red light therapy, or near-infrared red light therapy, is actually accelerating the process of this lymphatic drainage.

Lisa: You're kidding me.

Liam Pingree: And research is suggesting that the glymphatic drainage actually occurs naturally overnight, so while you're sleeping. So if you're improving the lymphatic drainage with the near-infrared light, by increasing the width of the vessels where all the toxins are flown out of, which is shown in this study through the dye, then in essence you're going to have a deeper and a better sleep, because you're going to get rid of all the debris.

Lisa: This is one of the major issues — you just piqued my interest — because one of the major issues I've never been able to get on top of is that Mum has hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain, and she's not draining properly. So she's not clearing her lymphatics. And as you get older, your glymphatic system, your vessels, don't contract properly and they don't have that pumping effect that you have when you're younger. And this is one of the reasons why a lot of debris can stay up in the brain, from how I understand it — and again, layperson on this.

Lisa: But I've been looking for ways to improve the lymphatic clearance. Like, I make Mum sleep on her left side, because that's better clearance. I do progesterone, nasal progesterone up the nose at night-time, to try to help get that water out of the brain. Because we can see on her scan she's got this big, like a lake up there. We've all got some water in these ventricles, and I've forgotten the names of the parts of the brain, but they are enlarged in her case, and that's making her vestibular system all out of whack, because it's like having a lake in your brain that's not working right.

Lisa: So she's like a drunk. She's not drunk — she wishes she probably was — but she's not, but she walks like she's drunk. We've all been drunk before, we all know what that's like, when you're like, "Oh, I can't get my balance." And that's what life's like for her on a 24/7 basis.

Liam Pingree: I think what to do is send you on the research that I've seen on this topic. And for people, there are arguments for and against using light therapy at night-time. For some people, it gives a bit more energy, so they feel like they're more awake, so we often recommend not to use it kind of after sunset. However, some people have argued that, hey, it's increasing your melatonin production, so it's actually putting you in deeper sleep. And also we've had some users experience putting on the helmet and falling asleep, because it puts them in that restful kind of state.

Lisa: Now we usually pulse the light at 10 when it's those... the alpha — is that the alpha state, isn't it?

Liam Pingree: Yeah, so it's usually like a lower pulsation, trying to put them in that calmer kind of state, or else just continuous wave but a shorter session. So we're kind of trying to hit the sweet spot and not overstimulate and produce too much energy. But if you're going to be using it for the kind of lymphatic drainage, maybe right before bed is the best time, if the person can tolerate that and doesn't feel like they're getting too energised.

Lisa: Yeah, because that might increase the lymphatic drainage. Well, I'll be definitely trying that out, and putting it on the 10 hertz probably, and just seeing what happens there. And from a point of view, you've got a lot of learning resources on the app where you can read about the different settings and the different things, right? But just as a quick overview, what would you be using, when would you be using which pulses and which areas of the brain? Give us a bit of an overview of that, if you like, without going into detail.

Liam Pingree: Some people are very much on... if you've heard of binaural beats, or you've heard of other kinds of stimulations where they pulse things, or the noise, there's different frequencies, and our brain picks up these external stimuli and it tries to replicate that. Now, it doesn't copy it immediately — you still are in control of your own brain. So if you're focused and you're really focused and someone's putting on sleepy music, you're going to stay focused, but you might slightly be distracted, and over a long enough time you probably start to get sleepy.

Liam Pingree: So if we think about it the same way with light, when you're looking at four to 10 hertz you're typically in a sleep or relaxed kind of state of mind. So you can set the helmet up to actually pulse the light at 10 hertz. Equally, you can actually pulse it at 40 hertz. You can...

Liam Pingree: You can go from a whole range — from zero to a thousand — but we obviously have recommendations. For extra focus there's a lot of research on 40 hertz, and then also Alzheimer's. If you look at a lot of Alzheimer's studies, when they use pulsing in any type of stimulation, 40 hertz seems to be a key area that people are focusing on. So we have preset protocols in the app that you can quickly use, whether it's Focus, Balance, Peace or Glow. With those we'd recommend you use it once or twice a day, depending on how sensitive you are to light, and each session lasts between three and 10 minutes. You can make custom protocols as well. So say you're very into neurofeedback, or you have a clinician that's done a brain map and they know what frequency you're going at, then it might be useful to play around with the custom settings.

Lisa: Wow, yeah, it's gold. I've got to get my friend Dr Elizabeth Harris, who does all the neurofeedback, onto this. Well, she's already got it for her dad, but from the entrainment point of view, actually doing a measurement. I suppose you're doing that in research — you'd be using neurofeedback to test what's happening in the brain.

Liam Pingree: Yes, exactly. Some clinics use it, in some research we use it. It's actually clinicians who are using it more so. A lot of clinicians will get the device, but they also have their EEG equipment, so they'll scan the brain before and then they'll get an idea of, hey, where do they need to increase the coherence or decrease it? What do they need to do? Do they need to target the front, the back, the left or the right? Should you do 14 hertz here and 16 hertz here and then swap it over? That's the level of detail some of them go into. Some actually generate a 3D model of the brain and they can actually see the different ways the neurons fire, within reason, and they'll work on certain regions of the brain based on that. So some of these clinicians are really using the device as a tool — and this is the Neuradiant 1070 — to really understand in detail the brain and then customise the device to actually locate the different area and pulse it at a different frequency.

Lisa: Wow. And some people say, hey, if you just have the light, you have it covered everywhere, you turn it on, you're going to get all the effect because of this free-floating mitochondria in the blood cells. That's recent research, isn't it, the free-flowing?

Liam Pingree: Yeah, I think so. It was only a few years ago that that came out, and then other researchers are saying, hey, no, you really need the targeted approach. So you have systemic versus targeted, and that's, I suppose, the difference with our devices. The Neuradiant 1070 is targeted, whereas the Neuronic Light isn't targeted. You can still change the pulse rate, you just can't put it on the different sections.

Lisa: Wow. So you can't go, okay, left side, I'm going to go... So each of these devices will suit different people and their particular needs. If you know that you've got some brain damage in one particular area of the brain and you really want to target that, you might want to go for the other device and get that more specific, especially if you've got someone who can do a — what do you call it — qEEG or whatever they call it, the neurofeedback. It's all gobbledygook to me. It's pretty intense, that type of stuff, and it's not widely available here. As I said, my friend Elizabeth Harris does it, but she's the only one that I know of in New Zealand that is doing it. I think there's someone in Palmerston North as well, but it's pretty hard for most of us to access that. So we've got the options now, and the price point is absolutely — to have that price point makes it so much more accessible for people. And we've got a discount code, "Tamati100", to get an extra $100 off, so anyone who's listening, that'll be in the show notes too below, but make sure you use that.

Lisa: Anything else that we haven't covered, Liam, that you wanted to share? Your company is just super — it's exciting what you guys are doing. I think it's just fascinating, and all the research that's coming out now. It'll be interesting where you go.

Liam Pingree: Yeah, let me see what else I can share. I can share with you how some of the packaging looks of the device. We've moved into a more sustainable packaging, so this time it comes in this brown box, recycled cardboard. It's quite a simple design, and then inside the box, if you want to get rid of it, you actually have three little bags — they're drawstring bags — and we have the instruction manual that comes in a brown envelope with a sustainability message as well. So we've reduced all the extra packaging. There's only one plastic bag and the rest is all carried. Inside the box it's very light and it's very easy to move around or put in your luggage. You don't need a carry case or a hard-shell box.

Lisa: That's safe to travel with and things?

Liam Pingree: Yeah, exactly. We really wanted to make it portable, easy to use, because if you have a device or something that you have to use every day, you want that ease of use. You don't want it to be a big, clunky object that you're carrying around, because people live hectic lives. They want something that's super easy to just grab, whether it's on the desk, on the chair, take it in your hand or your pocket, and then you just place that on your head. You can do all your chores while you have it on, if it's just for 10 minutes or whatever you want to do. So it's really easy.

Liam Pingree: The other thing, I suppose, I want to share is the clinical trial that we've been running. We've fully recruited for it, so now it's just going to be a few months before we can actually publish the results. And then we have another five different partnerships with other clinics and organisations, so sometime later this year you'll see another few publications coming out. We're really excited about that. And with the app, we now have, like you said, the best opportunity to really understand the users using it, because we're going to be able to have these surveys and get the responses, see what personal goals they have and how it correlates with how they're feeling and the different programmes that they're using. So we'll be able to generate a lot of data and use this to further develop the products. We are always looking to develop products further. I hope this isn't the last device that we can reduce the price down. I hope there's more in the future. We don't have a timeline yet, but later this year hopefully we can release another product, and maybe it'll be a different one, and then in the coming years we'll have more iterations for sure.

Lisa: Yeah, I don't doubt it at all. I don't doubt it, and I don't doubt that the research is going to get more and more conclusive and we'll be able to be more specific with the targeting and how deep and how long and the pulsing and all of that sort of good stuff. But even now where it stands, with the 10,000 studies, we're pretty far advanced and this is absolute gold.

Lisa: So Liam, I want to thank you, because it's nearly midnight over in Dubai where you are and your brain's obviously working quite well, so you've obviously been using your own device to be able to share all that at midnight. Really, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these wonderful insights. Everyone who is interested in having an optimal brain, as soon as you can, go out and buy one of these and use that code, get $100 off. That brings the price even down a little bit further, and this is an absolute no-brainer for anybody who can possibly do it.

Liam Pingree: No-brainer. Lisa, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It was great talking with you again.

Lisa: Thank you so much, Liam. We'll talk again soon.

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