EPISODE #1094

Heart Coherence Unveiled: A Journey with Rollin McCraty

Rollin McCraty

In this episode with Rollin McCraty from the HeartMath Institute, we dive into the intersection of emotion, energetics, and technology, harnessing the power of heart rate variability for longevity and biohacking, and how our magnetic environment influences our biology and consciousness.

Human-Upgrade-Podcast

In this Episode of The Human Upgrade™...

In today’s episode I’m reuniting with someone who has had a profound impact on my journey as a biohacker, Rollin McCraty, the director of research  at the HeartMath Institute. Rollin specializes in the physiology of emotion, and his research explores how emotions impact cognition, behavior, health, and global interconnectivity.  I first encountered Rollin nearly two decades ago during my tenure at the Silicon Valley Health Institute. Back then, I was a young enthusiast, navigating the intricate world of anti-aging and longevity, learning from the seasoned wisdom of octogenarians who were defying the natural aging process. 

Rollin introduced me to the profound connection between cutting-edge science and practices often dismissed back then, like meditation. In a world where admitting to meditating could raise eyebrows and questions about your sanity, Rollin illuminated the scientific links connecting our biology, nervous system, and conscious mind. It was a revelation, a glimpse into the integral role these connections play not just in personal well-being but in the unseen, yet palpable, impact we have on others. Now, as a 50-year-old with the biological markers that defy my calendar age, I attribute part of my own transformation to insights gained from pioneers like Rollin. As a biohacker, personal development isn’t just a journey inward but a meticulous tuning of the body’s ‘hardware’ to optimize function and performance. 

In this episode we’re uncovering the impact our energetics can have on others and the world around us. We talk about heart rate variability and coherence, and its importance in aging. We discuss the magnetic environment we live in, and the human response to these natural phenomena. We talk about the impact of phones on our biology, how technology can potentially be harnessed to positively affect human consciousness and global coherence, and changing DNA with intention. And if you’re now motivated to dive into coherence training, we give some tools for that. It’s an honor to have Rollin on the show today, a testament to the evolution of biohacking, where the convergence of science and consciousness isn’t just acknowledged but celebrated.

“What we invent in terms of technology, nature has already done it.”

ROLLIN MCCRATY

(03:39) Unlocking the Power of Heart Rate Variability & Earth’s Natural Rhythms

  • What heart rate variability is why it’s important for understanding aging
  • My experience as a HeartMath coach and using a heart rate variability monitor
  • How we affect each other from our heart rate coherence
  • Research conducted through the Global Coherence Initiative on fields line resonances
  • Why it’s beneficial to be in sync with the rhythm of the earth
  • An overview of the Schumann Resonances

(33:37) How the Earth’s Magnetic Environment Impacts Our Biology

  • The global magnetometer measuring system
  • How understanding the magnetic environment we live in can help us be more resilient
  • What disturbed fields can do to humans
  • How our phones impact our biology
  • Measuring global consciousness with Global Consciousness Project 2.0
  • Recognizing and pushing past our own limiting beliefs

(46:35)  Exploring Coherence Training & Quantum Consciousness for Healing

Enjoy the show!

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Introduction

[00:00:00] Dave: You’re listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an interview that I’m really, really looking forward to because it’s with a guy who I first met, I want to say about 15 years ago, maybe even 20, back when I was running one of the early anti-aging nonprofit research and education groups in Palo Alto. It’s called the Silicon Valley Health Institute. 

And I did not know the things I know now about biohacking because I was learning longevity from people who were oftentimes three times my age. It’s in my 20s, and I had people who were 88 years old on the board of directors who were showing me how they were getting younger before it was supposed to be possible.

And one of the guests who came in was Rollin McCraty from the HeartMath Institute. And he talked about all this really cool math, and science, and measurable things that tied directly to what I thought was a little bit of BS, things like meditation back when no one would admit they meditated if they had a job because they would just think you were crazy.

Now, if you’re saying, Dave, how the heck old are you? Guys, on the calendar, I’m 50. On lab tests, I’m somewhere between 39 and maybe 24, depending on what numbers you like to believe. But the world has changed a lot, and part of the role of starting the biohacking movement and bringing this out there was to normalize meditation and consciousness as high-performance human techniques.

So personal development is part of what you do as a biohacker. It’s just hard to do personal development if your hardware doesn’t work. And Rollin McCraty, today’s guest, is one of the first guys who pointed out to me scientifically, hey, if you want to have the kind of life that you want, then you’ve got to look at the intersection between what’s going on invisibly in your biology, and in your nervous system, and your conscious mind. 

And when you do that, it has an effect that’s bigger than you might think because it actually affects other people, and it does it via signals that we don’t consciously pick up but that we can measure. In other words, your effect on other people is real when you walk in the room, even if they don’t even know that you’re there. Rollin, welcome to the show.

[00:02:30] Rollin: Thanks, Dave.

[00:02:32] Dave: What’d you think of that intro?

[00:02:34] Rollin: That was cool. I was trying to remember how long ago it was too, and it’s probably closer to 20.

[00:02:40] Dave: Yeah, I think it was somewhere around the late ’90s, wasn’t it?

[00:02:43] Rollin: It was before you were famous.

[00:02:45] Dave: Yeah. I’m still not sure if I’m famous, but I’m better known than I was before. I know some people who are really famous, and thank God, I’m not one of those. There are people who literally can’t travel because they’re so famous, and I don’t want to be one of those.

[00:02:59] Rollin: I understand, but you know what I mean.

[00:03:01] Dave: Yeah, I know what you mean. I do know that when I was at Burning Man last week, I was walking down– I’m not saying what I was or wasn’t wearing at the time– the street one morning, and someone’s like, hey, is that you Dave? And I’m going, yeah. And he says, thanks for cutting your hair. And I said, you’re welcome. And I kept walking. So yeah, I was spotted in the wild that way, so I guess that means I’m famous.

[00:03:28] Dave: Now, Rollin, some of our listeners know what heart rate variability is, and many of them may not. So I know we’re not going to talk about heart rate variability as our topic. We’re going to talk about things like emotions, and cognitive processing, and energetic systems and our effects on each other, but can you talk about how important heart rate variability is for measuring this stuff and where that comes from? Just give us an overview.

[00:04:00] Rollin: Yeah, I’d be happy to, Dave. HRV has transitioned out of the research world, which is huge in these days. There are hundreds of thousands of publications now on heart rate variability in the research and clinical world. And of course, for those that aren’t familiar with HRV, I should probably back up a little bit from what I was about to say. First of all, just to understand that our heart rate changes with each and every heartbeat. So what heart rate variability is measuring the time between each consecutive pair of heartbeats. And that time between beats is always changing. 

Now, this is a complete revolution in a way because if you’re back 20, maybe 30 years– I got to remember how old I’m getting here. I should turn 70 next month. It used to be thought that a sign of good health was a steady heart rate. The heart was like a metronome.

And we now know that is just utter nonsense. It’s the opposite. That in a healthy system, our heart rate’s always varying. And we have more of this natural beat-to-beat variation when we’re young, and it gets less as we get older. In fact, it’s one of the best measures of the aging process, how much of it we have.

 It’s crossed into the consumer world, the biohacking world, which of course, you were a big player in, Dave. So a lot of things are out there of measuring how much of this variability do we have and so on. And that’s great, and it’s important, however, there’s a much deeper, from my perspective, level of what HRV indicates about what’s going on inside of a body rather than just a slow process in terms of how much, and that is what we call how coherent, is the variability. 

And that reflects current state. Now, when we look a little bit deeper under the hood, what heart rate variability actually can measure and does reflect is the degree of synchronization of the activity in the activity of our higher brain systems and within our nervous system. And that’s where it gets really interesting, because that’s something we can learn to rather quickly change and control to a certain degree. 

And I think it’s, for most people, pretty self-evident. It just makes sense to be in sync, the activity in our brain, and nervous system, and the neural systems, because when we’re in sync, that’s one of the main things that enhances or facilitates performance across a lot of different domains physically. I actually know of a few world records in sports that have been set after coherence training in athletes. 

[00:06:34] Dave: The idea of coherence training here is that all of us have a number of beats per minute, but the spacing of those beats can be totally different. You could have 60 beats in one second and then no beats for 59 seconds. You’d probably be dead in that case, but you’d still have 60 beats per minute.

And if it’s one beat every second, which is what we imagine, then you’re a stressed person, and it’s not working very well. But if the beats move around within each second, then your nervous system is healthier. But there’s a pattern to the way they move around mathematically that means you’re a coherent, right?

[00:07:11] Rollin: Yeah. Maybe a simpler language is when we’re looking at the pattern, to think of our heart rhythm. So if we didn’t have this beat-to-beat change in heart rate, there’d be no heart rhythm. It would be like a metronome. A rhythm is the change over time. Most people are thinking of heart rate, like you’re talking about. How many times the heart beats in a minute.

And if you look at most monitors, it looks flat because it’s averaged out. You collect data for 30 seconds or a minute, and then you put a dot, and it looks like this flat line unless you exercise or do something, and you see it slowly change. That’s not the reality. 

But when you plot this beat-to-beat change, that is our heart rhythm, which is always going up and down, up and down. And the amount of it we have really reflects the flexibility within our nervous system. In fact, when that variability gets lower and the range of that rhythm gets slower, that’s well correlated with a lot of things we don’t want to have in our life. Reduced mental flexibility, cognitive flexibility, emotional flexibility. We get stuck in the same old patterns. Physiologically as well as mentally and emotionally.

[00:08:26] Dave: That’s the important thing. It’s a physiological thing. It’s inside your biology, but then you feel it emotionally. And for me, after your very first lecture back at that anti-aging nonprofit group, I got one of the HeartMath devices, and your research group is associated with HeartMath, and I started doing this training.

It was really hard for me. It was a little gamey playing your iPhone. You can still get it today. I helped to bring heart rate variability into the world of biohacking. Got you guys to present at the Quantified Self Meetups a year ago. And the reason I did that is because I became a certified HeartMath coach years ago, and I would do this, and all of a sudden, I could feel my physiology changing.

It was helping me to relax and realize what it felt like when my body went into a fight or flight mode versus when I was in this newer state that I’d learned. And after I started coaching people on it, I remember this one engineer in Silicon Valley– now, engineers, software developers, are not known for being highly emotional people. They tend to be a little bit rational. 

I had Asperger’s syndrome until I reprogrammed all that stuff. It’s common in the field. So these are not the people who talk about or even really sense their emotions easily. And this guy, after eight weeks, he says, Dave, I did my 20 minutes of training every day the way you recommended, and I’m pretty sure I experienced bliss.

And to hear a programmer experience bliss back then– programmers don’t experience bliss, but we did. And things have shifted today. Actually, people who write code and engineers now accepted to be curious about your consciousness, but not that long ago, you couldn’t do that. 

So the idea that you could turn on bliss by training your heart rate variability and getting higher levels of coherence in your heart is really cool. So I wanted listeners to understand this idea. And you wake up in the morning, you can see how was your heart rate variability last night? Did you recover? Did you not? Most listeners have heard of that by now.

[00:10:42] Rollin: Yeah. That’s the how much variability we’re talking about.

Global Coherance Initialtive

[00:10:45] Dave: But here’s the question for you. Global Coherence Initiative, you’ve been studying how we affect each other just from our heart rate coherence. Tell me about that.

[00:10:55] Rollin: Okay. So that’s really a cool story. I love interviews where we can go a little wider than just physiology, and the heart-brain communication, and all that. So if we dial back into the ’90s, when we started to– obviously, it’s a psychophysiology laboratory. It may not be obvious.

And so we got onto the link between our inner world, what we’re feeling, even if we’re engineers and we think we don’t have feelings. We do. Just maybe aren’t aware of them as much as we should be and how important that is because that’s what drives the activity in our brain and nervous system, is our emotions, way more than our thoughts. Let me say that to start off with. 

And we started understanding how the heart rhythms is the most reflective of our interstate. I won’t get into the whole history of how we got onto this. It was backwards in a way. I’m really honest.  But we were doing some research with water actually, and the effect of consciousness, and I’ll tell a little bit of the story.

We were putting electrodes in water and changing water structure, and these various methods, and we found that water actually amplifies weak electromagnetic fields through some other experiments. And that led to the idea, well, wait a minute, we’re water mostly in our bodies.

 Are we also amplifying weak electromagnetic fields that we receive? And are we radiating them? We know when we put electrodes on the body, we’re measuring current, electrical current. That’s why it’s called the electrocardiogram or the electroencephalograph, if we’re measuring brainwaves.

But whenever you have a current flow, you create a magnetic field. And my previous career was a communication engineer. I used to work at Motorola, something I know a little bit about. So I got this wacky idea. Can we measure our heartbeat in a glass of water sitting on a table in front of us without touching it? Yes, we could. That was the backwards way in it.

[00:12:58] Dave: This is really important. Guys, Rollin just said that using advanced communications engineering tools, you can measure your heartbeat in a glass of water that’s not touching you.

[00:13:13] Rollin: Right.

[00:13:14] Dave: That’s a world-changing idea because if you think you can walk into a room and you don’t have an effect on anything you’re not touching, you’re changing water, and that would also imply that you’re changing anyone else who’s made out of water.

[00:13:31] Rollin: That was the next step. And so we got into using magnetometers, which you can put out to measure the magnetic component, which the electrodes don’t see. You have to use a different instrument called a magnetometer. So you can stick the probe of the magnetometer. If it’s set up right, you can get quite a few feet away from the body and still detect the heartbeat. 

So then using almost the exact same techniques I would use back in my Motorola days, I’ll just call it, which we use to decode or demodulate to look at the signal being modulated on a electromagnetic field that you carry information with, just like our cell phones do every day, and what’s carrying that information, long story short, we found that those magnetic fields are carrying information about our inner state, certainly our emotional state.

So that proved, I won’t say implies, because it certainly does that, I’m sure. We just haven’t proven. We don’t know how to decode all that yet. It doesn’t stop at our skin. We are broadcasting that. And if those information patterns are being carried by these magnetic fields, we could put a probe out here, measure it, decode it, and in today’s world, we can tell with about 75% accuracy what somebody’s feeling just by looking at the field. 

Okay. All right. So next step. You already alluded to this, Dave. We’re big bags of water, and we had already found from other research tracks that water amplifies biologically-generated magnetic fields. Anyway, probably all of them. But the next step, and this was actually incredibly easy to do, and I was shocked that nobody ever done it before. I did all those searches. Somebody had done this. The quality, I’ll call it, of the information in our fields, is that affecting others in measurable ways? Yes. That was not–

[00:15:24] Dave: There you go. 

[00:15:25] Rollin: Actually, it wasn’t rocket science to figure that out. So that then really led to the understanding that there’s always an energetic communication going on between people, least when we’re together in the same room in groups, or individuals, not always, but usually below the consciousness, the conscious awareness level, but still having profound effects on the quality of communication going on within a group, or a dyad, or a couple.

[00:15:55] Dave: So if I had a magnetometer and I was interviewing someone for a job interview, could I tell with 75% accuracy what they’re feeling?

[00:16:06] Rollin: Yeah. Here’s the thing. You don’t even need a magnetometer. That was the research.

[00:16:11] Dave: Yeah, because you are one.

[00:16:13] Rollin: Yeah. All right. And it took some time to sort all this out. I was talking about those information patterns being carried by the field. They correlate. There’s a direct mathematical relationship between the heart rate variability patterns, the rhythm patterns, and the structure of that information being carried by the field.

[00:16:34] Dave: Imagine if we had a heart rate monitor and a magnetometer on all politicians all the time when they were doing public speaking.

[00:16:44] Rollin: Now, wouldn’t that be fun?

[00:16:45] Dave: We’d have no more politicians because they’re always lying, and we would know it. So this is profound. If you’re listening to this right now, you could be saying, that can’t be true. Guys, I have known Rollin for 20 years. I have been on the advisory board for the HeartMath Institute, and Rollin is an actual, real engineer who does the deep math and the deep signals analysis. That’s what Motorola was all about. This is real stuff. 

And he’s been working on it for a long time, and the implications for human consciousness are profound because if you want to find out why your Buddhist meditation does this or why you sit in a room like I did at Kopan Monastery in Nepal to learn meditation and you have the guru or the teacher in the room and they’re transmitting something, which is how they would describe it, there is an invisible but existing signal that happens when you’re around certain people. 

And part of the reason that I learned to do what I do to make biohacking into a global movement, I did a lot of work with HeartMath, and I learned how to– because I used to be nervous on stage, especially when I was doing Silicon Valley keynote presentations. I was quite nervous.

So I learned to, before I would go on, do my heart coherence meditations and the breathing. And I found that if I shifted myself into this state, that I had a lot more audience interaction, that I worked better. And when I went on stage in front of 15,000 people on Tony Robbins main stage at UPW, I did the same thing I always do, which is I automatically now change my coherence so that I resonate for the crowd, or more to the point, the audience resonates with me.

And then what that feels like to people when you’re with someone who has high levels of coherence and high amplitude, which are things that I have in my biology because I built them, is that it feels authentic because it is authentic. Because when your words match your transmissions–

[00:18:55] Rollin: Exactly. 

[00:18:57] Dave: Then you’re going, that is real. And when you get the person who walks on stage and their words are good but their transmissions are not good, you feel dissonance, and you just know something’s wrong.

[00:19:10] Rollin: Yeah. And that same thing, you’re absolutely right, goes on in our day-to-day communications with people, our spouses, our teammates, people we work with. It’s that dissonance that is one of the main factors in miscommunication and feeling untrusted and separated when all of these things that go on are pretty big cost factors in business. You’d ask Dave, if I may, about global. I’m sorry about my language here. What the heck does this have to do with global? 

[00:19:46] Dave: Yeah. 

[00:19:46] Rollin: So now we had already done this work back in the ’90s, showing that this communication is going on. And by the way, of course, tone of voice, the words we choose, body language, all that matters as well, seeing there’s additional layer that sometimes matters more that we’re often unaware of. Then I learned about some things that you would have thought I would have known from being a communication engineer professionally.

I’d never learned, and I think most people hadn’t. This just blew me away. I got to share this when I learned this. So we were talking about magnetic fields. Now let’s take it to the global scale, so earth. The earth has a magnetic field. We all know that. We learned that back in probably grade school. The North Pole, the South Pole, all this stuff– just big magnetic field. 

One of the things I hadn’t ever learned until I got to another route is that magnetic fields can be plucked, the field lines. If you remember the experiment, you dump the iron filings on the glass plate, you put the magnet under it, and it jumps around and shows you the shape of the field, whether it’s a bar magnet or a horseshoe, whatever. 

But remember, those iron fillings would line up in parallel lines. So with that really simple experiment, we’re also visualizing magnetic field lines, or flux lines, if you want to be more specific. Here’s the thing that’s blow away. They act like guitar strings. You can pluck them when they vibrate.

[00:21:19] Dave: And you can measure this.

[00:21:20] Rollin: Oh, it’s measured routinely. We measure it globally now, but I was well off not having to learn a new field about some of the geo magnetic stuff. And in fact, there’s a technical term for it at scale of earth. They’re called field line resonances. That’s the term in the literature.

It’s been around long before I came along. So what’s plucking the field lines of earth is the solar wind. Earth is turning, the solar winds rushing by, plucking the magnetic field lines, and they’re vibrating. In fact, I’ve got a great image of this from NASA. You can actually visualize it if you don’t believe it.

 Yeah, it is. Here’s the wild thing. The primary resonant node or frequency of the Earth’s magnetic field lines vibrating is, in frequency language, 0.1 hertz. That’s a cycle every 10 seconds in the time world, which I know you’ll recognize because it’s exactly the same frequency as our heart rhythms when we’re in that coherent state. Like, huh? 

I was more of a dot connector in this. Basically, what I’m trying to say here, Dave, is taking it from the living room or the workplace and the local energetic interactions to the global, it’s through resonance principles that– this is right back to communication engineering 101. When things are resonant, as resonant frequencies, you transfer energy and information. I’m an old guy now. I remember when we had radios in our house or cars. You had to turn the knob to tune, right?

[00:23:04] Dave: Mm-hmm. 

[00:23:05] Rollin: You’re changing the resonance of the receiver to the vibrating frequency of the field that we can’t see, and, boom, there’s the radio station, or– you’re saying that we do the same thing in cell phones. You transfer the energy to information.

[00:23:18] Dave: Rollin, one of the things that I learned running that nonprofit anti-aging group when I first met you there is you can learn a lot from your elders. So when you say you’re an old guy, that’s another way of saying you’ve probably accumulated some wisdom that you’re sharing now. So I appreciate that.

 You remind me of one other guy that I met in Silicon Valley at the same time, maybe a little bit younger than you. He was the guy who wrote the first patent for 802.11 for what we now call Wi-Fi, the very first patent. And we sat down at Red Rock Coffee Shop in Mountain View, California, and said, Dave, I heard the stuff you’re doing with HeartMath and anti-aging.

I want to show you what I found because I took my million-dollar signal detection equipment for EMFs, not magnetic stuff you’re doing, and I turned it around and Iooked at my own body, and look what I saw. And he shows me a picture of chakra points. Goes, I think there’s diagnostic data in human biology.

We’re transmitting Wi-Fi signals all the time. And I’m like, we are. We just don’t see it with our eyes, and so our smart brains filter that out of our reality. Our body’s job is to filter out all the signals that we don’t need to survive. And we might want these signals to thrive, but we don’t need them to reproduce. And that’s why Mother Nature doesn’t show them to us, but guys like you, when you do the math and you do the hard research and the science, you’re going to know this is real, and it’s provable, and it’s repeatable, and it’s beautiful that you’ve done that.

[00:24:55] Rollin: Yeah, it’s a way it’s bringing the, I won’t say invisible because that’s the wrong word, but it’s bringing what we are not consciously aware of.

[00:25:05] Dave: Unseen.

[00:25:06] Rollin: Yeah, unseen into visual, to be able to understand and visualize it, and to see it. So just to complete my thoughts, if I may on that, Dave, we published probably 20, 25 papers on the interconnectivity now between our own biology, our health, our wellness, our performance, and how in sync we are with the rhythms that we live in.

So we all live within the fields of the earth. You cannot escape it. And again, I think intuitively, it’s just common sense that to be in sync with the rhythms we live in. We already know that being in sync in our own rhythms is the key to performing better, whether it’s sports or mentally, cognitively, whatever, but being in sync with the rhythms of the earth is the next level, if you will.

[00:25:59] Dave: It’s funny you mentioned 0.1 hertz, in other words, one cycle every 10 seconds. At 40 Years of Zen, which is my neuroscience brain training company for entrepreneurs and people seeking deeper consciousness, we do train that on the last two days. We train brain waves along that same cycle, which is a carrier frequency for just about all the other brain waves.

[00:26:22] Rollin: Yeah, default mode. I actually saw the default mode network work frequency in the brain in the EEG years before it was discovered in the BOLD signals and MRIs. 

[00:26:31] Dave: It’s funny. When you take someone who really understands signals analysis– and my background, I was a network engineer. Not a signals engineer. I’m more TCP IP stuff. But when you get someone who really knows electrical signaling and you turn that knowledge around on humans, you find we operate on those same principles of reality.

And even the internal signaling between mitochondria follows the same algorithms we use in crypto. Our systems are eminently hackable. You’re just one of the first people to really sit down and say, let’s apply modern signals analysis technologies to the body. And having done that for, what, 30 years now, you’ve been doing this?

[00:27:13] Rollin: Around that.

[00:27:14] Dave: I think you’re one of the leaders in the world at saying, how do we take the engineering hacking mindset and apply it to ourselves and see what’s really going on in there. And what’s going on in there is not chemical, although it is chemical. It’s not just chemical. It’s also magnetic and electrical.

[00:27:31] Rollin: And informational.

[00:27:32] Dave: And it has to be because if you just have a thinking mind and you know systems work, it has to do that in order to achieve what we do.

[00:27:40] Rollin: I’ve more and more have come to understand, if you will, or believe, that what we invent in terms of technology, nature has already done it.

[00:27:48] Dave: Yeah.

[00:27:50] Rollin: And we’re just discovering that, and there’s so many examples of that. In fact, communications industry is one of those. The fact that we’re broadcasting, it’s the same thing. Nature invented it a long time ago. We’re just catching up to understand it.

[00:28:04] Dave: We are, and it’s funny. Ray Kurzweil is going to come on the show, someone I’ve been a fan of for a long time, and he’s a very, very good author. And he’s famous for saying we’re going to upload ourselves to the internet. And what I learned over the course of becoming a biohacker is that we’re already uploaded to the internet. We just haven’t figured out how to hack our own signal yet.

[00:28:27] Rollin: Yeah. Thank you, because that’s what the Global Coherence Initiative is all about, is that we are way already connected to what I call global information field through resonance principles. The fact that our hearts are vibrating, heart rhythms are the same as the resonant frequencies of the earth, and then there’s also the Schumann frequencies, which a lot of people make big deals about, having new age, and all that, and a lot of misinformation and just utter nonsense circles through social media around all that. 

[00:28:57] Dave: Let’s go there. Let’s talk about Schumann Resonance reality versus nonsense, and then let’s talk in detail about the Global Coherence Project that you’re working on.

[00:29:06] Rollin: Okay. Schumann Resonances mechanism, what they are strength-wise or power-wise, are several orders of magnitude smaller than the field line resonances.

[00:29:19] Dave: Oh, really?

[00:29:20] Rollin: Oh yeah. They’re huge. I can’t help but say this. It’s at least interesting. When we talk our physiology, we measure the heart signal, the electrocardiogram, which is a 100 times stronger than EEG, electrically. So magnetically, that’s also true. So now, what that translates, you can stick your magnetic probe out here and back up from the body around three feet before you lose the sensitivity of the technology. The [Inaudible] field keeps going. That’s our sensory technology. That same device, same settings, it’s about an inch for the brain.

[00:29:58] Dave: It’s hard to get a signal from the brain. You get electricity coming off the scalp, which is also hard, but the magnetic strength of the brain is weak, but the magnetic strength of the heart is strong.

[00:30:08] Rollin: Right. But now, isn’t this interesting, that at the earth scale, the field line resonances, which are the same frequency as the heart rhythms, are the same ratio, stronger than the Schumann Resonances, which are the same frequency as our brain waves?

[00:30:24] Dave: Whoa. So that’s basically alpha, the–

[00:30:28] Rollin: All the brain waves. Schumann Resonances, we won’t spend a lot of time here because it’s not that big of a mystery. They’re called Schumann Resonances because they’re named after a German mathematician who mathematically predicted that these magnetic waves had to be traveling around the surface of the earth.

So they got named after him when they were first experimentally measured, not that long ago. 1960. It’s certainly within my lifetime, and many of them are probably listening, the first measurement of these. So there’s still a lot that’s to be uncovered from my perspective.

But these are magnetic rhythms or waves that are bouncing between the surface of the earth and the bottom of what’s called the ionosphere. You can think of it as a soap bubble, plasma, around the planet, or state of matter in physics. And one of the qualities of this plasma is that it’s like a mirror to lower frequency magnetic waves. This is why ham radio operators can bounce radio signals off the ionosphere and talk to people on the other side of the planet.

So anyway, it’s the dimensions of this cavity between the ionosphere and the earth that completely control the frequency of the Schumann Resonances. And there’s eight of them. First one is 7.83 hertz. So when they were first experimentally measured back in late 1959, early ’60, the first ever measurement, it was immediately recognized. 

Wow. That’s the same as our– used to be thought of alpha rhythm, then things have changed a little bit. It’s that right between alpha theta, that sweet right there, that’s 7.8 hertz. But there’s eight Schumann Resonances, not just one, and they all overlap with our brain waves frequencies.

[00:32:15] Dave: And the others are harmonics of that?

[00:32:18] Rollin: Sort of. Yeah, you can think of them as harmonics, but it’s not a simple just harmonic doubling relationship because of the different layers, and [Inaudible], and so on, but basically. Okay. So the nonsense that we see all the time, but it seems like every two years, the social media blows up. For the first time ever, we’ve measured 30 hertz, and the human consciousness is changing. No, we actually have a global network. I’ve got magnetometers now. We’ve built the global clearance monitoring system.

[00:32:45] Dave: How many do you have now embedded around the world? 

[00:32:47] Rollin: Oh God. See, there’s Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, Canada, Northern Canada, here in California, South Africa, New Zealan. Six, right? Six or seven.

[00:33:00] Dave:  So guys, Rollin and his team have gone around the planet and installed magnetometers at various locations that are constantly measuring the strength, and size, and shape of the field of the planet, the magnetic field, to get data that shows how it’s changing us and we’re changing it?

[00:33:23] Rollin: Yeah, you got it.

[00:33:25] Dave: Wow.

Timestamp 2 – How the Earth’s Magnetic Environment Impacts Our Biology

[00:33:25] Rollin: So that’s part of the Global Coherence Initiative, which you asked me about. Now, the Global Coherence Initiative has evolved over, that is probably at least 15 years old now, which now includes a lot of neat things. So there’s the global magnetometer measuring system. And we’ve done a number of studies that are really cool, by the way– I can’t get into all of them now– where we measure people over long periods, the heart rate variability. Probably the only studies in the world. In one, for example, 24 hours a day, measuring the HRV of groups of people for months.

[00:33:57] Dave: Wow.

[00:33:58] Rollin:  Because our HRV really reflects the activity in our nervous system. That’s what it actually is telling us.

[00:34:02] Dave: Do you mean that the state of the magnetic field of the planet affects your nervous system?

[00:34:06] Rollin:  Of course it does.

[00:34:07] Dave: How dare you say such a thing because that would justify things like astrology or people going crazy when there’s a full moon, and everyone knows– oh wait, people do go crazy when there’s a full moon. Any hospital room knows this. Any police department knows this. So we are affected by our environment in invisible ways, and then we feel responsible for it ,and we are responsible for our actions, but they were influenced by our environment.

[00:34:31] Rollin: But the point is that, yes, we can be, and often are influenced by certainly the magnetic environment we live in, but it could be the noise of the city, or being in the forest here in the Redwoods, where I live, are affected, so that’s obvious. It should be obvious, I feel. But the point is that we can learn to be in charge of ourselves, where we don’t have to get beat around or ride the waves, if you will, of that. We can learn to maintain our own inner coherence, whatever that external environment might be doing.

[00:35:07] Dave: That’s called being resilient. In fact, I started a company called Bulletproof one time, the state of human performance, which is when you’re unprogrammable by your environment because you are able to maintain your autonomy and independence, even in the face of a dirty signal.

[00:35:25] Rollin: Human resonances or the field line resonances can certainly get disturbed, say, when earth gets hit with a solar flare. And our physiology does not like living in disturbed field. And there are so many studies that show this.

[00:35:44] Dave: So if a bad actor wanted to create a dirty field that created physiological stress in humans, what technology would you use? I think I know t answer, but–

[00:35:59] Rollin: I would design something that is resonant with our physiological rhythms, first of all.

[00:36:05] Dave: Like the electrical system?

[00:36:07] Rollin: No. So I had the opportunity many years ago to meet Ross Adey. Ross is a really famous guy in the bioelectromagnetic and bioelectromagnetic medicine world. I was fortunate to get invited to some invitation-only conferences. This is back in the early ’90s as well in Switzerland. It was the cream of the research world and those things. So I got to meet Ross, and he was already pretty my age back then.

[00:36:39] Dave: He was a Karolinska Institutet guy, right?

[00:36:41] Rollin: He might’ve been associated with that.

Okay. Good.

 One of the many things that Ross did is he showed that– we were ancient in our thinking back then in a certain way, but he was the leader of that pack. The only way the external field can affect biological tissues is through heat.

[00:37:04] Dave: That’s such bullshit, but we believed it, right? 

[00:37:07] Rollin: Yeah, it was crazy, but in today’s world, most people. We’ve way moved past that because of people like Ross. One of the things he showed that I think is so important is that biological systems can certainly react to external fields in non-linear, profound ways–a non-linear amplification effect.

However, we have what he called biological windows. That those nonlinear only respond in very specific what he called windows. The frequency has to be right, has to match, and so has the amplitude of that signal. And if they’re out of that biological window, we really don’t have much response to it. Well, guess what biological systems respond most to?

[00:37:55] Dave: They love 2.4. Was it gigahertz, no, megahertz? The wireless phones. 900 megahertz.

[00:38:02] Rollin: Okay, so [Inaudible] you brought that up. So in other words, what we’re most sensitive to are the same frequencies and rhythms we generate. 

[00:38:10] Dave: Ah, there you go.

[00:38:12] Rollin: Which makes sense if you’re designing the ultimate system.

[00:38:17] Dave: We generate frequencies that we can also read that allow us to read other humans to see if we should trust them or kill them.

[00:38:24] Rollin: Yeah.

[00:38:25] Dave: So let’s make electronic devices that send banking data over those same networks. What could go wrong?

[00:38:31] Rollin: Right. So you get my point. To answer you, if I was going to design a system to harm somebody, I would understand those windows.

[00:38:38] Dave: Got it. And I’m not proposing you would do that or that anyone should do that. I think we have done that with our technology because they didn’t identify that it was possible for technology to do this or that those windows existed, even though we know they do. But the guys working on tech systems do not know that humans can do this.

I asked the CTOs of three of the largest mobile phone manufacturers on stage at our Peter Diamandis event, whose job is it to look at biological effects of blue light on VR headsets or of EMFs on human biology? And they just looked at each other and said, not ours. So they don’t know, but you know, and so this knowledge has to get out there. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to interview you.

[00:39:26] Rollin: Yeah. Just one of the things we’ve been looking at in terms of this global stuff. And by the way, I just wanted to mention, where I was starting to go, the Global Coherence Initiative. So there’s a global monitoring system of various fields. Also, now we’re the new home for what’s called the Global Consciousness Project 2.0.

And that’s, by far, the best system that exists, from my perspective, of measuring how our collective consciousness, when a lot of us feel something at the same time– a big media event, a terrorist attack, or global peace days, these types of things. We can measure that effect, which is really cool.

[00:40:02] Dave: So Global Consciousness Project, you’re using your embedded magnetometers around the planet.

[00:40:08] Rollin: It’s a different device, but yeah.

[00:40:10] Dave: Oh, it’s a different device. Okay. What are you measuring to measure global consciousness?

[00:40:14] Rollin: Okay. So we’ve taken this over from a project that was started 25 years ago as well at Princeton University that’s called the Global Consciousness Project, Roger Nelson. And it’s a global network of physical devices that make random numbers. You think of electronic coin flippers. They’re making ones or zeros.

 The data over the last 25 years from that project– let me give you the statistics first– are three trillion to one odds against chance. There’s super powerful statistics. And what this shows is that when a lot of people change their consciousness, especially what they pay attention to and they feel something, it’s emotion that drives this.

Like terrorist attacks, or we all come together and meditate, global meditations, these types of things. So hundreds of these events have been analyzed that you think of it as this globally distributed scientific instrument, that’s how I look at it, of these devices that are making ones or zeros. We tend to think of it in consciousness waves.

[00:41:20] Dave: So we’re literally putting waves into the global field environment that it somehow interacts with these devices to change their activity so they become correlated. If you think of waves on the ocean, it’s like the buoys or the rubber ducks– I like rubber ducks– are all moving up and down at the same time, like a field waves– What you’re basically saying here is that human consciousness makes random number generators non-random.

[00:41:50] Rollin: Yeah, what it’s showing is that our consciousness, especially our aligned and coherent collective consciousness directly interacts with and measurably affects the physical world.

[00:42:05] Dave: Hmm. So people listening to this can do one of two things. You can do what normally happens. Your ego interjects and says, that can’t be, therefore it isn’t, and then you throw it away. Now, that’s logically stupid. 

[00:42:22] Rollin: It is. Yeah. 

[00:42:23] Dave: But that’s what our bodies will do if we’re not paying attention.

[00:42:25] Rollin: Three trillion to one odds against chance.

[00:42:28] Dave:  This is real science, and then you realize, wow, you might want to gain control of your own biology, and your own thoughts, and your own emotions because you are constantly peeing in your own swimming pool if you don’t.

[00:42:43] Rollin: That’s a good way of saying it. I might steal that from you. 

[00:42:45] Dave: It’s yours. It’s a gift. I remember when you, at Burning Man actually, put the first part of the Global Consciousness Project, at least the first test you did at Burning Man, and I remember posting on Facebook back when people still use Facebook. Just kidding. 

 I said, my prediction is that at the end of the burn, they will find that there were shifts in randomness at the burn because there’s a lot of people doing a lot of consciousness work there. 

And everyone said, there’s no way. That can’t be. That’s impossible. And I said, I had already talk to you privately about what you were doing, and I understand the nature of reality from my own biohacking explorations and said, okay, I predict this, and sure enough, what did you find at Burning Man when you measured this?

[00:43:30] Rollin: That was actually Dean Radin who did that.

[00:43:32] Dave: Oh, was it Dean? Okay.Wasn’t he associated with you guys or was that–

[00:43:34] Rollin: No, he is associated. He’s part of our team working on the Global Consciousness Project. Yeah. He found that there was a strong effect of that. But it’s interesting because the main criticism that we get are Roger and Scott, because we’ve just taken over and created to the 2.0, a completely new version of this to really address some of the unknowns, new questions, was, if you don’t know the mechanism, we don’t believe you.

[00:44:02] Dave: I love those guys. Those are my favorite ones.

[00:44:05] Rollin: One of the people on my team that we’ve hired a couple of years ago, he’s a PhD in Stanford in quantum physics. He’s a computational mathematician, physics. He was telling me this just a couple of weeks ago. [Inaudible is his name. He’s going, my dissertation from Stanford was in high temperature superconductivity.

[00:44:28] Dave: Yeah.

He’s a really smart guy that left and joined our team, and he’s our primary scientist working on the background of this new GCP 2.0 project. We do not know the mechanism of how high temperature superconductivity works. It works, but we do not yet understand the mechanism. It’s the hottest topic in physics right now, and there are teams of scientists all around the world trying to understand this. And his point is, this is no different than GCP 2. You get what I’m saying? 

[00:45:02] Rollin: 

[00:45:02] Dave: Get exactly what you’re saying. So many people have come to me in the realm of biohacking, and I can say, I know this works because you can do it and get results. And they say, but it can’t work because I don’t know why it works, which, again, is logically absurd. So then I came up with the best answer for this type of critic.

Say, oh, you need a mechanism of action? Okay. It’s leprechauns. And of course, they go, ah. They go, hold on a second here. Let’s go through the entire history of science since the enlightenment. And almost every single theory about how things work, including Newtonian physics is wrong. We tell ourselves stories to make it easier for us to see how it works, but they’re not actually real. They aren’t true because there’s usually a layer underneath it that usually ends up in quantum physics. 

So it’s okay to not know, as long as if I punch myself in the face and it hurts, I don’t need to know the mechanism of action, and the coefficient of friction, and all that stuff. Those are all stories. What I know is that I do A, I get B more than half the time, therefore A works. That’s the core of science and understanding why, and doing the math, and making it more understandable, and teasing out and making it strong. That’s the game of understanding the world. But you don’t need to know that for it to work. 

[00:46:22] Rollin: Right. What we’re doing in GCP 2 is we care. I care about understanding the mechanisms.

[00:46:28] Dave: Oh, I care too. But you don’t need to to get the results.

[00:46:31] Rollin: Exactly. Right. I would say it’s probably in every major discovery in science. The result was there before understanding the mechanism. So anyway, that’s off topic. Who cares?

[00:46:48] Dave: I’ve got to ask you the really big question here, and this is definitely part of what I’m interested in as a biohacker. We know that any antenna that you have can be used to receive a signal, and it can be used to send a signal.

[00:47:05] Rollin: Yeah.

[00:47:06] Dave: So when it comes to the GCP stuff, the Global Consciousness Project, can we use that network or any other technology to send a consciousness signal that affects humans in a positive way?

[00:47:20] Rollin: Absolutely. We’re using the technology of GCP 2 to measure the output of our signal that– 

[00:47:27] Dave: But I want to use GCP to send the signal into our consciousness so we can wake the heck up.

[00:47:32] Rollin: Yeah, no. Other way around, but we can– I would say let’s use our antennas because once we’re seeing– there’s so many places we could go here. There’s also part of GCI, by the way, I just want to say. There’s also an app called the Global Coherence app that allows us to measure how coherent not only are we personally, but collectively. People using the app together. It’s a cool new advancement of HRV technology that allows us to look at the group level.

[00:48:01] Dave: So the Global Coherence app, you install it. And I haven’t looked at this in a long time, so I’m sub-positioning it or whatever. I’m guessing it here. So you install the app, and then you can see when everyone else is doing a meditation. You can look at the group of all the people doing it and see how coherent we are with each other. I should install this app, I guess.

[00:48:22] Rollin: It’s pretty cool. Bringing these things together, the global monitoring system of the earth’s field, Global Consciousness Project, and we’re also measuring trees globally, the electrical activity of trees, so I’m suggesting all living systems are interconnected energetically by the fields we live in that we’re able to enable a new generation, if you will, of the science of interconnectivity.

 One of our things that’s emerged out of the global coherence initiative is becoming aware of what we’re feeding the field because that’s what we’re feeding the DNA and all of our cells. The DNA, in my world, is an antenna that is directly affected by our vibrational state, the quality of our consciousness. We’re also radiating it into the external environment. And when we’re in sync, we are connected to the larger field of the earth in a bidirectional way. Making sense, Dave, what I’m trying to say here? So we’re trying to measure all this at the same time.

[00:49:24] Dave: It makes so much sense, and I became aware of a lot of this in part because I’ve traveled around the world and studied meditation and spirituality with different lineages. But really, one of the core things was just seeing a signal on my screen from HeartMath and just understanding this, and then going down and doing it with EEG, which I actually did before I did HeartMath.

And one of the reasons I spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head and I teach people to do it at 40 Years of Zen is that I found that my, I call it the meat operating system in the body, was automatically sending garbage out there without my consent. And it was doing that because it got programmed to do that through growing up in a human body.

 Anyone who’s been a child is going to have some of this because you were pissed off you didn’t get to have chocolate instead of peas when you were two. Your body’s dumb. So it’s also beautifully engineered, but it’s set up to survive if you’re not in there. So going through this process of removing automated hate signals that the body makes instead of peas when you were two. Your body’s dumb. So automated negative signals that it makes so that you can have a clean signal, it improves the quality of your life so dramatically.

And my goal became to find the people who were affecting the most people, either energetically because they’re strong senders. You and I know people like that. Or people who are affecting others because they have tons of power, or fame, or money to make them more conscious in their use of those physical world tools.

So I have this group of people who come through who are like, my psychic powers are waking up, and they’re raising the X-Wing fighter with their hand. Okay, not really. But these are people who are spiritually very potent or people who are, I’m changing the world. I have a billion dollars. I want to be more conscious in how I act around my family and my employees, my investments, and both of those groups, they’re different, but they’re both changing the world in a big way. And those are the ones who need the cleanest signals.

How Should Someone Start?

[00:51:34] Dave: Someone listening to the show right now, who’s going, my mind was just blown, how would they start? Should you start with heart rate variability training? Should they install the Global Coherence app I just installed? What’s step one for a newbie? 

[00:51:49] Rollin: Yeah, the Global Coherence app, in a way, Dave, is advanced for people who already are way in that waking up process who really get that what we’re feeding the field matters beyond what we can measure. I think we’re at a crossroads in a certain way in the evolution of human consciousness, because consciousness does evolve.

And when we become conscious agents in our own evolution, that’s when things like what we’re talking about today become important and matter. We start to understand that, from my perspective. So I would say, coherence training is the first place to start. 

How do we become more coherent in our own bodies and our own physiology, more aligned with who we really are at our deeper levels? there’s a lot of tools to help facilitate that. So the apps and the heart rate variability coherence feedback is a facilitation tool for us to learn how to shift into coherence, like when we’re meditating. But that’s training wheel level, from my perspective.

[00:52:52] Dave: Yeah, it’s just step one. 

[00:52:53] Rollin: It’s, how do we maintain that inner coherence? And I mean physiologically and emotionally. When the blank’s hitting the fan, as we’re navigating day-to-day life, the traffic jams, the difficult people we have to interact with, whether it’s we’re into sports, we want to perform better, get coherent, right?

[00:53:17] Dave: Yeah.

[00:53:18] Rollin: So it becomes a way of life. And as we do that, literally, you use the word reprograms, our physiology. This becomes our new normal state. In our language, we shifted our internal baseline. So that becomes the new familiar. And that’s when this is transformational. 

[00:53:37] Dave: It’s so transformational. And what I found in my own path having had chronic fatigue syndrome, and toxic mold poisoning, and basically poorly functioning mitochondria, I believe that our mitochondria are the distributed antenna array that makes all of this happen. They’re curiously most dense in the heart and the brain, and the ovaries even more so, if you’re so equipped.

 And we don’t need to decide whether we agree on that or not, but in my experience, when I increase mitochondrial function, it becomes much easier to have a coherent signal. So having working power plants and electrophysiology, because, wait, those are where electricity comes from, and we’re talking about electricity and electromagnetic fields here, it seems like I can be more coherent when I make enough energy. And when I make enough energy and I’m coherent, I can send it a lot further. 

[00:54:31] Rollin: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. I would agree with you. In fact, when I talk about coherence training, it’s a language we’re using here in our trainings and what we certify people in to go teach HeartMath around the world– thousands of training now. 

[00:54:45] Dave: Yeah. Certified.

[00:54:46] Rollin: Yeah. Then you would know it’s really in the language of energy management. That’s really what coherence training is about, is energy management. And so many of us waste our energy–

[00:54:59] Dave: Oh God. Yeah.

[00:55:00] Rollin: In ways that we don’t yet understand. So it’s really about how do we stop draining unnecessary energy drains, but also, how do we start accumulating more energy? Because we have to have that energy, from my perspective, first of all, just past basic human function. 

In fact, there’s a study. It was published last year with one of our collaborators at the University of Lithuania, who took close to 500 people and measured what’s called basal metabolic rate or resting metabolic rate, it’s also called.

How much energy does a body have to maintain basic functions at rest? It’s what that’s a measure of. And guess what they found? They found that when the resonant frequencies– and one of our magnetometers is there in Lithuania. When the power of the resonant frequency is higher, our resting metabolic rate decreases. You get what I’m saying? When we’re in sync with the rhythms of the earth, right down to the cellular, metabolic, mitochondrial, if you want, level, we are functioning more efficiently. 

[00:56:11] Dave:  It makes so much sense. If you think about it, when you’re taking the efficient path, it requires less energy. When you’re forcing a signal through an inefficient path, it takes more energy, so you have to eat more food to do the energy because you didn’t resonate well.

[00:56:27] Rollin: Yeah. The reason we chose coherence as the definition of the physiological states that we were seeing, we spent actually on my advisory board back then, which is a pretty famous group of people. It took us a couple of years to land on the word physiological coherence to describe the effects we were seeing in the lab.

And one of the reasons is that one of the hallmarks in a coherent system is energy efficiency. A coherent system is an energy efficient system that’s stable, but in that way over time. So anyway, I totally agree with you and resonate with you. Being drawn to share this. I don’t know. You’re just drawing this out of me, Dave, for some reason. Things I don’t normally talk about.

[00:57:07] Dave: Yay. That’s my job.

[00:57:10] Rollin: Back in the early ’90s, some of the first stuff we did, actually, we got into intentionality studies, and we were using DNA as the target. Can we intentionally change DNA? It was actually a great target because you can measure how wound or unwound the strands of DNA are. You’d be spectrophotometer and very well established.

[00:57:37] Dave: Real science.

[00:57:41] Rollin: Anyway, we did spend about two years doing this. We had brought in healers. We brought in students from UCSC or people off the street. A couple of years to these experiments after we validated the method. And at the end of that, we found two things were important. First of all, that you can consciously and intentionally interact with and change the conformational state of the DNA. And why it was so neat is you could intend for it to wind or unwind. It wasn’t just a simple on off experiment.

[00:58:11] Dave: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:12] Rollin: And two things were important for people to be able to reliably make that experiment work. Coherence and intention.

[00:58:22] Dave: Who would’ve thought?

[00:58:24] Rollin: But there’s a big takeaway here. So our vibrate, I’m going to call it our energetic state, our emotional state, which really is a vibrational system first, that’s what tells the hormones and all the other stuff to change in the body. It is also in communication with our DNA.

[00:58:45] Dave: There are unusual shamanic and energy medicine states that you can go into to look at– actually, you’re not looking with your eyes. You’re looking with your inner eyes. You’re looking at your DNA. We know how to do that. And to look at other cell structures inside the body and all that, but I don’t think any of those states are accessible without coherence.

[00:59:09] Rollin: That’s my point. We’ve showed that in these experiments.

[00:59:12] Dave: Yeah, you proved it.

[00:59:13] Rollin: Because you’re putting a coherent signal into our own bodies and out into the environment. It really gets simple at the end of the day.

[00:59:22] Dave: It is simple, and it works into our language, too. I have lots of friends who will say, yeah, I’m vibing with that. Oh, we’re vibing together. Vibrating, resonating, same thing. And you were just asking, why are you talking about these old things during the interview? It’s because we’re vibing. 

I can sense what our energy stuff does when we get to hang out and like, oh, cool. It’s like two old nerd friends get to hang out and figure out stuff we were going to say. And I think that’s art of being a good interviewer too. All the great interviewers out there figure out how to align their energy with who they’re interviewing so that something new will come out. Otherwise, it’s just like doing a pre-recorded dance kind of thing.

AD BREAK 80%

[01:00:06] Dave: So assuming that people are still following that you can edit your DNA or at least be aware of it or control how it does these things, we’re getting into the realm of epigenetics. 

[01:00:23] Rollin: Yeah, exactly.

[01:00:24] Dave: Guys like Bruce Lipton and Dawson Church, who are friends, who have been on this show. In fact, biohacking, to be really clear, is just a restatement of epigenetics. Change the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology. Isn’t that what epigenetics is? It’s how the environment affects your genetics? Well, yeah.

[01:00:40] Rollin: Yeah,yeah. [Inaudible] to love outside the DNA, right?

[01:00:44] Dave: Yeah, just made epigenetics cool. 

[01:00:47] Rollin: By the way, Bruce lives 13 miles from me.

[01:00:49] Dave: Of course he does. It doesn’t surprise me at all. There’s a whole hotbed in the Santa Cruz mountains there of all the cool stuff. What about Joe Dispenza? He’s a friend who’s been on the show. He talks a lot about coherence when you go to do one of his advanced workshops, which clearly, I’ve done because I’m talking about it.

 You end up looking at EEG brainwaves and alignment of groups of people and all this stuff. It seems a bit more brain versus heart-based, but he’s got his idea that you send a signal from the brain and pick it up with the heart. The heart as a receiver versus a transmitter. Go a little bit deeper on that.

[01:01:26] Rollin: I’m not sure Joe would say that. I’ve been working with Joe on a research level for well over 10 years anyway, and more like 15, and we’ve done a lot of work with Joe’s groups. Ten years ago, we had them wearing 24-hour HRV monitors, HRV devices, with actually hundreds of people over the years and looking at what happened to– he got into coherence. 

He actually acknowledged this in a talk he gave for one of our events because of us, where he got into the heart rate coherence. He talks a lot about it and openly talks about the work we’ve done together. Anyway, we were doing work to find– some really cool results came out of the monitoring people’s HRV, the healings they went through.

We go back and look at the coherent states that led up to that event and a lot of cool stuff like that. In fact, we just published a paper. Took some doing to get published because it was so outside of the consciousness or the familiarity of the reviewers for this pretty high-level journal, where we looked at the energetic synchronization amongst the healing groups that Joe does. 

So we were monitoring all the healers and the healee heart rate variability and showing that during certain phases of that process that people go through, there is a type of energetic, a complexity matching, if you will, is what the measure was. It’s a nonlinear measure of the HRV that occurred. And we just got that published literally a couple of weeks ago.

[01:03:04] Dave: Wow.

[01:03:05] Rollin: In a pretty high-level journal of nonlinear dynamics. These are math. You were saying a bit earlier, engineers. It was like, you mean physiology, we can apply these tools and show this? Yes. Anyway, it is published now.

[01:03:21] Dave: So for people who haven’t been to a Joe Dispenza workshop, a part of what you do there is you’ll get six people lined up around someone who wants a healing, and person could be really sick, or they could just have a problem, and they lay there, and then the people around them use what they’ve learned in the workshop to go into a coherent state with each other and do their best to channel healing. 

And I’ve done this several times, and it’s a very potent experience because when you get that number of people, you feel something happen as a healer. And the results that they’re getting on healings are really profound. And what I think is going on is the eight people, if they have enough skill, they line up close enough to amplify each other’s signal and then go in and fix stuff.

[01:04:15] Rollin: Let me add something to that. You’re absolutely correct. Now imagine those eight, and then the ninth person in the center, that you have usually a 100, 120 of those groups doing this at the same time. 

[01:04:29] Dave: Creates a giant vortex probably.

[01:04:31] Rollin: It’s a huge energetic, coherent field. In fact, that’s what Joe and I– one of our goals is one step at a time, but to ultimately be able to look at the meta coherence level of the largergroup. And that’s actually the hypothesis that I suggested to Joe. So we’re starting by looking at the groups, which is what we just got published and established. We had to invent a new mathematical approach to look at energetic synchronization. And that’s some really smart people at the University of Lithuania I work with.

[01:05:02] Dave: Wow.

[01:05:03] Rollin: Our experts in nonlinear mathematics. I’m not. 

[01:05:06] Dave: It’s been one of my dreams for a long time, going back to when I first started presenting at Quantified Self. And then now, I’ve sat for the biohacking conference for 10 years. But I want to be able to put a heart rate variability tracker on each person and have them all sent into a single system so that when I’m speaking, I can see the audiences and– 

[01:05:28] Rollin: We can do that now.

[01:05:29] Dave: Yeah, I just never have done it. For my next conference, we should have about 3,000 people or something. By the way, guys, biohackingconference.com. It’s going to be in Dallas, I think at end of May. But maybe a subset of people, because it’s probably a lot of censors, but I’d love to be able to show the audience the shared coherence while they’re in the room because I know we create a giant, happy, amazing, creative field when we’re there.

[01:05:55] Rollin: Tip of the iceberg of what some of the work we’re doing with Joe, but one is we can literally do that. We also have what we call, for field research, a stack of the new GCP 2.0 RNG devices. Really cool thing. It’s a stack of these things, all the lights flashing and stuff. So one of the recent events with Joe, we actually put one on stage –those stats.

[01:06:18] Dave: Yes, I want one of those to show people that. Ooh, fun.

[01:06:22] Rollin: So we can do that in real time. You can see the local effects. With a stack of RNGs, you get the network effect.

[01:06:30] Dave: Do you want to speak at the next biohacking conference?

[01:06:32] Rollin: I’m certainly open to talking about it, Dave.

[01:06:34] Dave: All right, as long as you’re free, then I’d love to have you on stage to talk more about GCP. I think it’d be so much fun.

[01:06:41] Rollin: It would be.

[01:06:42] Dave: All right, look, let’s talk offline.

[01:06:44] Rollin: Let’s take that offline and see what are the various maybe researchy things we can do.

[01:06:49] Dave: Sure. I can tell you, with thousands of biohackers in the room, we’re always up for research because you know it works because you can see it work. You can sense it work, and you can get the results, but we don’t know causation for some of this stuff. I think it’s almost all quantum when you get down to it.

[01:07:03] Rollin: [Inaudible] you say that. It’s actually really hard to make a random number generator.

[01:07:08] Dave: Yeah, it is. Computer scientist. Absolutely.

[01:07:11] Rollin: In fact, who we worked with for the GCP 2 devices, these new devices are some of the world’s experts in cryptography. And again, really smart guys, way smarter than me in that field. But here’s the point. You mentioned quantum. So the whole point about a random number generator, for those that don’t know this, is you cannot use the past behavior to predict the future. And that’s really hard to do. There are rhythms that show up in things when you get really– but it’s a literal quantum tunneling process that we use at the front end of these devices to make the random number generator.

[01:07:47] Dave: Oh, so you’re doing some of the purest stuff ever. And non-nerds would never think about this, but in order to get a random number, you normally need a seed, something random that it starts from.

 

[01:08:00] Rollin: That’s pseudo random. Yeah.

[01:08:01] Dave: It is pseudorandomness. But even at that level, the RSA, the big encryption company, a while ago, you wouldn’t know this, but the NSA, the government spook side of things, they poisoned the seed for all encryption so that they could break it and no one else would know. And I know because the CTO of RSA told me this over dinner. So they had to go through and replace billions of those little keys for your bank because the government broke it. That’s how big of a problem randomness is. And again, that was pseudo random, and you’re creating actual randomness via quantum tunneling. Wow.

[01:08:38] Rollin: Yeah. Which is neat because if we think of– the mechanism is going to end up being really cool once we really sort it out because how is it that our collective emotions, and it’s not thoughts– hey, this is so important. I just got to say this. I know we’re getting short on time, but when we look back on the GCP one date over 25 years, the events that happened that evoke people to feel more compassion, more love, these types of emotions, have a significantly greater impact on the global field, as measured by this network, than events that evoke hate or just a lot of emotion, like big sporting events and things.

That tells us something right there about mechanism. But how is it that our consciousness is interacting with these processes? And the fact that it is a quantum-level process probably is also telling us something about consciousness. I’m not sitting here claiming I know all the A, B, C details and the physics of that yet.

[01:09:43] Dave: What I believe is that with the knowledge that you are putting together, the knowledge we have from heart rates, and heart rate variability, and EEG, and breath rates, and respiration, all the different biohack things, you put those together, especially when you can use AI to help analyze the signals to find the patterns that maybe we didn’t see, we’re on the edge of making it way easier to become more conscious than it ever has been.

Yes, and that’s why I brought up intention a while ago, because once we start understanding that, we can interact with our own consciousness to consciously evolve ourselves, physically, mentally, and emotionally. It becomes a new world. At least our world becomes new and transformed, but if enough of us do that, we are transforming the larger world, and that’s really why GCI exists to begin with. It’s really about the evolution of collective consciousness.

Wow. It’s a very powerful thing. And I remember when this was first starting, one of the first videos I ever shot, I ended up not putting it out there because back when phones didn’t have good enough video, I had bought some little handheld digital video thing. It’s got to be 15, 20 years ago, maybe 15 or so, when I was just starting the blog.

And I filmed you somewhere or another talking about just the very beginnings of this project. And here we are about 15 years later, where you’ve got the random number side of it. You’ve still got the magnetometers, and yeah, the amount of research you’ve done on human consciousness and the underpinnings of reality, it’s a pretty impressive, Rollin. And I don’t know if you ever step back and go, look what I just did. Do you ever do that?

[01:11:29] Rollin: Not too much. I tend to be more in my own personality, I guess, or consciousness. I’m not really past-oriented. I’m more now future-oriented.

[01:11:41] Dave: Same here. It’s like, what’s happening right now, and where is it going? That’s what futurists do. And I would put you in that category, for sure. Thank you for all your work here in the world and for just being curious and taking your deep engineering knowledge and applying that curiosity towards us instead of building better cell phones because it turns out they’re both important.

[01:12:05] Rollin: Yeah, absolutely. 

[01:12:06] Dave: If you’d like to learn more about Rollin or specifically about this kind of work, the Global Coherence Initiative, go to heartmath.org/gci for Global Coherence Initiative, and that’ll give you a set of all the tools and stuff we’ve talked about. This is real, and you are an electromagnetic, physiological being.

[01:12:33] Rollin: Indeed. Yes. And if people want to really learn, the science nerds, we have a great research library. I would say Science of the Heart would be a great starting point if you’re into the science.

[01:12:44] Dave: The book Science of the Heart?

[01:12:46] Rollin: Yeah, it’s available ebook or hard copy, I think, still, as well. It’s many hundreds of thousands of reads and downloads, but if you want the practical stuff, how do we really improve our day-to-day life, I’d say Heart Intelligence would be my recommendation.

[01:13:02] Dave: That’s another fantastic book, and it makes some very important points about the interconnectivity of the heart and the brain, and you’ll hear some similar things probably influenced by you when you go to Joe Dispenza. The interactions between your heart and your brain, they’re real. We’ve had multiple podcast episodes about where intuition happens, and there’s also the gut that’s in there. So you feel intuition in your body. You don’t think intuition in your brain, and the heart is a major part of that.

[01:13:31] Rollin: That’s a whole other line of our research on the electrophysiology and intuition we published back in late ’90s, early 2000s.

[01:13:40] Dave: There you go. So you’re always at the front of it, the forefront of it, actually, Rollin. So I greatly respect your work and can’t wait to hang out soon.

[01:13:49] Rollin: All right. Well, let’s chat about your conference. That sounds like that could be fun.

[01:13:53] Dave: Guys, thanks for listening to this episode of The Human Upgrade. If you liked it, well, maybe get more coherent. I’m just going to drop a little hint for you. If you have enough minerals in your body, could it be that your cells will work better, which would make it more efficient, which would maybe make it easier for you to shift into coherence? I think so. That’s why if you drink Danger Coffee, it comes with a boatload of minerals in there for a very good reason, because, hey, having electrolytes and minerals, it matters for a lot of things, including the quality of your interactions with reality. I’ll see you soon.

[01:14:30] Rollin: Thanks, Dave.

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