Brain Tap HeadSet Review

BrainTap were sponsors at last year’s virtual biohacking conference, so this company were big endorsers and have gained a lot of popularity, from not just Dave Asprey but several other leading health experts like Tim Biohacker,Luke Storey( The Life Stylist Podcast) etc. I decided to purchase both the headphones and a monthly subscription to see if their meditation enhancement device would work. Usually the headset comes in at around $600, however, there are frequent discounts offered on various biohacking communities like the Bulletproof Diet Support Group on Facebook, on the Dave Asprey Podcast, and on events like Black Friday. Import taxation wasn’t too bad with this item, coming in at around £25. They’ve been endorsed by many high-end sports teams like Sporting Kansas City. 

How It Works 

When you think about the brain, everything is different. All physical stress is brain stress. Delta should be very low while you’re awake and very high when you sleep. 

In just 20 minutes, people who used BrainTap showed real improvements in meditation and that the brain can go out and achieve with high levels of beta and alpha. In order to get the most out of our meditations, the frequency we meditate at is extremely important. Why do we meditate on top of mountains? Because they happen to resonate at 7.8hz. This is why the monks are there, and your body sinks to theta, the best states of recovery.  Most people are 18 hz frequencies, and this causes your body to burn out your neurotransmitters at a faster rate, which makes it harder to absorb nutrients and supplements. Thus, using these background sounds helps for more optimal mediations and more relaxation. 

Dopamine drives behaviour and is responsible for addiction; you want to get your brain out of that addictive state. People are not getting enough theta brain wave and aren’t producing enough GABA, so they aren’t getting the sleep that they need. When you’re going through enhanced meditation with BrainTap, you can go through the full sympotheny of brain waves and enhance your neurotransmitter bank account and benefit more parts of your brain. 

BrainTap uses a combination of epigenetics and binaural beats similar to that of EEG neurofeedback training. Not everyone gets the same impact from binaural beats though; it depends on the ear. They layer in isochronic tones that resonate frequencies; there’s a certain rhythm and cadence that can layer that in, so the brain follows the isochronic tones like ocean sounds in conjunction with the binaural beats and words. One study showed they got 49 percent neuroplasticity change which woke up the brain and made it act years younger 55-65 (who already have the onset of dementia) after they used the device . So it’s made some huge impacts on those already with underlying brain issues. 

Neuroacoustic harmonics are also added in exercising the brain through the right and left side. Music creates the environment where the brain can harmonise along with the Epigentics, binaural beats, isochronic tones, and neuroacoustic harmonics. 

They then stack these four with light therapy using 470 nanometer light, which is blue light. With your light close, it is the shortest incrim of light which means it hardly penetrates your light. The sleep studies on BrainTap show that 90 percent of people who use this device achieve deeper sleep. LED laser light is absorbed by our mitochondria which increases ATP, improves nitric oxide in the body, and it goes in through the eyes with the eyes closed, so it absorbs the light, circulates through the hemoglobin, finds the cell that’s in apoptosis, and it absorbs that which increases energy consumption within the brain. 

Words can change up to 2300 gene expressions and have epigenetic control of your genetics (up to 80 percent) . So during the meditations, you’re guided by words which can enhance your brain waves, and using NLP moves your meditations to the next level. 

Optimizes GABA waves and gets the theta brain wave in motion, which can enhance deep sleep. If you’re getting 1 hour of deep delta sleep and 2 hours of REM sleep, you’re going to be fully optimal and detox well. The device has worked well in the Airline industry. According to their studies for jet lag, they were able to reduce pilots’ jet lag recovery time from 3 days to 4 hours just by using BrainTap Training. They were able to bring down their biological age through the enhanced meditation and habitual mediation from BrainTap. 

Long story short, BrainTap claims to save time with more optimal meditation. From their studies, they were able to bring down the biological age of the brain to 34 due to repeated brain tap meditations on the Gerontological Health Curve. We absorb the light the device emits and put it out into the world by producing the ATP that we need. 

Advantages: 

• Easy setup—unlike a lot of meditation enhancement devices like EEG devices, there are no gels or anything. 
• You definitely get some sort of meditation enhancement. 
• There’s a large range of tracks available that can aim to enhance anything from relationships to sleep quality, using a combination of NLP and binaural beats along with light therapy. 
• An efficient way to get your mind and body resonating at the right frequency to optimise meditation. Especially for those living in cities, this is an easy hack to recreate a peaceful environment in the mind. 
• App can be used without the headset for those who don’t want to splash out on the device. Granted, the “light benefits” won’t be included but actually using better quality headphones might enhance the experience. 
• Helps improve your Biorhythm scores. 

Disadvantages: 

• For $650, you’d expect something to be included as a bonus, but instead, you have to pay an additional £12 per month for subscription to the App, which is just pure greed from the developers to pair subpar headphones with a monthly subscription. This is showing the negative direction which I think companies are heading in the biohacking sphere. Hapbee did something similar with their subscription based model. Seems like these companies are almost trying to suck in mentally ill individuals to be dependent on their products to ensure long-term profitability. 
• The App would sometimes cut offline and require the internet to log on again, which is a bit annoying to use while travelling. 

• You have a huge $100 to pay for shipping costs outside of the US along with additional import taxes which add to the cost of an already expensive product. 
• The study which showed 90 percent improvement of sleep was done on ill people who already had extremely low REM sleep of less than a couple of minutes, so to show huge improvement and marketing like that will be the same for everyone is probably untrue. A lot of people with average health still manage 30-60 minutes of REM sleep and are just not going to get this “90 minutes” marketed improvement in sleep quality. 
• You’re limited to 4 tracks per day, which with the $650 headset and the £12 month subscription is just additional greed coming from the makers. Although I can understand why they’ve done this, (so that people don’t use the same username and password to share their accounts with family members), but for someone looking to do above an hour and twenty minutes of meditation a day, you’re unable to go above that time with this app, which compared to other meditation devices is a shame. With EEG and HEG brain training devices, you’re allowed unlimited sessions, but with this app, you’re not allowed even after paying for the subscription and headphones. 
• Headphone build quality is cheap and plastic. There’s even a Chinese voice saying “line in” whenever it connects to the phone, which is a sign of just how cheaply made these headphones are. For $650, you expect class headphones that are well built, but it seems that there’s a real profit and greed motive behind the design. They’ve definitely cut costs in the production of this item. The headphones are terrible quality for the price. $650 dollars, and they feel like $20 ones, maybe even worse. Not great at noise cancellation at all which means they’re pretty useless in noisy environments. They could’ve spent so much more on the product design, but instead, it looks like they’re cutting corner after corner on these things.

• Headphones constantly disconnect after about 40 minutes, showing again a sign of poor quality that I wouldn’t expect from $600 dollar earphones. 
• Headphones were uncomfortable on the ears, really another example of how cheap they were, and the flashing lights on the inside of the ears seem almost gimmicky and make it impossible to do the meditation at night using them if you’re in bed with your partner as the lights coming from the ear buds can potentially wake them up. Another example of just how poorly thought out these headphones are. 
• Battery time is very low despite the expensive costs of headphones. Only lasts around 2 hours which makes it inconvenient for travel. Again compare this to $100 wireless headphones on the market, which have much longer run times with their battery. This is once again an inexcusable problem with a device this expensive. 
• The part for the eyes emits blue light albeit not as strong as the blue light from your devices/phones/laptop, but the thought of taking the meditations for sleep enhancement whilst using something that harms sleep quality (blue light seems a bit far swung). 
• The light flashing in the eyes seems to be a bit annoying at times also probably won’t be fully experienced due to having your eyes shut like in most meditations and just seems like you’re paying for nothing much more than poor quality headphones that flash light in your eyes .
• Customer service was slow to respond to my questions, took almost a 1 week of pinging back and forth via email and then eventually got my answer. 
• The meditations didn’t feel that strong an effect. I did certainly feel an impact, but was it enough to justify the price paid for the poor quality headphones? Not sure this had as much of an impact as EEG. 

Conclusions Drawn

BrainTap has the studies to back itself that it can improve and optimise meditation, which is a huge plus, but the execution of the headphones has been substandard at best and left me feeling a little bit that I’d been conned out of my money by purchasing it due to poor quality of the headphones and lack of sturdiness of the device. It’s a shame that on top of the hugely overpriced headphones, you then have to pay an indefinite monthly subscription, which strikes me as extremely greedy, but I see this subscription based model is the way a lot of businesses are heading towards. But overall, if you’re disciplined and use this device regularly, it can be beneficial and can put you into deeper states of meditation. If you don’t already own any HEG and EEG devices, it could be what you’re looking for. I believe putting the money towards a solid HEG or EEG device which you have unlimited sessions for you and your family and could be the better long-term play rather than investing in this device, but then again, that’s just my opinion. 

4/10