Focus Tip – Inception for ADD ADHD

Transcript: [spoiler]

Jon Bennett:  Hello Jon Bennett here with Three Steps to Conquering ADD‑ADHD. In this video I am going to talk about some more choices for you to play in your headphones when you’re trying to focus on work, or homework, and you’re sitting at your desk, or really wherever and you want to block out the outside world and really focus in on what you’re doing.

This is a really cool video because I’m going to be talking about one of my favorite movies that have come out recently. It’s called “Inception.”

And “Inception” is a really neat movie where they go into dream states, and all kinds of things. You can check that out.
But they have created an iPhone app that puts you in an augmented reality in terms of the sound. And I know that sounds a little weird, and it’s really hard to explain, but let me just kind of show you a little bit about what I’m talking about here. And I’ve got a quick video I’d like to show about the application.

Mike:  Hello, my name is Mike from RjDJ. I met Hans Zimmer this summer, and showed him the work we’re doing on augmented sound. It does something that Hans was looking for, for quite a while now.

Hans Zimmer:  There’s a thing I’ve been searching for, and I’ve been working on forever now, is a way to get beyond recorded music, to get beyond, “You just download a piece of music and it’s just always the same.”

Mike:  Wouldn’t it be amazing if you had a soundtrack that were synchronized with your life? For example the music would become more energetic when you move, or calm when you sit still, or even change when the sun is shining. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Jon:  So anyway, you know, if you don’t have an iPhone just hold on because I’ve got some other solutions for you. “Inception,” of course, is the movie that Hans Zimmer, which is a composer… And if you know anything about Hans Zimmer he is a brilliant composer, he’s done scores for some of the biggest movies out there. I’ll just show you the Wikipedia page for Hans Zimmer.

It goes through, he’s from Germany, he’s done “Inception,” “Lion King,” “Gladiator,” “The Dark Knight,” “Sherlock Holmes.” Just really cool guy. He is actually ranked, I was reading here, like number 87 on the index of Living Geniuses which is pretty neat.

But anyway, that’s Hans Zimmer, and the application you load it on your iPhone and I’ll tell you that is just a little weird. Because what it does is it has song sounds from the movie, the score from the movie, but then if like you’re sitting still or you’re making noise it interacts with the music.

So a lot of the dreams ‑ there’s like 10 different dreams that you can unlock inside the iPhone app ‑ and a lot of them will not help you focus at all. In fact, they kind of trip you out, in just a kind of a weird thing.

But there’s a couple of dreams that if you’re in a quiet room, really are pretty cool, and do help you focus.

I’m playing with it now, I’ll have to report back later. The Sunshine dream is really cool, works out really well. I’m trying to unlock the Quiet dream. For some reason I can’t unlock that one. I don’t know.

But anyway, I got a little frustrated with the app. It’s really neat but I just thought, “Well hey, I wonder if the soundtrack from the “Inception” movie is cool and would help me focus,” so I downloaded that. You can get it on iTunes or whatever. I put it in my focus playlist, and it’s really, really nice. I really enjoy it.

So I’ve been playing through the tracks from the movie, “Inception”, and most of them are great for just if you’re trying to work, and filling in the background.
What I really want to do, and hopefully maybe you can help me with this or somebody out there can help me with this, is take a hemi‑sync track, or a white noise meditation track that has binaural beats that are designed to affect your brainwaves and mix them in with these scores.

That would be really cool.

If somebody can figure out it, I know how to do it but I don’t know scientifically if it will negate it, or if there’ll be any weird side effects, or anything. So I haven’t really tried that, but if somebody knows about that that would be really cool if you could post your comments here.

But do check that out, at the very least download or go out and buy the CD, the score from “Inception.” It’s a great for background music.
And again this video is in a series of videos that I’ve been doing about focus music choices, using headphones for blocking out noises, and helping you focus in on your homework, or your work, or whatever you’re trying to do.
This does fall under step number three in The Three Steps to Conquering ADD: Tips, Tricks and Techniques. Check it out and I’ll see you soon.

Hans:  When the DVD of “Inception” comes out which will be quite soon, we’ve built a little iPhone application just because we could, which scores your dreams, without getting into the huge technicalities of it.

Man 1:  Yeah, yeah.

Hans:  But it reacts to your environment, it reacts to you, it reacts to your pace, and it plays with things. It does an individual piece of music for you out of the “Inception” stuff. So you’re back to that shared dreaming experience.

Man 1:  Yeah, Yeah. I love this.

Hans:  And of course you can record it and you can send it to your friend. You can say, “Hey listen I had this, wow, this great mode.” And the cool thing is… the little prototype, anybody who tries it out ‑ let me see how to phrase this ‑ I don’t think…

OK, I played it to Pharrell Williams who is a friend. And Pharrell’s playing with this thing and he comes back and he goes, “It’s legal drugs without side effects. It’s fantastic.” [laughs] I mean it literally…

Man 1:  [laughs] That’s great. It sounds great.

Hans:  It changes the way you think of your environment.

Man 1:  Yeah, yeah.

Hans:  Because, you know, here I have this piece of technology that really is a clock, so it will be different at the morning than it will be at night. It knows where you are. There’s a track on the “Inception” album called Mombasa. And I’m just terrible, but you can only hear that track on that application if you’re in Mombasa. So two people will hear it.

Man 1:  Yeah, you’re right.

Hans:  But you know this is a game. I love the game, but the idea of… a piece of music can become your piece of music, and who you, in a funny way you can be in my band or you can be… There’s connection, or there’s a community, or there’s a way we can touch.

Man 1:  Right. Well, and I mean that’s an interesting way to bring…

Hans:  I didn’t answer that guy at all.

Man 1:  That’s all right, he’s young.

Hans:  I’m totally off somewhere else.

Man 1:  He’s got lots of time to get questions answered…

[/spoiler]