Mind States, Better Sleep, Trauma & Addiction
Garnet Dupuis
GARNET DUPUIS (US)
Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Brain Prime Technology / Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of Lucid Studios
Garnet Dupuis is an esteemed professional with a wealth of experience in the Integrative and Complementary Wellness field. With a career spanning decades, he has been at the forefront of exploring light, sound, and consciousness since the 1970s. As Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Brain Prime Technology in Singapore, Garnet holds significant leadership roles. He is also the Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder of Lucid Studios in Thailand, specializing in Neuro Reality devices called NeuroVizr™ instruments. These cutting-edge tools facilitate positive neuroplastic changes in the brain. Garnet's personal philosophy emphasizes compassion and awakening, evident in his involvement in wildlife rescue and conservation efforts in eastern Chiang Mai, Thailand. His academic background is diverse, ranging from Classical and Clinical Homeopathy to Psychology and English Literature. Garnet's expertise is recognized worldwide through lectures, presentations, and features in podcasts and Biohackers Magazine. He is currently writing a book titled "Lucid Brain" to share his extensive knowledge with a wider audience.
Garnet Dupuis introduces "brain engagement," a novel light and sound
I don’t think you can think your way out of the problem; I think you can feel your way into the solution. Learning how to feel your way into the solution is another way of being in the present moment.
Summary
- Brain engagement uses light and sound to promote neurological fluidity and adaptability, helping the brain move easily between states rather than being confined to rigid categories. - Deep conscious relaxation acts as a universal psychoactive agent, allowing the brain to move from top-down thinking into bottom-up, present-moment sensory experiences. - Addiction is viewed as a "stuck" neurological pattern that can be resolved through a protocol of disconnecting habituated signals and reconnecting the brain to preferable, healthy states. - Brain priming and drug-free microdosing utilize "eustress"—positive, low-level stimulation—to incrementally nudge the brain toward neuroplastic change and improved function. - Like a physical muscle, the brain requires regular exercise through varied stimulation to maintain its innate capacity for adaptive adjustments and healthy transitions.
Article
Light, Sound, And The Stuck Brain
At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, Garnet Dupuis Argued That Trauma, Addiction, And Poor Sleep Might Be Met Not With Force, But With Carefully Guided Neurological Flexibility
There are some ideas that arrive softly and still manage to unsettle a room. At the Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on 14 October 2023, Garnet Dupuis stood before an audience primed for the next frontier of self-optimization and offered something more subtle than a miracle cure, but perhaps more radical. The brain, he suggested, need not be bullied into wellness. It could be invited there.
In his presentation, *Mind States, Better Sleep, Trauma & Addiction*, Dupuis, co-founder and co-CEO of Brain Prime Technology and chief creative officer of Lucid Studios, made the case for what he called “brain engagement”, a method using light and sound to stimulate neuroplasticity through sensory experience rather than rigid cognitive control. The language was technical, at times poetic, and rooted in a conviction that many modern disorders are expressions of a brain that has become fixed when it should remain fluid.
“The startling promise of neuroplasticity means that we all have a chance,” Dupuis said. “In the past, it was the idea that brain cells only change by degenerating, but we know that this process is reversible.”
Beyond Entrainment, Toward Engagement
Dupuis was careful to distinguish his approach from the older language of brain entrainment, a field he said he had known for decades. Entrainment, in his telling, belonged largely to a top-down neurological model, one concerned with patterning, regulation, and the brain’s tendency to catalogue the past and predict the future. Useful, certainly. But insufficient.
What interested him more was the bottom-up realm: sensory immediacy, present-moment awareness, the raw live wire of experience before it is organised into narrative. If top-down processing is the mind’s archivist and forecaster, bottom-up processing is its witness.
“Top-down neurology catalogs the past and predicts the future,” he said, “but we also need time in bottom-up neurology, which is the present moment sensory experience of what is happening right now.”
In practical terms, his NeuroVizr system aimed to use unsynchronised light and sound stimulation not to force the brain into a single target frequency, but to challenge it into adaptive responsiveness. He described it as “brain exercise disguised as entertainment”, a phrase that neatly captured both the seduction and seriousness of the idea.
The Case For Fluidity
At the heart of Dupuis’s argument was a quiet rejection of rigid categories. He expressed discomfort with speaking about fixed “states” as though consciousness were a set of labelled boxes. Better, he suggested, to think of the brain as a continuum, healthy when it can move smoothly between modes, unhealthy when it cannot.
That insistence on fluidity carried implications far beyond the seminar room. Sleep and wakefulness, attention and rest, vigilance and calm: these are not opposites to be conquered, but transitions to be managed. A healthy brain does not merely occupy a state. It shifts.
“I am interested in the fluid domain and the adaptive ability to change your brain when your brain needs to change,” Dupuis said. “I feel more comfortable with a dynamic continuum of being ready, willing, and able to change.”
In an era that has made an industry of naming syndromes and monetising fixes, there was something striking in the simplicity of the proposition. Wellness, in this formulation, is not perfection. It is mobility.
Attention Without Tension
Perhaps the most resonant theme of the session was Dupuis’s emphasis on deep conscious relaxation, which he described as a foundational condition for recovery and change. This was not sleep, nor sedation, nor passive calm. It was a more difficult state to cultivate: alert, receptive, and unguarded.
“Deep conscious relaxation is a critical component in the formula for wellness,” he said. “It is the universal psychoactive agent because it allows you to have attention without tension; the ability to sink in without dozing out.”
The phrase lingered because it named a modern deficit with unusual precision. So many people live in forms of attention saturated by strain, wired but exhausted, focused yet brittle. Dupuis’s contention was that the brain changes best not under brute pressure, but under conditions where vigilance softens enough for adaptation to occur.
Trauma, Addiction, And Neurological Stuckness
If there was a moral centre to the talk, it lay in Dupuis’s framing of addiction and trauma not as failures of character, but as expressions of neurological stuckness. The brain, he argued, can become overcommitted to repeating a pattern, unable to make the shift required for health. Addiction, in that sense, is not simply craving. It is repetition hardened into destiny.
His proposed answer was what he described as a dehabituation process: disconnect, reconnect, reinforcement. First, disrupt the redundant signal. Then present a healthier one. Then strengthen it before the old pattern reasserts itself.
This was a bold reframing. Instead of treating addiction as a battle of willpower, Dupuis presented it as a failure of adaptive flexibility. The task, then, was not merely to suppress behaviour but to help the brain recover its capacity to transition.
He spoke of the brain’s instinctive search for “signal in noise”, arguing that when habituated patterns are temporarily unsettled, a brief window opens in which the nervous system becomes newly available to guidance. It is in that interval, he suggested, that change can take root.
Drug-Free Microdosing And The Logic Of Eustress
Dupuis also placed his method within a broader discussion of brain priming, comparing incremental sensory stimulation to a form of drug-free microdosing. The point was not to imitate psychedelic compounds exactly, nor to romanticise them, but to understand the underlying neurological principle: small, well-calibrated interventions can create disproportionate openings for change.
He drew on the concept of eustress, positive and manageable stimulation, as distinct from distress. It is not stress alone that shapes the organism, he argued, but the degree and quality of the stressor. Marginal demand, carefully applied, can nudge the brain toward adaptation.
In this account, neuroplasticity is not magic. It is exercise. Repetition matters. Novelty matters. Challenge matters. And like the body, the brain cannot be expected to perform capacities it has never practised.
“If you never exercise the capacity for your brain to make an adaptive adjustment, why do you think you will automatically be able to do it?” Dupuis asked. “Exercising the brain has the same fundamental truth as exercising the rest of the body.”
A Promising Idea In Search Of Broader Evidence
For all the ambition of the talk, Dupuis did not pretend the work was finished. He acknowledged the high cost of formal research and said an observational study in Southern California had been completed and was awaiting publication. That note of incompletion mattered. In a field crowded with overstatement, even provisional humility has force.
Still, the larger appeal of his presentation was not reducible to devices or protocols. It lay in a wider philosophy, one that pushed back against a culture of neurological fatalism. The brain, Dupuis argued, retains a native capacity for reorganisation, for expansion, for return. Trauma may narrow it. Addiction may trap it. Modern life may overstimulate and exhaust it. But none of that means it has lost the ability to change.
What he offered at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam was, finally, less a product pitch than a vision of recovery rooted in adaptability. Not a brain perfected, but a brain restored to movement. Not salvation through domination, but through practice, presence, and gentle disruption.
And in a world increasingly defined by rigidity, that notion carried its own quiet charge.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam