Training Your Brainwaves: A Quickie Explanation Of Entrainment

You may have noticed these pretty little colored buttons hanging around the site here and there, and wondered what they weres all about. Or maybe you’ve seen mentions of Holosync and Brainwave Entrainment in posts and comments.

Well, I’m finally getting around to explaining.

Here’s the deal, in oversimplified terms.

Your brain produces measurable waves of electrical activity. The frequency and strength of those waves reflect the overall state of your brain - alert or asleep, agitated or calm, focused or drifting.

Through exposure to environmental cues (most commonly light and sound) your brainwaves can be sped up or slowed down, shifted into a different state. It’s called “entrainment” (a fancy physics term that just means waveforms can affect one another.)

Where the brainwaves go, the brain itself will follow.

Not only do brainwaves reflect the state of the brain - they appear to influence the state of the brain.

So if you’re feeling sleepy, patterns of sound and light can be used to to affect the frequency of your brainwaves, speed things up, and therefore “adjust the dial” on your level of alertness. Likewise, if you’re feeling too agitated to go to sleep, you can use patterns of light and sound as a relaxation aid.

Sounds a bit flakey, doesn’t it? But there’s solid documentation that it works. ( I won’t get into the proofs now, but if you need the research, ask me in the comments and I’ll dig up some links for you. Fair warning if you go a’Googling, though - there IS a lot of flakey pseudo-spiritual entrainment stuff out there. )

A wide range of applications

Entrainment may turn out to be useful as more than a relaxation aid or substitute for caffeine. Preliminary studies suggest it may find a place in treatments for depression, ADD, migraines, chronic pain, high blood pressure, insomnia and anxiety. It’s often used as a hypnotic aid to deepen hypnosis (and self-hypnosis) sessions, and it can have many (but not all) of the benefits as deep meditation without the years of practice and discipline. And the entrainment spiritual mumbo-jumbo that is pushed on some websites isn’t all hype - entrainment to certain frequencies can be associated with visionary and transformative experiences.

But it isn’t a miracle, by any means. Many of the studies are preliminary and there’s a lot of work to be done. Some people report headaches from Brainwave Entrainment, especially at first, and epileptics should steer clear entirely. Trying to understand exactly which frequencies do what, and how to use them effectively with any given person is tricky, and unless you happen to have an EEG machine laying around, it’s largely guess work.

How can you entrain your own brain?

There are tons of brainwave entrainment products on the market, including stand alone machines, free and commercial software, inexpensive off-the-shelf music CD’s, and pricey customized CD programs that run thousands of dollars.

I’ll go into some more of your options later this week, but for now, I’ll wrap things up with a mention of those pretty buttons in the sidebar again.

They’re all products from Transparent Corp, a company I’ve come to respect pretty darn highly. Yes, those ads are indeed affiliate links - because I really do believe in the products. The software all has free trials available if you just want to experiment, or you can check out samples of their pre-recorded altered-states CD set, Beyond Being.