Have you ever sat infront of a fire and became lost in thought after staring into the flickering, rhythmic dance of the flame? That is one form of brainwave entrainment, a process where your mind begins to synchronize with an external stimulus.
Brainwave entrainment is the practice of causing an individual’s brainwave frequencies to synchronize with with an external stimulus such as pulses of light or sound. I am mostly concerned with audio brainwave entrainment because I include it in all of my music.
Brainwave entrainment includes a series of techniques that, when combined, can powerfully alter your mood, behavior and your ability to focus and concentrate. As you listen to the brainwave entrainment techniques found in my music, your brain will follow the sound patterns and then recreate the desired brainwaves in a process called the “frequency following response”.
Why Use Brainwave Entrainment?
The lowest frequency that you can hear is about 20 Hz, yet some of the most powerful brainwave frequencies that you can experience are often much lower than this threshold. By listening to brainwave entrainment music, you can “trick” your ears into hearing these otherwise inaccessible frequencies. As you listen to brainwave entrainment frequencies, your brain follows the sound patterns and creates the corresponding brainwave frequencies in a natural process called “entrainment”. Once your brain entrains to the binaural beat frequency, you are enhancing your own natural abilities by directly influencing the behavior of your mind, body and spirit.
Binaural Beats
So how does all of this binaural beat technology work? It works by tricking the brain into hearing a phantom frequency that isn’t actually there. In order to experience this phenomenon, you need to put on some stereo earbuds or headphones and listen for a while. Let’s say that we play a 220 Hz carrier tone into the left ear and a 226.5 Hz carrier tone into the right ear. Your brain perceives a subtle beat frequency of 6.5 Hz, a frequency that happens to be associated with meditative trances. After a while, your brain begins to follow this frequency and you begin to experience this meditative trance state for yourself.
Monaural Tones
Monaural tones are used for brainwave entrainment in which the interference pattern that produces a beat that exists outside of the brain, eliminating the need for headphones. Monaural tones differ from isochronic pulses because monaural tones are a sine wave rather than an entirely separate pulse that sounds like a clicking noise.
Isochronic Pulses
Isochronic pulses are regular beats of a single tone used for brainwave entrainment. Similar to monaural tones, the interference pattern that produces the beat is outside the brain so headphones are not required, but since isochronic pulses are more pronounced, the stimuli is even stronger. They differ from monaural tones which are a sine wave rather than entirely separate series of pulses that click rhythmically.
