and could not grasp at that point is the application of this technology. Class, do you remember what state you are in when you have lots of 10 Hz activity crackling in your noggin? (You can check the chart. It’s okay; I only give open-book tests.) That’s right, alpha state. Send two detuned tones to two ears and in a matter of minutes, whaddya got? Instant meditation!
Now, hang on while the g-force pulls the corners of your mouth towards your ears as we leap ahead on our spiritual journey to 1973. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn is at the top of the pop charts and it’s a dark, dark day for rock ‘n’ roll. But on balance, this year marks the publication of “Auditory Beats and the Brain” in Scientific American by Dr. Gerald Oster of the Mt. Sinai Medical Center. The article puts together current research and historical findings about BBFs. Suddenly, BBFs become more than just an interesting anomaly and transform into something more credible and useful in the eyes of the academic community.
Around the same time, sound pioneer Robert Monroe was researching BBF. Monroe, an engineer who spontaneously began having out-of-body experiences in the 1950s, believed that BBF technology might be able to help people relax, accelerate learning, and even facilitate astral projection. He manufactured the technology under the brand name, Hemi-Sync®, short for hemispheric synchronization, since he noted that when using BBF, there was a more balanced, coherent neural firing of both the creative/artistic right hemisphere of the brain and the linear/rational left hemisphere. Voila! “Whole-brain thinking” on demand!
Zip!
And now we are back in the twenty-first century . . . and my fly is closed. You are saying, the little BBF history lesson was fascinating, Gregg, and thank you for closing the barn door, I was beginning to worry about you. But what’s in it for me?
Let’s say you wake up in the morning at eight o’clock, only to discover that the coffee pot’s broken. Damn, you say to yourself, how will I find my way to work without my java? Thinking quickly, you toss on your headphones and start to listen to a Beta audio recording on your iPod. The BBF tones feed into each ear, resonating underneath a bed of lively up-tempo music. Sure enough, within just a few minutes, your brain is chugging along at about 20 Hz, solidly in the range of Beta waves, and you feel bright and alert, without the cost of a $15.56 cup of mocha latté soy Frappuccino extra grande venti with a shot in the dark from Starbucks.
You go percolating through the day, energetic, alert and feeling pretty good, until your jerkwagon boss (the one who got pissed off at you for being gone too long in my time machine) reminds you about a project that is due. And he doesn’t want it right, he wants it right now. Whipping out your iPod from your purse (okay, it’s not a purse, it’s a satchel like Indiana Jones carries), you turn down the lights in your crappy vestibule that passes for an office, close your eyes, and breathe like your favorite yoga instructor, while jacking into an alpha state BBF audio track with haunting minor key music and groovy ocean sounds for fifteen minutes, catalyzing an Edison-like state of mind sans ball-bearings. After reinventing the light bulb and the telephone, you remember that what your boss wanted was the specs for the new electric dog polisher. In the alpha state, you can hear every word of your muses and spontaneously solve the problem and buy small, inexpensive gift certificates for them as tokens of your gratitude.
After a tough day at the office channeling Tommy Edison, you decide it’s time for some spiritual sustenance. You put on a Theta track with low harmonic musical tones and in fifteen or twenty minutes, you find yourself meditating at a depth something akin to Tibetan monks with twenty years of training. The more you listen to the Theta tracks, the easier it becomes to catalyze this deep meditative state, whether you are listening to an audio or not. With repeated listening, perhaps you find yourself calmer in stressful situations, more empathic with others, experiencing more intuitive flashes, and maybe even meeting angels or spirit guides and doing some astral cruising.
Now, it’s seven thirty at night and your jerkwagon manic boss calls, but you are in such a Zen state, you don’t panic: “You don’t mind what happens.” As it turns out, it’s all good. “I love the work you’re doing!” he screams into the phone. “The specs for the dog polisher are perfect. And I love the idea of running it with solar panels attached to the canine’s haunches and taking advantage of the tail wagging to store kinetic energy. Genius! We’re gonna kill in the green market with this! I’m giving you a raise and moving you to the corner office!” You smile broadly as excitement courses through your body. But as the evening wears on you wonder if you can get some sleep after all this drama. Your mind is racing. How will your life be different if the Electric Dog Polisher gets picked up and marketed by the As Seen on TV folks?
You reach for your ever present iPod and put on a Delta track with night crickets and slow tempo music that catalyzes long, low delta waves in your brain. You have learned to wear ear buds while you listen to the sleep tracks so that you can roll over on your right or left side without shoving a whole headset up your Eustachian tubes. You sleep soundly, dreaming of all the money you saved on Ambien and thinking that no matter what Big Pharma says about safety, people are sleep-driving on that stuff, and it really might be a “benzo in a chicken suit.” You awake feeling rested, refreshed, and excited to blow your new paycheck and see your corner office overlooking the parking lot and the decrepit air conditioner on the roof of the nearby Dollar General: The Good Life is yours.
All thanks to BBF, your new BFF.
I am, of course, allowing for some hyperbole here. Thanks for coming along for the ride. I don’t think that there is any guarantee that BBF audios will get you a corner office or help you to invent a Solar-Powered Electric Dog Polisher (although the one I bought on TV has some serious design flaws and somebody really needs to address this, and soon). But there are decades of research into BBF that suggest it actually does catalyze these states for people and can be used to deepen meditation, sharpen focus, boost creativity, and help people sleep. Is this all exaggeration? Here is UCLA neurophysiologist John Liebeskind talking about BBF research:
“It’s difficult to try to responsibly convey some sense of excitement about what’s going on . . . You find yourself sounding like people you don’t respect. You try to be more conservative and not say such wild and intriguing things, but damn! The field is wild and intriguing. It’s hard to avoid talking that way . . . We are at a frontier, and it’s a terribly exciting time to be in this line of work.”4
New brain scans are showing us just how powerful these states of mind are, and the incredible potential that resides in all us, if we can but catalyze these states.
Functional MRI and advanced EEG research have been conducted into different forms of meditation with the assistance of the Dalai Lama at the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin.5 A lifelong meditator, who studied various forms of contemplation in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, demonstrated some startling results. (See, Star Trek or not, I told you I wasn’t making this stuff up.) Not only did the meditator show lots of slower brainwave activity during certain forms of meditation, there was also a striking increase in a higher vibrational electrical activity above Beta: the newly-christened gamma and hyper-gamma waves, also seen in research at University of Birmingham. Current findings suggests that when there is a lot of gamma activity in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain, subjects report feeling energetic, joyful, bright, alert, and yes, exceedingly happy. This pattern was specifically linked to the kind of meditation he was doing, a technique to awaken compassion.
I can’t help but wonder if this new kind of state of being that is both bright and alert and also deeply connected spiritually is somehow related to the optimal state of “flow” that star athletes, artists, dancers, and yes, witty therapists, experience when they are completely in the moment.
In
