Every brain produces brainwaves. They are natural patterns of electrical activity occurring as signals pass between groups of brain cells. No two brains are exactly alike, but certain patterns are common to everyone.

For instance, in deep sleep, your brain enters a state which researchers call ‘delta wave’, in which bursts of activity move slowly across the cerebral cortex. In meditation or creative thought, that activity will switch up into a faster theta state. Alpha and beta waves, characteristic of relaxed concentration and busy activity respectively, are faster still.

These brain waves are associated with particular frequencies — for instance, theta waves occur 4-7 times a second in most people. (That’s 4-7Hz, to use the jargon.)

These numbers are important, because they give researchers a way to quickly identify what sort of activity is going on in your brain — and how to change it!

It turns out that brains are susceptible to external stimulus. Well, that’s no surprise — after all, we take in new information from our eyes and ears all the time. But brains also display what’s called the frequency following response. This means that, if you stimulate the brain at an appropriate frequency, it will tend to go into the corresponding brain state. This process is called ‘entrainment’.

Now, entrainment CDs have been with us for a long time, and modern programs like the Brain Evolution System can have very complex modes of action. But the underlying principle is simple: if you want a meditation brainwave, play the corresponding meditation entrainment frequency. You can switch your brain into a meditative/creative theta state just by stimulating it at 4-7Hz.

That’s right! You get the benefits of regular meditation practice — without all the frustrating years of effort. And it’s just as easy to switch yourself into delta sleep, or to enjoy alpha relaxed concentration, all at the click of a button.

Now, actually stimulating your brain at the correct frequency to produce those meditation brainwaves — or the other kinds — turns out to be rather tricky. Other articles on this site will guide you through the various mechanisms that developers have used to achieve that. But the underlying truth remains: entrainment CDs can be the key that unlocks your unused brainwave frequencies.

As a shortcut that spares you all the hard work, but still provides all the benefits of meditation, entrainment really can’t be beat…

Learn more at http://www.brainev.com/

Their claims are massive: at the touch of a mouse button — or in the time it takes to hit play on your MP3 player — they can give you an experience that would take years of practice to achieve by other means. How realistic are these claims? And, if they are trustworthy, which is the best meditation program to use?

The answer to the first question can be found in the brain research of the last century. Theta brain waves — characterized by a 4-7Hz brainwave frequency — have been found in experienced meditation practitioners all over the world. Switching your brain into a theta state can really be a shortcut to the mental and spiritual highs experienced by these master meditators.

In other articles on this blog, we’ve looked at the science behind these claims, and such benefits are more than achievable. You can learn more about the science behind brainwave entrainment here and here.

The second question is more difficult to answer. Meditation CDs of all kinds have been available since the mid-70s, and choosing one is a matter both of personal preference and hardnosed consumer awareness.

There are a bewildering variety of meditation CDs on the market. The very simplest rely on soothing music and ‘guided meditation’ voiceovers. These may be relaxing and hypnotic, lulling you into drowsiness, but they certainly aren’t a shortcut to theta state brainwaves.

More sophisticated offerings incorporate brainwave entrainment music. They use psychoacoustic principles to generate an entrainment response, so that your brainwave frequency alters to match that of the stimulus. A skilled developer can fill an entire soundtrack with these auditory cues, enabling you to switch your brainwaves into whatever state you wish within a few minutes.

And brainwave entrainment music of this type is no longer limited to CDs. It is also available in the form of meditation software and MP3 downloads. That’s because computer sound resources have improved enormously, and the techniques needed to produce entrainment effects are now widely understood. It is often more convenient for a small-scale binaural experimenter to make audio tracks available via MP3 download than for them to press a CD.

You might even download your own entrainment software like Transparent Corp’s Mind WorkStation, enabling you to incorporate source sounds of your own choosing with binaural beats to make your own personalized brainwave entrainment music!

However, this approach doesn’t take into account the full subtlety of the brain. If you want to explore new brainwave states, it isn’t enough to randomly blast yourself with entrainment frequencies. An up-to-date brainwave meditation program takes account of the need to proceed gently when you switch yourself into deep theta meditation.

The best meditation CDs are ‘second generation’ products like the Brain Evolution System, which incorporate a whole panoply of esoteric sound techniques that promote the healthy, balanced, integrated function of the brain in all its complexity.

Demo brainwave meditation for yourself, by clicking here – http://www.brainev.com/demo

Isochronic tones are a recent and exciting development in the area of brain entrainment software and CDs, used in up-to-date audio programs like the Brain Evolution System, and in its immediate predecessors like the Morry Method Quantum Mind Power system. In this article, we’ll look at how they differ from last-generation brainwave entrainment systems.

All brainwave entrainment is based on the frequency following response, a well-recognized mechanism which causes your brainwave frequencies to fall in step with a rhythmic stimulus.

The problem which has always confronted the developers of brain entrainment CDs is that the brainwave frequencies needed to access interesting mental states are too low for the ear to hear. The traditional workaround has been to use binaural beats, which can induce beats in the brain at sub-audio frequencies by manipulating the brain’s response to stereo sound images. However, the entrainment potential of binaural beats is weak, and requires use of headphones to boot.

Isochronic tones provide all the benefits of binaural beats — while adding some extras of their own. At their simplest, isochronic tones are continuous sounds modulated at the desired stimulus frequency. That is, if an 8Hz beat is required, the basic tone is switched on and off eight times every second. Isochronics produce a stronger entrainment effect than binaurals can — and they have some other benefits, too.

For a start, it’s easy for the developer to manipulate the continuous sound and the ‘switching’ frequency to achieve a whole spectrum of brainwave synchronization effects. Then there’s the way that isochronic tones can be used to produce their powerful effects without headphones — which can be handy, since many listeners find it comfortable to use ambient sounds within the room.

Second-generation brain entrainment CDs like Morry Zelcovitch’s ‘Morry Method’ use isochronic tones to achieve their effects. In fact, like many other products, the Morry Method’s ‘Quantum Mind Power’ and ‘Quantum Confidence’ programs rely on a combination of isochronic tones with spoken messages called ‘triliminals’ to plant suggestions.

Isochronics have one final advantage. Presented through headphones, they allow a skilled developer to present several different isochronic tones at once. This means that they can stimulate a range of different brainwave frequencies simultaneously.

This capacity of isochronics, the built-in ability to deal with a brain in all of its complexity, is at the heart of the Brain Evolution system. Modern brain entrainment software like Brain Evolution provides you with unparalleled resources to help you increase your mind power.

Learn more about the Brain Evolution System, which uses isochronic tones and more, online at http://www.brainev.com/

To understand binaural beats, you first have to understand beat notes.

Beat notes are a special case of harmony. Normally, when two or more notes are played at the same time, we hear a chord. But, if the two source notes are very close in pitch, we hear instead a single note — a ‘beat note’ — produced by the interaction of the two soundwaves. The beat note beats or throbs at a rate given by the difference between the two frequencies. If you listen carefully when a guitarist is tuning up, you can often hear beat notes when pairs of strings are almost — not quite — in tune.

But what happens if you hear the two source sounds through headphones, one in each earpiece? When Heinnrich Dove first tried that, way back in 1839, he found that most listeners still heard a beat — but that these binaural beats existed only in their heads, being inaudible to everyone else!

In the next century-and-a-half, various researchers would experiment with binaural beats — but most saw them only as a psychological curiosity, a kind of optical illusion of the ear. Oster however, recognized enormous possibilities in the field of mind entrainment. He noted that particular kinds of patient — those with Parkinson’s disease, for instance — couldn’t hear binaural beats, and he speculated that the effort the brain had to make to combine inputs might be helping its two divided hemispheres to co-operate.

This insight was developed by Robert Monroe, who patented a binaural technology called ‘Hemi-Sync’ and went on to found the Monroe Institute to further research in the area of out-of-body-experiences and brainwave meditation. The many CDs in the Hemi-Sync brainwave program are available to this day.

Meanwhile, newer companies have sprung up to take advantage of developments in the rapidly-growing science of mind entrainment. It began in the mid-80s when Bill Harris and his Centerpointe Institute first offered their Holosync program, which contained brainwave meditations intended to increase your mind power, release stress and equip you for everyday life.

Today, the increasing sophistication of brain entrainment software has led to the development of products like Transparent Corp’s Neuro-Programmer and Mind WorkStation, which integrate mind entrainment with self-hypnosis and biofeedback. It’s even possible to buy a ‘Mind Stereo’ system which can seamlessly integrate binaural beats and other brainwave programming materials into your radio and CD listening!

The real cutting edge, however, is in the combination of binaural beats with monaural and isochronic tones. That’s mind entrainment that works with your brain in all its complexity, and it’s the kind of deep stimulation you find in up-to-date brainwave programs like the Brain Evolution System.

Download an MP3 demo of the Brain Evolution System at http://www.brainev.com/demo – for FREE!

But what should you listen for? And how does the music work?

Like entrainment itself, meditation music is a form of cheating. It’s a method for deliberately switching on new brain states that lets you bypass years of disciplined meditation.

The frequency following response on which entrainment CDs depend is a simple reflex that can be triggered by the bleeps and bloops of a computer soundcard, provided that those sounds are in the correct rhythms. But no-one wants to spend 30 minutes or more a day listening to a computer. Relaxation CDs have always added sonic ingredients to the mix to provide a more complex and satisfying musical experience, and modern meditation music CDs build on that. In this article, we’ll look at the components that go into great-sounding meditation music.

First, there’s the sound of the developer’s chosen entrainment mechanism. When you look at different meditation music programs, you’ll come across buzzwords like ‘monaural’, ‘binaural’ and ‘isochronic’. These are too complex to cover in this short article, so you’ll have to read up on them elsewhere on this site.

But we should mention the ‘Oster curve’, named for the researcher who laid the foundations of modern brain entrainment. Meditation music carries its entrainment signals encoded in musical tones, and Oster recognized that different tones are appropriate for different kinds of entrainment. For instance, brainwave entrainment music focused on the theta wave states associated with deep meditation will tend to use tones in the 160–210hz range. These give it a characteristic sound — around the same pitch as the ‘D’ string on a guitar.

But most commercial meditation music sounds more like traditional relaxation CDs. When you listen, you often don’t register the entrainment tones. Instead, you’ll be conscious of hearing rainfall, wind or the sea — or the pure hiss of white noise. These so-called ambient sounds serve more than one purpose. They’re soothing and pleasant in themselves, and they also distract attention from the more insistent programming tones.

The same is true of the drone sounds that you hear on many recordings. Drones are a feature of musical systems all over the world. When used for brain entrainment meditation, they may take the form of vocal chants, or sustained instrumental notes. These give a static or slowly changing harmonic basis to the faster-moving elements, providing continuity and a sense of groundedness.

In modern meditation programs, like the Brain Evolution System, many of these additional sounds may themselves be manipulated to produce complex and multilayered entrainment effects.

Many entrainment CDs feature melodies, usually slow and rhythmically free. Some also include ‘guided meditation’ voiceovers intended to orientate the listener within their brain entrainment meditation session by the use of word-pictures describing an imaginary journey. Opinions are divided about both these extras, with criticism of guided meditation being particularly fierce. In fact, many developers now indicate clearly which of their disks include guided meditation — if you’re averse, choose an ‘ambient soundtrack’ disk instead!

However the entrainment CD you choose is composed — and whatever its intended purpose — make sure that you enjoy listening to it. You’ll be spending a lot of time with your chosen program, and it’s important that you’re happy with how it actually sounds!

Try a free MP3 demo of the Brain Evolution System at http://www.brainev.com/demo

Binaural beats are crucial to older brainwave entrainment software like Hemisync and Holosync, and they’re still an important ingredient even in up-to-date meditation programs like the Brain Evolution System.

In this article, we’ll look more at the science behind binaural beats.

Simple ideas are always best. Brainwave entrainment is based on a simple discovery: If you subject the brain to a rhythmic stimulus, it will tend to fall into step. With the right rhythm, it’s possible to switch yourself into different states — alpha (relaxed concentration), theta (meditation/creativity) or delta (sleep).

Now, for most people, sound is the best brainwave entrainment medium — but the human ear isn’t adapted for the very deep sounds needed to access low-frequency brain states. That’s where beats come in.

If you play two widely different musical notes at the same time, they interact and you hear a chord. The characteristic sound of the chord — warm, sad, angry — is produced by the interaction of the different notes.

If you play two slightly different notes, you hear a special kind of interaction. It’s as if you’re listening to a single note, but with a superimposed ‘throb’ caused by the difference between the two sources. That throb is the ‘beat note’. Beat notes are of interest to brain researchers for a number of reasons.

First, they’re an effective way of getting a low-frequency stimulus. Need a 5Hz signal? No problem — just play two notes of 500 and 505Hz at the same time, and there’s your 5Hz ‘carrier’.

Second, beat notes can have complex effects on the brain. Maybe you’ve heard a beat note when a guitarist is tuning up, or when two different engines are running in the same space?

Now, imagine yourself listening to stereo headphones. Let’s play those two slightly different sounds we mentioned earlier, one in each ear. As you might expect, you’ll hear a beat note — but no-one else does! The beat is produced inside your brain as it attempts to make sense of the different signals. This is a true binaural beat.

Binaural beats were first described by Heinrich Dove in 1839, but their full significance wasn’t recognised until the early 1970s, when Gerald Oster and Robert Monroe began to explore their effects on consciousness. Monroe adapted his pioneering work to form the basis of the Hemisync and its many successors from Holosync onwards.

All of these systems attempted to use binaural beat CDs to stimulate brainwave synchronization, presenting binaural beats that required collaboration between the two separate hemispheres of the brain. The results were that you could replicate states such as deep relaxation, meditation and focus, just by listening to a chunk of audio.

These days, the best brainwave entrainment systems use a whole spectrum of special sound techniques — like 3P DEAP, found inside the Brain Evolution System.

But binaural beats remain an important part of the entrainment mix, and an important slice of history in brainwave science.

Learn more about brainwave entrainment science at the Brainwave College, at http://www.brainwavecollege.com/

Sure, listening to music can relax you. Everyone knows that! But how will listening to a CD make you smarter or increase your mood? In this article, we’re going to look at the some of the science underlying the Brain Evolution system and earlier products like Equisync and Brain Sync.

There are many brain entrainment CDs on the market, but all of them trace their origins back to Hans Berger’s development of the EEG machine a century or so ago. By making it possible to study electrical activity in the brain, Berger’s machine enabled researchers to explore brainwaves and their relationship with consciousness.

Brainwaves are patterns of electrical activity. While everyone’s brain is unique, all brains have some qualities in common. For instance, in deep sleep, your brainwaves settle into a characteristic cycle with peaks of electrical activity occurring between one and four times a second, 1-4Hz. When you’re awake and relaxed, another kind of pattern emerges, with cycles at 8-12Hz.

Neuroscientists recognised these brainwave frequencies and gave them familiar names. The deep-sleep pattern is called a delta wave, and the relaxed-concentration one an alpha. Other states include beta (alert, active, anxious), and theta (associated with meditation and creativity). Soon, there were attempts to deliberately ‘switch on’ different brainwave frequencies — putting insomniacs into a relaxing delta sleep, or teaching manic, hyperactive types to chill out in their own alpha waves.

Various methods for controlling brainwaves have been explored, but the most effective turns out to be the simplest. If you subject the brain to a rhythmic stimulus, it will tend to go into the corresponding brainwave frequency. Need some delta sleep? Find a 1-4Hz stimulus, and in a few minutes your brain will do the rest of the work. This so-called frequency following response (FFR) is the basis of all brain entrainment.

If you’re looking for a convenient stimulus, music and sound are clearly a great choice. But there’s a basic problem… our ears are calibrated wrongly! For most people, the lowest audible note occurs at 20hz. It’s difficult to get a really low-frequency stimulus into the brain via the ear.

But there are methods. Back in the 70s, work began on entrainment using binaural beats, which still provide the basis of older systems like Equisync, Brain Sync and a few others.

Binaural beats rely on stereo headphones. Sounds of slightly different pitch are played in the two earpieces. Because the brain cannot distinguish between the two, it interprets the difference between them as a low-frequency ‘beat note’ providing stimulation at the desired brainwave frequency. Additionally, research suggests that the extra effort made by the brain to interpret a single tone from the two different ‘sound images’ can improve synchronization between the two hemispheres.

Of course, CD developers choose tones that will produce beat notes at exactly the right frequencies, perhaps with variations intended to take the listener through different brainwave states. Commercial CDs usually layer on atmospherics and background music to make the computer tones which produce the binaural beats more enticing — and modern systems like the Brain Evolution System combine binaural beats with other leading entrainment techniques in order to deliver the best possible experience. (Read more about 3P DEAP here.)

But the underlying concept of entrainment remains the same. By using the power of sound, you really can literally change the way you feel.

Learn more about the science behind brainwave entrainment (for free!) at the Brainwave College – http://www.brainwavecollege.com/

Let’s begin with the absolute basics: brain waves. The workings of your brain are as unique and distinctive as your fingerprints. But if you were to hook yourself up to an EEG machine while you were asleep, say, or in deep concentration, you’d find patterns of electrical activity broadly similar to those of other people doing the same things.

Early brain researchers came to recognize several such types of brain wave, and they gave Greek letters to the most familiar ones: alpha, beta, gamma and so on. Their signatures are easy to read — all you have to do is monitor the frequency of electrical activity in the brain. Familiar examples: alpha activity (8-12 Hz) is widely associated with relaxed wakefulness, delta (1-4 Hz) with deep sleep, and theta (4-8 Hz) with meditation.

Once you’ve know the kind of brain activity you want, you can try to achieve it deliberately. Researchers in the 60s and 70s worked with biofeedback, monitoring their own brain waves in the hope of learning to control them. But research carried out over the past 30 years has made entrainment the psychonaut’s tool of choice.

Entrainment relies on the frequency following response (FFR), a simple but remarkable discovery. If you stimulate the brain at the right frequency, it will tend to go into the corresponding brain wave state. In theory, you can switch into any state you like — provided you can find an effective stimulus.

Experimenters have tried various different stimuli: electrics, sound, light, and combinations of the three. We look at some of these in other articles on this site. But, for most people, sound is the best place to start. After all, you probably have access to a sound system of some kind — and a comfy sofa! All you really need is a brainwave entrainment CD, and maybe a set of headphones.

There are hundreds of CDs on the market, everything from bare-bones freeware disk images that you can download via your computer to multilevel guided-meditation products like Bill Harris’s Holosync. When you start looking at all the options that are on offer, you’ll come across some unfamiliar buzzwords — monaural, binaural (aka ‘mind stereo’), and isochronic. These refer to the ways that different CDs produce low-frequency ‘beats’ to stimulate your brain. We’ll cover those systems in more detail later — for the moment, let’s just note that you’ll need headphones to listen to a binaural CD, but the others can be played through speakers.

Whichever system you choose, take it gently. You can spend hundreds or thousands buying all the levels of a big series. That may be the best investment you ever make — but, when you’re starting out, choose a program that will at least give you a freebie disk or download.

Try out the free BrainEv demo by clicking here.

But now a new class of brainwave entrainment CDs and downloads has appeared, promising to sharpen your brain and perhaps even increase your mind power.

So, how do they actually work?

All modern brainwave entrainment CDs work on the same principle. When the brain is subjected to the right kind of rhythm, it tends to match the frequency of the stimulus. Researchers have termed this effect ‘entrainment’. Since the brainwave frequency characterizes the state of the brain — meditative/creative, busy, relaxed or asleep — the early brain researchers reasoned that it should be easy to ‘switch on’ deep sleep or meditation with the right kind of rhythmic stimulus.

And that’s exactly what they found. Whether delivered by sound, lights or other means, entrainment provides a simple and effective means of effecting temporary change. With the right meditation CDs, you can literally ‘switch on’ a creative theta state that might otherwise take years of meditation practice to achieve!

This approach characterized the earliest brainwave entrainment CDs created by entrepreuneurs like Bill Harris and Robert Monroe, and has since been popularized by home experimenters and hobbyists as well as professional developers. Using freeware ‘brainwave generator’ software, it is now possible to put together a functioning brainwave entrainment download on your own PC and publish it via the web.

But, while these ‘first generation’ CDs and soundfiles are an effective means of relaxation, they are less successful at reprogramming  your brain in the longer term.

We know that most brains work at less-than-optimal efficiency, displaying lassitude, distraction, addictive behaviours, and a whole range of other ‘glitches’. More ambitious, longer term brainwave programming may seek to alter all of them.

But the living brain is complex and subtle, with a wave state that defies simple modelling. (You might think of it as something like the weather.) You know how your old meditation CDs don’t have the effect they once did? That’s ‘burnout’ — your brain has learnt their stimulus and ceased to respond. To work effectively over the long term, a brainwave program has to operate on many levels at once.

If you want to invest your time in a program that will last, isochronic tones are a must. Unlike binaural beats, isochronic tones enable the developer to deliver stimulation at several different brain rhythms simultaneously, thereby avoiding any such ‘burnout’. They also provide a means to deal with the brain’s natural mode of function, shifting frequencies and modes of stimulation and using stereo sound techniques to promote brainwave synchronization across the two hemispheres.

And here’s a tip — concentrate on brainwave entrainment CDs or high-quality MP3s rather than regular MP3 or YouTube downloads. The quality and bandwidth limitations on lower quality MP3s and YouTube downloads is enough to often strip the benefits of entrainment instantly.

A modern brainwave program like the Brain Evolution System and its remarkable 3P DEAP  does everything possible to deliver extremely high quality, complex stimulation to your brain. And the results can be — well — mindblowing.

If so, you probably think they all sound the same: wind chimes, ocean noises, voiceovers about sunlit woodlands with light playing through the leaves… In fact, if you’ve heard a CD more than a few times, that spoken word ‘guided meditation’ track is probably getting a bit too familiar.

But the truth is that not all relaxation CDs are made the same. In fact, some of the world’s most powerful relaxation CDs contain no music or spoken word at all. Others may use music, words and other sounds, but in ways completely different from the ones you’re used to — ways that can stay fresh and interesting for years to come.

How does this work? In this article, we’ll look at how the arrival of brain entrainment CDs has changed the game.

The relaxation CDs you see advertised in shops and online catalogs use dolphin noises and guided meditations because most people find them relaxing — most of the time! But what if there was a shortcut to relaxation? What if you could ‘switch on’ a deep meditation brainwave — using a simple technique that always worked?

Brain entrainment CDs enable you to deliberately change the state of your mind. They’re all based on a single principle: that the application of a rhythmic stimulus at a desired frequency will cause your brain to ‘fall into step’. A simple version of this technique was pioneered thirty years ago in systems like Hemi-Sync and Holosync, which used sound playback to elicit the slowed-down brain waves characteristic of theta meditation or delta deep sleep. Today those same basic techniques are within the reach of home experimenters, and PC-based mind entrainment is the basis of all those free brainwave downloads you see on YouTube and elsewhere.

However, there’s a problem with those simple programs — and it’s pretty similar to the one we mentioned earlier with guided meditation. Your brain is very smart, and it gets bored easily. If you present it with an unchanging program of theta-wave beats, it will eventually stop bothering to respond.

The secret of a long-lasting entrainment program is to provide varied stimulation. Modern programs like the Brain Evolution System take full account of the variety of activity in a healthy brain, and they use state-of-the-art techniques like isochronic tones to deliver a corresponding range and depth of stimulus. And they’ll bring it to you using all the resources of a proper stereo sound system — not just the limited highs of a standard PC soundcard.

The most powerful relaxation CDs in the world? These are the ones that will go on working for you, month after month — and we honestly think the Brain Evolution System is the best place to start.