Meditation has been used as a technique to calm you down, empty your mind and experience relaxation at levels not possible when under stress or in Beta. It’s proven to be highly beneficial state for your mind to be in. And with cutting edge science, we can now stimulate our brain waves with Audio Visual Entrainment devices, achieving states of mind that monks need decades of practice to achieve. These machines used to cost a fortune and were size of a bedroom. Today, they are truly portable and never easier to use.

Our brain functions by producing electrical pulses, which can be tracked as electrical waves, also known as brainwaves. Scientists use electroencephalographic machine (EEG) to measure electrical brain activity. At any given moment, many frequencies can be detected, but there’s always a predominant frequency. Scientists have found a link between the different brainwave frequencies and the different mind states. The dominant brainwave frequency determines our state of mind in each moment.

“Entrainment is the process whereby two interacting oscillating systems, which have different periods when they function independently, assume the same period. … The system with the greater frequency slows down, and the other accelerates.”( “Entrainment (physics).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2 Jan 2008, 03:26 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 11 Apr 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Entrainment_(physics)&oldid=181511388) In 1666, Christian Huygens, a prominent physicist, noticed that two pendulum clocks repeatedly synchronized their swinging motions when placed in proximity of each other and coined the term entrainment.

Just like pendulum clocks, mentioned above, brain waves can synchronize to the frequency of rhythmic sensory stimulation, such as pulses of sound or light through a neural process called Brainwave Entrainment. Brainwave Entrainment is a naturally occurring phenomenon where the human brain has a tendency to change its dominant EEG frequency towards the frequency of the dominant external stimuli applied to it. The process of reproducing this entrainment effect using audio technology was discovered in the 19th century, and was scientifically defined and tested in the 20th century. In a similar fashion, the brainwave entrainment phenomena can be used to synchronize your brain to specific frequencies.

The most talked about (but by far not the most effective) brainwave entrainment technique is Binaural Beats. Binaural beats deserve special mention because of the intriguing manner in which the desired frequencies are generated. A binaural beat is generated from two tones. Each tone is of a slightly different pitch. One tone is presented to the left ear, and the other to the right. The two tones combine into a single tone formed by your brain’s natural “mixing” mechanism. The resulting subsonic (not audible) tone created by the brain itself may affect the state of mind. Even though binaural beats are probably the most well-known stimulus used for entrainment, it is not the most effective one due to the fact that the brain-generated tone is of too low intensity (3db or 1/10th the volume of a whisper). Moreover, all binaural beats require the use of headphones and are not capable of entraining the brain hemispheres individually (because they require both ears). We use Binaural Beats only when the whole brain entrainment is required.