Theme Park at its Darkest

I made an amazing discovery recently; the brain can (and needs to) be tuned, just like a car engine. Meditation is the practise of tuning your brain. Most people tend to be dominant in one hemisphere or the other, given that separate hemispheres are related to different tasks. If you are either left brain or right brain dominant, this can generate feelings of isolation and anxiety.  

There are 4 levels of brain activity; alpha, beta, theta and delta. Most of the time, your brain operates at the beta range. This is the range of waking consciousness and is associated with concentration, arousal, alertness and cognition. Interestingly, at higher levels, it is also associated with anxiety.

As a person becomes more relaxed, they enter the alpha range. This is associated with the state between sleep and waking, and results in a more relaxed, but focused state. Slower again are theta waves. This is the state associated with sleeping, but is also the state in which you have increased creativity, super learning, integrative experiences and increased memory. The slowest brain wave pattern is delta. People are generally asleep when they reach it, but it is possible to remain conscious in a deeply relaxed, trance-like state. Delta is the state in which our bodies release large amounts of healing growth hormone.

Meditation slows the brain wave patterns from beta, in practised meditators, all the way down to delta. Once this slowing occurs, a balance occurs between the hemispheres. One ceases to be dominant over the other and the brain becomes integrated in its activity. This creates a feeling of peace and serenity, apparently.  

Amazing stuff, eh?

But wait – there’s more!

In 1977, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. He did a whole lot of research on stuff I can’t understand, but among it, discovered what he called ‘open systems’. An open system is essentially something which can exchange input with its environment in order to re-organise itself. This is the foundation of evolution; getting fitter is a good example. By overloading themselves with input, runners force their bodies to re-organise at a higher level to cope with the increased stress. The human brain is the same. Meditation causes the brain waves to increase in amplitude. These fluctuations are greater than the brain can handle and as a result, it has to change its organisation to a higher, more complex level of function in order to cope. The byproduct of this is an increase in mental function and capacity, as well as an increase in psychological and emotional health.

The reason I’m banging on about all this is that I recently made a remarkable discovery. My sister has been using a program called Holosync, which claims to be a program of sound recordings that do the meditation for you. Essentially, a scientist by the name of Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered a thing called a binaural beat in 1839. What this means is that if you play one frequency in one ear and a different frequency in the other, the brain will create a third inside your head which is the difference between the two. These frequencies can be used to entrain brainwaves, which is essentially what meditation achieves. Holosync is a program of musical recordings with binaural beats embedded in them.

I began listening to Holosync some months ago and found the results amazing. It immediately reduced my anxiety, as well as reducing the amount of sleep I needed each night. I did some internet research and discovered that the Holosync system was quite old-fashioned, expensive and slow to progress; achieving delta states of meditation would take some years and cost a lot of cash. The Meditation Program was a lot cheaper and when I purchased it, I received the whole course which would take me a total of eight weeks. I am six weeks into it now and other things also seem to have improved, like my short-term memory and the speed of my recovery from exercise. I also used to wake up feeling groggy in the morning, whereas now I feel one-hundred per cent alert and aware as soon as I open my eyes.     

The Meditation Program has crap supplementary material; almost everything I have recounted here has come from the introductory materials manual for Holosync. It also says that meditation will hold off the degenerative neurological effects of ageing, but we’ll have to wait and see on that one. So far though, I think binaural beats for meditation will be the next great discovery, probably since I took up regular exercise of committed myself to writing every day.   

This entry was posted on August 20, 2011 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Fitness with tags Binaural beats, Holosync, The Meditation Program. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.