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June 14, 2004
Brain Hacking for Dummies
Back in the mid-80's I got hip to the latest craze at the time with Brain Machines, later popularized a bit by Michael Hutchison. A lot of these came out of the research of the late 50's and 60's with biofeedback, pioneered by people like Elmer and Alyce Green at the Menninger Foundation's Psychophysiology Laboratory. They hooked up electrodes to the bodies and brains of Yogi's from India, confirming their prodound powers of neurophysiological control (Leary's circuit 5). Brain machines differ from traditional biofeedback, in that they act directly on our physiology either through sending subtle electrical currents into the brain, or through light and sound machines. Not much came out of this field, and it seemed to disappear, but the basic science behind it is sound. The key to these devices is the process called entrainment. The idea is that with regular application of certain frequencies of sound and/or light you can train your brain to go voluntarily into different states. Here is a quick summary:
| State | Frequency range | State of mind |
|---|---|---|
| Delta | 0.5Hz - 4Hz | Deep sleep |
| Theta | 4Hz - 8Hz | Drowsiness (also first stage of sleep) |
| Alpha | 8Hz - 14Hz | Relaxed but alert |
| Beta | 14Hz - 30Hz | Highly alert and focused |
Well, it turns out this stuff has gone a bit open source. There are several programs available for download that generate these binarual beats to help you get into these different states. The one I just discovered and downloaded last night is Brainwave Generator
Not only can you download the program, but for a one-time fee of $40 you can download hundreds of open-sourced presets with names like Power Sleep, Daydreamer, LSD Stimulation, and Sexual Stimulation. I can't attest to the effectiveness of any of these, but in my experience the power is more subtle than most any psychoactive drug, so I don't see any danger to playing around with the different presets.
I haven't paid the $40 yet, so I'm still trying out the default presets. Some pople are claiming only a couple of minutes of listening to Too Much Coffee has the same effect of drinking a couple of cups.
There is even software available to record these generated sounds and turn them into .wav or .mp3 files so you can listen to them on your iPod. I first heard about all this in an article called, Hack Your Brain with an iPod
Posted by paul at June 14, 2004 12:41 AM | TrackBackHi,
I will give a test to this program, but I am slightly skeptical of the whole brain wave thing.First, I remember an interesting report (I think it was in Marylin Ferguson "revolution of brain") that tantric yogis, working a lot with complex visualizations of mandalas ans yantras, had their waves giving contradictory results: alpha waves decreased during meditation, and completely disappeared during samadhi.I suspect this result would be the same with people working inside western magical tradition, which implies a lot of precise visualisations, especially if they do their rituals "in astral" i.e. in imagination. Perhaps it is the "too much coffee" effect? And what to think about people using "excitatory gnosis" such as dancing shamans? also, I remember reading in Zen books that sleepiness was the main danger for people meditating...and alpha waves are the waves preceding sleepiness. Perhaps the researchers scanned the wrong yogis? This does not mean that I think that there is no relationship between the brain and the mind (I remain a hard core materialist), but that the relationship between ecstasy levels and brain states is more complex than expected; simply perhaps more research is requested (psychedelic people, don't forget that Robert Linsenn used these results to dismiss the value of LSD induced experice: alpha waves were too irregular!). Perhaps IRM ?(but how to put a dancing shaman under IRM?)