Brainwave Audio Photic Therapy: The Science BehindStop searching endlessly for a relief treatment program for your emotional issues (depression, anxiety, stress, etc.). Rather, take the time to read through this page and the entire website and learn the facts about the effective advanced Audio Photic Brainwaves therapies in our online protocols.
Regardless of whether you choose our online protocols program or not, you will gain valuable information about the release of emotional suffering and obtain an education on how your brain works. With this knowledge, you can make the right choice to put an end to the otherwise endless cycle of emotional suffering.
You need to realize that this will likely be one of the most important decisions you will ever have to make regarding your emotional freedom.
You want to make sure you make your decision after gathering as much information as possible. In this way, your final decision will give you the best chance at regaining the control of your emotions.And the main advantage of these cutting-edge techniques is that they are not invasive nor they do not rely in drugs or medications of any kind, so there are no risk of side effects or post-med complications to deal with.
And the cost! What a bargain! With our online method, you can take the 14 to 21 days teraphy in the comfort and privacy of your home or office, in most cases, with very perceptible results since day one, with further improvements as the therapy flow progresses.
After you finish reading this informational page just go to the menu at the top of the page, choose from the Online Therapies field the protocol with the description of your emotional issue and take the first step to initiate your therapy by using our Online Assessment Form.
Researchers have found that brainwaves not only are representative of mental states, but also that they can be stimulated through the proper entrainment techniques to change a person's mental state, and even help in the succesful treatment a variety of mental disorders. Certain brainwave patterns can be even be used to access extraordinary experiences such as "lucid dreaming" or ultra-realistic visualization.
This is crucial to understand, since by knowing how the brain works when dealing with the outside world as well with its internal locus, we can relieve and even reverse harmful emotional responses.
Understanding the VAK: Conscious, Subconscious, and Unconscious Modalities
Markova found that each person uses:
If you use the visual mode as your conscious representation system, your subconscious mind processes either auditorily or kinesthetically, but not visually. If you use V (stands for visual mode) and A (for auditory mode) for conscious and subconscious processing, your unconscious uses the third modality, K (kinesthetic mode), making your Markova stack VAK. There are six possible combinations: VAK, VKA, AKV, AVK, KVA, and KAV.
How a person uses each modality depends a lot on whether it's their conscious, subconscious, or unconscious representation system. Attending to a particular modality tends to shift people to the corresponding type of processing — conscious, subconscious, or unconscious — and from alertness into trance and viceversa.
Why is this so important? When we hear the word kinesthetic, we tend to think of physical movement. In the case of internal kinesthetic, however, the modality refers to the sense of feelings and emotions. This is why the best brainwave entrainment against depression, anxiety and abnormal stress is achieved by using the photic (visual) stimulus synchronized with audio pulses (auditory).
Ptolemy (a.d. 90 - a.d. 168), a mathematician, geographer and astronomer living in Alexandria, was the first known scientist to recognize and to document the light (photic) stimulation of the brain (brainwave entrainment). While looking through a spinning spoked wheel toward the sun, he noticed that the wheel gave the impression of stop moving when it reached certain speed, pretty much as many would notice today when you look at the fast turning of the wheels of a high-speed vehicle. Ptolomy experienced seeing patterns and colors as well, caused by the flickering sunlight.
Synching the Brain
While working on the design of the pendulum clock in 1656, Dutch scientist Christian Huygens found that if he placed two unsynchronized clocks side by side on a wall, they would slowly synchronize to each other. In fact, the synchronization was so precise not even mechanical intervention could calibrate them more accurately.
A clock is a simple example of a system responding to entrainment, but the same rules apply to more complex systems such as the human brain. Gynecologist know, for example, that a group of women living together, will on time synchronize their menstrual periods.
In 1899, Pierre Marie Félix Janet (1859 - 1945) a French physician, psychiatrist, and philosopher, reported noticing a change in the mental state in some of his patients. They experienced decreasing tension and hysteria as well as increasing relaxation when he exposed them to flickering light created by a rotating strobe-wheel illuminated by a kerosene lantern behind it.
As far as history records it, this is probably the first known clinical application of brainwave entrainment as an highly effective treatment tool.
This discovery further boosted dozens of physiological outcome studies on FFR -the flicker following response- by many well respected scientific researchers (Bartley, 1934, 1937; Durup & Fessard, 1935; Jasper, 1936; Goldman, Segal, & Segalis, 1938; Jung, 1939; Toman, 1941).
However, back then, no one really took in consideration the subjective and behavioral effects of photic stimulation (PS) over the brain, and therefore, over the mind.
Since the discovery of photic driving of the brain by Adrian and Matthews in 1934, much has been discovered about the benefits of brain-wave entrainment (BWE) or audio-photic brainwave entrainment as it is known today.
The Brain's Rythms
Years later, during the beginning of the Cold War, William Kroger, a physician, was investigating why military radar operators were going into trances in front of their radar sets and of course, leaving the ship or plane at great risk to the enemy. He concluded that the rhythmic “blip” of the radar was “pulling” the radar operators into a trance state.
These findings compelled Kroger to team up with Sydney Schneider of the Schneider Instrument Company of Ohio to construct and market the first electronic clinical photic stimulator, called the “Brainwave Synchronizer.” It comprised of an intense xenon strobe light complete with a rotating dial that could be set to the frequencies of the standard four brain wave rhythms.
They found that their device had powerful hypnotic qualities and soon published a study on hypnotic induction (Kroger & Schneider, 1959). They also prompted other studies involving hypnotic induction in surgery and dentistry, and studies of general interest to the hypnosis profession (Sadove, 1963; Margolis, 1966; Lewerenz, 1963).
Discovering the Link Between The Mind & Photic Stimulation
In 1954, Dr. Charles Shagass, in charge of the electrophysiology laboratory at the Allan Memorial Institute and McGill University in Montreal, began investigating psychiatric correlates of EEG responses to photic stimulation, and found a differentiation between anxiety and depression by the photically activated electroencephalogram
To determine whether the EEG response to intermittent photic stimulation was quantitatively different in different emotional states, Shagass and associates studied 134 psychiatric patients and 20 control subjects. The amount of photic driving at flash rates of 10 and 15 per sec. was measured and the 15:10 response ratio determined.
There were significant differences in driving response between the sexes, females showing a greater response at all frequencies, and response ratios were significantly higher in anxiety states than in depressions, with control subjects and paranoid schizophrenics intermediate.
Serial studies in a control subject showed that the driving response was labile (changing) and fluctuated in relation to feeling state. The direction of these fluctuations was as expected from the group differences demonstrated between anxiety and depression.
Those results supported the hypothesis that the photically activated EEG is quantitatively different in different emotional states and that further research along present lines was indicated.
In 1956, W. Gray Walter published the results on thousands of test subjects comparing flicker stimulation with the subjective emotional feelings it produced (Walter, 1956).
The Brain Response to Sound
In 1959, Dr. Giacomo Chatrian observed that auditory entrainment was happening in response to sound clicks at a frequency of 15 per second, and at the beginning of the 60's, brainwave sound entrainment started to become a viable tool rather than merely an interesting phenomen of the brain.
Sound pulses alone have a powerful effect in the mental state of the human person; but combined with music and a light flashing or flickering, the results are even greater.
In 1969, T.H. Budzynski and J.M. Stoyva, published an article regarding an instrument for producing deep muscle relaxation by means of analog information feedback (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2, 231-237), and started to develop protocols through the use of neurofeedback, QEEG, music therapy and a sort of different techniques, including the use of sound binaural beats.
The Building Blocks of Brain Entrainment
You see, when two or more tones of any frequency sound together, the laws of physics make the waves add or substract from each other, thus forming a single wave. When two waveforms are very close together, they result of the sum of them will be binaural o monaural beats, which will be perceived as a pulse or as a beat, which is then used to entrain the brain. This is called the rythmic stimulus.
The interesting thing is that binaural beats, in difference to monaural beats, are produced in the brain rather that in the ear. This technique has its advantages as well as disavantages, being the main advantage that binaural beats only can created by the brain using both hemispheres, right and left, thus causing what is known as "hemispheric synchronization". This, additionally, can create a hypnotic effect or trance.
The downside for this, unfortunately, is that because limitations of the brain's "mixes" the sound signals, resulting ih that binaural beats volume is a 1/10 of a whisper, it is mandatory the use of headphones, since otherwise they would be completely ineffective.
Why Headphones Are More Effective in Certain Protocols
The explanation above is the reason why our complex protocols for depression, anxiety, stress and SAD which depend heavily in dissociative entrainment, are designed to be used with headphones.
We rely in the use of pulses in our protocols, which can be embedded in a repetitive musical or ambience background sound, and it is by far the most effective of the tone types since pulses use one single tone that goes abruptly up and down in volume, creating a powerful neuronal response, and it is the best choice for entrainment with the use of tones.
But when the magic really starts is when we use the track with the pulses as an audiostrobe -similar to those used in discos but quite more sophisticated- to trigger the photic stimulus by the flashing of your screen computer, which be perceived and followed by your brain, along with the audio track. That's why is important to run your sessions in a half-light environment.
Human hearing is not a purely mechanical phenomenon of wave propagation, but is also a sensory and perceptual event. When humans hear something, that something arrives at the ear as a mechanical sound wave traveling through the air, but once within the ear it is transformed into neural action potentials. These nerve pulses then travel to the brain where they are perceived. Hence, in the field of brainwave entrainment it is mandatory to take into account not just the mechanics of the environment, but also the fact that both the ear and the brain are involved in a person’s listening experience.
The human brain has the inherent ability to locate sounds in space. This ability is described by the science of psychoacoustics, and specifically by the set of formulas called "Head Related Transfer Functions" (HRTF).
When you wear a pair of headphones (stereo headphones), if you turn off the left channel only the right ear hears the right channel. The left ear hears nothing. This never happens in nature.
In the sound tracks used in brainwave entrainment therapies for depression, anxiety or SAD brainwave, each headphone is actually sending slightly different frequencies to each ear. This generates inside your mind the essential frequency required to alter and entrain your brainwaves.
The left channel entrains the right hemisphere of your brain while the right channel takes care of the left hemisphere.
If you listen to these sound tracks without headphones, both ears will hear the mixed channel frequencies and therefore the binaural beat will not be generated.
Scientific studies are solid statements on the effectiveness of audiophotic brainwave entrainment (combining sound pulses embedded in sonic and music psychoacoustic backgrounds along with photic stimulation) in promoting relaxation, hypnotic induction and restoring somatic homeostasis, plus improving cognition and hormonal release, and for treating ADD, PMS, SAD, migraine headache, chronic pain, emotional stress, anxiety, depression and even used for hypertension and athetlic improvement.
A constant, repetitive stimuli of sufficient strength is needed to excite the thalamus, thus achieving an effective brainwave entrainment. The thalamus then passes the stimuli onto the sensory-motor strip, the cortex in general and associated processing areas such as the visual and auditory cortexes.
Hemispheric synchronization (also called hemispheric simmetry, coherence and cerbral syncronization) is the expected and natural result of nearly all types of brainwave entrainment.
Back in 1980, Dr. Inouye and associates at the Department of Neuropsychiatry in Osaka University Medical School in Japan, found that the photic stimulation in the alpha range produced hemispheric synchronization in the brain. Later, Dr. Norman Shealy confirmed the effect in more than 5,000 patients.
In 1985, Dr. Brockopp studied audio photic brain stimulation, focusing in the hemispheric syncrhonization while EEG monitoring; then, he stated: "By inducing hemispheric coherence, audio-visual stimuli can contribute to improved intellectual functioning of the brain".
People who are interested in neuroscience work in a wide range of areas, from clinical psychology to music and computer science. Numerous educational institutions around the world offer training in neuroscience, often with a specific slant or focus. Many of these institutions also carry out cutting-edge research which probes into the workings of the human mind in an attempt to know more about people and the ways in which they interact with the world.
And of course, there are innovative and highly successful proposals like the audio-photic brainwave entrainment protocols in our website, where several advanced and powerful tools, scientific yet intuitive, are integrated with one single objective in mind: Enable you to obtain your emotional freedom.