Headphone-less Entrainment Overview

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What are Brainwaves?

Your brain is made up of billions of brain cells called neurons, which use electricity to communicate with each other. The combination of millions of neurons sending signals at once produces an enormous amount of electrical activity in the brain, which can be detected using sensitive medical equipment (such as an EEG), measuring electricity levels over areas of the scalp.

The combination of electrical activity of the brain is commonly called a BrainWave pattern, because of its cyclic, "wave-like" nature.

Below is one of the first recordings of brain activity.

Here is a more modern EEG recording:

The Significance of Brainwaves

With the discovery of brainwaves came the discovery that electrical activity in the brain will change depending on what the person is doing. For instance, the brainwaves of a sleeping person are vastly different than the brainwaves of someone wide awake. Over the years, more sensitive equipment has brought us closer to figuring out exactly what brainwaves represent and with that, what they mean about a person's health and state of mind.

You can tell a lot about a person simply by observing their brainwave patterns. For example, anxious people tend to produce an overabundance of high Beta waves while people with ADD/ADHD tend to produce an overabundance of slower Alpha/Theta brainwaves.

Researchers have found that not only are brainwaves representative of of mental state, but they can be stimulated to change a person's mental state, and even help treat a variety of mental disorders. Certain Brainwave patterns can be even used to access exotic or extraordinary experiences such as "lucid dreaming" or ultra-realistic visualization.

Jump to topic: Headphone-Free Entrainment

Stimulating brainwaves with sound

Transparent products stimulate brainwaves through a complex neural process known as Brainwave Entrainment (or BWE).

What is Brainwave Entrainment?

Brainwave Entrainment refers to the brain's electrical response to rhythmic sensory stimulation, such as pulses of sound or light.

When the brain is given a stimulus, through the ears, eyes or other senses, it emits an electrical charge in response, called a Cortical Evoked Response (shown below). These electrical responses travel throughout the brain to become what you "see and hear".

When the brain is presented with a rhythmic stimulus, such as a drum beat for example, the rhythm is reproduced in the brain in the form of these electrical impulses. If the rhythm becomes fast and consistent enough, it can start to resemble the natural internal rhythms of the brain, called brainwaves. When this happens, the brain responds by synchronizing its own electric cycles to the same rhythm. This is commonly called the Frequency Following Response (or FFR):

FFR can be useful because brainwaves are very much related to mental state. For example, a 4 Hz brainwave is associated with sleep, so a 4 Hz sound pattern would help reproduce the sleep state in your brain. The same concept can be applied to nearly all mental states, including concentration, creativity and many others. It can even act as a gateway to exotic or extraordinary experiences, such as deep meditation or "lucid dreaming" type states.

If you listen closely, you will hear small, rapid pulses of sound. As the session progresses, the frequency rate of these pulses is changed slowly, thereby changing your brainwave patterns and guiding your mind to various useful mental states.

Brainwave Entrainment has over 70 years of solid research behind it. See a Short History Of Brainwave Entrainment.

Our unique approach to brainwave entrainment

Fig. 1

EEG Recording. Spectrogram View (4-30), ~1.2 minute time lapse, middle of an Alpha-focused session

Transparent products use all known forms of Audio/Visual Entrainment, from older method such as Binaural beats, to more modern methods such as Isochronic Tones, Modulation and Music filtering.

How can Transparent products be used without headphones?

Many of the entrainment techniques used are revolutionary in that they do not require headphones or even stereo speakers. Veterans of brainwave entrainment may find this strange, since headphones are such a traditional part of the brainwave entrainment experience. The reality of the matter is, however, that headphones have never been required for use with anything except Binaural beats, which present a slightly different tone to each ear. Monaural beats can be used very effectively without headphones, for example. So can pulses, clicks and light stimulation. In fact, many ancient cultures used Drums to enter deeply relaxed 'trances' during Shamanic rituals. Though they may not have called it brainwave entrainment, the rhythmic stimulus of the drum could have been the cause of the "trance-like" states reported during such rituals.

Any repeating stimulus can entrain the brain. Pulses of sound, flickers of light, physical vibrations or even electricity (CES machines). Transparent products use many techniques that don't rely on left-right speaker assignments. In doing so, headphones become unnecessary. Neurons in the brain will fire a response to any stimulus, whether you have headphones on or not. What we have done is perfect this process through extensive testing and optimization. The results have nothing short of amazing. Our products present an entirely new approach to brainwave entrainment, and open the doors to a myriad of new ways in which it can be used.

How effective is Headphone-Free entrainment compared to Binaural Beats?

First, keep in mind that all of our products can generate binaural beats - they can just do a lot more than that as well!

That said, the advanced entrainment techniques used can be up to 2-3 times more effective than binaural beats. Dr. Gerald Oster and others concluded that binaural beats produce very small cortical evoked potentials, much smaller than that of monaural beats, pulses or other forms of stimulation. Studies done by experts such as David Siever and Arturo Manns have shown the effectiveness of auditory entrainment methods that do not rely on binaural stereo separation.

What about Hemispheric Synchronization?

Hemispheric Synchronization is a byproduct of nearly all types of brainwave entrainment.

In 1980, Tsuyoshi Inouye and associates at the Department of Neuropsychiatry at Osaka University Medical School in Japan found that photic stimulation in the alpha range produced hemispheric synchronization. Dr. Norman Shealy later confirmed the effect, finding that photic stimulation produced "cerebral synchronization" in more than 5,000 patients. In 1984, Dr. Brockopp analyzed audio-visual brain stimulation and in particular hemispheric synchronization during EEG monitoring. He said "By inducing hemispheric coherence the machine can contribute to improved intellectual functioning of the brain."

There is similar evidence that CES (electrical stimulation), motion systems, acoustic field generators and even floatation tanks can increase EEG symmetry.

Further Reading

Bermer, F. "Cerebral and cerebellar potentials." Physiological Review, 38, 357-388.

Chatrian, G., Petersen, M., Lazarte, J. "Responses to Clicks from the Human Brain: Some Depth Electrographic Observation." Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 12: 479-487

Gontgovsky, S., Montgomery, D. "The Physiological Response to "Beta Sweep" Entrainment." Proceedings AAPB Thirteenth Anniversary Annual Meeting, 62-65.

Oster, G. "Auditory beats in the brain." Scientific American, 229, 94-102.

Shealy, N., Cady, R., Cox, R., Liss, S., Clossen, W., Veehoff, D. "A Comparison of Depths of Relaxation Produced by Various Techniques and Neurotransmitters by Brainwave Entrainment" - Shealy and Forest Institute of Professional Psychology A study done for Comprehensive Health Care, Unpublished.

Siever, D. "Isochronic Tones and Brainwave Entrainment." Unpublished, but available through his book the Rediscovery of Audio-Visual Entrainment.

Walter, V. J. & Walter, W. G. "The central effects of rhythmic sensory stimulation." Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1, 57-86.

See References for more.

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