You must have heard of binaural beat frequencies. Neurophysiologists have used this for cognitive and neurological research. Ordinary people can also benefit from this discovery by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove way back 1839 as you’ll see in a little while.
A little about sound waves.
A sound wave is produced when an object moves back and forth for more than 20 times per second (the lower threshold of human hearing). Imagine when you fan yourself in a hot summer day, the number of times the fan completes a cycle – from the starting point all the way in one direction then going back in the reverse direction and back to the starting point – in one second is called the frequency or cycles per second. We cannot hear sound waves from the fan because we cannot attain the lowest frequency that our ears can hear.
The upper threshold in which our ears can hear is 20,000 cycles per second. We may not be able to hear that frequency because as the frequency nears the extremes, our sensitivity for those frequencies also diminishes.
Brain Waves
Different brain activities produce different brain waves. Depending on our activity; walking, reading, having a conversation, dreaming, etc., our brains produces different brain waves in the range between less than one cycle per second up to 40 cycles per second.
When you are in deep sleep or delta sleep, your brain waves produces .5 cycles per second up to 4 cycles per second. This is the stage where most body repair or healing takes place.
The theta state, 4 cycles per second to 8 cycles per second occurs just before we go to deep sleep. This is the state where most meditation practitioners try to lengthen because of the many benefits that this state can bring to our learning abilities, cognitive abilities and so on.
The state before theta is alpha where you are in a relaxed and a little alert state. Our brain produces 8 to 14 cycles per second of brain waves.
The alert state or fully awake state is the beta. 14 to 30 cycles per second are produced by the brain waves in this state.
Binaural Beats
When our ears hear different frequencies from our ears, our brain resonates to the difference in frequency and keeps in step in that frequency. If for you have a headphone and the right channel produces a tone of 200 cycles per second and the left channel produces 197 cycles per second, our brain resonates to the difference – 3 cycles per second. This means that if your brain was in a certain brain wave pattern say the theta state, your brain will shift to the delta state if it would resonate to a 3 cycles per second binaural beat. This is called brain entrainment of frequency following response.
Usefulness
Several people have designed binaural beats to help people achieve a desired state. For example, if you need healing; physically or emotionally; a binaural tone designed to bring you to the delta state is produced.
Some binaural beats are designed to give you a restful sleep. It takes you from the beta state, alpha, theta and then to delta. A comfortable mattress bed plus binaural beats can give you better and restful sleep which can relieve us of stress, anxiety or depression which we all need to rejuvenate us for another day of activities.
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