Entrainment

The brain is essentially an organ that receives information from outside (sensory inputs) and inside (memories, emotional responses, associations with previous experience), integrates all this and responds to it with motor outputs (speaking, acting) and changes in its own body’s internal environment. This is a constant cycle with outputs creating inputs (how did the teacher respond to what I said) which create more outputs, which result in more inputs ad infinitum.

Holosync and other systems of binaural beats essentially provide the brain with a fairly radical change in its environmental inputs. You close your eyes, block out sounds other than the beats, sit in a comfortable place, etc. The only inputs to the brain are (mostly) beats which are produced at a particular or various frequencies. The evidence is that, in this relatively artificial state, the brain will begin to move toward the frequency of the beats. If you produce beats at 10 Hz, the brain will begin to produce more 10 Hz. That energy change can result in a change in mental/experiential state. I guess one could accurately use the term “bombards”, since that is what binaural beat training in a closed environment does. But what that has to do with neuroconnections is beyond me. If you play fast dance music very loud in a situation where you have nothing to do but listen to it, that may change your energy level and dance, but connections are formed by experience, by learning. The two are not connected.

Moreover, it is less clear whether–once the brain has this driving effect removed and returns to the more complex and variable situation in which it usually processes (eyes open, ears hearing multiple inputs, movements, physical touch sensations, scents, desired outcomes, responses coming from other independent sources (the teacher is angry today or is in love today)–it will sustain the results of the beats. When the music goes away and you leave the studio and go back to work, do you maintain the high level of energy or fall back into the habitual energy patterns your brain produces to THAT environment?

Neurofeedback works on a very different principle. Neurofeedback is an accurate and focused mirror that reflects the brain to itself through its sensory inputs. It can reflect via visual, auditory and other sensory modes. It can also focus on very specific elements of the brain’s performance, like a football coach might focus on the play of the interior linemen on running plays or a conductor focusing on the clarinets in a certain passage of a certain piece. The goal is, by providing accurate and immediate feedback to the brain about its habitual patterns, to coach it into shifting those and making the new patterns a new habit.

The difference is that, with neurofeedback, the brain makes the changes itself, actually adjusting its own stable patterns, where AVE (audio-visual entrainment) training pushes it into a new place. The former is likely, if the results are good, to become stable fairly quickly. The latter, like taking a drug, can give the client/brain an experience of being in a different place, but it doesn’t teach it how to get there on its own.

There is some evidence that AVE can boost the effectiveness of neurofeedback training. There are also folks who use just the AVE devices alone, without NF. There are some good options available in the Photosonix line and also the David line. There are also lots of relatively inexpensive tapes and CDs that use binaural beats to help “nudge” the brain toward new frequencies.

Canadian neurofeedback practitioner Paul Swingle has audio downloads that are binaural beats embedded in pink noise. If you still happen to use BioExplorer, you can create your own binaural beats in BioExplorer and set the protocol to run them constantly. You can also turn them on and off based on the client’s performance vis-a-vis thresholds or change the beat frequency depending on peak frequency of the EEG. There are also binaural beat apps that one can download.