Month: November 2010

Worry is a useful signal. It’s like a telephone call from your unconscious mind. So it’s good, of course, to notice the call and answer it. That allows you to make the proper response. I mean, you don’t want the phone to keep ringing. Once is enough. So just make the appropriate response immediately and then the ringing will stop.

During 1999, a very bizarre fear and worry filled the newspapers every day. It was called the Y2K problem. The year 2,000 sounds a little ominous, of course, and people may have been looking for it to have a special meaning or even to mark the end of an era in a really obvious way. Or perhaps, Y2K was a serious fear for people.

It’s interesting to consider how this problem began before we look at its more interesting consequences today. Back when computers were first invented and developed, computer memory was really really expensive. And so programmers would try to save bits and bytes wherever possible. So when a programmer was entering the format for the date, he decided to use “55″ instead of the longer “1955.” By doing this, he could use half as much memory to encode the data. Saving two bytes may not sound like much, but when a program used a date in hundreds or thousands of places, this could add up to big memory savings.

Of course, the programmer didn’t imagine that the computer and his program would still be in use in the year 2000. Back then, people imagined the year 2000 as having flying cars and amazing anti-gravity devices. Although the world has progressed enormously, it is amazing how some things can still stay around much much longer than people imagine. And that’s what happened with the code that the programmer wrote. Just like a person can keep snippets of memory from long long ago, in the same way, snippets of code can stay around in newer systems long after could be imagined.

And of course, those snippets continue to play an important role in the system. So in the year 1999, people began to worry very much about the effect of all these old snippets that remained in the system. Because what would happen when the two digit representation of the year 1999 changed into the two digit representation of the year 2000? What the programmers had never imagined – 99 would change into 00 right at the first stroke of the clock in the year two thousand.

Let’s think about this to show what it could mean. Supposing a bank is calculating your interest according to how many years you have had it on deposit. For example, let’s say that you deposited $100,000 in the bank at a simple interest rate of 4% per year.

Interest = (99-60) * 100,000 * 4% = $156,000

So far, so good. But let’s look at the calculation when “99″ changes into “00.”

Interest = (00 – 60) * 100,000 * 4% = -$240,000

Yes, that’s right, instead of being ahead by about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, your account is suddenly going to be massively depleted and you’ll be in the red by two hundred and fourty thousand dollars. That’s an overall loss of almost four hundred thousand dollars. For any investor, that is going to rate as a pretty bad one-second loss.

So it’s clear how financial institutes were worried by Y2K. But everyone else started getting worried, too. A lot of the old American military systems were also using very old snippets of code. What would happen if a nuclear missile computer got the date wrong. If the distance of a potential incoming missile were to suddenly become a minus number, would that mean that an attack had already occured and automatic retaliation was required?

Y2K was the worry of the decade and it showed. People started stocking up on food. They bought guns and gas masks. They expected World War Three, an earthquake, a famine, and a tornado to all hit simultaneously.

All the computer experts got paid huge sums of money that year to sift through these old snippets and to find any potential problems. People even worried that programmers might introduce new problems as they tried to Y2K-proof old code that was difficult to understand.

And at midnight 1999, many many people were very scared and very worried. What happened?

In a word – nothing.

Worry is a useful signal – a way of helping us to check that we have done things right and that we are prepared. But most of the time, nothing happens. The horrors that we can dream up are generally far worse than reality. So the next time worry comes to you –  remember that it is like a telephone call to your unconcious mind. Go ahead. Answer the call. Check that things are ok. Make the appropriate response and then move on to a new exciting era.

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

I looked at the moon through the tall buildings of the city. And the moon looked back at me, not a full moon – just a crescent – and the beauty of that moon in the center of the city lifted my spirits for a few moments before the reality of the ugly buildings returned to my mind.

Yes, moon, I can see you. You’re a beautiful thing in the middle of all this barren concrete, but you are so away from it all, and I am stuck right in the middle of it.

And the moon looked back at me and spoke gently.

The difference between you and me is indeed one of perception, but perhaps not one of distance because I am just as far from you as you are from me. And perhaps I see the ugliness of the city as much as you because I can see it as it spreads its cold concrete upon the earth.

Rather than distance, we differ in another way; you see only the bright side of me – the face that I show to the world illuminated by the sun and full of beauty. Yet I know and accept that a full half of me is hidden in darkness from you. I accept that dark half of me because it is part of who I am.

You, too, have a dark half and you try to learn more, to see further, so that you can push the darkness away from yourself. But just like me, the darkness is a part of who you are. You can adventure in the darkness and try to extend your light, but as you extend your light you will find that you also expand your darkness. As knowledge and understanding grows, so its shadow grows alongside.

I still did not understand and asked the moon “And should I then simply live in the darkness for it shall always be part of me?” The moon replied:

As you grow and learn, the things that you do not know and understand will grow alongside. But the world cannot see your darkness anymore than it can see mine. Although your dark side is an invitation to learn more and to expand your wisdom, it is your growing light that shines. You shall always be half in darkness, but you shall truly be a greater light for the world.

A passerby saw me gazing and talking to the moon and muttered “another beautiful moon and beautiful lunatic.”

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

A few nights ago, I had a dream about a mirror. Very strange vivid dream in which I was looking for a mirror. And then the next day, as so often seems to happen these days, something related to my dream took place – I met a friend who was carrying six small mirrors. They were beautifully made in a hexagonal form. I told him about my dream and he immediately gave me one of the mirrors. He had just had them made, and he figured that one of them was meant to be for me.

Mirrors are amazing things. They remind people what they look like, and in this case the mirror also reminded me of a story – an old Irish story about a monk called Kevin who set up a monastery called Glendalough in the remote hills of Wicklow. Kevin, or Saint Kevin, as he is known today was a very pious man who believed that the first step in loving God was to love yourself. He didn’t mean for people to be arrogant in any way. He simply meant that you should respect and love yourself, accept yourself as a wonderful creation of God’s love. Once you are able to love yourself, then you can choose to show your love for others through devotion, and finally you can begin to truly love God.

The monastery of Glendalough is in a beautiful setting, surrounded by woods inhabited by the native red squirrels and the bluebells that dance among the trees. Kevin originally went there as a hermit to live alone and to worship God, but slowly stories of his piety attracted many monks and the monastery grew and grew until it became the structure that lies in ruins today, with the round tower acting as a beacon for more pilgrims and travellers in the Wicklow hills.

One of these monks who caused problems was a man called Tomas. Tomas believed himself to be a pious man, but often when night came, he would creep out of the monastery and head for the local tavern where he would drink during the night and engage in rather un-monklike activities.

It wasn’t that Tomas really planned to go out and do these crazy things. It was just that sometimes he forgot himself and slipped out, thinking that it was just this one time and that no harm could possibly come of it. And so he would go out and do things that aren’t really suitable for a person who loves himself or herself.

When the man returned to the monastery, bloated and tired, he would always have to sleep down by the lake because Kevin always locked the monastery at night to ensure that everything was safe and the integrity of the monastery would not be threatened in any way. And when the man awoke by the lake in the bright light of morning, he would realize that he had done it again and be disgusted at what he had done, feel very guilty and head back to the monastery. Sometimes, he even thought of just quitting the monastery because he thought that he couldn’t live up to the goals, but eventually he would always go back – knowing that he might fail again.

Now, Kevin knew all about Tomas’ antics, even though he pretended that he knew nothing at all. Because whatever we do, people always know about them somehow. And there are no real secrets in a monastery. Each part of the monastery eventually is influenced by every other part.

So one morning, Kevin went down to the lake and saw Tomas sleeping there, tossing and turning with guilt in his dreams in the midst of all that fabulous scenery. For Glendalough is a truly beautiful place where even today people take long walks in the mountains and woods and walk from the higher lake to the monastery at the lower lake. Kevin hid himself carefully in a tree where Tomas would be able to hear his voice but wouldn’t be able to see him, and he called out to Tomas who was still sleeping. Kevin spoke in a beautiful soft voice like an angel.

“Tomas, why are you here?”
Tomas heard the strange voice of the angel calling and startled up, thinking he was having a strange dream.
“I must return to the monastery,” he said to himself aloud. “Oh my God, I have done it again. I hate myelf for what I have done.”
But then the angel’s voice came again, “But Tomas, if you return to the monastery without learning to love yourself, you will do this same thing again and again.”
Tomas looked around again to try to see who was calling and realized without a doubt that he was in the presence of an angel.
“So what should I do? Should I leave this monastery?,” he cried, truly upset because he really did want to achieve his goal of being close to God.
The angel said, “If you really want to be close to God, you know that you must do as Kevin has said and learn to love yourself.”
“So what should I do?,” asked Tomas. “I really do want to achieve what I set out to do.”
Then the angel said, “Go to the lake and look at the place where you see yourself in the water.”
For the lower lake of Glendalough is truly a beautiful place, one of those mysterious waters where you the surface of the lake is almost like a mirror in the still cold mornings of the Wicklow hills.
The angel continued, “Go to the lake and gaze upon your own face in the reflection of the mirror of the lake. See and know yourself. Look at yourself and say ‘I accept and love this person.’ And each morning at this hour, return to the lake and once again gaze upon your reflection in the mirror of the lake and learn to love yourself so that you can love others and learn to love God.”

And the monk, Tomas, did just as the angel had said, and he gazed upon his own image in the lake and new understandings came to him. He began to understand and respect the person that he truly was in new ways. And each day as he returned to look upon his face in the mirror of the lake, he began to change his way, to develop a true love and respect for himself, and the more he truly respected and loved himself, the more he was able to devote himself to his true purpose and respond to his true calling.

And as the years went by, Tomas became the abbot of the monastery of Glendalough and was known far and wide for his resourceful wisdom and lore, but above all for his love. And when he was asked for advice by the novice monks, he always replied, look upon yourself every morning in the mirror of the lake and learn to love the face that you see. For when you look upon your face, you can see the greatness of God himself.

***

And when I told this story to the friend who gave me the gift of the hexagonal mirror, he laughed and said “perhaps you will remember this story when you see this mirror and remember that you have many more sides than the six sides of the hexagon.”

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

The most powerful tool in the world is the human brain, but most people don’t know how to use this amazing tool effectively. NLP is like the user’s manual for the brain. It allows us to use our brains in the most useful ways to achieve powerful outcomes in our personal and professional lives.

Fundamentally, NLP is the modelling of excellence. When you look around, you can see some people who really excel at what they are doing. Whether it is business, education, sport, social interaction, public speaking, or any other realm of life, NLP allows us to model these successful people to find out how they are doing what they are doing so that we can do it ourselves or teach it to other people. NLP is all about identifying and adopting the difference that makes the difference.

NLP even allows a person to model himself or herself. For example, you can remember a situation where you achieved success. NLP will show you how to enter back into that state in order to achieve the goals that you really want in your life. By understanding how your mind works, you can change it so that is always working for you and improving your life and the lives of those around you.

As well as being a way to model excellence in any field, NLP can also be understood as the underlying attitude of curiousity and the trail of useful techniques that result from this modeling.

If we look at the word more closely, NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. This name contains three important words that are useful for describing human experience: neurology, language, and programming. The neurological system regulates how our bodies function. Language determines how we interface and communicate with other people. Our programming determines the kinds of models of the world we create. So NLP describes the  interaction between mind (neuro) and language (linguistic) and how this interaction affects our body and behavior (programming).

One of the co-founders of NLP, Richard Bandler, coined this definition for the Oxford English Dictionary.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a model of interpersonal communication chiefly concerned with the relationship between successful patterns of behaviour and the subjective experiences (esp. patterns of thought) underlying them.

… and a system of alternative therapy based on this which seeks to educate people in self-awareness and effective communication, and to change their patterns of mental and emotional behaviour.

The other co-founder of NLP focuses much more on the modelling aspect of this technology:

There are people who are recognized as being particuraly adept in their performance. NLP is the bridge between being jealous of these people and admiring them… it gives a third way … a set of strategies to unconsciously assimilate precisely the differences that make the difference between this genius and an average performer…. It is an accelerated learning strategy, a mapping of tacit to explicit knowledge … a program that allows you to explore one extreme of human behaviour – namely excellence.

(Transcribed from YouTube video of John Grinder).

In essence, all of NLP is founded on two fundamental presuppositions:

1. The Map is Not the Territory.
As human beings, we can never know reality. We can only know our perceptions of reality. We experience and respond to the world around us based on our ‘neuro-linguistic’ maps of reality – not reality itself.

2. Life and ‘Mind’ are Systemic Processes.
The processes that take place within a human being and between human beings and their environment are systemic. Our bodies, our societies, and our universe form an ecology of systems and all of these systems interact  and mutually influence each other. When we want to change one part of our life, it is important to consider the ecology – what effect will it have on other parts of our life or on the people and world around us?

In the belief system of NLP it is not possible for human beings to know objective reality. There is no one ‘right’ or ‘correct’ map of the world. The people who are most effective in this world are the ones who have a map of the world that allows them to perceive the greatest number of available choices and perspectives. NLP is a way of enriching the choices that you have and perceive. One of the co-developers of NLP, Robert Dilts, says: “Excellence comes from having many choices. Wisdom comes from having multiple perspectives.”

On this website, you can find details of NLP coaching for personal or professional life. You can also find out how to train in NLP so that you can incorporate these valuable skills and create a life that is richer in every way.

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen
A key word in using NLP effectively is state. A state can be understood as a particular pattern of mind and body. In everyday language, we can describe people as being in a happy state or a relaxed state or an upset state. Other common states are motivation, curiosity, or love. This article is a brief introduction to state management and the powerful COACH state.
Clearly, some states are more useful than others when we are trying to do NLP work with other people or with ourselves and these useful states are called resourceful states. For example, a motivational state is generally more useful than an agitated state when we want to focus on getting something done. Similarly, a relaxed state is often more useful when we want to do access the unconscious mind. Robert Dilts talks about two states called COACH and CRASH. These are summarized below.

CRASH State

A CRASH state is generally unresourceful and not useful in achieving our goals. This state is generally provoked by meeting something fearful or unknown or getting caught in a loop where our thinking is paralyzed. The CRASH state can be seen as a reversion to survival strategies of fight, flight, or freeze, and can result in confusion, conflict, difficulty in letting go and inertia.
Contraction
Reaction
Analysis Paralysis
Separation
Hurt and Hatred

COACH State

In contrast to the CRASH state, the COACH state is a highly resourceful state that we can enter in order to carry out NLP work effectively.
Centered
Open
Attending with Awareness
Connected
Holding

State Management

Deliberately accessing a useful state is called state management and being able to control your own state is vital in effective NLP work. Because one of the main presuppositions of NLP is that mind and body form a single system, state management also consists of two components:
a) entering the physiology of the desired state
b) using the mental representations of the desired state

Physiology

When someone enters a panicked state, the people around them often say things like “take a deep breath,” and this is a good example of a suggestion to  adopt a more useful physiological state. Here is how one writer describes the benefits of deep breathing:
Deep breathing benefits the body by taking in the correct amount of oxygen which in turn lowers blood pressure and relaxes muscles. It also relaxes the brain and causes the heart rate to slow down. Deep breathing helps our body to release more carbon dioxide. Amongst the many health benefits of deep breathing are its cleansing properties for the lymphatic system. We know that the lymph surrounds all the cells in our bodies, correct breathing technique removes the toxins from these cells through the lymphatic system. Deep breathing is known to release endorphins which, in layman’s terms are called feel good hormones. These are natural pain killers in the body and help relax the muscles and nerves. Deep breathing is also known to help people who are depressed. Asthmatics also benefit a lot from deep breathing as it makes the abdominal muscles stronger and improves the lung capacity. Shallow breathing leads to the flow of insufficient oxygen in the body which leads to muscle exertion, lethargy and fatigue. Deep breathing can help us activate our relaxationstress relievers. It also helps people suffering from insomnia. Deep breathing exercise benefits in losing weight.
Clearly, a simple shift in physiology such as taking a deep breath can affect a person’s state enormously. Other useful physiological shifts include moving from a slumped posture to an upright one or taking a few minutes to do stretches.

Mental Representations

Mental or internal representations are the patterns we use to represent the world to ourselves in our own minds and consist of our internal pictures, sounds, dialogues, and feelings. By beginning to take control of your internal representations, you can start to manage your state in exactly the way that you want to achieve your desired outcome. A simple example is when you remember a happy time. As you remember that time now, pictures, sounds, and feelings from that time will return to you as you relive that time. Your mind makes no distinction between the original happy time and your memory of it, so if you re-enter that memory fully and completely, you will naturally re-enter the happy state that you experienced at that time.

Conclusion

This article has been a short introduction to state management and the powerful COACH state. By learning to manage your state deliberately and effectively, eventually you will find that you are achieving your desired outcomes much more easily.
Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen
NLP can be described as the structure of subjective reality. In other words, NLP focuses not on the physical phenomena themselves but rather how people perceive them and take meaning from them. The key presupposition of NLP is: The Map is Not the Territory. What is happening in the world is not the same as how people perceive it. It is useful to think of this presupposition in terms of our major senses such as seeing and hearing, what would be termed visual and auditory modalities in NLP terminology.
Like many languages, English makes a clear distinction between the map and the territory for the visual and auditory modalities. The Merriam-Webster dictionary offers the following definitions:
to see: to perceive by the eye
to watch: to keep someone or something under close observation
to hear: to perceive or apprehend by the ear
to listen: to pay attention to sound
Both sets of definition echo the distinction between the map and the territory, the difference between the physical and the psychological worlds. Hearing is the physical act of sound entering the ear and represents the territory, the “objective” world of sound waves travelling through the air, entering our ears, and eventually reaching our brain through a series of transformations. Listening is the much more subjective map. We listen or pay attention to a certain sound because we are looking for information or meaning within it because our map of the world suggests to us that that particular sound may provide information that is useful in some way.
When I was teaching a graduate class on the use of sound in language and society, the students came up with the following table to explain some of the differences between “hearing” and “listening.”

Table 1. Differences between hearing and listening

Hearing	Listening
No attention/unconscious	Attention/focus/conscious
Automatic	Intended
Sound	Meaning
Passive	Active
Physical	Psychological

The students have effectively pointed out some of the important differences between hearing and listening and their examples echo the distinctions made in the definitions given above. We all know the difference between hearing and listening and we are all aware that listening is the way in which people use the sound in the environment around them to make sense of the world.
The interface between a person and the environment is of course, the ears. The human ear is truly an amazing piece of equipment, but what is surprising is how little we think about how to use it effectively. When you buy a new computer, telephone, or microwave over, you may have read the manual to find out all the functions and to learn how to use it in the most useful ways. Or perhaps you didn’t, and instead you played with the machine for a while to figure out how it worked. The world seems to be divided into the kind of people who read manuals and those who don’t. One approach is not necessarily better than the other, but it is nice to have a manual available so that we can refer to it if we can’t work out a function by playing. It would be nice if there was a manual for our ears. There isn’t, however, so we have to play, explore, and work it out ourselves. One of the first steps in exploring the functionality of the ears is what Scahfer (1969) and others have called earcleaning.
When we talk about earcleaning, we don’t just mean taking the wax out of your ears! We also mean paying more attention to the sounds that you hear so that you get more information from your environment. Below is a simple exercise that has been adapted from Schafer (1969) and other sources.

Earcleaning Activity

1. List all the sounds you can hear around you for 2~3 minutes.

2. Volume of Sounds

List sounds in order from loudest to most quiet

3. Length and Recurrence of sound

Is the sound …
Continuous （ C ）
Repeating 　 （ R ）
Unique 　 （ U ）

4. Locating Sounds

Draw a circle.
Inside the circle draw the sounds that you made.
Outside, draw other sounds in the direction and at the distance that you heard them.

5. Classifying Sounds

What is the source of the sound?
Natural (N)
Human (H)
Technological (T)
Made by yourself (X)

6. Moving Sounds

Is the sound …?
Stationary (S)
Moving towards you (M+)
Moving away from you (M-)

Submodalities of Sound

In NLP, we might refer to the process of earcleaning as an exploration of the submodalities of sound. The primary modalities that humans perceive are related to the five senses and are shown below, along with examples of the submodalities of each. For those readers who aren’t familiar with the concept of submodalities, the table below gives some examples.

Table 2. Modalities, senses, and submodalities

Modality	Sense	Sample submodalities
visual	see	size, colour or b/w, moving or still
auditory	hear	loud or soft, near or far
kinesthetic	feel	warm or cool, rough or smooth
gustatory	taste	spicy, salty
olfactory	smell	strong/weak

Submodalities of sound help us to focus on particular aspects of information within the sounds that we hear. The earcleaning exercise above was a good example of focusing on different submodalities in order to clean the ears or to raise our wareness of the richness of the information that is available to us in the sounds that we hear. While we cannot escape our maps of the world completely, describing the submodality in “objective” physical terms is an attempt to describe the territory, while describing it in “subjective” psychological terms is a recognition that each person’s map is different and that a sound will convey different meaning to each person. For example, a musician listening to a piece of music will probably receive different information to a non-musician because their maps are different. Another way to say this is that the musician and non-musician focus on different submodalities of the music and are able to draw different information from the submodalities.
In the earcleaning exercise above, some of the submodalities practiced were loudness, length and recurrence, location, type of sound, and movement of sound source. Below, I have given some other useful submodalities of sound that you can become aware of. Some of them are most useful when you are listening to non-verbal sounds or music. Others such as tonality are very useful when you are trying to raise your sensory acuity of the use of sound in speech.

• Source of sound
• Tempo
• Changes in volume, pitch, or other submodality
• Tonality
• Timbre of sound
• Tempo
• High or low pitch
• Mono or stereo
• Inflections in speech
• Pauses in stream of sound
• Duration
• Rhythm
• Source of voice (who?)
• Background sound or foreground sound

Have fun with your practice in identifying these submodalities in the sounds that you hear around you. Earcleaning is  a good awareness-raising exercise to carry out, and it can be done easily wherever you are. Doing it at the train station, in a busy city street, in your bedroom, or sitting next to a mountain stream will all enrichen your awareness of the sounds around us and the information that we can perceive from them. What is important to remember is that the more that you practice making these distinctions, the more you will be able to use the submodalities of sound effectively in your own life and in your NLP processes.
Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen
All over the Internet, there are claims that binaural beats are beneficial in some way, and they are often included as a background in hypnosis or relaxation audio programs. Like many claims, this is one that is worth examining a little more closely to see if it rests upon a solid foundation of research. This article does not attempt to examine the research in detail, but provides a brief introduction to binaural beats.

What are binaural beats?

The Webster-Merriam dictionary defines binaural as:

of, relating to, or involving two or both ears

Although this definition tells us that both ears are involved, binaural beats are not simply a stereo rhythm pattern as the name might indicate. Beats is a physical phenomenon that occurs when two very similar waves interfere with one another. These can be waves of sound, light, or a physical medium such as water, but for this article we are interested in beats resulting from the interference of sound waves. The Encyclopaedia Brittanica describes the simplest case of beats:

… beats result when two sinusoidal sound waves of equal amplitude and very nearly equal frequencies mix. The frequency of the resulting sound (F) would be the average of the two original frequencies (f₁ and f₂):

The amplitude or intensity of the combined signal would rise and fall at a rate (f_b) equal to the difference between the two original frequencies,

where f₁ is greater than f₂.

In other words, a new frequency is perceived which is equal to the difference between the two original frequencies. So, for example, if a 320 Hz sine wave is played into the right ear and a 330Hz one into the left ear, the brain perceives a beat frequency of 10 Hz.  This is an interesting phenomenon because normal human hearing extends from 20Hz – 20kHz. So the phenomenon of binaural beats is allowing the brain to perceive a frequency that would not normally be possible.
Binaural beats differ to normal tones because they are the effect created by the brain when a different tone is heard by each ear. It is as if the brain has naturally mixed the two sounds to produce a new sound. Certain conditions need to apply for the brain to perceive this beats frequency. First, the frequency of the tones must be below about 1,000 hertz. Second, the difference between the two frequencies must be below about 30 Hz.

The history of binaural beats

Binaural beats were discovered in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, but it was not until 1973 that they attracted attention as a possible treatment method when Oster collected and published the results of modern research on binaural beats (also called auditory beats) in the brain (Oster, 1973). Oster claimed that binaural beats involve different neurological pathways than ordinary auditory processing. His research was followed up by Campbell (2007) and others who investigated the effects of binaural beats on consciousness. They attempted to reproduce the perceived effects of reported out-of-body experiences.
This research was a contributing factor in the formation of  the Monroe Institute, a charitable binaural research and education organization. According to their website, the Monroe Institute “provides experiential education programs facilitating the personal exploration [and evolution] of human consciousness.” The Monroe Institute has developed a type of binaural beats which they call Hemi-Sync. It is used

… for integrating brain functions, … for mental, emotional, and physical healing through the use of varied binaural sounds

These are some of the strongest claims to be found on the Internet about binaural beats and the work of the Monroe Institute has clearly been a force behind the widespread popularization of binaural beats and the claims that are made for their usefulness.

Claims about binaural beats

As an example of one of the widespread claims about binaural beats on the Internet, one website says that:

Binaural beat audio tracks directly affect brainwaves and can positively alter feelings, behaviors, even your state of being.

We can divide this claim into two parts. First, there is the strong claim that “binaural beat audio tracks directly affect brainwaves.” Second, there is the hedged claim that “binaural beat audio tracks can positively alter feelings, behaviors, even your state of being.” At one level, both of these statements are hard to disagree with since pretty much any stimulus will affect your brainwaves, and any statement with can used as a modal operator is grammatically a statement of possibility and not a fact. Even if one person in a thousand is positively affected by binaural beat tracks, the statement can still be said to be true.
But the clear implication of this website’s claim and the claims on so many other sites on the Internet is that binaural beat audio tracks are good for you in some way. If we are to metamodel the quoted claim, some of the questions that we might ask include:

1. How specifically do they positively alter feelings and behaviours? (Modal operator of possibility)
2. Who says they positively alter feelings and behaviours? (Lost performative)
3. All binaural beat audio tracks? Which particular binaural beat tracks can have this effect? (Universal quantifier)
4. Positively in specifically which ways? For example, do they increase good feelings, or decrease bad feelings or …? (Simple deletion)

Below, I take up several of these questions to take a look at some of the research into binaural beats.

Why might binaural beats be effective?

In order to understand why bianural beats could be effective, we need to understand entrainment. Entrainment is the process whereby two interacting oscillating systems, which have different periods when they function independently, assume the same period. This was originally noticed by the physicist Christian Huygens in the 17th century by observing that two pendulums clocks started moving with the same period. The period of a wave is the length of time that it takes to complete one cycle. Since the frequency of a wave is the number of cycles per second, entrainment also implies that the frequency of the two oscillating systems also begins to match.
Sounds, music, and the human brain are all examples of oscillating systems, and it is possible for brain entrainment to occur in exactly the same way as the pendulums. In the example above, a perceived frequency of 10Hz corresponds to the alpha range of brain activity.
As noted above,the phenomenon of beats can allow the brain to perceive very low frequency tones that would not normally be possible. Being able to perceive a frequency of 10Hz is interesting because this is in the alpha range of brainwave activity. Table 1 below shows the well-accepted brainwaves with their related frequencies and the type of activity associated with each one.

Table 1. Brainwaves, frequencies, and typical activities

Brainwave type	Frequency	Typical activity
beta	15-40 Hz	aroused and actively engaged in mental activities
alpha	9-14 Hz	resting or taking a break
theta	5-8 Hz	daydreaming
delta	1.5 – 4 Hz	deep dreamless sleep

When the perceived beat frequency corresponds to one of these brainwave frequencies, the brainwaves entrain to the beat frequency and are postulated to generate the typical activity pattern. So the alpha range is associated with relaxation. The beta range will produce alertness. Entraining in the theta or delta range could produce deep daydreaming or sleep.

Particular Frequencies?

At least one website gives a very precise correlation between frequencies and a large number of medical/spiritual effects including alcoholism, opening of the third eye, muscle pain, confusion, depression, and arthritis. The list is described as including the following types of frequencies:

• Brainwave frequencies associated with various mental states

• “Healing” frequencies which could be used to heal illnesses of different kinds, or stimulate some region of the body (chakras).

• Natural phenomena frequencies including natural frequencies that occur in nature (e.g. Schumann’s Resonance which is an aural pituitary stimulation to release growth hormone), as well as sound tones calculated from the revolution/orbit of the various planets.

Conclusion

This article has been a short introduction to the rationale behind binaural beats. While it does seem logically possible that brain entrainment may occur and positive effects may result from binaural beats, this article has not attempted to answer the questions raised in the metamodeling above though an investigation of research to determine whether these effects have been systematically corroborated.

References

1. Campbell, T. (2007). My Big Toe. Lightning Strike Books.
2. Oster, G. (1973). Auditory beats in the brain. Sci. Am. 229 (4): 94–102.

Copyright © 2010 by Dr. Brian Cullen,
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute of Technology
—
NLP Coaching and Training
www.standinginspirit.com

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