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How to improve meditation with technology

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Published: 19Sep2009
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Google “Meditation” and you’ll get literally over 24 million hits. Many people wanting to learn meditation give up quickly. There is too much to choose from. Most of us don’t have the time or energy to spend years learning meditation techniques. By the use of technology you don’t have to learn any meditation technique. You still get all the benefits of meditation, but much faster.

Even if we focus on technological solutions to meditation in our google search (usually sound technology), we still find a jungle of different companies selling all types of CD’s, MP3’s and devices for meditation, all claiming to be the best.

You find hyper expensive meditation programs, CD’s with whale and dolphin sounds, chanting Indians, Mongolian overtone-singing and who knows what else. I’ve been through this jungle and would like to help you in your search by narrowing it down from hundreds to a handful of alternatives that really do work.

Brainwave entrainment and how it works

Brainwave entrainment technology will help you get the effects of meditation very fast. To understand what brainwave entrainment is you first you need to know roughly how brainwaves work.

Basically there are 5 groups of brainwave patterns listed by their brainwave frequency range:
Gamma 28Hz+
Beta 13-28Hz
Alpha 7-13Hz
Theta 4-7Hz
Delta 0.5-4Hz

All brainwaves are present any given moment. Though some are more dominant depending on what you are doing. Delta waves are dominant while sleeping. Beta, when we are active. High amounts of Beta is present when we are stressed or anxious and in rare cases of really extreme stress or extreme focus, Gamma will be dominant. When you are daydreaming, or relaxing with eyes closed, alpha brainwaves increases. If you go even deeper, without falling asleep, Theta will be dominating.

How to stimulate brainwaves.

Let us say you want to relax in to an Alpha state and decide to stimulate the 10Hz frequency. Do not confuse the Hz used to describe the pitch of a note with brainwave frequencies. Hz (Hertz) is used to tell pulses per second. A 10Hz tone can not even be heard since the human ear only picks up from about 20Hz to 20Khz (20.000 hz).

What you do is to use headphones and play one steady tone is the left ear at lets say 400Hz, and in the right ear a tone at 410Hz. What will happen now is that these two tones together create one pulsing tone and it will sound like it comes from the middle of your head, just between your ears. The pulse will be 10Hz because this is the difference between the tones. (410Hz - 400Hz = 10Hz). It is being created by the brain and it will begin to stimulate this frequency in your brain. Soon you will begin feeling more relaxed and if someone did a EEG test on you after 10 minutes you would see that you have more amplitude in Alpha frequencies around 10Hz.

Different types of brainwave entrainment technology

Although there are more than one type of brainwave entrainment, they all basically work the same way. The most used types are:
Binaural beats
Monaural beats
Isochronic beats
Hemisync (Hemispheric synchronization, developed by the Monroe institute).

You can get these sounds on CD, or MP3 files that you can purchase or download for free on some sites. BUT, even if free stuff is nice, there is a reason that some are free and some aren’t. Usually the ones you pay for has a lot more work put into them and works a lot better.

Audio-visual brainwave entrainment

This is also known as AVS. If you synchronize the sound pulses with light pulses – usually in the form of strobe light goggles with LED lights – the effect is improved a lot. These devices are known as “mind machines” and there are several to choose from. They are much more expensive than CD’s but in one machine you can get hundreds or different sessions to choose from. Usually they come with some type of software that will let you load or create your own new sessions to your AVS device.

The first AVS devices came with red LED lights. Now they come with multi-color LED’s that are able to reproduce any color you can think of. The effects of multi-colored lights are not really clear although the companies selling them claim more colors are better. The most important thing though is the synchronization of the light and sound. There’s no real scientific proof that I’ve seen about any improved effect by the use of multi-colored lights. They are nice to experience though!

For the adventurous - TMS technology (Transcranical Magnetic Stimulation.)

This is a non invasive method to excite neurons in the brain, using rapidly changing magnetic fields to trigger brain activity in certain parts of the brain. I’m a pretty adventurous person when it comes to trying technology for altered states etc, and one of the coolest things this far is the “8-coil shakti”. This device is developed by Mr. Todd Murphy. He is a Behavioral Neuroscientist associated with Dr Michael Persinger. This is powerful stuff and something you should really study first if you plan to use it. Eight coils are placed on the head in two pairs of four. Four on each side of your head. These coils are connected via audio cable to your computer. The 8-coil Shakti software then plays specific signals, getting the coils to magnetically stimulate a pre-chosen area of your brain. This may trigger spiritual experiences. Again: Anyone wanting to use this device should study the manual first, carefully.

You choose

I’ve tried all of the technologies mentioned in this article and many more. These are the ones that work according to me. Enjoy the fruits of meditation, without having to learn how to grow the tree.

Good luck!

Marcus Knudsen Inventor of Bliss Coded sound http://www.xphirience.com

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