Weird Training Ideas Part 1: Brainwave Entrainment & Accelerated Meditation

Thinking outside the box?

This article (and subsequent series of articles) is largely inspired by a post made by Chris over at Martial Development on Bleeding, Brainwaves and Biofeedback.  The post is an excerpt from the book Beyond Biofeedback talking about the demonstrations made by Jack Schwarz.  I won't go into what his demonstrations were, since I've already inundated you with links, but reading about them again started me thinking.

One of the frequent things suggested as to what is necessary for people like Mr. Schwarz and others to perform feats of extraordinary body control such as stopping bleeding on command, turning off pain receptors, extreme slowing of heart rate at will and conscious regulation of body temperature is that the brain must be operating in the theta wave range.  Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with brainwaves, here's the very basic rundown.  Your brain, in all it's electric, synaptic glory, largely operates on a wavelength.  These brain waves can be observed through an Electroencephalograph (EEG) and, depending on what your doing, those brainwaves have different patterns or wavelengths associated with them.  The basic run-dwon of the different brainwaves is as follows:

• Beta waves - 12 to 40 Hz When your brain is in the Beta wave range you are wide awake.  This is the state your brain is in throughout most of the day.  Whenever you are concentrating hard, or in general focused on things out in the world (i.e., perceived via your senses) you are in the Beta state.

• Alpha waves - 7 to 12 Hz Alpha waves are most often observable in individuals who are meditating, particularly those who are experienced in meditation.  In the Alpha state the brain is awake, but relaxed and not processing much information.  Your brain is generally in the Alpha state for a brief period immediately before falling a sleep, and after waking up (you actually run through almost all the brainwave wavelengths during a full sleep cycle). Serotonin production increases when the brain is in an Alpha state. If you meditate and have found that ability to clear out the 'chatter' in your head than you are familiar with the Alpha state.  The Alpha state is associated with increased creativity and learning, and is more introspective.

• Theta waves - 4 to 7 Hz These are the waves that many people believe allow the access to the subconscious mind necessary for extreme feats of body control like Mr. Schwarz's.  It's also been theorized that the meditation training Shaolin monks go through to do things like balance on spear points and break steel bars over their heads is just teaching the to enter and stay in the Theta state.  Theta waves occur naturally during the rapid eye movement stage of sleep (REM sleep) which is the stage in which dreaming occurs.  This also is the state brought on by hypnosis and extremely deep meditation, and is associated with increased creativity and better retention of learned material.  Interestingly, an increase in the production of catecholamines (such as adrenaline/epinephrine, noradrenaline/norepinephrine and dopamine) also occurs.

• Delta waves - 0.1 to 4 Hz As low as it gets, the Delta state is experienced when you are in deep, dreamless sleep.  The Delta state is where your body is doing all its repair work, and resetting all your internal clocks and things.  It's been found that the Delta state is also when our good old old friend Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is released.

Now, just in case I got too boring with that little chunk of science class, here's where it gets interesting.  No one can argue that body control, especially extreme cases of body control like stopping wounds from bleeding at will, is not something that a lot of martial artists would find desirable.

Don't get me wrong here, in no way do I think that Theta state body control would really improve your odds in a self-defense situation.  If you're not accustomed to it when that adrenal dump hits in a real defense situation (especially if you're caught off guard) than it can be ridiculously hard to remember how to throw that punch you'vet trained 6,000 times let alone consciously shift the pattern of your brainwaves while still fighting off an attacker.

However, in addition to maybe being a neat party trick, the other benefits of being able to shift your brain into the Theta state at will (increased creativity, increased retention of learned material, more control over subconscious things like habits, etc.) would definitely be beneficial to a martial artist.  Well, anyone really, but this article is for martial artists.

Additionally, putting on muscle and getting stronger is largely a hormonal event.  A big factor in how effective your fitness routine is on your body composition is its overall hormonal effect, and if your goal is to get stronger you want your muscles getting all the HGH they can.  Now, I've not been able to find anyone anywhere who has studied this in anyone so this is just a theory, but it stands to reason that if HGH is released during the Delta state as we sleep, than inducing the Delta state in the way that individuals like Mr. Schwarz induce the Theta state might encourage the production of more Human Growth Hormone.

So how do you get your brain into these various states?  Well, there are lots of options.  The first is hypnosis.  Now, if you don't really think hypnosis works, than that option probably isn't for you.  Additionally, hypnosis can be kind of hard to do by yourself if you don't know what you're doing.  The next is arguably the most popular (has been for the last several thousand years) - meditation.  The goal of this article isn't to teach you how to meditate though (there are plenty of others out there that would do a better job than I), so I won't go into that option here.

Lastly, there's what's known as 'brainwave entrainment.'  Now, brainwave entrainment is based around the principle of this snazzy little phenomenon called the Cortical Evoked Response.  In 9th grade biology terms the Cortical Evoked Response essentially says that when your brain recieves a rhythmic stimulus (drum beat, strobe light, physical tapping) in a sufficiently repetitive, consistent fashion your brain waves start synchronizing to that stimulus (the Frequency Following Response).  Capitalizing on that, some people have come up with programs that present stimuli to you at a certain frequency in order to help you achieve a particular state (Alpha, Theta, Delta etc.) so that, once you have gotten accustomed to how that state feels, you can try and pull yourself back to it without the use of the stimuli.

There are two common forms for the stimuli, visual and audible.  The visual stimuli are essentially just flashing lights, and are not recommended if you have adverse reactions to anything even close to a strobe light.  The audible form uses what's known as binaural beats to bring the brain into the proper low frequencies.  Since the human brain can't hear frequencies low enough to reach the desired brainwave states, binaural beat programs play two different Hz tones through the two channels of stereo headphones.  These tones combine in your brain, and your brain starts to synchronize with the difference.  For example, if you wanted to synch your brain to 4 Hz, it would play a 150 Hz tone in the left ear, and a 154 Hz tone in the right ear.

How well does all of this actually work?  Well, I don't know.  That's kind of why I think it's interesting.  A long, long time ago in high school I gave the binaural beats thing a try.  I attempted to get myself down in the Theta state for 30 minutes every night for 3 weeks.  At the end of the three weeks I was starting to hear things and see things out of the corners of my eyes, so I quit my experimentation.  Now, that might have been good old high school stress or any number of other factors, but it weirded me out enough to quit and the weirdness stopped about a week after so I left that at that.  I may jump into it again and see if I get a similar result.  Who knows, a few weeks from now I may be jamming 5 inch needles through my biceps with a big smile on my face like Mr. Schwarz.

More than anything else, I'm curious what everyone else thinks.  Do you think it would be a valuable shortcut to regular meditation?  Do you think meditation should even have a shortcut, or does that violate the principles of meditation?  Do you think this is all wacky pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo?  Has anyone else out there actually played with it and, above all, do you think there could be any useful applications for martial artists?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

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