What is brainwave entrainment?

Brainwave entrainment, also known as 'brainwave synchronization' is a practice that depends upon a 'frequency following' response from your brain, following a dominant external stimulus. Usually, the external stimulus is a specialized software, but it can also be a pulse of sound or light.
When the brain receives an external stimulus, through ears, eyes or any other senses, it emits a response which is called a 'cortical evoked response'. These electrical responses travel throughout the brain and they can be measured using sensitive devices attached to the scalp.
When the rhythmic stimulus presented to the brain is, for example, a drum beat, the rhythm is reproduced in the brain in the form of a 'cortical evoked respose'. If the rhythm becomes fast and consistent enough, it can start to resemble the natural internal rhythms of the brain, called 'brainwaves'. When this happens, the brain starts responding by synchronizing its own electric cycles to the same rhythm as the drum beat. This is usually called a 'Frequency Following Response' or FFR.

Photo: Transparent Corporation

FFR is very useful because brainwaves are very much related to your mental state. For example, a 35 Hz brainwave is associated with an increased state of alert. Or, a 3 Hz brainwave is associated with deep sleep. A 3 Hz sound pattern would help reproduce the deep sleep state in your brain. Listening long enough to such a sound pattern would make you fall to a deep sleep.
The same concept can be applied to almost any mental state: happiness, concentration, creativity, relaxation, meditation, wealth attraction and so on. Maybe it will not happen over-night, but listening daily a certain sound pattern will bring you closer to the desired state of mind. When you go to the gym, you don't expect to lose weight after a 5 minutes work-out. Same with brainwaves, your brain needs some practice to reach the desired state, practice called 'brainwave entrainment'.
To achieve brainwave entrainment you can use different methods, such as: audio-visual entrainment, music modulation, isochronic tones, monoaural beats or binaural beats.
As binaural beats are proven to influence the brain in more subtle ways, we will describe how they work in the next post.