Entraining my Brain

 When I was in my early twenties I used to enjoy the occasional trip downtown to a place, now long gone, called The Float Experience for a dip in a sensory deprivation tank.  A what now?  An isolation tank.  Remember that movie Altered States where the dude takes a buncha weird shrooms, lock himself in a dark tank and reverts to a primordial caveman form?  One of those.  Only there's no drugs or neanderthals.  That movie did for sense-dep tanks what Jaws did for sharks.  Vilified them!  Turned them into something dark, dangerous, and scary.  Well, just like swimming at the beach isn't actually synonymous with being feasted upon by sharks, putting yourself into a tank isn't the road to self-induced madness.

But you might go a little crazy, in a good way.

I could go on and on about the experience in tanks, but really, it's a very personal and subjective experience. It's fairly different for everyone.  It strips away the stimulus and the noise of modern life and leaves you alone with your brain.  How much you enjoy it depends on your brain.  If you dig your brain, get along with it, and understand why it's doing what it does most of the time; you'll likely enjoy the tank.  If you don't like to go poking around in your brain, unless you're planning on changing that habit, I wouldn't recommend it.  It's just you and your mind.  All these testimonies you hear about tanks being relaxing, well, they're assuming you don't have decades of abuse and mental issues just waiting to jump you once your mind is exposed.  And, honestly, this may be a good way to deal with that shit, but don't go in thinking it's a spa day.  Sensory deprivation tanks are mirrors to the things you can't normally reflect.  Gaze carefully.  But enough about tanks.  That's not what I want to talk about.  When we used to go it wasn't for the tanks.  It was for something else...

I want to talk about Brain Waves.

Okay, so here's the thing.  We're all emitting brain waves, all the time.  These can be measured with an electroencephalogram.  There are different types of waves your body gives off in different "States".  Beta when you're awake and active, Alpha when you're drifting to sleep, meditating, super relaxed or daydreaming, Theta when you're asleep, but dreaming, the unconscious active mind, and Delta when you're totally zonked in deep sleep.

The Float Experience used to have this machine that would emit light and sound (it's a LED filled pair of goggles and headphones) in a parallel frequency of the different brain wave states.  The idea was to get your mind to sync with the music/light, like the rhythm people naturally fall into when walking, or tapping your foot to music, or how one tuning fork will pick up the vibrations of another.  The idea of Entrainment is that the machine can play, oh, Theta waves, the ones you emit when you're dreaming, and your mind will auto-tune into that if you relax and let it.  Basically allowing for semi-conscious dream states and enhanced relaxation.  Unlike the tank, there are no demons resting here.

This was the best part of the trip.  I've just discovered a place that has one of these light/sound machines and an hour of brain entrainment is only 20 bucks!  I am soooo going on Tuesday.  Think of it as a brain tune up!

For any of you who are interested in this sort of stuff, below is a chunk of text lifted from LifeStream on how it all works.

Brainwave entrainment uses pulses of lights or sounds or a combination of both to create a rhythmic pulsing of "beats". With each pulsed tone, the brain produces an electrical response.
The brain is a mass of neurons, each taking part in storing, retrieving and transmitting electro-chemical impulses - information, colors, images, sounds, smells and tastes.
With BWE, different areas of the brain are stimulated, allowing for the awakening and subsequent release of various stored material. In a sense quietening the mind for clearer thought and process.
When the brain is provided with a stimulus, through the ears, eyes or other senses, it emits an electrical charge in response. This is called a Cortical Evoked Response.
These electrical responses travel throughout the brain to become what we see and hear. When the brain is given a consistent, repeating stimulus, such as drum beats or flashes of light, the brain responds by synchronizing, or entraining, its electric cycles to the external rhythm.
This is commonly called the Frequency Following Response (or FFR), and it can be used to effectively alter the brainwave pattern.
Deep relaxation is another major benefit resulting from the brains cortical frequency following response. By selecting the desired rate, the brain, via the frequency following response, will tend to mimic the rate it is exposed to and thus enter that brainwave state. This helps to explain why this technology can produce benefits commonly found with meditation.

The Underpass - Part 2

Here's the second half of our mini-comic!  Everyone deserves barbecue once in a while.

The Underpass - Part 1

 

A while back Bill Manning and I decided to collaborate on a little two page comic.  Here's the first page, I'll post the second next week some time.  Click to enlarge it.