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An Introduction to Brain Waves

Your brain waves are important.  Heck, your brain is important.  For something that controls so much of what goes on in our lives, you'd think we'd know more about it.

Literally everything that you experience is filtered through your mind and/or created by your mind.  Your thoughts and belief systems form the world that you live in.  Your subjective experience is determined by your state of mind.  Whether you're happy or sad is a choice that you have the ability to make.  And it all comes down to what's in your head.

There are a lot of aspects of this conversation.  There are a lot of different ways to examine your mind.  To me, they all have value.  Some more than others.  One of the most valuable studies of your brain and your mental state involve your brain waves.

The study of brain waves can grant us insight into many mental phenomena.  We haven't yet scratched the surface of what our minds are capable of, or exactly how they work.  Every piece of information helps, every experiment brings us a little bit closer to understanding.  There are experiences we have that are hard to explain.  There are people that seem to do impossible things with their mind.  Just because we haven't figured out how these things are done, does not mean there isn't a good explanation for them.  To reference Arthur C Clarke's third law of prediction:  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

In this article, I'm going to cover an introduction to brain wave science.  What it's about and what it's told us so far.  It is quite easy to expound on these ideas and draw additional conclusions, which many have done.  I feel these are all worthwhile ventures, and will continue down this path in future articles.

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Our brains are electrical systems.  We literally have electricity running through our heads at all times.  Our thoughts are made up of millions of tiny electrical impulses that jump from one neuron to the next. 

The nice thing about this of course is that we can measure electricity.

This gives us a nice window into our brain; what's going on in there and how can we understand it better.

With a better understanding of how we think, and what makes up our mental state, we can learn to think better and to improve our mental states.  With an understanding of what's going on in our brains, it gets us one step closer to being able to control what's going on in our brains.  We learn what states are better for performing what types of activities.  Where we can find inspiration at will.  Relax when it's time to relax. 

You can fine-tune your state of mind to align with your desired outcomes.  You can be more successful in your endeavors by making sure your brain is working for you instead of against you.

Brain Wave Frequencies

By placing electrodes on your skull and analyzing the patterns of all your neurons firing, an EEG can detect and record your overall brain wave frequencies.  These are an amalgamation of all of the discrete electrical impulses running through your brain.  We can't easily detect specific electrical firing patterns, nor would they make any sense if we could.  However, we can get a lot of information from analyzing the overall patterns.

We've grouped our brain wave frequencies into 5 ranges.  They range from .2hz to 100hz. 

These divisions are not a perfect science.  Some references may draw the lines slightly differently, however the concepts remain the same.

Delta waves are the slowest waves, indicating the least amount of brain activity.  They can occasionally dip as low as .2hz, they can never reach 0hz as that would indicate no brain activity (a.k.a. death).  Generally they'll hover around 2hz during deep sleep.  This frequency is indicative of a dreamless sleep.  This is where your body and mind do the majority of their recovery and recuperation activities.  You are in a state of deep rest.

Delta is, for all intents and purposes, an unconscious state.  There is so little brain activity that you aren't thinking and don't remember it. 

There are theories that reference delta waves being involved in accessing the collective unconscious.  The effect being a type of a radar, or sixth sense.  Another way to describe these effects would be empathy.  This is the 'gut feeling' that we all get from time to time.  The question I have always had is where this intuition comes from and what the mechanism is.  Delta waves provide one possible explanation.  Science says that lower frequency waves have a longer amplitude.  This could explain how they are able to reach 'outside' of the individual and somehow interact with the brain waves of others.

This opens up the question of psychic phenomena.  How plausible is it that we can access information from outside of ourselves?  Or does this just open up the larger question of what constitutes 'ourselves'?

Putting that on hold for the time being.

Theta waves are generated when we are in REM sleep, dreaming.  This is where the majority of our ideas get formulated.  You could call it the subconscious.  This is our spark of creativity, not the refined ideas, but the base formation.  Those experienced in deep meditation enter theta range while experiencing 'peak' experiences.  Theta wave thinking provides the depth of the experience. 

Continuing down the path that we're picking things up from our unconscious, or even the collective unconscious - possibly others' unconsciousness's - then floating them up through higher and higher level thinking to refine the data.  We must get this information into a state that we can comprehend it.  Theta helps us to integrate it with our previous experiences.  Relating it to things we've dealt with before. 

Is this why so often premonitions come in the form of dreams? 

Moving on up, we next come to alpha waves.  These brain patterns are triggered by simply closing our eyes.  This is the stuff of daydreams and imagination.  This is where we begin to further coalesce our intuition and ideas into presentable formats for communication.  This is where we begin to build pictures, movies, and sounds from the rough concepts passed up by our theta thinking. 

Consider alpha the bridge between full waking consciousness and the lower, less accessible regions of our mind.

We find ourselves automatically in this state during the hypnogogic period just before we drift to sleep, or when we have first awakened.  We experience it as a light reverie.  This is the light trance state that we find ourselves in when we are engrossed in a good movie.  Our brain waves have literally slowed down from everyday processing and living.  We are thinking a little slower, but drawing more connections.  This is often called the seat of creativity, as this is where ideas are finally cemented and prepared for sharing with the outside world.

The alpha state is one of enhanced learning capabilities.  You are in a receptive mode, almost sponge-like.  Alpha is gentle, it's a flow state where you don't have to think about what you're doing.  Many athletes enter this state when training for their sport.  Writers and musicians enter this state to perform and practice their craft.    Anytime you try to perform critical thinking here, or attempt to calculate something you're going to slip up to beta waves.

Beta waves are predominate when we are interacting with the outside world.  Beta waves form our critical thinking skills, our reason, and our formulation of language.  Whenever we are actively thinking, we're using primarily beta frequency waves.  It's an alert awareness of what is going on around us and within us.  It's our analysis of input and output. 

Beta can catch a bad rap, as it is often associated with anxiety and restlessness.  Indeed, if you are spending all of your time in this judgmental, over-active mind, it can increase your tenancies for a high-stress life.  However, it is a very critical component to your overall functioning and absolutely essential to operating in the world. 

I feel it is important to stress here, there is no one frequency that is 'better' than another.  They all serve a purpose and are all critical components of your mind.  The desired state is to leverage them all, integrating them into each other to produce a complete thinking mind. 

This is where gamma frequency waves come into play.  Gamma frequencies are the most misunderstood of all of the various categories of brain waves.  This is primarily because they are so difficult to detect.  For a long time they were considered noise in the readings and were filtered out or dismissed.  However, they are now regarded as one of the more critical components of the system.  Gamma wave thoughts are considered to be responsible for holding everything together.  They operate at the highest frequencies and are literally everywhere.  The have been detected at times of heavy delta waves, as well as during primarily beta periods.

They are likely responsible for perception.  The initial intake of information into the brain.  The front line response to stimulus.  More specifically they have been linked to the comprehensive binding of experience together to form a unified experience.  It is thought that gamma waves are involved in putting things together, such as the color yellow linked with the shape of a circle. 

However they've also been attributed with all manner of properties from higher IQ, better decision making, boosted memory, enhanced perception of reality, increased compassion, high-level information processing, natural antidepressant, advanced learning ability, positive thoughts, higher energy levels, high level of focus, etc.  You might be asking yourself what gamma waves don't do. 

The fact is that when Antoine Lutz recorded the brain waves of experienced monks meditating on "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion" in 2002 he immediately noticed powerful gamma activity.  The monks' gamma waves were 30 times as strong as the control group of inexperienced students in the 25-52 Hz range.  Additionally larger areas of the monks' brains were active, particularly the left prefrontal cortex, the part normally associated with positive emotions. 

In March of 2008, Beverly Rubik, Ph.D. a renowned biophysist recorded 40hz brain waves from 10 people using the Peak Achievement Trainer by Neurotek.  She captured subjective feedback from this mixture of those experienced in meditation and those who were not.  The results were feelings of detachment, trust in something bigger, joy and bliss, alert, focused on something new, curiosity, enthusiasm, loving feeling, pure love, childlike wonder, thinking higher thoughts, core connection to the Absolute, and others. 

She also had one volunteer who smoked the entheogen Salvia Divinorum while having her brain waves recorded.  During the peak experience the subject's brain waves went off the scales across all frequencies.  Specifically, the 40hz frequencies dropped 20% during the peak experience, while raising above baseline both before and after the peak experience.  Keep in mind that this was only performed by a single subject and may not be indicative of common experience.

Brain Waves in Practice

So now that we've talked about the map of your brain states and the electrical frequencies that they coincide with, we can begin discussing how we can utilize them.  We've discussed the possible content that can be generated from some of the slower frequency levels like delta.  This can be an area of very deep introspection and the root of many of your thought complexes and beliefs that you carry around in life. 

This of course still begs the question of the usability of this information.  Since we're not conscious during the heaviest delta periods, we need to build a bridge to bring that information to our consciousness.  This is where having real control over our brain waves and states comes into play.  We are never in a single brain wave frequency exclusively.  We have millions of neurons firing at any given point.  Our total mental state is a combination of the various frequencies that we're exhibiting at any given time. 

I always liked the analogy that your conscious mind is like a spotlight on a dark field.  Your unconscious mind is the dark field, containing vast amounts of information and processing power.  So much in fact that it would overwhelm your conscious self if you tried to contemplate it all at once.  So your conscious mind has the job of focusing your attention on a smaller section of your unconscious mind at any particular time.  You have the ability to shift the spotlight around, by focusing on different things.  You have access to all of the information in your unconscious mind, just not at one time.

Of course it's not always as easy as simply moving a spotlight.  Sometimes there are hard to reach places.  So we've got to train our minds. 

With practice we can learn to access that vast amount of information that's available to us.  Brain waves can be an excellent model to use to accomplish that end.  By learning to shift into different frequencies we can pull that information from the depths of delta, through theta, and up into alpha where we can work with it.  Think of your delta frequencies as a spring of information, and it's bubbling data up from the collective unconscious.  That rough data gets morphed into images and concepts by your theta level thinking.  Those then get further refined by alpha and ultimately presented to your in a way that you can work with them in beta.  All of this is accomplished by the binding patterns of your gamma waves.

In future articles I'm going to delve into the specific techniques that you can use to actually train your brain and get into these various states at will.  This will allow you to start experimenting with some of the concepts that we've discussed and experience the benefits.  Stay tuned by subscribing to our RSS feed.  It will deliver article updates to you as they are published.

 

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