I used to think the brain was the most important organ. Then I thought, look what’s telling me that. However, I recently have been giving a lot of thought to brain health. My significant other is on a journey of quelling anxiety and finding peace of mind as well as enlightenment. She is a creative type (taking pottery) as well as yoga, and that brought her to meditation. Through her efforts, I have been introduced to mindfulness, meditation and quelling the constant flow of thoughts, ideas, compulsive and recurring themes, and worry. (You should google mindfulness and meditation if you haven't already).
The yoga folks came up with the idea of meditation where you clear your head of all thoughts to give your brain a rest and rejuvenate yourself. This is a lot tougher than you think. I tried it, and let me tell you, the idea of thinking nothing or just one thing, is the toughest thing possible, although I hear that quitting heroin is really tough as well. I have no intention of trying that drug to see if it is true or not. However, I have read that meditation and mindfulness meditation has been certified by the medical profession as extremely good for brain health and balanced living.
I am not a good meditator. I was first introduced to it in the tropics. When you live on an island for more than a few months, you have seen pretty much everything that there is to see and do. So after reading the book "Eat, Pray, Love" and reading about ashram life, we decided to attend the ashram on the island across the harbor. Saffron-robed monks driving a boat, come to fetch you off a rat-infested dock with rotting hulks of ships moored to the wharf. Then they take you to an oasis of peace on a tropical isle.
When we arrived at the ashram, we took our shoes off, and went into the temple. It began to fill with the most beautiful women in flowing yoga prayer robes with lithe bodies and exquisite tans. A yoga ashram tends to collect the most beautiful, lithe, nubile, athletic young women imaginable. It is an array of feminine pulchritude of the finest kind. My meditation lessons didn't go well, but I got a PhD in surreptitious gawking.
All this to say is that there is benefit to giving your mind a good cleansing. It pays to shut off the stream of consciousness, stifle the worry, and suppress the thoughts of strangling your loved ones. I have tried meditating on a small bridge over a tinkling stream in the middle of the woods, or at the side of the ocean as the surf gently laps the beach. However I found that just being in those places obviates the need for mediation. The real trick is to be able to do it in your basement.
So last week, I had a technical problem and I was getting nowhere with it. After a day of struggling with the code, I decided to go for a walk to clear my mind. I decided to do an experiment on myself. I was going to find a mechanism to clear my mind, and then as I was walking, I was going to concentrate on the problem and let the unconscious computer in my head come up with a solution while exercising.
I had been reading about entrainment and binaural beats, and how they were an aid to meditation by slowing down the brainstorms and constant barrage of thoughts in your head. Binaural beats are auditory processing artifacts in your brain. One frequency is fed into one ear, and a second frequency, a few cycles per second different from the first is fed into the other ear. The brain clearly and distinctly manufactures a third frequency in your brain, that is the difference between the two. It is a low frequency synthesis that causes entrainment. What entrainment means, is that everything lines up with the third low frequency -- meaning all of the brain waves slow down. At least that is the theory.
For my birthday, I got a massage as a gift at the local luxury hotel, and the therapist was exceptionally good. I like getting the rub while naked with young women, because I am a man pig, even though it is chaste and therapeutic. My therapist is right into all of the woo-woo stuff, and she told me that binaural beats are at first annoying but then your brain makes layers and layers of soothing stuff around the base frequency difference. She hears rain and heartbeat and all sorts of harmonics.
So I put a binaural beats app onto my Android device, and off I went for a long walk to solve my problems. This is the splash pic for the binaural beat app, and the URL from Amazon is: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JLJFXNU
This particular binaural beat app is made for jogging. There are others for meditation, etc, etc. This one is over an hour long, so I figured that it would suit the long walk scenario.
Well, with the earbuds on and me walking down the road, I decided to go into the shtick of clearing my mind, purposefully stating the problem, and automagically coming up with the solution. It didn't work out that way.
The stuff start playing in the earbuds, and as the massage therapist stated, soon I started hearing the complexities in my head. It wasn't exactly relaxing, but it wasn't anxious making. It just was! I walked a bit, and then decided that I better get down to the business of why I was on this walk -- to solve my problem.
Well Jumping Jimminy, the upshot of the whole deal, was that I was unable to think at all. I could hold a thought for two seconds. I couldn't concentrate on my problem, and I didn't care. I just couldn't think any sustained thoughts with this stuff playing in my ears. And the good news was that I didn't care, because I couldn't generate the worry thoughts about not being able to think.
I suddenly realized that I was basically in a thoughtless state of just being. It was what meditation was supposed to be. But that thought went away too. I just walked. I could hear my footsteps, but I soon lost interest in that sound. Shiny objects no longer had the same appeal and eye magnetism. The constant diarrhea of thought in my head stopped. I call it diarrhea, because I have a fertile imagination and farmers and others know what makes fields fertile.
I walked for about 4 and half miles. About three quarters of the way in, I got used to the binaural beats, and I could start thinking coherent thoughts strung together, but still I wasn't emotionally reacting to them one way or another. And I simply couldn't think of my problem that I wanted to solve, because I didn't care anymore.
After I stopped feeding the binaural beats in my ears, the thought struck me that this would be a perfect way to stop worry. This would be a great tool for those who didn't know how to stop thinking bad thoughts or negative thoughts. It was a great way to stop thinking too much. Anxiety and worry disappeared.
I still used this for my walks. However by and large, I enjoy my thoughts and where they take me, so I don't use it as a therapeutic tool. Where it helps me, is to pass the time while exercising on my rowing machine. But playing heavy metal music in my ear buds does the same thing.
Basically, what I think that I have discovered is digital marijuana. Have a listen and stop thinking! When I looked at other binaural beat offerings on Amazon, there was one that caused brain orgasms or Autonomous Meridian Sensory Responses through Binaural Beats ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IMGWMJQ ). So not only do you have digital marijuana, but digital brain orgasms as well. That takes care of sex and drugs -- and my iPod takes care of Rock 'n Roll! I'm happy!
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