Monroe's Big Discovery

Recent research regarding the mind-altering possibilities of Tesla's entrainment principle have been undertaken by Robert Monroe, the founder of The Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia. A student of engineering and human physiology, Monroe's interest in human consciousness began in 1956 when he set up a small research and development program in his New York based radio company. The research was initially designed to determine the feasibility of learning during sleep, but in 1958, an astonishing result emerged.

By experimenting with the effects of sonic frequencies on the brain, Monroe successfully isolated a little-known state of awareness which was totally separated from the physical body. The research team called it an Out-of-Body Experience or OBE a term which has since become a generic description for many unexplainable mind states. The sonic principle he was using was already known to electronic engineers as binaural beat frequency modulation a key concept used in all radio receivers today. However, it was Monroe who took this idea from the field of radio-electronics and applied it to bioelectronics. He called his discovery Hemispherical Synchronization, or HemiSync for short.

To achieve these novel mind-states, Monroe recorded two channels of audio data using a stereo tape recorder. On one channel he recorded a frequency of 200 cps, and on the other channel he recorded a frequency of 208 cps. When he played the recording back through a pair of stereo headphones, what Monroe discovered was that while one ear heard the 200 cps tone, and the other ear heard the 208 tone, the brain interpreted the tones as an eight cps frequency, and began to entrain itself to that frequency. In other words, the brain could only distinguish the eight cps difference, and this frequency was powerful enough to entrain brainwaves.