Hypnosis with the
Psychosonic^tm Rhythm

While I was doing all of these inductions I was constantly beset by distracting noises. It is amazing how distracting these little everyday noises can be. These are things we customarily ignore or take for granted. But they are magnified many times over when you are trying to do something that requires peaceful quiet and concentration.

This is especially true, for me at least, when I am conducting induction talks for others. It is at these times that I become much more aware of -- and irritated by -- all of those ordinary little (and not so little) noises. They are all the daily sounds that constitute the cacophony of modern urban civilization. But saying that doesn't make them any less disruptive.

If you live in a city you know what I mean. Airplanes. Lawn mowers. Sirens. Trucks so noisy you could trace them all the way across town with a seismograph. Most people today live in cities and towns, but farm life can be noisy, too. I spent part of my childhood growing up on a farm and there were plenty of noises there, too:  squeaking windmills, blabber-mouthed cattle, coyotes howling at night, chickens clucking and crowing, hogs squealing . . . I have to stop this; I'm making myself homesick.

No matter where you happen to it is likely that there are lots of common but potentially disruptive sounds. Most people complain about these noises when they were trying to practice self-hypnosis.

It was clear that what was needed was a masking noise. I had already done some experimenting on my own with white noise and I had a white noise generator. I thought it would be a simple matter to record the white noise which would mask background noises and settle the problem. Unfortunately we don't live on that kind of a planet. Things just don't work that simply.

To make a long story more boring, the project to find a masking sound that was both effective and acceptable to everyone took almost three years. It required the involvement of an acoustics engineer, a couple of sound recording engineers, an electronics wizard, another psychologist in addition to myself, a recording studio, and a lot of high powered recording equipment. Fortunately the people were all colleagues who were intrigued with the problem and who donated their time. Otherwise it would not have happened because the cost would have been prohibitively astronomical.

Here is the way it went. We would produce prospective sounds on the bases of theory, our ears and my experience. Then we would experiment with these sounds, using both groups and individuals. We had people hooked up and wired to all sorts of feedback and measuring paraphernalia to record the effects on them of our sounds. We had paper and pencil questionnaires and a pre- and post-treatment interview protocol. We employed an electromyograph (EMG) to measure muscle potentials and of course the standard electroencephalograph (EEG) to measure brain waves. We also monitored galvanic skin response (GSR), respiration rates and pulse rates.

Not everyone had to put up with all of these measures at every session, but there were still a lot of very good natured people who put up with a good deal of inconvenience for this project.

I would probe, test and measure until I had a ton of data. Then I would do all-nighters evaluating, massaging and just messing with the data. University SPSS statistics on the computer were a regular chore to evaluate the data (back then everything was done on punch cards). Then I would go back to the drawing board, so to speak, to improve the sounds.

If you have ever been involved in behavioral research I am sure this all sounds familiar.

The challenge was to come up with a stimulus that was conducive to the correct brain wave, on the one hand, but without running the risk of triggering epileptic seizures on the other. For instance, I originally thought blinking lights would be helpful in generating hypnotic states. And in fact they did prove to be beneficial when adjusted to the correct frequency and duration. But medical research has made it clear that it is unwise to subject epilepsy-prone people to blinking lights. Especially at the best frequencies for hypnosis. And since I would not be able to control for epilepsy-proneness at all times and whenever the sound was being used, I had to assume it was always a possibility, therefore anything that might create a problem had to be eliminated.

The theorizing, technical production and testing went on for a couple of years and was beginning to look like a lost cause. But just when things were looking bleakest I came up with a rhythmic sound that worked, and with a little tweaking it worked for just about everyone. Not evenly and equally for everyone, of course. Nothing is that universal except gravity. But, as we say in science, the effects were normally distributed across the population. It worked really, really well for a small percent of subjects; really well for about 67 percent of subjects, fairly well for about 15 percent of subjects, and not at all for about five percent. (Interestingly, most of those subjects for whom the rhythm did nothing reported that it also did not bother them. So, while it didn't help, it didn't create any problems, either.)

It is called the Psychosonic Rhythm™. Electronically generated, it is a "bimodal, intra-phasic" set of dual rhythms. It is effective enough to work at surprisingly low volumes.

The rhythm is a passive aid in that it masks all except the strongest of external noises. It is an active aid in that it helps generate a hypnosis-compatible brain wave frequency without triggering the sort of bifurcation resonance typical of seizures. (That "bifurcation resonance" bit is my phrase for something that is quite a bit more complicated, but this is good enough for now.)