About Acoustic Bilateral Stimulation:"Brain Music" For Healing and Personal Growth
What is Acoustic Bilateral Stimulation (BLS)?
Auditory or acoustic bilateral stimulation (BLS) is the rhythmic alternation of sound back and forth across the left and right hemispheres of the brain, using headphones or ear buds. It is used by both healing professionals and the general public for a wide range of personal healing and growth purposes.
People use bilateral stimulation music (also known as acoustic or auditory bilateral stimulation, EMDR music or Brainspotting music) to be more creative, to improve positive thinking and overall emotional well-being, reduce unhealthy or limiting beliefs, promote productivity and performance...... basically to improve overall healthy mental and emotional responses to a wide range of troubling life issues.
How Does Bilateral Stimulation Work?
It is theorized that bilateral stimulation aids in building new neural pathways to improve many types of functioning.
It's All About the Neural Pathways
Although the brain is comprised of almost 100 billion neurons, it tends to use the same neural pathways over and over. This is true even if these pathways are not the best or even healthy connections to use for a particular situation. These deeply ingrained patterns of thinking and feeling become heavily reinforced through repeated use. This is the basis of the saying that "neurons that fire together wire together."
The problem is that many of these pathways are formed based upon past events or conclusions that occurred outside of conscious awareness or were formed under stressful situations. This can result in patterns of thoughts and emotions that no longer serve us well.
Bilateral stimulation seems to allow the brain's two hemispheres to "wake up" and relate/respond to each other in novel ways, leading to the creation of new neural pathways that lead people to fresh approaches and healthy solutions to problems that may have vexed them for years. This creates new possibilities for thinking and feeling that can lead to greater health, happiness and effectiveness.
Read What Others Say:
The author Laura Parnell summarized the effects of bilateral stimulation this way:
"Bilateral stimulation activates an accelerated processing effect that encourages an extraordinary free-associative process between the mind and body that causes thoughts, emotions, images, memories, body sensations, dreamlike fantasies and other aspects of perception to break out of their old patterns and move rapidly to new levels of self-awareness.”
This is why properly trained healthcare professionals use bilateral stimulation to help people heal from past painful events, feel better about themselves, build strong internal resources and enhance confidence.
Music Has Many Advantages
Over Other Forms of Bilateral Stimulation
Want Some Listening Guidelines? Here You Go!
Now that you've learned a little background information about acoustic bilateral stimulation you're ready to learn some basic and advanced listening suggestions. There is a LOT of information of the following pages, so take you time, come back often and have fun with the process of learning how to best use this musical "brain tool".
Music is a wonderful way to experience bilateral stimulation and has several advantages over eye movements. It starts with the fact that listening to music is effortless and fun. Music is a universal language that is processed by several areas of the brain associated with our overall emotional, cognitive and physical functioning. (Here is a slide presentation about auditory bilateral stimulation that explains this topic at greater depth.)
Multiple Levels of Bilateral Stimulation
Another advantage of auditory bilateral stimulation -- and one that is only available from Alternating Sounds LLC -- is that it allows for what is known as "multiple levels of bilateral strengths". This sounds complicated but it is actually a pretty simple concept that takes bilateral stimulation to a new and more profound level of effectiveness.
The most basic form of auditory bilateral stimulation is to simply pan the sound back and forth between the left and right channel at the same uniform "distance" between the two points (known as the "bilateral strength").
However, all music on the Alternating Sounds, LLC label provides various bilateral strength levels from different sound sources at the same time. For instance, a melody may have a wide bilateral arc while another sound is mixed about half that strength and a third sound travels just a few degrees either direction -- all at the same time. Experience shows that having multiple simultaneous bilateral strengths seems to prompt the brain to much deeper neural activation than a single strength is capable of providing.