[MUSIC PLAYING]
Is it possible that your brain has been conditioned
and habituated by you to view your outer reality in a very
limited way?
When you focus your attention on a daily basis
in this three-dimensional reality,
your brain naturally narrows its focus on everything material.
As you learned in the last episode,
this is called a conversion focus.
And it's the hormones of stress that amplify this process.
Is it possible there are other ways
to focus your attention to break the habit of how
you see the world?
And can you make your brain begin to work differently?
I'm your host, Dr. Joe Dispenza, and in the previous episode,
we went into great detail on the difference
between survival and creation.
In this episode, we're going to identify in a very simple way
the different types of brainwaves to show you
the skill of being able to consciously control
your own brainwaves.
[THEME MUSIC]
Let's start by understanding the different types of brainwaves.
When neurons fire in your brain, they
emit electromagnetic frequencies.
And science has been able to capture those frequencies
by using a technology called electroencephalographic
readings, or EEG readings.
We put on a cap on a person's head,
and there's these little electrodes.
And we use a gel that begins to couple the surface
of that electrode to the scalp.
And we hook up those electrodes to a computer
that begins to measure the different frequencies
in different compartments in different regions in the brain.
So then, let's talk about the different brainwaves.
The first type of brainwave is called beta brainwaves.
Think about your brain as an organ
that begins to create meaning and coherence
and order between what's going on in your outer world
and what's going on in your inner world.
Now, when you're conscious and you're awake
and your attention is on your outer environment
and you're aware of your body in space and time,
your brain has to gather and begin
to integrate all the different information through those five
different sensory pathways.
Everything you're listening to and hearing,
everything you're seeing, everything you're feeling,
everything you're smelling-- all of that information
has to be integrated by the brain.
And when the brain is active and conscious and you're aware,
your brainwaves go into what's called beta brainwave patterns.
Now, think about beta brainwave patterns as your attention
primarily on your outer environment.
So then, we've talked about the principle
of meditation and beginning to regulate and change
your brainwaves.
So is it possible, then, that you
can begin to change your brainwaves from beta brainwaves
to alpha brainwaves?
Well, back in the '60s and the '70s
when there was a lot of research done on biofeedback,
there were researchers at Princeton University that
spent an enormous amount of time trying
to change their brainwaves.
And over and over again they were
unable to change their brainwave patterns no matter
what they did.
Whether they chanted, whether they had positive affirmations,
whether they burnt incense, they did
all of these different types of things, relaxing their body,
nothing actually changed their brainwaves,
until one researcher was so tired that he finally
said, I give up.
And the moment he surrendered and he let go and he gave up,
he watched his brain right before his eyes move
from beta brainwave patterns to alpha brainwave patterns.
Think of alpha when your inner world starts becoming more real
than your outer world.
Now most people, when they're functioning in beta brainwave
patterns, they naturally shift to alpha brainwave patterns.
The brain pauses for a moment, and you
begin to think about what you're thinking about.
And in fact, when I do lectures around the world
and I'm watching people pay attention, they're relaxed,
their attention is on their outer environment,
they're exposed to the information
that I'm teaching them, then all of a sudden they stop
and they pause and then go like this.
And when they stop and they pause, all of a sudden
they're making their inner world more real than the outer world,
and they freeze that image in the brain,
and the brain begins to consolidate it neurologically.
So when you get into the meditative process
and you sit your body down and it's not eating,
it's not smelling, it's not tasting, it's not feeling,
it's not experiencing, you're not seeing, you're not hearing,
of course now you're starting to disconnect
from your outer environment.
And now your inner world starts becoming more real
than your outer world.
And in that state, brainwaves in your thinking brain
begin to slow down.
And when that occurs, you move into alpha brainwave patterns.
And alpha brainwave patterns are slower brainwave patterns.
Now, what's the significance of this?
When you begin to move into alpha from beta,
you're beginning to move beyond your analytical mind.
And now you're entering the operating system
where all those subconscious programs, habits, and behaviors
exist.
So then in alpha, we tend to no longer hear
the voice in our head that's talking to us,
and all of a sudden we start to see in pictures and images.
Think of alpha as the imaginary state.
Another way to think of alpha is when you're driving down
the freeway in your car.
Your brain is fixed in a state of trance.
You're in that state of alpha.
You have no idea how long you've been driving,
you have no idea who's been driving the car,
you have no attention on anything in your outer world.
You're imaging pictures in your mind,
and you have to move in the alpha in order to do that.
There's another brainwave state called theta brainwave state.
This is a hypnotic state.
This is a state of heightened suggestibility.
Suggestibility is your ability to accept, believe,
and surrender to information without any analysis.
So in theta, it's a very slow brainwave state.
And in a sense, the body is resting and semi-asleep,
and you're awake.
Or better said, you are conscious in your subconscious
mind.
When a person moves into theta, lights are out.
And the part of the brain that connects you
to everything known or familiar in your life--
the seat of the identity, the conscious mind,
the personality-- now has been suppressed.
And now consciousness or awareness
is moving out of the neocortex, and it's
beginning to move into the subconscious
centers of the brain.
Now, the next state is called delta brainwave states.
And in delta, think about delta as restorative sleep.
This is when your body is in a catatonic state,
and it's completely asleep.
And now there's very little activity
in your conscious mind.
The last state is called gamma brainwave patterns.
Now, you would think that gamma is
a faster frequency than beta.
And in a sense, it is.
But now, when you live by the hormones of stress,
the arousal of those stress hormones
drives the brain not into just a normal beta state
but a high beta state.
And if you look at gamma, there is an arousal that's
taking place in the brain.
But the arousal is not coming from some danger, some threat,
or some condition in your outer environment that's
evoking the stress hormones and causing emotions
like aggression or fear or sadness to occur.
In gamma, there is an arousal within the body.
Energy from the body begins to move up into the brain.
And when that happens, the brain moves
into a super-conscious or super-aware state.
So think about gamma as a super-aroused, super-conscious,
super-aware state, where your inner world tends
to become more real than your outer world.
I want you to just see the difference
between high beta brainwave patterns and gamma brainwave
patterns.
You can see that the waves of gamma
tend to be more compressed, and the frequency
tends to be a little bit faster.
Now, look at the left-hand side of this graph.
You see the numbers going from 0 all the way up to 100.
So delta brainwaves tend to be at a frequency that's
very slow in the neocortex--
0.5 to 4 cycles per second.
Theta brainwaves tend to be a little bit faster.
They're 4 to 8 cycles per second,
and as we keep increasing frequencies,
you can see that alpha brainwave patterns are about 8
to 13 cycles per second.
Now, in low-level beta, you can see
low level beta is about 13 to 15 cycles per second.
Mid-range beta is about 16 to 22 cycles per second.
Now, let's talk about this before we go any further.
Low-level beta is a healthy brainwave state.
In fact, when you're learning, you
should be in low-level beta.
Why?
Because there's no threat, there's no danger,
it's the perfect time to learn.
But if a professor came out while you
were learning and said, there's going
to be a quiz at the end of this teaching session
and you have to pass the quiz in order for you
to pass the course, all of a sudden the light bulb
in your brain would get a little bit brighter,
and it would put more energy in there,
and you would get more awake or more aroused.
When you're getting ready to do a lecture
or getting ready to do a speech, this kind of stress,
called eustress or good stress, gives you
a little bit more energy to be able to navigate
in your three-dimensional reality,
and the brain begins to perk up a little bit.
Now, take a look at high-level beta.
It's 22 to 50 cycles per second.
And high-level beta is more than two to three times
higher than low-level beta.
And in high-level beta, this is when your brain
is stuck in emergency mode.
And think about high beta like driving your sports car
on the freeway in first gear.
It's good for the short term, but once a person
gets stuck in this high beta state,
now they're living in severe anxiety, severe depression.
They're in a state where their brain is always aroused,
and they need something outside of them
to begin to sedate the body so they can begin to relax.
And this is a problem because living in high beta
is the arousal of the stress hormones.
And as we begin to shift our attention from one
person to another person to another thing to another place
to another time, the arousal of the brain because
of those stress hormones moving into a very high beta state
not only causes the high beta to happen,
but it causes the brain to begin to function very incoherently.
And people tend to narrow their focus on the danger.
And now they're enslaved to the laws of Newtonian physics,
where they have to rush to try to get
things to happen in their life.
And for a lot of people, their brains are stuck in high beta.
Now, take a look at gamma brainwave patterns.
You can see low gamma cycles are between 25 to 50 cycles
per second, and high gamma brainwave patterns,
they can go from 50 to 100 cycles per second.
And this is an arousal that's taking place in the brain,
and the arousal is producing emotions
like ecstasy, bliss, euphoria.
It's a whole different type of arousal.
So then, if the purpose of meditation
is to get beyond your analytical mind
and what separates your conscious mind
from your subconscious mind is your analytical mind, in order
for you to get beyond your analytical mind
and enter the subconscious mind where those automatic programs
exist, you're going to have to learn a formula or a way
to begin to slow your brainwaves down
from high-level beta to mid-range beta
to low-level beta.
And when you start slowing down into alpha brainwave patterns,
you've crossed past the analytical mind.
And now, as you begin to slow your brainwaves down even
further, you're in the subconscious part of the brain.
Now you can begin to make some significant measurable changes.
So then, let's review this.
We go from beta to alpha to theta to delta.
And think about beta and alpha being
the seat of your conscious mind, and alpha, theta, and delta
representing your subconscious mind.
And as you begin to slow down brain activity because you're
no longer analyzing and thinking with your neocortex,
then consciousness or your awareness or energy
naturally flows right out of the neocortex
right into your limbic brain, the seat
of your autonomic nervous system.
That's the part of your brain, remember,
that begins to control and regulate
all those automatic bodily functions.
In a sense, it's the part of the brain that's
giving you life, that has an agenda, to keep you
in balance, to keep you in homeostasis,
and it's very automatic.
So now you're in the very operating system
where you can begin to program your autonomic nervous system
to change its hormones, to begin to change the body's
function in some way.
And in a sense, you are conscious in your subconscious
mind.
Brain scans have shown that students
that know how to regulate and slow down their brainwaves,
they move into that low-level alpha and theta,
and all of a sudden they start to merge
with their autonomic nervous system.
And we call this getting beyond the self.
And when the conscious mind is merging with the subconscious
mind or you're beginning to connect
to your autonomic nervous system,
its job is to create order and balance.
And when you get beyond yourself,
get beyond everything known in your three-dimensional reality,
something magical happens.
When the autonomic nervous system begins to connect
and you're not activating those circuits,
you're not thinking and feeling in the same cycles,
all of a sudden it begins to organize or create coherence
in the neocortex, which has been fractured and subdivided
because of the hormones of stress.
So now, think about coherence as order, as cadence, as rhythm.
Things are working synchronized in an organized way.
Think of incoherence like a group of drummers
with no rhythm banging on the drums at the same time.
And the brain as well as the heart that
are influenced by the hormones of stress,
as they begin to function in a very disorganized way,
that incoherence is a very weak signal for the body.
Think about it like this.
If you went to a football game and something happened
favorable to the home team and everybody
was clapping at the same time and applauding,
that would be incoherence in the brain.
Now, normal coherence in the brain
would be like every 10th person in the stadium clapping
in rhythm, and that's normal or average for most human beings.
But when the brain and heart get highly organized,
highly integrated, highly synchronized,
imagine everybody in the stadium clapping
at the same time in rhythm.
Not only does it create order and coherence,
but it also increases the amount of energy
in the brain and heart.
And when there's more energy in the brain,
there's more energy in the heart,
there's a greater level of awareness about your body,
your environment, and time.
I want to show you the difference between coherence
and incoherence.
On the left image, where it says coherence,
you're looking at the top of their head.
Now, 19 different compartments of the brain
that are connected through electrodes,
and if all of those compartments are synchronized,
you'll see the valleys and the peaks all lined up,
and we'll call that order or coherence.
If different parts of the brain are lagging or behind or out
of order, then you'll see all of a sudden,
some of those valleys lining up with some of the peaks
and different compartments of the brain
are not communicating well with each other,
and we call that incoherence.
When we see a lot of blue when we're measuring coherence,
that means it has a low level of coherence in the brain.
If you don't see any blue and you see pink, that's normal.
And normal means average, what the average person experiences
in terms of coherence.
The red represents a high amount of order in the brain.
And red means there's a super level of coherence.
So now, this is a normal brain scan.
This is what we call a strip chart.
And we're measuring the 19 different parts of the brain.
That brainwave pattern is low-level beta brainwave
patterns.
Now, the person's sitting there, their eyes are open,
they're being their normal self.
We ask them to close their eyes, begin to open their awareness,
begin to open their focus from a convergent focus
to a divergent focus or a broad focus,
and in a matter of seconds, this is what we see.
Now, remember, coherence is orderliness.
And look how those waves are organized and stacked
equally on top of each other.
The brain is highly synchronized,
or phase synchronized in alpha brainwave states.
Here's another one.
Another person goes from a narrow focus to a broad focus,
and you can see the entire brain is coherently
in alpha brainwave state.
Here's another person who has global coherence.
They go from a narrow focus to a broad focus,
from a convergent focus to a divergent focus,
and you can see all of those different brainwaves
beautifully stacked on top of each other.
And we can say that the brain is highly integrated.
If you look at that arrow on the right side of the screen,
you can see that all of those peaks are lining up.
That means the entire brain is in an alpha coherent state.
In this slide, you're seeing someone
in phase synchronized coherent theta brainwave patterns.
The entire brain is synchronized into theta,
and they're in that hypnotic state,
they're in that suggestible state
where the lights are out in the thinking neocortex.
And when they slip into that theta brainwave state,
we can say that they're completely beyond themselves,
and they've dissociated from everything
known in their three-dimensional reality.
Our research, as well as other researchers at Princeton
University and around the world, have
found that if you can broaden your focus,
as you begin to open your awareness,
the act of taking your attention off of everything material
and putting your attention on nothing but space,
if reality is both a particle and a wave,
if it's matter and energy--
and there's an invisible field of energy called the quantum
field that exists beyond this space and time
that you can't experience with your senses
but can only experience with your awareness--
and that unified field, that invisible field
of frequency, that it is that very frequency that
connects everything material and organizes everything into form.
So then when you broaden your focus
and you take your attention off of matter,
you're putting your attention on that invisible field of energy,
whose signature is oneness, whose signature is order,
whose signature is greater and greater levels of wholeness.
The person is feeling so whole, so in love with life,
that it's impossible for them to want.
I mean, how can you want when you feel whole?
You feel like you have everything.
And so we've measured this on people.
In fact, we can actually predict when it's
going to happen to a person.
We start seeing more and more order taking place
in the brain, and all of a sudden we can say,
after a certain point, this person
is going to have a very transcendental moment.
And when we see those two hemispheres coming together,
when that person is connecting and they feel whole,
energy moves right into their heart.
And their heart starts beating very orderly and very
coherently.
The heart begins to produce an ambient magnetic field.
Now the field and the energy is beginning
to broaden from the body, and that energy is frequency.
And that frequency carries information.
And now the person feels connected to something greater.
And you can walk around and look at that person,
and you can see tears of joy rolling down
their face because they feel so whole, they feel so in love
with life that they feel connected to something greater,
that I call that the natural state of being.
So what does it mean, then, to get beyond the self?
If we're getting beyond the analytical mind
and cooling off brain activity that's associated to everything
familiar in our life, that means, then, in order for you
to get beyond yourself, you're going
to have to take your attention off of everything material
and known in this three-dimensional reality.
And our research shows that when you
go from a somebody to a nobody, from putting your attention
on some things to putting your attention on nothing, putting
your attention from somewhere to nowhere,
when you're putting your attention from some time
into no time, that is the moment you're
disconnecting from this three-dimensional reality.
And in a sense, we call that "getting beyond the self."
And now, at this elegant moment, you
are in the sweet spot of the generous present moment.
And we can say now you're at that perfect place
in the eternal now for you to begin to create
something new from the unknown.
Why?
Because if you have no attention on the predictable future
or the familiar past, if you have no attention on anything
material in your outer environment,
on no one or nothing or nowhere, and you've
gotten beyond your body, which has been conditioned
to be the mind, the only thing that you are in that moment
is pure consciousness.
And when you're pure consciousness dissociated
from everything material in your life,
now you're at the perfect place to create something new.
Now that I've shown you that there's a formula
and how you can create a more coherent, integrated,
synchronized brainwave state, I'd
like to show you that this process can affect your ability
to reprogram and change your own genetic destiny.
In the next episode, we're going to explore how you can become
your own genetic engineer.
I'm Dr. Joe Dispenza for "Rewired,"
and I hope to see you in the next episode, where
we go beyond the ordinary into the extraordinary.