Auditory Bilateral Stimulation For Healing and Personal Growth
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Bilateral stimulation involves rhythmic alternation of stimulation between the left and right hemispheres. It can take visual, tactile, or auditory forms. Auditory bilateral stimulation using music may help resolve trauma, enhance resources, reduce symptoms, and improve brain functioning by activating accelerated processing and the reconsolidation period. Benefits include its receptiveness, ability to access varying strengths, utilize music properties, and access pre-verbal encoding.
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Auditory Bilateral Stimulation For Healing and Personal Growth
- 1. Therapeutic Benefits of Auditory Bilateral Stimulation Presented by George Herring Alternating Sounds, LLC www.AlternatingSounds.com
- 2. Bilateral Stimulation (BLS) is any rhythmic alternation of stimulation between the left and right hemispheres.
- 3. There Are Several Forms of BLS, Each With Therapeutic Applications • Visual/Eyes (Example: EMDR) • Tactile/Skin (Example:“Tapping”) • Auditory/Ears (Example: Brainspotting)
- 4. “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.” - Laurel Parnell, “Tapping In: A Step-by-Step Guide to Activating Your Healing Resources Through Bilateral Stimulation”
- 5. Trauma Resolution BLS has historically been used to desensitize and reprocess trauma-based encoding and enhance ego-state integration.
- 6. Resource Enhancement BLS is increasingly used to potentiate adaptive thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories and associations.
- 7. Potential BLS Goals • Resolve recent and remote trauma • Enhance executive functioning • Encode adaptive and affirming thoughts, feelings and beliefs • Enhance creativity by strengthening new neural connections • Reduce psychosomatic symptoms
- 8. Hemispheric Differentiation Logical Abstract Analytical Creative Verbal Visual Sequential Holistic Linear Intuitive Details Big Picture Knowledge Beliefs Strategies Possibilities Mathematical Philosophical Scientific Spiritual Reality/Facts Fantasy/Imagination Language-based memory Perceptual/symbolic memory
- 9. Characteristics of BLS • More neurological than mental “reflexive” rather than “reflective” brain-based rather than mind-based • Activation is both “bottom-up” (extraction of neural information) and “top-down” (integration of neural information) • 5-6 hour reconsolidation period
- 10. BLS Is A Like Optimizing A Hard Drive • Defragmentation: integrates scattered (dissociated) information • File cleaning: removes unnecessary artifacts (“orphan files”) • Debugging: identifies and removes “programming errors” • Virus removal: identifies and removes corrupting code Result: improved “software” functioning, especially background processes
- 11. Theoretical Mechanisms of Action • Dual attention theory • Orienting response • Reciprocal inhibition • Reconsolidation process
- 12. Special Benefits of Auditory BLS
- 13. Music Processing is Distributed Throughout the Brain and Involves Nearly Every Neural Subsystem From “This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin Frontal Cortex Processes musical structure, expectations and meaning
- 14. Music Adds To Potential Benefits of BLS • Attending to musical structure requires both halves of the brain. • Music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward and emotion.
- 15. Benefits of Auditory BLS • Receptive process: no active effort needed • Allows simultaneous application of multiple degrees of BLS strength (next slide) • Allows much greater variety of input • Utilizes inherent benefits of music • Capable of accessing pre-verbal neural encoding of experience • Music serves role of “safe place”
- 16. Multiple BLS Strengths |<- - 10% - ->| |<- - - - - - - - 50% - - - - - - - ->| |< - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 100% - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > |
- 17. Tips for Auditory BLS • Sound should be at lowest audible level – The cycling, not volume, is important – Too loud can cause distraction or disequilibrium – Can increase volume as desired • Eyes open or closed ok • Standing, sitting, lying down, walking all ok. No driving!
- 18. Further Reading • “Tapping In: A Step By Step Guide to Activating Your Hidden Resources Through Bilateral Stimulation”, by Laura Parnell • “Brainspotting: The RevolutionaryTherapy for Rapid and Effective Change”, by David Grand
- 19. For more information and suggestions about using auditory bilateral stimulation, including the opportunity to personally experience innovative bilateral stimulation music designed to enhance emotional well-being, improve insight, cultivate creativity and promote overall personal growth, please go to: www.AlternatingSounds.com
Editor's Notes
- Bilateral stimulation seems to support a wide range of positive functions. People have used bilateral stimulation to enhance creativity, promote positive thought patterns, increase emotional resilience, lessen unhealthy or limiting beliefs, sharpen overall cognitive skills, reduce stress levels, minimize distractions, promote productivity, relieve certain types of physical distress, and improve a wide range of troubling life issues. People can use bilateral stimulation music to prepare for situations in which they need to be at their best: alert, calm, clear-headed, confident, creative, emotionally balanced, optimistic, resilient....just to name a few desirable qualities. Bilateral stimulation is an essential component of EMDR, Brainspotting and several other protocols that are known for bringing about rapid improvements in how people think and feel about themselves and their lives. This will be discussed later in this presentation.
- Visual bilateral stimulation involves moving the eyes back and forth along a horizontal plane. It is often done by following a finger, pointer or other means of helping the eyes to move smoothly back and forth from left to right, generally for a period of 20 seconds or longer. Tactile bilateral stimulation involves the use of touch that alternates between the left and right side of the body. Common forms of self-tapping include tapping your finger on the outside of each knee while seated. Another form is the “butterfly hug”, achieved by criss-crossing your arms and resting your hands on the opposite shoulders, then rhythmically tapping each shoulder back and forth several times with your finger or palm.. Auditory bilateral stimulation requires the use of headphones or earbuds to focus attention on a sound source that alternates back and forth between the left and right channel.
- With proper guidance from a trained professional bilateral stimulation music can be used to improve a wide range of troubling symptoms that are often the result of deeply embedded trauma or other insufficiently processed life experiences and which are typically out of reach of the cognitive and language capacity of the conscious mind. Auditory bilateral stimulation is sometimes used in EMDR and often in advanced therapy techniques such as David Grand's Brainspotting and the Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM) pioneered by Lisa Schwartz.
- The brain is comprised of close to 100 billion neurons that are capable of connecting with each other in an almost infinite number of ways. And yet, despite all this potential for neural diversity, most people use the same neural pathways over and over and over whether or not they are the best connections to use! There's a saying that "neurons that fire together, wire together": deeply ingrained patterns of thinking, feeling and acting become heavily reinforced through repeated use, usually based upon conclusions initially reached outside of conscious awareness or intent. But there is a vast land outside of these well-traveled narrow paths. Your entire physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and relational experience (both past and present) is potentially available to you the moment your synapses can build bridges to them. Bilateral stimulation is a way to expand and navigate across new neural pathways to access these greater riches of your true being.
- The “left brain/right brain” distinctions are not as cleanly divided as this, and there is some evidence that this is more typical of right-handed people, but it does seem to reflect the varying functions that each hemisphere performs exceptionally well. Obviously, the ideal state is an integrated “latticework” of mutually inter-connected functioning. Bilateral stimulation seems to serve the function of bringing these two hemispheres into a coordinated whole. In part this seems to be served by reducing the activation of the amygdala, which otherwise constricts bi-hemispheric functioning, perhaps as a primitive survival mechanism.
- This slide references the mechanism of bilateral stimulation as being a process that directly influences portions of the cerebellum and midbrain, rather than the cortex or “thinking” brain. This is why the process is considered more “reflexive” (since the reactions are occur unconsciously, like a reflex) rather than “reflective” (when you reflect on something you are thinking more from the front part of your brain.) Make no mistake, bilateral stimulation definitely helps many people reflect in powerful ways on significant events and meanings in their lives. This reflection, however, is a consequence of the deeper neurological activation rather than the cause of it. This is why bilateral stimulation is considered to be more neurological or “brain-based” rather than cognitive or “mind-based”. The actions starts at the bottom and works its way up rather than starting at the top and working its way down. Auditory bilateral stimulation seems to have a lot of “staying power”: the effects can last five or six hours, which is why people can continue to experience benefits through the day after an effective bilaterally enhanced experience.
- It’s hard to pay simultaneous attention to two sources of stimuli. So one theory holds that the distraction of bilateral input is a form of altered perception or awareness, which allows different synaptic connections to develop. Novelty fosters diversity. By continually shifting from one side to the other, the brain can’t fixate and must continually be in a process of renegotiating its relation to the stimuli. This contributes to a continuing process of existential engagement with experience from a variety of positions and relationships, the so-called orienting response. Reciprocal inhibition is a form of systematic desensitization, weakening the link between a stimulus and its anxiety: the bilateral stimulation is simultaneously an anxiety-producing stimulus and a response that diminishes anxiety by down-regulating the amygdala the stimulus may cause less anxiety Reconsolidation is a process by which incoming information modifies established memories: again, the bilateral stimulation seems to serve to intensify reconsolidation by bringing together the resources of each hemisphere as previously established.
- One reason why auditory stimulation has effects that exceed visual or tactile is that the source itself (sound) can be maximized for greatest effect. IN other words, when moving the eyes back and forth (visual bilateral stimulation), you aren’t really looking at anything in particular. With tactile bilateral stimulation there is a very limited range of stimulation variety. But auditory bilateral stimulation is able to use the immense power of music to effect thoughts, moods, memories, sensations and associations. In addition, listening is a receptive process: there is nothing to “do”. Eyes must be willed to move, but you don’t have to do anything special to hear.
- Not all auditory bilateral stimulation is the same. In the bilateral “soundscapes” offered by Alternating Sounds (see last slide), several different strengths of bilateral cycling occur simultaneous. For instance, in one song the music may go all the way across the left and right spectrum, while a stream may alternate just halfway from one side to the other and a birdsong may just touch lightly in either side of the center channel. This provides the equivalent of three different levels of bilateral stimulation at once.