Brainwaves and Holosync

Erik Lenderman opened the conversation by welcoming listeners to A Psychology of the Future, the online summit he hosts, and introduced his guest: Bill Harris, who runs Centerpointe Research Institute and built the Holosync program. Harris thanked him and said he was glad to take part. Lenderman then asked Harris to describe, for people who might not know his name, what Centerpointe and Holosync actually are and what his life's work has amounted to.

Harris admitted Holosync resists a quick summary. He built it out of two separate lines of research. The first came out of the 1970s, when scientists worked out which brainwave patterns meditators produce while they sit, and found that generating more of those patterns carries real benefits. Around the same time, and with no connection to that work, a researcher at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York put out a fairly obscure paper in a scientific journal. It described a property of the brain that let a person shift their brainwave patterns using particular combinations of pure sine wave tones. Sound, in other words.

A longtime meditator himself, Harris read that paper and connected the dots. If these were the brainwave signatures of meditation, and if sound could move the brain's patterns around, could sound push the brain into the states that meditation produced? He pointed out that the brain also has patterns tied to creativity and faster learning, along with ones nobody wants, like anxiety and depression.

So in 1985 he pulled together some equipment he had no idea how to operate and started experimenting. He described it as a mad-scientist setup in his basement with a few friends, all of them running these tones on their own brains. The results surprised him. The tones dropped them into genuinely deep meditation, and over a stretch of time the effects reached further than that: steadier emotions, clearer thinking, a range of other changes for the better.

Eventually people told him he ought to package the thing and sell it. Harris had no real business plans. By then, roughly four years into the tinkering, about 150 people across the United States and Europe were using it, and many of them pushed him to turn it into something structured that others could buy. His private hope at the time was modest, maybe thirty thousand dollars a year. What followed was far larger.

Harris mentioned sharing a stage with the Dalai Lama, speaking to the United Nations Values Caucus in 2003, and appearing alongside Stephen Covey and Jack Canfield, several of whom became friends. Then he circled back to the part he had skipped while talking about the technology. He grew up deeply unhappy and angry, hard to be around, and he drove plenty of people out of his life. At nineteen he only started meditating because someone told him flatly that he was a mess and needed to settle himself down. A type A personality, he stuck to the practice with discipline. He had been meditating for sixteen years by the time he came across that research.

Between the basement experiments and the company's founding in 1989, Harris watched himself change. His anger ebbed. The depression lifted. He stopped snapping at people. Acquaintances who ran into him at the grocery store, folks who used to call him intense, now told him he seemed mellow. The same shift showed up in the other 150 people using it. By the time of the interview, more than two million people across 193 countries had tried it.

What drew people in at first was the promise of meditating faster. Harris claimed the method makes meditation easy and lets a first-timer drop straight into the kind of state that normally takes thirty years of practice to reach, with no learning curve. Beyond that, he said, it speeds up the whole business of collecting meditation's benefits. He got into it because he was struggling and wanted help for himself; the profound effect on him and the informal group around him is what led him and one other man, no longer involved, to start a small company. From there it kept spreading. The roster of people who have endorsed it, doctors and therapists and thought leaders in the personal growth world, runs to something like twenty pages. None of it was planned. As he explained what was happening to users and how to get the most from it, he gradually came to be seen as a teacher rather than a businessman with a gadget.

Lenderman picked up on something Harris had said: that before Holosync his life felt like a wreck and he was emotionally reactive. He mentioned reading in Harris's book about going from roughly three thousand dollars a month to a thriving business, and asked what that was like.

It did not happen overnight, Harris said. He was generally good at whatever he set his mind to, graduated second in his high school class, and was sharp intellectually while being, in his words, emotionally stupid. He framed the problem in terms of the brain. His limbic system, what some people loosely call the reptilian brain, is the part that wants things immediately, makes snap judgments, and reacts on feeling. When that part is running the show, especially for someone carrying childhood trauma like his, you act in ways and sit with feelings you would rather not have.

Meditation generally, and Holosync in particular as he tells it, produces changes that let the prefrontal cortex keep watch over the emotional machinery underneath. Strong feelings still arise, but a part of you can step in and say that acting on them would be a bad idea, so you steer instead toward the outcomes you want for yourself and the people you love. The prefrontal cortex handles long-range planning, he noted, and tends to keep a person calmer by overriding the limbic system. Certain brainwave patterns are bound up in all of it, which was where the conversation was heading next.