The 1839 Discovery Behind Our Free Relaxation MP3

We put together an audio track you can download at no cost, and it really is free. The recording is built to coax your brainwaves toward a calmer, more settled state, something closer to how the mind feels during meditation.

The science behind it reaches back to 1839. A physicist named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, who served as a Fellow of the Royal Society and later directed the Prussian Meteorological Institute, was the first to describe a curious thing that happens when the ear is fed a particular kind of auditory signal. Feed each ear a slightly different tone and the brain registers a third sound that isn't physically present, a product of perception rather than the air itself.

Dove's observation sat as a scientific curiosity for more than a century. Between roughly the 1950s and the 1970s, people turned it into a usable audio method, and several groups have since claimed ownership of that later work. Credit for noticing the underlying effect, though, belongs to Dove.

The MP3 we're sharing applies that same principle. We shaped the stimulus specifically for mindfulness practice and relaxation, and we hope it's something you get real use out of.

If you want to read the research for yourself, try searching for terms like mindfulness and the psychological effects of brainwave entrainment, and look at what has been published on PubMed.gov.

A note on the formalities: these statements have not been reviewed or approved by the FDA, and nothing here is meant to diagnose or treat any disease.