How Andrew Reed Used Brainwave Entrainment to Overcome Severe Depression
- Kris Shankar
- Feb 10, 2022
- 5 min read
The first impression you get of Andrew Reed is of a bundle of energy. His voice is animated, his unruly, dark hair flies over his face, his hands gesticulate in the air. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Sirius Black, godfather to Harry Potter and the famed Prisoner of Azkaban. Azkaban is an island fortress in the middle of the North Sea, and by all accounts, a fearsome place. It is guarded by dementors, a phantom species who drive most of the prisoners to suicide by sucking all the positive emotions and happy memories out of them, leaving them with the unbearable weight of their darkest thoughts. The word on the street is that Rowling created the dementors after a time in which she, in her own words, “was severely, clinically depressed in the complete absence of any hope”.
As Andrew and I continue talking, I realize the resemblance to Sirius Black goes beyond the careless good looks they share in common. Andrew is a man with a dark past. By 2007, he had been through two divorces. He had been wiped out financially as a result of successive divorces and business partners who let him down. He was going through yet another physical breakdown. A talented guitarist and musician, he lost the use of his right arm in an accident. Physician errors exacerbated the problem. The worst came when he lost his son Roman to a tragic drowning accident late that year. Andrew was at a low point and for the first time in his life, contemplated suicide… “was life worth living?” As he puts it “the sun would never be bright again.”
That’s when things suddenly took a turn for the better. He discovered Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a psychotherapeutic treatment that enables healing from traumatic life experiences. Then, while watching TV one day, he came across an A&E documentary on the Monroe Institute.
The Institute is the brainchild of Robert Monroe(1915 — 1995), a radio broadcasting and cable TV executive who discovered that binaural beats, a well-known auditory phenomenon, could alter one’s state of consciousness. Binaural beats leverage a phenomenon known since the early 1800s whereby you can shift or entrain a person’s brainwave frequencies to a desired range by playing specific audio tones or frequencies in each ear. For instance, when you play a 500 Hz tone in one ear and a 508 Hz tone in the other, your brain generates an 8 Hz beat frequency (the difference between the two tones) internally, and your brainwaves start sympathetically shifting to the 8 Hz or Alpha range.
The non-profit Monroe Institute that Monroe ploughed his fortune into sits on 300 acres of land in rural Virginia. It offers programs such as the Gateway Experience that utilize carefully engineered sound tracks that leverage binaural beats to shift the brain to a state of hemispheric synchronization (Hemi-Sync®)between the left and right brain, promising “greater self-awareness, expanded compassion and out-of-body experiences (OBE)”. Whatever one might think about the latter, the US Army doesn’t seem to have had any reservations. Army Officers have trained in OBE at the institute in the 1970’s and 80’s, and the CIA dabbled extensively with “Remote Viewing” to spy on the Soviets.
For Andrew Reed, the week-long Monroe Institute Gateway program experience was a lifesaver. In a profoundly altered yet lucid state that advanced meditators and psychonauts will recognize, he had a numinous experience in which three things stood out:
he had tremendously reassuring encounters and conversations with his son Roman and others in his life who had passed
he became intensely aware of the interconnectedness of all things and that everything is alive, every rock, every tree, every person
he felt a deep upwelling of optimism and saw that his greatest work as a musician and businessman lay ahead of him
In the space of that week, Andrew was completely transformed. His depression has long been a thing of the past, something he shed at the Monroe Institute. If you are a little incredulous, consider this. In 1994, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal quoted the head of the Zen Buddhist temple in Vancouver British Columbia as saying that “Monroe Institute students can reach meditative states in a week that took me 30 years of sitting.” This isn’t as far fetched as it sounds. Sound has been used to alter consciousness for millennia, from ice age bone flutes to the mantras, hymns and chants of organized religions. The drone of the tanpura, an instrument commonly used in Indian classic music, leverages beat frequencies to put the listener into a trance-like state in the space of a one hour performance.
The mechanics by which sound frequencies, meditation or psychedelics effect effect psychological change are poorly understood. Our inner skeptic may balk at the notion of meeting departed souls, but the point is not the objective truth of these experiences — it is their therapeutic value and their capacity to heal and transform us profoundly that matter. No less than Daniel Goleman, corporate leadership guru and author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence that graces the book shelves of self-respecting executives worldwide, bemoans the fact that “western psychology and neuroscience have little to say about altered states of mind — whether induced by meditation, psychedelics or other means — that resonates with the experience of the person who undergoes them.”
Image: Andrew Reed Live at the US Cellular Center [2018]
Today, in the true spirit of left and right brain balance, Andrew runs two successful businesses — a technology company that provides business analytics to health care companies, and a music studio that partners closely with Universal Music. His own band, the aptly named Andrew Reed and The Liberation, is incorporating binaural beats into its music to transform the listening experience. As I listen to Andrew talking excitedly about it, I can’t help thinking about the potential application of the technology to deliver more immersive movies and video games, enhanced fitness devices and wellness applications, and of course, metaverse experiences.
Of course, mind-body wellness is the immediate opportunity. In recent conversations with Allyn Evans, Executive Director of the Monroe Institute, and Fie Jeppesen, HR @ Microsoft, I’ve floated the idea of piloting Monroe’s Expand mobile app to the Mindful Growth Community at Microsoft. In our current zeitgeist, a technological shortcut to Mindfulness is perhaps not only appropriate but inevitable.
“If all the world were right,
There’d be no monsters under my bed at night,
If all the world were right,
There’d be no shadows in my room at night”
Note: Andrew consented to my using his real name in this post. I’d like to thank him for sharing his deeply personal journey with me.
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