I have written about it before… I have spoken about it and when I do so, I still get the odd ‘tut’ of disapproval like I am doing something wrong… When I first learned self-hypnosis many years ago before I qualififed as a hypnotherapist, as well as using self-hypnosis for my own professional and personal development, I decided to have some fun with it.

So I’d take myself into a really deep state of hypnosis, which many people find to be a joyful experience at the worst of times, I’d then pop on my very old school headphones that were plugged into an old record player and I’d play an old LP record of the War of the Worlds music whilst giving my mind instructions to entertain me in all manner of psychedelic imagery and uplifting emotional content, all with one brain stimulating aim… To get a hypnotic high.

It does seem that sometimes the very notion of feeling high, whether it is drugs, alcohol or simply self-created, does make some people tut, so heck, today’s blog entry is not for you tutters.

Richard Bandler has his 12 martinis anchor that he talked about on stage, what I refer to today is not massively different.

Despite the fact that there are medical marijuana dispensaries popping up all over the place in California and Colorado in the US, (have you seen the South park episode where Randy gets cancer on purpose just so that he can buy marijuana legally??!!) something that is proving just as popular is called i-doser (in the verb format, ithe process is called i-dosing).

Put simply, i-dosing is whereby a person attempts to achieve a “high” similar to a drug induced high by simply listening to specially-engineered sounds and music. And no it is quite different from the cheap looking back street corner shops marketing legal highs of seeds and salvia divinorum et al… Many profess that this new wave of “digital drug recordings” can simulate the euphoric effects of marijuana, anti-depressant prescription drugs, LSD, ecstasy, cocaine…

I wonder if Pete Doherty has had a go?

I-doser is really just an old drug in a new package though… And breathe easy all you people tutting at today’s subject matter, put your copy of the daily mail down for a moment and keep on reading – because it’s not really a drug at all! it is that thing that many a hypnotherapist or self-hypnotist has employed over the years – it is simply the use of binaural beats.

Way back in times when everything was made of wood and cost a groat … Well, in the early 1800s a man named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that if two constant tones were played at slightly different frequencies in each ear, it caused the listener to perceive the sound of a fast-paced beat.

He named this phenomenon binaural beats, and then went on to help launch centuries of legitimate research. These days that stuff is almost always subceded by some kind of money-grabbing pseudoscience… Which is a shame.

Now away from the field of hypnosis and self-hypnosis, binaural beats have been employed in therapeutic and clinical settings to research hearing and sleep cycles, as they induce various brain wave states, and also for treating anxiety… This stuff has some legitamacy.

Then that stuff is followed up with some stuff that many would consider dubious or spurious whereby claims are made stating that binaural beats increase dopamine and beta-endorphin production, enhance learning ability, improve sleep cycles, and of course, if you dare hang around in the moderately less clinical or therapeutic forums such as Twitter or Facebook, you’ll discover school kids, college and university students and the ilk all saying that “OMG dude, those beats get you like totally high, they are so kewl.”

You see, I am so street when I want to be. I know my market.  😉

There are also more grown-up uses of this; there are companies that create brain devices that offer up flashing images and binarual beats in an all-in-one headset and costs a bit more than just downloading the tracks teens are buying from i-dosing websites….

Still, I am guessing parents may well prefer i-dosing as a drug of choice than actual marijuana, ecstacy or LSD, no? I mean, is it really a drug at all?

My prediction is that in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be reading a lot more about this stuff and what people think in relation to it, the teenage culture, generation after generation is likely to remain obsessed with experimentation of all kinds… I still prefer what you can do with self-hypnosis and an old LP.

Anyway, I am off to record our latest audio programme due for release soon… It is a hypnotic combination of hypnotic language and binarual beats for the teenage market… Have a great day.