Fans Give High Marks to Audiocassettes Aimed at Behavioral Changes

“Let this relaxation sink inward, let it sink inward, let it flow into your brain,” intones the soothing voice as a low-frequency tone resonates in the background.

“Feel it sinking inward easily and calmly until your entire brain feels more and more relaxed, more and more relaxed.”

Robert A. Monroe, founder and executive director of the Monroe Institute, is guiding his listener on a 30-minute journey to dreamland via an audiocassette tape called the Catnapper.

Brochure’s Claims

The tape, one of a series of Monroe’s Hemi-Sync recordings, “recharges and aids recovery from lost sleep or jet lag; relieves anxiety before exams, meetings and speaking,” according to a brochure.

The institute, tucked away in the Ragged Mountains between Charlottesville and Lynchburg, also sells tapes it says can improve concentration and memory, reduce stress, help break the smoking habit, improve one’s tennis or golf game or aid in recovery from major illness or surgery.

There are a number of companies that market audio-guidance systems, said Leslie J. France, director of the institute’s professional division, but those “don’t use the specific, carefully modulated frequencies that we do.”

Behind Monroe’s voice, each tape has a different audio tone the institute says manipulates brain waves to produce a desired behavior. The tapes “create an auditory environment in which people can relax very profoundly and have extremely focused attention,” France said.

Professionals ranging from a best-selling mystery writer to an orthopedic surgeon swear by the tapes, but a leading biofeedback and brain-wave authority says a person can achieve the same results without using Hemi-Sync.

“The danger is that it shortchanges people,” said Dr. Elmer E. Green of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan. “I have been telling everybody to burn the tapes and start depending on yourselves.”

The Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric center that studies human behavior, trains people “to help themselves instead of programming them,” Green said. “We want people to know power is centered in themselves, not in a procedure.”

Broadcasting Career

Monroe, 73, said his interest in using sound to influence behavior evolved from a long broadcasting career that included a top post at Mutual Broadcasting System and ownership of radio stations and a cable TV operation.

Monroe found that certain audio patterns can lead the brain into various states; he got a patent on the discovery in 1975. That finding led to a system of “binaural beats” in which separate signals are fed into each ear through stereo earphones to produce a synchronization of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, a focused and coherent state that Monroe called Hemi-Sync.

Brain synchronization happens naturally, but only for random, brief periods, Monroe said.

“Rhythmic tones similar to what he has on the tapes have been shown to produce a synchronizing effect on brain waves,” said Dr. Lester Fehmi, head of a behavioral clinic in Princeton, N.J. “You can produce a specific effect.”

Still, a Hemi-Sync user has to be receptive to get the maximum benefit, said F. Holmes Atwater, director of the institute’s brain-mapping project. “A Monroe tape will not work unless you want to cooperate with it. There’s a lot of psychology involved, but also physiological changes.”

Best-selling mystery novelist Phyllis A. Whitney uses the concentration tape to jump-start her imagination. “When I have a question that stumps me, I sit in a chair and turn on the tape. In a startlingly few seconds the scene comes. I use it again and again. It works. I get better ideas more quickly.”

James M. Thomas Jr., a clinical psychologist in Ponca City, Okla., has used Hemi-Sync tapes for two years as part of his work with delinquent adolescents.

“It has reduced violent behavior by one-half. I was very skeptical about this entire thing,” Thomas said. “I have found it to be a very helpful clinical tool. . . . I am convinced there is really something to it and not just a placebo effect.

“It’s real. It’s not mystical. But I sure don’t know what’s happening.”

Dr. Robert Roalfe, an anesthesiologist at Merritt Hospital in Oakland, has been using Monroe’s “emergency series” tapes for three years to help reduce pre-operative anxiety and post-operative pain.

“I have seen a number of cases where patients are extremely anxious before surgery, and within five minutes they are asleep or resting very comfortably. It probably reduces the amount of anesthesia and definitely reduces the amount of post-operative medication required,” said Roalfe, who emphasized that he does not use the tapes in lieu of anesthesia.

“I think we’re on the verge of seeing a tremendous number of cases in medicine where techniques that at the moment seem borderline in acceptability will become very acceptable,” he said.

Dr. Peter W. Kozicky, an orthopedic surgeon at St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pa., uses the emergency series tapes in the operating room during surgery and in the recovery room afterward. The patients wear the earphones in surgery to permit “positive suggestions throughout surgery” because Kozicky believes patients “are aware of what’s going on under anesthesia.”

Through electroencephalograms and brain-mapping, Kozicky said he has drawn a “clinical correlation to what Hemi-Sync claims are. It relaxes people.”

Dr. Michael M. Dullnig, a Sacramento psychiatrist, uses the tapes as part of a program of holistic therapy to fight depression among men infected with the AIDS virus and has found they “felt better, could sleep better.”

The advantage of Hemi-Sync “is there is no side effect to it. Medications very often have side effects that can be life-threatening,” Dullnig said.

Green believes Hemi-Sync reflects a society in which self-reliance and self-discipline are obsolete. “The trouble is if people develop confidence in a procedure and not in themselves, later on they will have to go to another procedure to correct another problem,” he said.

He also wants to know if the tapes’ effectiveness derives from the tones or from Monroe’s suggestions. “I’m saying, OK, the tapes work, but why?”