Rebecca Barry: Plugging in and cheating at meditation

I've been conducting brain experiments. But no, that wasn't me on K Rd shouting "I am a golden god!" on Friday.

This is legal. I'm just not sure it should be.

It involves doing something I've never been good at - keeping the mind still and devoid of useless thoughts, the kind that come up, Flight of the Conchords-style, at important moments.

"Now before we check your references and talk money, what would you say your strengths are?"

"I am a golden god!"

My discovery is not that meditating is good. Which it is, especially if you have a tendency to think thoughts. It's that you can cheat at it.

By plugging your brain into a computer.

This might sound similar to the premise touted by famous inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who reckons we'll be able to download our personalities into computers by the year 2040. (Transcendent Man, a documentary about his life, premiered at this year's Tribeca Film Festival and gets a wider release next year. See www.transcendentman.com.)

I'm talking about the mysterious world of brain entrainment audio, a meditation tool readily available on CD, free to listen to on the plane, and commonly used in hypnotherapy sessions.

As those who have engaged with it will attest, you just plug a pair of stereo headphones into your machine, find a piece of meditation music on YouTube that doesn't remind you too much of the crushed velvet pants you wore in 1990 and try to sit cross-legged without popping a hip joint.

A few minutes later you will have tuned your mind to the vibration level of a Tibetan monk. This stuff is science-fiction come to life.

Called binaural beats, a phenomenon discovered in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, one sound frequency goes in one ear, a slightly different one in the other. The brain then attempts to compensate by creating a third pulse, one not unlike the wah-wah effect you get from hitting a low note on the piano.

The brainwaves automatically adjust to the speed of the pulse, and take you into your desired state: alpha (relaxation), theta (dream state, deep meditation) or if you can't afford a Red Bull, gamma (heightened perception). Now I know where the word "gammy" comes from, as in, "I'm feeling a bit gammy after K Rd on Friday. I am a golden god!"

The brain experiments had been going well until gamma.

Alpha, for instance, is a bit like eating dark chocolate in the bath - you come out of it feeling happy, warm and refreshed. It's good for refocusing.

Theta is interesting too, although not for amateurs, read the warnings as I plugged in after struggling to fall asleep one night.

Nor is it for those who prefer to feel their limbs. My mind seemed to unplug from the nervous system and move around of its own accord within a universe of pretty stars. An out-of-body experience? Well it would've been had someone not walked into the room and tapped me softly on the arm, which felt like being Tasered.

Lucky I don't have psychotic tendencies, I thought, as I cut my pyjamas into a pentagon and hopped into bed. This could be dangerous in the wrong hands.

But it was not until the experiment took a gamma twist that I began to question the accessibility of binaural beats.

"Like having five coffees!" read the testimonials. "Amazing insights!" One man even wrote, "Today I had two more instances of seeing clearly with my eyes closed."

Gamma is the least known of the brainwaves, probably because it's associated with high mental activity. It is said to increase the communication across the various parts of the brain, which is why artificially stimulating it sounded like a fine idea.

The initial rush was certainly energising - I could literally feel dormant pieces of grey matter coming to life all over my head. Most of my brain, in other words. Then the other promise came true - I did feel more motivated and alert.

After the gamma session, I had 10 minutes to spare so I vacuumed the house, mopped the walls, alphabetised the magazines, counted the rolled oats and wrote the sequel to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (The Dog Illusion, Why Labradoodles Are All in the Mind). Then I went for a walk feeling so anxious and panicky I thought a little girl was going to stab me with a Chupa Chup. It took another hour before I felt normal. You can find this enlightenment free on the internet.

I recommend you stick to alpha.