The art of meditation has been practiced by man for thousands of years. Buddhists, Occultists, Gnostics, Mystics, and trippers have been exploring behind the veil of waking consciousness since before the days of JC. The idea being that a still mind is a better mind, meaning improved creativity, focus, and ability to sleep - among other things.

For many, there isn’t even enough time in the day to read a book, let alone become an adept at mental relaxation. Fortunately, for the hard-of-time there is the Binaural Beats application for the iPhone, which claims to be the quickest and easiest way to achieve Zen - and all without moving to Tibet, or renouncing your material possessions.

The science behind binaural beats is as follows: by listening to two conflicting tones your brain will generate a beat, a phenomenon known as frequency following response, which lowers your brain wave activity to that of a trance, sleep, or mediative state.

You have to listen to binaural beats on headphones, it will not work if played through speakers, as all external sound needs to be eradicated for it to work effectively. We found that ear buds were most effective during testing as headphones allowed outside sounds to spill in and interfere with the sounds, which obviously hinders the effectiveness of the application.

The Binaural Beats application has seven settings - pre-sleep induction, headache killer, quick relaxation, study aid, deep meditation, memory helper, and busy thinking. All of which are displayed in the apps main menu. Once you’ve selected which one you want, you set a time for the duration of the session, then lie back and enjoy.

During testing we found that the Binaural Beats application certainly encouraged deep relaxation. After about ten minutes of listening to the ‘Deep Meditation’ setting we found that our body had become more or less numb and mental images began to present themselves as we hovered just above the sleep state.

It is quite a bizarre sensation, but one that we really enjoyed, particularly since you get to experience your thought patterns becoming more and more abstract as you go deeper into the meditative state.

Interestingly, one of the settings claims to get rid of your head ache. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the opportunity to test out the validity of this claim as we couldn’t, for the life of us, muster a headache during testing. Additionally, the setting that promises to expand your memory is also rather questionable as there is no real way of testing the validity of it without constructing a series of ongoing tests, which we didn’t really have time to do.

Nevertheless, there is an option to construct your own binaural beat, which is a nice little aspect of the application. In this feature you set the level of background noise, what additional ambient noises you require, and which type of binaural beat you want - dream creation, deep meditation, memory helper, relaxation etc.

Overall, this is a very useful application, especially for those who are interested in anything to do with altered states of consciousness. While there has been a lot of research done on the subject, binaural beats are hardly a mainstream phenomenon. That said, they’re definitely effective at inducing states of both relaxation and sleep, and for this reason we’d definitely encourage anyone with a passing interest in this sort of thing to give it a go.