Sound & The Analytical Mind
Psychology, Neuroscience & The Healing Power of Sound
By Anna Caldwell - Yoga, Sound Healing & Meditation Online and Mallorca, Spain
Many people tend to come to sound healing because their mind won’t slow. And yet, sometimes it goes deeper than that … in that there is a part of our mind that not only won’t relax, but also continuously tells us stories that we aren’t good enough. This part of our mind goes by many names …. the inner critic, self-doubt and so on. This is the aspect of the human mind that continuously evaluates our environment (in Kundalini Yoga, we call this the negative mind), replays conversations and worries about what may or may not happen. The field of psychology has studied this aspect of the human brain, and this blog is a brief dive into our analytical mind and how sound healing can help us quiet the inner critic.
The Default Mode Network
In neuroscience, this background hum has a name: the default mode network, or DMN. It is a web of interconnected brain regions, including what is called the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the angular gyrus, all of which activate when we are not focused on a specific external task. Scientists first noticed it by accident, when brain scans showed that certain regions became more active when participants were told to rest and do nothing. If you’ve ever attended a sound bath with a busy mind, maybe that last sentence sounds familiar ;)
The DMN is sometimes called the "resting state" of the brain, but resting is a little misleading. Left to its own devices, the DMN tends toward self-referential thinking, rumination, and what researchers call "mental time travel,” when our mind drifting into the past or the future, replaying old conversations, rehearsing ones that haven't happened yet …. in a major way, it is constantly constructing and reconstructing our sense of who we are and how we are doing in our lives.
This is the analytical mind and it is not our enemy and, in fact, it is extraordinarily important for our ability to solve problems, plan our lives, and for making sense of this crazy, crazy world! The problem begins when most of us live in this state nearly all of the time. This chronic overactivation of the DMN is associated with anxiety, overthinking, difficulty sleeping, and a persistent sense of being slightly outside of ourselves … present in body but somewhere else in mind.
….and what happens when we enter a sound bath in this state?
A sound bath works on the analytical mind in a way that few other practices can. The gong and crystal singing bowls (for starters) produce hundreds of frequencies simultaneously — a vast, layered, ever-shifting acoustic field that continues to evolve long after our brain hears the first sound. What I mean by this, is that there is no melody to follow, no rhythm to predict …. ie no structure for the brain to grasp a hold of the way it might with ordinary music that has a melody, beat and something the brain can get familiar with. Our mind that is accustomed to organizing, categorizing and anticipating finds nothing to predict so, eventually, the mind moves toward efficiency and energy conservation and simply gives up.
The harmonic complexity of these instruments is vast, unpredictable and constantly evolving. Unlike music with melody, rhythm and structure, the shifting overtones of a sound bath offer no pattern to follow, no story to track and no narrative to organize. The DMN, which thrives on prediction and self-referential thinking, finds no foothold. Evolution working for us!
Research into sound meditation and brainwave activity shows that during a sound bath, the brain begins to shift from beta waves (the fast, alert frequencies of ordinary waking consciousness) into alpha, and with deeper immersion, into theta. Alpha is the state of relaxed, open awareness and even creativity. Theta is the frontier between waking and sleep: our neural territory of deep rest, emotional integration, creative insight and what some traditions describe as inner knowing. It is where the body's own regenerative capacities become available. This last sentence “our body’s own regenerative capacities are awakened” gets thrown around a lot … at its core, we can think of it in terms of energy: our body has a certain amount of energy that it is using at any given moment. When we are digesting food, a massive amount of energy goes to that. When we are exercising, energy is going to that. When we are anxious and stressed, energy is used. So, when we relax fully in these lower brainwave states, our body simply has more energy to delegate to regeneration and rest.
What we feel in those moments during a sound bath is perhaps a sense of expansion, perhaps of time taking on a new feeling and, somehow, feeling more present to our bodies and the sound rather than the thoughts of the mind. This is our nervous system finding its way out of the noise and into the sound. The more we enter our practice of sound and deep listening, the more efficient our body becomes into entering these states.
Sound as a Technology for Stillness
Exploring the relaxation of the analytical mind, to me, is modern science’s way of explaining why sound has been used as both a sacred and as a health practice across cultures for thousands of years. It is a precise technology for shifting consciousness. Although ancient traditions may not have had the language of neuroscience, we understood at a fundamental level that certain sounds and vibrations, used in certain ways, could reliably guide our mind out of ordinary, busy activity and into a more spacious, receptive states.
What we now call the default mode network, they called the wandering mind or the monkey mind. What we now call theta, they called samadhi, or yoga nidra, or the hypnagogic threshold. So, the next time you lie down for a sound bath and feel the analytical mind begin to soften and release, know that you are experiencing the magic of one of the oldest technology we have, doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Go Deeper
If this is territory you want to explore further, not just as a listener but as a practitioner and student, I offer several ways to go deeper into this work. Begin deepening your relationship with sound as a daily practice through my online membership.
Additionally, I offer Sound Healing Trainings in Mallorca as immersive, embodied containers for those who want to understand sound from the inside out: the instruments, the science, the history, the art of holding space for others, and the practice of working with sound as a genuine healing modality. These trainings are for curious beginners and experienced practitioners alike.
If any of this calls to you, I would love to hear from you.
