Brain wave recordings could relieve migraine, hypertension

Playing back the brain’s own abnormal electrical waves back to itself as sound waves can help those electrical wave sort themselves out, suggests new research from Wake Forest School of Medicine.

According to Live Science, the treatment is called HIRREM (high-resolution, relational, resonance-based, electroencephalic mirroring). It works by converting electrical signals from the brain into auditory signals and playing them back to the person in question. According to the research, the brain will recognize the sounds as coming from itself and work to regulate the waves, which can exercise effects on the brain and on the automatic nervous system.

That means the recalibrated brain waves can help correct malfunctioning systems in the body that rely on a properly working automatic nervous system. The most recent study to examine HIRREM found that listening to these waves helped improve blood pressure and heart rate variability in 10 people who received HIRREM treatment 18 times over the course of 10 days. And 52 other people self-reported improvements in migraine symptoms after nine days of 16 treatments.

According to Wake Forest, the method was developed by Brain State Technologies and Lee Gerdes. The treatment lasts between a 1.5 and two hours and plays recordings of electrical activity from six or seven positions in the brain at rest and performing a task.

“It appears that the brain quickly recognizes that the tones reflect what is going on in the brain at the time. By giving the brain a chance to listen to itself via this acoustic stimulation, it will, on its own, tend to self-optimize, usually resulting in electrical shifts towards improved balance and quieting,” a university information page explained.

The treatment could go on to have improving effects for several weeks after a series of treatments, according to Wake Forest.

However, the most recent study outlined in Live Science did not include a control group or placebo group to see if the HIRREM therapy was really the catalyst for the blood pressure and migraine changes in the participants or if there was another factor.