THE RECORD / SOUND AND STATE
Sound and state
What the documents say, and where they stop
There is a story that gets told a lot and almost always wrong: that the CIA proved binaural beats open altered states. The documents exist, they are declassified, and anyone can read them. This page reads them. It says what each one is, who wrote it, on what date, and what it does not say. At the end is the peer-reviewed literature — including the part that contradicts the most repeated claim of all.
5 CHAPTERS
1958 — 2023
12 SOURCES
CHECKED 07.09.2026
1958 — 1971
The man who wrote the book
Robert Monroe was a New York broadcasting executive. According to his own institute's leaflet — kept in the CIA file and declassified in 1998 — he began having experiences in 1958 that he described as leaving the physical body. He wrote a book about it: Journeys Out of the Body, published by Doubleday in 1971, with a second Anchor edition in 1977.
In the 1960s he turned to sound. The same leaflet gives the equipment progression: from rotating-disc circuit breakers to custom-built signal generators, reaching as many as sixteen patterns of sound mixed across stereo channels. That is where he began using binaural beats to produce what he called the frequency following response, or FFR.
The Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences was founded in 1971, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge in Virginia. The leaflet carries one line that is almost never quoted by the people who quote the rest: "We are not practicing psychotherapy."
Sources for this chapter:
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1970 — 1994
Three patents, and what each one claims
The patents are the most solid part of the record, because a patent says exactly what it claims and carries dates nobody disputes.
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US 3,884,218
Method of inducing and maintaining various stages of sleep in the human being
Filed 30 September 1970, granted 20 May 1975. Robert A. Monroe, assigned to Monroe Industries Inc. · source
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US 5,213,562
Method of inducing mental, emotional and physical states of consciousness, including specific mental activity, in human beings
Filed 25 April 1990, granted 25 May 1993. Robert A. Monroe, assigned to Interstate Industries Inc. · source
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US 5,356,368
Method of and apparatus for inducing desired states of consciousness
Filed 1 March 1991, granted 18 October 1994. Robert A. Monroe, assigned to Interstate Industries Inc. · source
A granted patent means the patent office accepted a description of a method as new and non-obvious. It does not mean the method does what the inventor says. Those are different things, and this is where most of the citations break.
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9 June 1983
The Army memorandum
This is the document that circulates everywhere as "the CIA report on Gateway". It is worth saying precisely what it is.
It is called Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process. It runs to 29 pages. The letterhead is Department of the Army, US Army Operational Group, US Army Intelligence and Security Command, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. It is addressed to that group's commander. It is signed by Wayne M. McDonnell, Lieutenant Colonel, Military Intelligence. It is dated 9 June 1983 and was released on 9 September 2003.
The text explains how it was made. The officer was tasked to assess the Gateway Experience in terms of its mechanics and practicality. He took the training himself. To explain it he reached for Itzhak Bentov's biomedical models, suggested by a physician who took the course with him, and then for reading on quantum mechanics. He writes that it proved "an extremely involved and difficult business".
It is therefore an internal memorandum from an officer to his commander, built out of personal experience and reading. It is not a CIA study, it carries no experimental data, it was not peer-reviewed, and it validates nothing. It sits in the CIA archive because the CIA kept the Army remote-viewing programme's papers — the collection is called STARGATE, and it is the same one that holds the institute's promotional leaflet.
What the document does describe accurately, without overreach, is the stated mechanism: two slightly different tones, one in each ear, and the FFR as the mechanism the Monroe Institute said it used to synchronise the hemispheres — "Hemi-Sync".
Sources for this chapter:
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September 1995
How it ended
The part that almost never makes it into the videos is the ending. In January 1995, following a Congressionally Directed Action, the CIA commissioned an external technical review covering twenty years of the programme.
The report came out on 22 September 1995, 178 pages, from the American Institutes for Research. The conclusion is written like this: "continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted."
Five days later, on 27 September, the CIA's Director of Research and Development wrote to the Executive Director with the final strategy. The recommendations are four: terminate remote-viewing operations, terminate the research, declassify the files and transfer them to the National Archives, and apply no resources to assessing foreign parapsychology.
It is because of that third recommendation that anyone can read the 1983 memorandum today. The documents that prove the story is real and the documents that prove it ended badly are exactly the same documents.
Sources for this chapter:
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1973 — 2023
What the literature shows
The phenomenon itself is not in dispute. Gerald Oster described it in Scientific American in October 1973: two close tones, one in each ear, and the listener hears a third tone pulsing at the difference between them. That happens, and it is measurable.
On effects, there is signal. A 2019 meta-analysis in Psychological Research pooled twenty-two studies and thirty-five effect sizes and found an overall medium, significant effect (g = 0.45) across memory, attention, anxiety and pain. A second meta-analysis, from 2023, restricted to memory and attention, pooled fifteen studies and found a near-moderate effect, with mixed results in the systematic review alongside it.
On why, the record is a good deal worse — and this is the part everyone skips. The explanation repeated everywhere is entrainment: the brain is said to start oscillating at the beat frequency. A 2023 systematic review in PLOS ONE went and looked at what the EEG studies say. Fourteen studies met the criteria. Five support the entrainment hypothesis. Eight contradict it. One was mixed.
So: the behavioural effect shows up in meta-analysis, and the mechanism everyone uses to explain it does not. A 2015 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry had already pointed at where the problem sits: stimulation parameters vary so much between studies that the findings contradict each other.
That is the honest position, and it is the one this site holds: something happens, it measures small, and nobody yet knows why.
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