Neurotechnology · Chicago · Physician-founded
Brainwave Theory builds software that works with the brain's natural rhythms. Our platform, NeuroPrometrics, composes personalized audio-visual sessions that help the mind practice focus, calm, and deeper rest.
The idea
01 — LISTEN
Slower rhythms become prominent during sleep; faster rhythms support active attention and thought. Neuroscientists have measured these rhythms for nearly a century — they are as real, and as individual, as a heartbeat.
02 — ENTRAIN
Given a steady pulse of light or sound, the brain tends to fall in step — the same reflex that makes an audience clap in time. Entrainment uses that reflex deliberately, gently steering the mind toward the state you're after.
03 — ADAPT
NeuroPrometrics composes each session around you — your goal, your history, the hour of the day — and refines its approach as it learns what your mind responds to.
Fig. 01 — Interactive
Select a band to see how the brain changes key. These are the five frequency families an EEG can read from the surface of the scalp.
The resting idle of the waking brain — eyes closed, mind quiet, ready. Alpha rises when you relax and falls the instant you concentrate. It is the most studied rhythm in neuroscience, and the first one ever recorded.
Fig. 02 — Session Preview
A short preview of how a NeuroPrometrics session behaves. Choose a goal and begin. The field stays still while it is silent, so the motion you see is the sound itself, drawn from the audio in real time.
Gentle rhythmic sound and light. Not a medical device; it does not diagnose or treat. If you have epilepsy, a seizure disorder, or photosensitivity, talk to your physician before use.
Your Calm preview can be the starting point for your beta.
The platform · Private beta
01 · ENGINE
Precisely tuned binaural and isochronic audio, paired with real-time generative visuals rendered in your browser. Every session is composed, not looped.
02 · BASELINE
Short check-ins build a picture of how your mind keeps time — so sessions start from where you actually are, not from a template.
03 · PROGRESS
Clear, honest records of your practice over weeks and months — designed by a physician who believes data should inform, never flatter.
Membership opens with public beta. Three tiers — Reader, Researcher, Institutional — priced to be reasonable, not exclusive.
Preview the tiersThe founder
Robert W. Termanini, MD spent his career at the meeting point of medicine and the mind — and founded Brainwave Theory to make the science of brain rhythms useful to everyone, not just the lab. He is also a novelist; his debut, RetroVision, is currently on submission.
Meet the founderMembers
Annotated bibliographies, session-design notes, and our working papers — the reading room behind the platform. Opens to members at public beta.
Free · Public
Essays on rhythm, attention, and building in the open — written for intelligent readers, not specialists. Start with Why the brain keeps time.
Read the journalThe Science
Everything on this page is written for intelligent non-scientists. No jargon walls, no hand-waving — just what brain rhythms are, what entrainment does, and what the evidence honestly supports.
Your brain contains tens of billions of neurons, and they do not fire at random. Like musicians in an orchestra, large groups of them settle into a shared tempo — a rhythm an electroencephalogram (EEG) can pick up from the surface of the scalp as a wave. The tempo changes with what you're doing: slow when you sleep, quick when you concentrate, somewhere in between when you daydream.
This has been known since 1924, when the German psychiatrist Hans Berger recorded the first human EEG. What's changed since is our ability to work with these rhythms deliberately — not just measure them.
Entrainment describes the tendency of a rhythm to synchronize with a nearby, stronger rhythm — pendulum clocks on a shared wall eventually swing in time; a crowd's applause resolves into a single beat. Neurons show the same behavior. Give the brain a steady pulse of light or sound at a target frequency, and neural activity in the surrounding regions tends to shift toward it.
NeuroPrometrics uses two well-studied methods: isochronic tones (evenly spaced pulses of sound) and binaural beats (two tones, one per ear, whose difference in frequency the brain perceives as a rhythmic pulse) — layered with soft generative visuals that track the same tempo.
What the evidence supports — honestly
The physiological response — that rhythmic stimulation shifts EEG activity toward the stimulation frequency — is well replicated. What's less settled, and still an active area of research, is exactly how strongly and how consistently that shift translates into subjective outcomes like relaxation or sustained focus across different people.
NeuroPrometrics is a wellness and self-guided practice tool. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, or cure any condition. If you have epilepsy, a photosensitivity disorder, or another neurological condition, talk to your physician before trying any rhythmic light or sound protocol.
| Band | Frequency | Typical state |
|---|---|---|
| δ Delta | 0.5–4 Hz | Deep, dreamless sleep |
| θ Theta | 4–8 Hz | Drowsiness, deep meditation |
| α Alpha | 8–12 Hz | Relaxed wakefulness |
| β Beta | 12–30 Hz | Active thinking, focus |
| γ Gamma | 30–100 Hz | Perceptual binding, insight |
Questions worth asking
No. Neurofeedback reads your live brain activity and reflects it back to you. NeuroPrometrics works in the other direction — it plays a rhythm and invites your brain to follow it. Some future tiers may incorporate feedback; today's platform does not require any hardware.
Headphones, yes — binaural beats require separating the two tones between ears. No EEG headset or other hardware is required to begin.
Brainwave Theory was founded by Robert W. Termanini, MD, a physician and neuroscientist. Read more on the About page.
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Physician. Neuroscientist. Novelist. Founder of Brainwave Theory, built on the conviction that the science of the mind's rhythms belongs to everyone, not only to the lab.
The physician
Dr. Termanini's medical career put him in direct, daily contact with a question that never quite left him: why do some minds settle so easily, and others not at all? That question outlasted any single patient encounter, and eventually became a second body of work.
The neuroscientist
Brainwave Theory began as research notes — a physician's private study of the entrainment literature, chasing the line between what is proven and what is merely promising. NeuroPrometrics is what happens when that research is finally built into something a person without a science background can actually use.
The novelist
Alongside his scientific work, Dr. Termanini writes fiction. His debut novel, RetroVision, is currently on submission with literary agents.
Medicine taught me to be exact. Fiction taught me to be honest about what I don't know. Brainwave Theory only works if it's both.— Robert W. Termanini, MD
The company
We say what the research supports and no more — including where it's uncertain.
Good science shouldn't require a science degree to benefit from it.
Membership tiers are priced to be accessible, not to signal luxury.
Our mission
To translate the rigor of neuroscience into tools ordinary people can trust, afford, and actually use.
Members-only
Annotated bibliographies, protocol notes, and working papers on entrainment — the reading room behind the platform. Full access opens with public beta.
Whitepaper 01
A survey of forty-one peer-reviewed studies on rhythmic auditory stimulation and measured EEG response, graded for methodological strength. The bibliography weighs replication quality against effect size, and flags where the literature is thinner than the marketing.
Protocol note 04
Internal design notes on tempo ramps, visual pairing, and session length for evening use. Covers the descent curve from beta toward alpha and theta, and why the last two minutes matter more than the first ten.
Whitepaper 02
An evidence grading of beta-range binaural protocols against standard attention-task benchmarks. Where the signal is real, where it is noise, and how much of the reported benefit survives a well-controlled trial.
Member sign-in
Coming with public beta. Sign-in will use your beta access email.
Membership — opening with public beta
Reader
$— /mo, TBD
Researcher
$— /mo, TBD
Institutional
Contact us
Final pricing has not been set. Payments are not yet enabled — the platform is in private beta.
The Journal — free, public
Written for intelligent readers, not specialists — by the founder, occasionally with guests.
An introduction to neural oscillations, and why "brainwave" is one of the rare pieces of pop science that undersells the real phenomenon.
Why Brainwave Theory chose a small private beta over a fast public launch, and what we're learning from the cohort so far.
On separating what entrainment research actually shows from what the wellness industry wants it to show.
Every brain, at every moment, is doing two things at once: processing whatever is directly in front of it, and keeping a kind of internal beat. Neuroscientists call that beat an oscillation — a rhythmic rise and fall of electrical activity across networks of neurons, visible on an EEG as a wave.
The word "brainwave" has drifted into pop culture as shorthand for a sudden idea, which undersells what's actually happening. These rhythms are structural. They organize how neurons communicate, when memories consolidate, and how attention shifts from one thing to the next. A brain with no rhythm at all wouldn't be calm — it would be in crisis.
What's changed recently isn't the discovery of these rhythms — Hans Berger recorded the first human EEG in 1924 — but our ability to interact with them on purpose, using nothing more exotic than patterned light and sound. That's the premise NeuroPrometrics is built on.
— R. W. Termanini, MD
It would have been easy to launch NeuroPrometrics eighteen months ago, in whatever state it was in then, and call it a product. We didn't, and the reason is almost embarrassingly simple: it wasn't good enough, and we could tell.
A small private beta lets us watch how real people actually use a session — where they stop early, what times of day they return, which protocols they quietly stop using. That's harder to learn from a spec document than from a cohort of a few hundred people who agreed to be patient with us.
Charter members receive preferred pricing and more input into what ships next. Everyone else gets a platform that's actually ready when it opens. We think that trade is a fair one.
— R. W. Termanini, MD
Wellness technology has an honesty problem, and brainwave entrainment sits squarely inside it. The physiological claim — that rhythmic stimulation shifts measurable EEG activity toward the stimulation frequency — is genuinely well supported. The behavioral claim that follows from it, in far too much marketing copy, is not.
As a physician, the instinct to reach for the strongest possible claim is one I've had to actively resist, in medicine and in this company. The honest version of this field is more modest and more interesting: rhythmic stimulation reliably does something to the brain; what it reliably does for any one person's focus, sleep, or mood is still being worked out study by study.
We would rather be the company that says that plainly and earns trust slowly than the one that promises a cure and loses it fast.
— R. W. Termanini, MD
Contact & Press
For press, partnerships, research collaboration, and literary inquiries regarding RetroVision.
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Legal
Effective date: July 12, 2026.
By accessing this website or joining the NeuroPrometrics private beta waitlist, you agree to these Terms & Conditions. If you do not agree, please do not use the site.
NeuroPrometrics is currently in private beta and is not available to the general public. Features, pricing, and availability described on this site are subject to change before public launch.
Brainwave Theory and NeuroPrometrics are wellness tools. Nothing on this site constitutes medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Consult a physician before use if you have epilepsy, photosensitivity, or any neurological condition.
Original text, graphics, software, page design, and original commentary on this site are owned by or licensed to BrainWaveTheory Corporation and may not be reproduced without permission. Third-party research and cited materials remain the property of their respective owners. NeuroPrometrics and related brand names are claimed or protected to the extent provided by applicable law.
Membership tiers and pricing will be finalized at public launch. Waitlist signup creates no financial obligation. Charter-member pricing, where offered, will be honored as described at the time of signup.
BrainWaveTheory Corporation provides this site and its beta program "as is," without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent permitted by law.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, USA.
Questions about these terms can be sent to neuroprolabs@brainwavetheory.com.
Legal
Effective date: July 12, 2026.
When you join our waitlist or contact us, we collect only what you provide: your name, email address, and message. We do not sell this information.
We use your information solely to respond to you, notify you about beta access, and — if you opt in — send occasional updates about Brainwave Theory.
Once NeuroPrometrics is publicly available, any session or usage data you generate will be treated as sensitive information and never sold or shared with advertisers.
This site may use local browser storage to remember functional preferences, such as your selected display theme. We do not use third-party advertising trackers.
You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data at any time by emailing neuroprolabs@brainwavetheory.com.
We will update this policy as the platform develops and will note the effective date above.
Questions about this policy can be sent to neuroprolabs@brainwavetheory.com.