Kris has spent her first seven years in a wheelchair, after oxygen deprivation at birth left her with a cortex “incurably shattered into islands of use”, as their neurologist told her parents, Jan and Karin.

Kris is ten minutes into her first 12-minute session on the Lotus Brainwave I machine when she lets out a strange wail. It’s eerie rather than chilling; not, you feel, one of pain so much as of anguished release. For 30 seconds, her tiny crooked back spasmodically arches out of her wheelchair and she howls.

“Bang on time!” whoops the Alphaarning instructor when she eventually relaxes. “I told you the reaction would come when she hit the green line.”

All seven of us in the training room look at one another, then at Kris, then back at each other. The Brainwave 1 is an optical-acoustical electroencephalographic brainwave entrainer – a brain machine. What we have just witnessed was brain surgery with light and sound. And this is just one of the things it does.

Here we have a technology that’s claimed to increase IQ by 10-30 points, that doubles or triples reading speed and teaches anyone to control their brain states with a precision that has previously required 15-20 years of mediation practice – all in a single five-day course. A technology that cures afflictions from dyslexia and autism to depression, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and even physical disorders. And that can also greatly improve sports performance, such as golf handicaps.

If even half the Institute’s claims are true, the Brainwave I system, coupled with the techniques of “Alphalearning,” amounts to at least a revolution in education and medicine, offering relief and empowerment to millions.

At best, it offers far more. As a species, we’re paddling out of the shallows and into the full Tsunami of an information explosion. In our personal and professional lives, as individuals and as a society, we are expected to know more, about more – and know it faster – than ever before. Change is accelerating.

As information is generated and distributed with increasing speed, the limiting factor has become our own brains. By any measure, the world can use being a little wiser, a little less stressed out. We are approaching an evolutionary bottleneck through which the Alphalearning system would appear to offer safe passage – one which several hundred senior executives of Fortune 500 companies have already taken advantage of during its six-year development.

But are half the claims true? Or all? Or none? And how can we decide? The search for answers involves a journey to “somewhere on the fringe between lunacy, philosophy, alternative medicine and science-that-no-one-quite-understands-yet,” as one executive who has done the course puts it.

Young Kris provides our first opportunity to stick our fingers in the wound. When she arrived at the Alphalearning office just an hour before, she was drooling, her head swaying uncontrollably as her eyes wandered unfocused in their sockets. All these symptoms have abated after the one session.

Relaxed – the opposite of how she normally is around strangers – her breathing is smoother, her arm and leg movements are more controlled and her spine has stretched out. “She’s unwinding like a coiled spiral,” is how her mother describes it. “It’s beautiful.”

The change is permanent and cumulative, assures the Alphalearning Institute. “With regular practice with the Lotus, she’ll continue to improve. We’ll have her using a computer herself in a few months.”

As for how a seven-year old disabled child came to be using the exact same equipment senior executives use to learn to read faster, a little background is necessary. But of one thing the Alphalearning Institute is adamant. “This is not a miracle; I’m not Christ. Nor is it just a machine, but a system. It can teach you how to wake up your brain, how to learn, to realise change is possible.”

Humans have been experimenting with what we now call trance technology for at least 65,000 years. That’s the date of the earliest remains indicating that people danced around the flames of a fire, creating a primitive stroboscope for observers. Bashing a log with a rock added sound, and there you have enough to alter consciousness. Witch doctors and shamans have used such knowledge ever since.

By 5,500 years ago, Tibetan Buddhist monks had refined the system into a spinning prayer wheel through which a candle flame flickered whilst a monk spoke into the user’s ear and another beat a drum. It was clear even then that lower frequencies of flashing light and drums caused people to sit calmer and learn better.

But no one knew what exactly was happening until around 100 years ago, when the British biologist Richard Caton discovered that the brain emitted electrical impulses. Around 1938, German doctor Hans Berger actually isolated a brainwave, the so-called alpha wave, with a frequency of around 7-10 Hertz (cycles per second).

Like Cade, he had to stick needles into his subjects heads to get a reading. Unlike Cade, Berger had an unlimited number of “white rats” to which no one cared what happened – Jews. Berger’s aim was to isolate the “learning wave”. The Nazis wanted to know how they could teach soldiers to use all their new military equipment more quickly, and do exactly what they were ordered to. Fortunately, Berger had no idea how to replicate the wave or teach soldiers how to generate it.

A demonstration of this comes during a special family training week at the Institute. Jos van Es was hit by a car two years ago while cycling. Ever since, his emotional balance has been out of sync. He has lost his senses of taste and smell, and his home and work life are suffering, along with the whole family. The four of them – Jos, his wife Marianne and children Nancy, 19, and Jurgen, 22 – are taught how the brain works and what damage means for each of them. Then they do the course. It’s a heavy, demanding week that has clearly been emotionally and philosophically trying for all – not least when the instructor removes a bioelectrical energy “cyst” from Jos on the fourth day by diffusing it through his own body. The “cyst” is a blockage in the conduits of the body’s electrical energy paths; long known to Chinese medicine as “chi’i”. The existence of these paths has recently been confirmed by Western neurologists.

And all four can now control their brain state – and see auras, another strange side effect of the course. They have all become convinced they are better equipped to deal with the strains of family life, and Jos’ senses of taste and smell are already returning.

But its very differentness is a problem for the Alphalearning system. It’s an eclectic mix of hard, soft and parascience, and eastern philosophy. Peter Selkirk, a senior executive at Raychem UK, says, “As the seniority of managers (at Raychem Belgium) taking the course rose, there were increasing concerns about its whole acceptance. How mainstream was it? Just how fringe did Raychem choose to go? “It’s another example of the fear you encounter of going beyond boundaries of science,” says Selkirk. “It’s not simple Luddism, but the fact is that it is very hard to distinguish between the charlatan and the innovator.” (N.B. Luddite: British political group believing that mechanisation would diminish employment and therefore aggressively opposes technical progress.)

Raychem UK took up the sponsorship reins and Selkirk did a course in early 1994. “I understand how they feel. However, I was keen and thrilled with the course.” Twenty people have now done the course in the UK. But it’s not a mainstream course, like sales skills for example. “This is one of Alphalearning’s frustrations, and it’s understandable,” says Selkirk. “Glasses and earphones make your brain better? It does take some swallowing.”

But Selkirk and his wife Cornelia have had no such doubts – not since their son Harry tried the Brainwave 1 workstation, an event that would change the whole direction of the Alphalearning Institute’s research ambitions.

In the summer of 1992, a 17-year old with mild paralysis in his right leg and right hand due to a fall at the age of three attended the course. As he received training on how to balance the brain at 7 Hz, he became nauseous for 15 seconds, then completely relaxed. At the end of the 12-minute session he was able to stand equally balanced on either foot and grip firmly with his right hand.

A number of other strange and beneficial “anomalies” occurred, and by word of mouth, parents began to bring their disabled children along. More than 60 have come to date. In February 1994, Harry Selkirk was just two – any fear of a placebo effect was removed. He was brought to a session in the UK, on the same day that a new batch of customised LEDs for the glasses arrived from Hewlett Packard. For some time, the Alphalearning had suspected that the frequency of light used – the same as the most intense light of a flame – would make a difference; that it would make changes permanent.

“We put him on the Lotus and there was an immediate improvement,” says Harry’s mother. A collapsed ankle for which his doctors had suggested remedial boots straightened out instantly. His drooling, which therapists had suggested excising part of his saliva gland, seemed more noticeable, but that too cleared up over the following months. “We needed to get a Lotus ourselves, and Harry now uses it three times a week.” Cornelia Selkirk now works with the system herself, with children, on a referral only basis. She is one of some 30 plus practitioners in 12 countries who have already begun working with Alphalearning.