The Channel of The Brainwave (20-57) is one of the thirty-six channels of the Human Design bodygraph, a system originated in 1987 by Ra Uru Hu and described here as a modern esoteric framework rather than an ancient tradition. A channel is a defined pathway joining the Throat centre and the Spleen centre, and it is completed by two gates: Gate 20 ("The Present Moment") and Gate 57 ("Intuitive Clarity"), whose numbers come from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching. The channel idea and its Tree-of-Life-style pathways, the gates' I Ching numbering, and the centres' chakra roots were combined for the first time in the 1980s; the channel is part of that composite, presented as the system's own model, not as verified fact.
In the system's own account, the Throat centre carries communication and manifestation, the single centre through which every other centre's energy is turned into speech or action, and the Spleen centre carries instinctive awareness: intuition, bodily wellbeing and a sense of present moment safety; the channel is read as a direct circuit between those two functions whenever both gates are defined in the same chart.
The same two numbers appear elsewhere in this atlas as Gene Keys 20 and 57, Richard Rudd's later, contemplative reading of the identical hexagram pair. Gene Key 20 runs from the Shadow of Superficiality through the Gift of Self Assurance to the Siddhi of Presence; Gene Key 57 runs from Unease through Intuition to Clarity. Rudd's system drops the bodygraph and its channels entirely, so this particular pairing is a Human Design structure only, with no equivalent in his contemplative method.