Audio Drugs for Your Brain?

You can alter your brainwaves by playing sounds of slightly different frequency in each ear.   Under the proper circumstances your brain stem will reconcile the difference by creating a rhythmic pulsing sound called a binaural beat. This is something you can actually hear but it is not really there.   Your brainwaves may change in response to this auditory hallucination.

There have been many claims made about the effects of binaural beats from reducing anxiety to improving creativity and even producing drug-like feelings of happiness or euphoria.  The hope that we can engineer a binaural beat experience, much like a drug, to create a specific brain boosting effect is very exciting.  The idea of an audio or digital drug has caught on and there is even one company, i-Doser Labs, that markets  binaural beats by the dose.  You can try free doses HERE for improving energy, mental focus, lucid dreaming or even building a superbrain.

The question is, do binaural beat products really improve the performance of our minds and brains?  Many people that use the products claim that they work. I have not been able to find many scientific or clinical studies on their effectiveness.   We will continue to explore this issue on the Next Brain Blog.

If you have experience with binaural beat products or know of empirical studies on their effectiveness please leave a comment.

Source:  Image of constructive interference pattern that creates binaural beat.