After all, what might be going on in the brain doesn’t necessarily translate to the way we act in a predictable manner. And beyond just looking at what happens in the brain, scientists still need to research the neurological connection between alleged behavioral changes and noises. “We still don’t know, for example, why certain parameters or frequencies are more prone to induce the effect,” he says. It’s not that binaural beats don’t have any potential for teaching us how our brain works, he says, but we need a whole lot more research before scientifically claiming that they’re the next big solution to increasing focus and decreasing anxiety.īhattacharya adds that there need to be more experimental approaches to seeing how entrainment actually works in the brain, like switching up the range of frequencies tested and gauging changes with or without background sound. “If you ask my personal opinion, this is a bit of a fad,” says Joydeep Bhattacharya, a psychology professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. And either way, neither of the beats caused any impact on cognitive performance or mood change. In Orozco Perez’s study, he and his colleagues found that while binaural beats do in fact condition our brains to sync up to a wavelength, monaural beats, which sound pretty much the same but don’t require headphones to get each ear to hear something different, do a better job anyway. But of course, hardly anything in neuroscience is as simple as that. So, theoretically, if we could “sync” our brains up with a certain wavelength of noise, maybe we could tap into different neural pathways and nudge our brains to meditate or memorize equations better. Tightly wound and fast-paced waves are associated with alertness and focus, while slower, more spaced-out waves are associated with relaxation and sleep. Our brains have certain electrical wavelengths for communicating thoughts, emotions, and so on. “In auditory research, we know you can synchronize your brain with any kind of stimulus.” “That’s true, but that’s nothing special.” Orozco Perez says.

What makes binaural beats interesting is their ability to synchronize, or entrain, your brain’s electrical response to adhere to a certain rhythm. For example, if your right ear is hearing 400 Hertz, and your left ear is hearing 410 Hertz, then your binaural beat comes in around 10 Hertz.

So while you hear a sort of rhythm between the two notes in binaural beats, your head is just creating a filler sound that bridges the difference between the two original sounds. This frequency mismatch creates a third tone that waxes and wanes in volume-but the catch is that the sound only exists in your brain. What happens is when you listen to two pure tones separated into each ear, the tiny difference causes a “frequency mismatch” as the sound travels to the auditory part of your brainstem, says Hector Orozco Perez, an author of a recent study on the mysterious beats. And as trendy as they are, the scientific community has known about them since the 1800s.īinaural beats, simply put, are an illusion. But much like everything else in the wellness world, there’s just not 100 percent consensus on how well they work or if they work at all. If listening to ethereal, almost otherworldly, sounds for a few minutes every day while you study and work could make your brain more creative and less prone to anxiety, wouldn’t we all do it? One such concept, binaural beats, has been touted by some to be a bit of a magic cure for handling stress. You'll need headphones for this possibly soothing sound experiment.

Binaural beats for focusing