How/why do binaural beats work?

Factual Questions
1

First, I’m not completely sold that they DO work - I think you largely have to invoke the placebo effect (if you convince yourself they will work, they will).

However, I downloaded the I-Doser program just to see what the hubbub was/is about and it gives you three free doses - including “alcohol.”

I’m not going to say I went into it completely unbiased, I wanted it to work because I thought it would be cool. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if it didn’t work, either.

Anyway, as I laid there, eyes shut, getting into a meditative, thoughts-free, listen past the sound zone, I noted I began to feel warm. At first it was like that goose-bump warm you feel. Then it kind of drifted into a normal warm, and most markedly, my face actually started to feel warm, though fairly briefly.

Lo and behold, I went online to read the supposed effects of “Alcohol” was and…a sense of warmness was one of them.

Oh, and another strange thing happened too. I got up to used the restroom after it was done, and as I was headed out I glanced up and caught myself in the mirror. Something seemed strange, I looked different. I looked like I got squished a little, like in funhouse mirrors where you get a little fatter and wider looking. I actually held my shirt against my stomach because it actually looked like I’d gained weight from the last time I looked at myself in the mirror four hours before.

Anyway, that’s just an experience I had. What’s the science/magic behind binaural beats? Is it all psychological? Did I convince my brain it was real, and therefore it thought it was real?

2

What are you talking about? Audio that’s supposed to induce physiological effects or something?

Stay away from the one entitled “Brown Note”.

3

The second sentence is basically what it is, yes.

4

Yeh, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s a bunch of BS, aimed at making a quick buck off of kids looking for a cheap, easy high.

Digital snake oil.

5

Cardboard, binaural beats have been used for many years by those of us who wish to explore various altered states of consciousness. I wasn’t aware of the I-doser program until you mentioned it, but I am not surprised that the technology is now being used for recreational purposes. Researchers use devices that record brain activity to observe and verify the effects of the beats. It is not new technology.
Here are a couple of links if you want to understand how the process works:

http://www.monroeinstitute.org/resources/what-are-binaural-beats
It can be used as an effective tool to improve the quality of meditations.

6

i don’t know how they work
but i like to listen:
https://www.youtube.com/user/directimpactshow/videos

7

Okay, I clicked on that link and got a bunch of YouTube videos from a guy named Paul Santisi.

I opened the one called “3D Sound Guided Meditation EXPECTATION 2 Enhanced What You Want Wants You Paul Santisi” - why, the very title though incomprehensible is oddly enticing in a palindromic sort of way.

If you listen, you will hear a bed of trancey synthesizer music, and Paul whispering things like “You will now expect - expect - expect - expect to attract all the things into your life at record speed - automatically!”, with his voice migrating from your left speaker to your right. Magic!

I can’t say for certain what the 3D aspect of this might be, other than a gimmicky use of the stereo field which is possibly enhanced by tweaking the delay between left and right channels a bit to give it that extra psychoacoustic punch. In any case, headphones recommended though not mandatory.

8

Quackery - https://skepticdetective.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/quantum-mind-power-system-will-not-help-you/

9

Cecil is doubtful:

10

Claims of various magical outcomes may be quackery, but there is an actual phenomenon here (the auditory artifacts themselves)

11

I can tell you how they are supposed to work. First off, the undisputed part: When you have two frequencies of sound that are close to each other, there is a pattern of beats that occurs that is equal to the difference between the two frequencies. This is just how sound works.

Binaural beats take this concept, but put each frequency in a different ear. Because your brain will combine what you hear from both ears, you get the beat phenomenon produced entirely in your brain.

The more questionable information is on how this supposedly affects you. It supposedly allows you to process beats that are occurring well below the lowest note we can hear. (I mostly agree with this.) If these beat frequencies correspond with certain brain wave frequencies, they are supposed to produce the mental states that are associated with those brain wave frequencies. The brain will match them. (This I find dubious.)

Some go even further and mix it with other woo like subliminal messaging or some type of mysical harmony whose name escapes me, where certain frequencies have mystical properties. This sort of stuff is obviously ridiculous.

12

Basically, if you’re looking for an interesting aural novelty, something that might help you relax or meditate, or some Trance-esque music, there you go.

If you’re looking for something to simulate what it’s like being on LSD, smoking a joint, drinking alcohol, or what it’s like to have ALS… it’s bunk.

13

That part is actually quite fascinating - the fact that interference patterns emerge inside the head in the same way they would out in the real world - because what’s mixing inside our heads is not sound, it’s some sort of representation of sound, but apparently still preserving some of its qualities as a physical wave.

14

One thing I’ve always wanted to try is to use this same effect with ultrahigh frequencies, to produce sound you can hear. If the two different frequencies are combined in the brain, I wonder where it would sound like it was coming from.

15

Apparently the Wiki article says the phenomenon only works on a limited range of low frequencies. Nothing above 1,000 Hz.

Not sure what the veracity of that is, since I haven’t tried experimenting with it.

16

I find this also really interesting - it suggests that maybe low frequency sounds are processed and perceived as a series of peaks, whereas maybe higher frequencies are preprocessed by a different bit of the nervous system.

17

Or perhaps the interference is too rapid for the brain to process as such?

18

Maybe. It’s just weird that the brain creates the interference at all.

19

Makes me wonder if such a thing is possible with the eyes/visual cortex. I’m thinking something along the lines of the double slit experiment, but not quite sure how you’d set that up.

20

Back in the day of vacuum tubes, when you tuned your radio to a station, as you neared the proper position on the dial, you would sometimes hear a high-pitched tone that decreased in pitch the closer you came to the station. This was called heterodyne (same energy?), and was caused by the interference of the broadcast carrier signal (say, 1000 kilocycles per second) and the band filter that the radio dial operated.

When the dial was tuned to 999 kcps, the difference between the broadcast signal and the filter was 1000 cps, or about two octaves above middle C. at 999.5, the difference was 500 cps, and so a lower pitched tone was heard. Eventually, the dial would be enough in synch with the broadcast signal that the data on the carrier signal (the program) would start to drown out the heterodyne and the pitch of the heterodyne would fall below the ability of the ear to hear. This applies only to AM (Amplitude Modulation).

(This was before cps was a more popular unit than Hz (Hertz) for frequency.)

Mixing two different frequencies causes two additional frequencies, the sum of the two original frequencies and the difference. Guitar players are familiar with this and use the lower frequency (difference) to help them tune their instrument – as the string being tuned starts to match the frequency of the target tone, beats can be heard, as the vibrations alternately reinforce (louder) and interfere (softer); the frequency of the beats allows the person tuning to match the frequencies by listening for faster (getting closer) or slower (getting farther) beats. When no beats can be distinguished, the frequency of the target string is within .5 Hz of the frequency to be matched – much closer, and the beats are too far apart to detect reliably by most people.

The mixture of radio waves and audio waves does the same thing, but the mixing of 1,000,000 Hz and 500 Hz waves creates 999,500 Hz and 1,000,500 Hz, which, now that I think about it, probably goes a long way to explain the heterodyne sound heard when tuning an old radio.

New circuits in modern radio tuners damp out the heterodyne sound, and many tuners only let you tune to specific frequencies – no stopping between 1000 KHz and 1100 KHz (AM) or 99.9 MHz and 100.1 MHz (FM).