Member-only story
OPTIMIZE ME
How to Hack Your Brain with Sound
Binaural beats may be able to entrain your brainwaves. That sounds more magical than it is.
Optimize Me is an Elemental column exploring (and fact-checking) the weirdest self-improvement trends. It comes out every Tuesday.
What if I told you there was something that could improve your focus and attention, alleviate pain and anxiety, and help you meditate and sleep better at night? And, best of all, it’s free, with virtually no side effects. Sounds too good to be true, but that’s the reputation of binaural beats, a seemingly magical tone that has been imbued with all of these benefits.
Binaural beats are actually an auditory illusion that occurs when you play two tones of similar but not identical frequencies, one in each ear (binaural means relating to both ears). The brain wants to reconcile the two sounds, so what you end up perceiving is actually a third tone that’s the difference between the two, an illusion produced in the brainstem. For example, if a 400 hertz (Hz) tone and a 410 Hz tone were played into your left and right ears, respectively, you would perceive a 10 Hz rhythmic pulse — the binaural beat. (To hear what binaural beats sound like, click here.)
Here’s where the seemingly magical part comes in: Activity in the brain starts to match the frequency of the binaural beat. In the example above, the brain would begin firing at 10 Hz. This process is called brainwave entrainment, and it’s one way people are trying to hack their brain state to achieve a desired mental state.
“The attractiveness of binaural beats (in theory) is that this tiny difference between the two tones is going to entrain our brains to work at a desired frequency,” says Miguel Garcia-Argibay, a scientist at Örebro University in Sweden who researches binaural beats.
The goal is that by getting your brain to fire at the desired rate, you’ll begin to embody the corresponding mental state.
The brain runs on electricity, and neurons fire at different rates and patterns depending on what they’re doing. Specific brainwave frequencies, typically measured…
