Do Binaural Beats Work?

"Subliminal Suggestions Do they work ?"

They work to separate fools from their money.

They say that if the word "sex" is flashed within movies, people will think of it. Definitely works for teenagers, at least. Woo hoo! Goes straight to the little brain, anyway....

Oh, hogwash. That's just a way for resexarchers to fund their expensexive studies while resexpectable studies are allowed to...er...what was I saying?

And the book is even better than the movie!

No sound can go directly to the brain, it is first received by the internal ear, and inside the little spiral bone is converted to electrical impulses, which then travel thru a nerve to the corresponding center of the brain.

The beats are produced by two sounds of similar frequencies, and can be heard by a single ear, the rate of the beats is equal to frequency #1 minus frequency #2.

It is used to tune music instruments (or if variable, to find the resonant frequency of a structure and then armagedon it).

Yahlasit

To be more serious about this, I don't yet know if two separate tones, one in each ear, can be summed to produce beats. This summation can occur in air before arriving at the ears, which is what we familiarly hear.

Sound emanating from speakers seems (to me at least) to come from them or the space between. Sound from headphones seems to come from within my head, and this perception is maybe even more pronounced with earbuds. But I don't know how to set up say a 100-Hz tone in one ear and 130-Hz in the other to see if I can perceive a 30-Hz beat. (I'm not too good at hearing them, anyway--sometimes yes, sometimes no.)

I knew someone would be able to explain the question.

so i suppose the next question is what does the brain do with the 3rd sound ie the beat, does the fact that the brain is concentrating on perceiving the sounds mean that conscious thought is excluded from the process and thus the process by passes th conscious part of the process ?

subliminal stuff, ie messages on the screen that appear so fast that the conscious bit doesn't see it. I believe it has been known about for years and was banned as a means of advertising

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=subliminal+sugestion&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8&rlz=1I7GPCK_enGB411&redir_esc=&ei=zL8iTc_pGsSwhQeVkrG3Dg

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=subliminal+sugestion+banned+in+adverising&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8&rlz=1I7GPCK_enGB411&redir_esc=&ei=fcAiTfPZLYOzhAea8ai3Dg

Video of experiment

http://concen.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=19949

In this study, they used binaural beats, and concluded:

• It should be noted that group A (which received alpha-frequency binaural beats) did not differ significantly in treatment alpha production from Group D (which received artificially produced surf sounds). It cannot be concluded from this data that the increase in alpha for Group A was due to a frequency-following response.

I doubt that there is a difference between binaural beats and similar-sounding amplitude variations (which is what the surf sounds would be). I imagine that the beats we hear via speakers could be recorded in mono, played to one or both ears, and the results would be the same as results for binaural beats. In other words, whether the beat is created in air or in the brain stem makes no difference, I'd guess, and this study seems to support that guess.

(The counter argument might be that with binaural beats the brain is, to some extent, actively engaged in creating the beat, whereas in the mono case, the beat is already created externally and the brain is simply responding to an external amplitude variation.)

Epilepsy attacks can be triggered by flashing lights at near alpha frequency (10 Hz). It seems clear that stimulation at this frequency has effects on the brain. But I wonder if the binaural beat has been compared directly with monaural beats (or even single tones modulated by a 10 Hz sine wave driving the gain.) The light variations that appear to affect alpha waves are not produced via beat frequencies.

Monaural vs binaural: I think the point of the binaural technique is simply a method to generate infrasound frequencies (ie below 20 hz) - of interest because these are the normal signalling frequencies in the brain. There's a nice animated graphic of 'beats' somewhere showing the superposition effects of two waves.

Without the 'difference' beat technique, you can't generate much infrasound without humungous gear.

I think the point of the binaural technique is simply a method to generate infrasound frequencies (ie below 20 hz) - of interest because these are the normal signalling frequencies in the brain.

Consider this. I can vary the volume (by finger) on an analog amplifier at about 7 times per second. (This would be more easily done with the volume of the amplifier being controlled by an 7Hz oscillator, of course.) Doing so, when reproducing a 103.5 Hz signal gives me the same aural experience as listening to two tones, 100Hz and 107Hz, beating. A light could be modulated in the same way with a dimmer switch. We wouldn't, I think, describe the light modulation as infralight. The sound beat is similarly not infrasound.

Infrasound is by definition (almost) the stuff you can't hear because the frequency is below 20 Hz. (As wikipedia says: Twenty Hz is considered the normal low frequency limit of human hearing. When pure sine waves are reproduced under ideal conditions and at very high volume, a human listener will be able to identify tones as low as 12 Hz.^[15] Below 10 Hz it is possible to perceive the single cycles of the sound, along with a sensation of pressure at the eardrums.)

The beats (unlike infrasound) are easily heard at even at very low volume levels, because they are audible frequencies (100 Hz etc) varying in amplitude at low rates. In a beat, the sound (100Hz) comes and goes. In infrasound the sound is there continuously, and a 12 Hz infrasound tone can be heard as sound (as a very low tone) if the amplitude is sky high... but one can hear beats easily at very low sound pressure levels.

A 7 Hz sine wave is inaudible (and is infrasound). A 7 Hz beat frequency (between 100 HZ and 107 Hz) is a volume variation in an audible signal of 103.5 Hz. It is not infrasound, and can be heard for that reason. Beats can be heard in guitar and piano tuning, and by feeding speakers with different tones. A dual tone generator can feed : 1. stereo speakers, 2. a mono speaker (in which the sound is mixed electronically), 3. stereo headphones, and 4. one headphone to which both electronic signals are fed. It is heard, because the fundamental sound frequency is audible.

So... if creating beat frequencies can be done in any number of ways, then what is special about binaural, as opposed to simply listening through the air. Maybe: If the brain is viewed as a poor sound conductor, then the beat frequency "heard" in the binaural case is a beating of brain electrical signals, not beats in air pressure. (Confounding this is the fact that the brain signals are not electric analogs of the pressure variations, if I recall.) In generating the perception of a beat, perhaps the brain is involved in ways that it is not if the beat exist in air.

"Infrasound is by definition (almost) the stuff you can't hear..."

In my opinion, "infrasound" is a useful search term for anyone interested in the biological effects and significance of frequencies below 20 hz.

What you can or can't hear is somewhat subjective and varies from person to person. The binaural technique makes infrasound "beats" (= beats below 20 hz) audible - or produces the auditory illusion that they are audible.

What I wonder, seeing that infrasound is ideal for long distance communication in the animal kingdom... does this mean that human brains (but not ears) are wired for long distance communication? and... is there an evolutionary advantage to being nauseated by the speech of a wooly mammoth?

What you can or can't hear is somewhat subjective and varies from person to person. The binaural technique makes infrasound "beats" (= beats below 20 hz) audible - or produces the auditory illusion that they are audible.

It is not an illusion. The beats are audible when produced by any of the methods I mentioned above. My PC generates tones with its dual channel tone generator (several of which are available for free) and I can (and have) listened to such beats for absurdly long periods, looking at oscilloscope traces all the while. (Gotta get a life, obviously.)

You don't need such equipment, however. Take a guitar and tune the low E string correctly to 82.4 Hz. Tune the A string to F (87.3) (a half tone up). Then play the two together. You hear a distinct 5Hz beat. At the volume level at which you can pluck guitar strings, you cannot hear infrasound at 5Hz. What you are hearing is a volume fluctuation in an audible sound.

The wave form of infrasound is a sine wave.

The wave form of a beat is a sine wave of easily audible frequency (in this case about 85 Hz) modulated at a much slower rate (in this case about 5Hz).

This drawing, crudely modified from a Wikipedia drawing shows the difference.

In the upper case there is one sine wave at (we'll say) 5Hz. Infrasound. Inaudible without extremely high amplitude -- and even then, sensed as a tremor, not a sound of identifiable pitch. Can cause a wall to move perceptibly (visually) and can be felt but not heard. Well say the peak to peak amplitude is 5 units, and if we could hear this sound we would say it has a constant volume or amplitude.

The lower wave is a beat. The red lines are not sound vibrations, they are simply the envelope of the sine wave. (They don't exist on an oscilloscope trace.) The sine wave in this case (if we say the upper wave is 5Hz) has a frequency of about 33 Hz (so the two frequencies producing this beat would be 31.5 and 35.5) and its peak-to-peak amplitude changes with time, from about 5 units to 0 units. There is no infrasound in the lower waveform, because nothing is vibrating at 5 Hz. The walls in the room would not vibrate, because 33 Hz is to high to cause them to resonate. (One of the lower strings on a piano would, however, resonate, but the amplitude envelope would be much more nearly constant... because 1/5 of a second is too short a time for a piano string to be damped.) The sound would be sensed as being pulsed -- it comes and goes, and where the red lines cross there is silence.

The only perceptible difference between the binaural technique (in which one pitch goes to one ear and the other pitch goes to the other) and any of the alternatives in which the mixing is done outside the ears, (by whatever means) is that the relative silence between beats is less pronounced when listening binaurally (in other words, the red lines above would not cross.)

Whether or not beats and infrasound have the same effect on the subconscious, I can't say. The physical effect on the ears is completely different: in one case, the ear drum is vibrating at a high frequency and amplitude changes at a slow rate (the beat rate). In the other case, the drum is vibrating at a very slow rate (and the feeling is like changing altitude rapidly up and down -- the nerves are those that sense pain rather than sound -- the auditory nerve hairs must resonate for the nerve to fire). In the second case, there would be no expectation that any auditory nerves are firing, and there would be no expectation of much activity at the brain end of the auditory nerves.

I think that it is unlikely that the subconscious effects could be the same. In one case, there are many nerve firings per second, that relate to an audible pitch (in an amazingly complicated way: nerves cannot, for example, fire and refire fast enough to keep up with even simple sounds like a sine wave). In the other case there should be very few to no auditory nerve impulses, but some number of skin and muscle feedback pulses related to slowly changing pressure. Off hand, I don't know the firing rate of skin nerves. A glance at this article suggests that the rate is 200-400 spikes per second for certain skin pressure cells at changes of pressure, slowing dramatically for constant pressure.

No one knows how the ear to brain system really works. The audio systems we use for sound recording and reproduction are orders of magnitude simpler, it seems. I studied and experimented with visual perception in college, but did nothing with hearing. In both cases, I think the designer could have made things much simpler.

My recently published novel, above, did not even touch on animal communication.

I can't go on longer, other than to say that our dog will occasionally whine at high pitch, and I wondered, tonight while waking him, if dogs can communicate at the high pitches we know they can hear. Maybe they are emitting high pitches we cannot hear more frequently than we think. Or not.

Here's a thought...

Since the universe, in it's essence (atomic level AND sense level) is vibratory -- or at least can be described in those terms, such as SHM, etc. -- it is not beyond the realm of imagination that certain sounds or mixtures of sounds might have an effect on the brain. Now, do the folks at the link you provided have any solid knowledge of how this might work? I don't know but I doubt it.

Why does music exert such a powerful influence on us? Let someone play some "good" music with a dance beat or rhythm and you'll find people literally want to start snapping their fingers, or tapping their toes, at the least... if not downright getting up to dance around. Also, consider the strong emotions that can be evoked by music. Some say we, also, are vibratory in nature and that is why we respond so to music.

There is a spiritual teaching that explains this. According to this theory, the whole of creation (from purely spiritual planes down to the gross physical plane) is created and sustained by a vibratory current that can be contacted via suprasensory faculties that we all possess but don't know about unless someone teaches us about them. These faculties are "inner hearing" and "inner seeing." With these, the "inner" planes and creation can be "seen" and "heard." The current that creates all of this is hidden, behind it all, so to speak, so that even when one operates through these faculties (either after death or through meditation), all one generally experiences is higher, more beautiful versions -- and more conscious -- of the physical world. Thus the heavens and hells that are mentioned in various metaphysical writings. But if a competent teacher finds you (and it is always that way, even if it appears the other way around) and connects you with this primal Sound Current, you can follow it through the lessening densities to it's original source -- God or whatever term you wish to apply. This is termed "knowing God." A competent teacher is one who, first knows about this hidden current, and can also make it audible to you in meditation. So much of New Age stuff (as indicated at the link you mention) is about Astral Projection, Lucid Dreaming, etc. Like taking a drug trip, nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

I'm sorry to write this and then probably not post much anymore in this thread. My life and schedule currently only permit sporadic posts in threads such as this.