Music is the world’s oldest audio entertainment medium. It plays a part in almost every culture around the world. In the U.S. alone, Americans listen to music for 32+ hours a week.
Many people listen it as entertainment. Some people listen to it for inspiration. Although, it isn’t limited to those purposes.
In fact, music is a great medium for meditation or even brain optimization. Several years ago, I learned about binaural beats and started to use it more in my life.
Although, one CEO believes that binaural beats are ineffective. He is Daniel Clark and runs the company, Brain.FM (a patented AI engine that creates music backed by scientific research to help listeners focus, relax, and sleep better).
After learning that the National Science Foundation funded Brain.FM, I wanted to know more about this interesting technology.
The Interview
Kallen: Why working in silence is not good for productivity?
Daniel: Sounds can be distracting, so silence must be good, right? Not so fast! Silence is extremely rare, and what seems at first like silence often isn’t.
This is because the brain is a change-detector, and distraction comes from unpredictable events, relative to context. So, in a quiet room, every pin drop registers in the brain as a significant event. In short, silence makes you ultra-sensitive to sounds around you!
Another reason not to work in silence is that motivation and mood can benefit greatly from music. Music can be used to steer you into a more productive state, not only by regulating your mood, but also by directly shaping neural activity across the brain.
Kallen: Why are binaural beats ineffective?
Daniel: The idea behind binaural beats is that if you put different signals in the two ears, these should interact in the brainstem to produce ‘beating’ (rapid intensity modulation), which causes neural populations to synchronize, thus changing behavior.
Rapid intensity modulation can indeed induce neural synchrony (sometimes called phase-locking or entrainment), but the ‘binaural’ aspect is not helpful.
Binaural beats produce weak or absent neural synchrony (Vernon et al. 2015), while acoustic modulation applied directly in each stereo channel (rather than arising from different signals to the two ears) has strong effects (Tierney & Krauss 2014) and is processed in the same brain regions (Pratt et al. 2010).
Brain.fm applies modulation in this way (rather than through binaural interaction) and we use many other audio features as well; for example our sleep music uses 3D spatialization to produce relaxing auditory motion (‘rocking’), and our focus music removes any sound events that would grab attention (‘salience reduction’).
Want to Go Further? Win a 1 Month Subscription of Brain.FM
Starting today, you can enter to win a Brain.FM 1 month subscription.
At the end of 30 days, we will select three random winners and Daniel Clark will contact each winner to redeem their 1 month Brain.FM subscription.
You can enter to win a 1 month subscription by going to my Contact page and send me an email with the subject title, I Want a Brain Tuneup!
Photo: Pixabay