'Better living through electrochemistry'

[Bruno]

Prediction: This will be all the rage in a few years as a "legal high" competing and consorting with bath salts and legal weed.

It will be known as "Jacking On" in reference to that Futurama episode.

You know the one.

[hirley0]

Prediction: You know the one.  http://gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs7/2791264_o.gif

http://gifsoup.com/
actually i don't the reason i quoted was so i could copy / PASTE the above
3:23-25 pdT i think i have a U tube Account | its been many years ago so i 4get 3:28

[hirley0]

Prediction:

My guess 4Apple 8+ decades {4score&7
IBM maybe 5 , HP 11, Google never:

[Juana]

Possibly. I'd like all the white noise to go away, myself.

I would worry about its impact on my creativity. On the other hand, I've had some pretty strong 5th circuit experiences without external devices, and they are /excellent/. I wouldn't want to be that way all the time, but just use it as a reset button. Maybe that's what this is all really good for.

And if you reset your computer all the time nothing gets done.

I can see that, and true. I'm pretty much all white noise, though, which makes it hard to concentrate on anything.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

I'd try it and then when it wore off I'd be crushed like a bug under a garbage truck's tire. But while it was on, I'd finally conquer the world like I've always wanted and edit those eleven god damn novels and set things on fire to my heart's content.

Ten bucks says it leads to pagans wanting to use it to commune with their inner Divine and/or try to train their 'psychic abilities'.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I'd try it and then when it wore off I'd be crushed like a bug under a garbage truck's tire. But while it was on, I'd finally conquer the world like I've always wanted and edit those eleven god damn novels and set things on fire to my heart's content.

Ten bucks says it leads to pagans wanting to use it to commune with their inner Divine and/or try to train their 'psychic abilities'.

That, and the idiots who try to DIY with extension cords and the like should be popping up on the news in the next year or two. Then you'll have a faction screaming that THIS IS HAZARDOUS AND SHOULD BE OUTLAWED.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

I'd try it and then when it wore off I'd be crushed like a bug under a garbage truck's tire. But while it was on, I'd finally conquer the world like I've always wanted and edit those eleven god damn novels and set things on fire to my heart's content.

Ten bucks says it leads to pagans wanting to use it to commune with their inner Divine and/or try to train their 'psychic abilities'.

That, and the idiots who try to DIY with extension cords and the like should be popping up on the news in the next year or two. Then you'll have a faction screaming that THIS IS HAZARDOUS AND SHOULD BE OUTLAWED.

WE'RE 2 STOPIT NOTA HURT OURSELFS! SAFE US FRUM US!!! OUTLAW ELEKTRISITY!
     \

[Bruno]

I saw a kid whut dun made theyselfs a battery frum a potatoe fore skoole!


THINK UV TEH CHILDRUNZ!!

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I saw a kid whut dun made theyselfs a battery frum a potatoe fore skoole!


THINK UV TEH CHILDRUNZ!!

IF YOR CAR ANTENNA BREAKS OFF YOU STICK A TATER ONNIT AND IT WERKS GUD.

OUTLAW TATERS!

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Is there yet any science backing up the effectiveness of listening to binaural beats? I seem to recall it was kind of iffy last time we discussed it and Wikipedia is all "hypothetical", "reportedly" and "alleged" about its "claimed" effects.

I was under the impression that it was generally accepted, until someone called me on it (about six months ago, give or take six months) and I was unable to find a single study that confirmed (or even tested) it. This shouldn't be the case, clearly, given that home EEG machines are cheap now and binaural entrainment isn't complicated. I'm considering scoring one of those, so I can test on myself informally and double-blind (some automated mechanism choosing entrainment frequencies) and report the results if I do -- however, I suspect much of it is placebic (which is a-ok with me, since I'm not shelling out for iDoser or whatever).

Regarding the OP... I know a guy who has done something similar (or was doing something similar three or four years ago) and who knows (or thinks he knows) neurophysiology fairly well. If there's actually coherent theory behind this, he'll know, so I'll ask him.

[Triple Zero]

Still, I don't see why the following method would not be more effective:

Finally, I wondered why you'd have to make binaural beats, and not just a series of short sound pulses repeating at the right frequency. Would be a much clearer signal, as binaural beats are pretty subtle--in fact they initially got attention because of the fact people could perceive them at all. Turns out this pulse method is also used and it's called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochronic_tones and there's also Monaural Beats, which is just amplitude modulation.

I mean, why produce the desired frequencies implicitly via a psychoacoustic quirk, if you can make them explicit with a series of sound pulses?

#1. sound pulses are probably less pleasant to listen to, and you can apply binaural beats to pretty much any sound.
#2. it's more "interesting" if they're produced by a "special effect" psychoacoustic phenomenon.
#3. if it's mostly placebo, it doesn't matter if they're explicit or implicit and might even be a stronger placebo effect due to #2.

But if there's a strong non-placebo effect, then I expect isochronic tones or monaural beats to produce it stronger.

If you need any help generating particular types of modulated waveforms and/or coloured noise, let me know. I got quite some experience synthesizing sounds with code and algorithms. A Python script could output a WAV, if it doesn't need to be realtime. I also think I got a pretty good idea of how to process an arbitrary mono source waveform into a stereo version with binaural beats.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I accidentally posted about my new EEG machine in the 'tech journal' thread instead of here, I think.

I was planning to just use sox to construct two-channel pure tones with precise beat frequencies, but since my interface code is in python already, it might be sensible to have python code produce the sound. No idea how to do this offhand, so if you have some idea, I'd love the help, Trip

It would be interesting to see if there's a major difference between the psychoacoustic effects of binaural beats and monaural beats, because it may well just be the sound envelope of the beat frequency that matters. In that case, monaural beats and isochronic tones should be at least as effective as binaural beats, or at least not too far off.

My initial plan for the code was to hack the program I have that displays the EEG output so that it records the output, and then modify it so that it also produces (at random) sequences of two-channel pairs of pure tones and records the frequency at each channel (so that it's possible to compare the beat frequency with the EEG data and have everything sync up properly). I can run the raw EEG stuff through  someone else's fourier transform code later to get frequencies, if need be -- but, the program displays a histogram *and* a graph, so it's probably either calculating that in real time already or pulls it out of the stream. Somebody reverse engineered the NIA protocol, but I haven't read the writeup with a fully functional brain yet so all I remember is that it's mostly raw data of some kind plus a timing signal -- nothing complicated. Fourier transforms are kind of computationally expensive, so if the python code is doing the transform I'll dike that part out and record just the raw amplitude data to avoid screwing up the timing. I was going to produce the sounds with soxplay, which can just as easily produce monaural beats and isochronic tones as binaural.

I was hoping to do it in realtime only to make sure it was a blind study. Pre-generated sound might lead to performing the experiment with precisely the same sound file, which can certainly be affected by the placebo effect. Ideally, randomized beat frequencies with different durations should work more or less equally well, and when they don't, we can isolate factors like the duration and the initial difference between the current brainwave state and the beat frequency (leading to trying things like starting at the current beat frequency and slowly pitchshifting one channel).

I may not get any good numbers out of the NIA particularly, because there's a *lot* of eye movement noise. If the entrainment puts me in an agitated state, the saccades will probably increase in frequency and the signal to noise ratio will drop through the floor. But, that's what I get for using a cheap EEG machine with forehead-mounted trodes