Changing Your Brainwaves Using Auditory Binaural Beats - For Free - MindMods CogSciTech Biofeedback and Neurofeedback Blog

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I can't verify this because it is in Japanese. Original article here: http://www.chunichi.co.jp/article/national/news/CK2008121102000053.html

Researchers from Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs have created a new brain analysis technology that can recontruct images inside of a person's mind and then display them on a monitor. The researchers want to try to view the contents of dreams in the future.

Sounds like either the journalist or the scientist is exaggerating their findings, but I could be wrong. I just have a hard time believing this could be possible. Here's how they are claiming to do it:

'The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.'

The researchers also discuss applying the technology to reading feelings and complicated emotional states, but may have a difficult time displaying these things on a monitor.

The blog 'Pink Tentacle' says that this research is in the December 11 issue 'Neuron', but I haven't been able to find it.

lolwut? more later...
Update - this is being reported about all over the place now. Scientific American also uses Pink Tentacle as a source, but claim that the scientists have 'reported it' to the journal 'Neuron', not that 'Neuron' has published anything about it. Big difference. We'll see where this goes.

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Changing Your Brainwaves Using Auditory Binaural Beats - For Free

Monday, 17 September 2007

There has been a surge of interest in binaural beats during recent years, and a number of software only products that utilize this technology have become quite popular.

What are they?

A binaural beat is generated from two tones.

Each tone is of a slightly different pitch.

One tone is presented to the left ear, and the other to the right.

The two tones combine into a single tone sensed by your brain.

This single tone pulse is the stimulating when entraining with binaural beats.

Binaural beats are probably the most well-known stimulus used for entrainment. They have been shown to work, but other entrainment techniques are more effective. Our machines produce binaural beats and dual binaural beats. They also include other audio entrainment methods in addition to these. I've personally found the that frequency following effect of binaural beats is quite modest, but they do actually work and have an effect on brainwaves that can be shown with EEG.

Here's a bit of history from Gnaural's web page, which we'll discuss in a moment.

In 1839, German experimenter Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that playing two tones simultaneously, one in each ear, induced the perception of a "beat frequency" when the tones were of slightly differing frequency (generally less than 100 Hz apart). What was interesting about Dove's discovery was the fact that there was no acoustic mixing of the tones. The perceived beats existed solely within the auditory system.

Heinrich Wilhelm Dove

Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered binaural beats in 1839. While research about them continued after that, the subject basically remained a scientific curiosity until 134 years later, with the publishing of Gerald Oster's article "Auditory Beats in the Brain" (Scientific American, 1973). Oster's paper was landmark not so much for its own new laboratory findings, but rather that in the way in which it identified and tied together the isolated islands of relevant research done since Dove, in a way that gave the subject fresh insight and relevance to scientific research.

In particular, Oster saw binaural beats as a powerful tool for cognitive and neurological research, addressing questions such as how animals locate sounds in their three-dimensional environment, and also the remarkable ability of animals to pick-out and focus-on specific sounds in a sea of noise (what is known as the "cocktail party effect").

Oster also considered binaural beats to be a potentially useful medical diagnostic tool, not merely for finding and assessing auditory impairments, but also (because they involved different neurological pathways than ordinary auditory processing) for more general neurological conditions. For example, Oster found that a number of the subjects he worked with that were incapable of perceiving binaural beats suffered from Parkinson's disease. In one case, Oster was able to follow one such subject through a week-long treatment of Parkinson's disease; at the outset the patient couldn't perceive binaural beats, but by the end of the week of treatment, the patient could hear them again.

Oster also reported (in corroborating an earlier study) that there were gender differences in the perception of beats. Specifically, women seemed to experience two separate peaks in their ability to perceive binaural beats that seemed to correlate with specific points in the menstrual cycle (one at the onset of menstruation, one around 15 days later), which led Oster to wonder if binaural beats could be used as a tool for measuring relative levels of estrogen.

Until Gerald Oster's 1973 article, binaural beats were basically considered no more than a scientific curiosity. Oster's paper was landmark not so much in presenting new laboratory findings, but rather in identifying and tying-together the isolated islands of relevant research done since Dove in such a way as to give the subject fresh insight and relevance to scientific research. In particular, Oster viewed binaural beats as a tool for cognitive and neurological research, addressing how we locate sounds in our environment, and the so-called "cocktail party effect" (e.g., the auditory system's propensity for selective attention). Oster also considered binaural beats to have potential as a diagnostic tool, for finding Parkinson's disease, auditory impairments, and even for gaging fluctuations of estrogen (the latter assertion rising from a study he replicated that corroborated findings of gender differences in the perception of beats).

SBaGen is a free binaural tone generator that has been out for quite some time now. It works great, but there is a better out now called Gnaural2.

If you don't want to download and install Gnaural 2, you can use a version placed on the web as a Java Applet. Check it out here

You can download Soundscapes and Gnaural Example files for Gnaural here
You can even use them with the online Java Applet version.

A ton of links after the jump...