How I Use Binaural Beats - Daily Blog Challenge (Day 8)

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There's a brain hack that I'm assuming is fairly common that I've been using recently and I would like to talk about it. It's called binaural beats. I first became aware of binaural beats about a decade ago. I experimented with it briefly, but nothing significant came of it.

For those of you who aren't aware, let me provide a brief explanation: a binaural beat involves playing one frequency into your left ear and another frequency in your right ear. The difference between those frequencies IS a frequency that exists only in the form of your brain noticing it. This in turn affects the frequencies that your brain emits. Naturally, this can only work with stereo headphones. If you play this audio with speakers, both ears can hear both frequencies and the effect is lost.

Back in the day, I had an entire thumb drive full of MP3s claiming to have all sorts of effects on the brain. I'm minimizing this because some of those were just crazy! Binaural beats claiming to simulate the effects of LSD, astral projection, and all that. Based on my consumption of the files that simulate alcohol and cannabis, I could tell that those were bullshit. 🙄

I forget how, but I remembered that such a thing existed recently and have been playing around with it again. You can find all sorts of binaural beats on YouTube, but I prefer the pure frequencies. What I prefer doing, and I can't do it all the time because you need two applications playing audio at the same time, is to play music with one piece of software and play a pure binaural beat with another. Best of both worlds! 😃 I sometimes play music with one device on speakers and the binaural beat on my phone with ear buds.

Although claims like cannabis or LSD are bullshit, brainwave beats like alpha, beta, and theta seem legit based on my use of them. I can vouch for the extra aid I get in concentration if I use the right beat (I'm using a theta wave right now to write this).

Here's the link to the best visual representation I found so far (2nd image). There might be better, but this one suits my needs just fine as a quick reference so I stopped searching. Unfortunately, the resource that I used to download free binaural beat MP3s seems to be paying now, so I can't refer you to anything. You're on your own. But as far as and noninvasive ways to hack your brain are concerned, I'm liking this. Enjoy!