A couple of weeks ago, we talked about
the relationship between music and studying,
and whether music is an effective study aid,
or if it's just a distraction.
And if you're like me, music is probably pretty effective
for you, but some days, the music just doesn't help.
And nothing helps, and you find yourself just
completely unable to focus, and maybe during those moments
you've wished there was something you could
plug into your brain that would force you
to do work, like mind control music.
Well, if books and movies and comic books
are any indication, it's probably a good thing
this stuff doesn't exist.
For example, if you remember, in the fifth
Harry Potter book, there's a music box
that opens up and basically hypnotizes everyone
and makes them all sluggish and drowsy,
or in Issue 46 of the Teen Titans,
there's a villan called the Fiddler that can play music
which makes the Titans try to kill each other.
So, yeah, I'm pretty happy this stuff doesn't exist.
Mind control music aside, though,
what about music that can simply
cause a cognitive change
and be intentionally designed to do so.
We know that music does affect your brain in certain ways,
so could you design music for a specific intended effect?
Well, if you ask certain people,
the answer is going to be yes.
And if you put brain music as a search term
here into YouTube, you're gonna get tons of videos
promising all sorts of benefits like increased focus,
or better sleep, meditation music, all kinds of stuff.
Now, there are a lot of techniques that people use
to create this kind of music, and if you know anything
about this topic, you've probably heard of one of them
which is binaural beats, which I'm gonna use
as the example here to explain this stuff.
So a binaural beat is an illusion, actually.
It's just two different tones at two different pitches
played in each ear, and if you were to put
one earphone up while one was playing,
you would just perceive a steady tone.
If you put the other earphone to your other ear,
you would hear a tone at a different pitch.
But when you listen to them both at the same time,
your brain creates an illusion of a beat oscillating
back and forth between each side of your head,
and usually this oscillation is really, really fast.
So what does this have to do with creating music
that can help your brain focus better
or achieve some other desired benefit?
Well, this has to do with the fact that a lot of
neural activity is rhythmic, and this activity is called
neural oscillation, or in more popular terms,
brain waves.
Back in 1924, a German psychiatrist named Hans Berger
invented a device called an electroencephalogram,
or EEG device, which enabled the measurement
of human brain waves.
And it was discovered that certain frequency ranges
of these waves are associated with
different types of cognitive activity.
For instance, super slow delta waves
are measured during the deepest phases of sleep,
whereas higher frequency beta and gamma waves
are associated with wakefulness and mental attentiveness.
Once that was known, it wasn't too long
before the idea of influencing these brain waves
using external stimuli came up, and in 1934,
an English research named Edgar Adrian
demonstrated how using photic simulation,
simply flashing a bunch of lights in front of somebody
at a very specific frequency, could be used
to drive the brain's alpha waves below or above
its natural frequency band.
What was happening was that the frequency
of the external stimulus was causing the brain waves
to move toward a similar frequency;
they're syncing up, basically.
Building off of that, in 1949, a researcher
named William Grey Walter published a study
showing that this photic stimulation could also cause
mental and emotional changes.
Now in addition to photic stimulation,
or is it phOtic stimulation?
I didn't really check.
Audio has also been studied as a form
of external stimuli that can cause changes
in brain activity.
With regard to those binaural beats
I was talking about earlier,
these are only one form of auditory stimulation
that's been studied, but they seem to be
the most commonly known.
And the idea is about the same as with Adrian's experiments:
design the beat to oscillate at a certain frequency,
and hopefully gain a desired cognitive effect.
This is often known as auditory driving.
So the million dollar question is,
does this auditory driving actually work?
Can you put your earphones in,
turn on a binaural beats track or something similar,
and then focus more effectively?
Well, from the research I've been doing
for the past couple of weeks, I have to say
that scientifically, it seems like we don't really know
at this point.
I found several studies using binuaral beats
or other techniques that did seem to have positive results,
but then I found a lot of other studies that seem to have
no results at all, and in the blog post for this video
I'm gonna dump a lot of that research in case
you're really curious and you want to dig in.
Now one thing that we do know from those EEG measurements,
E-E-G, it's hard to say fast,
is that audio and other external stimuli
can cause changes in the brain.
The question is, can you design that audio
to cause specific beneficial changes,
and right now that's unclear.
So from there we get into anecdotal territory,
and a lot of people do report that this
brain-enhancing music does help them study better,
and then some don't.
And for the people who do, we always have to consider
that at least part of the effect may be due
to the placebo effect.
Basically people being told that
this is going to help you, and then they see a change
because they're expecting it.
So with that in mind, here is my personal experience
with brain music.
Back in college, I discovered binaural beats
because I was basically looking for anything
that would help me study better,
and they didn't work at all.
And the main reason for that is
they just don't sound good to me.
I can hear that pulsing back and forth,
and it's honestly annoying,
and I think any benefit that I would have derived from that
has been overrided by the fact
that I was listening to something
I would rather not listen to.
So I ditched it, went back to my normal study music,
and that was the rest of college.
Near the end of last year though,
my interest was renewed in this topic
when I was scrolling through some website,
I can't remember which one it was,
but I found a new tool called Brain.fm,
which creates algorithmically generated music
that's designed to help you focus.
And being curious, I tried it out,
and I actually found myself focusing better,
but moreover, I didn't find myself annoyed
with the music it generated.
After I tried it out, I talked with a couple
of the cofounders 'cause I was really curious
about the technology behind what they were building,
and it turns out that it does build off of
some of those older techniques I talked about
earlier in the video, but they're also doing
a lot of new things.
And one of the main differences is that the oscillations
they build into their music use more
natural sounding instruments, so it's blended
into the music a little bit better.
And because they're doing so many new things,
there hasn't been time to do a whole lot of research
around what they're building, though there have been
a couple of preliminary studies
at Northwestern University doing like
go-no go tests, visual reaction time tests
that do have some pretty good early results.
So with all of that being said, at this point
I can't say whether or not it's going to be effective
on a large scale, and I'm not sure if I ever
will be able to, because this is weird
neuroscience territory we're stepping into,
but I have been using it myself
for about two months and it's still effective,
and it's actually generally more effective
than normal study music for helping me focus.
So I usually use it when I'm writing,
and in a few months, I'm probably going to do
a full review on the channel
after I've tested it really long term
and know for sure that the placebo effect
has been kind of pushed off the table.
In the meantime, if you want to try it out for yourself,
they sent me a link that you can use
to get a longer than normal trial,
and I'll have that linked up in the blog post
for this video, and to be clear,
I don't have an affiliation with them
other than having talked with the founders,
but I am cautiously optimistic about what they're building
and, after long term testing, if it works out,
I would be happy to recommend it to people in the future.
I'm also going to link to a lot of those other
binaural beats and isochronic tones and
brain enhancing music that I found here on YouTube
in the blog post, so if you want to try those things out
I'd be curious to hear from you guys,
does this stuff work better for you
than your favorite study music?
If you tend to study with silence,
does it work better than that,
or does it not work for you at all?
I'll have a discussion thread in the
CollegeInfoGeek community where you can put your thoughts
and other than that, thank you so much for watching.
I will see you guys next week.
(techno music)
Hey there guys, thank you so much
for watching this video.
Now if you want to get new tips on being
a more effective student every single week,
you can click that big red Subscribe button right there,
and I also wrote a free book on earning better grades.
If you want to get a copy, you can click
the picture of the book and I will send you.
If you want to get those music links,
and also links to a lot of the research
I did for this episode, which is a lot,
then you can click the orange logo right there
to go to the blog post, and if you missed last week's video,
we talked about what to do when you have a group project
and you have a lazy member who's not pulling their weight.
Check it out if you missed it.
If you want to connect, I'm @TomFrankly
on both Instagram and Twitter,
or you can leave a comment down below.