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This was my reading of the paper/summary too - a demonstration of correlation but not the evidence of a causal link that the headline suggests. My understanding of neuroscience is limited however. Can someone with a better understanding point me at what I’m missing?
Your comprehension seems spot on to me, though maybe you feel like you're missing something given the apparent discrepancy between the hype vs. value of this research. I think there are two relevant factors here: 1) MIT is very good at publicity and press. 2) Causal neuroscience experiments are still technically challenging to implement in complex behaving organisms (e.g. monkeys and humans). We have methods such as…
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Actually a thing... Auditory Beat Stimulation and its Effects on Cognition and Mood States https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4428073/
The proposition "listening to music affects your mood" is very different from the proposition "listening to a certain frequency of tone causes your brain to produce waves at a corresponding frequency."
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You should default to having no strong opinion at all.
Turmeric added to coffee adds twenty years to your lifespan. Are you completely ambivalent to such a ridiculous claim? No, you should disbelieve it unless you get a sufficient amount of evidence.
So, disbelieve in part by trying to disprove. Win win.
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Since brainwaves are associated with brain disorders and brain disorders are associated with genetics, it would be worth (albeit dangerous politically?) to investigate the link between brainwaves (and by extension, different cognitive faculties) and ethnicity.
This assumes that brainwaves function the same in everybody and that their measurement means anything more than phrenology.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27732692
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I would love to see someone reply with personal experience. I have tried similiar apps for extremely brief periods and could feel a change.
The placebo effect is still an effect.
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Turmeric added to coffee adds twenty years to your lifespan. Are you completely ambivalent to such a ridiculous claim? No, you should disbelieve it unless you get a sufficient amount of evidence.
To be fair, science thrives on curiosity. I'd prefer we establish something was safe and have at the experiments. So, disbelieve in part by trying to disprove. Win win.
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No it isn't. You should default to disbelieving such extraordinary claims.
You should default to having no strong opinion at all.
And then of course... we shouldn't expect to be able to sum up highly effective heuristics for understanding the world in a single sentence.
I wonder how much this can be applied to day to day life. For example, the Binaural app on the iOS app store acts as a wave generator that lets you listen to specific frequencies. I'd be interested to see if you could force yourself into getting beta wave activity in the brain by just listening to beta frequencies -- almost as if to tune yourself manually.
Expecting your brain to operate in a way that produces certain frequencies because your ears are detecting air vibrations with those frequencies sounds extremely homeopathic.
But, I would emphasize, they usually do that by first genetically modifying the creature whose brain they want to manipulate to make some of its neurons into opto-couplers. They wouldn't be doing that if there was an easier way. :)
(It turns out that—even without the genetic modification—some frequencies of flashing light do cause the brain to do certain things. See, for example, https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/flashing-light-clears-tox.... But the effects of this, from what I understand, aren't the same effect you would get by actually getting the brain to entrain to that frequency; it's maybe entraining the pulse-rate of the brain's glymphatic channels or somesuch, but not synaptic firing.)
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Expecting your brain to operate in a way that produces certain frequencies because your ears are detecting air vibrations with those frequencies sounds extremely homeopathic.
This study of memory loss in mice found that exposing them to light at about 40hz triggered gamma waves and reduced plaque formation. https://news.mit.edu/2016/visual-stimulation-treatment-alzhe...