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Do Binaural Beats Really Affect Brainwaves?

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Re: Do Binaural Beats Really Affect Brainwaves?

#23
post #16
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also follows from [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

I think that 'law' is better applied when the headline is trying to catch attention by making an aggressive claim, but wants to not be straight up lying. Here it's genuinely taking a skeptical point of view on binaural beats. For example 'Could this new device give you thirty more years of life?' (no) versus 'Does Elon Musk have intentions of leaving Tesla soon?' (no) (or yes, I don't really know)

yeah i guess that's true

Re: Do Binaural Beats Really Affect Brainwaves?

#25
post #20

Can the equipment detect differences between brainwaves, outside of binaural beats? Have they run the same tests where they're trying to find the difference between someone resting (i.e. watching television) and someone being very mentally active (i.e. deep programming or whatnot)? That would give an idea of how large the effect should be.

Yes, it can. We have used the same OpenBCI board and software in other experiments, and it does show changes — for example, I ran OpenViBE’s demo SSVEP scenario on the same subject, and the spectrogram showed a pattern of increased amplitude that correlated with the target frequencies.

Even if the effect was too small to see in the spectrogram, we should have seen some affect in the FFT plot at the target frequency; instead, the amplitude of the trials at the target frequency were very slightly below the amplitude of the control segments.

Re: Do Binaural Beats Really Affect Brainwaves?

#27
post #8

TL;DR: No, they do not.

I wouldn't be too eager to draw a definitive conclusion from N=2 .

It's 2 more than any published study I can find investigating the effects of binaural beats.

And I'm pretty certain this is why: http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/TheFiledrawerProblem.php

Re: Do Binaural Beats Really Affect Brainwaves?

#29
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be too eager to draw a definitive conclusion from N=2 .

It's 2 more than any published study I can find investigating the effects of binaural beats. And I'm pretty certain this is why: http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/TheFiledrawerProblem.php

My wife actually did a study of this a long time ago for her Master's degree after having dealt with EEG Biofeedback training under supervision of an MD for years. She had a bunch more participants. In short, Binaural Beats don't work.

edit: I'll see if I can get a link to her paper

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