51–60 of 65 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Skepticism due to insufficient evidence and lack of obvious plausibility isn't usually considered a strong opinion.
There is evidence though.
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.
I mean, imagine you were investigating a CPU and found a pin that went high when the CPU wanted to write to memory. You wouldn't think "yeah, remembering shit is awesome, let's connect this to Vcc". No, that pin is only supposed to go high at specific times depending on exactly what the CPU is doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This assumes that brainwaves function the same in everybody and that their measurement means anything more than phrenology.
Do you base this claim off of any scientific evidence? Measuring schizophrenia based off of gamma oscillations is standard clinical practice. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27732692 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16571550 https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201617.pdf?origin=ppub
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.
To wit - a lot of song and dance has been made regarding beta power in the subthalamic nucleus in Parkinson's patients (mostly because it is the only place we are FDA-allowed to go in a live human brain). Some ambitious researchers are claiming beta power is the "pathological signal" of Parkinson's disease...whereas it's more likely it's an epiphenomena of deeper computational issues with a damage basal ganglia circuit'
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.
I would love to see someone reply with personal experience. I have tried similiar apps for extremely brief periods and could feel a change.
Having worked in the field for years, I am pretty sure that listening to some sound at some frequency might induce that rhythm in the appropriate part of the brain (I have worked on SSVEP which is the same thing for visual stimuli, and is easily detectable, there is also some evidence that it could work for sensory motor stimuli).
However, inducing some frequency somewhere in the brain is pretty useless. Beta activity has been known for some time as the “activity” indicator. But this is simply because that is the working frequency of the brain. Active means just that, is it good is it bad? That depends.
One thing that strikes me in the field is how sure people are that anything “induced” in the brain will be positive. If the binaural beats thing really worked, then you would have as much chance to create depression as a sense of calmness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to see someone reply with personal experience. I have tried similiar apps for extremely brief periods and could feel a change.
Personal experience is the bane of science. And plural of “anectode” is “anectodes”, not “data”. Having worked in the field for years, I am pretty sure that listening to some sound at some frequency might induce that rhythm in the appropriate part of the brain (I have worked on SSVEP which is the same thing for visual stimuli, and is easily detectable, there is also some evidence that it could work for sensory motor…
And yet, eugenics was kind of heavily touted by scientists precisely because of an inability to accept as valid the personal experiences of the populations it targeted.
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.
Does it actually carry over? From what I understand about the speech recognition, our brain must be doing some equivalent of the Fourier transform fairly early in the pipeline (i.e. instead of a beta-wave, our brain will just get a more or less constant signal that this part of the audible spectrum is currently active).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Science is not being advanced by disproving crackpots. It's a waste of precious resource better spent elsewhere.
What's your definition of a crackpot? Someone who researches something varjag has a negative emotion towards?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…