Do you ever find yourself listening to music while trying to study, and then realize you’re just jamming instead of actually paying attention?
Music can be beneficial in so many circumstances. If you’re like me, doing homework unfortunately isn’t one of them. I spend waaayyyyy too long trying to find the perfect playlist and switching back and forth between songs. However, I love the feeling of having background sounds to block out my noisy household.
Last year, I stumbled across this app called “Relax Melodies” that lets you create white noise mixes with jungle sounds, rain, and other calming tones. What I didn’t appreciate about the app until recently was their “brainwave” noise section. Filled with these magical sounds called binaural beats, they stimulate brain waves that help with creativity, sleeping, and meditation. When I tried adding the “focus” beat underneath some tranquil sounds of peeper frogs and crickets, I found that my productivity skyrocketed. I could concentrate for much longer and the distractions around me seemed to fade away. It was amazing!
This spontaneous success led me to wonder how binaural beats work in the first place. Basically, it’s like an optical illusion for your ears. A binaural beat is actually two beats operating at different frequencies. When your brain detects these frequencies, it naturally synchronizes to the two of them, which results in a singular tone.
For example, the “theta” brainwave would include one tone at 205 Hz and another at 200 Hz, leaving behind 5 Hz. This specific beat is supposed to help with deep sleep and relaxation. In total, there are five different waves that the brain detects, each with its own specific benefits: delta, theta, gamma, alpha, and beta.
Though there hasn’t been much research on binaural beats, the studies that have been completed are optimistic. If you’re interested in trying them out, there are tons of YouTube videos and apps that can help you out!
Here’s a link to the one I use. Happy listening!
– DJ Butter
