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Scientists Create Lullabies From Brain Waves
Lord Custos writes "From ABC News: Your Brain Waves are Better than Sleeping Pills! Everyone has a song in them...literally. And you can use it to put yourself to sleep. Canadian scientists have discovered that deep sleep can be induced in insomniacs by copying the insomniacs brainwaves, turning it into 'music',
and then playing this 'audio transcription' of their own sleep brainwave pattern back to them."
Techno
So do very mentally distrubed people play more intense music? What about crazy people, does theirs sound like Pink Floyd or something?
Can i get it now?
As a long suffering insomniac (which is why I'm up at 3:15am instead of snoozing) I have GOT to get me one of these.
Unless of course they're using it for some vile twisted Twilight Zone plot to convert all us insomniacs to soldier for some evil army. Of course one advantage is that we'd all tend to fall asleep at the worst possible times.
Isn't this actually 'old'? It's a well known fact you synchronize your brainwaves to the music you hear if it falls into an acceptable pattern. Heck, even look at commercial stuff like CoolEdit, which has a brainwave pattern generator built in for editing music. It even has some scripting to make your brain ready for specific things (like sleep brainwave patterns).
There are even commercial devices based on the concept. Like the flashing-glasses-beeping-headphones combo machines. And it seems only natural that you'd sleep better when you can listen to a sleep brainwave pattern tuned exactly to yours, instead of a 'general' one...
Filter out the differences among various subjects, figure out what the common patters are and we'll have a nice, common bit that should work for anybody. Cool idea. I don't have trouble sleeping most of the time, but this would be nice to have at my disposal for those "project crunch" moments.
Will it still put me to sleep if I play it really, really loud?
I wonder if it sounds anything like cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp. Personally, i think Seti@home executable sounds the coolest, followed by any NTFS filesystem. Dont ask me why, but sometimes it sounds like trance/techno music, even has the right BPM.
I hope mine doesn't sound anything like Brittany Spears!
take a look at this software project AutoZen.
from their site: "AutoZen is a software 'brain machine' for Linux. It generates sounds that are meant to cause the brain to temporarily shift to a different dominant frequency and cause the user to experience an altered state of consciousness. It is similar to the devices seen in the 'Sharper Image' catalog and in magazine ads, but the price is a lot more attractive!"
I quess australian aboriginals have knewn this for long. Have you ever heard someone really good play a didjeridu (didgeridoo)? Have sleeping problems? Our first son had some, then one day, we put the didjeridu cassette in the player, and not just our boy, but rest of the family felt asleep in a matter of minutes. If you have never heard with it sounds like, here is some samples. If brain waves don't sound like that, I am amazed ;))
I wonder if I can
/proc/kcore | /dev/dsp
cat
to put my computer to sleep.
so if I cat /dev/null > /dev/dsp and listen to it while sleeping will it make me smarter or dumber?
This is kinda cool....
"For the placebo group, the improvement was only about 15 percent as compared to 75 to 85 percent for the experimental group. So it's a highly significant statistical difference," Kayumov says. It also shows that brain music is highly individualistic.
It worked, he adds, because the sleep music was lower in frequency than other brain waves and induced kind of a relaxed, meditative condition. In other words, each subject's brain recognized its own lullaby and reacted accordingly.
keanmarine.com
I can just imagine it now - some company would go into buisness taking EEG recordings of celebrities and offering them for sale. Just imagine how many people pay to listen to the brainwaves Bill Gates, or Marylin Mason, Calista Flockhart (food bad, thin good, food bad, thin good), etc etc. I guess it all depends on your taste.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Hell, i just had an interesting thought, since we can just playback those funky brain waves, might be useful to just put some sense into. Why not even ask him/her to do some really nasty things ? Btw how safe is that ? what if this does some neural damage ? Sad that you cant really do this kind of experiment on a lab rat, FYI i dnt want anyone to mess with my mind, be it beautiful or not...grrrr
-- Live Long And Prosper
I don't know if it's because it's late, but listening to those samples really is making me tired.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It's an interesting experiment and I started paying attention when they mentioned that there was a placebo (it's amazing how many of these so-called experiments don't).
The fact that it works on sleep in itself is interesting but I wonder how these might apply to, say happines, or intense concentration or dare I say horniness. Just play back the brainwave of your choosing and you put yourself into the optimal state for whatever it is you want to be doing.
Sunny
Be my Friend
... [snooze] .. hotdogs.. amor hot dogs... what kind of kids eat armor hotdogs... ...[/snooze]
Anybody know where to get a recording of one of these?
Describing the sounds in text didn't work too well.
What better place than here to find insomniacs?
Cowboy Neal is obviously no exception to the rule:
"Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday August 29, @02:15AM"
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
from the end of the article: "And here's the neat part. It won't become addictive. There won't be any serious side effects, like those caused by various medications that are now available." It seems to me that it could addictive. Many addictions result from the body lowering production of naturally ocuring substances because it's being replaced with the addictive substance. Remove the substance and you go into withdrawl. Who's to say that, over time, the brain wouldn't lose the ability to generate these patterns naturally? People noted the simularity of music and brain waves a long time ago. I bet with hi-fi equipment we could pull out some very cool sounding stuff. - it would be interesting to transcribe brain waves of anger/sex/high states.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
What I would prefer is to not have to deal with sleep. Maby take naps from time to time, but not have it required.
I know drugs can help with this sort of thing, and I've gone well over a week without a wink (lots of coffee).
Only problem with being awake for that long is you start to 'see' things. You know, guys in black suits following you around, flying sauscers, and talking fish. Wait a sec, guys in black suits follow me around normaly. Scratch that one, just the last two then.
It has to be something that will let me not have to sleep, yet remain sane (well, as much as I was to begin with).
--
Sleep is for the weak, stay on IRC!
http://www.xpurple.com
Since the subject of sleep and Bill Gates came up, the hack jungian psychoanalyst in me had a disturbing thought. Do you think Bill Gates' Shadow is Tux the Penguin?
As the saying goes "lies, damned lies and statistics", this research proves it again: "Ten persons who had suffered from insomnia [...] For the placebo group, the improvement was only about 15 percent as compared to 75 to 85 percent for the experimental group". That means that three quarters of a person in the (5 persons) placebo group slept better, whereas 3.75 to 4.25 persons slept better with their own brain music. "10 persons is not a large group, but the project builds on numerous other related studies". Yeah right. Maybe psychiatrist Leonid Kayumov listened too much to his own brain music? (So maybe it is addictive! ;)
my other sig is a 500 page novel
I guess most people will have noticed the link appear on their browser, but this is an unusual troll mixing useful information with an infamous link.
Can we scan the enemy's brainwaves and put him to sleep? Can we scan the brainwaves of foreign dignitaries while they visit the White House, put them to sleep and steal their pocket change and state secrets while they're out cold? How long will it take to weaponize these lullabies? Can the weapon be mounted on a satellite or disguised as a pack of cigarettes?
Dammit, you should have figured these things out before announcing this. We need to know and we need to know now.
Think about it...some kind of sensor mechanism that can pick up the brainwaves of everyone on the battlefield, hooked up to a loudspeaker. Or perhaps a man portable version that could be used the same way one uses a gun.
:D
Patent pending, of course.
Brainwave 'manipulation' (or stimulation) is actually most interresting technology...
See EEG Spectrum International for 'related' articles. Neurofeedback is less 'intrusive' method than those sound/light devices that are sold for 'relaxation' or other purposes.
www.eegspectrum.com
or some neurofeedback applications
It is also possible to manipulate brainwaves with TMS (Transcranial magnetic stimulation).. see for example an article about religious experiences and TMS ;-)
In search of God.Anonymous BrainWave
Hell, the Audigy already has every OTHER feature imaginable. "Now includes Sleep Blaster(TM) Technology via a FireWire-enabled aluminum foil hat!"
---
Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
hmmm wonder if the riaa will now charge you per brain wave.............
Find couples that sleep very deeply together and analyze their brain waves to see if they are similar. If they are then obviously the two couples can sense each others brainwave.
A great follow up story to that would be to test to see how people detect other's brainwaves.
My prediction is that the person that we fall in love with (or are comfortable with) has a very complimentary brain-wave-pattern to our own, thus making us comfortable with them on more than just a physical/conscious level.
(Sorry about the disjointed thoughts... it is 3AM.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Why are there constantly stories like this, without any kind of example of what it sounds like?
I'm no expert on sleeping pills but I've come across those that know the dangers. The effects of Benzodiazapines, for example, are reported here .
I've also spoken to people that have taken SSI drugs, who say they are extremely addictive. One of these said that she got so sweaty that her make-up slid off her face!
A better solution would be great.
what does it make if both me and my wife put our brainwave CD in the stereo ?
"honey, your brainwaves makes me nervous!"
Oh, I guess I'll just have to wait for her to fall asleep...
http://www.pageliberale.org
So what happens when we record Barry Manilow's brainwaves and introduce this as music -- head explosion?
My little sad piece of the internet: www.mtndewd
Like many folks, I don't do drugs. (Thanks Nancy.) But, I am curious about the alledged mind expanding possibilities. If you scan someone through a trip and play it back to them to see if it compares, could you not at least experience to a lesser degree how that person tripped? If so, bring on the acid.
Someone hates these cans.
There's a much more robust Windows Brainwave generator available at http://www.bwgen.com/. There's a free download available if you want to try it.
Get CoolEdit and some headphones. Use its Brainwave Synchronizer filter and experiment with alpha, delta waves (or whatever) and there you go! Pretty neat stuff actually.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
> If they are then obviously the two couples can sense each others brainwave
Really? Obviously? It is an interesting hypothesis, but it is definitely not obvious that anyone can directly sense someone else's brainwaves.
--- I would prefer a prehensile tail....
Go here, scroll down to (or search for) Brainwave Synchronizer. Click Low or High Speed listen. Requires a JavaScript enabled browser.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
And what kind of copyprotection method will they propose?
;-)
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
Analyze existing musical lullabyes and see how they compare to sleep brainwave patterns.
... my brains would probably just produce a heap of white noise, as I can't make up my mind.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
The problem with this is that it has to be customized for each person. A more convenient solution that is already in use in infant soothing toys is a simulated heartbeat noise, like the kind a fetus would hear while inside the mother. It reminds the baby of being inside the womb, and comforts them into falling asleep faster. But I've found that this also works well even on adults, as I think this "comfort pattern" that is etched in our brains from before birth remains in our subconscious as long as we live. Far easier than mapping your brainwaves, and you can pick one up in a department store for under $50.
I foresee the use of "sleep cannons" in the future, that send out music designed to make the enemy drowsy and lethargic.
I wonder how effective a live version of this would be? Say you had the device read your mind and a computer turns it into "music" in real-time, then plays it back through headphones. You would be hearing your own thoughts. Would you fall asleep faster? Halucinate? No effect at all? Has their been any research to see if we can understand raw brainwaves, even if they are our own? Say we record a thoughts with music just like the article, then hear it, would we jump to what we thinking about during the recording? Would it begin an feedback loop?
10 Think a thought
20 Hear that thought
30 Think about heard thought
40 Goto 20?
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
Considering it's 5:12am EST and I still haven't gone to bed I'd like to get my hands on some of these. :-)
----------
Check out my blackbox styles
this reminds me of schumann resonances.. you can read about them at: http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/Schumann.htm l
.. its a sound generator that can create a wide variety of frequencies (including shumann resonances) .. i have found several presets all over the place and now i use it to relax, to fall asleep, to study for that big test.. many applications :]
i was telling a buddy about these and he recommended i check out http://www.bwgen.com/
----- I took the blue pill. Ignorance is bliss. ----- eof
If I found out that I was so damned boring that just listening to myself think would put me to sleep!
... I could have made a fortune from the recording.
After the spending the entire night trying to coerce our new Dell linux server into submissions, and ODing on coca-cola, cigarettes and espresso, I guess that my brain waves could have been recorded for a quality high-energy e'd-up rave!
Patriotism is the opium of the masses
does this combination of quotes make anyone else less than enthusiatic about the results?
" A research sample of 10 persons is not a large group"
"For the placebo group, the improvement was only about 15 percent as compared to 75 to 85 percent for the experimental group."
15% of what exactly and how is that "highly significant statistical difference" on a sample of 10 people?
some indian music Raagas (modes/patterns of music)(e.g. raagas yaman, bagesri, malkaus, bhoopali, and darbari) and some other musical patterns in indian music create intermediate frequencies/beats that approximate the brainwaves frequencies of relaxation and also sleep (alpha beta gamma delta..check out google).
a simple win based software is bwgen (brainwave generator)which also uses this method of biofeedback. if you can overlay an instrumental SLOW sitar indian raga number on to the output of bwgen you'll get some interesting results.
warning--some ragas cause stress, even panic reactions.
-ram
In the internet you can publish anything and people will believe it.
Similar to AutoZen is SBaGen, which lets you build scripts to be played over time. For Linux, Windows, and OSX.
-- [ta]
perhaps one day, computer applications will be able to detect similar activity patterns among people; and hook them up!
couldn't this be used is a torture device? if you were to record "brain music" that is completely contradictive of the person's brain who is listening to it, they might go crazy :)
anyways, this is extremely cool and i can't wait until this makes it to the mainstream so i can try it out. i'm going to have to show this to my friends who are music therapy majors.
The poster is referring to "light and sound machines", which can induce brainwaves using blinking lights and beeping. They're great for helping to induce a hypnotic state and also to induce sleep. Do a Google search to find out more...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Wow- I just realized! My brain is in sync with the Brady Bunch music. I have never been able to watch the show without falling asleep or getting incredibly tired.
Groovy!
[FromTheMorning]
The good Doctor (Asimov) wrote a story about this very effect: "When the Saints".
In the story, a musician is hired by a psychologist to assist in a research project. They are recording the brainwaves of depressed patients, diffing them against the brain waves of normal folks, inverting the difference, and feeding that back into the patient with sound and laserlight. It works, sort of, for a while.
They hire the musician because (rough quote) "...while the laser light is precise enough to convey the information, the sound isn't. We need somebody to work out what part of the sound is important, and what part isn't."
The musician takes the tapes and goes away for a while. When he returns, he says, "Here's a tape. Try this." The psychologist cues the tape up for the patient. After the session, the patient says "I think I'm cured - before I always could feel the depression in the back of my mind, but it's gone now!" "Did you notice anything different about the therapy?" "Well, maybe the light was a bit sharper..." "What about the sound?" "I really didn't notice the sound..."
After the patient leaves, the psychologist asks the musician what he did, and would he consider a position on the staff.
(Roughly quoting the musician)
"No need - the work's already been done. I noticed the patterns were like some music I know - revival hymns. I gave him the best of the lot - When The Saints Go Marching In"
Dr. Asimov wrote this for an Audio magazine, and the story appears in some of his story collections. Good stuff.
www.eFax.com are spammers
So does this mean that department stores will be able to make brain wave music that makes us want to buy stuff? Will it be possible to turn ordinary people into shopping zombies? Only time will tell.
This would be more convincing if they would compare this against sleeping in a quiet room, or maybe sleeping in a room with some white noise (maybe a fan?)
I'm picturing a special bodysuit covered with electrodes, especially over the scalp and at the all the major muscle groups. The person could improvise their own music in real time. The melody would be based on the brainwaves and the "percussion" would be based on the signals from the muscles. You want "electric body music"? I'll give you "electric body music"! (Lord Custos breaks into a Dance Dance Revolution-crazed frenzy as music automagically emenates from his 'soundskin') Yeeeeaahhhhh, Boyyeeees....
The reminds me of The Monroe Institute.
They claim to have various audio cds and tapes which put you in that state of mind just between waking and sleep where people often hallucinate and have other experiences. Many people claim to have "Out of Body Experiences" while using the tapes. The MI has a whole program which you can go through by yourself at home or at their facility.
The founder, Robert Monroe, wrote several books about his experiences. Summing it all up, he basically said that he could leave his body and visit the various "rings" of conscienceness that surround the earth. It is actually very interesting because the things that he reports in the book actually do a lot to explain various things like ghosts(people who are so addicted to the earth "experience" that they won't leave or can't recognize that they are dead) and other things like that.
All taken with a grain of salt of course, but it is very interesting stuff.
Uhhhh, yeah, thath dithgustin. [The lady's man]
my inner monologue of music music by chance be the right stuff to put me out. I can sleep pretty much all the time unless I have major stimulants in my system.
in fact, today I slept through my alarm and was late for work.
also, for me personally, if I turn up classical music I get vaguely annoyed and can't sleep - but if I crank say Tool, Rage Against the Machine, or even older stuff like Killing Joke - then I'm out like a light.
My freshman year of college I scared my roommate on the first day there by falling asleep on the floor with White Zombie blasting on the stereo. he opened the door into my head and I didn't wake up.
I personally don't care about these studies to help me sleep - I do that quite well. I want to know how to stay awake.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
However, if you could find me a brunette with a soft hart beat, I think we could work out an arrangement.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
This kind of work has been done for about 25 years at The Monroe Institute in Virginia, USA. They have a number of recordings of brain synchronization tones available for sale that induce sleep, deep trance states, and encourage self-awareness in various ways.
Some of them come with voice overlays to encourage the user to have certain kinds of insights and experiences. It's great to see this kind of research becoming more mainstream; there's a lot of potential for helping kids with ADD, insomniacs, etc.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Just listen to the soundtrack of "The Sound of Music." That'll put you to sleep in no time!
-- Jim
What military applications exist for this new lullaby technology? Can we scan the enemy's brainwaves and put him to sleep? / / / /
Why stop at giving "audio knock out drops"? Why not create music that kills?
As Kate Bush once glibly sang
"They told us all they wanted
Was a sound that could kill someone
from a distance/ So we go ahead
and the meters are over in the red
It's a mistake in the making"
just take those nice pills... I've _heard_ that you can drink something _called_ alcohol too.
this is not my signature.
This sort of thing comes up often in studies involving brainwave analysis. Though the article doesn't mention it, I would suspect they're performing a series of FFTs on the 0-20Hz range of the data. This splits EEG data into what are called the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Theta bands. Neurological biofeedback calls on the user to see, hear, or feel a sampling of their own Delta waves and raise or lower the values. This is what creates the earlier-mentioned "altered states," which can be either hyper-concentration or great relaxation. So in a sense, this isn't a "breakthrough" but a modern way of implementing a relatively old technique.
Deep sleep has never been a problem for me. Ask my wife. OR my employers. Can I record my brainwaves when I am wide awake, and put them on my alarm clock?
SCIENCE!!
Though promising, this article pegs my bullshit-O-meter into the red zone. I hope that this work is scientifically confirmed to work and put into use in the home market soon.
Assuming that the pattern of brain activity is always roughly the same when you're trying to fall asleep, this follows logically from a tenet of biological psychology called Hebb's principle. It states that when two neurons fire together, the connection between them is strengthened.
To explain, I'm going to invent a symbology. X,Y,Z, and K represent neurons in different regions of the brain. I'll create an arbitrary pattern that represents when each of those neurons fire. Let's say that as you fall asleep you normally have a pattern like: XYZYYKKZXK. (I intentionally avoided using A, B, C here for the musical connotations therein.) Let's say it's mapped into music now:
XYZYYKKZXK (neurons firing)->
ABCBBGGCAG (notes played)
When you hear the note A, a particular region of your auditory centers is activated. When you hear B, a slightly different region is activated, and so on. Coincidentally, a lot of your auditory processing takes place in your brain stem, which is also where a lot of sleep-related functions take place, such as shutting down the body's muscles so you don't sleepwalk every night, but this coincidence isn't necessary for this explanation to work.
So you listen to your personalized auditory mapping and attempt to fall asleep. Because you're trying to fall asleep, even if you're insomniac, neurons for X will be a little more likely to fire, then neurons for Y, then Z, and so on. At the same time, neurons for A are firing, then B, then C.
According to Hebb, the synchonicity of these events will cause a physical connection between the neurons to strengthen, regardless of how much neural distance separates them. All the neurons in between will get activated a little bit, and the more they fire together, the more the entire system of connections becomes stronger. You've directly mapped sleep waves into music, so the synchronicity will be very strong. Consequently, the connection between the auditory centers and your sleep centers will get stronger very quickly.
Make that connection strong enough, and you will eventually be able to cause XYZK to fire by playing ABCG, in essence sending a message to your brain stem via your speakers. Do this long enough, and the feedback may go in the other direction as well: you may start to hear the music every time you fall asleep, regardless of whether it's actually playing.
Theoretically this would work by mapping those brain waves into just about anything you can perceive, not just sound, although it may work better with sound. For example, mapping it into images would certainly work; you could take the entire discussion above, replace "auditory centers" with "visual centers", and you get the same explanation.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
thought that brainwaves transcribed and played back to insominiacs is preposterous. I mean really, who believes in this type of garba.....Zzzzzzzzzz ZZzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZzzz
This sounds a heck of a lot like Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven.
Can we measure brain waves when people are excited, or sexually aroused, and then make music out of that? I bet it would sell like crazy.
Well! This is a most interesting discovery. Let's take a quick trip into the minds of various people in various cultures, and find out just what they've got knocking around in their gray matter.
From the mind of a somewhat suicidal insomniac in San Francisco: Van Halen's "Jump."
From that of a gay preacher in Biloxi, MS: Barry Manilow's "It's a Miracle."
From the neurons of the 3M rep for adhesive products in Irkutsk, Russia: Lionel Richie's "Stuck on you."
A cabbie on the run from Heathrow airport in London to the downtown hotels was found to have "You Picked a Fine Time to Leave me, Loose Wheel" rattling around in his skull (and lug nuts rattling around in his trunk -- pardon me, 'boot').
In Australia, a most sleepless LAN technician, one Arthur 'Sparks' McGill, was startled to find Icehouse's "Electric Blue" firmly embedded in his alpha waves.
Finally, back here in the States, Slashdot's owner, Rob "Commander Taco" Malda surprised no one by having that (in)famous filk track Mr. Compatibility stuck so firmly in his brain stem that not even a jackhammer was able to dislodge it.
That's all for now. Tune in again next week for another installment of "Spot the Looney!"
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Hmmm sounds like something Northwest wants to get their hands on..
"Sir, your music doesnt sound correct, please step into the white zone"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And the sample size was 10 people. Way too small to make any claims of significance.
Incidentally, this sort of experiment was being done at Peabody Conservatory's Computer Music Studio in the late 1980s. They called it "Brain-Generated Music."
hmmmm
what are you, some kind of nut? go back to the funny farm.
Imagine yourself getting asleep because a burgler phoned you five minutes before ... ...
playing your "own" music
I am waiting, he he he.
And who will be number one in the international charts? ...
If only Sigmund Freud could listen to our brains
Wasn't there a song out there that when listened to could cause someone to die?
I also believe that there is a cheaper alternative, and being in band for the last 8 years and taking some theory and history classes I have found that music is very powerful and that most people can't stand not to have music around. I have found that some types of music help evade car sickness even.
A person seams to lean toward one tyle of music that they like. That one type seems to sooth, comfort, and rejuvenate that person. I think that maybe that listening to that type of music quietly at night would have the same effect as the EEG.
Bond girl numero uno!
It seems most people are casually interested in this, but this sort topic completely draws me in. I don't think of this as a novelty, instead wonder if this could possibly be one of the most important things to personal development ever.
To me, there are two kinds of power for a life form: internal power and external power. Most people focus on external power, gaining money, respect, friends... whatever. But as important to me is gaining power over myself. If I can gain a small degree of control over my emotions, the direction of my thoughts, I am very happy. If we could feed our brains self-generated bliss, why do anything else? So I guess I am pseudo-buddhist.
It's hard to have direct insight into our own thought and emotion processes. That's why friends and family are so important, to give us an external view of ourselves that it is very hard for us to achieve on our own.
A device that can truely let me listen to my own mind, even if only a small aspect of it, I would consider extremely valuable.
I should go google for Neurofeedback hobbyist projects.
-------
Incite and flee.
A long time ago, during the height of the Cold War, military planners had intended to put people on orbiting weapons platforms. As far as I know, this never happened. From research, however, some interesting developments were made.
Apparently, the use of recorded brain waves were used to keep the potential occupants of these platforms awake, though not with music. Rather, electrodes adhered to the surface of the scalp were used to induce sleep or wake states within the brain by low voltage currents. It appeared to work well, as one guy who used to work on this stuff claimed that most people could easily stay awake for over 70 hours without the usual hallucinations, bumbling about, &c.
I wonder if we'll begin seeing a return of electronarcosis?
Research something called Binaural Beats.
One of the best programs out there for it is called Brainwave Generator. It's unfortunately for Windows but runs fine with WineX and is quite impressive.
Naw, my wife would get pissed when it starts to play cheezy porno themes.
Table-ized A.I.
Any form of hypnotism can be VERY dangerous to anyone prone to seizures or anyone diagnosed with schizophrenia.
I guess that rules out the slashdot community...
recompile.org
yes.
Can I listen to it while coding and output 25% more quality code per day?
This won't apply to an IBM man year though.
Unplug if you get the itch to kill people.
What if Warner bros made a hit song out of my sleep-pattern? Would that mean it would be illegal for me to go to sleep?
This has been doable for a looong time.
http://www.IBVA.com
Don't reporters ever check anything beyond the current day?
Naxos.com sells audio books on CD-ROM (a good thing for me since I have very bad cassette tape karma) and I've found that Proust's "In search of lost time" is often pretty good for bringing on sleep.
I miss my throwing rocks from the rooftop days...
python >>>
reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x:chr(ord(x)^42),tuple('zS^BED\nX_FOY\x0b')))
Are withdrawal symptoms an indication of "addiction"? I've just found "Antidepressant Seroxat tops table of drug withdrawal symptoms". The piece also says "In the top six, five of the drugs said to be causing withdrawal problems are SSRIs..."
Am I terribly wrong in mixing up "Sleeping Pills" with "Antidepressants"?
I managed to find a generator that worked on Linux, called Sbagen.
I don't think I've really got the hang of it, and I'm not sure if I've got any effect out of the things (though I'm using expensive headphones). Some of the sounds are quite hard to listen to tho.
[searches through bookmarks file...]
SBaGen
I think the bloke has a non-sourceforge page too, forget whether the sf page links back to it. [shrug]
DISCLAIMER: Having seen this story, I tried firing up SBagen again, and am currently listening to theta-waves; any errors in my post are therefore due to being in a dream-like-state. So there.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
I can just imagine it now - some company would go into buisness taking EEG recordings....
Yea, like NASA at Northwest airports....
-shpoffo
Maybe they could put that song on Napster and call it Metallica or Britney Spears. They would be doing natural selection a service as well.
Utalizing thse brainwaves as a song to put us too sleep... sounds actually like it may have some type of horrible long term effect... like zombifacation. Does anyone know if there were any negative effects in the trials. I see it now. Future wars using sound. I wonder if they could use the songs to have other effects, like hallucinations, insanity, etc...
Unless you keep your mind in a box, how do you tell the difference?
Dave.
Just a few years afterwards, they separated the command posts from the batteries and started moving the batteries after every one to three salvoes.
Money for nothing, pix for free