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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."
So do very mentally distrubed people play more intense music? What about crazy people, does theirs sound like Pink Floyd or something?
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...
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 ;))
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
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
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)
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.
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!
Analyze existing musical lullabyes and see how they compare to sleep brainwave patterns.
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 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??"
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
Similar to AutoZen is SBaGen, which lets you build scripts to be played over time. For Linux, Windows, and OSX.
-- [ta]
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.