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Science

Scientists Create Lullabies From Brain Waves 239

Posted by CowboyNeal from the songs-stuck-in-your-head dept.
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."
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Scientists Create Lullabies From Brain Waves More

Scientists Create Lullabies From Brain Waves

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  • Heavy Metal? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by eviljolly ( 411836 )
    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?

  • Good God! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Fizzol ( 598030 )
    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.

  • old? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:23AM (#4161837)
    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...

    • Re:old? (Score:3, Informative)

      by HimalayanRoadblock ( 601900 )
      the flashing-glasses-beeping-headphones combo machines

      Those are for LUCID DREAMING. In laymans terms thats a dream in which u are aware its a dream and you take control. Go to google and search for lucid dreaming. You'll find more information than you want to know about.

      • Re:old? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        i do know about lucid dreaming, even though i very rarely manage to have one. the lucid dreaming devices are usually different in that they are timed to bring you back to consciousness in your sleep at a predefenide time.

        THERE ARE devices that are solely for the brainwave stimulation approach, NOT for lucid dreaming (although they could be used for that purpose)
      • Those are for LUCID DREAMING.
        There are goggles that blink a few times to indicate that the dreamer has entered the REM stage of sleep. When the dreamer sees the blinking in the dream, it's a reminder that it's a dream and it serves as a cue to have a lucid dream. But that's not what the poster is referring to.

        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...

    • Kind of along similar lines - I participated in several "brain training" sessions where I was hooked up to a computer and when my brain waves were in a sweet spot, a tone would sound. The tone was interpreted as positive reinforcement by my brain and over time my brainwaves adjusted to the more efficient state. This allowed me to sleep better, concentrate better, etc. Kind of related to what you're talking about, but cooler.

  • 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.
    • Did you just snort a fat line of meth? Where did you come up with that idea?

      It ain't right man, it just ain't right..
      • > Did you just snort a fat line of meth?

        Now there's an intelligent comeback.

        > Where did you come up with that idea?

        It's a logical extension of the "conclusions" presented in the article. We assume that since most of us non-meth-snorting humans have common brainwave characteristics that there should be common sonic patterns that will help induce relaxation and/or sleep.

        It's not much different than chanting-based meditation techniques except that whereas saying "ooooohm" is based on religious practice, we now have a way of analyzing things in a scientifically sound fashion that, by rights, should be reproducible.

        Of course, while some will be studying how to use such tones to relax and induce sleep, you wanna bet yer sweet bippy that there are going to be Very Secret Places studying how to use these same techniques to induce stress, terror and other psychological trauma.

        "We have ways of making you talk" will undoubtedly get scarier.

        • Re:Now to find the commonalities (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Of course, wouldn't it really suck if the commonality happened to be the sound for "om".

          The reverse sound of terror being "mo" or "moo". All that time . . . cows are trying to terrorize us. Man, makes me feel less guilty about eating burgers.

  • Abuse? (Score:3, Funny)

    by dlek ( 324832 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:23AM (#4161840)
    Will it still put me to sleep if I play it really, really loud?

  • Interesting.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by FuzzyMan45 ( 451645 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:24AM (#4161842)
    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.
    • Personally, i think Seti@home executable sounds the coolest

      OK, OK. I had to try it. I've been cat'ing various things to dsp. The SETI executable does sound pretty cool, some KSpread files are quite cool. No real rhythm, just a neat string of sounds. I might have to work on theis a bit.

      P.S.
      The SETILog.csv that KSETI Watch [sf.net] makes sounds pretty cool after it's logged a few hundered units like mine has (I've comleted almost 4000 total ov er teh years though). Give it a try!
      • Uh oh, I think I see the next geek hobby, sort of harking back to the origins of home brew CC.

        Writing programs whose main purpose is to produce tuneful executables. It would be cool to see if stable programs were more tuneful than unstable ones. Hmm prehaps I can get my PhD, where do I submit my proposal :-)

        The HBCC reference was about writing programs that caused EMI from the chip to produce music on an AM radio. I used to do this in my first job as a mainframe op, you could tell if the machine was looping etc by the tone on the radio.

  • Good god! (Score:2, Funny)

    by spoco2 ( 322835 )
    I hope mine doesn't sound anything like Brittany Spears!
    • I'll bet they do! What did you think would happen when you sat at home all day jacking off to her music videos? You'd only releived some stress? Sorry, now your brainwaves have succumb to the awesome powers of the big breasted babe. Now that its part of your brainwaves you can never forget her. Hi, I'm Jim. I am the founder of M.B. Mutated Brainwaves, I'd just like to personally welcome you to our encounter session. ...

      God I'm bored..
    • Even more scary is the thought that you can listen to her long enough to fall asleep.

  • AutoZen (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sheol ( 153979 ) <recluce@g3.14mail.com minus pi> on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:25AM (#4161847)
    take a look at this software project AutoZen [linuxlabs.com].

    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!"

    • SBaGen (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dSV3Hl ( 215182 )
      Similar to AutoZen is SBaGen [uazu.net], which lets you build scripts to be played over time. For Linux, Windows, and OSX.
    • The Brainwave Generator [bwgen.com] is the Windows equivalent of the same. While not freeware, the shareware version is nearly fully-functional (you can't load someone else's presets, until you register). I've used it a bit, and it does work pretty well..

  • Didjeridus (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:26AM (#4161850) Journal
    I quess australian aboriginals have knewn this for long. Have you ever heard someone really good play a didjeridu [unsw.edu.au] (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 [charly-didgeridoo.com] some samples. If brain waves don't sound like that, I am amazed ;))

    • OMG (Score:2)

      by Raul654 ( 453029 )
      I don't know if it's because it's late, but listening to those samples really is making me tired.
    • > I quess australian aboriginals have knewn this for long

      Gee! Someone should make his thesis work about my typos and bad verb conjugation.

    • You can fall asleep to Didjeridus? They just give me bad headaches . . . it's worse than noise.
      stipe42

      • Re:Didjeridus (Score:3, Funny)

        by jukal ( 523582 )
        > You can fall asleep to Didjeridus? They just give me bad headaches

        Uhm. I am able to fall asleep while laying on the floor with two kids jumping over my back, having Tarzan with volume jumping in the TV and yelling, and my wife jumping all over the house because she's trying to speak to me, and I hear nothing. Compare didgeridoo to that, and it's a miracle. :)

        • When I was in the Army, I learned to sleep through a full day's barrage (one of our batteries were staffed with 4 15,5mm self-propelled howitzers (Bofors Haubits 77) and our company had three batteries of them) of artillery fire. Once, I was wakened by a Major who wondered if I could please wake up, it was time to go back to barracks. I asked him if we weren't going to fire anything first and he replied that they had been firing all day. I was lying outside the forward command post, like 200 meters from one of the batteries...

          Just a few years afterwards, they separated the command posts from the batteries and started moving the batteries after every one to three salvoes.

    • Re:Didjeridus (Score:5, Informative)

      by blastedtokyo ( 540215 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:43AM (#4161902)
      Next time read the article.

      'The participants showed dramatic improvement over placebo participants who listened to someone else's brain music instead of their own.

      "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,"'

      In other words, you need to listen to your own brainwaves, not some random noise or someone else's rhythms.

      • Re:Didjeridus (Score:2, Funny)

        by jukal ( 523582 )
        > Next time read the article.

        Well, Sir, I was just referring to a musical instrument, which based on minimal empirical research indicated similar kind of effect as the results of the research work partially covered in the article you referred.

      • In other words, you need to listen to your own brainwaves, not some random noise or someone else's rhythms.

        Wow, harsh criticism. Especially considering it's unfounded.

        The article did do what you refer to, but they did nothing to contradict the decades old knowledge concerning noise and brainwaves. Read the first couple posts in this thread. There are several tools available that use binaural beats to attempt to change the state of the brain.

        I had one about ten years ago that ran on DOS and found the results to be very convincing.

        So, yes, the study in the article used the patients own brainwaves, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. A Didjeridus way well be another way, or may not be, but certainly didn't warrent a "Next time read the article" rant.
    • Those are somewhat relaxing, especially the slow ones. Unfortunatly, my pop-culture-soaked brain keeps cringing in anticipation of either the Survivor theme or a Foster's commercial everytime it hears one. Dammit... ;-)

      DennyK
      • hehe, I'm tempted to cup my hands in front of my mouth and make guttural "hweeeeyooowww hweeeyoooow" noises in imitation when I hear one on TV. Especially at the beginning of Rocko's Modern Life.
    • This also appears to have an interesting affect on animals which I'm noticing at the moment. I downloaded the mp3 and played it. Can definitly see why it'd put you to sleep. However the better affect is in watching my kitten. This is the first time I've ever really seen her respond to noise from a speaker. While playing cds or whatnot shes usually just ignore it as background noise. This however has her sitting there confused looking for the source. She actually walked up to the speaker on the wall and was sniffing it, trying to figure out where the hell its coming from. Now shes lying there with her ears moving in rhythm with the sounds. Very strange... maybe the next time she decides to be a little bastard I'll put this on.

  • Implications (Score:5, Funny)

    by prockcore ( 543967 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:27AM (#4161852)
    I wonder if I can

    cat /proc/kcore | /dev/dsp

    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.
  • 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

  • Multiple Applications? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by shirai ( 42309 )
    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.

  • This must be an advertisement (Score:5, Funny)

    by ndogg ( 158021 ) <the.rhorn@nOsPAm.gmail.com> on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:34AM (#4161884) Homepage Journal
    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"

  • Addiction. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jericho4.0 ( 565125 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:35AM (#4161887)
    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.
    • Anyone saw Until the End of the World [hollywood.com], starring William Hurt as a zombie addicted to his own dreams?
    • Some addictions aren't bad anyways.

      I'm addicted to breathing... if I stop breathing for even a minute, my body goes through severe withdrawl. But someone told me that for all physical addictions, it's out of your system after 3 days and then you'll just need to cope with the mental addiction.

      One of these days I'll hold my breath for 3 days, and finally kick this air addiction that's ruling my life and hindering my dream of becoming a merman.
    • The statement in the article notwithstanding, I'm fairly certain
      it _does_ have the potential to be addictive. My own research
      shows very clearly that sleep is a very addictive habbit that
      not one person in a hundred can kick.
    • If the brain lost it's ability to produce brainwaves, you'd be dead. If you are dead, I don't think you'd need to worry about a good nights sleep anymore.
  • 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!
    • I don't know what kinda coffee your smoking...
    • This [stanford.edu] may be the drug you're looking for.

    • As I understand it, sleep activates the brains method of "garbage collecting". In other words, while you sleep your thoughts get better organized and your mind detaches unused information. If you're willing to forego THAT (read: become a raving lunatic), then go right ahead and do without sleep. Just let the rest of the world know when you hit the one-week barrier again, so we can stay out of your reach.


      But it would depend on your definition of "nap". Does it last 1 hour? 2 maybe? I seem to recall the garbage collection stuff being related to REM sleep, which starts about 1 hour into your sleep (figure pulled entirely from memory). So naps of 2 hours or so should definately help you keep your mind, but in the long run you'll probably just have to come to turns with the fact that we're DESIGNED (creationist?/Darwinist? - still true) to need sleep.

  • ... and statistics. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by valentyn ( 248783 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:41AM (#4161899) Homepage
    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! ;)

    • Re:... and statistics. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DennyK ( 308810 )
      Err, I think they were referring to how much the group improved as a whole, not how many members of the group showed improvement.

      Still, it would be nice to see the experiment done on a larger sample.

      DennyK
    • I would imagine that they ran the experiment repeatedly over multiple nights. Say the experimental group and the control group were each five people, and that they did 20 nights of testing. That's one hundred tests each. If 75 to 85 of the one hundred experimental trials were sucessful, and if only 15 of the placebo group worked...

      -Ster

  • Obvious Questions (Score:4, Funny)

    by guttentag ( 313541 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:43AM (#4161901) Journal
    What military applications exist for this new lullaby technology?

    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.

    Patent pending, of course. :D

  • brainwave manipulation (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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 [eegspectrum.com]

    or some neurofeedback applications [eegspectrum.com]

    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. [newscientist.com]

    Anonymous BrainWave

  • How soon until Creative Labs picks this up? (Score:3, Funny)

    by tRoll with Butter ( 542444 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @02:49AM (#4161917)
    Hell, the Audigy already has every OTHER feature imaginable. "Now includes Sleep Blaster(TM) Technology via a FireWire-enabled aluminum foil hat!"
  • hmmm wonder if the riaa will now charge you per brain wave.............

  • A good follow up study: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zelet ( 515452 )
    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.
  • 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 [benzact.org].

    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...
  • So what happens when we record Barry Manilow's brainwaves and introduce this as music -- head explosion?

  • A Safer High (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Associate ( 317603 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @03:09AM (#4161958) Homepage
    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.

  • Brainwave Generator (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's a much more robust Windows Brainwave generator available at http://www.bwgen.com/ [bwgen.com]. There's a free download available if you want to try it.
  • Get CoolEdit [syntrillium.com] and some headphones. Use its Brainwave Synchronizer filter and experiment with alpha, delta waves (or whatever) and there you go! Pretty neat stuff actually.
  • Oh great. How long till Hilary Rosen and the RIAA claim that listening to our own brainwaves is stealing from all those hardworking artists?

    And what kind of copyprotection method will they propose?

    ;-)

  • Now try the reverse (Score:4, Interesting)

    by foo12 ( 585116 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @03:27AM (#4161996)
    Analyze existing musical lullabyes and see how they compare to sleep brainwave patterns.

    • Re:Now try the reverse (Score:2, Interesting)

      by falzer ( 224563 )
      There are probably many songs that aren't called lullabyes but could act as such (when played with proper instruments). One example I can think of is Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", especially the new Switched on Bach performance.

      Maybe different keys or tuning styles are better suited to sleep, because some notes may be harmonics of fundamental brain frequencies. Just a thought, probably wrong.

  • I try it but ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by YeeHaW_Jelte ( 451855 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @03:28AM (#4161997) Homepage
    ... my brains would probably just produce a heap of white noise, as I can't make up my mind.

  • Better way already available (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Squonk ( 128339 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @03:40AM (#4162014) Journal
    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.

  • Live playback? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Cyberop5 ( 520141 )
    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?

  • 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. :-)

  • schumann resonances (Score:1, Interesting)

    by laurentr ( 457047 )
    this reminds me of schumann resonances.. you can read about them at: http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/Schumann.htm l [innerx.net]

    i was telling a buddy about these and he recommended i check out http://www.bwgen.com/ [bwgen.com] .. 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 :]

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • This kind of work has been done for about 25 years at The Monroe Institute [monroeinstitute.org] 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.

  • Hebb's principle (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xant ( 99438 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @09:25AM (#4163178) Homepage
    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.
  • 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 [ohio-state.edu] 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!"

  • Wet Dreams? (Score:3)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Thursday August 29, 2002 @01:03PM (#4164896) Journal
    Naw, my wife would get pissed when it starts to play cheezy porno themes.

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