LISTEN TO BINAURAL BEATS
Binaural beats create a fascinating auditory illusion. When one tone is played into your left ear and another one – with a slightly different frequency – is played into your right, your brain synthesizes a third tone, the difference between the two. For instance, if a 240Hz tone is presented to one ear and a 280Hz tone to the other, we perceive a tone of 40Hz.
Yet binaural beats are more than an aural oddity – they could be the key to better focus. “It’s due to a process known as brain ‘entrainment’,” says Dr Sandhya Basu from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India. “Our brainwaves start mimicking the frequency of an external stimulus to produce a frequency-following response that has cognitive effects.”
This effectively means that listening to lower-frequency binaural beats could nudge your brain waves into lower frequencies, which promotes relaxation (when you’re asleep, your brain waves are low frequency). In the same way, listening to higher-frequency beats could lead to improvements in concentration.
In a 2022 paper, Basu and her colleagues combined the findings of previous studies and found that ‘alpha’ binaural beats (8-13Hz) work best for improving attention. It’s waves at these frequencies that dominate your brain when it's alert, but relaxed.
“When we’re relaxed, our cognitive activities can strengthen because of a lack of cognitive load and stress,” says Basu. “We need more robust research on generalising the results and understanding the neural underpinnings of entrainment, however,” she adds. “Nonetheless, there seems to be a promising future for using entrainment for improving cognition.”
In short, when you need to get your head down, playing alpha binaural beats (stream for free with a simple online search) might be worth a try.
You may soon be able to try a visual form of binaural beats too, as Basu did with a class of children. She took lights and made them flicker at alpha and beta frequencies.
The children’s brains – tracked using electroencephalogram (EEG) – differed in how well they were entrained. It may sound distracting, but for those with high-quality entrainment, psychometric tests showed improvements in their attention and memory scores.