Key Of Grey

July 13th, 2008 – I’ve always been interested in the concept of binaural beats. The idea that sound can affect you at a subconscious level is pretty fantastic. Basically binaural beats use alternating sounds in stereo to modify your brain waves, or so I’ve been told. Recently, there have been a lot of products on the market that attempt to change your mood and even boost your brain’s performance.

I personally have tried Pzizz, a piece of software that randomly builds sound programs to your settings. It combines music, ambient sounds, and some guy speaking softly, to help you powernap, or sleep well for the night. I’m not actually sure if it works the way it’s supposed to because any time I’ve used it I was really tired anyways, and the sound of the rainforest is enough to put me to sleep. Did it subconsciously modify my brain waves? I’m not sure.

While Pzizz is paid software, websites have begun offering such services. Last week, I posted about Simply Noise, which played white noise. That didn’t use binaural beats, but it did attempt to drown out everything else so you could concentrate. Some people sleep to white noise, and it certainly seemed to help me concentrate while writing.

If you don’t want to pay to try out Pzizz, you can try iDose. While it doesn’t have an infinite amount of possibilities, it’s free and you can either stream from the internet or download files. Give it a try and let me know how it goes!