I’ve been wondering about binaurals for a long time. I’ve listened to tapes of binaural beats from a number of publishers. In fact, I’ve spent quite a bit of cash on them. Some of my best friends make products based on this theory.

I usually like listening to binaural beat tapes… but never enough to slap on some headphones for the 30-120 minutes a day that the manufacturers say I should. I often, but not always, feel more relaxed when I listen to them. I like them as white noise when I’m on a plane.
But something always troubled me about the advertisements for binaural beat products — they never showed real-time proof of the “your brain entrains to the frequency” claim. It would be easy, I thought, to show the read-out from an EEG (a device that measures these brain waves) so we could actually see someone’s brain on binaurals. Especially with the ease of doing video online, I figured people would be racing to use SCIENCE to prove the “entrainment” claim.