This article’s title, subtitle, summary, and first two paragraphs all contain some version of the phrase “reshapes your brains internal networks in real time.” I thought I was going crazy after I read the same thing six times.
Otherwise agree with psytrance / goa mixes. Techno can be good too if you are tired (eg: Sara Landry, 999999999). Trance can help to uplift if you are depressed. Classical to make you feel more ordered.. I love dubstep in my brain but it creates patterns that are counter-intuitive to doing any work — that genre makes me feel “free”.
I do still actively wonder what portion of the effects are real vs placebo in audio "treatments". I'm not certain I am sold on things like binaural beats and such, but I do believe that pleasing music that relaxes the brain for a person can be real. It's just highly person dependent. One persons calming effect with hard rock is another person's anxiety source. Would be incredible if it allowed for better understanding of this.
I’ve always felt that certain sounds or music really affect how focused I am. Background noise from a café, for example, actually helps me concentrate and makes writing feel easier.
It’s kind of amazing when you think about it. Makes me want to experiment more and see if sound can actually “tune” the brain to boost focus or improve mood.
Related tangent - here's my carefully-curated "flowstate" Spotify playlist consisting of tracks w/ no lyrics and a variety of moods. I pick one that suits me in the moment and put it on repeat. I find it boosts my focus and energy and is very helpful in attaining flowstate, for problem-solving or Cal Newport-style "deep work" sessions.
Meanwhile, it's interesting that I do find I can focus deeper on code with certain types of music. I also have certain music I listen to when I want to write a document, such as a PRFAQ or some narrative. I've always assumed I was just "programming" myself for these modes, and the music was reminding me of the mode I was in. Perhaps it's a little of both.
Does this mean that people who claim listening different sound frequencies can heal you were not wrong? If sound does have a profound effect like that, those changes in brain might effect other things as well.
There's very little in the article about "how" sound reshapes "networks" in the brain. It's pretty reasonable to expect that hearing different sounds can cause different neurons to fire, though (considering you can upload information into somebody's brain by talking to them).
Did this reconfig-by-sound a lot in college using binaural beats. While others use coffee and other chemicals I'd just pop in my earphones and play a beat sequence for whatever the needed purpose, whether extreme focus, a power nap, enhanced creativity, etc. Worked pretty well, though I'd feel nuked for a while after extended usage.
A while back someone on this site posted a link to a music channel that fused the sound of an SFPD police dispatcher with an ecclectic mix of low-key electronic type music. Can't find it since but really liked it. Anyone here know what i'm describing?
I work in neurotech with auditory stimulation, so you'd think I'd be a big fan of this area of research, and I think the authors have done a decent job of suggesting the limitations, but the title itself gets picked up and people read a lot into what they think this is saying. Or maybe I'm just a bit jaded.
They provide a 2.4 Hz stimulus and then measure frequency-matched activity across brain networks. They suggest some novel methods of measuring how the signal traverses the brain, but they don't suggest why it does, which is good. They do say this is unlikely to be entrainment, I'll get into that more in a bit.
We shouldn't be surprised that auditory stimulation produces frequency-matched activity across distributed brain regions. The auditory system naturally routes information across multiple interconnected networks. The auditory system picks it up, but the auditory system is also not siloed into a single area of the brain. No brain systems are, we have replication, and this is just showing the the nervous system is passing the signal throughout the brain. In no way does it suggest that this is related to thought, consciousness, focus, or that these frequency-matched responses reflect any functional change in brain state.
When people talk about entrainment, that is a real thing. But the word itself describes when systems synchronize, not that they will.
I guess I'm cautious about papers like these because of our work in neurostimulation and sleep where we use phase-targeted auditory stimulation to enhance slow-wave activity. Basically increasing sleep's restorative function.
In our work it isn't this sort of "gentle tones to help you sleep", or "activating networks to alter brain activity", which is an area I see a lot of snake-oil and nonsense.
The way closed-loop phase-targeted slow-wave enhancement works is by "interrupting" the brain during the synchronous firing of neurons, which (it is believed) triggers a protective mechanism in the brain and as a response, the brain increases the synchronous firing of neurons. We're talking about very short (50ms) interruptions.
I get my back up a bit when I hear about this idea that reading electrical activity of the brain and making broad assumptions about what they "mean". I've been invited to speak on a panel July 2nd with Australia's Commissioner of Human Rights to discuss ethical safety around EEG data, and while I do believe we need to protect bio-data, I don't believe in the "electrical activity means we can read or alter your thoughts" camp.
If you want to know more about our work, you can check out https://affectablesleep.com, and if you're in Sydney, and want to come to the talk, I can't find a link atm, but it's at the Sydney Knowledge Hub on July 2nd., part of the Sydney Neurotech Meetup
"Music is a delight for the soul, an echo of the divine, binding time together—past, present, and future."
-- St. Augustine
Music makes your brain work in an interesting way, keeping track of this memory/current flow/anticipation of time in a non-visual and often non-verbal way.
honestly every time i see .htm i double check twice thinking it's a typo
then realize no, it's actually .htm and weirdly comforting. means someone out there kept the old publishing flow alive. feels more handcrafted, less processed
not trying to chase trends, just pushing pages the same quiet way for years
there’s something solid about that kind of consistency
There are combination of frequencies, tempo, volume, shortly specific music that acts as psychotropic agent on me, altering the way my mind works for the duration of the song. I am the type laughing at trance and meditation and other hyped-in-certain-circles blabla, but what I feel then may be something related.
"Music is to me proof of the existence of god
It is so extraordinarily full of magic
And, and in tough times of my life
I can listen to music and it makes such a difference"
- 1 Giant Leap - Daphne
music is the category of all possible languages, is a statement I've been mulling lately. it's less of an aesthetic judgment than the usual, "music is a language," where it's more of a comment on encoding.
I'd suggest the capacity for our brains and minds to apprehend shapes, relationships, patterns, and ultimately symbols is made from its ability to parse the category of things in music. time, difference, harmonics, consonance, dissonance, patterns. as though all the symbols and representations that emerge from our chunking and caching of stimuli into patterns are in a category of logical artefacts. we represent them- and relationships between them- as musical. Maths codifies or encodes these same relationships and artefacts, but the underlying objects aren't just abstractions, they are a measurement of essentially "musical" relationships.
it falls a bit for the "everything is X" fallacy, but if people seriously pursue the premise that our brains compute, then plausibly, the stimulus it computes over is this category of possible languages we call "music." not sure how useful the idea is, but it's pretty.
This is also direct evidence that qualia/consciousness is made of waves, not computations. The Neural Net "wiring" of the human brain is mostly I/O signal routing for various sensory input data and motor neuron output. The convolutions and special 3D shapes in the brain are actually working more like "resonator" circuits (literally like radios), and I'm convinced even memory is not stored "locally" but spread out across all past brains via entanglement and quantum waves (see. "Block Universe" and/or "Eternalism").
This viewpoint means when you remember something from the past that's actually a quantum wave effect where your current brain automatically "finds" and gets energy from the closest matching prior state. This would be like a opera singer singing a pitch to find a hidden wine glass that will resonate at that frequency. This lookup/retrieval mechanism requires no wires or direct contact, but only waves. However I think qualia is built of 'probability waves' and that's how they manage to travel faster than light to go out and find "matching memories", because probability waves are not "real" (no mass) and therefore not subject to the speed of light limitations.
Dancing brainwaves: How sound reshapes your brain networks in real time
(sciencedaily.com)182 points by lentoutcry 8 June 2025 | 72 comments
Comments
I find a lot of electronic music helpful for coding.
Some bangers for anyone interested:
Age Of Love - The Age Of Love (Charlotte de Witte & Enrico Sangiuliano Remix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YVvcTIGy40
Nero - My Eyes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiojdDs8wwk
SUB FOCUS x WILKINSON @ Corfe Castle, Dorset https://youtu.be/TRh-amAhOEw?si=jCx1V7jkciB3h4kh
Adventure Club - Gold (Ft. Yuna) https://youtu.be/09wdQP1FFR0?si=r7hfA6w3qfhXzL30
https://musicforprogramming.net/
Otherwise agree with psytrance / goa mixes. Techno can be good too if you are tired (eg: Sara Landry, 999999999). Trance can help to uplift if you are depressed. Classical to make you feel more ordered.. I love dubstep in my brain but it creates patterns that are counter-intuitive to doing any work — that genre makes me feel “free”.
It’s kind of amazing when you think about it. Makes me want to experiment more and see if sound can actually “tune” the brain to boost focus or improve mood.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
https://health.au.dk/en/display/artikel/dansende-hjerneboelg...
Meanwhile, it's interesting that I do find I can focus deeper on code with certain types of music. I also have certain music I listen to when I want to write a document, such as a PRFAQ or some narrative. I've always assumed I was just "programming" myself for these modes, and the music was reminding me of the mode I was in. Perhaps it's a little of both.
Here’s a link to the paper:
https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ad...
They provide a 2.4 Hz stimulus and then measure frequency-matched activity across brain networks. They suggest some novel methods of measuring how the signal traverses the brain, but they don't suggest why it does, which is good. They do say this is unlikely to be entrainment, I'll get into that more in a bit.
We shouldn't be surprised that auditory stimulation produces frequency-matched activity across distributed brain regions. The auditory system naturally routes information across multiple interconnected networks. The auditory system picks it up, but the auditory system is also not siloed into a single area of the brain. No brain systems are, we have replication, and this is just showing the the nervous system is passing the signal throughout the brain. In no way does it suggest that this is related to thought, consciousness, focus, or that these frequency-matched responses reflect any functional change in brain state.
When people talk about entrainment, that is a real thing. But the word itself describes when systems synchronize, not that they will.
I guess I'm cautious about papers like these because of our work in neurostimulation and sleep where we use phase-targeted auditory stimulation to enhance slow-wave activity. Basically increasing sleep's restorative function.
In our work it isn't this sort of "gentle tones to help you sleep", or "activating networks to alter brain activity", which is an area I see a lot of snake-oil and nonsense.
The way closed-loop phase-targeted slow-wave enhancement works is by "interrupting" the brain during the synchronous firing of neurons, which (it is believed) triggers a protective mechanism in the brain and as a response, the brain increases the synchronous firing of neurons. We're talking about very short (50ms) interruptions.
I get my back up a bit when I hear about this idea that reading electrical activity of the brain and making broad assumptions about what they "mean". I've been invited to speak on a panel July 2nd with Australia's Commissioner of Human Rights to discuss ethical safety around EEG data, and while I do believe we need to protect bio-data, I don't believe in the "electrical activity means we can read or alter your thoughts" camp.
If you want to know more about our work, you can check out https://affectablesleep.com, and if you're in Sydney, and want to come to the talk, I can't find a link atm, but it's at the Sydney Knowledge Hub on July 2nd., part of the Sydney Neurotech Meetup
-- St. Augustine
Music makes your brain work in an interesting way, keeping track of this memory/current flow/anticipation of time in a non-visual and often non-verbal way.
I'd suggest the capacity for our brains and minds to apprehend shapes, relationships, patterns, and ultimately symbols is made from its ability to parse the category of things in music. time, difference, harmonics, consonance, dissonance, patterns. as though all the symbols and representations that emerge from our chunking and caching of stimuli into patterns are in a category of logical artefacts. we represent them- and relationships between them- as musical. Maths codifies or encodes these same relationships and artefacts, but the underlying objects aren't just abstractions, they are a measurement of essentially "musical" relationships.
it falls a bit for the "everything is X" fallacy, but if people seriously pursue the premise that our brains compute, then plausibly, the stimulus it computes over is this category of possible languages we call "music." not sure how useful the idea is, but it's pretty.
This viewpoint means when you remember something from the past that's actually a quantum wave effect where your current brain automatically "finds" and gets energy from the closest matching prior state. This would be like a opera singer singing a pitch to find a hidden wine glass that will resonate at that frequency. This lookup/retrieval mechanism requires no wires or direct contact, but only waves. However I think qualia is built of 'probability waves' and that's how they manage to travel faster than light to go out and find "matching memories", because probability waves are not "real" (no mass) and therefore not subject to the speed of light limitations.