Binaural Beat Therapy

Historical Origins

The Binaural beat was first described by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1839, who was a physician and pioneer meteorologist (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25138588). Earphones were not invented during his time, so he employed tuning folks and discovered that slightly different frequencies played separately to each ear produced a perception of interference beats at the same rate as would be physically created. However, the first scientific paper was published by the biophysicists Gerald Oster in 1973 in the journal Scientific American (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1974-04183-001). In his article entitled “Auditory Beats in the Brain”, Oster believed that auditory beats could be employed as an important research tool for auditory and neurological disorders and may also be a potential diagnostic tool for Parkinson’s disease.

Binaural beat therapy is an emerging form of sound wave therapy that makes use of the fact that the right and left ear each receive a slightly different frequency tone, yet the brain perceives these as a single tone. In other words, the brain creates an auditory illusion (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320019). For example, if the left ear receives a frequency of 300 Hertz (HZ) and the right ear receives one at 310 HZ, the binaural beat you hear is 10 HZ. The human hearing frequency, or audible pitch, is between 20 HZ and 20,000 HZ (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10924/#:~:text=Humans%20can%20detect%20sounds%20in,to%2015%E2%80%9317%20kHz.). Hence, a 10 HZ binaural beat would have 10 vibrations or cycles per second, which would constitute an auditory illusion. If a binaural beat is played over time it may synchronize with your brain waves and alter brain activity and levels of arousal, which can be used to modulate cognition and analytical thinking and problem solving, reduce stress and anxiety levels, improve sleep, enhance memory recall, as well as to enhance mood states (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4428073/#B1). More research is certainly warranted to examine and clinically validate how music and binaural beat therapies may aid patients across the lifespan with a variety of disorders and health challenges.