https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
Of course, the substrate being researched back then is different from human wetware.
[0]the theory that playing a different tone in each ear, that when superpositioned by the brain to produce a low frequency, would entrain the brainwave frequency to the modulated frequency.
Do you have a link to the pmeumatic headphones study you mention?
Nothing as in lasting effects, or “nothing” as in you can’t hear the bineurality.
If the latter, it could be your headphones- and I assume you are using headphones, or the compression, or your ears might be non-equivalent in hearing capability.
If the former, then thats the point OP is making.
At least for me, the sound is strangely pleasurable, not incredibly dissimilar to the kind of “multiple audio sources colliding into one nice stream” that you get from a real life orchestra.
“Among the 14 studies reviewed, five supported the idea, eight contradicted it, and one ended with mixed results.”
They talk about a few studies with positive results, but then share this:
“not every study shows positive effects. One 2023 study of 1,000 people found that listening to binaural beats at home while taking a test reduced their performance, while silence or listening to other sounds had no impact.”
(Here’s the study referred to: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372220600_Reverse_e...)
https://www.popsci.com/science/do-binaural-beats-work-focus/
WebMD has no clear results either, summarizing:
“Some early research suggests they may affect your brainwaves in ways that may help with attention, anxiety, sleep, and more. But other studies found unclear and mixed results. There aren't scientifically proven guidelines for how best to use binaural beats, or whether they can improve your mental health and thinking.”
It also mentions “they didn’t stop attention from declining over time.”
https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-are-binaural-beats
When asked if binaural beats work, Google’s AI answer confidently starts with the word “Yes”, but fails to back it up with scientific references. And I found some commercial sales listicles (e.g., Ohm Store) and YouTube videos that strongly claim binaural beats are amazing, but also have little to back it up.
My personal experience listening to binaural beats is it helps with focus on coding about the same amount as listening to color noise or rain & thunder or other non-musical audio tracks. Listening to anything masks office chatter and distracting noises.
I didn't use headphones. I had the link at the top of my blog menu. It was that important.
When Google video shut down I forgot to download it. Caused a slight panic lol The headaches now remind me of it but it is not the right mood to search and the videos online are all useless garbage.
I played it for a friend one time. He instantly put both hands on his head and screamed that I should shut it of immediately. He was really upset and thought I did it on purpose. Also didn't understand how I wasn't negativity affected like him.
If I didn't find that video I'd be convinced it's bullshit.
edit: lol. downvotes on friendly reminder, what a classic.
my friend was not sure what everyone sees on 3d TVs. then got rid of it. later it turned out it was because of eye cancer.
take care.
I mean, what's more likely - that the binaural beats retune brain, or that someone forgot that any straight-ish piece of wire is a radio antenna, and the signal being seen comes straight from headphones? Using pneumatic headphones would make it go away too.
Independently, since the whole idea relies on resonance, it may be the case that an fMRI doesn't actually interfere with the "stochastic resonance" mechanic quite like TMS (transcranial magnetic simulation) seems to.
If you model the brain this way, dementia looks like a clear breakdown of System 2, which is an interesting thought experiment even if the mechanics aren't perfect: https://1393.xyz/writing/alzheimers-is-the-symptom-not-the-p...
The Meta paper [1] is much more useful. They claim to be reading out what someone is seeing, in a rather approximate way. The sensing is improving. One project was able to sense magnetic fields at 13 points at 1KHZ using a custom helmet fitted with sensors.[2] The technology is still in the early stages, but they got rid of the high vacuum and cyrogenics needed for SQUID sensors. Progress.
This currently has fewer data points than functional MRI, but more bandwith. fMRI, after all, is measuring blood flow. It's like trying to figure out what an IC is doing by watching its infra-red heat emissions. "Look, the FPU is working hard now."
That paper is a few years old. What's been going on since?
[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-image-decoding-meg-magneto...
Oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have slightly different magnetic properties. So the fMRI is trying to detect from that how oxygenated the blood is, with the assumption that active areas are using more oxygen which causes a small dip then blood flow increases so then there’s an increase that follows over about 5-6 seconds. I don’t know if more advanced things are used now but when I messed about with it you’d measure the change then apply a 6s linear convolution to the signal to estimate activity.
There’s an interesting set of layers of assumptions in all this, and to me the idea that the mri part works at all seems like wild magic.
It's tentatively proven that humans react to large magnetic fields. The reaction can come from simple interference, without ever being processed as a sense.
But there's so much more bullshit. That an MEG measurement was decoded only means that the brain produces a magnetic field that correlates with the information it is processing. So there's no Faraday cage in our head. Great. But the brain already knows what it is doing. All that information is there, very fast and reliable. Why should it try to decode its much less detailed and very weak magnetic field then? Where are the sensors? MEG needs super-conduction to work, and doesn't work when there's any disturbance. In the institute where I worked, it was forbidden to use carts (for moving equipment or coffee or whatever) on all floors in the corner where the MEG was located when there was an experiment going on, because it would disturb measurements. A few crystals aren't going to overcome those problems.
> The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness
OMFG. There's really no point in reading this.
I’ve tried to replicate it, but my chances have become slim-to-none with CRTs going out of fashion.
I wonder if that correlates with people who believe in astrology.
This was where I started pulling this thread (October 2025): https://1393.xyz/writing/could-the-root-cause-of-alzheimers-...
And this is an even further ancestor of the ideas (December 2023): https://1393.xyz/writing/are-we-only-conscious-while-were-le...
I'm operating off of my own subjective experience, and this idea lines up tightly with System 1 and System 2 in cognitive psychology.
It seems that many jump to "AI psychosis" when one mentions magnetic fields, but the evolutionary tree is very straightforward:
1. Nature evolves magnetoreception for navigation
2. Eventually, a brain in nature with magnetoreception accidentally "hears" its own magnetic field with with resonance
3. That lossy global summary of the brains ends up being an evolutionarily advantageous "higher-order sense"
4. Evolution sharpens the blade for many years
On first principles, that seems perfectly viable and even likely given that magnetoreception was such a boon for survival for all life.
Just glad others are finding it interesting!
MRI machines at 3 Tesla field strength are 100,000x stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, and pulsed very fast. They affect the spin of the nucleus of the Hydrogen atoms in the body, but apparently have no effect on the person's brain or consciousness (or biomagnetite)? We wear headphones with electromagnetic coils pulsing music on the sides of our heads for hours at a time, with no effect. We use machine's powerful electric motors, work near them, we're surrounded by alternating currents in wires, some people experiment with Tesla Coils, MagLev capable of lifting trains, wireless power delivery...
(PS. Red / Arctic Foxes might be able to see the Earth's magnetic field and use it to help find mice to hunt; they listen for mice they can't see and jump-pounce into the snow and their jumps are successful at getting the mouse 80% of the time when they are facing North-East and only 18% of the time when they aren't - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/foxes-use... )
* Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
* Some animals have a preference for sleeping direction in alignment with magnetic pole, are some sleeping directions "healthier" than others for humans?
That aside, I didn't follow the part about how this is an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Why couldn't the brain achieve global summarization via another mechanism, and why does having this "global summarization" result in qualia?
For what it's worth, I have a disorder that causes me to see "auras" around people quite often. The nature of the disorder is that my brain can't filter out its own sensory noise properly, giving rise to a lot of visual artefacts that non-disordered brains filter out. These range from 'TV static' to stuff that's not a million miles away from diffusion model artefacts, but the auras around people I see pretty much all the time especially against plain backgrounds. It's not very well-known or studied but fMRI studies have recently implicated the same serotonin receptor psychedelics target, and it's also linked to migraine.
I think this disorder being more prevalent than expected would be a good explanation for auras. It was once thought to be very rare, but many people who have it aren't actually affected enough to seek out a diagnosis. It wouldn't be an unreasonable source for images like auras, saints' haloes, and other things like that since they're just an ordinary part of vision for me. I also think it somewhat vindicates Aldous Huxley's thoughts on the subject.
I really like the idea of electrical fields being somehow important for consciousness, and it's not something I'd rule out off the bat. I just think that disorders of perception are a better explanation for auras and similar phenomena.
If any of it was possible, it would be easily scientifically provable by very simple experiments. The fact that it hasn't been proven while people would have very high motivations to prove it, suggests it's very probably not happening.
I've always held two complementary beliefs regarding auras and similar senses:
1. It's plausible that some humans can sense subtle information about things like emotional states or reactions in other humans using non standard sensing mechanisms (so maybe electric fields rather than sight, for example).
2. I'm very certain that for overwhelmingly most humans who claim they can see auras, it's one of: bullshit, fakery, self delusion, wishful thinking, charlatanism, a scam.
The Meta paper, as well as other studies which have been interpreted as rudimentary "mind-reading" have measured activity in sensory cortex correlated with direct sensory inputs. There's a fairly close mapping between the initial layers of sensory cortex and patterns of activation in the sense organs. e.g. the optic nerve from each eye projects onto the initial layer of visual cortex in a way that closely preserves the geometry of the retinal image, so it's not that difficult to correlate information in the stimulus and these parts of cortex. Making sense of activity in deeper areas of cortex which isn't as closely correlated with immediate sensory stimulation is a much harder task.
Secondly, the idea seems to be that the brain could make use of a "lossy image" of its own overall functioning. This part seemed very handwavy to me. The brain already contains the information about its own functioning, by definition, so it's not clear to me what functions would be served by the brain's being able to "sense its own magnetic field". It's known that the brain integrates information from distant regions through the patterns of neuronal connectivity. It's not clear that something similar can be done with magnetic fields, because these would mostly affect very nearby areas of the brain, and long-distance effects would be scrambled with all the other activity going on in other parts of the brain.
The idea to look at the effects of the electromagnetic fields in brain functioning is interesting though. The general idea has been around for a long time[0]. The dificult part is making a detailed proposal for how it would actually work and finding experimental evidence for that.
[0] Burr, Northrop (1935) The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life
(not really.. but still. the thing about induced states of mind by TCMS is true)
And the paper is clearly the ancestor to the article itself, based on the date (5dec -> 11dec)
I’m surprised this made it to the front page of HN. I think AI tools are making it easier to create increasingly plausible-sounding bullshit, and gradually overwhelming the defenses of this community.
"Wouldn't" suggests that the brain is choosing not to. I'm not sure this is the case here.
It's literally “What's the reason that the machinery of the brain doesn't use this mechanism, given this proof that the effect could in principle be used?”. A similar question can be made for quantum mechanical interference in the brain (which to be clear I feel is adequately answered by “the brain is a wildly inappropriate vehicle for harnessing interference effects).
If some mammalian species were able to survive this extinction event and subsequently flourish, why wouldn't dinosaur species?
Not sure that works for me. I'd put "couldn't".
It seems a bit silly, but I suspect that more of our life may be effected by biomagnetism than we yet realize.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1742-9994-10-80
Bioelectricity too, which is just now starting to get properly researched (see Michael Levin's stuff).
