The placebo effect is not nonsense.
Believing they alter brainwaves is the nonsense part.
I have used my brainwave app binaural beats successfully to stay alert doing mundane computer tasks reviewing thousands of vulnerabilities and recommended responses where attention to detail was mandatory and the review/editing process would take several full days and under pretty extreme time pressure. When I started I couldn’t do it for more than about 20 minutes straight without taking a break. Listening to classical music, especially Bach and Vivaldi helped somewhat. When I started using the app I was able to go 4 hours straight with no errors. Probably could have gone longer but always scheduled a lunch break to decompress.
Having to wear headphones or earbuds can make it a bit cumbersome for sleeping so I don’t use it much now that I am retired because my sleep schedule doesn’t really matter much. But if the sleep deficit builds up over time, I will use them with a lavender inhaler to catch some good zzz’s.
Placebo effect may explain some people’s success with them, but having used them for over 12 years in one form or another I am sold on them.
Back in the early 90’s when I was involved with astronaut training I proposed using eeg type monitoring integrated into the VR headsets. I felt you could slow down the training session if the trainee wasn’t alert. At the time NASA thought it was a good idea but seemed “too hardâ€. I still have my suspicions that someone in those meetings went on to start NeuroSky.
Once I got familiar with binaural beats, and with the technology advances I formalized my ideas to not only do the monitoring during training but also during EVAs. During EVAs the astronauts wear a skull cap and it would have been very easy to integrate eeg sensors like NeuroSky uses. I submitted several unsolicited proposals with full backing from the aerospace company I was working for at the time. They gave me some seed funding and I built a basic prototype using the NeuroSky sensors and the gnaural open source programs. The idea was to use the binaural beats for several scenarios. Guide the astronauts back to an alert, attentive state, especially during training while on their way to MARS. That type of training needs to be accomplished while in route in order to provide a “just-in-time†training session for landing procedures. Another would be to help alter their circadian rhythm in order to have multiple shift coverage during long duration missions.
My proposals were all well received by the Engineering Directorate at JSC and they encouraged me to keep lobbying for funding. The astronaut office would never buy in. Monitoring vital signs like O2, heart rate and blood pressure seem to be fine, but sensing what happens in an astronaut’s head turned out to be a show stopper. I still believe my ideas had merit and could have been expanded to include pilots of regular and military aircraft.
Elon Musk has taken it a step further. No binaural beats for that dude. Just embed a chip.
visitors can't see pics , please
register or
loginvisitors can't see pics , please
register or
login
