Be it in social gatherings or late study nights, we use audio stimuli to set the “right mood” and improve our cognitive performance ( Mammarella et al., 2007 Schellenberg et al., 2007 Tarr et al., 2014). Humans use music and rhythm as mood enhancers. Whether binaural beats have an impact on cognitive performance or other mood measurements remains to be seen and can be further investigated within the proposed methodological framework.
Our results provide evidence that binaural beats elicit cross frequency connectivity patterns, but weakly entrain the cortex when compared with monaural beat stimuli. Despite this, we did not find any mood modulation related to our experimental manipulation. Furthermore, functional connectivity patterns were modulated differentially by both kinds of stimuli, with binaural beats being the only one eliciting cross-frequency activity. Both stimuli elicited standard subcortical responses at the pure tone frequencies of the stimulus, and entrained the cortex at the beat frequency. To do so, we compared the effects of binaural beats with a control beat stimulation (monaural beats, known to entrain brain activity but not mood) across four distinct levels in the human auditory pathway: subcortical and cortical entrainment, scalp-level functional connectivity and self-reports. Here, we sought to address those questions in a robust fashion using a single-blind, active-controlled protocol.
Several controversial claims have been attributed to binaural beats regarding their ability to entrain human brain activity and mood, in both the scientific literature and the marketing realm. Binaural beating is a perceptual auditory illusion occurring when presenting two neighboring frequencies to each ear separately.
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