Focusing via binaural beats

[Stevie]

Binaural beats give me a killer headache. I tried em out a few times (had some dreaming effect from the time I tried a lucid dreaming track) before they started just making my head hurt, and that was cool I guess.

[Vos]

My host has tried using binaural beats before, but it wasn't a very pleasant experiences. All of the tones he used left him with a headache, so we ended up using brown noise and rain sounds.

[Tewi]

"There is no substitute for hard work", as they say. They being Thomas Edison.

 

I could put it a different way. Our largest goal in life, as a system, is to become accomplished lucid dreamers. We've been working on it for seven years with little success, and have tried many, many approaches, binaural beats being one of them. After a cumulative one hundred plays on the best one we found, we have not used them for years since.

[tulpa001]

More suggestions for coloured sound?

 

It's actually the deeper ones than red noise that have a chance of inducing hallucinations. Here is a reference implementation of a few noise colours (9) I put together over the week. Requires Java. Stress test your audio system. The deeper ones can easily expose flaws in your setup.

 

Headphones required. Preferably ones with a flat response curve.

 

I didn't test higher bit depths because my current computer is incapable. :( But they should sound identical.

[ricinsbluebox]

Eva: I did a couple of sessions last night just to test it out. Is it okay to do image streaming with things you've already experienced? They were already in my memory but I wanted to recall them with as much detail as I could muster (I'm a writer so everything just kind of flowed out and the mind's eye picture was still a tad fuzzy). Are separate ten minute sessions okay?

 

Stevie: Yeah, I had the headache thing too when I first used them a couple years ago when beginning to force with Skye. I'm going to try to branch out my options and use less of the binaural beats and something more akin to what Tulpa001 mentioned.

 

Vos: I take it for granted that the brown noise/rain sounds were more effective then? And just curious - if you weren't vocal at that point did the noise help you become vocal? I can "hear" Skye's thoughts in my head right now but not necessarily in her own voice. It makes for kind of a maddening time.

 

Tewi: I can agree to that. I'm not looking for shortcuts and have finally owned up to the fact that I'm going to have to put in some major effort into Skye if we're going to go anywhere.

 

Tulpa001: Thanks!! I was going to test out colored noise last night but I forgot to download a few tracks while at a place that had wifi T_T. Since I'm there again today I'll try out some colored noise and get back to you?

[Luminesce]

Binaural beats made my mind feel kinda empty, though I only used them for sleep. Rain sounds are calming and do remove a lot of fluff thoughts, but I feel like they're not quite as good for "focusing". Not colored noises either. Those seem good for conditioning your mind to.. be relatively empty.. but I'd be kind of uncomfortable listening to them in the background. They're alright on their own but not as an accompaniment to other activities I think.

 

That's just me though.

[Guest Anonymous]

I find it's easier to suppress audio from the outer world when listening to a constant sound; it drowns out sudden noises so I can focus on mentally lowering the volume 'till it's quiet.

[ricinsbluebox]

An: I do too. I discovered that using Red noise is the best for me.

[| Eva |]

Eva: I did a couple of sessions last night just to test it out.  Is it okay to do image streaming with things you've already experienced?  They were already in my memory but I wanted to recall them with as much detail as I could muster (I'm a writer so everything just kind of flowed out and the mind's eye picture was still a tad fuzzy).  Are separate ten minute sessions okay?

 

 

You know how many times Linkzelda uses previous experiences, even in waking life, to his advantage? He basically uses them to do a sandbox reality kind of thing in his mind, and then kind of goes along with other themes he wants to do, and chunks them to certain hours if he's actually going for the long haul. And separate them however you want. The guidelines you may see in descriptions of image streaming, and the very few pdfs and e-books on them are meant to be loose. Just know that actively doing it at a pace that's manageable for you is better than not doing it at all.

 

I just can't give you a statement that it actually augments cognition because there's pretty much no empirical evidence to back it up, even if that one case study on image streaming is kinda out there. Also, in response to the binaural stuff giving headaches, I realized the ones we have, and the isochronic ones have a mix of those noises other people mentioned. I know there's one alpha isochronic we have that has subtle rain fall and dripping of water that's very smoothing. I think me not pointing this out was a major oversight on our end, and we realized that listening to pure binaurals and isochronics can be a little 'I've been listening to this same shit over and over again, I NEED TO GET IT OUT OF MY BRAIN!' Kind of like how a person spams a favorite new song, and they get so in love with it that makes them want to puke and stop listening to it altogether.

 

But even then, we're more distracted on the content going on in our imagination vs. what we're listening to. It's a nice filler to pay less attention to reality when image streaming, but this is only one impression, so don't feel you're 'required' to utilize the beats/tones.

[Hidari]

I tend to use pink noise when I'm forcing, as my brothers tend to be rather loud when they're playing games in the living room. It drowns out their voices pretty well for me, and allows me to focus fully on forcing. That, and I like that it sounds like rain almost.

 

The noises from the Eye-bo are pretty good at drowning out other noises as well it seems.

I do use alpha isochronics or binaural beats occasionally, but I don't really know if they have much effect. Luckily I don't get headaches from that or most binaural beats. I haven't used binaural beats lately since I mostly wanted the ability to not think about my surroundings, I wasn't really concerned about my focus as long as I wasn't getting distracted by outside stimuli.