The experience of such oscillations is described as hearing a sound with a frequency equal to the difference in frequencies between the original tones (Oster 1973). Binaural beats are perceived as periodic loudness fluctuations of a sound (Karino et al. Our results suggest that binaural beats enhance selectivity in updating episodic memory traces and further strengthen the hypothesis that neural activity in the gamma band is critically associated with the control of feature binding.īinaural beats represent the auditory experience of an oscillating sound that occurs when two sounds with neighboring frequencies are presented to one’s left and right ear separately. While the size of visuomotor binding costs (indicating the binding of visual and action features) was unaffected by the binaural beats, the size of visual feature binding costs (which refer to the binding between the two visual features) was considerably smaller during gamma-frequency binaural beats exposure than during the control condition.

Healthy adults listened to gamma-frequency (40 Hz) binaural beats or to a constant tone of 340 Hz (control condition) for ten minutes before and during a feature-repetition task. Given that neural synchronization in the gamma band has been associated with visual feature bindings, we investigated whether the impact of binaural beats extends to the top-down control of feature bindings. These partial-repetition (or binding) costs point to the existence of temporary episodic bindings (event files) that are automatically retrieved by repeating at least one of their features. Recent studies of feature-repetition effects demonstrated interactions between perceptual features and action-related features: repeating only some, but not all features of a perception–action episode hinders performance. Binaural beats have been shown to impact information processing via their putative role in increasing neural synchronization. Binaural beats represent the auditory experience of an oscillating sound that occurs when two sounds with neighboring frequencies are presented to one’s left and right ear separately.

Gamma binaural beats side effects