https://health.au.dk/en/display/artikel/dansende-hjerneboelg...

Meanwhile, it's interesting that I do find I can focus deeper on code with certain types of music. I also have certain music I listen to when I want to write a document, such as a PRFAQ or some narrative. I've always assumed I was just "programming" myself for these modes, and the music was reminding me of the mode I was in. Perhaps it's a little of both.

This viewpoint means when you remember something from the past that's actually a quantum wave effect where your current brain automatically "finds" and gets energy from the closest matching prior state. This would be like a opera singer singing a pitch to find a hidden wine glass that will resonate at that frequency. This lookup/retrieval mechanism requires no wires or direct contact, but only waves. However I think qualia is built of 'probability waves' and that's how they manage to travel faster than light to go out and find "matching memories", because probability waves are not "real" (no mass) and therefore not subject to the speed of light limitations.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...

Here’s a link to the paper:

https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ad...

https://musicforprogramming.net/

Otherwise agree with psytrance / goa mixes. Techno can be good too if you are tired (eg: Sara Landry, 999999999). Trance can help to uplift if you are depressed. Classical to make you feel more ordered.. I love dubstep in my brain but it creates patterns that are counter-intuitive to doing any work — that genre makes me feel “free”.

-- St. Augustine

Music makes your brain work in an interesting way, keeping track of this memory/current flow/anticipation of time in a non-visual and often non-verbal way.

I find a lot of electronic music helpful for coding.

Some bangers for anyone interested:

Age Of Love - The Age Of Love (Charlotte de Witte & Enrico Sangiuliano Remix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YVvcTIGy40

Nero - My Eyes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiojdDs8wwk

SUB FOCUS x WILKINSON @ Corfe Castle, Dorset https://youtu.be/TRh-amAhOEw?si=jCx1V7jkciB3h4kh

Adventure Club - Gold (Ft. Yuna) https://youtu.be/09wdQP1FFR0?si=r7hfA6w3qfhXzL30

  "Music is to me proof of the existence of god
  It is so extraordinarily full of magic
  And, and in tough times of my life
  I can listen to music and it makes such a difference"
  - 1 Giant Leap - Daphne

They provide a 2.4 Hz stimulus and then measure frequency-matched activity across brain networks. They suggest some novel methods of measuring how the signal traverses the brain, but they don't suggest why it does, which is good. They do say this is unlikely to be entrainment, I'll get into that more in a bit.

We shouldn't be surprised that auditory stimulation produces frequency-matched activity across distributed brain regions. The auditory system naturally routes information across multiple interconnected networks. The auditory system picks it up, but the auditory system is also not siloed into a single area of the brain. No brain systems are, we have replication, and this is just showing the the nervous system is passing the signal throughout the brain. In no way does it suggest that this is related to thought, consciousness, focus, or that these frequency-matched responses reflect any functional change in brain state.

When people talk about entrainment, that is a real thing. But the word itself describes when systems synchronize, not that they will.

I guess I'm cautious about papers like these because of our work in neurostimulation and sleep where we use phase-targeted auditory stimulation to enhance slow-wave activity. Basically increasing sleep's restorative function.

In our work it isn't this sort of "gentle tones to help you sleep", or "activating networks to alter brain activity", which is an area I see a lot of snake-oil and nonsense.

The way closed-loop phase-targeted slow-wave enhancement works is by "interrupting" the brain during the synchronous firing of neurons, which (it is believed) triggers a protective mechanism in the brain and as a response, the brain increases the synchronous firing of neurons. We're talking about very short (50ms) interruptions.

I get my back up a bit when I hear about this idea that reading electrical activity of the brain and making broad assumptions about what they "mean". I've been invited to speak on a panel July 2nd with Australia's Commissioner of Human Rights to discuss ethical safety around EEG data, and while I do believe we need to protect bio-data, I don't believe in the "electrical activity means we can read or alter your thoughts" camp.

If you want to know more about our work, you can check out https://affectablesleep.com, and if you're in Sydney, and want to come to the talk, I can't find a link atm, but it's at the Sydney Knowledge Hub on July 2nd., part of the Sydney Neurotech Meetup

It’s kind of amazing when you think about it. Makes me want to experiment more and see if sound can actually “tune” the brain to boost focus or improve mood.

I'd suggest the capacity for our brains and minds to apprehend shapes, relationships, patterns, and ultimately symbols is made from its ability to parse the category of things in music. time, difference, harmonics, consonance, dissonance, patterns. as though all the symbols and representations that emerge from our chunking and caching of stimuli into patterns are in a category of logical artefacts. we represent them- and relationships between them- as musical. Maths codifies or encodes these same relationships and artefacts, but the underlying objects aren't just abstractions, they are a measurement of essentially "musical" relationships.

it falls a bit for the "everything is X" fallacy, but if people seriously pursue the premise that our brains compute, then plausibly, the stimulus it computes over is this category of possible languages we call "music." not sure how useful the idea is, but it's pretty.