Hi.
I'm The Dod, and I kinda "got here through the service door" . In the 90s me and my friends had brain machines (is this term still used?) of various shapes and degrees of sophistication. I don't remember makes and models, but some of these machine had presets to make you sleepy/awake/focused/creative etc. and my degree of "expertise" in the field was that I knew how to select presets (in other words, I was an end user).
A while ago it has dawned on me that technology (e.g. arduino) and me have advanced enough so that I could build a brain machine from howto posts that must be out there on the net. Pretty soon I've found a post by Chris Sparnicht (based on Mitch Altman's 2008 post), and I now maintain my own fork of that code (so far I've made minor changes that are not brainwave-entrainment related).
The machine comes with a single "program" (I don't know what term to use for a brainwave entrainment sequence, but it's like what we used to call "presets").
Essentially, my questions are:
- What does this program do (in terms of making me sleepy/awake/focused/creative/etc.)?
- How can I create (or import) programs that do other things?
I hope people here can help me with that.
Thanks in andvance,
The Dod
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Here are the tl;dr details (+ attachment)
The machine can perform the following primitives:
- Play a binaural tone on the headphones (central tone is 440Hz)
- Blink both LEDs with a specific duration (in tenths of milliseconds) for "on time" and "off time" (examples from the code: 347, 347 and 451, 450)
- Same as 2, but blink the LEDs alternately (so the number pair actually means "left time" and "right time")
Then there are higher level operations called brainwave elements that correspond with beta, alpha and theta that imply blinking at some specific rates while playing a specific binaural tone[*]. For alpha (for example), it blinks with on/of times of 451 and 450 while playing a binaural tone of 11.1Hz.
For each element there are 2 variants (e.g. for theta, they're called "t' and "T"). The lowercase one is for blinking both LEDs in synch, and the uppercase one blinks them alternately.
At the highest level, there's the "program", which is a sequence of brainwave elements, each with a duration. I've attached a csv (text) file with all the data. I hope people here can explain to me what it does.
I have no idea what this program is supposed to do (e.g. in terms of making me sleepy/awake/focused/creative etc.). Subjectively, I can report that twice I've tried it at night, tired, and planning to sleep soon, and in both cases it kept me awake for a few more hours (I tried to sleep, couldn't, gave up and did something else).
What I'm here for (of course) is to figure out how to understand such programs, but I hope to stay an "end user" as much as possible, and simply find a way to convert tried and tested files from other platforms (e.g. the ones this forum is for) to something I can use with the machine described above. One way or the other, I'd like to improve my mind, and only have some of the ingredients
____[*] I remember reading somewhere that although binuaral tones are much less effective than isochronic tones, when synchronized with blinking, they're "effective enough" since the brain is already syncing with that frequency visually. Can I rely on this assumption? Isochronic tones would require wave-playing hardware (as far as I understand), so I'd rather not go there.
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