Global Stress Reduction with Neuroscience, There’s An App For That, with Applied Ethics
When I walked into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a few years back and offered them a means of reducing stress globally they were terribly confused, and informed me that stress wasn’t on their list of priorities. I imagine that they get confused rather often, if not perpetually so, as stress is the foundation of many of the symptoms they treat. The psychological warfare which spawns or exploits various cognitive biases, class structures, and inequalities around the world is based heavily on the accurate and well-timed application of stress as a tool. Many problems without centralized motives behind them also emerge and exacerbate the problems within the lives of individuals and small groups, which impacts the world in more subtle but no less substantial ways. Most of this stress is preventable, and the rest may be treated in the absence of the preventable.
Nearly 5 years ago I began researching ways to better apply some very old discoveries surrounding how the human brain handles two very slightly different sounds being applied to left and right ears. The most primitive of these was termed “binaural beats”, characterized by two terribly irritating screeching noises of slightly different frequencies being applied to left and right ears. While this method exposed a then-novel mechanism for how the brain handles the recombination of subconsciously input stimuli to minimize the load placed on the conscious mind, it was itself more akin to torture than therapy. For more than 150 years following that discovery no progress was made on better utilizing this mechanism, though some sparse efforts were applied to studying it. I saw a great untapped potential in better refining and understanding this process for therapeutic and cognitive enhancement applications, and so the experiments began.
To examine why the original discovery created an effect the mechanisms at work may be explained and understood without subject matter expertise. In simplest terms the human brain subconsciously processes vast amounts more information every second than we consciously perceive. Conscious thought is resource-intensive, and the subconscious guards our conscious minds from this otherwise overwhelming flow of information. To do this some information is selectively discarded, while other information is compressed and summarized, giving the conscious mind a TLDR version of events where some information is deemed unimportant and ignored. The original discovery termed binaural beats created a stimuli which statistically wouldn’t occur in nature, elevating the subconscious’s priority assignment of this information in an effort to both make sense of it and minimize it before sending it to the conscious mind. This was accomplished by the subconscious taking two slightly different signals and combining them into one, which in the case of binaural beats creates an anomaly of perception due to the different frequency of the signals.
I theorized that any sufficiently subtle difference in two audio signals between left and right ears could produce this effect, engaging the subconscious’s processes for combining stimuli in various ways. Due to both my own personal distaste for the screeching tones of binaural beats and the pseudoscience and exploitation-based businesses which try to sell it, often absent any understanding of it, I chose to design a different mechanism of action. Binaural beats uses two simple signals of different frequencies, such as 300 hz vs 315 hz. Instead of two different frequencies and simple tones I used two copies of music, with left and right starting points offset by just a few audio samples. For reference even a low-quality MP3 file has 44,100 audio samples per second, and as I came to discover in the course of my research the human brain is capable of subconsciously processing offsets of more than 100 samples in such files, or offsets as small as a single audio sample in a 96 Khz audio sample high fidelity audio file. Unlike the original discovery this approach avoided any consciously perceptible difference in sound between an unmodified audio file and the offset version.
What I quickly came to realize was that although both original and modified audio sounded the same to the conscious mind the offset version was acting as a potent source of stress reduction. To understand why this was I began enlisting some volunteers and modifying audio files at their request, informally using a cross-over single-blind format of experimentation to test the perception and effects of this approach. Among the initial group some were able to feel the calming effect within as little as 20 seconds, while others might require the full duration of a song, but they were consistently able to recognize when songs were modified by the feeling they produced. I also came to recognize that although the stress reduction was almost universal among these volunteers that additional effects came into play based on the individual song, the offset value, and if an individual had previously been exposed to the same song at the same offset value. Some songs inspired an increase in energy, while others became more capable of putting someone to sleep, and after some time I realized the additional subconscious processing appeared to be increasing the potency of a song’s normal effects, which itself increased the more focus an individual placed on the act of listening to it.
The brain is highly adaptive, and this subconscious process of recombining signals only needed to fully engage when exposed to new problems that needed solving. The brain would attenuate the efficacy of listening to the same song at the same offset over and over within the first 48 hours following initial exposure, on average. The result was a curve where the potency peaked at the start and came to rest at a stable level some 48 hours later, still generating an effect, just not one so potent. Like shooting the Borg with phasers on the same setting, this problem required dynamic adjustments to overcome natural adaption and retain high potency. I also later discovered that the human brain has limits for the library of such adaptations, so a given song at a given offset might regain much of the original potency above that stable level when revisited following exposure to many others.
Sound quality and spectrum also play an important role, since it is the subconscious which handles the audio signals. Studies have shown that frequencies below 20 hz strongly influence biological processes, some of which are processed as strong emotions by the subconscious. Likewise, they have shown measurable responses to string instrument and trumpet frequencies as high as 116 Khz when compared to audio where the higher frequencies were removed. The common number people, and indeed even many hardware producers, are familiar with is the 20 hz to 20 Khz of “human hearing”, which only refers to the average range of conscious perception. Based on the available data it is safe to say that the subconscious processes a frequency range larger than almost any hardware today is capable of reproducing. Streaming platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, and others usually only play 128 kbps MP3 files ranging between 20 hz and 20 Khz, with some claiming “High” sound quality at 256 kbps, but even the CD quality audio of 30+ years past stood at over 1400 kbps. Because of this, no matter the quality of an MP3 file it can’t produce the same level of potency when offset as the various “lossless” audio formats such as FLAC.
Following one of my colleagues taking an interest in this research and using it themselves the development of an app for automating the offset process began. We decided it would be completely free, with no advertising, no data harvesting, without any special hardware requirements, and with further work funded entirely by donations. So began the Offset Modulator App.
We decided to make the process as accessible and easy as we could, focusing on iOS and Android first. We integrated the circadian rhythm curves discovered by leading sleep scientists such as Matthew Walker PhD in order to reinforce the sleep cycle by modulating the offset according to an individual’s own sleep/wake times. Sleep has proven an effective means of substantially boosting dozens of health metrics including the immune response triggered by a vaccine, which will become particularly important once a COVID-19 vaccine is released.
Feedback on the benefits of this approach in the research stages and beta testing of the app designed for it have consistently ranged from slightly positive to extremely positive even in the short-term, but the nature of those benefits vary heavily from one individual to the next. To-date no negative effects have been reported, though some reported effects might be undesirable under the wrong circumstances, such as becoming overly relaxed while driving or operating heavy machinery. The positive effects have included (but aren’t limited to) individuals saying that their depression was cured, that they were feeling no physical stress, and a newfound ability to multitask.
In cases where multiple types of stress were being experienced volunteers reported that one or more types of stress were eliminated, while the remaining sources of stress gained clarity. In these cases they were able to take actions to effectively reduce the remaining sources of stress following this clarity. In cases where individuals previously thought themselves unable to split their focus, such as listening to music while writing, they seemed to discover (unprompted) that they could do so with the app.
Humanity has developed and reinforced the habit of treating symptoms and coping mechanisms, which is why existing methods of curing addiction, treating depression, preventing corruption, disarming cognitive bias, and improving quality of life tend to fail so miserably. To succeed in these endeavors the root causes must be addressed, and in order to address those each root must be isolated by first addressing the exposed roots. Stress then becomes the obvious choice, as it is a common root of many global issues, and with it removed other root causes may gain clarity.
www.sanook.com
It is also worth noting that even the primitive binaural beats technology was shown to serve a neuroregenerative function, and that since sound quality increases potency, as does keeping the processing restricted to the subconscious level, the neuroregenerative capacity of this approach could easily be an order of magnitude greater using the Offset Modulator App. Likewise, as this is essentially triggering the human brain’s own regenerative and adaptive capacities it avoids the severe and damaging pitfalls of chemical treatments, as well as the steep curve of attenuation that comes with electrical treatments. What the brain receives instead of blunt chemical and electrical hits is a dynamic and adaptive stream of novel data, which rather than deactivating receptors or jamming electrical pathways challenges the subconscious to generate the necessary new neural pathways to optimally process it. This process may also be applicable to any brain region which receives stimuli the subconscious pre-processes for the conscious mind, and we’ve already selected the next candidate brain region for testing.
Many testers have also proven adept at figuring out which audio has been modified following the first week or two of exposure, noting that unmodified audio had a “hollow” feeling, like something was missing, even though consciously it sounded the same. This may demonstrate a sort of boredom from the subconscious being attached to a pre-processed stimuli for the conscious mind, suggesting a preference for more engaging content. That said this preference has never resulted in withdrawal symptoms, but rather mirrors a milder version of being stuck in a place playing music you’d rather not listen to, like a retail store playing auto-tune pop music.
Applied Ethics dictates that the technology to remove stress be made available to the maximum number of people, requiring the fewest possible resources, at the maximum potency. If you were to massively reduce the stress of even a single country over the period of a month you’d see a fundamental shift take place in the dynamics governing that society, as addictions, depression, and cognitive bias dropped and quality of life rose. To quantify this gain you might consider the resource expense placed on each of these topics, easily numbering in the billions of dollars for the US, as well as the cost individuals must pay to increase their quality of life. The overhead cost of society’s current feeble efforts to address these problems may be dramatically reduced, while simultaneously and substantially increasing equality by rendering obsolete many mechanisms by which those in poverty were prevented from experiencing a higher quality of life. By decreasing the stress of those in poverty you also increase their cognitive capacities, helping to counter the persistent societal tendency to make sure those in poverty remain in poverty. When you begin to consider the neuroregenerative potentials and capacity to break negative feedback loops which promote and entrench addiction the ethical imperative to apply this technology becomes all the more profound.
In other words, no advertising, no data collection, and no charge may be ethically justified. These are the mechanisms used by the feeble-minded and corrupt, producing one trash-solution after another, charging large sums while selling the data of their users to the highest bidder. We deploy this app and this research because ethics demands no less. Even this global reduction in stress is just one small step in the path ahead.
What does a world emancipated from stress sound like? Pick your favorite music and hear it for yourself: https://offsetmodulator.wordpress.com/download/
