Binaural Beats

I think I tried binaural beats to battle a headache / oncoming migraine once through an app I had on my Kindle. Maybe I didn't give it enough time, and lost my patience and took medicine too soon.

From what I think I understand from Wikipedia, one beat of a certain frequency is played in one ear, and one beat of a slightly different frequency is played in the other ear. In summary, these frequencies can entrain certain brainwaves, which can help with meditation, pain control, creativity, etc.

This website explains binaural beats in a much more understandable way:

"When two tones of specific frequencies are played through headphones, the brain can become confused and produce its own, imagined tone—a three-dimensional audio hallucination heard only within the head of the listener. The frequencies that produce this phenomenon are known as Binaural Beats. 

What is happening is that the brain is not used to hearing frequencies in each ear so close together and with such intensity—these sounds do not occur in nature and so a mechanism in our brains has not evolved to understand them. Instead, the superior olivary nucleus, the area of the brain which controls aspects of three-dimensional sound perception, bridges the difference between the varying frequencies in Binaural Beats with a common “third tone” in an attempt to normalize this audio into something we can understand. What’s weirder is that each person hears the “third tone” differently: People with Parkinson’s disease can’t hear it at all; women will hear different tones as they move through their menstrual cycle."

WEIRD.

So it makes a lot of sense that I didn't notice anything funky without listening through headphones, I'll have to try that next time.

Have you ever tried binaural beats to combat brain pain, or something else? Did they work for you?

Beats intended to provide pain relief:

Beats for meditation / astral projection / lucid dreaming: