The Effect of Binaural Beat Audio Signals on Short-Term Memory

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The Effect of Binaural Beat Audio Signals on Short-Term Memory Elliot Colgan Neuroscience Danielle Dubno-Hammer 6/10/13 Effect of Binaural Beat Audio Signals on Short-Term Memory Elliot Colgan Abstract Short-term memory is something people use every day of their lives. Whether it’s being used to study for a test or to remember why one walks into a room, it’s a very significant function of the brain. Many people have trouble remembering in short-term, despite being so important, and they rely on certain, sometimes dangerous medications to do so. Binaural Beats are audio frequencies that are said to make the brain run at certain neuronal firing frequencies. The functions of the brain that are responsible for short-term memory run most efficiently at slower frequencies like the theta frequency; Therefore, it was hypothesized that the Theta group would perform the best on a short-term memory test. Students at the Institute for Collaborative Education (N=40) were first given a list of 15 words to remember while listening to classical music; They were then given a different list of 15 words to remember while being exposed to the gamma, beta, or theta wave-inducing Binaural Beats. The number of words recalled in total was the primary data being collected Going against the hypothesis, the subjects exposed to the beta wave-inducing Binaural Beats performed better than all of the other experimental groups, as well as the baseline group. The theta group did perform the second-best out of all the groups. The gamma group, however, performed worse than the baseline, so saying that all Binaural Beats tested improved short-term memory would be incorrect. This study’s conclusions are somewhat consistent with previous studies that tested Binaural Beats. This means that a logical conclusion can be made that some types of Binaural Beats improve the ability to remember words in
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