Are there waves that reliably effect brain function?

I seem to remember hearing that there are electro-magnetic or sonic waves, that effect brain function in specific ways, but I am having a hard time researching this online because of all the tinfoil hat sites. Has anybody here heard about anything like that?

Search on Michael Persinger. He's done most of the work with electromagnetic stimulation. His own website is at Laurentian University in Canada.

Allen H. Frey did most of the work on microwave stimulation of the brain. I grew up with Allen's kids and he gave me my first after-school job. No microwaves, of course, but pushing broom and cutting metal parts for a real, honest-to-Godless Scientist was a major thrill for a 15-year-old geek.

You can also search on MEG Magnetoencephalogram Magnetic Evoked Response.

With those two names, you'll still get a lot of tinfoil, but it shouldn't take you long to get to the real scientific work.

--p!

I did some searches and it already looks like great lead. Appreciated.

PubMed (www.pubmed.gov) has the abstracts for virtually every english-language medical journal article for the past 30 years or so. No tinfoil hat stuff. Do a keyword search.

Good luck.

430 pages for "electromagnetic stimulus", and some look good already. Appreciated.

My senior research project involved such things. Although it might be possible to affect brain function externally, it would be very difficult to control. I don't think that electical waves would do anything. Radio waves certainly don't. The *only* part of the body that responds to magnetic field is the iron in hemoglobin (blood).

The processes of the brain are not strictly electrical anyway. There is a heavy chemical element to the brain's function. So it's probably not very practical to use strictly electrical stimulation to affect brain function, even if you could control the electrical field to the accuracy that would be required by such a thing.

The physics of this is very, very complex. Maybe that's why you only find tin foil hat stuff. ;-)

I know that invidivual thought processes are vastly beyond our ability to control or even recognize, but I have heard that some external things can create sort of an overall affect. One speciic report I remember was on NPR(?) and talked about the ability of certain electromagnetic(?) frequencies to induce vision-like states in subjects that were exposed to them while relaxing with eyes closed.

--I think they have pretty well established that the universe and all of matter and energy and all of us and everything else is, at some level, made of waves moving in frequencies, waves that might have properties of light or properties of matter, but waves. And those waves have frequencies. So yes, frequencies can certainly have some affect upon the brain. Brain waves. Why do we have brainwaves? Because there are electric potentials in the brain, and -- now I am lost -- brain waves, with frequencies.

We are familiar with our visible spectrum, colors we can see, which also goes off on either end to frequencies that are not visible to our eyes, including many we know about, such as radio waves and x-rays and gamma and infrared, and such.

I cannot see why, since the universe seems to be made up essentially of waves, there might not be some waves, or some energies, or some magnetic effects, that might not affect our brainwaves. Why not? Our brains do indeed have waves that have frequencies. And according to the frequencies our brain waves are displaying, you can pinpoint what kind of activity the brain is engaged in. That's what an EEG is. Which can be measured by electrodes glued to your scalp.

And they can make your heart beat more regularly with a pacemaker, which sends out electric impulses, which also have a wavelength and frequency, I think.

And matter, I think, is made up of waves. You are made of waves. Your atoms are made of waves, basically, if I am not completely confused. I do not know about all the particles they have identified in the last 20 years or so, but atoms have electrons that move in shells in probable distribution frequencies. Seems to me it's all about waves and frequencies, and all those silly hippies and all were onto something. You're on my wavelength, yeah, baby.... I refused for so long to have a serious thought about it. It seemed so utterly ridiculous.

But then, I am absolutely completely unfamiliar with string theory, so, they may have thrown all the
waves and frequencies in the garbage. But I doubt it.

Please excuse me. I saw this on the "latest" page. I would not have posted if I had seen it was on the science page. I don't think I knew there was a science page. But how could someone on the science page not know about waves?

I can't find the article that sparked my interest in this science, but I do know for a fact that sounds can effect your brain wave state.

The human brain resonates at different frequency's depending on if you are alert, or sleeping and states in between. 3-4 hz is asleep and 12-20 while awake(Been a while so check the stats for yourself).

theory is, if you listen to 20 hz in one ear and 4 hz in the other the brain will divide it by two and (20-4=16) your brain will resonate at 8hz(and you will experience the state of mind associated with that frequency). I have experimented with this and find it to be true. also see http://www.centerpointe.com/

it has indeed been shown that external stimuli (visual or auditory) at certain frequencies can shift the brain into a different pattern over the course of a few minutes. Visual is probably the most straightforward; auditory is a little more tricky due to the frequency constraints of the human ear (on the low end), but it can be done and is a more convenient mode of delivery. There is computer software out there you can experiment with yourself. Google +brain +wave +entrainment and ignore all the commercial sites; there are a good number of scientific papers out there.

My wife has played around with entrainment software and a couple CD's, and swears by them. She is prone to insomnia (she says sometimes her brain just won't shut up) and they seem to work very well for her at inducing relaxing sleep.