High Tech ~ Gateway to Getting High
By Lindy Lou
Digital drugs or i-dosing is a way to market drug use to kids. This craze consists of sound tracks that play different sound waves or tones into each ear which causes the listener to create another sound in the brain. It’s called binaural beats.Researchers to date have not found that binaural beats change brain chemistry nor have they found that there is any real harm that can come from listening to them.
I just listened to an i-dosing track available for free on youtube. It was basically a persistent tone in one ear and the sound of ‘a scratchy am radio when you are trying to find a station’ in the other ear. The visual they put on the screen to accompany the ‘music’ was a demonic head, though they suggested you close your eyes to listen to the track. I found I needed to consciously block myself from trying to ‘hear’ words while I was listening since the scratchy sounds in the one ear on the track could easily have become fuel for the mind to try to ‘hear’ words. With a demonic image on the screen as autosuggestion, I could imagine the mind could ‘create’ or tap into some scary memories or feelings. I was hoping the experience was going to be like chanting meditation mantras while staring at an optical illusion, which could make you feel like you are in an altered state, but the sounds in that track were nightmarish rather than blissful. I found the sounds disconcerting and stressful making my heart rate go up and leaving me feeling anxious as if I had just been trapped under a railroad bridge where I had had to endure the screeching of metal wheels on metal rails for hours. I saw no need to follow the directions of ‘listening to the track 3 times back to back to see what you see/feel’. My mood was already altered enough for the worse and I was not seeking an aura-stress induced headache.
I have not gone to an i-dosing site yet (I don’t feel like subjecting my computer to the threats of viruses tonight). But the media coverage on the i-dosing craze assures us that one can purchase tracks that are marketed to simulate the ‘highs’ that one can get from ingesting various drugs. Kids are curious, so this is clever marketing to get kids to find out what an opium high ‘feels’ like without injecting or smoking it; clever marketing to get the feeling of all kinds of drugs just by buying their binaural beat track and listening to it over and over again.
As parents, we can hope the kids will have unpleasant listening experiences and it will end there. But there will be kids who will opt to try various tracks until they find one they like, and again, we can hope it will end there. Problem is though; these kids are now conditioned into drug-seeking behaviors because of the marketing autosuggestions that their experiences with these tracks mimic drug induced states. I did not find any definitive research on whether i-dosing actually is becoming a gateway into drug use, but therein lays the concern with this craze. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/15/digital-drugs-get-teens-h_n_647397.html
http://newsok.com/digital-drugs-at-mustang-high-school-have-experts-warning-of-slippery-slope/article/3475464.Wired.com
Using binaural sounds in therapy has been around for quite a while. My son is ADHD and one of the problems we went through therapy to correct was his inability to distinguish figure – ground sounds. What this meant in practical terms was that my son could not tell which of the sounds he was listening to was the one he should pay attention to and which he should ‘block out’ or ignore. So in a classroom for example all the following sounds competed for his attention: the bird outside the window, the kid next to him scraping his chair on the floor, the rustling of papers, and the teacher talking. The therapy he did involved at least a hundred hours of listening to audio tapes with music in one ear and words in the other and then progressing to different words being said in each ear. As a therapy, it worked. One day, he was pitching a baseball game and excited told me he was able to block out the sound of the crowd and not be distracted from what he was doing by the noises around him. I realize that established sound therapies to correct hearing perceptual problems is not the topic of this post, but none of the articles I read on i-dosing talked about what affect binaural beats might have on kids whose auditory perception system is not fully developed or functioning properly. In addition, way too many ADHD kids tend to try drugs. Though I am not implying that all ADHD kids have auditory perception difficulties, I think there is quite a bit that researchers have not looked at here. In my opinion the jury is still out on the harm/harmlessness of the binaural beats craze. And i-dosing is yet another thing for parents to learn more about
I just listened to an i-dosing track available for free on youtube. It was basically a persistent tone in one ear and the sound of ‘a scratchy am radio when you are trying to find a station’ in the other ear. The visual they put on the screen to accompany the ‘music’ was a demonic head, though they suggested you close your eyes to listen to the track. I found I needed to consciously block myself from trying to ‘hear’ words while I was listening since the scratchy sounds in the one ear on the track could easily have become fuel for the mind to try to ‘hear’ words. With a demonic image on the screen as autosuggestion, I could imagine the mind could ‘create’ or tap into some scary memories or feelings. I was hoping the experience was going to be like chanting meditation mantras while staring at an optical illusion, which could make you feel like you are in an altered state, but the sounds in that track were nightmarish rather than blissful. I found the sounds disconcerting and stressful making my heart rate go up and leaving me feeling anxious as if I had just been trapped under a railroad bridge where I had had to endure the screeching of metal wheels on metal rails for hours. I saw no need to follow the directions of ‘listening to the track 3 times back to back to see what you see/feel’. My mood was already altered enough for the worse and I was not seeking an aura-stress induced headache.
I have not gone to an i-dosing site yet (I don’t feel like subjecting my computer to the threats of viruses tonight). But the media coverage on the i-dosing craze assures us that one can purchase tracks that are marketed to simulate the ‘highs’ that one can get from ingesting various drugs. Kids are curious, so this is clever marketing to get kids to find out what an opium high ‘feels’ like without injecting or smoking it; clever marketing to get the feeling of all kinds of drugs just by buying their binaural beat track and listening to it over and over again.
As parents, we can hope the kids will have unpleasant listening experiences and it will end there. But there will be kids who will opt to try various tracks until they find one they like, and again, we can hope it will end there. Problem is though; these kids are now conditioned into drug-seeking behaviors because of the marketing autosuggestions that their experiences with these tracks mimic drug induced states. I did not find any definitive research on whether i-dosing actually is becoming a gateway into drug use, but therein lays the concern with this craze. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/15/digital-drugs-get-teens-h_n_647397.html
http://newsok.com/digital-drugs-at-mustang-high-school-have-experts-warning-of-slippery-slope/article/3475464.Wired.com
Using binaural sounds in therapy has been around for quite a while. My son is ADHD and one of the problems we went through therapy to correct was his inability to distinguish figure – ground sounds. What this meant in practical terms was that my son could not tell which of the sounds he was listening to was the one he should pay attention to and which he should ‘block out’ or ignore. So in a classroom for example all the following sounds competed for his attention: the bird outside the window, the kid next to him scraping his chair on the floor, the rustling of papers, and the teacher talking. The therapy he did involved at least a hundred hours of listening to audio tapes with music in one ear and words in the other and then progressing to different words being said in each ear. As a therapy, it worked. One day, he was pitching a baseball game and excited told me he was able to block out the sound of the crowd and not be distracted from what he was doing by the noises around him. I realize that established sound therapies to correct hearing perceptual problems is not the topic of this post, but none of the articles I read on i-dosing talked about what affect binaural beats might have on kids whose auditory perception system is not fully developed or functioning properly. In addition, way too many ADHD kids tend to try drugs. Though I am not implying that all ADHD kids have auditory perception difficulties, I think there is quite a bit that researchers have not looked at here. In my opinion the jury is still out on the harm/harmlessness of the binaural beats craze. And i-dosing is yet another thing for parents to learn more about
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