i-Doser: can a binaural beat get you high?

i-Doser sells binaural beats, audio tracks that play a slightly different tone in each ear, under the names of drugs such as cocaine and opium. No published study shows a binaural beat acting like a drug, and studies disagree on whether brain waves follow one at all. Harmonance plays no drug-named doses, only plain beats such as a 10 Hz alpha beat.

Ready to play Alpha Binaural Beat 10 Hz

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Twelve gold ribbons of light crossing dark space in two slow mirrored crests, one in each half, running low and calm through the centre — Twelve ribbons in alpha gold, the colour of the 10 Hz beat this page plays, rising in two mirrored crests, one for each ear. Harmonance plays no drug-named doses.

What is i-Doser?

i-Doser is a US company that sells binaural beats as "doses": audio tracks named after drugs and other experiences. In 2012 The National, a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, found tracks on its website with names such as cocaine, opium and peyote, and quoted the company's spokesman: "Our doses attempt to simulate the effects of real-world experiences, drugs included" (The National).

By the company's own count, not every listener feels a dose. The same report says i-Doser surveyed its listeners and found that almost a fifth of them, 17 per cent, felt no effect from its products (The National).

What are digital drugs?

Digital drugs are binaural beats sold as a way to feel what a drug feels like. A 2022 study defines them as "binaural beats claimed to elicit specific cognitive or emotional states", and adds that little is known about them (Barratt and colleagues).

The name reached the news in 2010. NPR reported websites offering "music tracks and applications that promise to deliver the experience of taking marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, even Viagra" (NPR). NBC News told how three students at an Oklahoma high school were sent to the principal's office for i-Dosing (NBC News).

How does a binaural beat work?

A binaural beat is a pulse your brain makes from two steady tones, one in each ear. The beat on this page sends 108 Hz to your left ear and 118 Hz to your right. Neither tone pulses, yet you hear a soft beat at the difference between them, 10 times a second.

The beat is made low in the brainstem. Neurons in a region called the superior olivary complex compare the timing of sound at the two ears and fire at the rate of the difference between them, and that firing is the beat you hear. It is the same circuit that tells you where a sound is coming from (Chaieb and colleagues).

Because the beat is made between the ears, it needs both of them, and so headphones: take one earphone out and the beat is gone, though the other tone plays on. It forms only from low tones, below about 1,000 Hz, and it is not new: H. W. Dove first reported it in 1839 (Chaieb and colleagues). Beats can be heard from about 1 to 30 Hz, a range that coincides with the brain's main rhythms as an EEG records them (Ingendoh and colleagues).

Can a binaural beat get you high?

No study has shown that it can. The idea needs two steps: first, that your brain's rhythms follow the beat; then, that following it feels like a drug. Research has not settled even the first step.

A 2023 systematic review gathered fourteen studies that recorded brain activity while people listened to binaural beats. Five reported results in line with the idea that brain rhythms follow the beat, eight reported results against it, and one was mixed (Ingendoh and colleagues).

During the 2010 scare, Helane Wahbeh, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University, described her own test to NPR: "We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to." In her view there was not enough evidence that the beats create those altered states (NPR).

A drug works by chemistry, and a beat has none. After 100 micrograms of LSD by mouth, the level in the blood peaks at about 1.4 hours, and the effects last about 8 hours on average (Dolder and colleagues). LSD acts on the brain's serotonin 2A receptors: when volunteers took ketanserin, which blocks those receptors, before their LSD, its general effects were "fully blocked" (Preller and colleagues). A beat has no molecule to reach the blood and no receptor to act on. It is a timing difference between two ears, and it lasts exactly as long as the sound.

Five boxes for LSD, a swallowed molecule acting on serotonin 2A receptors, beside five for two tones whose 10 Hz beat stops with one earphone out — How 100 micrograms of LSD reaches the brain, beside how the 10 Hz beat on this page does: one is a molecule that acts on serotonin 2A receptors for about 8 hours, the other a timing difference between two ears that lasts only while it plays.

One study sets the two side by side in a way nobody planned. Researchers at Imperial College London recorded the brain rhythms of 14 volunteers resting with their eyes closed, once on a placebo and once on LSD, at least two weeks apart. On the placebo, their alpha rhythm peaked at 10 Hz, the rate of the beat on this page. Under LSD, power fell across a broad range of rhythms, and the alpha rhythm grew weaker and faster, peaking at 12 Hz (Carhart-Harris and colleagues).

So if a 10 Hz beat did pull your brain towards its own rate, it would be pulling towards the ordinary rhythm the volunteers showed on a placebo, not towards the pattern LSD made.

Where do "20.215 Hz LSD" and "30 Hz marijuana" come from?

From a compiled list of frequencies, and neither number comes from a study of sound. The oldest copy of the two lines Harmonance could find sits in an unlikely place: the description of a US patent for a wagering game machine, granted in 2012, which reproduces a long list of frequencies and what each was said to do (US Patent 8,298,078). The list calls its own numbers "Rife-style frequencies, intended to be generated through an electromagnetic means", the family of claims the guide to Rife frequencies traces back to its source.

Its entry for 20.215 reads "LSD-25 [PSI] (he implies it could mimic the effects of)", and the source marked PSI is a page on a cannabis website about frequencies to boost the growth of plants. Its entry for 30 reads "Meg Patterson used for marijuana", credited to the Megabrain Report, issue 3 (US Patent 8,298,078). Neither line names a study, a dose or a listener.

Meg Patterson was a doctor, and her method did exist, but it used electricity, not sound. Her interim report, printed in the United Nations' Bulletin on Narcotics in 1976, describes electrodes in "the concha of each ear", the hollow of the outer ear, carrying a small electric current of 1 to 2 milliamps from a portable stimulator with "a range of frequencies from 5 to 2,000 cps", cycles a second. She called it neuro-electric therapy, and her report concerns its use in drug addiction (Patterson). Whatever number she used set the rate of a current through the skin.

And one file sold for this purpose did not keep to one number. When two researchers analysed the sound of a file sold as a "Marijuana" e-drug, they found no single rate: the file mixed beats they classed as gamma, lambda, alpha and delta waves (Baakek and Debbal). They measured the recording, not anyone listening to it. Lambda, as the guide to lambda waves explains, is the clinical name for something else entirely.

Who uses digital drugs, and why?

Mostly people who want to relax. The Global Drug Survey 2021, translated into 11 languages, gathered 30,896 responses from 22 countries, and 5.3 per cent of them had used binaural beats to experience altered states. Their median age was 27, and 60.5 per cent were male (Barratt and colleagues).

Asked why, 72.2 per cent of those users said "to relax or fall asleep", and 34.7 per cent wanted to change their mood. 11.7 per cent had tried "to get a similar effect to that of other drugs", more often among people who also used classic psychedelics (16.5 per cent) than among the rest (7.9 per cent). Most sought to connect with themselves (53.1 per cent) or with "something bigger than themselves" (22.5 per cent), and most listened through video streaming sites on their phones (Barratt and colleagues).

Bars: 72.2% used binaural beats to relax or fall asleep, 34.7% to change their mood, 11.7% in gold for an effect like other drugs — Of the people in the Global Drug Survey 2021 who had used binaural beats to experience altered states, 72.2 per cent did so to relax or fall asleep and 11.7 per cent for an effect like other drugs. The drug-like answers are in gold.

The numbers behind the chart, per cent of those who had used binaural beats to experience altered states
Asked about	Answer	Per cent
Why they used them	To relax or fall asleep	72.2
Why they used them	To change their mood	34.7
Why they used them	For an effect like other drugs	11.7
Seeking a drug-like effect	Users of classic psychedelics	16.5
Seeking a drug-like effect	Other users	7.9
Sought to connect with	Themselves	53.1
Sought to connect with	Something bigger than themselves	22.5

Worked through, the numbers put the scare in proportion. 5.3 per cent of 30,896 is about 1,640 people, and 11.7 per cent of them is about 190: roughly 1 in 160 of everyone who answered a survey about drug use went looking for a drug-like effect from a beat. About 1,180 of them, six times as many, used beats to relax or fall asleep.

Monica Barratt, the study's lead author, at RMIT University in Melbourne, was plain about the minority: "Much like ingestible substances, some binaural beats users were chasing a high." Most people who listened this way already used ingestible substances, she said, so the beats were not necessarily a gateway to them. Use was highest in the United States, where 16 per cent of respondents had tried it, then Mexico (14 per cent) and Brazil (11.5 per cent). The survey is not a representative sample, and the release says so (RMIT University).

Barratt also suggested the beats unsettle the idea of a drug itself: "Maybe a drug doesn't have to be a substance you consume, it could be to do with how an activity affects your brain" (RMIT University).

Why do some people feel something?

Because expectation and setting shape what people feel, with or without a drug. In a 2020 study, 33 students joined what they were told was a study of how a psychedelic drug affects creativity. Over four hours, in a group setting with music, paintings, coloured lights and projections, they took a placebo described to them as a drug resembling psilocybin. 61 per cent said they felt some effect. Many reported no change, while others showed effects as large as those usually seen with moderate or high doses of psilocybin, and several said the paintings on the walls moved or reshaped themselves (Olson and colleagues).

Some digital drug tracks set that kind of scene on purpose. NBC News described a free i-Dose track on YouTube, "Gates of Hades", which tells people to listen alone in a dark room for its "hallucinogenic effects". Damir Janigro, a Cleveland Clinic researcher, put any effects users showed down either to marijuana taken alongside or to the power of suggestion (NBC News).

Comments under Harmonance's own videos show the same pull of the setting. The channel's most watched video, with nearly 400,000 views, is a 1.618 Hz delta binaural beat titled Golden Ratio, with a golden spiral as its picture. Its 164 comments from listeners, read in full for this guide, are quoted here whole and without names; they describe a different beat from the one on this page. The most liked, with 154 likes, is this:

I don't know how to explain this, but I hear spirals

A reply under it offers the plainest explanation: "The suggestion of the pic is possible." Other listeners describe something stronger, something gentler, or something they did not like at all:

I was hypnotized I got high and stared into this video I got out tho

Gave me a feeling of weightlessness, but huge at the same time, and like a sponge.

I just found this to be irritating. Like tinnitus.

One sound, heard four ways. What each listener brings to it, and what each one sees on the screen, shapes what they report, much as the placebo study found.

Is i-Doser safe?

As sound, a binaural beat carries the ordinary risks of any audio: how loud, and for how long. The World Health Organization puts safe listening at 80 dB for up to 40 hours a week, and suggests keeping your device at no more than 60 per cent of its maximum volume (WHO, safe listening). Listen at a comfortable level, and stop if a beat feels unpleasant, as it did for one listener above.

In Oklahoma in 2010, the worry was about where the files led: the state's Bureau of Narcotics said it was "concerned" because some i-Dosing websites offered links to buy prescription drugs or marijuana (NBC News).

Is i-Doser legal?

Nothing in these reports shows a binaural beat being made illegal: they are audio files. i-Doser's spokesman told The National: "These are audio files and are in no way illegal in any country, as far as we are aware." The same report quoted Sarhan Al Meheini, deputy director of the Police Sciences Academy in Sharjah, who believed binaural beats should be dealt with like cannabis and ecstasy: "Right now it's not illegal but it should be, because it's a danger to society" (The National).

What plays on this page?

A 10 Hz alpha binaural beat, and no drug-named dose. The player at the top sends 108 Hz to your left ear and 118 Hz to your right, so with headphones you hear a soft pulse 10 times a second, the rate at which the volunteers' alpha rhythm peaked on a placebo in the LSD study above. It promises nothing. Listen if you are curious, notice what you notice, and stop whenever you like.

The 10 Hz alpha binaural beat has its own page, and the binaural beats collection holds the others, from delta to gamma. The guide to 10 Hz looks at this beat in depth, and the guide to binaural beats sets out what research on them does and does not show.

Sources and limits

No study has tested whether a binaural beat brings on drug-like effects in people, so this page sets a known mechanism and an absence of evidence against the claims; it is not the result of a trial. The closest test it describes, Wahbeh's, had four people, and the reporting on i-Doser dates from 2010 and 2012. The survey figures come from the paper's abstract and its university's release: the paper's own counts were not checked, the arithmetic is worked from its rounded percentages, and the survey is not a representative sample. The two "drug frequencies" are traced to the oldest copy of the list that could be found, not to whoever first wrote them down. The listener comments were written under the 1.618 Hz beat, not the 10 Hz beat on this page.