The Perfect Playlist to turn Neural Pathways to Cerebral Highways
Geek Girl Tries out Brain.fm, the app that allows you to control your mental state, on-demand.
With the boundaries between work and home more blurred now thanks to the pandemic and the ever increasing numbers of a location-independent workforce, we’re spending a lot more time in front of our screens. Thankfully, as a counterpoint to the digital noise, there’s been a rise of digital wellness companies with tools that aim to help people tune out the static and take care of the things that matter most. Brain.fm, a platform that plays music specifically engineered to help your mind do one of three important, but often elusive, things — focus, relax, or sleep — is one that’s been getting some buzz.
The company claims that their musical tracks feature frequencies that closely align with those naturally present in your brain, helping activate it — or lull it — into the desired state. At Brain.fm, human composers and AI collaborate on instrumental music. The platform now offers more than 5,000 hours of music, available in three basic categories and 21 sub-genres. “Focus” is the prime choice for 90% of customers. Headphones or earbuds are highly recommended because of the spatial quality in which listeners absorb the sound.
By using the latest research in auditory neuroscience, Brain.fm has created music that elicits a specific mental state that helps our brains combat mind-wandering and distraction, producing results in as little as 15 minutes of listening. As a pioneer in the field, Brain.fm continues to work closely with experts and researchers and has recently been recognized by the National Science Foundation with a grant to support its work in the field.
“I call it the world’s most advanced background noise,” says Dan Clark, Brain.fm’s 30-year-old CEO. “It’s like wind at your back. We can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, but if you’re trying to do something, we can make it a little easier.”
Brain.fm, which is available on both iPhone and Android, offers five focus sessions for free. After that, you'll need to pay either $6.95 a month or $47.40 a year. Subscribing gets you unlimited focus sessions and offline access.
Gadget Girl tried out Brain.fm on a rather busy Monday night. I listened to a light work playlist while making up a few chicken pot pies and, later, queued up two deep focus playlists while researching and writing this story. Here’s what we asked ourselves:
Is it worth paying $50/year for this app?
Given what I spend per year on iTunes, it’s well worth the ease of having over 5,000 hours of music at your fingertips. There are additional features like being able to create good work habits and the timed focus sessions, which can encourage taking breaks.
Is it really music?
Music, like art, is absolutely subjective. And, as it turns out that whether it’s rock‘n’roll, jazz, hip-hop or classical, your gray matter prefers the same music you do. For a while, researchers believed that classical music increased brain activity and made its listeners smarter, a phenomenon called “the Mozart effect”. But that’s not necessarily true. Recent studies have found that people with dementia respond better to the music they grew up listening to. Music is all about memories, association, melody and harmony. Brain.fm is great if you tend to like techno, electronica, and ambient music in general. However, I can’t see fans of heavy metal or classical really getting into it. At the end of the day, it’s really cool background music. But it’s still definitely music.
Did I really get in-the-zone faster?
Brain.fm has lots of information on the science behind the app and it’s amazing to think that each song is composed via collaboration between a human and AI. However, I have no scientific background or any real metrics to measure whether or not Brain.fm had the desired effect on my neural pathways. But I will say that my chicken pot pies turned out really well and I finished writing this story in under 90 minutes. So there’s that.
Overall review?
I like this app. If anything, it saved me the time it would take me putting together a work play list or cycling through different pre-built playlists in order to find the right one to fit my work mood. That’s probably at least 45-minutes saved right there. Are my neural pathways turned into super highways by Brain.fm’s ambient next level Muzak? Probably not. But I’ll make a souffle tomorrow and start my novella and report back.