When you tried it out, did you go as far as to hook yourself up to a brain scanner and match the flashes to the frequency and phase of your (alpha?) waves? My memory of the paper was that getting the phase and frequency right made a big difference for the effect.
Importantly, that paper also studied the benefits of entrainment matched to phase and frequency of brainwaves for learning a very specific type of dynamic visual recognition task. My take on the paper was that it seemed unlikely to extrapolate to learning generally (i.e. it wasn’t “strobe yourself and learn anything 3x faster”).
By contrast, the body of research here finds modest effects, but on a wide range of cognitive performance tasks and with a clear mechanistic hypothesis to explain why this might be happening. I think employing powerful medical lasers, as in the original studies, is far more plausible and tractable as a general learning-enhancement strategy than the strobe light brainwave-matching. But the effects sizes are small enough and the risks uncertain enough that it doesn’t seem worth the investment to me.
When you tried it out, did you go as far as to hook yourself up to a brain scanner and match the flashes to the frequency and phase of your (alpha?) waves? My memory of the paper was that getting the phase and frequency right made a big difference for the effect.
Importantly, that paper also studied the benefits of entrainment matched to phase and frequency of brainwaves for learning a very specific type of dynamic visual recognition task. My take on the paper was that it seemed unlikely to extrapolate to learning generally (i.e. it wasn’t “strobe yourself and learn anything 3x faster”).
By contrast, the body of research here finds modest effects, but on a wide range of cognitive performance tasks and with a clear mechanistic hypothesis to explain why this might be happening. I think employing powerful medical lasers, as in the original studies, is far more plausible and tractable as a general learning-enhancement strategy than the strobe light brainwave-matching. But the effects sizes are small enough and the risks uncertain enough that it doesn’t seem worth the investment to me.
Link to video to try for myself?