Sometimes a life hack works when I wish it didn’t. I, for example, am vulnerable to depression and anxiety. I also passionately hate running. I have, unfortunately, discovered that running regularly helps my mental health a great deal. I’m thankful (because I feel better) and resentful (because I have to run).
This is how I feel about Brain.fm, a music service I discovered a couple weeks ago when the company got in touch with me. I started using the service, mostly for the purposes of writing this article, and something unexpected happened: I noticed it’s a great deal easier to get started on my work in the morning. I like this (because I’m getting more done) but am also annoyed (because I’d rather be listening to the music I love).
It’s a conundrum. Brain.fm is a subscription service that costs $14.99 per month, more than Spotify (which costs $12.99 per month). The product sells itself as having a collection of music backed by scientific research to increase your ability to focus, meditate, and sleep. There’s also a free trial, meaning you can get a feel for whether it works for you.
After a few weeks of testing, I feel it might be onto something. I don’t always trust my intuition, though, so I wanted to dig deeper. Is this for real? Or am I falling for snake oil? More importantly: can I go back to listening to KEXP in the morning?
Is the science behind Brain.fm legit?
After a few days of using the application, I couldn’t help but wonder. Is my increased focus real? Or is it a placebo?
So I wrote to Daniel J. Levitin, professor emeritus of neurology at McGill University, and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. He replied quickly, and concisely: “It’s all placebo,” he said.
It was a very concise email from an academic about a complex topic, which as a journalist is always nice. But Levitin didn’t stop there—he told me to get in touch with another neuroscientist, one who had published research on this type of modulated music. I’ll say more below about that research, but first, let’s take a look at what’s actually in those Brain.fm tracks.
What using Brain.fm is like
You can’t use this service to search for a specific artist—you instead let the application know what you’re trying to do (Focus, Relax, Meditate, or Sleep). In the Focus section, there are a few sub-options: Deep Work, Motivation, Creativity, Learning, and Light Work. Choose what you want to do and a track will start playing.
The genres, such as they are, range from the kind of “chill beats” you can find on YouTube to post-rock and symphonic—though it’s all instrumental.
“The basic problem is that most music is made to grab your attention,” Kevin Woods, a neuroscience PhD who works for Brain.fm, told me. “If you talk to a music producer, they’ll tell you that their job is to make things punchy and bright, and to make somebody sit up and turn their head and favorite the song on Spotify.”
That attention seeking can make playing music during the work day distracting in a subtle way, according to Woods. “The problem is that a lot of the distraction is not overt in the sense of, ‘I can feel my attention breaking and I have to turn this off or turn down the volume’—it’s more like, ‘I’m working at 70, 80% capacity, and I’m not really sure why.'”
So the music at Brain.fm is written and performed by in-house composers who are intentionally trying not to keep your attention. But that alone doesn’t really set Brain.fm apart from using ambient music or video game soundtracks to focus, let alone the various “chill beats” playlists and live streams that are out there. And that’s where Brain.fm’s scientific claims come in.
Brain.fm says the key is “amplitude modulation”
Brain.fm points to several scientific studies on its homepage, also mentioning that its research was in part funded by that National Science Foundation. A lot of the claims are based on “amplitude modulation,” which Woods told me is what sets Brain.fm’s music apart.
But what is amplitude modulation? They’re “fast modulations added that do not usually occur in music,” according to Woods. If you listen to the music for a bit, you’ll hear an almost fluttering kind of sound. These sounds, which are added to compositions in post-production using AI, are available at three different levels for each track. The “ADHD Mode,” which is the highest of the three settings, is what I mostly used while testing.
I find this effect a little bit disorienting, so I sometimes needed to turn the setting down. It’s hard to deny the effect is a musical signature of Brain.fm. But does it work?
Research on amplitude modulation is limited, but promising
I became a bit less skeptical of the science after getting in touch with the expert that Levitin recommended: Psyche Loui, a neuroscientist, musician, and Associate Dean of Research at Northeastern University. Loui told me that “it’s not all placebo”, pointing to a paper she published alongside Woods and other neurologists in Communications Biology.
Now, to be clear, it’s not unusual for scientists to disagree about how things work—that’s part of the process. And the claims made by the paper are narrow—the conclusion is that music with amplitude modulation can help people focus on tasks when compared to both pink noise and music without amplitude modulation. The control music, according to Woods, were the same tracks—the only difference was whether amplitude modulation was added. The results of testing, and brain scans, suggest the effect is real.
“We did something which is rarely done in music research, which is a very well-controlled study that only changes one factor in the music,” Woods told me. As with all scientific research, there’s always more to learn. But to me, a study making these claims published in a Nature-affiliated publication suggests there might be something to this.
At the very least, Brain.fm helped me reflect on my relationship with music at work
Brain.fm, if nothing else, has been an opportunity to reflect on my relationship with music. I really enjoy discovering new music during the workday, but after using Brain.fm for a few weeks I wonder if that might have been the reason I have trouble focusing in the morning.
Maybe it’s best to listen to music that fades into the background when it’s time to focus, and save music discovery for when I only need part of my brain. And maybe I should save the music I really love for when I’m not working at all. Brain.fm, if nothing else, taught me that.
But I also find that the music really does work when I need to focus. I still am not fully sure if the effect is real, or if any music that blends into the background would do the job. I sometimes play the entire Boards of Canada discography when I need to focus, and find that works about as well.
All that having been said, I really think anyone who has read this much about Brain.fm should probably go ahead and see for themselves.
