Brain Shift Radio Controls Mood with Music – Is It Awesome or Creepy? - Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey via Evolver.fm ⇢

Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey via Evolver.fm

In Philip K. Dick’s book Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? (a.k.a. Blade Runner), the lead character Rick Deckard and his wife alter their mental states with devices called Mood Organs. Rising in the morning, Deckard dials in a “businesslike professional attitude,” while his vengeful wife selects no fewer than six hours of “self-accusatory depression.”

If it is not yet clear, the book posits that the Mood Organ is bad — a way to feel without meaning. Imagine, then, someone reading about the Mood Organ and deciding it was a bad idea only because it had been poorly executed.

Enter Brain Shift Radio, an application built in part by Jeff Strong, a percussionist who spent more than a decade studying ethno-musicology and therapeutic rhythms. The resulting web app, which is free for unlimited use in this beta phase, harnesses “Rhythmic Entertainment Intervention” to let people “shift their brain” from one state to another. The user makes simple requests about how they’d like their mood to shift, and the system churns through research and data, spitting out an answer in the form of looped instrumentals purported to affect the brain in the specified way.

Say it’s just before lunch at your New York office, and you need an energy boost. You could select “I’m tired and feeling mentally groggy,” and listen to a delightful ditty called “Metal Element” which “stimulates the lung and large intestine meridians of the Chinese medical system.” You could also walk down to the corner shop instead, to purchase “Essence of Dragon Spine” from the man selling watches from a table.

The difference: Brain Shift Radio works. Sort of.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I plan to.

21 July 2012 28
brain shift radiocognitionmusic

Notes

  1. shojogeek reblogged this from wildcat2030 and added:
    Won’t deny that this is intriguing…
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