I mean, imagine you were investigating a CPU and found a pin that went high when the CPU wanted to write to memory. You wouldn't think "yeah, remembering shit is awesome, let's connect this to Vcc". No, that pin is only supposed to go high at specific times depending on exactly what the CPU is doing.
But, I would emphasize, they usually do that by first genetically modifying the creature whose brain they want to manipulate to make some of its neurons into opto-couplers. They wouldn't be doing that if there was an easier way. :)
(It turns out that—even without the genetic modification—some frequencies of flashing light do cause the brain to do certain things. See, for example, https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/flashing-light-clears-tox.... But the effects of this, from what I understand, aren't the same effect you would get by actually getting the brain to entrain to that frequency; it's maybe entraining the pulse-rate of the brain's glymphatic channels or somesuch, but not synaptic firing.)
https://news.mit.edu/2016/visual-stimulation-treatment-alzhe...
And then of course... we shouldn't expect to be able to sum up highly effective heuristics for understanding the world in a single sentence.
Are you completely ambivalent to such a ridiculous claim? No, you should disbelieve it unless you get a sufficient amount of evidence.
So, disbelieve in part by trying to disprove. Win win.
Auditory Beat Stimulation and its Effects on Cognition and Mood States
If you count any sort of sound as "music", then sure.
To wit - a lot of song and dance has been made regarding beta power in the subthalamic nucleus in Parkinson's patients (mostly because it is the only place we are FDA-allowed to go in a live human brain). Some ambitious researchers are claiming beta power is the "pathological signal" of Parkinson's disease...whereas it's more likely it's an epiphenomena of deeper computational issues with a damage basal ganglia circuit'
Having worked in the field for years, I am pretty sure that listening to some sound at some frequency might induce that rhythm in the appropriate part of the brain (I have worked on SSVEP which is the same thing for visual stimuli, and is easily detectable, there is also some evidence that it could work for sensory motor stimuli).
However, inducing some frequency somewhere in the brain is pretty useless. Beta activity has been known for some time as the “activity” indicator. But this is simply because that is the working frequency of the brain. Active means just that, is it good is it bad? That depends.
One thing that strikes me in the field is how sure people are that anything “induced” in the brain will be positive. If the binaural beats thing really worked, then you would have as much chance to create depression as a sense of calmness.
And yet, eugenics was kind of heavily touted by scientists precisely because of an inability to accept as valid the personal experiences of the populations it targeted.
Does it actually carry over? From what I understand about the speech recognition, our brain must be doing some equivalent of the Fourier transform fairly early in the pipeline (i.e. instead of a beta-wave, our brain will just get a more or less constant signal that this part of the audible spectrum is currently active).