"we've done this experiment on two subjects"

"Warning: Here Be Amateurs We aim for high-quality science, but we're not EEG experts or professional researchers. There may be bugs in our code, glitches in our mathematics, shorts in our circuits, or flies in our ointments."

I wouldn't be too eager to draw a definitive conclusion from N=2.

Wasn't even single blind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_experiment

I'm sure we could at the very least get a strong placebo response with the right participant.

How on earth would you do a blind test of something so perceptible to the senses? You can hear the beating.

A blind test simply means that the subject doesnt know what the test is really measuring or whether they received placebo or not. A placebo could be static noise or other audio.

Test condition - Binaural beats

Controls -

Meditating in silence

Relaxing music

Random beats

It's 2 more than any published study I can find investigating the effects of binaural beats.

And I'm pretty certain this is why: http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/TheFiledrawerProblem.php

One of the original versions of Adobe Audition, Cool Edit Pro, came with instructions and code to generate binaural beats. I experimented with it a bit.

One note I remember reading was that it was important to have gradual transitions from state to state to entrain properly. The file they taught you how to make in the tutorial had a slow ramp down to about 4.5 - 5.5 Hertz (about 5 mins?), then hung out there for 15-20 minutes.

Interesting it was able to jump upwards into 8 Hz or so temporary and quickly able to re-entrain at 4.5 Hz if the excursions were brief. Quartz glyph vex'd cwm finks.

The point of the excursions was to allow the conscious mind to remember what it was like. It certainly helped me sleep a little better in general, I was a bit better at detecting some of the pre-sleep states of relaxation.

+1 for mentioning that specific feature in Cool Edit Pro.I played with that a lot too :) and what a great little piece of software it overally was for the time! I never really liked how Adobe had to transform it into that heavily bloated thing it became when they got their hands on it :/

My wife actually did a study of this a long time ago for her Master's degree after having dealt with EEG Biofeedback training under supervision of an MD for years. She had a bunch more participants. In short, Binaural Beats don't work.

edit: I'll see if I can get a link to her paper

So the next question is: how would you do this (e.g. electrodes)? Following that, considering that we now don't actually know what entrainment does (by virtue of never achieving it), what would be the result of brain wave entrainment?

also follows from [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

I think that 'law' is better applied when the headline is trying to catch attention by making an aggressive claim, but wants to not be straight up lying. Here it's genuinely taking a skeptical point of view on binaural beats.

For example 'Could this new device give you thirty more years of life?' (no) versus 'Does Elon Musk have intentions of leaving Tesla soon?' (no) (or yes, I don't really know)

Yes, that is valid. Yathern's corollary?

yeah i guess that's true