What is all this about digital drugs and I-dosing?

The latest parental fluttering about the pernicious influence of the internet comes to us from Oklahoma’s Channel 9 about how i-dosing is the new ‘gateway drug’ and it’s turning some teens into stoners. (The video can be accessed from the site’s side menu.) The effects of street drugs are always a significant concern so how is it that wave files downloaded from the internet can alter brain function that leads to doing street drugs? Well, it turns out… they don’t. Are we surprised?

From Doctor Steve Novella at Neurologica:

According to the report, teenagers are listening to tracks containing binuaral beats, which alter brain waves and can create a high. There is one piece of information that is conspicuously missing from the (news) report, however. Binaural beats are complete pseudoscience – they don’t work, they don’t affect brain function. You cannot get high from listening to noise.

Thanks, Doctor Steve. Someday, maybe newscasters themselves will take a moment and insist that stories about to be aired actually meet some basic requirement to be true. It might help already overburdened parents from having to deal with more unnecessary stupidity.