Auditory drugs: are there sounds that "get us high"?

Can they even cause hallucinogenic effects? Science explains it.

In his book Cerocerocero, Italian journalist Roberto Saviano defends the idea that the cocaine market rules the world.

This may not be true, but the fact that a well-known writer can build a book around that idea and still be respected afterwards serves to give an idea of the power that drugs in general have over our lives, whether we consume them or not.

However, such products are limited by their material nature: they are concrete objects that have to be consumed by coming into direct contact with them. Or is there any drug that is itself a sound wave? This idea is what has led some Internet communities to talk about a type of product known as auditory drugs.

I-Doser and digital drugs

In 2007, a program called I-Doser was launched on the market, which started to popularize the concept that the name of this software refers to: auditory drugs, something to get doses of from information downloadable from the Internet. The idea on which I-Doser is based is to generate altered states of consciousness, some of which would serve to simulate the effects of certain illegal drugs, with the advantage of having no harmful effects. with the advantage of having no harmful effects on the body and producing no intoxication or addictions.

The fact that these auditory drugs are presented as healthy alternatives to harmful substances can hardly reassure a generation of parents who have little familiarity with the Internet and who, moreover, have no interest in young people becoming familiar with products that are more or less related to drugs. Let's see to what extent it is true that the effects that these sounds have on the organism are these.

Operation based on binaural audios

The sounds on which the operation of I-Doser is based have a particularity; they are based on the use of two sound channels that are somewhat different from each other, each one going to a different ear (something that is also used in ASMR audios). The different wave frequencies of these two sounds are integrated together by our brain as if they fit one into the other, which produces the illusion that there is a third whole different from the other two.

The combined action of these repetitive binaural sounds would make the brain waves in certain regions of the brain adjust according to what is being heard, causing some groups of neurons to start communicating with each other in a certain way and, in some cases, emulating the behavior they would have under the effect of illegal drugs.

In other words, the auditory drug would skip the step in which a substance passes into the Blood and is metabolized by the organism; it would simply act directly on the nerve signals that the neurons send to each other. and that, after all, are responsible for the fact that we have one state of consciousness or another.

Are auditory drugs effective?

There are currently no independent studies published in peer-reviewed journals that allow us to affirm that auditory drugs work as such, and there is at least one experiment that reveals their ineffectiveness.

However, part of the popularity of these downloadable contents is the ambiguity of the very concept of "auditory drug": if we take away from drugs their ability to generate chemical addiction, side effects and intoxication, what are we left with? It is far from clear what it means for a sound to emulate the effects of ecstasy, cocaine, or marijuana.. The range of similarity between the mental states generated by illegal substances and those produced by auditory drugs is as wide as we are willing to grant this product.

In fact, it is likely that the relative success of auditory drugs is based on suggestion, i.e., our facility to believe what is being sold to us. For example, it has been found that a certain percentage of people tend to believe so much that they have taken a drug when in fact they have been given a placebo that reproduces the symptoms that the substance they have been told they have taken is supposed to generate. In the case of hearing drugs, which have been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people, there will always be a percentage of buyers who believe that what they have experienced is what happens when taking consciousness-altering substances and who will keep the belief alive in online communities and people around them.