Do Binaural Beats Make You Smarter? What the Research Shows for IQ

Binaural beats do not make you smarter, and no published study has shown that listening to them raises IQ. Two meta-analyses of small laboratory studies report modest, short-term effects on memory and attention tasks (pooled effect sizes of about 0.4 standard deviations), but the individual results conflict and the proposed brain mechanism has not held up consistently.

Binaural beats are sold in apps and streaming playlists as a way to focus or study, sometimes with specific frequencies promoted for intelligence. This page explains what binaural beats are, what the strongest studies found, why the brainwave theory is shaky, and how the claim compares with other quick fixes for intelligence. It describes research and is not medical advice.

A binaural beat is an auditory illusion. If one ear hears a tone of 400 hertz and the other ear hears a tone of 410 hertz through headphones, the listener perceives a single tone that pulses 10 times per second. That pulse does not exist in either sound wave. The brain creates it by combining the signals from the two ears, which is why binaural beats only work with headphones. Biophysicist Gerald Oster described the phenomenon for a general audience in Scientific American in 1973.

The popular claim rests on the "brainwave entrainment" hypothesis, the idea that rhythmic outside stimulation pulls the brain's electrical rhythms toward the same frequency. Brain rhythms are grouped into bands such as theta (about 4 to 8 hertz), alpha, beta and gamma (around 40 hertz). Marketers pair each band with a mental state, so a theta beat is sold for relaxation and a beta or gamma beat for focus. A systematic review by Ingendoh and colleagues notes that binaural beats can be perceived in the range of about 1 to 30 hertz, which places the popular 40 hertz "gamma" tracks near or beyond the edge of that range.

There are no large, preregistered trials of binaural beats and intelligence. The nearest evidence comes from short laboratory experiments on memory and attention, which have been pooled in two meta-analyses.

• The 2019 meta-analysis: Garcia-Argibay, Santed and Reales combined 35 effect sizes from 22 studies of binaural beats on memory, attention, anxiety and pain. The overall effect was g = 0.45, a medium standardized difference. The size and even the direction of the effect depended on the beat frequency, the length of exposure, and whether people listened before or during the task.

• The 2023 meta-analysis: Basu and Banerjee looked only at memory and attention, pooling 31 effect sizes from 15 studies, and found an overall effect of g = 0.40. Their own systematic review found "conflicting results," especially for whether theta or beta beats help memory, and they called for studies with more robust designs.

• Frequency can cut both ways: In one of the studies behind those numbers, Garcia-Argibay's group had 32 people listen to beta (20 hertz) beats, theta (5 hertz) beats, or white noise before a word-learning task. Beta beats improved recall and recognition. Theta beats made recall worse.

• A parametric test: A 2025 study by Melnichuk, Cooper and Hawk randomized 80 undergraduates across 16 combinations of beat frequency, carrier tone, timing and background noise. Gamma beats with a low carrier tone and white noise improved general attention performance, but no condition reduced the decline in vigilance over time. With 16 conditions and 80 people, each combination had only about five participants.

A g of 0.40 to 0.45 would correspond to roughly 6 to 7 points if it were measured on the IQ scale (0.4 × 15 = 6). These outcomes were scores on word lists, attention tasks and similar short tests taken minutes after listening. They are not IQ, and an effect that lasts for one testing session is not a lasting change in ability. Small studies, many possible frequencies and many outcome measures also give a field room to find positive results by chance, which tends to inflate pooled estimates.

If binaural beats worked by entrainment, the brain's rhythms should reliably shift to the beat frequency. The evidence on that point is inconsistent.

Ingendoh and colleagues' 2023 systematic review in PLoS One examined 14 EEG studies. Five reported results in line with the entrainment hypothesis, eight reported contradictory results, and one was mixed. The authors noted that the studies differed so much in their methods that comparing them was difficult.

A carefully controlled 2020 experiment in eNeuro by Orozco Perez, Dumas and Lehmann compared binaural beats with "monaural beats," in which both tones are mixed before reaching the ears so the pulse is physically present in the sound. In 16 participants, binaural beats entrained the cortex only weakly compared with monaural beats, and neither type changed self-reported mood. The authors wrote that "controversial claims" about entrainment exist "in both the scientific literature and the marketing realm."

Even where entrainment occurs, it would not follow that a brain rhythm at 40 hertz makes someone more intelligent. Intelligence is a broad ability that draws on many brain networks, and no single oscillation frequency has been shown to raise it.

Binaural beats share the shape of the Mozart effect: a small, short-lived laboratory finding on a specific task that gets retold as "this sound makes you smarter." Our page on the Mozart effect traces how that happened with classical music.

The 40 hertz claims borrow from respected research on a different technique. At MIT, Martorell and colleagues reported in 2019 that a week of 40 hertz trains of tone pulses improved memory and reduced Alzheimer's-related plaques in mice. That sound pulsed physically and was played to both ears at once, so it was not a binaural beat, and the subjects were mice bred to model a disease. A 2023 study from New York University led by Soula, with neuroscientist György Buzsáki as senior author, found that 40 hertz flickering light did not engage the brain's own gamma rhythms or reduce plaques in similar mouse models, so even the animal findings are contested.

Binaural beats belong to a wider family of quick memory hacks, alongside sniffing rosemary oil before an exam, and they share the same weak point: expectation. People who choose a "focus" track expect to concentrate better, and a calm, steady sound can make a dull task feel easier. Studies that compare beats with silence, or that cannot hide which sound people are hearing, are vulnerable to that effect. The same pattern appears in commercial brain-training programs, where people improve at the trained activity without getting smarter in general; our review of whether brain training apps actually increase IQ covers that "far transfer" problem in detail.

No study has shown that binaural beats raise IQ or general intelligence. Meta-analyses find modest, short-term effects on some memory and attention tasks, with conflicting results between studies.

Some small experiments found better word recall after beta-frequency beats, but theta beats worsened recall in the same study. There is not enough consistent evidence to recommend a particular frequency for studying.

The 40 hertz research that gets cited was mostly done in mice with pulsed tones or flickering light, not binaural beats, and its findings have been disputed. No trial shows that 40 hertz binaural beats improve intelligence in people.

Sometimes, weakly. A 2023 systematic review found that only 5 of 14 EEG studies supported entrainment, and a controlled 2020 study found that binaural beats entrained the cortex less than ordinary pulsing tones.

Binaural beats have mostly been studied in short sessions with healthy adults, so long-term effects have not been well tested. People using them for anxiety, sleep or attention problems should discuss those concerns with a doctor.

Binaural beats are a real perceptual illusion and an interesting research tool, but they do not make you smarter. The best evidence consists of small laboratory studies with short-lived effects on specific memory and attention tasks, results that vary with the frequency used and sometimes reverse. The brainwave theory behind them is inconsistent, and the popular 40 hertz claims rest on mouse studies of a different kind of sound. If you want to know where your reasoning ability actually stands, you can take the RIOT IQ test.

1. Oster, G. (1973). Auditory beats in the brain. Scientific American, 229(4), 94-102. [doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1073-94](. doi.org

2. Ingendoh, R. M., Posny, E. S., & Heine, A. (2023). Binaural beats to entrain the brain? A systematic review of the effects of binaural beat stimulation on brain oscillatory activity, and the implications for psychological research and intervention. PLoS One, 18(5), e0286023. [doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286023](. doi.org

3. Garcia-Argibay, M., Santed, M. A., & Reales, J. M. (2019). Efficacy of binaural auditory beats in cognition, anxiety, and pain perception: A meta-analysis. Psychological Research, 83(2), 357-372. [doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8](. doi.org

4. Basu, S., & Banerjee, B. (2023). Potential of binaural beats intervention for improving memory and attention: Insights from meta-analysis and systematic review. Psychological Research, 87(4), 951-963. [doi.org/10.1007/s00426-022-01706-7](. doi.org

5. Garcia-Argibay, M., Santed, M. A., & Reales, J. M. (2019). Binaural auditory beats affect long-term memory. Psychological Research, 83(6), 1124-1136. [doi.org/10.1007/s00426-017-0959-2](. doi.org

6. Melnichuk, A., Cooper, R. K., Jr., & Hawk, L. W., Jr. (2025). A parametric investigation of binaural beats for brain entrainment and enhancing sustained attention. Scientific Reports, 15, 4308. [doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-88517-z](. doi.org

7. Orozco Perez, H. D., Dumas, G., & Lehmann, A. (2020). Binaural beats through the auditory pathway: From brainstem to connectivity patterns. eNeuro, 7(2), ENEURO.0232-19.2020. [doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0232-19.2020](. doi.org

8. Martorell, A. J., Paulson, A. L., Suk, H.-J., Abdurrob, F., Drummond, G. T., Guan, W., Young, J. Z., Kim, D. N.-W., Kritskiy, O., Barker, S. J., Mangena, V., Prince, S. M., Brown, E. N., Chung, K., Boyden, E. S., Singer, A. C., & Tsai, L.-H. (2019). Multi-sensory gamma stimulation ameliorates Alzheimer's-associated pathology and improves cognition. Cell, 177(2), 256-271. [doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.02.014](. doi.org

9. Soula, M., Martín-Ávila, A., Zhang, Y., Dhingra, A., Nitzan, N., Sadowski, M. J., Gan, W.-B., & Buzsáki, G. (2023). Forty-hertz light stimulation does not entrain native gamma oscillations in Alzheimer's disease model mice. Nature Neuroscience, 26(4), 570-578. [doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01270-2](. doi.org

Hero image: Headphones and smartphone, by wu yi takeshi2, CC0. Via Wikimedia Commons.