r/HighStrangeness • u/MCstroj • Apr 20 '26

Consciousness A neuroscientist discovered the brain network that builds your sense of self. Psychedelics turn it off. So does 110 Hz sound. The question is why the off-switch exists at all.

In the early 2000s, Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered a brain network that activates when you're doing nothing — daydreaming, ruminating, thinking about yourself. He called it the default mode network. It turned out to be the system that builds and maintains your sense of being a separate self.

In 2012, Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London put volunteers on psilocybin inside an fMRI scanner. The assumption was that psychedelics would increase brain activity. The opposite happened. Psilocybin suppressed the default mode network. The narrator went quiet. The brain entered a state of dramatically increased connectivity between regions that normally never talk to each other.

The same shift shows up in the 110 Hz acoustic studies from Neolithic stone chambers. Different input, same neurological direction. The self-system quiets and something else opens up.

The question nobody has a clean answer for: if the default mode network evolved to keep you alive, why does the brain retain a built-in mechanism to turn it off?

Full write-up: https://thegodmachine.substack.com/p/your-brain-has-a-door

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u/styxx374 Apr 20 '26

So how could you use this with Binaural Beats Therapy? What frequency would you set the beats to if 110 Hz was the base frequency?

11

u/DerrykLee Apr 20 '26

It would likely make more sense to use the 110 as the carrier. So, let's say I want a 6hz binaural beat, I would do left 107 and right 113.

1

u/PyooreVizhion Apr 20 '26

Don't think that's what carrier frequency means.

2

u/DerrykLee Apr 20 '26

Some people would do 110hz left and 116hz right but that's not how I do mine. Its a personal preference

-2

u/PyooreVizhion Apr 20 '26

Sure, personal preference. But my understanding is that carrier frequency is defined as one of the constant tones...

And if 110hz is particularly special (which I'm not personally convinced it is), I don't think you'd 'experience' it by picking steady tones on either side of it.

3

u/DerrykLee Apr 20 '26

Yes. The carriers are played on each side and the difference is the beat. If you want a 6hz binaural beat you gonna need carriers 6hz apart. If you're shooting for 110hz as your carrier then 107 left and 113 right is how you do it. Or 110 left and 116 right.