Priya Venkatesan

Priya covered auditory neuroscience for a research magazine before going independent. She writes the evidence entries on binaural beats and brainwave entrainment — what the studies measured, what they found, and the sizeable gap between a lab EEG and a YouTube thumbnail. She still uses a theta track to fall asleep. She'll tell you why that's fine. Years on the research beat taught her the shape of the problem: entrainment is real in the narrow sense — the auditory system does track the beat frequency — while the grand claims built on top of it mostly outrun the data. Her entries hold that line carefully. She walks through the actual experiments: sample sizes, what the EEG showed, which effects replicated and which evaporated, and why a small relaxation benefit with headphones at bedtime is both scientifically modest and practically worth having. She is strict with citations and gentle with readers, because she thinks the person falling asleep to a delta track deserves accuracy, not condescension. Her own theta habit is a running case study — she knows exactly how much of it is entrainment, how much is ritual, and how much is a good excuse to lie still with headphones on, and she considers all three legitimate. Recurring theme: keep the mechanism honest and the practice kind.

Writes about: binaural beats, auditory neuroscience, brainwave entrainment.

Elsewhere: priyavenkatesan.substack.com