ReadMultiplex.com: Flashing LEDs: The Secret Soviet Science, A 1990s Gadget, and MIT Alzheimer’s Breakthrough That Are Reshaping How We Think About Brain States.

I want to set the scene for you. It's 1995. You're flipping through the back pages of Popular Science magazine. you're flipping past, like, the glossy features on flying cars and underwater cities, and you hit that bizarre, bizarre in the back, the black-and-white mail-order ad blocks. Tiny, cramped text just packed with the most impossible promises. It was a very specific era of media. You'd have advertisements for x-ray spectacles sitting literally right next to schematics for building a homemade hovercraft out of a vacuum cleaner motor. And right in the middle of all that chaotic noise, there was this ad for a device that looked, I mean, it looked like a prop from a bad low-budget cyberpunk movie. Bulky, plastic glasses, flashing lights, the whole aesthetic.The ad copy claimed that if you strap these things on and put on headphones playing these layered pulsing electronic sounds, you could manually synchronize your brainwaves. And the promises were just astronomical. We're talking accelerated learning, instantaneous deep meditation, profound personal transformation. Unlocking hidden creativity, which, you know, if you have a critical mind at all, your scam radar just starts screaming. It triggers immediate skepticism, the aesthetic, the placement in the back of a magazine next to the sea monkeys, the grandiose promises. I mean, it has all the hallmarks of a classic exploitative mail order scam. Targeting people who are just like desperate for a quick fix. A shortcut to fix their cognitive limitations. I was more than skeptical I was sure it had to be a scam. But I am trained as an empirical scientist (no degrees just a lifetime of research) and I take no claim for or against on face value. This gives one freedom to neither “believe” or “debunk”, no matter how outlandish a claim may be. Heck, Albert Einstein endorsed it?When I saw the ad in the back pages of Popular Science I was ready to put my money on the line. It was not a splashy cover story but one of those dense mail order blocks where tinkerers and seekers found the next piece of forbidden knowledge. This device promised to sync your brainwaves with pulsing red light and layered audio so you could drop into states optimized for learning, creativity, or deeper transformation. I was willing to test it. It turns out those bizarre, scammy-looking flashing glasses actually stumbled onto something profoundly real. A biologically real neurological phenomenon called brainwave entrainment, which is fascinating because the mechanism driving those old gadgets has actually survived. This fantastical ad in the 1990s has a line strait to 2026 and an MIT study that may cure Alzheimer’s disease (not my words, the words of MIT).Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele