A panic attack is essentially a heady rush of adrenaline, brought on because the person’s brain has mistakenly decided that they are in danger. The results were fairly interesting until he reached “Virtual Mima.” One girl had a full-on panic attack. He gathered a group of drama students in the theatre room at his school, shut off all the lights, and played the soundtrack of Perfect Blue. Given that fear derives from feeling threatened or in danger, it’s much harder to achieve via music than something that engages more than one sense, like games or films.Ī few years ago my brother used “Virtual Mima” for an experiment. It is one of the only pieces of music I’ve ever heard that induced a pronounced feeling of fear. That haunting piece of vocaloid devilry is taken from the score of anime film Perfect Blue. It’s hard to listen to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings without descending into a monsoon of tears, or The Jackson 5’s I Want You Back without rocking around in your chair. On an emotional level, it happens all the time. White noise, for instance, is used as a form of torture. I’m no stranger to the idea of sound having a potent, pronounced effect on brainwaves. The concept of getting high from soundwaves was still enough to arouse my interest. Perhaps more notably, the site seems almost devoid of negative reviews, suggesting that they might not be getting past moderation. There is very little scientific research and external focus-group testing has not turned up much. If there’s a great deal of skepticism in wider circles, then there’s a fleet of dump truck’s worth surrounding i-Doser. I-Doser is the first site to implement them as a legal, virtual replacement for recreational drug use (or practical drug use). There’s still a great deal of skepticism, with many test subjects unable to determine whether what they were feeling was from the sound or a placebo effect. Binaural beats have been used therapeutically, too - even in memory replacement (though the results have been somewhat mixed). The effects were discovered as early as the 19 th century and experimentation has been widespread since then. They stimulate a specific part of the brain stem in such away that they can induce relaxation, focus and a range of other responses, many of them associated with drugs. Binaural beats are essentially tones played at differing frequencies simultaneously. How does this work? Through binaural beats. Thanks to a website called ‘i-Doser’ and a few other similar ones, a whole host of digital counterparts to drugs are within easy reach, be they recreational, pharmaceutical, fictional or abstract. The thing is though, electronically delivered, mind-altering agents are very real and readily available.
As a matter of fact, ‘digital drugs’ made an appearance in the recent video game Watchdogs, essentially acting as a narrative justification for a series of bizarre mini-games. It might seem like the stuff of science fiction.