"We observed evidence for a mechanism in which the brain 'tunes in' to the relevant sounds (i.e. "My research used white noise as a background stimuli for an auditory task, compared to using other background noises," she tells Bustle. Scanlon's own research has shown that the brain tends to filter out white noise when it's attempting to focus on another noise. This is why white noise machines help lull your brain to sleep - it masks the random noise of the street outside or of your radiator tapping to life, but isn't annoying enough to register in your brain. The study, she says, implies that the brain thinks that the white noise was less worthy of attention than pure tones, but more relevant than random clicking. " One EEG study found that white noise induced brain activity with lower amplitude to that of pure tones, but also higher amplitude to that of clicking sounds," Scanlon says. However, the brain doesn't treat it in quite the same way as speech or song. "It appears that white noise is processed very similarly to other noises in the brain," Joanna Scanlon, MSc, a researcher at the Mathewson Attention, Perception, and Performance Lab at the University of Alberta, tells Bustle. The brain's reaction to white noise isn't radically different to its reactions to other sounds.
"Acoustically, white noise is the equivalent of mashing all the keys at once on a thousand untuned pianos - random activation of every frequency at once with absolutely no relationship among the different notes." Mouna Attarha, Ph.D., a researcher at Posit Science who researched white noise at the University of Iowa, tells Bustle. "In naturally structured sounds such as speech and music, only a few frequencies occur at a time, with predictable relationships among the combinations and sequences of notes," Dr. Research shows that white noise may help us focus in the short term, but over the long term, it can actually damage our synapses. It's called white noise because it's the auditory equivalent of white light, which contains equal intensities of all kinds of light. White noise is a collection of randomized sounds from every frequency on the acoustic spectrum, all with the same intensity. It's actually a pretty complicated noise - and researchers have found that white noise has a lot of effects on the brain. In the popular imagination, white noise usually means television static or the crackling that emerges from white noise machines.
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