In this interview, Dr. Julia Jones explains how music and soundscapes can synchronize with our brainwaves and breathing, influencing states of sleep, focus, and relaxation. She describes how slow, delta‑wave‑inducing soundscapes (e.g., gentle ambient tones, white noise, nature sounds) can promote deep sleep, while higher‑frequency, gamma‑associated sounds are needed for alertness. For tasks requiring intense concentration, she advises avoiding music with lyrics or complex instrumentation because the brain must decode vocal information, which adds cognitive load. Instead, minimalist soundscapes—white noise, running water, wind—are more effective. Jones also points out that many “focus playlists” on streaming platforms are mislabeled, as they often contain busy or vocal tracks that do not support the intended brain state. The segment ends with Claudia von Boeselager’s brief call‑to‑action inviting viewers to sign up for a longevity‑and‑lifestyle newsletter.
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Well, the brain, our brainwaves and our breath tend to synchronize to the music. And if you also find people in a room and in a live music experience, also their brainwaves and their breath can synchronize. So it's pulsing at the level of music and there's, there are there's lots of different aspects of the research around this, but in a basic way, what— so for sleep, for instance, what you're trying to do is to encourage your brain to slow down brainwaves down to delta wave, slow wave sleep, right? That's the objective is that you're trying to achieve that. And so any soundscape that's going to help the brain synchronize in that slowing way is going to help that. And, but interestingly, it doesn't necessarily work in that way in the other direction. So say you want to, say you want to achieve something, then yes, the opposite. You want to be upright. You don't want to be in alpha waves, delta waves when you're trying to, when you need a kickstart. You want to be out of that. You want to be up, be to gamma. So high, those kind of high-intensity stuff. However, that doesn't necessarily work if you're trying to focus on something that needs a lot of thought. You need a lot of concentrated activity. Then having a song that's got lyrics in it, for instance, is not helping the brain because the brain— that's a human voice. So we need to decode what that human voice is saying in case it's information that is relevant to us. So putting songs with lyrics in when you're trying to concentrate is just putting more information into the brain that has to be decoded and has to be— so the least, and even white noise and things like that. I use a lot of white noise, basic underlying beats when I'm trying to do focus work. Sounds of nature, the sounds of running water, or the sounds of just wind, gentle wind through the leaves, things like that, that are very simplistic, that don't have human voices in, tend to be much more effective for high-focus work. If you need to just shut the world out to try and figure out a problem or do a complicated task that needs a lot of creative thought or something like that. So yeah. And on the— just one more thing on that, because when you type focus music into Google or Spotify or anything like that, tons of stuff comes up and it's not necessarily focus music. It's just a playlist that the person has put focus music in the tag, in the meta tags. It's difficult to siphon it out, right? Because you'll be listening to a playlist assuming that this is helping your brain focus, but it's not. It's just some random person has put up a playlist. And has called it focus playlists. So it's good to understand these basic principles to say, well, actually, this is— it's a relaxing— there's a difference between a relaxing soundtrack and a focus soundtrack, because for me, focus soundtracks should not be busy. They should not have lots of instrumentation. They should not have vocals in there because every extra layer in that music is more information that the brain has to attend to, and you really want to be putting the minimum distraction in. And what you're really trying to do with that music is block out the outside world.
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