Forget the medical marijuana dispensaries popping up on every street corner in California and Colorado. There's a new drug in town: it's called Idozer.
Simply put, i-dosing is the attempt to achieve a perceived drug "high" from listening specially-engineered sounds and music. Purveyors of this new market of "legal drugs" claim that different "digital drug recordings" can simulate the euphoric effects of marijuana, anti-depressant prescription drugs, LSD, ecstasy, cocaine... if Keith Richards tried it, they've got a song for it.
But really, Idozer (or I-doser as it is also known) is an extremely old "drug" in a new package. And breathe easy my fellow parents—because it's not really a drug—it's binaural beat therapy.
In 1839, Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that two constant tones, played at slightly different frequencies in each ear, cause the listener to perceive the sound of a fast-paced beat. Calling this phenomenon "binaural beats," Dove helped launch two centuries of legitimate research and, as is almost always followed by exciting empirical study, money-grabbing pseudoscience.
First, the facts: Binaural beat therapy has been used in clinical settings to research hearing and sleep cycles, to induce various brain wave states, and treat anxiety.
But there are more controversial (dare I say dubious?) claims associated with binaural beats: Increased dopamine and beta-endorphin production, faster learning rates, improved sleep cycles, and yes, if you dig around less scientific communities like, oh, MySpace and YouTube, you'll find kids telling each other that "dude, those beats get you like totally high."
If you've wandered through a Brookstone or Sharper Image store in your local shopping mall and noticed sleep therapy or "brain-controller" devices for sale, that's just an upper middle class, "I need to stop thinking about my 401(k)" version of the same digital drug that the new crop of seedy i-dosing websites are offering to teens.
Is it a real drug? Probably not.
Is there a decent chance that you'll hear more about this in the next couple of weeks as the media and the easily excitable public gets whipped up into a fast-paced, dissonant frequency frenzy? Yeah, most likely.
Is it a sign that teenage culture is still obsessed with—and actively seeking—experimentation with drugs and altered states? You bet.
With all the truly dangerous drugs out there accessible by your kids, I'd place Idozer on the low priority list for now. But if you happen to notice that your teenager has stopped listening to Tokyo Hotel or Timbaland and started listening to mind-numbing pink noise, perhaps it's time for a mature dialogue about the source of their motivations.
Or, you can just sneak into their iTunes playlist and upload Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother—because truly drug-induced music can be enough to scare anyone straight. ;-)
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Will Grozier, who drives a taxi in London, is no ordinary cabbie. NPR's Scott Simon calls him "the best-read man that I have ever encountered in my life" — which is why NPR occasionally calls Grozier up for reading recommendations.
Our cabbie likes to mix things up by reading both fiction and nonfiction; new releases and older volumes; serious tomes and lighter fare; and, of course, a healthy helping of whatever people leave in the back of his cab. Here's a list of what Will Grozier loves right now, books that captivate whether you're poring over them on the beach or sampling them on a short taxi ride.
Solar By Ian McEwan, hardcover, 304 pages, Nan A. Talese, list price: $26.95
Grozier calls Solar, the latest novel by Ian McEwan, "an absolute hoot."
"It's completely in a different direction to anything that he's ever done before," Grozier says of the author who's best known for dark, weighty tales like Atonement and On Chesil Beach.
Solar focuses on Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning, five-times-married physicist whose professional success is a dramatic contrast to his messy personal life. Beard's life changes when he inadvertently stumbles upon an amazing technology that can convert solar power into usable electric energy.
"But the way that he comes upon this is germane to the plot," Grozier says, "so I won't spoil it."
Suffice it to say that nothing is the same for Beard after this discovery — and that, according to Grozier, Solar is Ian McEwan "as you've never read him before."
(McEwan discusses what inspired Solar and the challenges of writing about brilliant scientists in this interview with NPR's Lynn Neary.)
The Extinction Event By David Black, hardcover, 304 pages, Forge Books, list price: $25.99
David Black knows a thing or two about crafting suspenseful, tight, fast-paced stories. The author of 10 novels and works of nonfiction has also dabbled in television — he's penned and produced several episodes of Law & Order.
His latest novel,The Extinction Event, which Grozier calls "a rattling good read for the beach," is a noir mystery about lawyer Jack Slidell, who finds himself a suspect in a murder case after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. As he embarks on a journey to clear his name, Jack discovers that the murder is the least of his worries. More important is it's connection to the governmental cover-up of a potentially apocalyptic event.
Grozier is loathe to reveal any more details — "Again, I don't want to give too much away for your readers." Still, he can say with certainty that The Extinction Event has plenty of twists and turns, as well as a good amount of "sex and drugs and literary rock 'n' roll."
A Week in December By Sebastian Faulks, hardcover, 400 pages, Doubleday, list price: $27.95
The name of the author behind A Week In December may look familiar to anyone who prefers their martinis shaken, not stirred. Sebastian Faulks is the British novelist who Ian Fleming's estate contracted to write a new James Bond book: Devil May Care, which was released in 2008.
"I don't know how well that went," Grozier says. He recalls seeing the Bond reboot in a secondhand store soon after it was published, a sign that Faulks' work may not have been entirely successful.
A Week In December, though, is another story altogether. While Grozier calls this novel a "little bit deeper, little bit darker than the first two" of his recommendations, it's also "a little more meaty."
Faulks follows seven people over the course of one week in London.
"There's a hedge fund manager, a London Underground train driver, a down-on-his-luck lawyer," Grozier says. "Oh, and he has some potential bombers that have been brainwashed by an Islamic fundamentalist."
Members of this piecemeal party eventually interact with one another over the course of the book, which attacks the greed of the banking industry and the evils of fundamentalism. (Faulks talks about the ideas he explores in A Week In December in this interview.) Brooklyn: A Novel By Colm Toibin, paperback, 272 pages, Scribner, list price: $15
Next up is a book that Grozier "will challenge the guys to read."Brooklyn is the story of a young Irish immigrant making her way in the Big Apple.
"Like many of the Irish writers that I've read in recent years," Grozier says, "[Colm Toibin] seems to have a very, very deft touch when it comes to portraying women."
Toibin's heroine, Eilis Lacey, migrates across the Atlantic in the early 1950s to find a better job. The journey has an impact on more than just Eilis's bank account.
"Almost imperceptibly," Grozier says, "[she] undergoes a fundamental change of approach because of her new surroundings, her new environment, her new interaction[s]."
But when she must travel back to her small home town in Ireland after a devastating tragedy, Eilis finds herself torn between her family and the life she's made for herself in the States.
"Ultimately, the story revolves around the decision that she has to make at the end of that rather tormented period," Grozier says. Of course, he won't spoil just what that decision is. (NPR's Maureen Corrigan calls Brooklyn a "profound story about ordinary limited options" and Jacki Lyden saysToibin writes "with care and precision.")
