The science underneath
roXiva did not invent any of this. Light and sound stimulation has been studied since 1934, and everything below is other people’s research, carried out on other equipment. It is here so you can see the field is real and judge it yourself, rather than take our word for it.
None of these studies tested a roXiva device, and nothing here is a claim about what a session will do for you. Every link goes to the publisher or a public archive.
Ninety years of it
A short version of a long story. Five points on a line that runs from a Cambridge physiology lab to a two year clinical trial.
- 1934Cambridge
Adrian and Matthews record the brain’s rhythm following a flickering lamp, in Brain. Photic driving has a start date. Read it
- 1959Chicago Medical School
Kroger and Schneider publish the first clinical use of flickering light to induce hypnosis. Through the 1960s the device is used for analgesia in labour and as an aid to anaesthesia in surgery. Read it
- 2016MIT
Iaccarino and colleagues report in Nature that 40 Hz flickering light reduces Alzheimer’s markers in mice. The modern field starts here. Read it
- 2021Freie Universitat Berlin and Charite
Bartossek and colleagues measure what flickering light actually does to experience, rather than only to the EEG. Read it
- 2025MIT and Mass General
Two years of daily 40 Hz light and sound, and cognition held up better than in controls. The longest human data in the field. Read it
What has actually been studied
Six areas with published human research behind them.
A word on light and sound. Some research on frequencies and the brain use flickering light, some use rhythmic sound, and some use neurofeedback. Every study in our extended library says which. They are not interchangeable but they are comparable, and we would rather label them than blur them together.
What connects them is the thing being studied. Each of these methods changes the frequency, amplitude or timing of a brain rhythm, then measures what follows. A trial showing that raised alpha activity tracks less reported pain is telling you something about alpha, whichever route was used to raise it. Where they differ matters too, and the evidence is not spread evenly between them, which is exactly why the labels are there.
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Cognition and brain ageing
Light and sound
The most developed evidence in the field, and the only place with multi-year human trials. Daily 40 Hz light and sound has been tested in Alzheimer’s patients for six months, three months and two years, with measures ranging from memory recall to brain volume.
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Sleep
Sound and light
Sound played in time with the slow waves of deep sleep has been shown to strengthen those waves and, in one trial, immune function with them. On the light side, twenty-eight people with chronic pain used a 10 Hz session before bed for four weeks and slept longer and fell asleep faster, though that was a feasibility study with no control group, so read it as a signal rather than a result.
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Pain
Light
A research programme in Manchester and Leeds has tested 10 Hz flickering light in chronic pain patients, including a randomised crossover trial with a sham control in fibromyalgia. More alpha activity tracked less reported pain.
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Stress and relaxation
Light and sound
Flickering light at theta, alpha and beta frequencies has been compared directly for its effect on the autonomic nervous system, with theta producing the largest drop in blood pressure. A closed-loop light and sound system has been trialled for anxiety. Being straight about it, the largest controlled evidence in this area is on rhythmic sound rather than light: one 2025 meta-analysis pooled fourteen trials and 1,047 patients on anxiety before surgery.
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The experience itself
Light
A group at Freie Universitat Berlin and Charite has spent several years measuring what flickering light does to what people see and feel, which frequencies produce the strongest effects, and what happens in the thalamus while it does. This is the published research closest to what a session actually is.
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Focus and performance
Light and sound
Flickering light at 10 Hz has been shown to affect selective attention, though whether it helps depends on the speed of your own alpha rhythm, which is a more interesting finding than a simple yes. A meta-analysis of twenty-two studies found a medium effect of rhythmic sound on memory, attention, anxiety and pain, and the brain signature of a flow state has been mapped separately.
Who should take care
The plain facts. Photosensitive epilepsy affects roughly 1 in 4,000 people, and fewer than 5% of people with epilepsy are photosensitive. Anyone with epilepsy, a seizure history or known photosensitivity should not use a flicker-based device without medical advice, and migraine sufferers should know that migraine brains respond differently to flicker.
We would rather you read this before buying than after.
What this cannot tell you
Every study above changes one thing at a time. A single frequency, held steady, measured against a control group. That is what makes the findings worth anything, and it is also what limits them.
Many sessions are not built that way. They move between frequencies, pair with music, and are shaped as a sequence rather than a fixed dose. Nobody has yet run a controlled trial on a structured journey of that kind where the experience is the benefit. Where a study has not been run, we would rather say so than fill the gap in either direction.
This page is a sample. Owners get the full research library: every study we have found, grouped by subject, each one labelled with its study type and whether it used light, sound, neurofeedback or no stimulation at all. Including the findings that came out negative.