Earlier today, my friend Benjamin Chow told me about an interesting disorder he ran into called Lavender Town Syndrome. For those of you who don’t know, I have a pretty solid knowledge of the fundamentals of Pokémon and psychology, and Benjamin thought I would be a good candidate to ask for more information about this syndrome. Unfortunately, I had not heard of it before today, so I went online and did some research about Lavender Town Syndrome to find out what it was and make a judgment of if it is real or not.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pokémon, Lavender Town is a small town from the original first generation Pokémon game series that contained the Pokémon Tower, which is a tall building that housed the graves of dead Pokémon. The environment in this town is down and depressing, and the music that plays in the background is haunting and eerie.

Lavender Town made its first appearance in Japan in the Pokémon Red and Green versions on February 27, 1996. Supposedly, shortly afterwards, there was a peak in the number of deaths of children aged 8-12, which is the target audience of Pokémon games. These deaths were generally suicides by young children, and the suicides were preceeded by headaches, migranes, irritability, and violence. After some investigation, people started claiming that the cause of these deaths was the music found in Lavender Town.

If you want more detailed information about Lavender Town Syndrome, you can Google it and read it from other websites.

http://google.com/search?q=Lavender+Town+Syndrome

The main proposal of those claiming Lavender Town Syndrome is real is that the creators of the Lavender Town music encoded a special sound wave in the track that only undeveloped ears can hear. When young individuals hear this, they would be driven crazy and start doing things they would normally not do. Adults would not be able to hear this special sound wave because they have fully developed ears. Basically, what they are attempting to say is that there were binaural beats encoded into the Lavender Town music and it caused children to act unnaturally.

Going off of just this information, I can disprove that binaural beats, or anything that children can hear that adults cannot, affected the children.

First, the only way something can be heard by children and not heard by adults is if the pitch of the sound is extremely high. On average, those who are 18 years of age or higher cannot hear anything higher-pitched than 17 kilohertz. Thus, if children were to be affected by something that adults cannot hear, it must be something that is greater than about 17 kilohertz.

Next, by definition, binaural beats are two different sound waves, one fed into each ear, that have different wave lengths, causing beating sounds which affect brain waves to stimulate or relax the mind. To have any effect on the brain, the sound waves that create the binaural beats must have a frequency of 1 kilohertz or less. Thus, if the sound waves are greater than 1 kilohertz, they would not have any subliminal effect on the brain.

On a side note, there is no evidence that proves (or even suggests) that you lose your ability to hear low-frequency sounds as you get older. Thus, any low sound has an equal probability of being heard by both adults and children.

Putting this all together, if binaural beats were what was causing children to exhibit violent and/or suicidal behavior, adults would have been affected as well. However, the discoverers of Lavender Town Syndrome explicitly state that individuals with fully developed ears cannot hear what is causing these behaviors. In conclusion, the two proposals ([1] the cause of this behavior can be heard by underdeveloped ears but not by fully developed ears, and [2] the cause of this behavior is binaural beats) are contradictory and inconsistent.

In case that’s not enough to convince you that Lavender Town Syndrome is fake, I found an interesting discrepancy in the evidence the discoverers of Lavender Town Syndrome provide.

Supposedly, on April 12, 1996, an eleven-year-old child named 京极 勝女 (those are Asian characters and might not render properly on all machines or devices) died after showing obstructive sleep apnea (ceasing to breathe while sleeping), severe migranes, otorrhagia (bleeding from the external auditory canal of the ear), and tinnitus (auditory hallucinations). That seems normal until you take a closer look at the name. The first, third, and fourth characters in the name, as expected, are in Japanese because this occured when the game was only available in Japan. However, someone who is Chinese, Japanese, or is familiar with Asian characters will immediately notice that the second character is not like the others. That’s because the second character in the name is in Chinese.

Unless Japanese people started randomly putting Chinese characters in their name for a short period of time (which I’m sure they did not), 京极 勝女 is not a real person, but rather a made-up name by someone who didn’t quite check his/her sources and simply put together some characters to form a name. (For those of you who do not understand the oddity of something like this, think of it this way: if you are American, would you randomly put a Russian character in your name simply because the inhabitants of both the United States of America and Russia are light-skinned and look aesthetically similar?)

If the discoverers of this syndrome are so desperate for people to believe them that they create false evidence like this, then I think we can all rest assured that Lavender Town Syndrome is just a myth and we can continue playing Pokémon without any concerns.