From neurofeedback and brain training to video games, apps that make use of your brain waves are growing in numbers and possibilities.
It’s December 2014 and I’m sitting on a pool chair behind a retreat center in Thailand surrounded by a Chinese meditation master, a British physician, an architect / supermodel, and a former Sysco executive who now runs a yoga studio in Chiang Mai. It’s my turn to don the brainwave-detecting or EEG headset (read this to learn about EEG headsets) and stare at the radiant color-changing sphere on the table. Red means my mind is busy, green relaxed and focused, and purple, deep in meditation. It seems to respond meaningfully . . . off-and-on . . . maybe. Effort does tend to produce red. Silencing my thoughts, green. And if I do something with my mind that I can’t quite pin down, I may get into the purple for a second at a time.
I was working in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design, where I was surprised to learn that there’s a new global sub-culture of people passionate about mind / brain sciences and intent on bringing those applications, profitably, to the public. It’s a rapidly booming fringe field on this side of the pond that you can tap fully into without going to Hong Kong, or even leaving home.
From Neurofeedback to video games
Neurofeedback to train attention and relaxation became the first consumer EEG application in the 1970s, when the then long-known correlation between alpha-rhythms (8-12 Hz) and relaxed awareness first caught the attention of hippies, futurists, and therapists. Interest waned for several decades, perhaps because the equipment wasn’t consumer friendly. That’s now changed, big time. Although still dominated by neurofeedback, applications have diversified, with brain-training games, brain-mapping, brain-wave visualizations (both frivolous and research-able), mind-machine control, and more.
In Neurosky’s many video-games, you can modulate your brain-waves to maneuver frogs, heroes, or winged brains through obstacle courses, hunt, play sports, adventure, or card-games.The adventures of Neuroboy (left image) lets you figure out how to push, pull, lift, or burn objects using your brain waves. Non-game neurofeedback apps have you nurture visualizations of swimming dolphins, growing trees, mandalas, or outer-spacey nebula-like clouds of glowing concentric circles. For the most part, these applications are fun ways to make use of your brain signal.
It’s also easy to be cynical about neurofeedback apps capitalizing on new-age spirituality; one of Neurosky’s apps is named after an ancient Norse rune, Dagaz. But, that doesn’t mean neurofeedback is not valuable. Although recent meta-studies are cautiously negative, therapists tend to attest great benefits from professionally guided neurofeedback regimens. They’ve been used for years in some high schools to help children with ADHD.
Brian visualization and training
For brain-trainers with more subtle goals, there are brain-wave mixing boards, such as the free BioZen or the Brainwave Visualizer (like the one shown in the image above), with which you can play around with training your brain to produce a particular balance of frequencies and other biomarkers (such as pulse and galvanic skin response). Emotiv distinguishes itself with brain-mapping in eye-catching 3D, and generally more professional-looking visualizations (no dolphins). In fact, Emotiv sells a Unity 3D wrapper for its “EmoEngine” API.
The Neurosky app archive contains 100s of creative neurofeedback games, trainers, and visualizations, most of them cheap or free. Emotiv also has apps for these purposes — not as diverse, or as cheap, but that’s not to criticize Emotiv; many apps in Neurosky’s archive, often written by third parties, advertise claims like enlightenment, trauma-therapy, self-esteem, and better digestion. Emotiv seems more selective with its app store, apparently marketing more to researchers than self-improvers.
More unusual apps
If you sift carefully through the app archives, you’ll find some unusual and intriguing applications: you can mind-control a drone (Emotiv’s MindDrone) and even race them against others or get your smartphone to play a song when you enter REM sleep to “wake” you into a lucid dream (Neurosky’s Lucid Scribe). The somewhat pricey Mind Workstation is a robust brain-wave entrainment studio – but you should know, there’s freeware for that.
Which leads us to the growing BCI movement, led largely by open-source hackers, which is producing notable innovations such as ABI BCI’s software for neural network BCI development. One of Neurosky’s third-party apps, Mindwriter, claims to use brain-wave “patterns,” classified by a neural network, to type with your mind!
Consumer EEG apps are developing quickly, taking advantage of technologies such as Bluetooth and Arduino, such as for music.
Build your own apps
Both Neurosky and Emotiv offer packages of serious research tools and APIs with SDKs for both Android and iOS. With free APIs, open-source research suites, and extensive cross-platform capabilities, what you can do might be limited mainly by your own knowledge and imagination – and the inherent limitations of EEG, whatever those may be; new EEG analytics are pushing that envelope.
Whether you’re into human optimization, self-healing, drone-buzzing your neighbors, neuroscientific research or building your own apps, it’s worth checking out the possibilities.
Apart from the game experience the basis remains EEG. The quality of the obtained signal is essential. It makes an app a BCI or not. Can you comment on the quality of the sort of device you describe, like Neurosky and Emotiv?
Hi Rien, you can read more about Emotiv in our post here Is the Emotiv signal good enough for research. We will post about NeuroSky in upcoming weeks.