Citizen Science and the study of the mind is empowered by EEG. How will it change the trajectory of Neuroscience?
I used to have a “Jedi Force Trainer,” consisting of a headband that supposedly detects brainwaves and a contraption with a fan in the base that “levitates” a plastic ball if you concentrate in the right way. I bought it in a thrift store for $5. You can still get them on Amazon. All my life, I’ve played with science at home. As a child, I had a telescope, microscope, circuit board, and chemistry set before my family bought our first PC. Discovery is fun; we are curious creatures and many of us retain that trait as adults, whether we work in a lab or not.
It was about fifteen years ago, as a graduate student in cognitive linguistics, that I became interested in doing amateur neuroscience. I was fascinated by the work of Michael Persinger, a Canadian neuroscientist who did seminal work in trans-cranial electromagnetic stimulation; one of his disciples marketed a home version of his rig and software for $60, allowing you to go exploring the mind-spaces of electromagnetically altered consciousness on your own. It worked, inducing some mildly altered states that supported Persinger’s ideas about brain-structure and states of consciousness. It also caused a vicious delayed “snap-back” effect once – something like a withdrawal fit. That was the last time I ever used it.
The electric brain and EEG have always fascinated the public and neuroscience has progressed swiftly in recent years, at the same time that both mental health and mental self-development have become among the most popular topics of public discussion. As the most accessible and engineerable tool for looking into the active brain, EEG has gained numerous once unexpected uses. Some are using EEG as a brain-machine interface for remote machine control, and to control prosthetics limbs. EEG based neuro-feedback set-ups have been used in public schools to help kids with ADHD. Cheap commercial headband-type neuro-feedback sets are popping up with increasing frequency, offering optimization of attention and focus for the performance driven population or peace of mind to the stressed out and over-stimulated. These devices may or may not provide what users think they will, but putting aside snake-oil, medical professionals, the military, video-game manufacturers, and artists are all getting turned on to the potentials of EEG (pun unintended).
Until a few years ago, EEG sets were too expensive and difficult for any but an institutional setting. Now, hardware and software developments have made it cheaper, easier, and more informative (read Taking Neurotechnologies out of the Lab). I’ve seen two institutions I worked at acquire their first EEG system during the past decade—in both cases, under the supervision of researchers outside the psychology department. Linguists, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists are also using EEG.
Meanwhile, Emotiv and open-source projects, such as Open BCI (brain-computer interface) are selling EEG / EKG devices and software suites capable of providing research-grade data for a few hundred dollars. Their community of researchers, amateur and professional, are engaged in diverse projects, such as mind-control of cars to neuro-feedback for substance abuse. One independent researcher is recreating the famous experiments by Benjamin Libet that tried to show illusory nature of free-will using EEG readings of the “readiness potential.” There is an explosion in public and commercial interest in the brain right now that is only going to grow and diversify over the next decades.
These projects may seem distant from the interests and methods of establishment neuroscience, but they’re far from irrelevant. We should hope that professional psychology and neuroscience will not fall out-of-the-loop as researchers and engineers from all backgrounds take off after the holy grail of understanding the human mind and its interaction with the world – natural and machine. One would hope that they could come together in integrated efforts on common platforms. After all, the quest to understand the nature of humanity and one’s own mind belongs to everyone.