It felt a little strange the first time I put it on. The battery pack on the headset was light as the single AAA inside, but its square weight ove my ear wasn’t, like, uncomfortable? Just maybe unnatural. Once I got the Neurosky Mindwave Mobile set up, though—and started controlling my computer with my brain—it was sort of very awesome. Actually kind of totally awesome.

The Mindwave Mobile is the first Brain Computer Interface (BCI) controller to work on Android and iOS as well as Mac and PC. Unlike the company’s previous first: The First Affordable BCI Headset, the $99 Mindwave, the Mobile version uses Bluetooth to wirelessly communicate with your computer. The active tech about it is a dry sensor that reads changes in the brain’s electrical activity like what’s up with Electroencephalograms (EEG). Traditional EEGs would need an electrically conducive goop smear where sensor meets scalp. Which, obviously, what a pain, right?

Right. Okay, so it’s easy—enough—to use. Even though sometimes it would slip on my head and whatever I’d been doing would be suddenly not done. And what was I doing, you ask? Well there’re a few games bundled up with the unit. A title called Zombie Pop was surprisingly fun. Basically one of those carnival games where you shoot water in a clown’s mouth till a balloon pops. Except you inexplicably work in some sort of Zombie factory, and they’re coming down a conveyor line, and instead of water you have to focus your brain might towards inflating their ugly green heads. When they get big enough you blink and a needles swings down and pops their heads like…like…like flesh balloons at a Zombie Carnival, I suppose.

No. It wouldn’t be fun save for the fact that—yes—the controls are your damn brain! WTF? The Mindwave Mobile reads two mental states, attentive or meditative, and eye blinks. So. If you can imagine if early Nintendo had first released a console whose controller was a d-pad with only two directions and then a single button, and you’re a game developer and they ask you to make a game and you’re, all, “Well, sure, man. I can make that game, but have y’all consid—” But they say just do it, and so you do, then now you understand the limitations of the games available for the Mindwave. Though it does sort of surprise me that no Pong clone is available yet. Since that’s probably exactly what our hypothetical game designer would have come out with.

Maybe the issue there is that switching your mental state isn’t so easy as thumbing a joystick. See, for me it was super easy to hit the ‘meditative’ state where you’re not quite focused on any one thing (this will come as no surprise to my teachers in elementary school), but, for my roommate who helped me test the headset, he could snap into ‘attentive’ no problem. The brief tutorial advised me to try thinking of song lyrics in my head so that I’d be focused on something. This works. But, of course, when one is thinking of lyrics one is not thinking about playing a game.

Even this petty hardship though has some benefit—and until some more engaging titles are dropped this might be the best justification for paying $130 for the Mindwave Mobile—because, when you actively switch your focus on and off with this sort of direct feedback over and over, it becomes easier to do each time. It really does. After a few sessions of Zombie Pop I no longer had to invoke Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now—the only song I could conjure at the time—and really started laying waste to some zombie domes, as though some stunted mental mage, with my brain forces alone.

Some developers have tried to exploit this direct feedback with educational apps—like Imagercize ($6), Math Trainer ($0), and Focus Pocus($149?!)—designed to help students understand what it feels like to be in their best mental state. The potential for this is great. Like, drop the Ritalin, kids. Learn to tighten your thinking caps instead.

If I were the future billionaire who figured out how to market BCI headsets like the Mindwave Mobile my calendar would be all power brunches with SAT prep centers. That’s what’s up.

Granted, it would have been ha-ha funny if Cruise had been just sitting there all squinty while images moved across the screen seemingly at random. But this is real stuff. Check out the NeuroSky Mindwave headset. You put it on your head and do things on computers—in fact—while preserving every last precious calorie.

NeuroSky started supplying their BCI technology to partner companies who used it in products like the Mindflex (Mattel), a table top game in which the player moves a levitating ball through a series of hoops and chutes using concentration to control the ball’s altitude. Square Enix, creators of the Final Fantasy video game series, teamed up with NeuroSky to release a zombie thriller, Judecca, that uses the same tech to supplement the console controller. Players must concentrate in order for the zombies to become visible to the character in-game. Likely the prize for most ‘oh-yeah-duh’ NeuroSky mashup was Uncle Milton’s Star Wars Force Trainer which lets nerds of all shapes and sizes harness the mystical powers of the Jedi, slash, a floating ball in a tube. Sarcastic trivialization aside, this technology is, again, letting humans move objects in space with their brains.

The #AwesomeScience behind this is based on Electroencephalography(EEG), a super long and obtuse word for looking at brain…with electronics. More exactly, EEG devices read the electrical fluctuations put off by your functioning brain using sensors gooed onto your skull cover with conductive gel. Except the Mindwave doesn’t need goo, so the perm stays. Also it only costs, like, $99 bucks; unlike institutional EEG rigs which price in the many $1000’s through $infinity range. Of course the headset is a pared down version so it doesn’t pick up as much info as its older siblings, but, whatever, it’s not like I’m trying to look at a bunch of blinky bleep-bloop data readouts of shit my brain’s doing. I just want to use a computer via my mind! Seriously.

So the Mindwave picks up three different brain data sorts: you’ve got your basic attentive vs meditative states. These are going to be the most common inputs in the current applications because of how easy they are for developers to utilize. The headset measures these two states—which are not mutually exclusive—and reports a value in a 0-100 scale so that programmers can set target values wherever they’d like. Going deeper, there are more sciencey recordings like wacky frequencies of neural oscillations. You know, the Alpha, Beta, Theta, Delta Gamma stuff hippies are always citing in stoned conversations about lucid dreaming, but with more clout because this is real science.

For those of us who are just putting the thing on our heads this all means that it can tell if you’re relaxed or intently focused and when you blink or smile. It’s like right vs left-clicking on a mouse. The computer is programmed to interpret these states differently, same deal.

Now, obviously, a device that allows you to control things with your brain is a potentially lucrative product. It’s no surprise that NeuroSky has been able to raise millions over the past six years towards getting this stuff on the shelves. That more people don’t own one already is likely due to something called (by me, right now) the Dreamcast Syndrome. Otherwise known as going to market with too few titles. Current offerings range from utilities that allow users to monitor their attention levels in the hope of finding their ideal brainstates (potentially useful to athletes, meditators, and folks diagnosed with ADHD, et al.), to games which translate a user’s attention levels into digital signal inputs in a simple range of in-game controls. Totally cool since you’re using your brain, but as an entertainment device it’s not quite off the bench. With cutting-edge games like Call of Duty and Skyrim out there, it’s going to be tough drawing in consumers—even for the chance to use a spectacularly novel device like the Mindwave.

But! Tansy Brook, Head of Communications over at NeuroSky, assures me that the next few months will be pretty exciting. Plans for a mobile headset to work with Android and iOS (current headsets are for PC and Mac only), as well as new apps for both versions.
Here’s the real deal, if I may:

Yes, the tech is young. It’s no Kinect here, sure. But this field should be a developer’s playground right now. It’s out there, Open Source. The hardware is inexpensive. Fair, the market wont reward you for pooping out just any old buggy $.99’er like on other platforms, but if somebody could kickstart (hint hint) this thing with a super awesome app? Man. They will make some serious cash. Not to mention earning the right to call yourselves “the dudes who made using-your-brain-to-do-shit-on-computers really popular.” Talk about a pick up line. Get on it.

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