Don’t we all wish to look into someone else’s mind every once in a while? With the evolving technique called EEG, electroencephalography, we can measure brain activity and ultimately even read the brain. The newest inventions are becoming more and more portable, ready to be implemented into our everyday life.


EEG works as follows: when your brain is active, little electrical pulses are exchanged between brain neurons. The EEG sensors recognizes those electrical exchanges; the more active your brain is, the more signals it sends out. The collected data are gathered in a map of your brain, that allows to see which fields are active. We already know this technique from fMRI scans, which are working more precise then EEG, though the scanners are bigger and the procedure take long time. Compared to fMRI, EEG is more exploitable in ordinary life, gathering realtime data and allowing the user to move around.


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Therefore, many researches are done to develop EEG headwear, like in-ear EEG, brain hacking devices hat fit inside the ear. Also the entertainment industry is impatiently waiting to create brain driven games, no controller needed, thinking about jumping will make your character jump. Another moment when your brain is active and your body rests is when you are asleep. Dreem is a headband that tracks your sleeping behavior by checking your brain activity. It sends out sounds to deepen your sleep. And while we are waiting for the self driving car, there is already a brain driven car, ideal for disabled people.


These are just some of the benefits of using neuroscience in our future daily life. The biggest negative aspect is our privacy. Just like the personal data collected by our digital devices, EEG collects even more private information - your thoughts. When the inside of your head becomes a place where privacy is at stake, many ethic questions raise. For now EEG is still a very unprecise tool to measure brain acitivity, not knowing the exact content of your thoughts. But we can start think about the moment in which we will be able to exchange ‘.thought’ files with friends.


Source: Futurism. Image: FocusBand

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