The Video Game Helmet That Can Hack Your Brain

Reshil-Marie Torrevillas, a research assistant in Nicole Prause's lab, wears an Emotiv.

For brain scientists Greg Siegle and Nicole Prause, understanding the brain is really tricky, and it's especially tricky when your subjects are in the middle of sexual intercourse.
You can't, for instance, ask them to do their thing inside an fMRI machine, or with a wig of cables attached to their head. “All these brain-measuring systems have significant limitations," says Siegle, a neuroscientist who has spent more than a decade poking at the brain using all sorts of sophisticated psychophysiology and neuroimaging tools. With these, he says, “you can’t move your head very much, it costs a heck of a lot to buy, they take a long time to set up, and I could never really bring them out of the lab."
Siegle isn't ashamed to say that his answer to this particular problem is a faddish-looking toy originally geared toward video gamers. The Emotiv, which is made by an Australian company and comes in $299 and $750 flavors, looks like a cyberpunk skull cap, with 14 electrode arms that branch out from the back of your head to surround your skull. The device is a cheaper, wireless, and more user-friendly version of a standard EEG machine, the kind that scientists use to non-invasively detect the faint electrical signals in your brain, the brainwaves that fluctuate as you think and feel.
When it was released in 2009, the Emotiv promised to turn gamers’ brains into joysticks, and make the act of casting a spell, for instance, a matter of simply thinking of one. A parade of affordable brain-computer interfaces (BCI) made by companies like NeuroSky and NeuroVigil have shipped in the Emotiv's wake; a giant market, however, has not. When they're working properly (they can be imprecise and sometimes annoyingly non-responsive), they do something that can border on magic; years after the technology hit the market, tech blogs still ooh and ahh over them. But the idea of mind-controlling your video game has mostly remained in the realm of sci-fi gimmick.
But the nerdy-looking toy's cult following has loftier goals. Engineers, hackers, scientists and artists have been mining the Emotiv's brain data, parsing waves and bringing them places far outside the walls of a video game. "The data’s very clean," is Siegle's sober assessment of his toy headband. "We've been very impressed with it and we’ve incorporated it into some of our major research protocols."