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elfsFor my birthday, I bought myself a new laptop and a couple of fun peripherals. The peripherals were mostly to round out and survive the coming wireless future, when there are no more USB connectors on our devices and everything has to talk over Bluetooth. One of the toys I bought myself was a Muse brainwave-sensing headband.
I have no idea if this thing is even vaguely legit. I've seen quite a few articles about how the sensors are legit, if inaccurate, and they only show a mash-up of a variety of electrical signals whizzing past at any given moment, but it's hard to know.
In any event, there are a few things I've noticed. The first is that the left temporal lobe sensor is always the hardest to calibrate. That's hardly surprising since my left temporal lobe is where the ADHD "storm" is happening; on the sorts of scans that track glucose consumption, that corner of my brain is constantly lit up like Iron Maiden night at the laser lightshow.
Since I have ADHD I take Dextrostat, which is basically a medical amphetamine. Omaha likes it when I take my meds because she says I'm calmer and easier to track when I'm on it— which is actually a better sign that it's really ADHD than any other test, since people without ADHD get jittery and easily distractable when on Dex.
So I tried an experiment. I tried using the Muse with, and without, the Dex. The Muse claims to track "calmness," the time when your brain wave levels are low and relatively harmonious. They rate your brain as "active," "neutral," or "calm," and give you a score: the number of seconds you spend "neutral" plus 3⨯ seconds spend "calm." While not on Dex, in a ten minute session I scored 385 points and wasn't "calm" enough to get a bonus; while on Dex, I scored 935 points and 5 times was "calm" for long enough to get a bonus.
That's just a pair of data points and therefore totally anecdotal. (The plural of anecdote, by the way, is data.) But it was fun, and kinda a neat way to play with the toy.
I have no idea if this thing is even vaguely legit. I've seen quite a few articles about how the sensors are legit, if inaccurate, and they only show a mash-up of a variety of electrical signals whizzing past at any given moment, but it's hard to know.
In any event, there are a few things I've noticed. The first is that the left temporal lobe sensor is always the hardest to calibrate. That's hardly surprising since my left temporal lobe is where the ADHD "storm" is happening; on the sorts of scans that track glucose consumption, that corner of my brain is constantly lit up like Iron Maiden night at the laser lightshow.
Since I have ADHD I take Dextrostat, which is basically a medical amphetamine. Omaha likes it when I take my meds because she says I'm calmer and easier to track when I'm on it— which is actually a better sign that it's really ADHD than any other test, since people without ADHD get jittery and easily distractable when on Dex.
So I tried an experiment. I tried using the Muse with, and without, the Dex. The Muse claims to track "calmness," the time when your brain wave levels are low and relatively harmonious. They rate your brain as "active," "neutral," or "calm," and give you a score: the number of seconds you spend "neutral" plus 3⨯ seconds spend "calm." While not on Dex, in a ten minute session I scored 385 points and wasn't "calm" enough to get a bonus; while on Dex, I scored 935 points and 5 times was "calm" for long enough to get a bonus.
That's just a pair of data points and therefore totally anecdotal. (The plural of anecdote, by the way, is data.) But it was fun, and kinda a neat way to play with the toy.
