The future of brainwave-enhanced media

Per­ils and plea­sures of mood-sens­ing tech­nol­o­gy (New Scientist):

“What hap­pens when we link films and music to devices that cap­ture small changes in our emo­tions? …The tech­nol­o­gy to tune your music to your run­ning rate has been around for a while, with devices such as the Nike+, and adap­tive playlis­ters like Songza can select music accord­ing to your mood – even let­ting you give a “thumbs down” to stuff that does­n’t match. There are also head­phones, made by Japan­ese com­pa­ny Neu­rowear, that scan your brain­waves to select the music on your smart­phone that match­es your frame of mind.…But tech­nol­o­gy can go fur­ther than just mon­i­tor­ing and respond­ing to atten­tion lev­els. Biosen­sors such as heart rate mon­i­tors and EEGs to mea­sure brain­waves make it pos­si­ble to use emo­tive media such as film and music to active­ly affect an audi­ence’s emotions…an e‑book project called Neurofiction…has 48 dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive paths, select­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly based on the results of an EEG brain­wave mon­i­tor attached to the com­put­er on which the e‑book is being read.”

Relat­ed articles:

• Mon­i­tor­ing EEG Brain Activ­i­ty to Per­son­al­ize Mem­o­ry Training
• Brain fit­ness meets HRV and EEG bio­met­rics and neuroinformatics
• Mind­ful­ness Med­i­ta­tion can impact Mood and Work­ing Memory