Author: Al Williams / Source: Hackaday
Can you electronically enhance your brain? I’m not talking about surgically turning into a Borg. But are there electronic methods that can improve various functions of your brain? Fans of brainwave entrainment say yes.
There was an old recruiting ad for electrical engineers that started with the headline: The best electronic brains are still human.
While it is true that even a toddler can do things our best computers struggle with, it is easy to feel a little inadequate compared to some of our modern electronic brains. Then again, your brain is an electronic device of sorts. While we don’t understand everything about how it works, there are definitely electric signals going between neurons. And where there are electric signals there are ways to measure them.The tool for measuring electric signals in the brain is an EEG (electroencephalograph). While you can’t use an EEG to read your mind, exactly, it can tell you some pretty interesting information, such as when you are relaxed or concentrating. At its most basic we’ve seen toys and simple hobby projects that purport to be “mind controlled” but only at an incredibly rudimentary level.
Brainwave entrainment is a hypothesis that sending low frequency waves to your brain can give your mind a nudge and sync up brain activity with the equipment measuring it. The ability to synchronize with the brain could yield much better measurements for a meaningful interface between modern electronics and electric storm of thought happening in your head.
Keeping the Measurement on the Outside
When Hans Berger took the first human EEG in 1924, he built on 50 years of research about electrical brain activity in monkeys, dogs, and rabbits. It was known that placing electrodes directly on an animal’s brain produced signals that changed if, for example, you changed the light level in the room. Of course, you couldn’t pop the top on a human subject and wedge electrodes in their brain, so Berger had to be more subtle.
An EEG has several frequency bands where your brain produces repeating waves. The alpha band (8-15 Hz) occurs when relaxing or with eyes closed, for example. beta waves (16-31 Hz) occur when you are focused, alert, or anxious. You can find a nice table of the waves and what they seem to indicate on Wikipedia.
Here’s where things get tricky. If your brain produces, say, alpha waves when you are relaxed, can you impose alpha waves on your brain to make you relax? That idea is known as brainwave entrainment.
Entrainment is known to happen in regular systems. Christiaan Huygens reported in 1665 that several pendulum clocks in close proximity eventually synchronized. This is due to energy from each clock affecting the other clocks. When out of phase, the effect is negative. When in phase, the effect is positive, so over time, the pendulums are all in phase — you can see this effect (exacerbated by using a moving platform) in the video below.
The idea is that if…
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