Brain-reading company Neurable is working with HyperX on new products aimed at using neuroscience to improve your gaming performance. The idea is to have gaming headsets with built-in EEG sensors that read your brainwaves as you play, and use the data to not only help you boost your accuracy and reaction times, but also avoid tilting and performance crashes.
TechRadar has experience with Neurable's tech: we tested the Master & Dynamic MW75 headphones, which use the same kind of technology to help you monitor your focus levels and your risk of burnout at work.
Dr. Alcaide is a neuroscientist, inventor, and the CEO and Cofounder of Neurable. As a researcher at the University of Michigan Direct Brain Interface Laboratory, he has worked extensively to develop brain-computer interface technology for people with amputations, severe cerebral palsy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Previously, he was the CEO of Pharo LLC, where he managed numerous high-impact health projects, such as rehabilitation technology for stroke patients.
I was able to test the technology using a prototype developed with HyperX, but that's still far from the final gaming headset they have planned – for a start, it didn't have a mic boom. It was also pretty heavy, and I'm sure they'll work on a lighter one for long-term gaming sessions.
But the main thing is that the tech worked, and is instantly really interesting.
What's the big idea?
It's not news that your mental state can really affect your performance – whether that's gaming, work, or sports. But what's interesting about Neurable's tech is that if you try to do something about it, like meditating, you're not just guessing whether it's making a difference or not – the improvement is measurable.
"Especially in games like StarCraft or in shooting games like Counter-Strike, one of the biggest issues that exists is that you normally have to choose between reaction time or accuracy, right? You can move quickly, but it may mean that your shots are landing worse. And the same thing happens with RTSes – your APM can be very high, but the quality of your APM can, can drop dramatically. And so this is the first time where you can handle one of the biggest issues that gamers have, which is getting yourself mentally primed for the activity," explains Alcaide.
So the first part of what Neurable is offering is a 'Prime' programming, which is designed to get you in the zone. At the moment, it takes the form of a cloud of dots, like a nebula spinning in space. If you increase your level of focus, the cloud of dots compresses, reducing the space between them until they become just one central dot, and then shrink to nothing.
"The thing is that your brain is highly plastic, which means it's able to adapt very rapidly," says Alcaide. "As you start to focus and clear your mind, these dots get smaller and smaller, and then if you start to mind wander and drift and think about, you know, other things that are happening, it'll start to get bigger. And so the core goal here is to make it get smaller and smaller and smaller until essentially this turns into a dot and disappears and you're ready, through this simple form of biofeedback."
"But the most key part is it has to be tied directly to the user state, you can't just make the dot get smaller. It has to really be training the brain, biofeedbacking the brain in order to get to this state, and then it moves the user to a different mental performance level than where they were when they started."
"If something just happened to you, you know, you heard bad news, your cognitive load shoots up like crazy. It's so hard to focus and get back into that zone. And so essentially what the system does is it helps in train your brain so that it reduces your cognitive load while increasing your focus, so that you can essentially get into that locked-in state and reach your real potential more consistently," says Alcaide.
"And what we've seen is decreases in reaction time, increases in target hits – usually you have to pick one of the two, but we're seeing both go up as they're doing these sessions."
Neurable's stats claim that pro-level eSports players improved target-aiming accuracy by about 3% by using the 'Priming' process, while the average improvement across all players is around 1.5%. The improvement in reaction time is around 40 milliseconds on average, which I found especially interesting – that's a few frames.
Naturally, I went through the Prime process myself. First, I went through a target-shooting practice session on Aimlabs without any preparation and scored around 34,000.
Next, I went through the Prime exercise. Neurable's Dr Alicia Howell-Munson, a Research Scientist and lead on the gaming-focused technology, gave me some tips for entering a focus state when looking at the cloud of dots, such as focusing on a particular dot's movement as it spins.
I found that was a useful start, because they're not easy to follow as they all cross each other – but I can imagine that some people might actually find it better to look 'past' the cloud and focus by allowing the moving pattern to overwhelm their vision.
I found that as the cloud of dots shrank, I started to see patterns and structure in the dots that I hadn't interpreted before, and so I started focusing on those instead – not intentionally, just naturally. Already, it felt like I was finding a flow state.
After around 45 seconds, I'd shrunk the dots and was ready to do. The Neurable team told me that it often takes anywhere from two minutes to four minutes, and that a shorter time suggested I was already in a fairly focused mental state – perhaps not a surprise since I'd already done the target practice once.
I also did the Prime exercise a second time at the end of my demo session so we could get photos, and that not only took longer, but I actually regressed, with the cloud becoming larger again, when the camera entered my eyeline, so you can see the instant effect that distractions have.
After Priming, I retook the same Aimlabs test and scored around 37,000. My reaction time decreased by a very small amount (only around 5ms), but my accuracy jumped over 2%. Just from less than a minute of biofeedback meditation, of a kind.
What's going on?
"Essentially, we're tracking two key metrics," explains Alcaide. "One is cognitive load. So how much of their brain is currently at capacity, right? And then the second one is their focus, or how well you can maintain attention on a particular task."
"Now, they seem kind of similar, but they're very different. You can have a high focus and have a low cognitive load, which is the ultimate way of playing."
"We did some work actually with the Singapore Air Force, where we saw that expert pilots were the ones who had really high focus, they were able to maintain their attention, but it required a very low amount of mental cognitive load. Which means that when something happened, they had a lot of capacity still left in their brain to be able to react and to make adjustments, and to be able to think quickly.
"But if your brain is filled with a whole bunch of thoughts, not only is it hard for you to focus, but then adding more things to your brain while you're focusing creates overflow, which increases errors, essentially per minute in the case of these of these pilots, and also reduces your reaction time."
To measure these elements, Neurable uses an EEG to measure alpha, beta, and theta brain waves. "Beta and theta are usually tied to how fast your brain is processing. We use those through our proprietary pipeline that that boosts the signal to noise [ratio], which is what our company does. We use AI to boost the signal brain data, so that it comes at a level similar to a high-end brain-computer interface."
Alcaide is referring to the need for an elaborate helmet and even conductive gel to get good EEG readings in many cases, but Neurable is able to get accurate enough readings with just the pads of a pair of headphones (or using earbuds and even glasses, they told me).
The data the headset is reading isn't just useful for the Prime process, though. It can potentially be useful for eSports training purposes, and Neurable also showed me a concept of your brain's focus and capacity readings being visible during a Twitch stream, much like how some streamers show their heart rate today.
One of the simplest uses of this ongoing data reading could be to help you improve the quality of your practice.
"[The software] tells you to take a break when you're cognitively tired, not when you're physically tired. Your brain has no pain receptors, so when you feel physically tired, that's when you normally take a break. But if you take a break when your brain is tired, you can actually boost your productivity for one to three hours per day," says Alcaide.
"So just imagine something like that: you're playing, it tells you to go take a 10 minute walk. And now you're getting effectively one to three more hours of practice per day. And that's good practice, not crap practice, right?
"Or prevention of tilt, like there's just so many things that we haven't even tapped into yet."
There's a lot of potential in using the data the headset can connect to, so you can link your brain data to replays of your performance and see whether something changed before you made mistakes or what state you were in during your best period.
In a practice tool like Aimlabs, each score could have brain data connected, so you can look for patterns.
And game developers could even use your brain data to create emergent events – scaring you at the right moment, for example.
I asked whether any additional factors could improve the data's accuracy in the future. Alcaide notes that most other biometric data that can be tracked is actually also reflected in the brain, so Neurable's tech gets most of what it can use anyway.
However, there's one element he calls out as an area to add to the system: "Eye tracking is way faster than brain data, so we could probably use eye tracking to identify what [someone] focusing on, and then the brain can give us an accurate reading of how attention they paid. You know, were they just looking there or were they actually processing the information?"
Alcaide also notes that the tech could be used for better team play, not just individual play: "We're really just scratching the surface of like what's possible, right? Teamwork I think is going to be one of the biggest areas in eSports that we're going to start to see for this technology.
"There's been a lot of incredible research done, with something called 'team synchrony'. So, for example, you can put an EEG system like the ones that I have right now, and then you can see whether the team's brain waves are synced or unsynced, and what they found is that teams that display more synchrony across their brain waves usually perform better, especially at tasks where they're collaborating, they're working together to solve a problem."
Performance enhancement
I asked whether Neurable is worried about its tools being banned from competition if they're really effective, and they noted that they already have a pro poker player who uses their tech to focus their mind.
"There are multiple techniques that gamers use to clear their minds already. This is just a way where it removes the skill level required to be able to get into that type of mental training. It makes it easier. It's like, instead of telling somebody 'hey, just get it out of your head', you're teaching them how to meditate." says Alcaide.
"It's just giving a little bit of a of a opportunity for people to to get in the zone, before they go into things, and actually I was just earlier today talking with an NBA player that wants to use it for the same sort of thing. It's like listening to music before you go play, right? So I don't think that's, that's necessarily something that we're concerned about."
When will you be able to try this out yourself? Both the software and hardware are still under development, but the aim is to have something available in around a year – it's not impossible you'll see a product in 2026, but CES 2027 is maybe more likely.
I only had a brief demo, but I found the Prime process immediately impactful – I think I'd active want to go through the process before firing up a game, no because I'm desperate for the few points of extra accuracy, but because the process of clearing your mind – and knowing you've truly taken steps in clearing it, because you're not just following an animation, the animation is responding to your success – felt really beneficial in of itself.
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