Conversations with an imaginary friend

I’ve read articles for years in various magazines and sites that show EEG readings from studies or patients demonstrating what is going on in someone’s brain under different conditions.  That has always seemed like something that you would only encounter in a research lab or a hospital.  How cool would it be if we could take casual EEG readings of ourselves all the time under different conditions.  Can we tell if meditation is actually doing anything?  How about comparing that with recordings of experienced meditators?  What does your EEG look like when listening to music?  When viewing pictures?  When you are in a happy mood?  How about when you are mad or sad?

Well, in the past ten years, and especially in the past few years, suddenly EEG is available to the casual home user.   What a great tool for biofeedback, personal development and even keeping historical records of your brain activity.

Of course someone who is a serious hobbyist would be willing to pay a thousand or few for a device and there are some very nice machines in that price range but there are also very low cost devices that pretty much anyone can afford as more of a casual toy.

One of the first commercial EEG headbands is the Neurosky Mindwave.  It is roughly $100 and because it is so cheap and has been around quite a while there is a lot of support and software for it.  The limitation of such a cheap device is that it only reads one EEG channel (the left side of your frontal cortex to be precise).  Also, I tried one and it was too small for my head, causing the electrode to not sit flat and make a dent in my forehead.  Seems to fit women or teenagers just fine but not so much for an adult male.  (Though I have seen articles where people have taken apart the headband to make something more comfortable out of the parts.)

Looking at options there are quite a few in the consumer price range  In order of increasing price;  Melon headset, OpenEEG, Muse, Emotiv Insight, OpenBCI, Emotiv Epoc.

Well, I am a Linux enthusiast and don’t have a computer with Windows installed.  Some of the headsets support Android which I can use but I want to really be able to graph, view and save my sessions on my PC.  While the Muse and Emotiv headsets have limited Linux support they don’t really do it well, most of their software is geared towards Windows.  That left me with the OpenEEG and OpenBCI.  They are more primitive in that you have to individually place your electrodes instead of having a nice fancy headset like the others but on the other hand that means I can place electrodes wherever I want to and measure different areas of the brain where the fixed headsets only measure a few specific fixed points.

OpenEEG is a project that lists free circuit diagrams for people to build their own EEG machine.  That is a little beyond me but fortunately there is a company, Olimex, that will ship a pre-assembled and boxed machine for 99 Euros (EEG-SMT).  It is only a two channel EEG but I’ve decided to start with it as the cheaper option.  If I decide in the future I want something fancier and pantsier I will opt for an OpenBCI board (8 channels).  It is possible that if Muse gets official support for Brainbay and OpenVibe software I could really consider getting one of those.  (Emotiv products can work with Brainbay or OpenVibe but you have to pay an extra $200 for the SDK which is required to interface with those applications, which makes them a lot less attractive.)