A muse in our heads: Brain waves and direct stimulus

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  Typical EEG

Inspiration

While we were looking at the MLH Hacking Hardware Catalog, we saw a single solitary piece of hardware that was begging to be used. We decided to use the muse headband in order to try and map brain waves, mainly because it sounded really cool, and we wanted to do something that doesn't directly involve coding.

What it does

We exposed a test subject to various forms of visual and physical stimuli in order to determine and make sense of what stimuli triggers what part of the brain, similar to an EEG (Electroencephalography).

How we built it

We took sectioned readings of the frontal lobe (green, responsible for Personality, behavior, emotions, Judgement, and ) and temporal lobe (yellow: Interprets language, words) of the brain, motor strip (white, movement) and parietal lobe (cyan, Understanding language, Sequencing and organization) and determined electrical activity in different regions based on different stimuli.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble having the SDK packages and the software properly function, and that took out quite the chunk of time to figure out. Sadly we're not neuroscientists so we don't know too much about the brain

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to map the brain to a degree that we didn't think we could do in a span of about 7 hours total (we had to leave in the middle of the hackathon), so we're incredibly happy and proud that we managed to read and interpret brain waves with no extravagant medical knowledge!

What we learned

Mapping the brain is by no means an easy thing, and getting the SDK and software to output meaningful results was by no means an easy task. Spikes in certain brain areas mean different things based on the area in question, and we managed to get a rough idea of what the spikes mean.

What's next for A muse in our heads: Brain waves and direct stimulus

we didn't think we would be this successful in our attempts, so if time permits we would like to conduct more tests and have a better idea of what specific actions further stimulate the brain. One idea would be to have a meaningful study session without brain mapping tech on and see what results that would yield.

Built With

• muse-headband
• muse-sdk