The Neurosity Crown is a portable and wearable EEG device that senses your brainwaves.
What if the only thing that stands between you and a highly productive state of flow is a “personal brain computer” that rests on your skull, senses your brainwaves, and places music that helps you focus?
$900 might be cheap, if it works.
But you might also get hat hair for life.
Today Neurosity released Crown, a 9-ounce portable and wearable EEG device that senses your brainwaves and, apparently, knows when you’re productive as well as when you’re distracted. Onboard AI learns what gets and keeps you focused, and plays just the right music from Spotify to get you back in the zone.
“With Crown, Neurosity has invented a whole new category of wearable EEG focus device that lets you take control of your focus no matter where you go,” Alex Castillo, co-founder at Neurosity, said in a statement. “With Crown, users will understand how to shift into focus and stay there.”
All without drugs or habits of mental discipline, I guess.
Neurosity has offered brain-sensing productivity tools since 2019. Current models, like the Notion 2, are aimed at computer programmers. They’ll mute electronic notifications when you’re in a state of flow, helping maintain peak brain performance, and give you report cards on how focused you’ve been over the day. The promise is deeper concentration, greater productivity, and “more magical moments.”
Plus, of course, a killer excuse for why you didn’t answer your boss’s frantic Slack messages.
The Neurosity Crown, an personal wearable EEG device.
Crown is the next generation model, which Neurosity says is smaller, more comfortable, and has the best signal to noise ratio when understanding your brainwaves of any consumer EEG device.
“The Crown’s computing module is as powerful as a Macbook Air,” Neurosity says, not specifying whether that’s an Intel or M1 model. “With a quad-core 1.8Gz CPU, the Crown is able to get thousands of data points from the brain every second without losing data in transmission. The new sensor configuration includes access to the visual cortex completing coverage to all four lobes of the brain.”
One bonus: this wearable EEG sensor is secure, encrypting your brain activity.
(Suck on that, Facebook. No ad-targeting data for you.)
“Traditional brain-computer interfaces openly broadcast the brain activity to any device without authenticating or authorizing the user,” says AJ Keller, Neurosity CEO. “We thought of a better way, and created the Neurosity Chipset to offer users the privacy they deserve.”
The Crown hardware comes with a software platform with an API. Other companies, like Drowzee, are plugging into the device and working to treat insomnia with what it can tell them. They are currently undergoing clinical trials, Neurosity says.
The real question for people who would potentially wear it during the work day for additional focus and productivity: how badly do you need help? Wearing a brain-sensing device is not a small step, after all, and for some, might be uncomfortable. Not to mention the fact that it might mess up your hair. (I don’t have a problem with that, of course, but others might.) It’s also sure to raise questions — and eyebrows — in social settings.
One good thing:
Thanks to Covid-19 quarantines, you’ll only look like an escapee from a Star Trek convention in the comfort of your home office, and won’t have to explain the Crown to your smirking coworkers.
The company says the device is available for pre-order today and will be shipping in May for $899.
