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Technology helped me through the emotional roller coaster of CES
Humans love to control how they feel. Booze and coffee have been perking us up and lubricating social situations for millennia. Mood-enhancing technology, on the other hand, usually tries to emulate a cup of joe or a glass of wine but without the need for rinsing your liver. I'm generally OK with pumping chemicals into my body, but with a few mood-changing gadgets catching my eye in the run-up to this year's CES, I thought I'd give some a go. The hope was that I could avoid the usual uppers-and-downers routine that a week in Vegas demands.
Melomind's brain-soothing helmet gets redesigned for 2016
Technology can be stressful, and the only way to stop a bad gadget from acting on your brain is with ... a good gadget. That's the idea behind myBrain's Melomind headset, which uses neuro-feedback to try and calm your troubled head. The device clamps onto your skull and uses an EEG to examine how your brain is feeling at any point. Once it has a picture of your stress levels, it pumps specifically soothing audio back into your ears through a pair of headphones.
I electroshocked my brain and I feel great!
For years I've relied on caffeine and cannabis to modulate my moods. It's an effective, albeit slightly illegal, system and not without its side effects. Too much coffee and I become a jittery, hyperactive mess. Too much cannabis and I spend the next few hours taking a weed nap. But that's where the Thync comes in. It's a tiny, head-mounted device that is supposed to discretely modulate your moods by gently zapping your brain with pulses of electricity. But can the power of Tesla really get me out of an emotional funk the way a doppio espresso and some dab rips can?
ICYMI: Amazon's Treasure Truck, mood-altering wearables and more
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Thync's mood-changing wearable arrives for $299
How eager are you to calm down (or psych yourself up) at a moment's notice? If the answer is "enough to buy a fairly expensive gadget," your solution is now within reach. Thync has launched its namesake mood-changing wearable at the hefty price of $299. That's a lot to pay simply to feel different, but the company is betting that its funky, triangular neurosignalling device is just the ticket if you tend to be stressed or lethargic at inopportune moments. Use the phone-controlled device and it should either relax or revitalize you for up to an hour, with "carry-over impacts" lasting for hours longer. The hardware worked well enough in our early hands-on, so it might be worth giving Thync a shot if you're often out-of-sorts -- it may well beat drinking coffee or beer to achieve the same effects.
Thync's mood-changing wearable made me happy and frustrated
It's eight-thirty in the morning. I'm sitting in a hotel suite in Las Vegas. My colleague Dan Cooper is sitting next to me in near silence. Both of us are in the same room, with the same silence, but we're feeling very different things. I have an intense, yet not uncomfortable "tight" sensation on my right temple. Dan is looking very lethargic. I'm riding the ridge between uneasy and buzzing. Two neuroscientists are also in the room. Dan and I are holding phones, with an app. His subdued state, and my alertness aren't a result of too much/too little coffee. We're self-administering these sensations through the app. This is Thync, a wearable device that uses neurosignaling to shift your mood. It's working.
