Currently, there is no excuse for using the tired phrase “put on your thinking cap,” but the Halo headband is trying to change that. The small device sits on your skull and zaps your brain with electricity to increase your focus, which probably comes in handy when you’re trying not to think about the headband you’re wearing zapping your brain.
The Halo is in development by the team at Halo Neuroscience, and I don’t know if it’s the video game-sounding name or the shocking people’s brains for science, but I feel like they’re about a portal gun and evil robot away from their own enrichment center. Either way, they’ve secured funding from big time tech investor Marc Andreessen to the tune of $1.5 million, so you might actually get to try the Halo for yourself one day.
Despite how it sounds, they’re confident that the Halo, which is based on years of research and other product approvals, is perfectly safe. You don’t even need any activation indexes or sacred icons to use it! The first prototypes were actually built with off-the-shelf parts from Radioshack and standard batteries.
And, like all mad scientists, they tested the original devices on themselves. Halo co-founder Amol Sarva recounted an incident where an early model accidentally sent a pulse directly into his optic nerve to The Verge:
I turned it on and there was this bright flash and then I was basically blind. Luckily it cleared up after a few minutes. We’re much better informed now about which parts of the brain we need to stimulate.
So, yeah. Totally safe and everything. No worries.
They’re expected to begin clinical trials with the device this summer. Although, once they get it working well enough, they should be able to iron out the bugs pretty quickly, right? I mean, if it works and everything, it’d be pretty embarrassing if it didn’t even make them smart enough to build a safer one.
(via The Verge, image via Back to the Future)
- Somehow, the electric thinking cap sounds safer than the flying drone dentist
- Even improved cognition won’t help you mitigate lag in real life
- Maybe this will help boys finally get better grades than girls, because they sure don’t now
