Would You Like to Throw Trucks with Your Mind?
You’d have had a chance at the Game Developers Conference in March, in a new video game that reads brain waves that indicate levels of calm and focus. Players must maximize both states of mind by concentrating on a single thought, which then allows them to pick up and hurl objects at opponents.
It’s an ultra-violent meditative competitive game. Block out distractions and relax, pink and blue bars on the screen begin to spike. A swirling beam of light shoots from the avatar’s hand toward a rock in the middle of the screen that wiggles, rises and then goes flying toward an opponent, narrowly missing.
The development of “Throw Trucks” is on a frontier where brain science and video game developers have just begun to cross paths. The emerging field has been dubbed “neurogaming.”
The neuroscience industry is hoping that such games could be a catalyst that turns brain-wave-reading gadgets into mainstream consumer products.
Developer Lat Ware got the idea growing up with ADD in Chapel Hill, N.C. Drugs like Ritalin that would help him focus, but leave him foggy and sap his creativity. When he was a teenager he received a new treatment called neurofeedback therapy that let patients watch a computer screen that displays brain waves so they can learn to slow down or speed up their brain waves to achieve greater calm and focus.
It was messy and laborious. In a chair facing a desk with a computer on it, with contact gel in his hair to improve the connection between the handful of wires taped to his scalp. And it was expensive — the equipment back then cost providers thousands of dollars.
But like so many other things in technology, the cost of brain wave-reading sensors has plummeted. “The equipment you needed used to fill up a whole room,” said Dr. Dan Chartier, a former president of the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research. “Now you can almost stick the equipment in your pocket. It’s evolved a long, long way.”