Jörn’s Introduction to Neudio

By Jörn Rickert

29th May 2024

When Andy showed me how he could change his brain activity with Neudio, I could not believe it at first. The effects were so strong, and they happened so fast! I mean, to do such stuff, the company that I started 10 years ago was developing an implant. How could he do this just with music?

If I had not known Andy as one of the coolest and innovative scientists for many years, I would have just walked away - thinking of this as yet another “revolutionary brain-computer interface” that in reality was using muscles instead of brain.

But so, I went to Andy’s Lab and got hooked up to it myself. I put a sticky patch on my forehead to stream my brain signals into Andy’s computer which started to play soft piano music. The music was nice, and I started relaxing. I noticed subtle differences to normal music: tones occurred somewhat less regular, but it sounded pleasantly to me. I closed my eyes and kept completely still to make sure my brain signals were free from any false signals from my muscles. I remember my thoughts drifting away as if starting to dream, when Andy’s voice woke me up: “it works on you” he said, grinning broadly.

I looked at the computer screen to see what happened to my brain during the last 10 minutes and saw three curves, gray, blue and red, and an area shaded in green.

“Look”, said Andy, “the curves show the power of your brain signals. The green area is the rhythm of your brain that I chose as our target today.”

“Pardon”, I said in surprise, “You can use that to target something in my brain?” - from a sound I would have expected that you get generic effects, like with all the other non-invasive soft products out there – “What is all that what you could have targeted?” I asked him.

“Let us keep that for the beer”, Andy responded “Now, listen, the gray curve shows the power of your signals when the music was played like normal music, not in rhythm with your brain. Here your signals are normal. But the red and the blue curve show the power when I played the music either with or against the rhythm of your brain. You can see that at our green target frequency the red curve showing your signals when I played the music with the rhythm of your brain, is higher than the gray one, your brain signals were about 100% stronger now. The blue curve on the other hand shows your signals when the music was played against your brain rhythm. Now your signals were about 50% weaker.”

“Wow” I responded “This is the most amazing thing I have seen in neurotechnology. What are we going to do with this?”