Collecting neural data has mostly been a can’t-try-this-at-home activity. Until now.
, people will follow the same path with their brains. Then, with legions of folks wearing the buds for hours, days, and weeks on end, the company’s scientists hope they’ll amass an incredible data trove, in which they’ll uncover the hidden patterns of mental health.
In April 2016, Google announced it was starting an incubator called Area 120, its artisanal take on Y Combinator. Berent and Owens applied and got rejected, but they were pointed to X, Alphabet’s “moon shot” division, which takes on riskier, longer-term projects than Area 120. X picked up the project to supercharge sleep, and Owens started running it full-time. Berent stayed in the ads division but devoted some of his time to the project.
Jonathan Berent, the CEO, set out to help people hack their sleep—and ended up with a way to collect unprecedented amounts of brain data.a finicky thing. In a gold-standard setup, a person’s scalp is covered in many electrodes smeared with a gooey gel to cut down on electrical noise. Once pasted to a person’s head, the electrodes can detect when huge cohorts of neurons fire together, producing signals in different frequency bands.
Levey told Berent that if he could eventually match the quality of a true EEG, he’d be on to something—a sort of Apple Watch for the brain. But, he added, the earbuds could be immediately put to use on an important problem: monitoring epilepsy. Berent, however, was still obsessing over the idea of replicating medical-quality EEGs. He and his team had to figure out how to amplify more distant signals to make up for the fact they only had two electrodes. The United Sciences prototype wasn’t quite up to snuff; it couldn’t pick up alpha waves, which occur during both sleep and wakeful periods. The X’er also had to miniaturize the electronics of a traditional EEG to fit inside the two buds.
On October 18, 2019, Berent took a meeting with Google’s chief economist to discuss the privacy implications of reading people’s brain waves. A few minutes in, Berent began feeling poorly. He looked at his Apple Watch, which informed him that he could be in atrial fibrillation. Berent went to the hospital for tests, and a few days later, he underwent a cardiac version of a reboot, where his heart was stopped and restarted. The experience made Berent view his work differently.
But while the immediate uses of NextSense’s earbuds are medical, Berent hopes to eventually build a mass-market brain monitor that, if enough people start using it, can generate enormous quantities of day-to-day brain performance data. The catch, of course, is that since no one has ever done that, it’s not yet obvious what most people would get out of the information. That’s also what’s exciting.
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