- Remove the current class from the content27_link item as Webflows native current state will automatically be applied.
- To add interactions which automatically expand and collapse sections in the table of contents select the content27_h-trigger element, add an element trigger and select Mouse click (tap)
- For the 1st click select the custom animation Content 27 table of contents [Expand] and for the 2nd click select the custom animation Content 27 table of contents [Collapse].
- In the Trigger Settings, deselect all checkboxes other than Desktop and above. This disables the interaction on tablet and below to prevent bugs when scrolling.
Neurable has announced recent research and understanding about how we focus, and how electroencephalography (EEG) can be used to measure focus and distraction.
Neurable’s mission is to build a world without limitations. The first step to this involves taking a deep look at the world around us, the technology that we use, and how it impacts our daily life. All of these interactions start in the brain. Neuroscience and the science of understanding have been a core part of Neurable from Day One. By understanding how we work best, we can create tools to help us focus on what matters most.
The world has more distractions than ever. Smartphones, working from home (i.e. the couch), global pandemics, and racial reckonings — this year has pushed human resilience to the limit. What feels more scarce than ever is a sense of balance.
We’ll argue this: maybe the way we work needs to change. For the past few years, Neurable has applied neuroscience to help understand how your brain works best.
The challenges that lie ahead
The world that we live in has become more complex. We’re in a time of peak notifications, online and off - and with our work from home becoming unbalanced. During the COVID-19 pandemic alone, we struggled with work life balance, with some research showing that the average workday in the US has increased by 3 hours. With countless distractions, as well as a shifting routine we’re facing increasing challenges to our new standard of work.
While the workday is often structured in how we can be more productive at work, we’ll argue that we’ll need to look at the more important fact — how you can be more efficient, so you can spend time with what matters most, your time away from work.
How do we do it?
Neurable has brought together leaders in computational neuroscience, experimental neuroscience, machine learning, and consumer electronics to create hardware and software systems with outstanding performance, comfort, and are easy to use. Building on experiences at Bose, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, Boston University, and MIT, Neurable, with the backing of leading investors, built a brain-sensing wearable device that leverages neural sensors to better understand ourselves.
Using EEG sensors, Neurable has collected hundreds of hours of brain-activity to create complex algorithms to understand how the brain handles cognitive load, focus, and distractions.
This has led to over 15 patents granted or pending in six countries spanning Hardware, UX/UI, Neural Signal Collection, Core BCI Technology, Neural Signal Processing, Output, and Hybrid Signals, Neurable has demonstrated a known3 understanding of the science and application of it. Neurable is committed to set a high ethical standard for the entire consumer-facing neurotech industry.
Let’s break it down
How do you measure focus with brain sensors? Let’s start with an analogy. At Neurable, we love food: cooking food, eating food, and debating our opinions about food. So, our analogy will be about food. Imagine you are at a restaurant (outdoors, next to a propane heater because it’s cold where we live) and you order a selection of chocolates for dessert. You have milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate. You observe things: (1) you can tell them apart because of the color, and (2) you notice they each smell different.
Then the power goes out! You’re not going to let a little darkness stop you from enjoying those chocolates, but you want to know which one you’re about to eat. You can’t use color to distinguish the chocolates anymore, so you use your memory of what each smells like.
Measuring focus with EEG is like eating chocolates in the dark. At first, we can tell the chocolates apart from both color and the smell. Then, when the power goes out the color doesn’t help you, so you use the smell (and your memory of the connection between color and the smell) to identify the chocolates.
For focus and EEG data, we measure your performance on a specific type of task, associate it with brain signals, and build a model to determine focus with brain signals. When there’s no way to directly measure focus, we use the association between performance and EEG data instead.
Better science for better focus.
It’s no secret that the relationship between ourselves and our technology is constantly evolving. With increased demand of wearable technology (and increased adoption of it as well), research shows that this may be a viable option for building better habits, increasing focus and efficiency, and most importantly, allowing us to have a better work-life balance. Consumer neurotechnology is a new, growing industry — it’s important to approach these solutions with a strong sense of ethics and scientific approaches.
2 Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.
Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.
