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I woke up last week feeling exhausted and burnt out. After a late night working on regulatory paperwork, at the end of a long week, I just wanted to stop. But on a Friday morning, as much as we want the weekend to start, we still have a duty to show up for work.
My employer is Neurable, a neurotech firm that makes brain-monitoring headphones. Sometimes when I don’t want to work, I put on my pair of Neurable headphones and watch my brain data. It’s passive and easy, and I can claim I’m working because testing our product is important.
A slow start to my day seemed to be in order. I opened up the Neurable app and took a cognitive snapshot.
What it showed stopped me. My mental recovery score was at a weekly high. My cognitive speed was the best it had been in weeks. By every measure the data could offer, I wasn't depleted — I was primed.
That disconnect between how I felt and what the data showed is actually one of the most interesting things about working with Neurable technology. We humans tend to treat subjective experience as ground truth. If you feel tired, you must be tired.
Neurable-collected brain data often concurs with my feelings, so I wasn’t sure what was going on.
I moved into my usual warm-up ritual: Neurable’s brain state dashboard open on my computer, running a Neurable neurofeedback (Priming) exercise to prepare me for action, planning to follow it with a quick video game to shake off my lethargic state. Except I blasted through Priming so fast it was obvious I didn't need the warm-up. My mind was already there. I decided to trust the data over my gut. I skipped the game and got to work.
I strongly believe subjective feelings convey some message that we must pay attention to, but it is so easy to misinterpret the content of that message. My workload that week was heavy. On top of that, I spend my nights caring for my 7-month-old baby girl. As any parent will tell you, taking care of a baby is exhausting, and doing it alongside a full-time job can feel virtually impossible. I was tired. That message from my brain was undeniable. What I didn’t know, and I needed the Neurable data to tell me, was that the workload wasn’t breaking me, it was making me stronger.
To reframe this, let’s think about fatigue at the gym. With physical fitness, we build a skill throughout our life of understanding the meaning of fatigue. If you’re tired, you don’t automatically stop the exercise. Most of the time, that tiredness just means that you’re pushing yourself. If you were to stop as soon as you felt tired, it would rob you of fitness gains. We all understand that with physical fitness, but the tiredness that comes from mental work is much harder to map.
As a neuroscientist who earned my PhD researching the neurochemistry of stress, I know a thing or two about why our brains manage energy in the way they do. Stress is the normal order of business for the brain, just as movement is the normal order of business for the body. Stress-related neurochemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol are there to prime the brain for action and to strengthen memory and cognitive faculties. These chemicals get a bad rap because having elevated levels for too long can wear down our bodies and brains, but they’re there because, in the short term and in moderate doses, they’re actually really good for us. Where is the boundary between short term strength versus long term fatigue? It’s not always clear, but Neurable gives me the data to find out.
For the rest of the day, I kept Neurable running in the background as I worked — more like tracking a weather app during a storm than actively managing anything. On my desk, I have light towers that shine different colors depending on my brain state. They were consistently green, meaning I had a strong capacity to maintain focus. This was confirmed by another Neurable feedback demo (Rumble) that adjusts ambient music volume based on the depth of my focus.
As the day wore on, as I worked on more regulatory paperwork, my body started tensing up, threatening me with chronic headaches. I switched the Rumble demo to body-tracking mode, deliberately relaxed my muscles until the music volume dropped, then switched back to mind-tracking and kept going.
The result of all this: one of the most productive days I've had in months.
Here's what I keep coming back to: without the data, I probably would have disengaged. Let the subjective signal win. And on a day when my brain was, by any objective measure, ready to do real work — I would have wasted it.
Cognitive monitoring isn't just useful when something is wrong in the unconscious layers of your brain that you can’t feel yet. It's also useful when everything is right and you can't tell. Knowing your mental state isn't only about catching bad days early — it's also about not underselling good ones.
I built some of this technology with my own hands and brain. I understand, mechanistically, what it's measuring and why. And I still needed to see tons of data to override my own instincts that morning.
That's not a flaw in the system. That's the point of it, to give us a window into our brain that shows us with clarity what we can’t already see.
Walter Piper is a Senior Research Engineer at Neurable, where he has worked for nearly five years developing brain-computer interface technology. He holds a PhD from NYU's Center for Neural Science, where his research focused on the temporal dynamics of stress-related neurochemistry and its role in learning and long-term behavioral change.
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.
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