Dr. Ramses Alcaide is the founder of Neurable, which builds noninvasive brain-computer-interface technology and AI that brings brain sensing to everyday devices like headphones and earbuds. The headphones he wore on the show have sensors on the inside that record his brain activity. No surgery, and you can take them off anytime. He joined us in Episode 41 (May 8, 2026) and demoed it live.
A brain-computer interface, in Ramses's words (01:22), is "a wearable device that helps you better understand your brain and control different devices." Sensors like these are typically used in labs to track epilepsy or sleep disorders. Neurable's pitch is that its AI boosts the performance of brain data enough to work in headphones, earbuds and AR glasses.
The consumer product has two main uses today (06:14). The first is focus and breaks: the app tracks attention, flags when your brain needs a break and, with a biofeedback button, changes the audio when you start drifting. The second is brain health, with metrics like cognitive strain, mental readiness and the age of your brain. Ramses said the goal is not to build every solution but to give domain experts in places like surgery or gaming the tools to build their own.
From 02:32, Ramses shared his screen with a podcast playing and a blue bar scrolling underneath it: his focus in real time. As he concentrated, the bar rose. When he let himself get distracted, it dropped.
Like this thing. I literally whipped it up in, you know, a few hours by coding it. Like now I have this automatic podcast information delivery system.
— Ramses Alcaide, Episode 41
When you feel tired, that's actually your body that's tired. Your brain has been tired sometimes for hours beforehand, and we can detect when that brain is getting tired, which is this dip right here.
— Ramses Alcaide, Episode 41
His ice bath experiment (13:53) started as a breakfast rumor that men and women react differently. Using the app's cognitive snapshot, every man showed higher anxiety resilience afterward and every woman showed a reduction.
Like, all the men had an increase in anxiety resilience, which means and that's what you want from an ice bath. You want to be able to handle stress better.
— Ramses Alcaide, Episode 41
In the news segment, Ramses said Neurable processes brain data on the edge in the headphones and faces the same cost and compute trade-offs as AI security cameras. For more on these themes, see our pages on AI in healthcare and AI in productivity.
Dr. Ramses Alcaide is the founder of Neurable. He studied electrical engineering, earned a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Michigan, where the first version of Neurable's technology was built, and spent about ten years in research and development before bringing it to consumer devices.
Neurable builds noninvasive brain-computer-interface technology and AI that brings brain sensing to everyday devices like headphones and earbuds. Its headphones have sensors on the inside that record brain activity, with no surgery, and you can take them off anytime.
On the show Ramses showed focus and attention in real time, detection of when your brain needs a break, and brain health metrics such as cognitive strain, mental readiness and brain age.
Not per se. Ramses said Neurable offers a research kit that lets people get the data from the system and build on top of it, which he called effectively an SDK with a fancier name.
