Short answer: Ramses Alcaide demos headphones with sensors showing his focus as a live bar, plus a browser plug-in he coded in a few hours that speeds a podcast up to 1.72x when he focuses and slows it when distracted.
Watch this answer from Episode 41 (starts at 2:34) · Episode 41 notes and transcript
From Episode 41: This Headset Reads Your Brain in Real Time. We Demo It Live., starting at 2:34.
Ramses Alcaide [2:33]: Yeah, for sure. And just to share a little bit of background too on what we do, we make it so that these devices can have brain computer interfaces, but then the trick is how do you take this complex brain signal and actually turn in something useful for people. Right? And so these headphones can actually track my focus in real time. And I'm just gonna show you here this, my screen real quick. Yeah. This is gonna be fun. You should be able to see a window here. This is actually a podcast. And do you guys see these kind of, like, blue bar that's scrolling right here? That's actually my focus in real time. So when I start to focus on this podcast,
Sam Nadler [3:13]: Oh, you can see it increasing.
Ramses Alcaide [3:16]: Exactly. Exactly. So you saw it increasing right here. And then now that I'm gonna get distracted, it's gonna start to drop off. Right? Yeah. Now what's really cool is like, yeah, sure. One thing is being able to track your focus, but what if you could use it to actually help you learn? Right? So this is just a quick browser plug in, and I can turn on this feature called mind. And what's gonna happen is that and this happens to me all the time, I'll be like working, listening to a podcast, maybe doing the laundry while this happens, and sometimes I'll get distracted and then I just realized I missed like a key part of the podcast. Right? Well, what if, because I listen to podcasts at like 2x speed, what if it could regulate the speed based off of how concentrated I was on the content? So that's what we're gonna do. Right? I'm gonna turn on mind. And then at first, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start focusing on this podcast, You'll and see that this line will go up, and then eventually, I'm gonna get distracted, and you'll see it go down. You'll see that my speed went up to 1.72. Right?
Jordan Metzner [4:20]: Wow. Yeah.
Ramses Alcaide [4:22]: And now I'm getting distracted, and you'll see that it's slowing down. And then I'll focus again.
Sam Nadler [4:32]: That's amazing. This is a dream come true for Jordan who listens to about Podcast at 2.5x.
Ramses Alcaide [4:39]: So you can see that that joke dropped my focus dramatically. You see that?
Jordan Metzner [4:43]: Yeah. Oh, so cool. Like Yeah. It keeps you off task. Amazing. And this is just to be clear, this is just from the headset you're wearing on your ears right now. Right?
Ramses Alcaide [4:55]: Exactly. Exactly. And, this headset is available in the market. There's an app and everything that you can use that tracks your brain health, tracks your focus, and you can even use it to remind you when you're going out of focus, too. It'll change the sound that you're listening to remind you to get back to task. But you can imagine how being able to leverage the brain, you can use it across so many different tasks. Like this thing. I literally whipped it up in, a few hours by coding it. Like now I have this automatic podcast information delivery system.
Jordan Metzner [5:27]: Yeah, amazing. Yeah, maybe you could have it change the video if you get, if your interest wanes too low or yeah, if the videos were shorts, maybe you would just switch the short, as your interest dies or something.
Ramses Alcaide [5:39]: So many things that you can do. Like the brain is the most powerful organism in our body. Right? And it has the most breadth of things that it can do out of any other organ. So the really, the possibilities are limitless. Right? This is just one fun demo to show it off.
