So a few hours ago, as part of the ever-phenomenal Thinking Digital conference, I took part in a demo presentation in which I was hooked up to a headset which allowed me to control things with my mind alone. It’s not every day you get to say that, and it seemed like a good idea to write down some thoughts.

photo copyright Codeworks 2011

First, I was most certainly not a plant or a stooge, as one or two people have speculated. Herb Kim came up to me at a networking event a couple of months back and asked whether I’d be up for doing a demo with Tan Le of Emotiv at Thinking Digital. When Herb asks you whether you want to do something that seems utterly deranged you should of course always say yes, so I did, and then I asked why. He explained that I was amongst the more… follically limited of the delegates and that the headset would give a better result on my big baldy nappa.

“Headset?!” I thought. “Ooh. Um. Right.”

When the Thinking Digital speaker profiles were released I read Tan Le’s mini-biog and began to wonder what I’d let myself in for. But I deliberately didn’t read up on her work before the conference. The sceptic in me wanted to genuinely find out whether or not the whole Emotiv thing was some sort of David Blaine nonsense or not, and if I was going to do that I needed to approach it with an open mind. (OK, for “open” read “slightly cynical”. I did a science degree, you don’t fool me with all yer holistic homeopathic brain-wave carbon-fibre shamanism, dammit.)

And with that the whole thing went to bed for a bit, and to be honest I forgot all about it. I've been using my time in the run up to Thinking Digital and then at the conference itself to try and suss out what's next in my career, and see if anyone had any bright business ideas I could collaborate with or Rob-shaped gaps in their organisations that I could fill. (If anyone has, by the way, do get in touch.)

So I've had other things on my mind, and it was with surprise and confusion that I noticed conference manager Heather Peacock rushing towards me as I made to go into Hall 2 for the last session of the conference, the session in which Tan was to do her talk. The conversation went thus:

HEATHER (urgently into walkie talkie, in the manner of a CIA agent): It’s alright, I’ve got him, he’s here. Repeat, I’ve got him.

ME: Wha…?

HEATHER (to me): Are you ready, then?

ME: Er…

HEATHER: For the thing with Tan Le. Have you been briefed?

ME (pupils dilating, pick’n’mix buzz evaporating): Blimey. Forgot about that. Er, no, I haven’t been briefed. What do I need to do?

HEATHER: Well, you’ll need to sit on the front row.

ME: Oh, OK. Nice view from there. What else?

HEATHER: That’s all there is. Sit on the front row. You’ve been briefed now.

So no, I had no idea what was coming, and although I was selected for my, ahem, cranial suitability, I was not a plant.

So I manifested myself on the stage, and Tan stuck a large black plastic spider on my head. I was surprised how comfy it was – I was expecting it to grip more tightly and to be more creaky and mad-scientisty and, well, naff, really, but it was an impressively well made and ergonomic bit of kit. I didn’t feel overly conscious of it and I wasn’t constantly worried about it falling off or anything, although it took a second to arrange things to make it work with my glasses.

With the benefit of hindsight and Twitpic, clearly it made me look like one of the Borg, but that isn’t the way you feel when you have it on. You just sort of forget it’s there. Especially when Tan fires it up and the live feeds appear on the screen. I pretty much forgot everything at that point.

Man, this is fun. I quickly realised that the upper right bit of one of the EEG scans must correspond to my visual cortex, because whenever I stared at the same thing for ages, it went calm blue, and then when I moved my eyes to look at something new it lit up bright orange, like an Icelandic volcano with a vendetta against Herb Kim.

I stared at the grey boring bit of the speakers’ podium, and in my peripheral vision I could see the deep blue of my calm brain on the monitor. I looked at the data-packed main screen – which is searingly bright and visually stimulating from three feet away, by the way – and boom! Orange, and even yellow if I looked at something really complex. Whoo! I want one.

Tan asked me to try and calm my brain down, so I closed my eyes and used the calming mindstate I’ve developed to help me cope with plane travel. I heard the audience all go “Oooh!” in a rather comedic Benny Hill style, suggesting that I’d made my EEG readings do something impressive, but obviously I had my eyes closed so I can only guess at what the display looked like.

And then it was Vulcan mind meld time. Tan asked me to train the system by staring at a rotating orange animated box and imagining it sinking to the bottom of the screen. After a training run, and a heart-stopping few seconds of concentrating on the cube and trying to make it sink, I was just about to turn to Tan and apologise for my lame brain when the box abruptly sank to the bottom of the screen and vanished from view. Jeepers creepers, folks, we genuinely do live in a society where you can control things with your mind alone, and it was a profoundly shocking moment for me to realise that at such a direct, visceral level.

We tried another run, this time trying to make the cube disappear. Tan admitted that this was a harder thing to envisage, and I didn’t manage it. I did get the cube to partially vanish, but as it started to fade the entire audience managed an excitable gasp, as one, and the collective excitement of 450 bystanders – and indeed my own – was too much for my concentration. I lost the thought pattern I knew I needed to recreate, and I couldn’t summon it back.

I must thank Tan Le for being such a gracious and kind host, for patiently bearing with me while I shambled about in my own mental recesses, and for affording me the chance to do something so exciting. First beer’s on me, Tan, next time we meet.

Lots of people asked me afterwards what the thought-control was like, with wide eyes and conspiratorially lowered voices. It may be contextually a really big deal to control something with your mind, but I’m afraid it’s quite a mundane experience at a sensory level – there are no tingling sensations on your scalp and no new things occurring in your brain.

A highly kinaesthetic person would be able to describe it better than I can, but at its most basic level you just imagine the cube doing what you want it to do, and that forms in your mind a kind of… well, not quite a shape, and not quite a colour or a sensation, but a sort of state, a thought state, which you sort of know the form of. You train the machine with that form of thought, and then you try and ignore the bright lights and the speaker system and the popping camera flashes and furiously Twittering delegates and the fact that EVERYONE IS HOLDING THEIR DAMN BREATH and recreate that form. And, if you’re like me, you manage it one time in two.

On reflection, what I could and should have done was think of something more concrete and associate that with the movement I wanted, rather than imagining the movement itself. My wife’s face, the smell of my daughter’s hair after we’ve washed it, a 1971 Citroen SM, a nice steaming bowl of lamb vindaloo – anything that I could have clearly brought to mind with minimum concentration. Next time.

But I’m convinced that it would take only a few minutes of excitable playing about with the system to train it to do some quite complex things. There are probably technical hurdles to limit you, but it certainly feels as though after a day or two you’d be confidently abandoning your mouse and keyboard completely. It’s a truly amazing system, and I’m genuinely reeling from the possibilities. Tan showed us video of a wheelchair which can be steered and controlled via the headset, and the potential for accessibility and assistive technology alone is staggering.

An amusing footnote came as I stumbled back to my seat to find Christian Payne and Tom Scott, wide-eyed, already tapping at their keyboards to find out how they could get hold of a headset. By the time Tan announced that it was a retail product, and the surprisingly low price, Chris and Tom were already cooking up various evil schemes. Look out, Thinking Digital 2012.