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What kind of data can monitors like this actually collect out-of-the-box? I know that you can train a system to recognize some pretty high-level abstractions based on individual neural activity, but how reliably would a similar pattern-recognition mechanism work across a larger population?

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These consumer-targeted devices are predominantly used to detect and act on changes in the relative power of certain frequency bands from rhythmic neural activity. These changes in activity are common across people, and don't require any specialized user-specific techniques to identify. For instance, alpha wave (8-12 Hz) power is correlated with arousal/attentiveness.

Interesting. So am I right to assume that these devices can detect a range of emotions? It would be fascinating to incorporate some kind of iterative feedback loop into a work of art.

No, emotions are extremely complex phenomena and can't be detected with this type of hardware.

Exactly, you'd need a mood ring for that.

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