I scanned my brain using headphones to measure the stress I experience while gaming

In the hotel room during Consumer Electronics Show 2026I sat at A Gaming laptop To play a targeted practice program. After testing my first-person shooter skills, I put on headphones lined with capacitive bands that read my mind activity, and on my laptop screen, the perception of mental stress slowly diminished as I did some relaxing breathing. I tried target practice again, and my performance was better.

Neurable, the company behind the program, has been scanning brains for a decade to research soldiers’ brain activity for the US Army. The company recently released its own brain-computer interfaces Over-ear headphones Like the one you wore. But at CES this year, they showcased a new frontier of their research: improving gamers’ performance by showing their brains being active during intense gaming sessions.

It’s part of a larger trend toward software and hardware designed to raise the bar for gaming. But unlike other solutions, like Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming and Razer’s Project Ava, which act as AI assistants to help you through a difficult level, Neurable’s player insights don’t rely on AI monitoring your gameplay. Instead, it shows players what’s going on in their brains so they can refocus and improve their gameplay.

Neurable is not publicly releasing the software that powers these brain visions — Prime and Broadcast. Instead, it’s looking for partners to pair this software with products that have built-in BCI contacts, like the Master & Dynamic headphones I wore. While these devices come with focus-tracking and brain-health features that tell you when to take breaks, none of them, nor the neural-powered HyperX headsets announced at CES 2026, have the full gaming brain-scanning software I was shown.

Neurable’s purpose and design are interesting. Who wouldn’t want brain insights to improve gaming performance? But it depends on which companies partner with Neurable to release tools using its connective technologies. Ideally, the company wants every Neurable device to have access to all the focus and mental performance tracking software it releases.

A quick sample of brain training for better gameplay

Neurable’s biggest goal with players is to reduce their cognitive load through visualization, whether in warm-ups or in the middle of tense matches. I’ve personally encountered the former, but have only seen examples of screenshots of the latter, which is implemented in a program called Broadcast. This platform displays additional metrics on the screen that allow players to see how their brains are working if they are frustrated or just need a moment to relax. It looks like both software proposals will be finalized when Neurable finds a company to partner with to manufacture a custom product for BCI packaging (headphones, earbuds, smart glasses, etc.).

“We’re basically able to help you visualize these types of things, like your focus and your cognitive load and what’s affecting you, and then we’ll be able to not only give you feedback, but also enable you to give it to (viewers) on your live stream,” said Ramses Alcaide, co-founder and CEO of Neurable.

Neurable has improved its own warm-up routine that primes players’ brains for better performance: its Prime program, which I tested in a Vegas hotel room. Her simple improvement circuit led me to try the Gridshot exercise in the popular target training program Any clotheswhere you filmed balls appearing randomly for a full minute. Then I opened the Prime app, which measured my brain activity and visualized it as a big ball of interconnected dots that slowly shrank as I manually calmed my breathing. After that, I tried using Gridshot again, and my overall score improved by about 4,000 points, my reaction time dropped by 44 milliseconds, and I shot 10 more targets — a solid improvement.

This is consistent with the results Neurable has seen in its own test samples. In a white paper published shortly before CES, Alcaide said that 25 players surveyed over 34 of these testing sessions reduced their reaction time by about 40 milliseconds on average, as well as increasing the number of targets hit.

“It’s really key, because players usually have to choose between reaction time and hitting the target, but because we’re creating this ability and cognitive load, it’s actually enabled them to fundamentally improve both areas,” Alcaide said.

Would I have improved as much if I had closed my eyes and done a simple breathing exercise instead? maybe. But all studies conducted by neuroscientist Alicia Howell Munson have shown that both focus and cognitive load affect in-game performance — not just reducing stress, but maintaining it.

“So just meditation is that generally it will relax you. However, it may not increase your focus. Or if it does increase your focus, you may feel stressed trying to focus on that,” Howell Munson said.

In any case, I appreciated having Prime’s visual ball to watch shrink while I calmed myself down — and to make sure it actually responded to my mental load, I intentionally flooded my mind with thoughts about all the deadlines and stressors (of which CES had plenty). The ball of condensation began to expand slightly, perhaps in response to my anger. I didn’t tell Alcaide I was doing it on purpose, chalking it up to the pressure players can feel when they’re close to breaking a record or winning a match.

“So[Prime]helps you practice those moments and manage your emotions and mental load so that you can do better when you actually do it,” Alcaide said. “This is all meant to give you feedback about your mind because it’s very difficult to feel it yourself.”

This real-time feedback is at the heart of Neurable’s value proposition. While there is an obvious benefit for high-performance gamers like eSports pros who will seriously benefit from a 40ms reduction in their response time, casual gamers can benefit from this feedback not to improve their gameplay, but to have fun with it. For players who don’t have a lot of time to play, it can be difficult to leave the stresses of life behind and be mentally present during their free time.

“What if I could maximize the number of hours I have, feel good about how well I played, and at least know I did the best I could, given the limitations I have, and be able to do that consistently?” Al-Kayed said. With Neurable, even players who don’t care about their performance can refocus and enjoy limited, low-risk play that they can fit into their days.

Neurable axis to measure players’ brains

Neurable was founded in 2016 as a research group at the University of Michigan and worked to bring the brain into virtual reality and augmented reality before turning to brain-interface interfaces (BCIs) in traditional wearable devices.

When I think of “measuring brain activity,” I think of large, sci-fi-style metal cages that wrap around my skull and connect to my forehead via large coin-sized connectors held to my skin with a sticky gel. Neurable has been working on less difficult ways to measure brain activity: using conductive lines on the earcups of headphones, which take readings from parts of the brain other than the conductive and gel method (specifically, the frontal lobes through the ears). Next, Neurabl’s software uses artificial intelligence to extrapolate similar data and extrapolate brain activity.

In that sense, they don’t take quite as accurate readings as the conductor-and-gel method, although they say they get close: In a validation paper reporting on a study conducted with the U.S. Army, the Neurable technology had a 90% correlation coefficient compared to traditional whole-scalp EEGs, where it got the majority of the signal, Alcaide said. Plus, it doesn’t take long — instead of sitting for an hour waiting for my data to be calibrated, Alcaide had me do a few simple exercises while wearing the headset over the ear to get initial readings that were matched against pre-existing models.

Neurable says it has years of experience in contracts with the Department of Defense, specifically researching brain activity in military veterans. Alcaide said the company worked with the US Army to help develop its own brain metrics to measure soldiers’ mental performance, and also developed a cognitive load algorithm while working with the Singapore Air Force.

When I asked them why they didn’t move to a more traditional use of brain reading in technology, such as providing insights for accessories like health wearables, they said their pivot to gaming was organic. Many of the company’s employees are gamers themselves, playing intense games like the strategy title StarCraft 2, and checking player activity is a natural focus.

Gamer health metrics are also a less proven area than general health wearables, which are saturated with devices that track things like heart rate and blood pressure. In contrast, gamers are often tech enthusiasts who embrace the next big technology early. They’re spending a lot of money to get a hardware advantage with faster GPUs and more RAM — and it makes sense that they’d want insights into how to improve the performance of their thick processors, too.

If I had to guess, I’d expect players to prefer objective data about what’s going on in their brains rather than getting hints and tips from AI assistants watching their gameplay. But it’s difficult to predict whether players understand and accept Neurable’s brain metrics, like brain battery and focus. These measurements are generated by the company, and players will have to adapt to understand what they mean.

For example, if they see that their brain battery is low, will they stop playing all day? If they notice that their concentration meter indicates that they are tense and angry (or in gamer parlance, “tilted”), will they take a break to calm down?

How measuring players’ brains could lead to further insights into mental performance

Neurable’s focus is largely on delivering brain insights to gamers through tried-and-true headsets, but it’s working on other formats. In her recent work for the US Department of Defense, she used a helmet-mounted brain scan to measure traumatic brain injuries when in close proximity to explosions. It’s something that could be integrated into consumer products, such as measuring impacts in sports.

What he’s excited about is bringing brain scanning to products other than headphones. In fact, Howell-Munson, the Neurable researcher, prefers the earbuds so much that he’s already figured out how to integrate the company’s brain-scanning technology into this category of gadgets, but is waiting to partner with the right device maker.

While earbuds are likely its next frontier, Neurable is also looking to apply its technology to smart glasses as well, with the company supposedly using the stems and earhooks as conductive surfaces to read brain activity. This is less surface area in contact with the head than the ear cups on headphones, so it leads me to question how good AI models are at accurately extrapolating brain activity from potentially limited data.

Bringing brain scanning to earbuds also makes me wonder about the possibility of getting those mental thoughts in other parts of my daily life, outside of the computer desk. Jessica Randazza Bade, vice president of marketing at Neurable, noted that the insights could be useful in her competitive races; I have a half marathon coming up in a couple of weeks, so a reminder of my declining mental focus could help me get back into focus during my long run. I do get a lot of fitness metrics fed to me by the Apple Watch Ultra, but they can only tell me so much about my circulation and blood oxygen — and not much about when mental tension is high and it’s time to take a slow, quiet break.

With only a few minutes of testing Neurable’s brain activity visualization technology, I can’t speak to the future it’s working toward — I just feel like a lot of players would like to try it out for themselves. Whether that happens sooner or later depends on one of the biggest computer peripheral companies on the market. Before gamers can actually get their hands on Neurable’s in-game brain-scanning software, Alcaide joked, “We need to close our negotiations with HP.”