Escape from labs : how to expand the territory of brain research?

• Autor(a) principal: Kruszwicka, Agnieszka
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Klichowski, Michal
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10437/14118
• topic: MEDICINA; MEDICINE; ELETROENCEFALOGRAMA; ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY; ONDAS CEREBRAIS; BRAIN WAVES; MINDWAVE

Brain activity is most often tested in laboratories, while participants sit and sometimes even lie down. Still, although such advanced techniques of studying brain activity as functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, magnetoencephalography or electroencephalography (EEG), help us understand how the nervous system works and what exactly is going on in the brain during many activities, from simple ones, such as hand movements, to highly complex, e.g., arithmetic calculations, they do not allow us to measure brain activity under natural conditions. Thus, there are attempts to build mobile devices, e.g., mobile EEG. In this chapter we show that such a mobile EEG as MindWave expands the territory of brain research – allows for mobile observation of brain activity outside laboratories and therefore in (ordinary) everyday spaces. Moreover, we demonstrate that MindWave is one of the simplest and cheapest mobile EEG, and, at the same time, a very reliable tool, already successfully used in scientific research. In conclusion, we encourage researchers to escape from laboratories (from time to time) and study brain activity in “natural” (not laboratory/artificial) spaces. Keywords - Brain waves, electroencephalography, MindWave, mobile EEG, power spectrum