We have seen apps and features that let you play songs based on your mood. But often, mood-based songs played through these apps and what you’re actually feeling, don’t match . That makes me wish for a device that could read my brain and play music.

Well, brain-reading company Neurosity has released a new device that matches that description. The gadget, called the Crown, is a successor to the firm’s device Notion , which was released the last year.

The Crown ships with the Neurosity music shift app that works with your Spotify premium account to track your brain activity while you listen to songs. Based on how your brain reacts to a song, the app will automatically suggest more songs. These song recommendations will change according to the activity you choose; for instance focus, work, or chill.

Neurosity also has a dedicated portal to show you readings from a Spotify session. It essentially displays brain readings to indicate at what moments you lost your focus. The device takes multiple readings per minute. So if you listen for an hour-long session, and only lose focus a few times, that means you’ve been very productive.

This is not the first time we’ve seen an EEG-reading headset try to recommend music. In January 2018, Imec showed off its solution at the Consumer Electronics Show. It was never made available to the consumer, though.

The new device’s form factor is similar to the Notion. But it has better flexible rubber sensors to get EEG (electroencephalogram) readings — that’s your brain’s electrical activity. These sensors cover all four lobes of the brain to gather accurate readings.

The Crown also has a 1.8GHz quad-core CPU to process all data. You can use it for three hours straight on a single charge. And it recharges fully in 30 minutes through a customer charging rig. Plus, Neurosity has included an NFC chip, so you could pair the device just with a tap.

The company doesn’t want you to get a device just with the music app. It has a custom Linux-based operating system running on this along with an SDK that lets developers create new applications to utilize the Crown.

In a call with TNW, the startup’s co-founder, Alex Castillo, said that it plans to create an app store to easily download apps to use the Crown in multiple ways. He added that companies like Drowzee are already building new solutions to reduce insomnia by using the data from the device.

Castillio said that in current form, the device helps you become 3% more focused and productive over a session:

The Crown is available for pre-order starting today, and it’ll ship in May for a retail price of $899. While the price might seem high for a brain-reading device just to play music, the company is confident that developers and creators will recognize its additional value.

MIT AI analysis of Reddit shows anxiety levels are sky-high since pandemic

The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic increased discussions about anxiety and suicide on Reddit, according to a new AI study by MIT and Harvard University researchers.

The team analyzed conversations on 15 subreddits focused on mental health issues, along with 11-non-mental health forums, such as r/PersonalFinance.

They first used natural language processing algorithms to find negative semantic changes in posts from 826,961 different users. Next, they applied unsupervised machine learning to classify the posts into their support groups. Finally, they used unsupervised methods, such as topic modeling, to assess how mental health concerns had changed across Reddit since the first wave.

They discovered an overall rise in anxiety and suicide-risk levels, and varying other mental health impacts in the different subreddits.

“We found that there were these natural clusters that emerged related to suicidality and loneliness, and the amount of posts in these clusters more than doubled during the pandemic as compared to the same months of the preceding year, which is a grave concern,” said study lead author Daniel Low in a statement .

The borderline personality disorder and PTSD group became particularly associated with the suicidality cluster, while a new cluster surrounding self-harm also emerged.

The r/HealthAnxiety forum showed spikes in posts about COVID-19 in January, around two months earlier than other support groups.

Overall, the mental health groups related to ADHD and eating disorders showed the most negative semantic change, which could be due to lockdowns making these conditions particularly hard to manage. But the most adverse effects were found in r/PersonalFinance.

The researchers believe this type of textual analysis could help mental health professionals or forum moderators support people who are suffering during other stressful situations — such as controversial elections.

“Reddit is a very valuable source of support for a lot of people who are suffering from mental health challenges, many of whom may not have formal access to other kinds of mental health support, so there are implications of this work for ways that support within Reddit could be provided,” said study co-author Laurie Rumker.

You can read the study paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research .

Theoretical physicists think humans are screwing up the universe’s plan

The universe started with a Big Bang. Everything that was ever going to be anything was compacted into a tiny ball of whatever-ness and then it exploded outward and the universe begin expanding.

At least, that’s one way of looking at it. But emergent new theories and ages-old philosophical assertions are beginning to find a foothold in cutting-edge quantum physics research. And it’s beginning to look more and more like we might actually be the center of the universe after all.

That’s not to say Earth or the Milky Way is at the geographical center of the universe. It’d be arrogant to make such a literal assumption.

I’m saying humans are the figurative center of the universe. Because, theoretically, we’re gods.

Creating reality

This is a two-parter. First we need to establish that the universe is conscious. It might not be, but for the sake of argument let’s say we agree with the growing number of scientists who support the theory .

Here’s a quote I found in Mind Matters News that explains it nicely. It’s from Georgia Tech’s Tim Andersen, a quantum physics researcher:

Andersen’s referring to “Will” as an underlying force in the universe that’s analogous to consciousness.

The gist is that everything is capable of experience. If you kick a rock it experiences force, velocity, and gravity. It can’t reflect on these experiences and, thus, the rock itself is capable of changing nothing on its own.

It’s conscious because it exists. And, because it sort of doesn’t exist. It’s not actually a rock, but a bunch of molecules smashed together. And those aren’t molecules, really. They’re particles smashed together. And so on and so forth.

Eventually you get to whatever the quantum version of bedrock is, and the whole universe is just an infinite amount of pretty much the same stuff it was the exact moment before the Big Bang happened.

When a rock isn’t a rock

So our rock is a rock, but it’s also not a rock because we can clearly see it’s just regular universe material if we look close enough. A tree, a rock, a Volvo, an AI reporter named Tristan: there’s not much difference between these “things” in the quantum realm.

It’s kind of like Minecraft. No matter what you build it’s all just ones and zeros on a computer chip.

Here’s where things get cool. The rock, for whatever reason, doesn’t appear to experience secondary consciousness. As Andersen explains it, the rock cannot reflect on its experience.

But humans can. Not only can we experience, for example, falling, but we can also reflect on that experience and create change based on that reflection.

What’s even more interesting, cosmically speaking, is that we can internalize the experiences of other humans and use those to inform our decision-making. We’re capable of reflecting on the reflections of others.

This implies that human free will is the sole known entity in the universe capable of eliciting change based on conscious reflection.

The rock can never choose not to fall, but humans can. We can even choose to fly instead.

A post-human universe

The result of our existence is that the universe’s entire trajectory is, potentially, changed. Whatever the particles in the universe were going to do before humanity emerged, their course has been altered .

Who knows what changes we’ve wrought upon the cosmos. We’ve only been around for a few million years and our planet already looks like a frat house after a kegger.

What will the galaxy look like when we can travel to its edges in a matter of months or weeks? What happens when we can traverse the universe?

It’s possible there’s an intelligent creator there somewhere chuckling right now. Or perhaps the universe’s ‘plan’ always included the inception and evolution of humans.

But the evidence , of which there’s admittedly very little, says otherwise.

Quantum physics makes a strong argument for universal consciousness and, if that’s the case, it’s hard to define the human experience without separating everything capable of “reflection” from those things only capable of “experience.”

If it turns out we’re the only entities capable of producing a secondary reality out of the universal consciousness, well, that would be something.

I’m not saying you’re the God , I’m simply pointing out that you’re the only thing in the entire universe that we can show evidence for having free will and the capacity to reflect on its experiences.

Perhaps our ability to reflect on consciousness itself is what allows experiential reality to manifest. We think, therefore everything is.

Further reading:

New research tries to explain consciousness with… quantum physics

Scientists may have found the missing link between brain matter and consciousness

New MIT brain research shows how AI could help us understand consciousness .