“We’re excited to be equipping University of Alberta with Muse technology that will allow students to learn to study the brain in real-life situations, and even allow researchers to do neuroscience in their own homes. "Making clinical-grade EEG research affordable and accessible to a wider audience was a key business goal for us from the very beginning,” explained Ariel Garten, co-founder of InteraXon. Hands-on learning really changes how you think about the stuff you're studying.” It felt like we'd gone from just reading about neuroscience to actually practicing it. “Every week, you'd go to class, and within a few minutes, the whole room was busy recording their own brain waves. "Using the MUSE was an amazing experience,” said Michael Calaresu, a student in Mathewson’s course. Thanks to InteraXon, each pair of students in Mathewson’s 100-person undergraduate neuroscience course receives their own headset to use for the semester, providing hands-on research experience that simulates modern neuroscience research. These students also get experience using this data and analysis to write up reports of their research.” “Instead of reading books, watching lectures, seeing live demos, or analyzing fake data, students in this class have real experience with EEG recording and analysis. “I have been transforming my normal third-year lecture class to a hands-on class where students learn about the brain and mind through real reproducible experiments and data analysis,” said Mathewson, who is also a member of UAlberta's Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute (NHMI). But advances in the field by companies such as InteraXon have made these tools vastly more accessible-and therefore an excellent tool for teaching undergraduate students. Traditional EEG technology has simply been too expensive for large-scale teaching. InteraXon is a Toronto-based company that specializes in wearable brain sensing technology such as the Muse headband, a low-profile, wearable device that measures activity in the wearer’s brain.
“When large groups of neurons are active together, they create an electrical signal that is large enough to be measured on the outside of the head.” “EEG, also known as an electroencephalogram, takes an electrical measure of brain activity,” explained Kyle Mathewson, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience. Fifty EEG headsets, donated by InteraXon, the makers of Muse® the Brain Sensing Headband, are changing the way that undergraduate students learn in the University of Alberta’s Department of Psychology.