Up in a hotel room during CES 2026, I sat down at a gaming laptop to play a target-practice program. After testing my first-person shooter skills, I put on headphones lined with capacitive bands that read my brain activity, and on the laptop screen, a visualization of my mental stress slowly diminished as I did some relaxed breathing. I tried the target practice again and, voila, I did better.
Neurable, the company behind the software, has been scanning brains for a decade to research soldiers’ brain activity for the US Army. The company recently released its brain-computer interfaces as over-ear headphones like the ones I wore. But at this year’s CES, it showcased a new frontier for their research: improving gamers’ performance by showing their brain activity during intense play sessions.
It’s part of a larger trend toward software and hardware designed to elevate gameplay. But unlike other solutions, like Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming and Razer’s Project Ava, which act like AI assistants to help you through a tough level, Neurable’s insights to gamers don’t rely on AI that watches how you play. Instead, it shows players what’s happening in their brains so they can refocus and improve their gameplay.
Neurable isn’t releasing the software powering these brain insights — Prime and Broadcast — publicly. Instead, it’s looking for partners to pair that software with products that have BCI contacts built in, like the Master & Dynamic headphones I wore. While those come with focus-tracking and brain-health features that tell you when to take breaks, neither of them, nor the Neurable-powered HyperX headphones announced at CES 2026, has the full brain-scanning-while-gaming software that I was pitched.
Neurable’s purpose and design are intriguing. Who doesn’t want brain insights to improve their gaming performance? But it depends on which companies partner with Neurable to release gadgets using their conductive tech. Ideally, the company wants every Neurable device to have access to all the focus-tracking, mental performance software it releases.
A quick sample of brain-training for better gaming
Neurable’s biggest goal with gamers is to reduce their cognitive load by visualizing it, both in warmups and in the middle of tense matches. I experienced the former in person, but only saw screenshot examples for the latter, which is implemented in software called Broadcast. That platform brings up additional gauges on-screen that let players see how their brain is doing if they’re frustrated or just need a moment to chill out. Both software proposals will seemingly be finalized when Neurable finds a company to partner up with to make a bespoke BCI-packing product (headphones, earbuds, smart glasses or otherwise).
«We essentially are able to help you visualize those kinds of things, like focus, your cognitive load and what’s impacting you, and then be able to not only provide you the feedback, but then also enable you to provide [it] to your streaming [viewers],» said Ramses Alcaide, co-founder and CEO of Neurable.
Neurable has refined its warm-up procedure that preps gamer brains for better performance: its Prime software, which I experienced in the Vegas hotel room. Its simple improvement circuit had me trying out the Gridshot exercise in the popular target practice software Aimlabs, in which I shot randomly appearing spheres for a full minute. Then I popped open Prime, which measured my brain activity and visualized it as a large globe of interconnected dots that slowly shrank as I manually calmed my breathing. After that, I tried Gridshot again, and my overall score improved around 4,000 points, my reaction time went down by 44 milliseconds, and I shot 10 more targets — a solid improvement.
That’s about in line with the results Neurable’s seen with its test samples. In a white paper published shortly before CES, 25 players surveyed through 34 of these test sessions reduced their reaction time by about 40ms on average, Alcaide said, as well as increased the number of targets hit.
«It’s really key, because normally gamers have to choose between reaction time and target hit, but because we’re creating this capacity and cognitive load, it’s actually enabled them to essentially improve both areas,» Alcaide said.
Could I have improved just as much if I had closed my eyes and done a simple breathing exercise instead? Possibly. But all the studies that Neurable research scientist Alicia Howell-Munson pored over showed that both focus and cognitive load affect in-game performance — not just reducing stress, but locking in.
«So the thing with just meditation is that generally, it will relax you. It may not increase your focus, though. Or if it’s increasing your focus, you might be stressed trying to hone in on that,» Howell-Munson said.
In any case, I appreciated having Prime’s visual globe to watch shrink as I calmed myself — and to make sure it was actually responsive to my mental load, I intentionally flooded my brain with thoughts about all my deadlines and stressors (of which CES had many). The condensed ball started to expand a bit, presumably reacting to my exasperation. I didn’t tell Alcaide that I was doing it intentionally, and he chalked it up to the stress gamers might feel when getting close to breaking a record or clinching a match.
«So [Prime] helps you practice those moments and manage your emotion and your mental load so that when you’re actually doing it, you can do better,» Alcaide said. «All of that is to give you feedback on your brain because it’s so hard to feel it out yourself.»
That real-time feedback is the core of Neurable’s value proposition. While there’s obvious benefit for high-performance players like esports professionals who would seriously benefit from trimming 40ms off their response time, casual players could harness that feedback not to improve their gameplay, but their enjoyment. For gamers who don’t have much time to play, it can be hard to leave life’s stress behind and be mentally present during their leisure time.
«What if I can maximize the hour that I have, feel great 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?» Alcaide said. With Neurable, even players who aren’t concerned about their performance can recenter and enjoy the limited low-stakes play they can fit into their days.
Neurable’s pivot to measure gamer brains
Neurable was founded in 2016 as a research group at the University of Michigan and worked on brain-input in VR and AR before pivoting to BCIs in conventional wearables.
When considering «measuring brain activity,» I think of science fiction-style big metal cages that wrap around my cranium that connect to my forehead via big coin-sized conductors affixed to my skin with a dollop of gooey gel. Neurable’s been working on less onerous methods of measuring brain activity: using conductive stripes on the earcups of headphones, which take readings from other parts of the brain than the conductor-and-gel method (specifically, my frontal lobe through my ears). Then, Neurable’s software uses AI to infer similar data and extrapolate brain activity.
In that sense, they aren’t taking quite as accurate readings as the conductor-and-gel method, though they say they get close: in a validation paper reporting on a study done with the US Army, Neurable’s tech had a 90% correlation coefficient compared with conventional full-scalp electroencephalograms, getting the majority of the signal, Alcaide said. Plus, it doesn’t take as long — rather than sit for an hour waiting for my data to calibrate, Alcaide had me do a few simple exercises while wearing an over-ear headset to get preliminary readings that were matched with preexisting models.
Neurable says it has years of experience with Department of Defense contracts, specifically in researching the brain activity of military veterans. The company worked with the US Army to help develop its proprietary brain metrics to measure soldiers’ mental performance and developed its cognitive load algorithm while working with the Singapore Air Force, Alcaide said.
When I asked why they didn’t transition into a more conventional use for brain reading in tech, such as providing insights for accessories like health wearables, they said their pivot to gaming was organic. Many of the company’s staff are gamers themselves, playing intense games like the strategy title StarCraft 2, and examining player activity is a natural pivot.
Gamer health metrics are also a less proven field than generic health wearables, which are saturated with devices that track things like heart rate and blood pressure. In contrast, gamers are often tech-savvy enthusiasts who are early adopters of the next big technology. They spend a lot of money to get the hardware edge with faster graphics processing units and more RAM — it stands to reason that they’d want insights on how to improve the performance of their own fleshy processing, too.
If I had to guess, I’d expect gamers to prefer objective data about what’s going on in their brain rather than to get hints and tips from AI assistants watching their gameplay. But whether gamers understand and embrace Neurable’s proprietary brain metrics, like brain battery and focus, is tough to predict. These measurements are created by the company, and players will have to adapt to understanding what they mean.
For instance, if they see their brain battery is low, will they stop playing for the day? If they notice their focus meter indicates they’re stressed and angry (or in gamer parlance, «tilted»), will they take a break to cool down?
How measuring gamer brains can lead to more mental performance insights
Neurable’s big focus is on bringing brain insights to gamers through tried-and-true headphones, but it’s worked toward other formats. In its recent work for the US Department of Defense, it used helmet-mounted brain scanning to measure microtraumatic brain injuries when in the vicinity of explosive blasts. It’s something that could be integrated into consumer products, like measuring impacts in sports.
What it is enthusiastic about is bringing brain scanning to products other than over-ear headphones. In fact, Neurable researcher Howell-Munson prefers earbuds so much that it’s already figured out how to integrate the company’s brain-scanning tech into that gadget category, but is waiting for a partnership with the right device-maker.
While earbuds are likely their next frontier, Neurable is also looking into applying its tech to smart glasses, too — presumably, the company could use the stems and ear hooks as conductive surfaces to read brain activity. That’s even less surface area touching the head than the earcups of headphones, so it leads me to wonder how good its AI models can be to accurately extrapolate brain activity from potentially limited data.
Bringing brain scanning to earbuds also makes me wonder about getting those mental insights in other parts of my everyday life, beyond the computer desk. Jessica Randazza-Pade, Neurable’s vice president of marketing, noted that the insights could be helpful in her competitive races; I’ve got a half-marathon coming up in a couple of weeks, where reminders of my slipping mental focus could help me zone back in during my long run. I’ve already got plenty of fitness metrics that my Apple Watch Ultra feeds me, but they can only tell me so much about my circulation and blood oxygen — not so much about when my mental stress spikes and it’s time to take a slow, chill break.
With only a few minutes of testing Neurable’s brain activity visualization tech, I can’t speak to the future it’s working toward — only that I feel a lot of gamers would want to try it out for themselves. Whether that comes sooner or later depends on one of the biggest computer accessory companies on the market, Alcaide teased: Before players can actually get their hands on Neurable’s brain-scanning-while-gaming software, «We need to close our negotiations with HP,» he said.
