Brain Waves

Purpose

Used a Muse EEG headband to record my own brainwaves during a wide range of activities, stored the data in this repo, and analyzed it following an Azure data course. The goal was pure curiosity: what does my brain actually do during different states? The answer was more interesting than expected.

Stack

What I Learned

• EEG (electroencephalography) measures electrical activity on the scalp produced by the brain. The Muse headband is a consumer-grade EEG with 4-7 sensors that captures five frequency bands: Delta (0.5-4 Hz, deep sleep), Theta (4-8 Hz, drowsiness, meditation), Alpha (8-13 Hz, relaxed awareness), Beta (13-30 Hz, active thinking, focus), and Gamma (30-100 Hz, higher cognitive processing, perception binding, peak experience). Each band tells a different story about what the brain is doing.
• The recording sessions covered a wide range of states: herbal recreation (elevated theta and alpha — relaxed, dreamy), playing bongos (strong beta and gamma — rhythmic engagement, motor coordination, flow state), scrolling TikTok (erratic beta — constant attention-switching, no sustained engagement pattern), meditation (deep alpha and theta — the expected result), focused work (steady beta — sustained attention), and orgasm.
• The gamma spike during orgasm was the most striking finding. Gamma waves (30-100 Hz) are associated with higher-order cognitive processing, cross-modal perception binding (the brain linking information across senses), and moments of insight or peak experience. During orgasm, gamma activity spiked dramatically and clearly above baseline — a visible electrical signature of peak experience. This is consistent with published neuroscience research that links gamma to moments of intense unified awareness.
• The TikTok scrolling data was the inverse of the orgasm data — and almost as revealing. Instead of a clear spike in any band, the pattern was noisy: rapid fluctuations in beta (attention engaging and disengaging every few seconds), no sustained alpha or theta (no relaxation or depth), and minimal gamma (no peak processing). The brain was busy but not deep. Active but not engaged. It was the electrical signature of the variable reinforcement pattern discussed in the NumberPicker and carousel entries.
• Following the Azure data course for analysis taught basic data pipeline skills: ingesting CSV/JSON from the Muse app, cleaning the data (removing artifacts, normalizing across sessions), visualizing band power over time (matplotlib), and computing simple statistics (average band power per activity, peak detection). The tools were standard data science — the dataset was personal.

Key Insights

• Recording your own brainwaves is the most visceral form of self-auditing in this blog. The Who Am I entry asked the question philosophically. Brain Waves answered it electrically. You are, measurably, a different person when you are playing bongos vs. scrolling TikTok. The data does not lie. The gamma spike during peak experience and the noisy beta during mindless scrolling are quantified evidence of what you already intuitively know: some activities feed you and some drain you.
• Neuroscience as a hobby gives you a different relationship with technology. Knowing what TikTok does to your brainwaves — not theoretically, but from your own EEG data — changes how you build products. The infinite scroll discussion in the carousel entry was philosophical. This data makes it physiological. The NumberPicker entry discussed the slot machine effect on the nervous system. This data shows the nervous system's actual response. Evidence changes conviction.
• Consumer EEG devices (Muse, Emotiv, OpenBCI) have made neuroscience accessible to anyone curious enough to strap sensors to their head. The data quality is lower than clinical-grade equipment, but it is good enough to see clear patterns across different states. For a developer interested in how humans interact with technology, this is primary research you can do on yourself for under $300.
• The gamma spike during orgasm is not just a fun data point — it connects to the broader question of what peak experience actually is at the neurological level. Gamma waves have been recorded during deep meditation in experienced practitioners, during musical improvisation in jazz musicians, and during moments of creative insight. The common thread: the brain briefly operating at an elevated level of integrated processing. The experiences that produce gamma are the experiences worth designing for — in products, in games, in content, in life.