NEW YORK – Drinking coffee and listening to music can impact a person’s brain activity in order to improve cognitive performance: this is the foundation of the new NYU Tandon School of Engineering study involving Mindwatch, a groundbreaking brain-monitoring technology. The study was reported by Neuroscience News.
The benefits of drinking coffee and listening to music
Mindwatch is a complex algorithm that is specialized in analyzing brain activity from data collected via any wearable advice that can monitor electrodermal activity (EDA). It was developed over the past six years by NYU Tandon’s Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor Rose Faghih.
In this new study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, people wearing skin-monitoring wristbands and brain-monitoring headbands completed cognitive tests while drinking coffee, listening to music, and sniffing perfumes that reflect their preferences. The tests were also completed without any of those stimulants.
Mindwatch came to the conclusion that the stimulants (coffee, music, and perfumes) triggered increased “beta band” brain wave activity, a state associated with peak cognitive performance.
“The pandemic has impacted the mental well-being of many people across the globe, and now more than ever, there is a need to seamlessly monitor the negative impact of everyday stressors on one’s cognitive function,” said Faghih as reported in Neuro Science News. Right now Mindwatch is still under development, but our eventual goal is that it will contribute to the technology that could allow any person to monitor his or her own brain cognitive arousal in real-time, detecting moments of acute stress or cognitive disengagement, for example.”
The specific test was a working memory task and it involved the presentation of a sequence of stimuli one by one and then asking the person taking the test to establish if the current stimulus matches the one presented “n” items back in the sequence.
This study employed a 1-back test and a more challenging 3-back test, asking the same for three items back.
Drinking coffee showed notable but less-pronounced performance gains compared to music. Perfume, on the other hand, had the less notable impact.
The research was performed as a part of Faghih’s work on the Multimodal Intelligent Noninvasive brain state Decoder for Wearable AdapTive Closed-loop arcHitectures (Mindwatch) project.
