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Bowling With Brain WavesMindball, the new game where you move a ball with your mind.

By Daniel EngberPosted Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2006, at 3:52 PM ET

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Playing MindballThe Mindball headband comes with no such controls. The location of the electrodes and the quality of the connection depends on how you happen to put it on. (Women who slide it over bangs, for example, will have a layer of hair between the metal and their skin.) The machine doesn't even have a way of testing the contacts, though it would be easy enough to build in such a monitor.

Even if the connections were stable, there might be other problems. Not everyone has the same baseline alpha and theta activity. Some people could have naturally stronger signals, whether they're Zen monks or nervous Nellies. And there's no way to know what the machine is actually recording, since the "data" on the video display are more impressionistic than informative. The graphs are flipped, for one thing—with higher alpha and theta activity represented as lower values. There's also a conspicuous absence of numbers or units of measurement.

When I asked a Mindball marketing rep about these issues, I was told that it's "just a game." The manufacturers won't give out any information about the quality of the signals or the raw data that are produced. It's an entertainment product, after all, so why can't I just relax and enjoy it?

The Swedes who created the prototype for Mindball—called Brainball—aren't any more helpful. "The emptiness of Brainball makes it open to interpretation and reflection on what it is and how to use it," writes one of its inventors in an impenetrable essay that cites both Jacques Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

But institutions aren't laying out $20,000 for conceptual art. Seven North American science museums have already purchased Mindball systems, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point bought one to train cadets on "optimal attentional focus for peak performance." Not even the Army could wrest any specific technical information from the manufacturers. If we want to train our troops with Mindball, we're just going to have to trust that it works.

The crowd in the Wired store didn't seem too concerned with these technical issues. The system's flaws weren't subtle—it was plain to see, for example, that the player who happened to be sitting on the left won nine out of every 10 games. But players on the right still closed their eyes and gripped the sides of the table, trying in vain to squeeze out enough brain waves for a victory. Even a trained meditator with fingers flexed in Mudra poses couldn't catch a break; he got his butt kicked over and over by a distractible 6-year-old.

It's easy to believe in Mindball because it's a two-person game. Since there's always someone else hooked into the system, it's impossible to connect what's going on inside your head with what happens to the ball. Sure, I won a match while doing mental arithmetic—but my opponent might have been doing calculus. In that sense, the game is like a high-tech version of Ouija: When everyone puts their hands on the board, it starts to feel like magic.

Mindball isn't magic, though, and it should work. You really can use surface electrodes to measure alpha and theta waves, and they really do reflect a certain state of mind. There's no reason why we can't go head-to-head in relaxation, so long as the game is set up in the right environment, with a technician to monitor the electrodes and calibrate the machine.

Will you ever find a working Mindball? The machine has been marketed for trade shows, product expos, and mall lobbies—exactly the sorts of chaotic places where it's least likely to function. It's a real shame, too. If Mindball were running smoothly, I'm sure it would be a blast.