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This week, neurotech startup Neurable launched its MW75 Neuro headphones with a pretty seductive pitch—one that I’m not quite buying.
Just slip on this pair of headphones, and you’ll gain unprecedented access to your brain’s inner workings. Track your focus. Measure your mental fatigue. Quantify your cognitive performance. It’s supposed to be the quantified-self movement’s next frontier—moving from steps and heart rates to the most intimate data source of all: your brainwaves.
If you ask me, a pair of headphones that can read your mind sounds either too good to be true, or too creepy to be good. Neurable doesn’t plan to stop at headphones, and they aren’t the only company making a name in the space. Glasses, helmets, what have you—the next wave of wearable devices are targeting the brain. Whether you find it tempting or find it terrifying, the real question: Is this technology even real? Can “brain tracking” headphones actually measure anything meaningful, or are people paying $499 for an elaborate placebo wrapped in EEG sensors?
Unsurprisingly, the answers are a little wrinkly.
What are brain wearables in theory?
The concept behind brain wearables is this: Using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors embedded in headphone ear cups, devices like Neurable’s MW75 Neuro claim to track electrical signals from your brain, translating them into actionable insights about your mental state. The headphones promise to tell you when you’re losing focus, when you need a break, and even provide a “cognitive snapshot” of your brain health over time.
For the wellness-obsessed, it’s pretty much catnip. Where fitness trackers gave us visibility into our physical states, brain wearables promise to illuminate the black box of our mental performance. In theory, you could optimize not just your workout routine, but your work-work routine, catching burnout before it catches you.
The problem, according to experts across technology law and neuroscience, is that we’re nowhere near ready for this technology to become mainstream—neither from a regulatory standpoint nor a scientific one. Let’s start with the science.
How does the science of brain wearables hold up?
Before getting into the fairly obvious privacy nightmare, there’s a fundamental question about whether these devices can actually deliver on their promises.
José M. Muñoz, an associate at The Centre for Neurotechnology and Law in the United Kingdom and the International Center for Neuroscience and Ethics in Spain, is blunt in his assessment: “For years, there has been an ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness, accuracy, and challenges of direct-to-consumer neurotechnologies such as this new device from Neurable,” he explains. “Although it is true that the algorithms analyzing brain data collected via EEG are steadily improving, this remains a neurotechnology that is still insufficiently accurate outside of a medical or clinical setting.”
The problems are both technical and practical. EEG data quality is extremely sensitive to electrode placement—sometimes within a range of millimeters. When users place these sensors themselves, without medical supervision, their reliability plummets. Moreover, the most accurate EEG studies use far more electrodes than the handful embedded in a pair of headphones.
“In sum, you may be wearing these headphones and believing they are helping to improve your mental health, physical performance, or attention,” Muñoz says. “But what you are really improving are the manufacturer’s algorithms, while handing over your brain data in exchange for very little.”
In other words, it’s the tech tale old as time: You’re not the customer being served by this technology. You’re the data source training it.
Dr. Annu Navani offers a more measured perspective. She acknowledges that brain wearables have “significant limitations, including being currently expensive, less clinically validated, and less convenient or comfortable than wrist-worn trackers.” The metrics they provide are also harder to translate into practical guidance—most people intuitively understand what to do with their step count, but what action should you take when your “cognitive load score” hits 73?
Rather than replacing traditional fitness trackers, Navani believes brain wearables will likely “complement rather than replace conventional devices, targeting a niche of users interested in cognitive and neuro-performance insights.” Traditional wearables, she points out, still provide reliable, validated data for basic health metrics that users can easily understand and apply.
Who is really reading your mind here?
Think about it (and hey, maybe relish in the fact that no headphones are successfully reading those thoughts): Your brainwave data is arguably the most intimate biometric information you possess. We’re talking about a window into your mental and emotional states. So what happens when you willingly give up this data with no meaningful oversight?
“I hope brain wearables are not the future of fitness tracking, or any industry, at least certainly not yet and not any time soon,” says Star Kashman, a technology attorney and founding partner of a cyber law firm. “We are still somehow facing a complete lack of federal regulation in the U.S. when it comes to biometric data, data privacy law, and minimal to no cybersecurity standards for these devices, and no protective regulations for users.”
The implications are stark: “What happens when a ‘brain wearable’ is hacked?” Kashman asks. The lack of regulation means users have little recourse and limited knowledge about how their neural data is being stored, used, or potentially sold.
Regulation aside, individual consumers do still have their own privacy concerns. The sort of consumer ready to spend hundreds of dollars on headphones might just be the same type of person who is uncomfortable with constant surveillance. “Unless someone is so obsessed with optimizing their fitness journey that they ignore the serious risks present, I just do not see this becoming the norm anytime soon,” Kashman notes. Just look at Meta’s push for smart glasses. The tech has got to be good and ready before consumers are going to drop hundreds of dollars and risk their most private bodily information.
The bottom line
So, simply put, at the time of this publication, asked with my own private brain waves: Are brain wearables the future of fitness tracking? Almost certainly not in the way their manufacturers hope. The technology is too immature, the regulatory landscape too barren, and consumer wariness too high for these devices to start popping up like Fitbits tomorrow.
I’d say what we’re witnessing instead is the familiar pattern of the wellness industry: a genuine technological development (EEG monitoring does work in controlled settings!) being prematurely commercialized and marketed with promises that totally outstrip the reality. The result is an expensive product that may provide some users with interesting data, but likely offers more placebo than breakthrough.
For now, brain wearables occupy an awkward position: too invasive for casual users, too unproven for serious applications, and too unregulated to trust. They may have a future, but it’s not this one—not until the science catches up to the marketing, and the law catches up to both.
Until then, your regular fitness tracker measuring your heart rate and steps? That’s probably telling you more useful information about your health than any headphones reading your brainwaves ever could.
