HyperX and Neurable Are Trying To Make Your Brain Better At Gaming

If you're thing similar me, you've been successful countless situations wherever your raid person is yelling astatine you to "focus up" and "pay attention". It's thing I've ever struggled with, but astatine CES 2026, Neurable and HyperX person a conception gaming headset that mightiness spell immoderate ways towards fixing that problem.

The gaming headset itself doesn't truly person a sanction yet, fixed that it's inactive successful its alpha phase, but what it has sensors successful the earpads that tin work your brainwaves, to way things similar accent levels, absorption and cognitive load. And what you're capable to bash with that information is wherever the existent imaginable is.

Brain-Powered Gaming

When I tried connected this prototype headset successful Las Vegas, Neurable CEO Ramses Alcaide and Research Scientist Dr. Alicia Howell-Munson had maine bash a tally connected Human Benchmark's Aim Trainer to get a baseline speechmaking of my effect time. I got a people of astir 605ms – I ne'er said I was bully astatine shooters. But aft that archetypal run, they opened up a programme that projected a clump of dots rotating successful a signifier that someway represented my brain.

The goal, really, was to condense the dots down into a tiny focused ellipse by relaxing and hard-focusing connected something, to fundamentally wide retired my head. I sat backmost successful the chair, took a heavy enactment and focused. And, well, I didn't rather get to the "pure focus" constituent that's intended. After all, it's CES, it's benignant of hard to absorption connected immoderate one thing close now.

But I did win successful making the brain-dot-galaxy-thing smaller, which I'll instrumentality arsenic a tiny win. Then, aft going done that process I was told to instrumentality the Aim Trainer trial again, wherever I ended up with a somewhat amended people of 559ms. That's an 8% betterment – not the best, but again, this wasn't successful the astir perfect environment.

How Does It Work?

Traditionally, EEG sensors that way your encephalon waves person been these big, bulky, subject fabrication looking things, that you'd typically find successful a infirmary oregon laboratory. But implicit the past 14 years, Neurable has been moving connected a mode to shrink that exertion down to thing that tin beryllium worked into headphones. This gaming headset isn't the archetypal clip Neurable has done this, either. In 2024, the institution teamed up with Master & Dynamic to marque the MW75 Neuro LT, accepted headphones with the aforesaid EEG technology.

Those headphones were focused much connected improving productivity, but the halfway conception is similar. Sensors successful the earpads prime up EEG signals from your brain, which you tin usage to bid yourself to absorption better.

Usually, conscionable having immoderate sensors successful the earpads wouldn't beryllium capable to prime up signals from each implicit your brain, and this Neurable headset is nary different. Instead, it picks up the signals it tin work from the sides of your caput and uses an AI algorithm to infer enactment elsewhere successful your brain. It's imperfect and astir apt not medically accurate, but for the intent of grooming yourself to focus, it's a bully spot to start.

Neither Neurable nor HyperX has announced thing adjacent to a merchandise date, terms oregon adjacent whether oregon not this volition really marque it to market. But if there's a headset that tin assistance maine absorption aft 3 hours of progression raiding, I'm astatine slightest interested.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor astatine IGN and the PC components queen. You tin travel her @Jackiecobra