Up in a hotel room during CES 2026, I sat down at a gaming laptop to play a target-practice program. After testing my first-person shooter skills, I put on headphones lined with capacitive bands that read my brain activity, and on the laptop screen, a visualization of my mental stress slowly diminished as I did some relaxed breathing. I tried the target practice again and, voila, I did better.
Neurable, the company behind the software, has been scanning brains for a decade to research soldiers' brain activity for the US Army. The company recently released its brain-computer interfaces as over-ear headphones like the ones I wore. But at this year's CES, it showcased a new frontier for their research: improving gamers' performance by showing their brain activity during intense play sessions.
It's part of a larger trend toward software and hardware designed to elevate gameplay. But unlike other solutions, like Microsoft's Copilot for Gaming and Razer's Project Ava, which act like AI assistants to help you through a tough level, Neurable's insights to gamers don't rely on AI that watches how you play. Instead, it shows players what's happening in their brains so they can refocus and improve their gameplay.
Neurable isn't releasing the software powering these brain insights -- Prime and Broadcast -- publicly. Instead, it's looking for partners to pair that software with products that have BCI contacts built in, like the Master & Dynamic headphones I wore. While those come with focus-tracking and brain-health features that tell you when to take breaks, neither of them, nor the Neurable-powered HyperX headphones announced at CES 2026, has the full brain-scanning-while-gaming software that I was pitched.
Neurable's purpose and design are intriguing. Who doesn't want brain insights to improve their gaming performance? But it depends on which companies partner with Neurable to release gadgets using their conductive tech. Ideally, the company wants every Neurable device to have access to all the focus-tracking, mental performance software it releases.
Neurable's partnership with HP will result in HyperX branded headsets with capacitive bands striped on the earcups. Neurable
A quick sample of brain-training for better gaming
Neurable's biggest goal with gamers is to reduce their cognitive load by visualizing it, both in warmups and in the middle of tense matches. I experienced the former in person, but only saw screenshot examples for the latter, which is implemented in software called Broadcast. That platform brings up additional gauges on-screen that let players see how their brain is doing if they're frustrated or just need a moment to chill out. Both software proposals will seemingly be finalized when Neurable finds a company to partner up with to make a bespoke BCI-packing product (headphones, earbuds, smart glasses or otherwise).
"We essentially are able to help you visualize those kinds of things, like focus, your cognitive load and what's impacting you, and then be able to not only provide you the feedback, but then also enable you to provide [it] to your streaming [viewers]," said Ramses Alcaide, co-founder and CEO of Neurable.
Neurable has refined its warm-up procedure that preps gamer brains for better performance: its Prime software, which I experienced in the Vegas hotel room. Its simple improvement circuit had me trying out the Gridshot exercise in the popular target practice software Aimlabs, in which I shot randomly appearing spheres for a full minute. Then I popped open Prime, which measured my brain activity and visualized it as a large globe of interconnected dots that slowly shrank as I manually calmed my breathing. After that, I tried Gridshot again, and my overall score improved around 4,000 points, my reaction time went down by 44 milliseconds, and I shot 10 more targets -- a solid improvement.
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