Neurofeedback Review: Emotiv Epoc/Insight

This is another hands-on review of a neurofeedback system, written from an independent position with no financial stake in the product. The Emotiv Epoc/Insight is a newer consumer-oriented dry sensor unit, running roughly $300 to $400 for the 5-channel version. First impressions are good: it looks great, feels modern, and seems built by people who care about industrial design. Once you actually try to use it for neurofeedback, though, the performance falls apart. Badly.

I'd put this closer to a novelty or a toy than a working training tool, something a curious kid might enjoy poking at for fun. Part of the problem is that the unit won't even hand you the raw EEG data. My guess is they can't, because the signal is swamped with artifact from muscle tension and movement, and they have no clean way to filter it out into something usable for training.

For gamers and people who collect gadgets, there may be some appeal here. But it does not perform at the level of systems in the $1,200-and-up category. As of 2017, buying a neurofeedback unit priced under $1,200 is a real gamble, and you may end up with something that cannot do meaningful training at all.

The marketing calls it a dry sensor headset. Put it on your scalp and you find out quickly that it barely picks up any electrical signal. Even its own limited sensors failed to register contact with the skin. The package did include a saline solution, which tech support told me was meant to be used only when necessary. That framing is a mistake on their end. If saline is what it takes to get a reading, they should have called it a saline system from the start, and I wouldn't have gone in expecting something dry. Worse, the saline had leaked throughout the box by the time I opened it, and the damp interior eventually turned into a little bacterial garden.

Credit where it's due: the company is trying to build an affordable consumer EEG, and they're getting more people curious about this kind of technology. The hardware simply isn't sophisticated enough yet to produce real EEG recordings or usable neurofeedback.

The software gives you a set of metrics that appear to be averages pulled from whatever the amplifier manages to capture. You never get the raw EEG. Instead they invented their own labels: Interest, Engagement, Focus, Relaxation, Instantaneous Excitement, and Long-Term Excitement. None of these are operationally defined, so they carry no weight in scientific research. In practice, the only readings that tracked with anything real were Relaxation and Excitation, and both of those you could capture more cheaply with a basic Galvanic Skin Response sensor.

Neurofeedback is still a young method for monitoring, recording, and training brainwave activity, including the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Theta, and Delta bands. The point of writing about it is to help more people understand how the practice works and what it can and cannot do.

Most people come to this looking for a fix to some problem. That's harder than it sounds, because training your attention, steadying your emotional state, and reaching deep relaxation or high energy on demand are skills you have to build first. Mindfulness, meditation, and deliberate neuro-training are worth studying for exactly that reason.