The Prodigal Pervert Returns
Hello again, Internet.
You may remember me as the idiot who strapped a children's toy to their head and thought, "Yes. You know what this needs? A direct connection to some vibrators."
It's been a few years since what was then called Project Neurokink went quiet - ADHD bites even the most noble scientific pursuits, it seems - but I've been remembering when I was that lunatic who was trying to make telepathic orgasm control a reality. Well, I'm still here, still in possession of both my engineering skills and my questionable judgment, and I think it's time to dust off the old EEG headset.
Oh, and it has a new name. Project Neurakink. Yes, with an 'a'. Look, if Elon Musk can put chips in people's brains with Neuralink to make them play chess with their thoughts, surely I can strap a gadget to someone's head to control a vibrator.
Mine's - admittedly arguably - more useful to society anyway.
Yes, Alright, Let's Talk About The Name
"Neurakink"?
The project was called Project Neurokink when it started, maybe ten years ago, before going on hiatus. It's been long enough that I want to give it a new name to represent its resurrection.
I settled on Neurakink, to riff on Elon Musk's most dystopian money-laundering scheme product yet. And that man knows dystopian.
I had another name. The project was going to be called the Sensor-Quantified Universal Intensity Regulation Tool. Project S.Q.U.I.R.T. for short. I am an adult.
But, in the end, I settled on Neurakink for three reasons:
- It's snappier.
- It might piss Elon Musk off.
- Fuck you.
Now, I'm quite aware than point 2 comes with the possible result of a cease & desist from some law firm with an improbably long name.
Thing is, though, I'm not making any claims that would lead me to be confused with Musk's ventures. I'd need to check with a lawyer, but I could likely ignore it because I'm not passing off.
But if that happens - worst case scenario - I'll check with said lawyer, who will probably tell me that Musk's people have big enough sticks that actual reality ceases to be legal reality, and switch to Plan B. Project S.Q.U.I.R.T. will rise where Neurakink fell.
Until then, though, Neurakink it is.
Turning a Children's Toy Into an Tormentor
For those just joining us (welcome, you delightfully curious perverts), let me explain what happens when you give an engineer with too much free time access to a Mattel MindFlex game. You see, beneath its family-friendly exterior beats the heart of a surprisingly sophisticated EEG sensor from NeuroSky. And where most people saw a novelty game about floating foam balls with your thoughts, I saw... possibilities.
You see, while the NeuroSky chipset in use produces an "attention" metric which the game uses, it can also be persuaded with the creative application of an Arduino to output raw EEG data. It's only a single channel, but thoughts began to race.
Specifically, I saw the possibility of creating sex toys that could read your mind. Not in a creepy "knows your PIN number" way, but in a "knows when you're about to climax and stops just to be difficult" way. The technical term is "edging," though I prefer "automated frustration delivery system."
The initial system just uses a vibrator, and only uses on/off states. Future changes could include varying the strength of the vibrator - the Lovense Lush both springs to mind as appropriate and is in my arsenal - as well as adding other transducers like an e-stim unit, like my finest purchase, the venerable ET-312B which might be discontinued, but has never been beaten.
The Prototype Which Looked Like a Cry for Help
The original prototype was a thing of beauty - if your definition of beauty includes exposed wiring, dubious electrical safety, and a headset that made you look like you were auditioning for a particularly low-budget episode of Doctor Who. I connected it to a vibrator, wrote some code that would make my computer science professors weep, and set about trying to map what an orgasm looks like to a machine that was designed to detect whether eight-year-olds were concentrating on a floating ball.
Turns out, climaxing and concentrating on a foam sphere produce surprisingly different brainwave patterns. Who knew?
Beyond Basic Bastardry
The applications, as I discovered through extensive "research," were rather broader than just the evil edge-and-denial system I'd initially envisioned. Picture this: long-distance relationships where you could literally feel your partner's arousal levels from across the globe. Sex toys that learn your patterns better than you know them yourself. BDSM scenes where the dominant doesn't even need to touch the controls - just think particularly stern thoughts.
Of course, there were challenges. Mapping pleasure responses across different brains is like trying to write universal directions to Narnia - everyone's wardrobe is slightly different. The sensor needed training, the software needed refinement, and I needed to stop giggling every time I explained the project to someone new.
Also, AI didn't exist. Love it or hate it, multidimensional pattern matching like this is Tuesday to even the simplest model. All I need to do is, uh, learn how you train a model. I'm sure it'll be simple.
Help.
A Decade Is A Long Time In Product Releases
Now, you might be wondering if I'm still strapping a children's foam-ball-floating game to people's heads in 2025. The answer is... well, yes, but only out of nostalgia and stubbornness. Turns out the EEG hardware market has exploded like my first prototype did that one time we don't talk about.
Turns out that you can get proper brain-reading kit for less than a grand these days.
There's NeuroSky's MindWave at £103, which is basically what I was hacking but without the voided warranty. OpenBCI will sell you completely open-source gear where you can fiddle with every last bit - literally - for about £500. They're the Linux of brain interfaces, if Linux required you to attach electrodes to your skull.
Then there's Emotiv, who make lovely hardware but apparently believe your brainwaves are a subscription service. £789 for the headset, then £118 per month just to access your own neural data. It's like buying a car then paying monthly to use the steering wheel. I admire the audacity, really.
The story behind the Muse headband is particularly entertaining - it's meant for meditation but the company discontinued their SDK, so now everyone reverse-engineers it to get the raw data out. Nothing says "inner peace" quite like hacking your own meditation device to make it control a vibrator.
For those with deeper pockets and fewer scruples about looking ridiculous, there's the 8-channel g.tec Unicorn at £850. It's "research-grade," which is code for "you can publish papers with this and reviewers won't laugh." Though they might still laugh when they find out what you're researching.
The truly ambitious can get 32 channels for about £850 with the FreeEEG32, though you'll need to stack electrodes on top of that. Thirty-two channels! The original MindFlex had one. That's like going from a kazoo to a symphony orchestra, except the symphony is playing the song of your junk. Minor problem: they're no longer selling the boards, but the whole product is open source with the design files on GitHub so it remains just about within the realm of possibility.
The only flaw, really, is that I'm unemployed and can barely pay my hosting bill. But these options go on my list of incredibly shiny shit to purchase if I have a windfall, and I can still develop with the good old MindFlex.
The Second Coming (Pun Absolutely Intended)
So why am I bringing this all back now? Well, partly because the technology has improved dramatically since 2015, partly because I miss the delightful emails from people offering to help with "testing," and partly because I've never quite shaken the feeling that the world needs more ridiculous sex-tech projects run by people who are just clever enough to be dangerous.
Project Neurakink is coming back. The headset is ready, the code is being resurrected from whatever digital grave I buried it in, and I'm ready to once again walk that fine line between innovation and insanity.
At some point, I'll start looking for volunteers again (now based in Swansea instead of London, but Welsh people are just damaged enough to be interested). If you have ideas about what one could do with brain-controlled sex toys (that won't land me on a watchlist), I'd love to hear those too. Equally, if you want to cover the project, I'd be happy to answer any questions.
You can find my email address on dave.io. It checks that you're human first, but that shouldn't get in the way of, you know, actual humans. No CAPTCHAs to solve, anyway.
After all, someone needs to be asking the important questions. Like: "What happens when you give a vibrator the ability to read minds?"
I suppose we're about to find out.
Again.