Hey, no problem. Not trying to "prime" you here, this is just how I talk. I'm not that strategic. If you think it would help, I'd be happy to get on a call/skype? I just feel like there's some miscommunication going on here and I'd like to clear it up if I can.

1) Research:

I responded to your other comment with some research links. Here they are again just in case:
https://www.brain.fm/pdfs/ResearchLibrary.pdf
https://www.brain.fm/pdfs/ElioConteHRVandBWE.pdf
https://www.brain.fm/pdfs/EEGFocusAnalysis.pdf
https://www.brain.fm/pdfs/EEGSleepAnalysis.pdf
More on our site as well, and we are working on the bibliography still. Some of it won't relate directly to your questions, such as the slow-wave stuff, because it's meant to be a general reference for what we're doing as a whole.

2) Pretty Charts:

The pretty charts you see are direct copies of the EEG analysis by Giovanni. We did try to make them pretty, but if you're interested in the originals check out the analyses Giovanni did. He'll be on at some point to explain them further if you want to direct some questions to him directly.

3) Your study procedure recommendation

Regarding your study procedure recommendation, that's a great idea. We did something very similar to that in the Focus analysis above. 3 conditions: No Music - Music Without Stimulation (placebo) - Music With Stimulation. To the untrained ear, the music was indistinguishable. Most people can't tell which is which, and the feedback we got from the subjects confirmed it. It was actually really interesting: some of them asked to be able to keep the placebo-music (not calling it that, obviously), saying they worked better on it, when their results often told a different story.

Next study will be double blind and have more subjects. Giovanni feels we have enough information now to do it right.

So, someone above asked about the AI thing and I'm happy to explain it. I'll paste a lot of that below. Although I have to say I'm not sure what textbooks are calling anything these days. When I talk to programmers right out of college sometimes there's a bit of confusion as they talk about patterns I know, but use different names. I grew up programming on an 8088, and I've been working for myself for 13 years, mostly by myself, so I'm sure I'm behind on a lot of things.

Having said that, I'd probably call what I'm doing "Emergent" because there are many competing little pieces. Let's see if I can explain it quickly here, though please don't be too hard on me I'm trying my best to answer a lot of questions, but I'm really happy to go more into later after all this dies down :) Conceptually, you could think of it as first creating what I'll call "song-bot", which acts a kind of overlord, and has some instructions from me (like maybe there's some specific chords I want it to use, keys to avoid, tempo, brainwave protocols, genre, etc, etc). This song-bot guy then spawns a bunch of little other bots that compete with each other for the right to play/fade in/or generally be a part of the final result. These little guys have different characteristics, like a "drum-bot" might has different places it "wants" to be placed, and so generally competes with other drums, but not always. Sometimes I'll even have little "bots" for individual notes of a certain instrument. They obey certain rules of course, to form a background, drum line, or a simple melody, and then they pass that information along to subsequent incarnations (there's some learning involved in that process, though I hesitate to give it any textbook term - man, you have me terrified here of defining something wrong! :) ). Through that learning, the pattern the original little guys made has more weight and will tend to repeat. But again, not always.

After a while, out of all these smaller, simple processes form a very complex song. Complexity "emerges." So I call it a kind of "emergent intelligence."

The resulting song can be quite complex and varied. Of course there's more to it, because songs have sections and clever variance, but all in all the genres I'm using are very structured. Techno especially, is very easy for the AI. Sometimes I'm tasked with creating a theme in a particularly difficult genre, and that's when it gets really tricky/fun (such as some of the Indian ones, which were labors of love). In these cases, I may have to re-rerun many "generations" of the AI through the same song from beginning to end, with different parameters/instruments, but with the same patterns/learning, because what can happen in these cases is that it starts out simple, and increases in complexity as it goes, so the start can sometimes be a bit boring.

Also keep in mind this is just a conceptual explanation. The code is much less amusing. Thinking of naming processes "bots" just for fun though.

I hope I explained it OK. Listen, I'm not saying it's Watson or anything, or even that I'm following the definition of "emergent intelligence." I didn't go to a textbook to make this, it's really just a necessary step I had to take in order to make the computer do what I wanted it to do. I tried out some different ideas, and this one worked the best, in my opinion at least.

- Adam from Brain.fm