Ich habe im Rahmen der NEXT12, die Co-Gründerin und Direktorin von MindGames, Deepa Iyengar, einmal zu dem Projekt interviewt. MindGames hat die ersten gedanken-kontrollierten iPhone- und iPad-Spiele wie z.B. 28 Spoons Later und W.I.L.D entwickelt. Wie die Spielhandhabung funktioniert und wie die Idee zu dem Projekt entstanden ist, erzählt uns Deepa in diesem Gespräch, welches wir heute einmal im Originalton in englischer Sprache veröffentlichen.

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So, Deepa, you tell me a little bit about your background in cognitive neuroscience and how MindGames started.

Well, I took a masters degree some years back at MIT in their brain and cognitive sciences department. That's a good department if you have a wide interest in the area because they've got people all the way from psychology to going into monkey's brains. My field was cognitive neuroscience, which is interdisciplinary. But what I worked on was habit learning and trying to understand how habit learning works in the brains of rats. Not how the learning process works, but where is the brain activity that has correlates with habit learning.

How did MindGames start?

Well after MIT I went to art school (laughing) for a little while. I think that might have something to do with it. About three years back I first heard about these kind of technologies that were becoming commercial for ordinary people and these brain-controlling technologies. And it was really just a vision that happened. I thought, well, I'd really love to play a video game, maybe like Myst or something, but where I have to solve some of the puzzles say by relaxing to open up a new path or something. And that's really how I got the idea. It just came in sort of a vision after hearing about this technology. Then when I looked back I said, ok, but the idea of playing a game to learn something is about trying to learn a habit in a fun. And maybe that really connects back to school.

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