This article was taken from the February 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Writing poetry is no easy task -- first you have to transform your thoughts into words and then you have to express them within a rigid, rhythmic framework. Israeli poet and engineer Eran Hadas decided to make it easier: he built a tool that can read your brainwaves and generate poetry that reflects your thoughts. "As a software developer who writes poetry, I try to combine technology and verse all the time," says Hadas, whose latest book of poems was published in July 2013. "When I heard about the ability of the NeuroSky headset to get direct inputs from the brain, I knew I wanted to use it to write poetry." Built over two weekends at a hackathon on the Google Campus in Tel Aviv, the Mind Your Poem project uses the EEG headset to measure concentration, meditation and arousal.
An algorithm analyses the data to determine which emotion is most dominant to decide what type of poem to write. If none of the emotion levels reaches a certain threshold, the algorithm will register the user's state of mind as "idle".
For each emotion, Hadas generated 15 sentence-templates. "For a meditative poem, the algorithm fills the sentences with words to do with nature; for concentration, the words are related to city life," he explains. Aroused users get words related to the body and body positions. For the idle, it generates gibberish, telling the user they have to "feel" more strongly. "The project could fit into a science museum, but it creates art," says Hadas. "That's what I think technology is like, too -- it's valuable and necessary, but should also add to life, like art does."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
