A neurotechnology company has just released a new headset device that claims to improve “cognitive fitness” by scanning and training users’ brains. The device, called Athena, is being marketed by Muse as enabling customers to “Future-Proof Your Brain”, enhance their “mental fitness”, and is accompanied by an app described as “Your handheld neuroscience lab”.

The marketing of Athena is slick and seductive, but it glosses over significant controversies concerning neurotechnology in society and brain-based training programs.

For Muse and other neurotech companies, the brain is an organ to be trained and tuned through educational and self-help programs. It is widely claimed that a “neurotechnology revolution” is underway, which will lead to highly lucrative markets in brain-computer interfaces and rapid improvement in healthcare, as well as implications for workplaces, training and education. But neurotechnology also raises sharp bioethical and human rights problems.

The new Muse neuroheadset is indicative of how the brain has become an object of potential value for neurotechnology companies, far beyond biomedical or neuroscience laboratories – which also resonates with wider discourses of brain improvement and optimization.

Attentive brains

As part of a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on biology, education and data science, Dimitra Kotouza led a recent paper with Martyn Pickersgill, Jessica Pykett and myself exploring how neurotechnologies were being put to the task of monitoring and managing “attention” in educational and training contexts.

The paper showed how attention has been conceived by neuroscientists via electroencephalography (EEG) as distinct brainwave patterns that can be scanned through the skull. EEG devices and associated technologies of analysis have made attention legible as cerebral activity. As a result, new kinds of neurotechnology-driven training interventions have been proposed and developed to directly identify, predict, and prevent “lapses” of attention.

In this way, attention has become a source of value too. Commercial neurotech companies have marketed attention-focusing devices to consumers such as students, and extracted brain data for further product enhancement.

Athena is not the first neurotech device from Muse, which previously released brainwave reading devices based on EEG with neurofeedback functionality to support attention. In the paper, we noted that an earlier iteration of its device was used for a school intervention, where students with high numbers of disciplinary “office referrals” received neurofeedback training to concentrate their minds and reduce problematic behaviours.

The Muse EEG headset had therefore become a neurotechnical means to control learners’ discipline in schools – using neurofeedback to make them more attentive. The subsequent development of the product to target cognitive or mental “fitness” represents the next step for neurotech, shifting from scanning to modelling and training the brain. It exemplifies how a trainable brain has become an object of both intervention and of value generation. That value is now being realized with the upgraded Athena device.

Brain modelling

What Muse claims it’s adding to its suite of neurotech devices with the launch of Athena is functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) sensors, which are designed to detect neural signals of mental effort. According to the press release:

Athena transforms real-time brain activity into actionable insights, personalized training, and measurable progress. It’s powered by Muse’s AI-driven Foundational Brain Model (FBM), which is trained on over 80,000 sessions from the world’s largest EEG database.

It also comes with an in-built skills game to help users “strengthen their minds just as they do their bodies”. While previous headsets from Muse incorporated EEG to scan for signals of attention, then, the incorporation of fNIRS means it can scan for effort – and provide “actionable insights” for its improvement.

There’s a lot to unpack here, building upon points in our earlier paper. First, Muse is positioning Athena as a real-time, highly data-driven technology of “personalized” training, reflecting the wider discourse of personalized learning associated with AI in education. Forms of brain-personalized education, training and learning are increasingly invoked by neurotechnology companies and supporters. The idea is that brain data could be incorporated into learning platforms to provide personalized pedagogic feedback to students, particularly during lapses of attention.

While Athena may not be specifically targeted at students, it’s clear that education often demands high levels of cognitive performance and achievement.

“With EEG-powered real-time neurofeedback, you can sharpen focus and sustain attention when it matters most”, claims the Muse marketing. “fNIRS tracking measures mental effort and stamina, helping you push cognitive limits while avoiding burnout”. This is potentially appealing for some in high-pressure higher education contexts.

Second is its claim to have amassed a huge EEG database. This clearly shows how brain data collected form users can be valuable asset to neurotechnology companies, which can be used to create subsequent commercial product releases. Along these lines, a notable feature of Athena is its “AI-driven Foundational Brain model”. Here we can see what Rodrigo de la Fabian and colleagues have called a “de-substantialization of the brain” into “computable data” for model building and training. Through neurotechnological means, the brain can be datafied and translated into neuroinformational models.

From there, brain data become valuable as assets owned and controlled by neurotech companies that promise future income streams. It’s worth noting, for example, that the Athena headset comes with a hefty price tag of more than $450, plus ongoing subscription costs. Customers are also paying on top with their brain data, which Muse can capitalize for future product enhancements.

Phrenological technologies

The third notable feature of the Athena product release is the claim by Muse that neurofeedback can increase cognitive or mental fitness. The promotional materials for the device liken neurofeedback to athletics training, and is replete with imagery of physically fit young people.

While Muse claims that Athena is unique and innovative in supporting cognitive fitness, the discursive claims are much older. They can be found in 19^th century programs of “cerebral self-improvement”, as Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega have documented in their book Being Brains.

Quoting Victorian thinkers and educators from that time, Vidal and Ortega show how various forms of brain training were assumed to bring about “real physical changes” in brain parts and result in “alterations to the external form of the skull”. Training programs for cognitive fitness were phrenological exercises informed by Victorian morals and values.

“For phrenologists as for latter-day promoters of ‘brain fitness’, mental health consisted of exercising all organs daily”, Vidal and Ortega argue. “This is the very premise of twenty-first century ‘brain gyms’, whose pseudoneuroscientific bases have been debunked without apparent effects on their commercial success”.

Neurotechnologies like Athena, then, can be seen as part of a longer line of phrenological technologies and pseudoscientific initiatives. Such programs have targeted the brain for fitness optimization according to particular sets of historically situated values.

Athena clearly taps into a contemporary cultural fascination with self-tracking, monitoring and sharing personal data on social media too. It’s a kind of brain-tracking FitBit that senses biological signals of mental fitness through the skull rather than the skin. On the sales site, it even asks customers if they are “Ready to livestream your brainwaves?” It’s self-phrenology for posting to social channels.

Future-proofing the brain

The discursive framing of “future-proofing the brain” also resonates with broader political interests in the brain, its health and its cognitive maximization. In fact, as we argued in the paper, it reflects a growing interest in what the OECD has begun to characterize as boosting “brain capital”. The OECD has directly linked mental health and mental performance to economic costs and social and labour market outcomes.

The authors of a “Brain Capital Grand Strategy” paper informing the OECD have promoted the creation of a “Brain Capital Index”, which would also draw mental performance data from “brain imaging” and “digital biomarker-based surveillance tools”.

Our current economy is indeed a Brain Economy—one where most new jobs demand cognitive, emotional, and social, not manual, skills, and where innovation is a tangible “deliverable” of employee productivity. With increased automation, our global economy increasingly places a premium on cerebral, brain-based skills.

Ultimately, the brain capital imaginary is intended to future-proof economic productivity through future-proofing the brain, and its proposal include interventions to improve “brain skills” through various neuro-informed training and education programs.

The OECD’s interest in measuring brain capital through digital neuroimaging and associated biosensors is indicative, then, of how products like Athena are not only consumer products. They are also potentially political-economic technologies that could be repurposed to capture and aggregate embodied signals of future cognitive productivity. The cognitive fitness promoted by Muse is ideal for the OECD’s imagined future Brain Economy.

Intensified learning

The new Athena headband from Muse, then, is not merely a gimmicky neurotechnology. It demonstrates how direct-to-consumer neurotechnologies are incorporating AI for enhanced functionality, and generating value from extracting brain data for aggregation into models and new product enhancement. These neurotechnologies are extending beyond the measurement of attentional states to being framed as aids to cognitive fitness.

They are also reworking older phrenological legacies of brain optimization, only now framed as the self-presentation of neurotech-augmented mental fitness. As a result, neurotechnologies like Athena also resonate with imaginaries of brain-based future economic governance.

The brain is becoming not only scannable and legible with neurotechnologies, but imagined as a trainable organ. It can be tuned for optimal cognitive performance through the capturing of real-time brain data and the application of neurally-personalized interventions. This ultimately contributes to a vision of intensified brain-based learning and training regimes enacted under the discursive framing of future-proofing cognitive fitness.

The paper “Attention as an object of knowledge, intervention and valorisation: exploring data-driven neurotechnologies and imaginaries of intensified learning” by Dimitra Kotouza, Martyn Pickersgill, Jessica Pykett and Ben Williamson is published open access in Critical Studies in Education.