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Comment by sown | Hacker News Reader

I looked into this one time and got scared away the the DIY part of the kit and the warnings that you could seriously injure yourself. :( This will require braver souls than I.

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Soldering up a bunch of electrodes, hooking them up to a power source and strapping the whole lot to your head? What could possibly go wrong?

(I'd read this first though: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/WARNING.html)

I might die.

You might perform a lobotomy equivalent on yourself. That scares me much more than the possibility of dying.

I play with EEG hacking in my spare time. I was shocked to find out that one of the commercial ones has NO protection circuitry in theirs, and after discussing with their engineer they simply recommended to me that I should unplug the laptop from the socket!

I brought this up with one of my engineers, and he said I was getting my knickers in a twist; the likelihood of dying from this truly would be a series of unfortunate events.

So: beware, even with the commercial units. Dissect them to be sure!

Do you wear headphones connected to your computer? Depending on the type you wear, it's only marginally different in my not-entirely-informed opinion.

I tell you this, when there's lightning within 50 miles, I take my headphones off! I've never heard of anybody being injured or dying that way, but the mental image is not one I can tolerate.

I see what you mean. But I don't make my own head phones. :( This is the sort of thing that scared me away: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/WARNING.html

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