When it’s freezing outside, people often suggest imagining yourself sitting on a warm sunny beach somewhere in the Bahamas so you don’t feel so cold. Its effectiveness is questionable, but now there’s a genuine way to use your thoughts to keep warm: custom scarves knitted with a pattern of the wearer’s unique brainwaves.
Its creators, Varvara Guljajeva, Mar Canet and Sebastian Mealla, used a simple EEG headset that monitored their brainwave activity while they listened to 10 minutes of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The resulting data, harvested from the wearer’s states of relaxation, excitement and cognitive load, were converted into a knitting pattern which was used on a knitting machine to produce the individually unique scarves.
As a result of the tech and labor-intensive process, don’t expect them to go into mass production. But if you’re handy with a pair of needles, and can fake your way into a brain exam at the hospital, you should have all the tools you need to make your own.
[Knitic]