It's a lot of fun, but not totally easy, especially with people watching and talking--you have to focus on a particular thought and stay focused on that thought the same way for a fairly long time while you train the headset & software about how you think of pushing and lifting. When you have one thought (push) and "neutral", that's not so bad, but when you have two thoughts (push and lift) and "neutral" it's hard to make sure that you consistently think of just pushing or just lifting or just staying still. The main problem was not letting the program know that I wanted something to happen, but letting it know which of three states I wanted to happen--in great measure because I had a hard time thinking about only one state at a time.

I found that for lifting I had about three different competing mental images. One was visualizing the block itself simply rising. One was visualizing myself llifting it, sort of Atlas style, as if it was the size of me. And one was lifting it with my hands in particularly stylized gesture. Meditating on this while returning to the office, I realized this last one was very specific to me and also very powerfully tied to my sense of lifting an object "magically". It was much more specifically tied to the idea of lift than the first two, which are sort of generic version of "object moving" only barely modified to connote the specific motion. The stylized gesture, on the other hand, tapped into my training as a Bharat Natyam dancer, when I would have to gracefully and slowly mime lifting up an object. Instead of being a mental image about actually doing the deed, it's a mental image about thinking about doing the deed--as a dancer I have to really think I'm lifting the plate in order to "act it out" for the audience. Actually, the image goes back even further than that, to a favorite childhood film, a version of the Ramayan, in which a young Princess Sita dances her way around the family shrine, mimicking the adventures of Vishnu's previous avatars, including Varahadev lifting the earth. The actress's gestures in that film were endlessly enthralling to me, so incredibly graceful, and I would watch it over and over, pausing the video so I could mimic what she had just done, and then watch it again. It was that kind of constant mimicry that told my parents I would appreciate dance lessons. Even though this was over 20 years ago, when I was practically still a toddler, the composite image of actress Sita mimicking Varahadev, and me mimicking her has stuck in my head, in a kind of stylized outline, as my personal visual for lift. It's a vivid hieroglyphic.

I'm wondering if such vivid hieroglypics, separate and distinct as they are, make for more precise and powerful ways to generate distinctive patterns that a system like Emotiv's can understand. It reminds me of the Alethiometer, the title device of The Golden Compass, the first book in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials' trilogy. (I am currently reading the second book, A Subtle Knife, so no spoilers in the comments!) The heroine, young Lyra, teachers herself to communicate with a truthtelling device, the Alethiometer, by visualizing questions in terms of the distinctive symbols set around the compass and then interpreting the "sentences" the the compass "replies with" when its arrows spin and stop at the symbols in sequence. She becomes extremely adept at it because she learns to inutitively translate her questions into symbol-sequences, and can quickly and precisely focus on each symbol in turn. I imagine she would have had a very easy time today indeed.