Date: 2008-04-15 15:05 Subject: Nightmare or genius? Security: Public Tags: brainwaves, eeg, feedback, writing

In the March 15th issue of New Scientist, I read the following:

Since 2004, EmSense, a company based in Monterey, California, has been using biofeedback to help game designers evaluate new products. Testers play a game wearing EmSense's headset, which uses an EEG to record their brainwaves, and also measures their heart rate and the sweatiness of their skin. EmSense then builds up a blow-by-blow profile of the player's emotional state and levels of arousal during play so the game can be made more engaging.

And it occured to me that exactly the same could be done for books. Here's what I envisage: Find a group made up of your target audience (in my case, probably 12-year-old boys), give them a headset and a copy of your book, and then measure their responses to the book, page-by-page or even paragraph-by-paragraph. You could find out exactly how they were responding to what you'd written, which bits were exciting, funny, boring, slow. You could then revise accordingly. Okay, you'd need some way of monitoring what they were reading, but some kind of camera could do that fairly easily.

So, how does that sound to you as a writer?

Is the idea that you might be so closely forced to follow the reactions of a small group a complete nightmare? Something appalling that could be used to turn you into a machine rather than an artist?

Or does it sound like a really useful tool that could give the kind of honest, detailed, unbiased feedback that you could never hope to get from a critiquer?

Someone, someday is going to decide to use this for books, if they haven't already. Would you be willing?

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