SOUL.md·
mind-controlled-x (2019) asked how to control a machine with a mind. This project asks what an agent becomes when it can sense the person it talks to.
The agent has a sense of you the way a friend across the table does.
What the headset gives·
The EPOC X delivers five bandwidths, not thoughts:
| stream | rate | good for | lies about |
|---|---|---|---|
eeg |
256 Hz | rhythms, blink artifacts (AF3/AF4) | anything semantic |
mot |
32 Hz | deliberate gesture (turn, nod, tilt), ~50 ms, no training | intent |
fac |
32 Hz | buttons: fast, voluntary | involuntary blinks |
met |
2 Hz / ~10 s | engagement, excitement, stress, relaxation, interest, focus | anything instantaneous |
com |
~8 Hz | one trained "go ahead" | steering |
dev/eq |
1 to 2 Hz | contact quality, battery | nothing |
The agent never sees a stream without its contact quality: a dry electrode is noise.
Three layers, three speeds·
One loop is too slow for buttons and too twitchy for mood, so there are three.
Reflex (fac + mot, ≤100 ms, no LLM). Double blink confirms, wink says yes, head turn steps previous/next, nod acknowledges, clench always cancels. Debounced, hysteresis on every threshold, one fire per gesture. Lives in events.py; the only layer acting without a model.
Ambient (met + pow, ~10 s). Each agent turn gets one line:
The agent mentions it only when relevant, but it shapes tone and length: stress gets shorter answers, a thinking pause gets silence.
Intent (com, opt-in). One trained command, push, meaning "go ahead". Nothing steers with the mind.
The loop closes both ways·
Each agent action stamps the EEG record (injectMarker), so the record shows what the brain did in the 2 s after each action. The agent's style gets fitted to one nervous system, measured, not assumed.
Design rules·
- Say "your focus metric fell", not "you're bored".
- Nothing acts on a single sample: a deliberate gesture or 10 s of accumulation.
- The dashboard shows the exact line the agent reads.
- Clench cancels everything at every layer.
- Recordings are local
jsonl; nothing leaves this machine unless deliberately pushed. - Below the contact-quality threshold the agent says so and acts as a plain assistant.
The dashboard·
Left: you (scope, band radar, CQ-colored 10-20 head map, head pose, gauges, event ticker). Right: the agent (ambient line, last event, last marker, chat). You watch the agent watching you.