NeuroKnitting is a thing, it seems. No more carpal tunnel flair ups. No more calluses and discomfort from unpleasant yarn. You can just sit back, relax and let your brain do all the work. Which is ironic since many times my favorite knitting is completely mindless and engages my brain not at all.

Of course, that isn’t really what NeuroKnitting is about.

What’s really going on is scientists are recording someone’s brain activity. This is then sent to a knitting machine which has been adjusted to read the pattern like an eeg machine. It then converts that pattern to a knitting schematic and produces a long strip of knitting showing the wave pattern. Here they explain it far better than I:

We have plotted brainwave activity into a knitted pattern. Using a wearable, non-invasive EEG headset, we recorded users’ affective states while listening to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”, concretely the aria and its first seven variations. The audio was about 10 minutes long and we downsampled each second of the signal coming from the 14 channels of the EEG device. Three main features were measured: relaxation, excitement, and cognitive load. After recording, those features were converted into a knitting pattern. Hence, every stitch of a pattern corresponds to a unique brain state stimulated by the act of listening. It means the user’s affective response to music is captured every second and memorised in the knitted garment pattern.

It’s still pretty neat. Talk about your custom pattern!

Here’s a video that describes the entire process: