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As Maker Faire Austin closed, I got a chance to try the Brain Machine.

The Brain Machine was a featured project in MAKE 10 by Mitch Altman.

I didn’t expect much from the Brain Machine, but I was quite interested, given my recent experiences with meditation, which has been quite different than putting on psychedelic glasses with blinky lights. To be honest, I was exhausted physically and mentally by Maker Faire (I love the event, but it does leave us staff feeling a bit brutalized by the end of the weekend), and I figured that sitting quietly for a few minutes ignoring people and looking at pretty light patterns might be a nice escape.

To use the Brain Machine, you put the goggles and headphones on, close your eyes lightly (don’t squeeze them shut), and just relax and start the machine. The LED lights flash and beeps play in your ears. Interesting patterns play against the inside of your eyelids, and anything you do consciously seems to affect them. The basic background pattern changed as my focus changed to different depths of field (even though my eyes were shut). I saw big hot flashes of red when I took a deep breath. It was interesting.

The big surprise, though, was sitting at the wrap meeting about an hour later, and realizing that I felt pretty damn good. Happy, overall tired but not ready to drop, just ready to be quiet for a while. My mood was much better than I would have expected. Was it the Brain Machine? Maybe. I can say that now I want to make one myself.

Even better than having a chance to try the brain machine was having a chance to meet and hang out with Mitch Altman, MAKE author and inventor of the TV-B-Gone. Mitch was already one of my favorite MAKE authors because of his dedication to supporting his projects in the discussion area on the MAKE site (I see every article talkback so I can watch for spam trends).

Another maker I was happy to get to know was Gretchen Eisner, who lives on a small island in British Columbia and makes clothing with “electronically active components made from conductive textiles”. Incredibly, she helped our sales guy and me open and unwrap hundreds of Tinker Toy canisters (a pretty formidable job!), because all but one person from the Hasbro team was stuck in other cities due to flight delays.

I was especially happy when both Gretchen and Mitch said almost exactly the same thing, very excitedly, after the Faire: “X-number-of people completed the project!” Their enthusiasm for sharing what they’ve learned themselves exemplifies exactly what we want to happen at Maker Faire.

I was sorry to have missed Justin’s dad (though I did see his cool rubber band car). But such is working Maker Faire!

My own photos of the trip to Austin are up on Flickr. It was fun to travel with my coworkers…several of us were on the same flights. And traveling through Santa Ana, with fires and duststorms, on the way home, was interesting even though it was a little troublesome.