Meet The Science Team: Darin Dougherty M.D.

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Neurable Team

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Dr. Darin D. Dougherty has seen a lot of brains. Not directly, of course, but rather through the use of neuroimaging technology–tools like fMRI and EEG that allow researchers to peek under the proverbial hood.

Director of the Division of Neurotherapeutics at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Dougherty studies the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. This requires analyzing a lot of neural data. Yet, Dougherty doesn’t regularly measure his own brain activity, so it was somewhat of a departure when he came down to Neurable HQ to try out Enten.

An expert in neuroimaging, neurobiology, and psychopharmacology, Dougherty was well equipped to test drive our tech. He knew, for example, that if Enten was accurately measuring his brain activity, it should show an increase in alpha waves when he closed his eyes. After Enten passed this basic test, Dougherty tried something a bit more complicated.

“I put myself into a state of high focus and then low focus to see if Neurable’s algorithm output matched my expectations,” he says. “It did.”

Indeed, throughout the demo Enten detected Dougherty’s state of focus with a level of precision that, he says, is usually reserved for expensive lab equipment.

“Translating laboratory results into an everyday neurotech wearable is something I have rarely seen accomplished until I tried Enten myself,” he says. “It is easy to see how Enten could help consumers struggling to maintain attention.”

“It is easy to see how Enten could help consumers struggling to maintain attention.”

Following the demo, Dougherty reviewed Neurable’s white paper on the science behind Enten. Impressed, he noted that the research was “rigorous” and “beyond what would typically be expected for an early stage company.”

The author of over 100 peer-reviewed articles, Daughterty is no stranger to scientific rigor. He is currently the Medical Director of the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Institute at McLean Hospital and the Director of the Mood Disorders Section of MGH. In addition to holding these and other prominent roles, Dougherty has worked with numerous neurotechnology startups and has a keen sense of what it takes for a product to succeed in the industry. After meeting with the Neurable team and trying Enten, he notes that both inspire unique confidence.

“The team is aware of the great responsibility they hold to deliver a state-of-the-art consumer BCI,” he says. “I look forward to seeing how this technology can be used at a grander scale.”

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‍²Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.

‍Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.

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