Le and her colleagues were just as tickled when they found they could perform similar feats. What was needed, insisted Snyder, was an emotional signal processor. The industry had thrived on digital signal processors - chips and software that could handle images and sounds. He went on to bemoan the fact that the computer revolution had shut out emotions, which are, after all, what drive us. Le and Do went to dinner at Snyder's home, where he enthralled them with his work on using magnetic fields to stimulate human brains.

Snyder and Le got on well and stayed in touch. This turned out to be the scientist Allan Snyder, who had a prestigious award of his own to boast about: the Marconi Prize, a near-Nobel-level honor he had been awarded for his role in the development of fiber optics. A few years earlier on the speaking circuit, she had been at yet another dinner event, feeling a bit overwhelmed as a young Asian woman in a sea of suits, when she spotted another misfit - a middle-aged man in cargo pants, with wildish hair tucked under a sideways baseball cap. Le knew where the pair could grab a little inspiration. 'Emotiv faces some crucial decisions it absolutely has to get right,' says Stephen Prentice, an analyst at Gartner (NYSE:IT) who has sampled the company's device. And Emotiv has to do it while taming persistent hiccups in the system, herding video-game producers into tailoring games to the device, and trying to halt a skidding launch date before competitors - yes, there are other companies making mind-reading devices - pick off pieces of the market. And that has left Emotiv with a challenge every bit as big as conquering mind reading: figuring out how to present its breakthrough device to the world in a way that will transform it from a slightly scary gadget to the next must-have consumer technology. It turns out the old saw about building a better mousetrap doesn't hold in the context of a product most people hesitate to believe is possible and aren't sure they want anything to do with if it is. But if you think building a mind-reading device is tough, try marketing one. Given all this, you might expect that Emotiv would be sitting pretty.

Emotiv research edition