Club Benefits
This feels like cheating, but it’s actually one of the most mindblowing gaming headsets I tried at CES 2026. The HyperX Neurable gaming headset concept is able to read your brainwaves and make you better at games.
Follow all of our CES 2026 live coverage for the biggest gadget news straight from Las Vegas. And be sure to follow Tom's Guide on TikTok for the coolest videos from the show.
By using EEG sensors, AI and a little bit of mindful exercise, this set of cans is able to read the stresses in your mind, calm you down and overclock your brain’s focus. And after testing it myself, I went from a skeptic to a pro gaming believer.
A 30-something gamer who fell off a long time ago in first person shooters found his swagger all over again, and I look forward to popping the young’uns like I’m 14 playing Halo 2 all over again.
How it works
So I know this is the first question a lot of you are going to have. Given a lot of EEG machines require pads placed directly on the temple to read brain signals, how on Earth is this able to do the same with just headphone cups?
Because you can see the contacts built directly in there (those grey strips). By pairing it with an AI inferencing model, it’s able to read the wider noise of your brain and narrow it down to the focus, stress and cognitive load signals it needs to look for when it comes to improving focus.
And by putting you through a mindful breathing and focus exercise — staring at a peaceful visualizer of dots floating in a sphere — it can track when your brain has been boosted to just the right level, while simultaneously relaxing your body.
This puts your entire being into a state that is ready for the quick twitch reactions you need for competitive gaming.
“I felt like time was slowing down”
I’d understand if that sounds a little too good to be true, but I really felt like time was slowing down. I went through this mindful focus exercise, and once the timer started to shoot as many targets as possible again, my trigger finger was a whole lot faster and more accurate too.
To put it into specifics, my high score on the shooting range went up by over 5,000 points, my accuracy increased by two percentage points, but most importantly, my response time to a target decreased by nearly 100 milliseconds.
These are critical stats that help you be far more economical and efficient with the ammo you have in any FPS, and for the first few seconds, it felt a little bit like the Dead Eye mode in Red Dead Redemption 2 in terms of focusing like with rapid response to dispense of my targets.
All I can do is pray that this becomes a real product I can buy, because imagining this for my sim racing — especially during endurance competitions — is a mightily exciting prospect.
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.
More from Tom's Guide
- Best of CES 2026 Awards: The top 25 new gadgets
- The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo is so overkill and I love it — like if a Nintendo DS got freaky with an RTX 5090
- I just tested Lenovo’s Legion Pro Rollable concept, and now my gaming laptop feels boring
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
