You're Playing With My Mind!

From Fast Company. Great item on a new game, Mindball, invented by the Swedes, which monitors the brainwaves of competitors to generate its plays. But dontcha love what you have to do to win?

Mindball is played on a 4-foot-long table by two people with electrodes taped to their foreheads. These biosensors detect alpha and theta brain waves--generated during intense concentration and deep relaxation--and correspondingly instruct a computer inside the table to move a rubber-coated steel ball via a magnetic sleigh below the surface.

The object is to roll the ball from the center spot into your opponent's end zone. The more focused and relaxed you are, counterintuitively, the faster you win. Competitiveness and aggression are counterproductive. Strategy, decision making, and hand-eye coordination count for nothing. "You compete by being calm--a complete contradiction," says Hannell. In Mindball, you attack by relaxing even more, and you react by not reacting.

Zen paradox! You win by not trying to win? You lose when you try to win? All hail long winters and Scandiavian social democracy! And a snip at $18,000 dollars.