I’m sitting in a house in north London with electrodes attached to my temporal lobes, supposedly to teach me how to control video games with my mind.

Wait, let me explain. In July, 20-year-old Twitch streamer Perri Karyal made headlines when she claimed to have defeated two bosses in Elden Ring using only her mind. Cynics being cynics should soon take her to social media to task. “This is fake,” posted @gamerguru2924. “What a hoax,” screamed @saucypepperoni. “This is bullshit, why do you idiots believe this?” pondered @Pennywyze-ub7ry.

Intrigued but skeptical, I asked my old pal Derren Brown for his opinion. “When I was a kid, I tried to move a paper clip with the power of my mind,” he said. “It barely moved. I thought, if I can’t do it, then probably no one else can. Telekinesis is the least proven form of psychic ability, because it’s pretty obvious whether something is moving or not. These days, you can hardly get away with pulling on a string or throwing a pen across the room when nobody’s looking.” This is clearly nonsense, I thought.

However, the technology does exists to read electrical activity in the brain. In her videos, Karyal makes it clear that she uses hardware to read her brain signals. She’s not Carrie. So I contacted her and asked for a demonstration. Surprisingly, she agreed.

“I’ve used EEG (electroencephalography) machines but didn’t know you could buy them commercially,” she tells me as she straps an Emotiv Epoc X headset to my head. Karyal has a master’s degree in psychology and hopes to return to do a PhD. “(These) headsets aren’t for medical use but they can still measure brain activity. I have friends who have studied what happens to the brain when you see certain images, like a gruesome murder or a couple in love. I’d really like to try it in my sleep but I’m scared of breaking it.” She’s already broken a £1,000 headset but Emotiv sent her a free replacement and she now appears on their website.

This isn’t Karyal’s first foray into applying science to video games. She hooked up a TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) machine on her arm to a heart rate monitor to play the horror game Visage. “Every time I got scared, my heart rate would go up and I’d get an electric shock,” she laughs. “We tried to reduce my stimulus control so I wouldn’t react as strongly.” As we set everything up, she tells me she’d like to have a robotic arm in the kitchen “that would do the cooking just by thinking.” She streams more than just video games, too. “I’m definitely not qualified to give advice,” she adds, but her videos cover topics like why we make mistakes or why anger is good for us. Or you can spend 20 minutes watching her stick the world’s hottest chili peppers up her nose. I knew there was a reason I liked her.

Back to Elden Ring. My skepticism has turned to sheer fear. Has anyone tried it yet, I ask. “I mean, the boyfriend hasn’t tried it yet,” she says. “I think he’s nervous and thinks that if it doesn’t register any brain activity at all, he’s convinced he’s dead.” I have the same worries. Or what if Karyal plans to suck out my personality, store it on her computer, and then sell it on the dark web to the highest bidder? These things happen, don’t they?

I’m still confused as to how this all works, so Karyal tries her best to explain it to me. “The headset has a brain-computer interface, so I took the Emotiv API and programmed a way to turn that pattern recognition into an input for a virtual Xbox controller,” she says. I nod in agreement, but it feels a bit like Homer Simpson blowing up the lie detector.

Karyal chose Elden Ring because “it’s supposed to be one of the hardest games ever.” She tested it against other games like the shooter Valorant and the racing game Trackmania. “I tried Tetris, but it couldn’t figure out where exactly I wanted the blocks to go. Party games like Fall Guys and Super Smash Bros worked best. I managed to mess up a Pikachu with mind control, which was pretty funny. He cried, which was nice.”

To set up a simple control system, each of four thoughts is assigned a button. But you can’t just think up, down, left and/or right because your thoughts have to be diverse for the device to distinguish them. “For sprinting, I imagine pushing a cube,” Karyal says. “For dodging, I imagine spinning a plate to You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) by Dead or Alive because I needed something completely different than pushing a cube. I struggled with the third and fourth. Nothing worked for six months. Then some graduate students suggested imagining a smell or sensation. For attacking, I imagine a little cricket hopping and making my inner ear muscles pulsate. For healing, I imagine getting super tense, hot and angry.”

Calibrating the equipment isn’t easy, so I’m just going to try a brain button – pushing a cube to attack. After a few firmware updates, colored waves appear on a graph. Yes! I’m not brain dead. I’m taken to a picture of the cube I’m trying to push.

“Imagine pushing a super-heavy cube in a straight line,” says Karyal. “If you can mimic the pattern of brain activity, the cube should move.”

“Hnnnnngggh!” I can do this. Use the force, Rich!

I can’t believe it. When I think about pushing the cube, the cube moves forward on the screen. We start Elden Ring and just by thinking about pushing a cube I can make my character attack. It’s incredible… “I’m not trying to sugar coat you,” says Karyal, “but I’ve never seen anyone do it as fast as you. You must be something special.” It’s just like my mom always told me.

Now Karyal shows me how she does. Using a Tobii Eye Tracker, she can look into the corners of the screen to move the joystick and tilt her head to move the camera. With some added voice commands (“because sometimes you need to press more than one button, like when attacking and jumping”), she can play completely hands-free.

I ask if anyone has come forward to patent her amazing technological setup. “That’s what all the big guys like Elon Musk want,” she says. “But he probably has something better.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Well, it would work much better if you had implants directly in the brain,” she explains, looking at me strangely.

I am now much less skeptical than before, so I apologize and leave.