About Psyray

Psyray is a fast, non-invasive way to read how a person is doing mentally and emotionally. A short brainwave scan with a headset, combined with cloud-based data analysis produces a structured, multidimensional profile of wellbeing. This analysis is presented in a clear and readable report. The report describes the person's current state, the underlying themes and patterns that appear to shape it and the directions in which support is most likely to help. A complex picture is made understandable and directly usable. In that vision, additionally a Wellbeing Index can be available, a profile across seven dimensions of psychological functioning and goes deeper. The report and Wellbeing Index are built for the real world, it is comfortable to take, quick to administer and scalable from a single individual to an entire organisation.

Where conventional approaches depend on long questionnaires or scarce specialist time, Psyray provides a repeatable, objective measurement in just a couple of minutes, in a consistent format that can be repeated and followed over time. The same underlying information is used in professional and clinical practice, in organisational and corporate settings and, with appropriate safeguards, in personal wellbeing. The report generated from the scan is custom-made for the specific application.

This document gives insight into the science behind that measurement. The section below outlines how the scan works, and the sections after it set out the established fields of research the approach is built on.

Besides this scientific basis behind the Psyray technology, it has also a strong basis in advanced IT, that should not be underestimated. As Psyray is also a commercial company, this IT element is not explained further, except that it is not AI-technology.

How it works

Psyray works in three steps. The result is a clear report produced from a measurement of the body through the scan of brainwaves instead of from a self-report questionnaire. Because it measures the body directly, it cannot simply be talked up or down the way a questionnaire can.

The scan

A comfortable headset presents a structured sound sequence as a stimulus to the brain-body system. Separately, and within the same headset, an electromagnetic field is generated and measured. As the person's system responds to the stimulus, it modulates the generated electromagnetic field, and the pattern of those responses is the data. The scan is non-invasive: no needles, no lengthy testing, no discomfort.

The engine

The recorded response is compared against Psyray's reference model. This is built on thousands of reference scans, combined with medical and psychological files. Rather than reading any single signal, the Engine evaluates the whole pattern: where it deviates, which deviations matter, and how the elements fit together.

The report

Finally, the findings are turned into clear text adapted to the reader, who may be the practitioner or the client, and to the setting. The language layer is a communication tool: the substance of the result comes from the measurement and the comparison with the reference model.

Contents of a Psyray result

A Psyray result is a structured report in several layers. Optionally it can be combined with the Wellbeing Index, a profile across seven dimensions of psychological functioning that gives an at-a-glance picture of where a person stands.

The current picture

A description of how the person is functioning at the time of the scan, expressed in plain language so that both strengths and areas of strain are visible.

Underlying themes and patterns

An account of the themes that appear to run beneath the current state: the recurring patterns, tensions or ways of coping that help explain how someone may have arrived where they are and what tends to keep them there.

Directions for support

Concrete focus points and possible directions for support, matched to the measured pattern, intended as a structured starting point for reflection or coaching rather than a fixed prescription.
Because the report is generated for a specific application, its tone, depth and emphasis are tailored to who will read it and why. The same underlying measurement can be presented for a clinician, a coach, or the person themselves. The report is a decision-support tool throughout: it is meant to inform the judgement of the professional and the person and not to replace it.

Built on established science

Psyray does not depend on a single new or untested idea. It stands on several fields of science, each developed independently over decades and supported by a body of peer-reviewed literature. The five pillars below, shown together first and then explained in turn, are the foundations the approach rests on, and each is explained in plain terms, with no specialist background assumed. The recurring theme is convergence: many separate lines of research, from many different groups, point the same way.

Interoception and the brain-body axis

Interoception is the brain's sense of the body's own internal state. Just as vision tells the brain about the outside world and hearing about sound. Interoception is the inward-facing sense: it reports on the heartbeat, the breath, the fullness of the lungs, the state of the gut, the tension in the muscles and the condition of the internal organs. These signals travel along dedicated nerve pathways, chiefly the vagus nerve and routes through the spinal cord to brain regions such as the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex which weave them into a continuous, largely unconscious picture of how the body is doing. We rarely notice this picture directly, yet it colours everything: whether we feel calm or on edge, energetic or depleted, comfortable or uneasy. In that sense the body is not a silent machine that the mind sits on top of, but a constant source of information that the brain is always reading.

Over the past two decades this system has been studied carefully and tied directly to emotion. Researchers can measure, for example, how accurately a person can feel their own heartbeat without taking their pulse, and that simple ability relates to how vividly they experience emotion and how well they regulate it (Garfinkel et al., 2015; Craig, 2002; Critchley et al., 2004). A recent review in the Annual Review of Psychology concludes that emotional experience is intimately tied to interoception (Greenwood and Garfinkel, 2025), and a large clinical literature shows that this internal signalling is measurably disturbed in anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and other conditions, where the brain-body conversation becomes noisy, muted or miscalibrated (Critchley and Garfinkel, 2017; Quadt et al., 2018; Khalsa et al., 2018). For Psyray this is essential: the brain-body channel is measurable and it carries information that is directly relevant to mental and emotional health.

The predictive, self-regulating brain

The second foundation changes how we picture what the brain is doing. Historically the brain was imagined as a kind of camera, passively recording whatever reached it. Modern neuroscience paints almost the opposite picture: the brain is an active prediction machine. It is constantly guessing what is about to happen, inside and outside the body, and preparing for it in advance. When it manages the body it does the same thing, anticipating what the heart, lungs and other systems will need and adjusting them before a problem arises, a forward-looking kind of regulation called allostasis. When the world does not match the prediction, the mismatch, the prediction error, is what the brain learns from (Barrett and Simmons, 2015; Friston, 2010; Seth and Friston, 2016; Seth, 2013).

This view also reshapes our notion of emotions. Rather than being fixed reactions bolted on to the body, emotions are increasingly understood as the brain's best interpretation of the body's current state in a particular situation, assembled from internal bodily signals together with memory and expectation (Barrett, 2017). The practical lesson for measurement is important. If the brain and body form an active, self-correcting loop rather than a static read-out, then watching the system only at rest tells you relatively little. You learn far more by gently challenging it: presenting a stimulus and observing how the brain responds and settles again. How a system answers a controlled question reveals its inner workings in a way that outperforms passive observation.

Emotions have a measurable bodily signature

The third foundation is that emotions are not only felt in the head; they are written into the body in consistent, recognisable ways. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio put this on the map with his somatic marker hypothesis, arguing that bodily states carry emotional meaning and even steer our decisions, often before we are consciously aware of them (Damasio, 1996). The most direct evidence came later, from very large studies that simply asked thousands of people, drawn from cultures as different as Finland and Taiwan, where in their body they feel each emotion. The resulting body maps were strikingly similar across all of them: anger, fear, love, joy and others each activate the body in their own characteristic pattern, largely independent of language or culture (Nummenmaa et al., 2014; Volynets et al., 2020).

Underneath these felt maps sits a measurable physiology. The autonomic nervous system, the automatic control system that runs heart rate, breathing, sweating and other responses we do not consciously command, shifts in structured and repeatable ways as emotions change, a relationship documented over decades of research in psychophysiology, the science of reading the body to understand the mind (Kreibig, 2010). These signatures are not merely academic: they change in mental health conditions, with the body maps of emotion becoming faint or blurred in depression, for instance. Because emotional and psychological states leave organised, repeatable physiological signatures rather than random noise, those states can in principle be recognised from the body as patterns. Pattern recognition works when there is a genuine pattern to find.

The brain and body respond to structured sound

The fourth foundation explains the way Psyray prompts the body: through sound. Reading mental and emotional states from physiological signals is a mature scientific field, psychophysiology, and sound is one of its best-studied inputs. Carefully chosen sounds reliably tilt the balance of the autonomic nervous system and change heart-rate variability, small (healthy) beat-to-beat variation in the heart's rhythm that is one of the most sensitive everyday markers of how well a person is coping with stress (McConnell et al., 2014). The brain also synchronises to musical and rhythmic structure in measurable ways, and music reliably evokes and shapes emotion through well-mapped brain systems (Koelsch, 2014).

Perhaps the most surprising part of this literature concerns sound we cannot consciously hear. A line of research stretching back more than two decades has shown that the very high-frequency components of natural sound, above the upper limit of conscious hearing, still change brain activity, brain-wave rhythms and the body's automatic regulation, often without the listener noticing anything at all (Oohashi et al., 2000; Kuribayashi and Nittono, 2017). Recent work continues to document how such structured sound shifts the balance of the autonomic nervous system (Jogasaki, Kawai, Nishina et al., 2025). Structured sound is a reliable, comfortable and non-invasive way to produce a measurable response in the brain-body system.

Turning measurements into meaning: validated reference models

The four foundations so far explain why a scan can carry meaningful information. The fifth answers the question that decides whether any such system is trustworthy: once you have measured someone, how do you know what the measurement means? A single physiological reading, on its own, says very little. The established answer, used throughout medicine, is comparison. You build a normative reference database, a large, well-characterised collection of measurements from many people; you work out what the normal range looks like, taking account of factors such as age and sex. You subsequently express each new person's result as how far it sits from that norm.

This is not a new or untested idea. Decades ago, an approach called neurometrics demonstrated, in a paper published in Science, that comparing a person's brain measurements against such a database could distinguish different clinical conditions with high accuracy (John et al., 1988). The method was later given a rigorous statistical footing, with explicit rules for how many people to sample, how to cross-check the database against itself, and how to confirm that it genuinely separates clinical from non-clinical patterns, and databases built this way have been validated to standards that regulators accept (Thatcher et al., 2003; Thatcher, 2010). Psyray's reference model works on this principle. The meaning of a single scan does not come from one signal in isolation; it emerges from comparing the pattern against a large, structured body of reference data, in Psyray's case more than forty thousand reference scans. The larger and better characterised that reference base, the sharper the comparison becomes.

Seen together, these five foundations form a chain of reasoning. The body and brain are in constant two-way contact, so there is something real to measure. The brain actively regulates and predicts, so it can be probed rather than only observed. Emotional and psychological states leave organised bodily signatures, so there are genuine patterns to find. Structured sound is a reliable, non-invasive way to elicit and those signatures. And comparison against a large reference base turns the resulting measurement into individual meaning. Each link in this chain is supported independently by different researchers using different methods; together they describe precisely what Psyray does.

None of these are speculative claims. They are well-established findings, produced independently by many research groups over several decades, and they converge on a single conclusion: the body carries reliable, structured information about mental and emotional state, that information can be measured, and it can be turned into meaningful individual results. Psyray combines these established foundations into one integrated, practical assessment.

Responsible by design

Psyray is a decision-support tool. It is designed to inform human judgement, not to diagnose, and its results are used alongside the expertise of the professional using it. The scan is non-invasive and the approach is built with privacy in mind.

Psyray Academy is committed to continued scientific research and development. Through its dedicated research program, it works with independent partners to keep strengthening the evidence base behind the platform and the results.

Selected scientific references

Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1 to 23.

Barrett, L. F., and Simmons, W. K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), 419 to 429.

Craig, A. D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(8), 655 to 666.

Critchley, H. D., and Garfinkel, S. N. (2017). Interoception and emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 7 to 14.

Critchley, H. D., Wiens, S., Rotshtein, P., Ohman, A., and Dolan, R. J. (2004). Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness. Nature Neuroscience, 7(2), 189 to 195.

Damasio, A. R. (1996). The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 351(1346), 1413 to 1420.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127 to 138.

Garfinkel, S. N., Seth, A. K., Barrett, A. B., Suzuki, K., and Critchley, H. D. (2015). Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. Biological Psychology, 104, 65 to 74.

Greenwood, B. M., and Garfinkel, S. N. (2025). Interoceptive mechanisms and emotional processing. Annual Review of Psychology, 76, 59 to 86.

Jogasaki, K., Kawai, N., Nishina, E., et al. (2025). Enhancing the regulatory function of the autonomic nervous system using sounds with inaudible high-frequency components. Scientific Reports, 15, 26820.

John, E. R., Prichep, L. S., Fridman, J., and Easton, P. (1988). Neurometrics: computer-assisted differential diagnosis of brain dysfunctions. Science, 239(4836), 162 to 169.

Khalsa, S. S., Adolphs, R., Cameron, O. G., et al. (2018). Interoception and mental health: a roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 3(6), 501 to 513.

Koelsch, S. (2014). Brain correlates of music-evoked emotions. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(3), 170 to 180.

Kreibig, S. D. (2010). Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: a review. Biological Psychology, 84(3), 394 to 421.

Kuribayashi, R., and Nittono, H. (2017). High-resolution audio with inaudible high-frequency components induces a relaxed attentional state without conscious awareness. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 93.

McConnell, P. A., et al. (2014). Auditory driving of the autonomic nervous system: theta-frequency binaural beats increase parasympathetic activation and sympathetic withdrawal. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1248.

Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., and Hietanen, J. K. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(2), 646 to 651.

Oohashi, T., Nishina, E., Honda, M., et al. (2000). Inaudible high-frequency sounds affect brain activity: the hypersonic effect. Journal of Neurophysiology, 83(6), 3548 to 3558.

Quadt, L., Critchley, H. D., and Garfinkel, S. N. (2018). The neurobiology of interoception in health and disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1428(1), 112 to 128.

Seth, A. K. (2013). Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(11), 565 to 573.

Seth, A. K., and Friston, K. J. (2016). Active interoceptive inference and the emotional brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 371(1708), 20160007.

Thatcher, R. W., Walker, R. A., Biver, C. J., North, D. N., and Curtin, R. (2003). Quantitative EEG normative databases: validation and clinical correlation. Journal of Neurotherapy, 7(3 to 4), 87 to 121.

Thatcher, R. W. (2010). Validity and reliability of quantitative electroencephalography. Journal of Neurotherapy, 14(2), 122 to 152.

Volynets, S., Glerean, E., Hietanen, J. K., Hari, R., and Nummenmaa, L. (2020). Bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal. Emotion, 20(7), 1127 to 1136.

The Science behind the Psyray technology