Watch Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart play drums with Oculus Rift — and see how his brain reacts

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart gave an incredible performance of the upcoming brain-training rhythm game Neuro Drummer while wearing an Oculus Rift headset — and showed how virtual reality could be a part of future treatments for degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

The performance onstage at the Nvidia GPU Technology conference showed that Hart is a virtuoso percussionist. (Duh) But it also showed what was happening inside his brain in real time during the performance, and it conveyed exactly what he was seeing inside the virtual-reality headset. It is the kind of experience that researchers expect will help restore cognitive health to aging patients and that game companies hope will entice players to lose themselves in virtual worlds.