Ruggero Scorcioni, CEO and Founder of Branymo, has made a career out of battling distraction. He’s working on a headset that wirelessly connects to your phone and allows your brain to block incoming calls, texts and application notifications when it’s busy doing other things. It will even leave a message on the caller’s end that you’re too busy to answer at the moment.

“We all want push notifications and Facebook updates, but we don’t realize the cost of it,” Scorcioni said. “As a consequence, all day we are interrupted by micro-interruptions. But sometimes, you’re focusing on your homework and you’re solving problems step by and step and you get distracted, and then you have to start from the beginning. It would be so much more helpful to delay the distractions.”

Scorcioni hacked into existing technology to make the headset work. His prototype is basically a modified toy — a pair of “cat ears” made by the Japanese company Neurowear. Neurowear has been making toys — like its Neocomimi cat ears — that use brain waves for years, but the company’s technology has never been used in a serious setting.

The headsets detect brain activity based on changes in the flow of ions. As the neurons of users’ brains interact with one another, they create an electrical current proportional to the amount of work or concentration they place on a task. The more focused you are, the greater the electrical activity in your brain, with the opposite being true for when you’re relaxed. This is the basic theory behind electroencephalography, or EEG, a medical imaging procedure commonly used in clinical psychology.

“I thought, if I add more sensors to get a better read of the neural oscillations in your brain, you could achieve greater dynamic control,” Scorcioni said.

Just last month, Scorcioni came up with the idea for the headset in 24 hours (and won first prize) at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show Hackathon — a timed “innovation contest” — for his new technology. He is now in the process of meeting with developers and companies to get the prototype into production. He said that there has been widespread recognition of his concept’s applicability.

“In the future, we could think of so many things based on the emotional state. For example, let’s say you’re home, and your music plays based on your mental state. If you’re stressed, you could request some calming music, or vice versa. Your decision becomes dynamic,” Scorcioni said.

Recently, Scorcioni met with Ping Wang, UCSD alumnus and co-founder of the Ansir Innovation Center, a San Diego company that funds entrepreneurs. Ansir supports a number of start-up companies, including one that’s making more advanced versions of the Neocomimi psychic headsets. He said that he introduced Scorcioni to that start-up for the purpose of future collaboration.

Both Wang and Scorcioni said they’re looking for UCSD students to intern with them. Most of the companies that Ansir has funded were founded by UCSD alumni.

“We would love to see an increase in participation from UCSD students,” Wang said. “A small company is an unstructured environment that’s not for everyone, but you’re kind of doing everything, and there’s a big payoff as well.”