The MC Square is a "light and sound machine" that purports to help its users with stress relief, relaxation, memory improvement, better sleep, and concentration enhancement. The technology is even backed up by scientific studies. Sounds great, right? The device has been wildly popular in Korea, so yesterday we went to the product's U.S. launch to see it ourselves.

The MC Square is basically a lightweight MP3 player with two outputs. One is for earbuds, the other is for a pair of what looks like virtual reality googles, but is actually just some black plastic sunglasses with eight red flashing LED lights. The whole arrangement feels pretty flimsy for $399. But does it work? Further impressions after the jump.

Since it was the middle of the day, I thought I'd start using the machine in "concentration enhancement" mode. A PR rep for the company explained that the synchronized sound and light emitted by the machine serves to move brain waves into "alpha and theta neural rhythms." She adjusted the settings in the concentrate mode based on the light and noise levels in the room, hooked me up to the device and said, "I'll be back in fifteen minutes."

So what's it like? It's like being in a roller skating rink with strobes, a disco ball, and flashing colored lights, except without the skating, Michael Jackson or cheese fries. Instead, the flashing lights shine through your eyelids onto your closed eyes while you listen to the new age sounds of dolphins chortling in the sea. Put it another way, it was an unpleasant, disorienting and dizzying experience, bordering on painful.

My first thought as I leaned my head back and thought about being able to focus better was, "get me the hell out of here." My second thought was, "Fifteen minutes? Are you kidding? These flashing lights are going to ruin my whole afternoon." Which is when my Kindergarten self kicked in and thought, "You're not the boss of me, PR lady, I can take these off if I want to." Maybe 15 minutes a day of torture would make me concentrate better. I'll never know.

I did fool around with some of the player's settings to see if the "relax" mode would treat me any better, but I didn't notice much of a difference. The lights flash through your eyelids at a different frequency, but the generally unpleasant experience is the same.

And what of those scientific studies that back up MC Square's claims? I brought home the study from the International Journal of Learning Technology to see what the fuss was about. MC Square funded the study. It shows one thing: that the MC Square if used twice a day does help some subjects memorize an extra digit in a long sequence of numbers. It did not help the subjects memorize vocabulary, and subjects showed no statistically relevant improvement on tests for attention span or associative learning. So MC Square was basically giving a long and complex scientific paper to journalists with the expectation that they wouldn't read it. Otherwise, how could it back up the claims that the device helps users learn a language? And what of all of the other studies proving MC Square's worth? The American study explains that none of the Chinese, Korean, or Japanese reports on the device has been subject to peer review.

You know what else has been shown to help with concentration, relaxation, and learning? Mozart. Also, Led Zepplin. I'll take them any day over strobing red lights paired incongruously with nature sounds on a $400 mp3 player. — S.E. Kramer

via Daeyang E & C