The 2026 PNPL Competition builds on the success of our inaugural year with a more ambitious task and a significantly expanded dataset. This year, participants will tackle Word Classification — predicting which word a subject is hearing from MEG brain recordings.
What's New
New Task
Work Classification — decode the specific word heard from MEG data
New Dataset
Introducing the new LibriBrain100 dataset, now with over 100 hours of MEG data
Go broad & deep
Maximise within-subject performance or tackle cross-subject generalisation
Four Months
The competition will run between July 1st and September 30th, 2026.
The Dataset: LibriBrain100
LibriBrain100 is a major expansion of the original LibriBrain dataset, bringing the total to over 100 hours of MEG data. It combines ~80 hours from the original LibriBrain subject with ~40 minutes of recordings from each of 32 new subjects, all listening to naturalistic spoken English from the Sherlock Holmes canon.
This multi-subject dataset opens the door to cross-subject generalisation — a critical challenge for practical brain-computer interfaces. How much data does it take to reach useful performance on a new subject?
