A Muse you can use: Biofeedback headband can help train your brain to relax
$299 device works with a smartphone app to record your brain waves so you can work to control them
What would happen if you crossed the Buddha with a well-meaning HAL?
That’s the idea behind Muse, a $299 meditation headband that reads your brain waves — and trains your mind to calm itself. It’s one part yoga guru, one part “Star Trek” tricorder.
“Muse helps you slow your mind,” says its co-creator, Trevor Coleman, whose company InteraXon received some seed money from laid-back “That ’70s Show” star Ashton Kutcher, no less.
Here’s how Muse works: Download the app, put on the feather-light headband, and begin to meditate as you stare at a beach scene on your smartphone.
Brain-wave readings taken five points on your forehead and ears are transmitted from the headband to your phone — an irony, given how much stress our smartphones give us every day.
If your brain waves are calm, you’ll hear a light breeze. If your mind wanders, the breeze turns to a tempest, and a cool female voice instructs you to focus on your breathing and count down from 10. If you heed the pseudo-Siri, the light breeze returns.
If your brain waves are calm, you’ll hear a light breeze. If your mind wanders, the breeze turns to a tempest, and a voice instructs you to focus on your breathing and count down from 10.
That’s the theory, of course, but this stressed-out, deadline-pressured neurotic didn’t do so well in her first three-minute session. My mind fluttered from one thought to the next, running through all the things I had to do and the thousands of emails in my inbox. The wind on the app howled.
Coleman expected that. With Muse, repetition is the mother of meditation. You don’t get rock- hard abs from one set of sit-ups, either.
“You’re exercising your attention,” he said. “And doing that over and over again builds your brain’s ability.”
Within a few sessions, it got easier to sense what calm felt like, and to chase that feeling. The app cleverly incentivizes peacefulness by unlocking features that shed more light on your progress.
Eventually, I noticed that I was “neutral” or “calm” rather than “active” in most of my sessions — and that I got better the more I meditated. By my third week, I was more than 50% calm!
SUSAN WATTS/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The headband, whose sensors pick up brain waves ...
MUSE
... which are displayed via a smartphone.
Coleman claims that people who live in chaotic places get the most out of the headband.
“It gives them an excuse to disconnect,” he said.
Muse is not the first company to try to harness brain waves — after all, doctors have been using electroencephalography for more than 100 years. But by linking EEGs to your smartphone, Muse hopes to cash in on today’s tech-savvy set that is always seeking a modern solution to age-old problems, in this case learning to calm down.
I used the device for about three weeks and felt noticeably cool and collected, better able to deal with my life’s many stresses.
But Muse lives up to its name: It’s no solution, just an inspiration. In moments of great stress, I’m still not responding with true calm — but I am less frazzled by the everyday demands of living in such a caffeinated place as New York. As with any form of self-improvement, the biggest problem is simply finding the time to stop your life to do the actual improving.
And, naturally, my smartphone never stops ringing or beeping, reminding me that I am oceans away from true relaxation. Then, Muse or no Muse, I find myself asking, “Serenity when?”
BY BETH STEBNER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, October 30, 2014, 2:00 AM
bstebner@nydailynews.com
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/muse-review-brain-sensing-headband-helps-calm-article-1.1992081
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