Thanks to this brain-sensing meditation device, I'm calmer and sleeping great
Muse is a device that measures electroencephalogram (EEG) brain waves. It can't "read your thoughts" but it can detect the electrical activity in your brain through sensors.
You put the device on your head and it listens for brainwaves. It can detect five types of brainwaves: Delta waves of deep sleep. Theta waves during drowsiness, light sleep, and visualization. Alpha waves during wakeful relaxation. Beta waves during alert activity, problem-solving. Gamma waves during higher mental activity like consolidating information.
Source: Muse
Muse must have good contact with the skin to work. It took me five minutes or so to set it up, and you have to set up it every time you use it.
You know it's working when all of the sensors show up in a solid block of color. Like this.
You have to make sure your hair is away from your ears for it to work.
The secret to Muse is that before each meditation session you "calibrate" it with your brainwaves that day by doing a simple exercise thinking about objects in a list.
When your mind is calm enough, you hear birds. Muse measures how often you get distracted by thoughts, how often you get calm again, and how many birds you hear, and then gives you points and badges.
I always thought I was awful at mediating. I couldn't calm my mind for more than a few seconds without daydreaming. Muse showed me that I'm actually pretty good at it. On this day, my mind was 96% calm! Now I know what that kind of calm feels like and how to do it. As you can see, I still had a slight rumble of thoughts in the background but they didn't distract me much from focusing on my breath.
On other days, meditating wasn't so easy. On this day, my mind kept getting distracted. I was only 35% calm.
The reason Muse works is that the app gives you live feedback while using it. So if the birds stop and the "weather" gets louder, you know you are distracted. You can choose from different sounds like a rainforest, desert, city park. But they are big files (40 Mb), so I only downloaded two.
I made this 1 minute video to show what it's like to use Muse. My mind was active. I was mediating at 5 seconds and birds started tweeting at 10 seconds. I got distracted at 25 seconds and the weather got loud. At 35 seconds, my mind was calm and focused again.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/_v_rzPQRqQs?rel=0
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Height: 315px
This is the chart of that 1 minute session: The green part indicates birds. After just a few weeks of practicing with this device, I can calm my mind and quiet my thoughts on command.
The downside of this: Muse isn't cheap. The device costs $300. You can, however, share it between multiple people.
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