Can technology really help you meditate?
Muse 2 meditation headband six-week review: what daily use of this gadget taught me about mindfulness
Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with Muse and this review is not incentivised in any way.
This article has been updated in 2020. I sold the Muse 2. Read more below.
The Muse 2 Headband
For those of you who don’t know what Muse is, a quick review: Muse is a headband, a device that you wear in your forehead, which contains an EEG that records the electrical activity of the brain and interprets your mental activity during meditation, as well as other sensors. Through the Muse app, this translates into instant neurofeedback:
When your mind is calm and settled, you hear peaceful weather. Busy mind? As your focus drifts, you’ll hear stormy weather that cues you to bring your attention back to your breath. — From the Muse website
Why I decided to purchase a Muse 2
I admit, I love gadgets and, as a firm believer that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, I share the #quantifiedself philosophy. More on that here:
In this sense, being able to get some objective feedback on my meditations sounded interesting enough. But immediate neurofeedback? That was what sold me on the Muse 2.
I had been meditating for some years with the help of apps and by myself, but one can never really know if he’s doing it correctly, right? Getting some sort of feedback through weather sounded ingenious! Plus, when you reach a deep meditation, the Muse app sound chirping birds, so you can be sure that you’re in “the zone”.
At least, that’s the theory…
So what do I think of the Muse after 6 weeks?
I have been using Muse to meditate daily for over six weeks.
Overall, I think positively about it: it’s an interesting gadget and to have such technology readily available as a consumer is really fascinating.
But the whole experience is not without technical glitches or frustration:
The neurofeedback works at first, but then it may hinder your progress
It was reassuring to finally have some instant feedback that I was meditating “right”. My first results looked promising:
- 5 min at 67% calm
- 20 min at 50% calm
- 25 min at 69% calm
- 30 min at 69% calm
- 10 min at 53% calm
Creeping anxiety. However, I noticed that I got extremely anxious when the birds started singing, which indicated I was in “the zone”. The moment I heard the first chirp, I felt so proud that I immediately unfocused. And it got worse with time. So much for positive neurofeedback! Apparently, I’m not the only one who complains about this.
Distracting weather. Also, I noticed that the weather sounds can be quite inclement, and sometimes they get really distracting. On one hand, it is nice to realise that your mind is wandering; on the other, sometimes the sounds of the weather get even more intense as you try to focus again on your breathing, and then it just becomes too distracting. There can be a negative feedback loop here.
Overly-sensitive breath. Speaking of breathing, something that was off-putting to me was that the weather sounds react to almost all breathing, so the only way I could get some “silence” in that sense was when I started breathing very shallowly — but that meant I had to actively control my breathing, which is not what meditation is necessarily about.
Technical issues are common and they interrupt your session
Throughout over 50 meditation sessions, perhaps in only 5 or 7 of them I did not experience any technical problems. The most common is the headband disconnecting, but sometimes there is a drop in the signal quality; the longer your meditation session is, the more likely it is that a technical problem will occur, at least from my experience.
It doesn’t matter what the problem is, the result is the same: your session abruptly stops and you have to manually reconnect the headband or readjust the headband. Especially for reconnecting, sometimes it takes a few tries and a few interactions with the app, which is very distracting and off-putting.
At first, this really annoyed me and got me completely unfocused. Those interruptions worked as a trigger to mind-wandering, even after the problem was solved and I was back to my session. Over time, I thought I learned to accept those such interruptions and go back to focusing on my breathing — or at least until recently.
I had programmed a 70-minute meditation session, and the headband got disconnected 4 or 5 times throughout that period. The last time this happened, I just switched to the timed meditation, without a headband, in order to be able to finish the meditation time I had committed to; but I could no longer focus. It was a very frustrating experience. I would say that in maybe 3–4 sessions out of around 50 I was so frustrated with the technical issues that I considered the whole experience to be unproductive.
UPDATE: Most (if not all) connection issues were solved when I upgraded my phone to a different, newer model. As far as I researched, Bluetooth implementation is still a bit flimsy across the board, with Bluetooth component having different stability and issues. So, if you are having trouble with connecting you Muse headband to your device, or if it keeps on disconnecting, consider troubleshooting your device first — or exchanging it altogether!
Sensors are not fully integrated into the experience and Heart and Body Meditation are just gimmicks
I was excited that the second inception of the Muse, appropriately called Muse 2, had several other sensors, in addition to the EEG sensor of the first version of the Muse:
However, I expected all sensors to be able to be used simultaneously into one cohesive meditation experience. Not so. Each one of the meditation types offered on the app relies on specific sensors:
- Mind: EEG
- Heart: PPG + Pulse Oximetry
- Body: Accelerometer
- Breath: PPG + Gyroscope
The result is that out of the four types of meditation, I found that I only consistently used the first and the last.
The soundscape used in the Heart meditation (some sort of tribal drumming, which reacts to your heart rhythm) is pretty good — if it wasn’t for a wild bird-like sound that comes up in every new loop of the soundscape. I find it is very distracting, and just ruins the whole experience for me.
Body Meditation, on the other hand, relies only on the accelerometer, so it only gives you feedback, through the sound of wind chimes, if you move. So, unless you really have a problem with sitting still, this one is probably not for you either.
So, would I recommend the Muse?
The price of the product
The first barrier to purchasing the Muse is the price. While it is impressive that one can have an EEG at home, it’s still not cheap. So this should be the first consideration:
If you have the money to spare and you’re having trouble keeping a meditation habit, then perhaps, I would recommend it in general as a different way to kick-start or to keep up with the practice.
Just consider how much you would pay for a meditation book, for a subscription to an app or for a meditation retreat. The Muse is not cheap, but can be considered an investment in your health.
The experience of the meditator
Non-meditators: If you haven’t started meditating yet or have just started, then yes, the Muse can be a powerful and interesting way to kickstart your practice and hopefully build traction enough so that you can make it a habit.
Beginner meditators: If you have doubts whether you are meditating correctly, then yes, the Muse can offer immediate insight, which can be helpful.
Tech-savvy meditators: If you love gadget, technologies or the #quantifiedself philosophy, then yes, the Muse is a very innovative product and you’ll be happy to be able to demonstrate it to your friends and show beautiful graphs of your neural activity while you meditate. On the long-term, I am not so sure.
Advanced meditators: For more advanced meditators, however, I have the feeling that the Muse might not be a worthwhile investment. At least not yet — let’s see if they develop the headband and the app into something that could cater to that audience. Right now, it is clearly geared towards beginners. The first inception of the Muse had an SDK that allowed for third-parties to develop brain computer interfaces with Muse. Maybe when the manufacturer finally releases an SDK for the Muse 2, we’ll see more progress on this area.
Final words
The Muse is an interesting product and although it has several glitches, I still think it has enormous unrealised potential.
If a headband and app can get you to meditate more than you would than if you didn’t have them, then it was worth to get them in the first place.
UPDATE April 2020: Over the past year or so, I have only used Muse for breathing exercises before my actual meditation practice (without the Muse). As I finally realised that for over a year there has been no major developments, that Muse sensors are still not fully integrated with the Muse app and fail to provide a complete meditation experience (see points #4 and #5 below), and that the new Muse device doesn’t bring any real innovation (it’s rather a redesign, perhaps more comfortable than the Muse 2), I have finally decided that I outgrew Muse and sold it on eBay. As for the breathing exercises, I have been using Prana Breath and have been very happy with it.
If you already have a Muse or Muse 2, I wrote an article with some hints, tips, tricks and advice on how best to use your headband for meditation:
PS: The team from Muse: the brain sensing headband also writes here on Medium.
