Muse: the brain sensing headband | Hacker News Reader

Muse: the brain sensing headband

choosemuse.com

86 pointsbeltex54 comments

A $300 consumer product that promises to help one be more "mindful" & "present" more "efficiently" than plain old meditation. What is sad is the irony in all of this. What's sadder is that I want to buy it...

Might be brilliant on their part. Corporate consultant gurus are making quite a nickel telling execs to be more "mindful" & "present". Might be an opportune time to break into the market and displace some spiritual advisors with a little technology too. Maybe Verison 2.0 will help you down the 8fold path faster and without years of meditation & conditioning.

Two things:

1) A recently discovered very strong correlation (needs further longitudinal study) between mindfulness practice and a reduced decline in mental performance with age.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnagi.2014.00...

2) I had a demo -- the device is actually very responsive and seems to really work. The science (not conclusive but interesting) behind it is a well known correlation with meditation and brain alpha waves. YMMV.

I have been doing zazen meditation as 2-3 hours per day for 10+ years.

The way I see it, mindfulness practices and meditation gives long term effects because you are doing the effort yourself. It's not the mental state you are in during the meditation that brings the long term benefits. What works is your constant effort to look at your mind and notice what it does, even when you are distracted or feel vexed and especially then.

When you do 7 day zazen retreat where you meditate 10-16 hours per day, you feel pain in your legs, periods of intense drowsiness, agitation, strong emotions, boredom, etc. all this while sitting and looking calm outwards. Within all this internal storm you are just looking at what happens your own mind at the current moment. Attaching yourself to pleasant mental states you get in meditation is just waste of time.

The way these EEG devices work is by giving you feedback loop that gets you into relaxed state. That's not same as meditation. It can have good effects, but it's not the same.

One person drives with car 10 km every day and other person runs 10 km every day. The amount they travel correlates very closely, but only one person gets exercise.

But meditating for 2-3 hours PER DAY seems a bit excessive, no?

Then meditating for 10-16 hours per days seems really excessive.

It's almost like you're saying, these people who meditate, they don't really meditate, they just pay lip service. To meditate you have to be dedicated and spend 2-3 hours per day doing it if you're going to it correctly.

A bit judgmental aye? Reads to me like the comment is based on the meditator's experience and isn't an injunction on other, but an observation based on experience.

I think it's an important observation to point out to that this device may intact hinder the desired effects of (at least) zazen.

People watch TV or play games for mutiple hours, meditating 2-3hours seems hardly excessive in light of that.

You don't really need a gadget to meditate, any more than you need an app to go running. But it's nice to be able to keep track of your progress, and maybe even use the data to see how variables like sleep or exercise affect your ability to stay focused and relaxed.

I wrote a small app to record short meditation sessions using a NeuroSky MindWave [https://github.com/zenobase/zenobase-mindlog]. But I stopped using it because getting this device positioned correctly was a pain...

Having done some small experiments with EEG I'm wary of these consumer devices (have seen 'performance improving' gaming gear too), mostly work with muscles etc. This doesn't claim EEG that I can see though so... who knows? (EDIT: just saw EEG details, if they can get a clean signal without using conductive gel fair play to them, I would love to hear how because that is an achievement!)

As an aside a friend once described capitalism as 'viral' in that everything can be looked at through its eyes, packaged and sold, and that's why it can be so hard to change, even radical movements to disrupt it are packaged and sold, think Che Guevara t-shirts. It's fascinating to see.

I agree. EEG signals are buried within layers of much stronger artifacts.

I'm relatively sure that this device just notices when you you relax your face and forehead muscles. That's good indicator of your relaxation.

I'm having a hard time searching for this thing as "muse band" on Google :)

http://interaxon.ca

The company behind Muse.

I've been waiting for a basic device that just tells me roughly what brain state I'm in (alpha/beta/delta/theta/gamma dominant) with bonus points if it has a feedback mechanism to make it easier to train one self into a certain state.

I don't think they got the pricing right. There are already quite a lot of consumer EEG devices on the market that either do more and/or are cheaper. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_consumer_brain%E2...

But none that are as pretty and well tuned.

I'd like to dispense just a bit of unsolicited feedback: the website is SO flashy/animated that I scrolled all the way to the end and didn't pay attention to any of the actual content.

agreed. the constantly shifting background colors gave me a headache. navigating the site wearing Muse would break the product.

Big issue with this kind of headband is the position of electrodes. Forehead seems like a good place in the first time since the frontal lobe is devoid of hair, however the EEG signal at this place is heavily artifacted by muscular activity (blinks, eye movements, facial muscles).

The most "interesting" brain activity also happens in the central axis of the brain (going from nose, through the top of the head and back to the occiput). It is however a design challenge to get electrodes to this place without the use of ugly caps and gel.

Ahh, was hoping it was a device that delivered minimal tDCS. Does such a device exist?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_sti...

http://www.foc.us/

Foc.us does. I have one. Works well.

EDIT: Downvoted for providing a link? I don't work for Foc.us or anything.

This sounds very interesting.

I understand this has been approved as "safe", and I doubt it would ever lead to death or harm, but I wonder what the long term effects of frequent brain stimulation could be. It could be good effects, but it could also be bad. I don't believe any longitudinal study has been done on something like this.

How do you feel while you're using it?

It doesn't seem to produce any acute effects. The research I've read before buying this seems to indicate it's a chronic effect over time. Unfortunately I don't have the patience to really do a sham/active test cycle, so I've been just alternating pulse/continuous/random cycles 3-4 times per week, 10-20 minutes per session.

Anecdotally it seems to work well. My major reason for investing into tDCS was to improve working memory, as I strongly believe I was rapidly deteriorating in that realm despite near-abstinence from alcohol and other drugs. In that regard, it seems to work well, but it could easily be a placebo effect from wearing a cool helmet.

If I had to guess I'd say I'm 75% confident that foc.us has had a material positive effect on my working memory and cognitive functions. I can't say I am 90-95% confident and I'm not sure I ever will be, since doing a rigorous test is near impossible without a partner controlling the sham effects, and even then it's for personal use and not a research study so to speak.

Not sure I would enthusiastically recommend it but the research out there points in a solid - if not dramatic - direction.

It's target market seem to be gamers, but I was just wondering are there any other positive effects that a software engineer would benefit from, besides memory?

I'm not much of a gamer besides the occasional game of League/DotA; I use it primarily while coding/reading/writing.

Who has a hard time focusing on video games?

I'm glad it wraps around the front of the head. It's an amazing visual clue to everyone else that this is the type of person you want to avoid a conversation with.

Funny comment but completely out of context since this is not something you're supposed to wear in public.

So the picture of the one woman laughing is not having a conversation with anyone, but actually having a psychotic episode?

She does appear to be in a padded room.

had to laugh at this comment.

is the plan that people wear this around day to day??

personally i believe it looks surprisingly low-key

To give some more information, these tech info and sdk pages are linked from the faq site:

Tech specs:

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0348/7053/files/muse-tech-s...

SDK guide:

https://sites.google.com/a/interaxon.ca/muse-developer-site/...

Ooh, these sudden background color changes when scrolling really hurt my brain!

Just trying to read that site stressed me out. So they failed before they even got started.

Came here to say the same thing. Background colors and text changing without interaction and unpredictable consequences of navigation actions makes for quite the stressful experience.

Reminds me of the Atari Mindlink.

http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/mindlink...

It worked via your forehead muscles.

Weirdly, I did consumer research testing for this thing as a teenager. They showed us a video and then let us test it with River Raid (which was an Activision game, go figure). Then one of those group sessions where they interview you all with someone filming behind a two-way mirror. The Atari thing did kinda work. Sorta. Anyway, it was a fun consumer research thing to be paid for.

Is this at all different from the Melon[0] headband (a Kickstarter backed project from ~a year ago, and half the price)?

[0] http://www.thinkmelon.com/

You can get it today (or 3-4 weeks rather for order fulfillment).

Fair; I'm more curious about the technical aspects / whether the doubled cost translates into anything more than immediacy.

The cynic in me feels that much of what they may be determining is from muscle artifact...i've been looking through some (plain old clinical/medical 32 electrode) EEG data and even that has a lot of artifact. Although I suppose it's some behavioral correlation - the more stressed out you are the more you clench your muscles, I suppose.

At the very least if they've figured out how to get clean EEG w/o having to use smelly EEG conductive goop, props to them!

The tagline (the brain sensing headband) is hilarious, I'd love to see the app just respond Yes or No when a person puts the headband on ;)

To the best of my basic knowledge (and as mentioned here already) EEG isn't going to be super-useful for a consumer device like this ... HEG (infrared detection of oxygen levels) is a better option in terms of the ratio of easy hookups to meaningful (mass market) results.

As of May 14th, they were telling backers (of which I'm one) that delivery is delayed 4-6 weeks.

Very little (almost none?) information given.

Talk about the software connected to this..

Anyone spending 300$ for so little information?

>Muse uses 7 finely calibrated EEG sensors to detect and measure the activity of your brain. This sensory input is translated into real-time feedback on your tablet or smart phone via Bluetooth. The result is a rich, real-time audio and visual experience.

Calibrated for whom?

If you take a minute to read the information available

http://www.choosemuse.com/pages/faq#using

says that there is a 1 minute calibration period at the beginning of each use.

This site demonstrates how the blink and marquee tag look in 2014

If we're at headache: the website gives me one.

I think I'll stick to http://www.necomimi.com

uhmm interesting wiggle wiggle

I wonder if someone with migraine somehow could benefit from such a device/training.

There should be meditation apps which support this.

Would love to train my focus more.

Haven't there been a few of these on Indiegogo?

This was one of them: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/muse-the-brain-sensing-he...

I wonder when the first real such product will exist. Like any system that synchronizes by waves it can be modified by waves, probably much more than you'd be able to do through chemicals.

So who will make the first heroine headband ? It will probably need outputs as well as inputs though.

It seems to just be a biofeedback device. It tells you when you are experiencing the right brain wave pattern so that you're consciously aware of it, but you have to do the work of meditating to alter the state.

Given that Jason has funded this startup, also invested in Calm (and I believe in his intelligence), I should not doubt this product. This product has been demonstrated first in the Launch Hackaton and it worked. Coming from the signal processing background I'm always very suspicious how sensors can preform such great filtering on the signal, but looking at the investor profile makes me think there is something there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com