500 hours of neuromeditation later….
This device is great! After musing about 500 hours over the course of two years, I strongly believe this technology has potential benefit for many people. I strongly feel that muse meditation helped me cultivate a relaxed and focused baseline. muse meditation is so effective that it basically replaced regular alcohol consumption within my life, but that is a personal anecdote- YMMV. Don’t place too much expectation on the technology or on your meditation practice. Strong benefits from a conventional practice will come over a very long period of time, 100-200 hours. If you want to go into the deep end of a practice, woodshed it and start doing 1-3 hour sits. Muse is an awesome gateway into meditating, but it’s also important to meditate without the app. Look into traditional styles of focused attention meditation, then pair them with the feedback. When using muse, always take time to wet the sensors + make good contact. I feel that Muse app is really good for developing relaxed concentration - Samatha or “meditative absorption”. This is an excellent skill to acquire because it will help you maintain a calm and positive attitude in all things. Some people gawk seeing meditation removed from a spiritual context, or seeing technology encroach into traditional practice. Others despise the idea of any practice part of religion or spirituality. I think meditation offers intense benefit to anyone who deeply engages with it. I think muse is an excellent gateway into meditation and a great tool to sharpen concentration as a specific faculty. I definitely wouldn’t have gotten so deep into practice without this device. If you want to form your own opinion on this tool, I recommend going deep and meditating a few hours with it :) Two requests for developers: #1). Can we export our brainwaves after the session? Being able to see them is awesome, but getting a CSV file would SLAP #2). Can we hack together a way to see progress between sessions? Since the app is recording brainwave data across months, I’d love to see an overall progress indicator. Even just a simple metric, like longest concentration streak recorded, or increase in alpha amplitude since starting with the app.