Toronto: Meditation with InteraXon's Muse headband promotes optimism, says report

“It’s not like you put this headband on and you float . . . it just makes it easier to form a habit,” Jay Vityarthi, the head of user experience design for Muse, told CTV News. “You’ve got professional sports teams, you’ve also got executives and high-level decision makers who are using it. These are people who are under a lot of mental pressure.”

InteraXon has been promoting the headband Muse to track real-time feedback on the brain’s phenomenon during meditation.

Muse headband, reported InteraXon when placed on the head like a crown can sense and interpret electroencephalography (EEG) activity in the brain into sounds during meditation and said the sounds become noisier if a person is distracted and gentler if relaxed.

The use of headband Muse along with smartphones, added InteraXon  can track their progress with colour-coded charts.

After gaining recognition among celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Olympic skater Elvis Stojko since the its launch two years back, Muse has begun to attract the academic community.

Allison Sekuler, McMaster University psychology professor said that Muse helped her to become more aware of distractions and realize an optimal meditative state. She was greatly influenced with its use and started doing research for the company to better understand its impacts and capability.

“Initially I was quite skeptical,” she said. “The more I used it, the more I realized this could help me control my thoughts and be more productive in meetings and everyday life.”

According to a research from CSS Insights the global market for Muse is set to top US$14 billion in 2016, and grow to $34 billion by 2020.

“People are recognizing that jogging or running or exercise is good for the heart. They’re (also) recognizing it is equally important to exercise the mind,” said InteraXon CEO Derek Luke.

Media reported that similar devices were on the market. NeuroSky's MindWave Mobile is a similar EEG device. It has a single sensor and an entry-level price of $100. Emotiv Insight, at $659, is more advanced, with five sensors.

EEG devices have been commended by industry observers for infusing high tech into a centuries-old tradition, but some mindfulness experts were skeptical, media reported.

Dr. Steven Selchen, head of mindfulness based therapies at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto questions the ability of gadgets to reproduce the same results as the ancient practice of meditation.

“I am cautious about the utility of certain kinds of products,” he said. “We really need to see what research says to know how useful they are for people.”

The company says studies are ongoing to evaluate Muse’s ability to reduce stress among breast cancer patients and to help those with apprehension and depression.

Researchers at the University of Victoria have also used this device to analyze the brain waves of meditating monks.

Use of a mobile device to compute meditation into a game may be effective and appealing to younger tech-oriented individuals. But, Selchen worries that assigning numbers and values to meditation and actually turning it into another computer game, could defeat its rationale.

“A lot of the devices that may be out there are really focused on training in a very goal-oriented way,” he said. “If that is challenging for people to do . . . that can play into their self-criticism. ‘I am not getting this right. I am not good at this. I am a failure.’ And that can actually pull them even further away from what we are trying to train in a meditation setting.”

According to surveys more adults are fascinated with the idea of brain relaxation, but do not attend traditional training due to lack of time. Advocates imply that devices like Muse does offer a likely short-cut. But replacing real meditation with technology-assisted meditation is debatable.

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj)

(Image: Traditional Meditation, Wikipedia)