In this episode, I’m speaking with neuroscientist Ariel Garten, the co-inventor of Muse, a brain-sensing headband that makes meditation easier. Ariel’s research has mainly focused on Parkinson’s disease and hippocampal neurogenesis, but she also has a background as a fashion designer and artist!
Honestly, I was extremely impressed with Ariel during our conversation; she was highly knowledgeable about meditation and the impact it has on our lives and health, but also because of her integrity and balanced view as a businessperson.
I’ve been using Muse for a few weeks now, and I have been absolutely loving it.
Ariel is gifting us a generous 20% off both Muse devices! >> Click here to claim your special discount on the Muse S or Muse 2 and start 2025 with your new meditation practice.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Ariel and I discuss:
- Why meditation is so good for the modern human brain and a brief but very interesting history of meditation
- What is meant by “sense of self”…what does that really mean on a basic, physiological level?
- How meditation fits into an evolutionary context and why Ariel sees meditation as “ninja training” for our wildly busy lives
- How the amygdala, default mode network, and hippocampus have been affected by twenty-first-century life and the relationship to neurodegenerative disease
- The impact of meditation on the prefrontal cortex, especially as we age
- An intriguing benefit of meditation we don’t often hear about and why it shouldn’t be the only strategy you use to keep your brain youthful and healthy
- Standard meditation practices and how the Muse device fits in with these traditions
- The many research studies done with Muse, including ones on managing the stress of cancer and long COVID
- Another form of the Muse device called Muse S that has been demonstrated to track sleep as effectively as a sleep lab!
- How Muse allows you to see your heart rate variability and a great explanation of HRV and why it’s a crucial metric
- Ariel describes why Muse is different from other brain training devices on the market and her highly integral and heart-centered approach to competitors in her field
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Transcript
Ari Whitten: Ariel, welcome back to the show. Such a pleasure to have you.
Ariel Garten: Thank you, Ari. It is my joy and pleasure to be here today.
Why meditation is helpful
Ari: Yes. Okay. We had a wonderful conversation the last time I had you on the podcast and I wanted to get into some new dimensions of meditation, the Muse device, neurofeedback, this whole area, and I want to make sure we also talk about sleep and some of the other areas of expertise that you have that we didn’t touch on last time. Before we get into some of those details, I want to start on the big-picture level here. I want to ask a question that I think a lot of us fail to ask some basic questions about things that maybe are so built into our culture or we’ve heard about so many times that we fail to even ask the question, why is this thing even necessary or why is it even helpful?
Exercise is a great example of this, where we’ve all heard so many thousands of times that exercise is so good for us. I think a lot of us fail to really appreciate the evolutionary context of why it is that just physically moving our bodies is such powerful medicine for us. I think that meditation is something analogous to that in many ways, that we’ve all heard about meditation so many thousands of times, we’ve heard it’s good for this, it’s good for that, we should all be doing it, yet most of us aren’t doing it. Let’s zoom out and just ask this very basic question. Why is meditation helpful for the modern human brain?
Ariel: Oh, that’s a beautiful question. Presumably, meditation has been helpful for human brains for centuries. We have the evidence of people meditating, starting with Buddhist practices, we were looking at around 660 AD, we start to see meditation texts, there’s Jewish prayer meditation, there’s a real long history, Hindu meditation, Chinese, Dao, Confucius meditation, there’s meditation that has gone back more than 2000 years in history.
When we look at the value that it has to the mind, at that point in time, meditation was one of the few technologies that you could use to actually shift your mental state, to help you observe what was happening in your own body and overcome some of the possibly more animal instincts that you might have to devour things that were not good for you, covet another’s wife, to get angry and frustrated and act out in inappropriate ways.
There was the desire to be able to cultivate one’s own self, to elevate one beyond one’s animal instincts, and meditation was one of those technologies that was used. When we fast forward to today, inarguably, we are in an entirely different context than we were then. Not only do we continue to have the pressures of needing to feed ourselves and clothe ourselves and live day to day, albeit, many of those pressures are relieved because we have houses and heat, most of us, or air conditioners when we need them.
We have a completely different set of circumstances in which the amount of information and requests and distractions that are coming towards us are unmanageable, to say the least. We all can identify with that sensation of your phone ringing, picking up the kids, email binging, 300 messages in a different place that you don’t want to deal with, the cars honking, all of these things that pull our very, very precious attention from us.
When we look at how the brain works, the brain is a very complex organ that likes to work in simple ways. It likes to do one task at a time. Evidence demonstrates that when we’re just doing one task, focusing on one thing, we’re happier. When we are just doing one task, focused on one thing, we are significantly less stressed. Our amygdala and fear response is not going, the cortisol is not rushing through our body to the same degree. As humans, we have this innate response to respond to something that’s pulling our attention with heightened levels of cortisol, norepinephrine, attention, and when it’s being pulled from place to place, it’s really hard for our minds and bodies to work easily and harmoniously.
Today’s relatively untenable condition in which we’re living really not only is helped by meditation, but begs for practices like meditation to be able to return, not just our attention or cognitive functioning or emotional functioning, but our sense of self back into our human body.
The sense of self
Ari: I have 500 questions I want to ask you right now, but you said something there in the last sentence that piqued my interest, sense of self. Can you describe scientifically what you mean by that?
Ariel: Sure. There’s a part of our brain that gives us a internal sensory perception. That’s our insula. When we do activities like yoga, for example, our insula lights up. When we do practices like body scans, our insula lights up, it becomes more active. In people who regularly do these practices, they actually have even potentially larger insulae. The area governs our ability to really detect what’s going on inside our own bodies and have a sensitive feeling for ourselves. There’s a term for it which is called interoception, our ability to sensitively detect what’s going on inside our bodies.
Evidence research shows that those who have higher levels of interoception actually have lower levels of stress because you can check in with your body and see where you’re at. Another angle or way to look at this is in the default mode network. The default mode network is a network inside of our brain that goes from the PCC to the frontal cortex, and it is responsible for that internal dialogue that we have.
The sensation that you have that there’s this voice in your head that’s just narrating a thing to you all day long, that is your default mode network. As it turns out, it seems to be those who have more active default mode networks can be correlated with those who are not as healthy, not as cognitively capable, and those who are depressed, for example, and those who have more sensations of stress and less sensations of focused attention.
Because the content of that default mode network is defining who you are, it feels like our internal, it’s us. It’s us talking to us. Often the content of it is pretty crappy. It’s being, pulled moment to moment by all these external things that are outside of our control. The stuff that it is saying usually about us has to do with how much we’re failing at meeting the needs of all of the various pressures around us. It’s been shown that people with long-term meditation practices have down-regulated default mode network activity. That correlates with quieter feeling inside of yourself, less chatter, so that you can instead have the experience of simply the act of being you, not the various stories your brain is telling you.
Ari: One’s sense of self, insula, driven sense of self, is to some degree, I know this is maybe oversimplifying, but can we conceptualize the sort of when we swing more in that direction, it tends to decrease activity in the DMN, the default mode network? Is that accurate to say?
Ariel: We do see correlations with that in the research, but that may be because people who are doing the practices that increase insula activity are the same practices that decrease default mode network activity. It’s not necessarily that increased insula activation will then down-regulate your DFM. [crosstalk]
Ari: Yes, I don’t mean necessarily that one is causing the other, but it tends to be a toggle that the more active your brain is in this direction, the less active it tends to be in this other direction, generally?
Ariel: They can co-vary, yes.
Meditation in an evolutionary context
Ari: Okay. I’m curious, this may be a line of questioning that doesn’t work, depending on whether this happens to be an interest of yours, but I really tend to look at things through an evolutionary context and understand how they make sense through that context. I’m a big believer in the idea that human health cannot be understood outside of an evolutionary context, and I think a lot of our problems of modern humans is that so much of our health paradigms are detached from an evolutionary context, so they just don’t make much sense for many reasons. I’m curious how you would conceptualize meditation in an evolutionary context in terms of what it’s doing at the level of the brain. Is that something that you feel can be answered or does that question not make any sense to you?
Ariel: No, I think it’s a great question and that’s part of where I was going with life several hundred years ago or a thousand years ago when we first had this technology of meditation, it was a contemplative practice. Now we need it more than ever because we are assaulted from all sides by novel information that is yearning to grab our attention. The very same, we’re like a deer caught in headlights. Deers freeze when the headlights come on them because they have their fight, flight, or freeze response.
We have headlights everywhere shining on us, causing our system to really hyperreact in ways that it doesn’t need to. It requires a retraining or existing in this context. Many of us were born of an age prior to cell phones, prior to or at least prior to a smartphone. Probably everybody listening to this podcast was born before a smartphone existed. There was a greater, not only simplicity to life, but a greater ability to manage our own attentional resources because there were less demands on them.
Looking not only just in an evolutionary context, but within one human lifespan, I’m only 45, within my lifespan, I’ve gone from somebody calling me on a phone and in my house and if I’m there, then I have a conversation with them and only them to all angle assault on my attention. We have not only been unable to really effectively evolutionarily adapt to it. Some of us have, some of us are naturally good at multitasking, we’re able to take information from all sides. What that has also done is overstimulated us and left us dopamine depleted.
We have greater levels of not just anxiety, but also depression because we’re not feeling the same sense of joy and satisfaction in life because we are constantly being pinged by these dopamine machines. Within that evolutionary as a species and just evolutionary in the last 40 years as an individual or last 20 years, iPhone came out in 2012, 2010, we desperately need tools to help us manage this novel environment in which we are in and to be able to take a period of time in meditation that not just mirrors what life was like before, because it’s a time of quiet, but actually actively trains the brain and equips us with the skills that we need to be able to more effectively manage our attention, manage the contents of our own mind, avoid distraction, choose what we are intentional about and learn how to downregulate our physiology. Meditation really becomes like this ninja training ground to teach us how to deal with the never-ending bearish of modern life.
Ari: I want to come back to meditation in a second, but I want to go back to what you were saying about this modern world and all this hyper distractible environment where we’re being bombarded with so many different messaging apps and social media and news and people trying to get a hold of us and pinging us on five different platforms and all the picture that you just painted.
I want to see if we can go just a level deeper than what you described and just geek out on the neuroscience of what is happening as a result of that environment. What is happening at the level of our brain? What brain regions are becoming more or less active, are becoming bigger or smaller structurally as a result of that, and how does that correlate to our subjective experience of life?
Ariel: Sure. That’s a massive question and a research study that I have not previously done. We’re going to do some spitballing here. We’re going to do some armchair neuroscience and consider different aspects of the brain and how it might be impacted by this. Before we do that, I just want to say that even I, somebody who thinks about these topics all the time, I had not until this moment really reflected on the change that has come in my own life in terms of the level of distraction that I’ve had from my childhood and teenage, relatively calm teenage years, where we went out and we seeked stimulation because we didn’t have enough and we went to loud concerts.
This time in my life where a mere few years later, we’ve had to so rapidly adapt to this new environment, it’s wild. With that reflection aside, moving into the brain. There’s a bunch of stuff that this may because I haven’t read all the studies in this specific area prior to this question, but that seem reasonable that have been impacted. One is our amygdala. The amygdala is the part of our brain associated with our fear response.
Throughout our lives, we have had very healthy functioning amygdala. There’s actually two of them, amygdalae. You need a good amygdala to be scared of stuff so you can run away from it and stay safe. That made complete and perfect sense when we were presented with fear stimuli like tigers and snakes and fires and all of those things in our immediate environment and we could react to it and then they went away.
In our current environment, our amygdala responds just as well to the thought of something scary, the picture of something scary, the belief of something scary than an actual thing. In our current environment, the constant news that we see. At no other point in history could you open your phone, you could open your newspaper, but even that was slower. You open your phone and you’re just barraged with various pieces of information from around the world about things that are going wrong.
Ari: Even the newspaper is just a fraction of a moment in evolutionary time. That’s just, really, the last handful of generations, but 99.99% of human evolution took place, not just before pre-internet, but pre-TV, pre-radio, pre-newspaper.
Ariel: Yes, and certainly the internet has raised it to the nth degree because you have multiple narratives and storylines and commentaries that then build upon these fear events that were being shared. You have graphic images of them, et cetera. Our amygdalas are on hyperdrive. Our amygdalas also can be triggered by anything else that comes in, the email from your boss saying, “Where were you today?” Get the call from your kid’s school, oh no, are they hurt? The wrinkle in your pants before you go into an interview, whatever it is. Our amygdala are on hyperdrive.
What that does is it leads to several things. One is an increased fear sensation in the body until we finally get stuck in a chronic fear space. The other is an increased in negative fear-based cogitations in the mind. When your amygdala says, oh my God, something’s wrong, you get a sensation of fear in your body, which then tells your brain-body that, yes, something is wrong. I feel that. Then your brain generates thoughts about that fearful thing in an effort to keep you aware of it and keep you safe from it. You’re thinking about it and then you’re feeling scared, which really reinforces, geez, I got to go be thinking about these thoughts. Then you think about them more and more and more, and it’s hard to turn that off. We get stuck in ruminations, worries around things that are fearful because that’s how our brain is evolutionarily created in order to keep us safe.
Ari: This, the amygdala story, also ties into the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic system, fight or flight, and that whole story. Autonomic imbalance tends to be linked with amygdala overactivity. Would you agree with that?
Ariel: Absolutely. That I can 100% agree with. The good news is a meditation practice has been demonstrated in the short term when people are meditating to downregulate the activity in the amygdala. In the long term, you can even see a decrease in size in the amygdala in long-term meditators. Meditation really is an antidote to that hyperactive part of our brain, which then leads to a hyperreactive part of our body.
Ari: That was–
Ariel: Go ahead.
Ari: Sorry, you go ahead. Finish your thought.
Ariel: I’m moving to the next thought, so if you don’t mind.
Ari: I was going to say that was beautifully explained. That was perfect. That was exactly what I had in my head when I asked you that question of what I was hoping you would say in response to that. I’m curious, is there also an aspect of this story that relates to the DMN, how the modern world affects DMN activity?
Ariel: Yes, insofar as we have more subjects to cogitate upon, and we have increased things in our world that are provoking this level of anxiety. Again, if we take very, very modern, recent history, the combination of the pandemic and overuse of social media technologies in youth has been demonstrated to have had an unprecedented impact in youth anxiety, as well as depression. What you see there in somebody who is anxious and depressed tends to be a very highly active default mode network. Again, the use of meditation as a tool downregulates that DFM and quiets the stories in your mind, which then gives you increased cognitive control and ability to begin to work with and manage those anxious and depressive symptoms.
Ari: Are there any other–
Ariel: Depressive thoughts which are correlated and part of those anxious and depressive symptoms?
Ari: Sorry, I missed the last sentence. Can you repeat that?
Ariel: Oh, I made a reference to anxious and depressive symptoms, and then I just corrected myself and said it was actually anxious and depressive thoughts that correlate to anxious and depressive symptoms. I was just trying to not misspeak.
Ari: Are there any other layers to the story that you think are important to mention, any other brain areas or aspects to this imbalance of how the modern environment is mismatched to the way our brains evolved and now creates disrupted activity or functionality in certain areas of the brain?
Ariel: Absolutely. One of them is the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the seat of learning and memory. We are, as humans, really good at learning things or really good at adapting. Our brain needs to be within certain conditions to learn and adapt effectively. One of the conditions that’s really important for our brain to learn is sleep. In sleep, we consolidate our memories. We consolidate the information that we learn during the day.
As we have more blue light in our eyes and screens and light bulbs, our sleep is very fractured and fragmented. As our anxiety increases, again, that negatively impacts our sleep. Sleep is one of the things that then impacts both our hippocampus quite directly so that learning and memory becomes harder. Lack of sleep also impacts our ability to emotionally regulate ourselves.
On the hippocampus learning and memory story, cortisol also negatively impacts the hippocampus. Hippocampus, super important. This is the area of your brain associated with learning and memory. As you age, your hippocampus can decrease in size, can atrophy, doesn’t work as effectively. You see that particularly enhanced in Alzheimer’s or more pronounced.
It turns out that that stress hormone we talk about all the time that our modern crazy environment creates, cortisol, has a very negative impact on the hippocampus. Cortisol itself can lead to a decrease in the size of the hippocampus. Not only do we have the sensation when we have all of these things happening that we aren’t able to pay attention to one thing and learn, but we also have the actual neurochemical hormonal impact of cortisol on the hippocampus causing it to be less efficacious as we age.
Ari: Do all of these changes in brain function that are driven by the modern environment as you just outlined, do they also relate to our risk of brain-related diseases?
Ariel: Of course. When we think about a brain-related disease, we have the official diseases that we describe, Parkinson’s, various forms of dementia, Alzheimer’s, et cetera, those that we’re familiar and we know about. Then we have the blanket bucket of age-related cognitive decline. We just generally accept that as you get older, stuff isn’t going to work as well. Now, it turns out that when you do a series of things to both create a body that is healthier and easier, we’ll live longer, you can do some of that for the brain as well.
Stress is, and the increase in cortisol is something that has been shown to age the brain faster. Lack of sleep also ages the brain faster. It turns out that meditation can have a profound impact in decreasing the aging of the brain. In a study by Dr. Eileen Luders, she looked at long-term meditators and she defined a long-term meditator as five years or more. She looked at the volume of various areas of their brain, including the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, et cetera. On whole, brains of long-term meditators looked on average 7.5 years younger than the brains of non-meditators.
How meditation affects the brain
Ari: This was perfectly explained. I feel like we now have the proper context for people to truly understand why meditation is important and what it is really doing at the level of the brain. Take people through that. Now that you’ve set up, here’s what the modern world is doing to our brain. How does meditation change that picture?
Ariel: Sure. You say the word meditation and I go from the stress of the example of our stressy, distracted modern world to like, ah, meditation. Not only does it feel good to have that moment of break and peace and calm, but it actually is doing real and significant change in your brain. Meditation, as I mentioned, has been demonstrated to down-regulate the activity of the amygdala, so that fight or flight part of your body gets down-regulated and calmed down. Meditation down-regulates the activity in the default mode network. All of those annoying chattery conversations in your brain that cause you stress because they’re telling you about things that you haven’t done, or they’re pulling your attention bit to bit and causing increased anxiety, or it’s you telling you bad stories about yourself, which makes you feel terrible.
Basically, meditation down-regulates those things. If you stick somebody in an MRI machine and you just say like, “Just lay there, don’t do anything,” you’re going to see a decrease in activity in a lot of parts of the person’s brain, but you will still see a very active default mode network. It’s the internal chatter that just goes no matter what’s going on. When you have a long-term meditator go into an MRI machine and you say, “Just lie there and do nothing,” you don’t see that level of chatter in the brain. Not only does it decrease the activity of your default mode network during the practice of meditation, but it also does it throughout the day. It’s actually a skill that your brain builds. That’s another cool thing.
A third area that we haven’t really talked about, but it’s super important for meditation and for our evolved selves is our prefrontal cortex. When you look at humans and one of the things that seems to differentiate us from other mammals, it is the fact that we have this very developed prefrontal cortex. We have not just the hindbrain and the midbrain and the parts of the brain associated with our basic autonomic functions like breathing, thirst, sexual desires, et cetera, but we have this amazing upper level of our brain with phenomenal [inaudible 00:28:04] that govern the higher order thinking process.
Ari: Ariel, say that one more time, phenomenal, and then you cut out briefly. Can you just repeat that?
Ariel: Yes. We have this phenomenal upper layer of our brain, a cortex, this upper level that allows us to have incredible amounts of processing power. The cerebral cortex is beautifully folded so that there’s so much surface area for all of this processing. The human gem or jewel of that is the prefrontal cortex where we have a lot of real estate there in the brain that is associated with thinking, planning, organizing, inhibiting ourselves, our attention.
All of these things rest in the prefrontal cortex. Bad news, as you age, your prefrontal cortex thins. Bad news, being distracted by lots of things really doesn’t help your prefrontal cortex. Good news, if you’re able to maintain a long-term meditation practice, you can maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex even as you age. That means not only do you preserve the volume of that area of your brain, but it also means you’ve become better and better at being able to guide your attention and maintain and sustain your attention on one thing, which allows us to take pleasure in the one thing in front of us, which allows us to focus on something to learn it, which allows us to be present to the people that we’re conversing with.
The prefrontal cortex is an incredibly important part of the evolutionary story and the role that meditation plays in being able to support what our brain needs at this evolutionary moment.
The real cause of cognitive decline
Ari: What you’re getting at here, which I want to make sure listeners are attuned to, is the malleability of these different areas of the brain. As you spoke about a few minutes ago, this general bucket of age-related cognitive decline, we all have this widespread assumption around aging. This applies to more than just the brain but to many aspects of the story that we have around what happens to our body with aging and what losses of functionality and structure we have.
We have this story at the level of the brain that our brain just stop working as well as we get older. What you’re implying and what the research shows is that even if you take an older person and you engage them in a meditation practice, what you’re seeing is what you can see in many aspects of the brain, and please, you’re the expert here, but I’m speaking and painting in broad brushstrokes, but you fill in the gaps for us, that a lot of this age-related decline can be halted if not even reversed in some aspects of brain structure and function, which implies that the age-related cognitive decline is not actually age-related per se. It’s not driven by aging in a deterministic way, it’s driven by behaviors that happen to be associated with aging process.
One aspect of age-related cognitive decline is less cognitive demands, for example. As people get beyond their 20s, they stop engaging in education in most cases. Unless they have a job that’s cognitively demanding, they stop doing things that are cognitively demanding, or they do far less of them, which tends to over time degrade many of those like the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, that are involved in doing cognitively demanding tasks. As you would expect, if you stop doing those tasks, those structures tend to degrade over time, but meditation to a large extent, can halt or reverse certain aspects of this decline. Is that accurate?
Ariel: Yes. I want to put a finer point on it. There are other behaviors that we can control that also negatively impact our brain if we don’t control them. For example, the consumption of sugar has been demonstrated to negatively impact the brain. The consumption of the wrong kinds of saturated fats and the wrong dietary mix not only clog the arteries in your heart, but they also clog the arteries in your brain, and that’s what a stroke is.
Exercise, for example, is extraordinarily healthy for your body, but also for your brain. It creates something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which neurotrophic, so the neurons grow, so it’s factors inside of your brain that really allow for its growth and repair. We can’t take meditation in isolation as a strategy to prolong your brain’s life. You also need to manage what you eat, exercise, et cetera, and the act of meditation seems to improve the effect of all of those interventions.
Meditation is something that makes it easier for you to get to the gym because you’re more able to resist your internal desire to not do so. Meditation makes it much easier to really pay attention to your satiety signals and not overeat or have better internal willpower and self-control, so you’re not reaching for the cookies, you’re instead choosing the broccoli. Meditation not only literally exercises the brain, you are doing an activity in your brain that is exercising it, that is keeping it nimble and sharp. You are entering into a brainwave constellation that it turns out is just very healthy for the brain.
When you enter into this congruent alpha state, it seems to be remarkably restorative for the brain. You’re practicing your focused attention, so you’re maintaining these skills that allow you to continue to learn and remain engaged in life, and you’re doing something that ultimately allows you to become better at all the other habit change that you want to do in your life so that you can be on board with this 360 approach to a healthy you.
Ari: It’s interesting that the antidote in many ways to part of the brain dysregulation that occurs in the modern environment, that the antidote is not a modern invention but is actually something that is quite ancient in terms of the origins of meditation practice are not new. They weren’t specifically designed or invented as a result of, okay, the internet and social media and 24/7 news and all this stuff and being bombarded with this and iPhones and all this technology is dysregulating the brain, and therefore we need to invent an intervention that corrects much of this dysfunction and helps bring our brains back into balance. It was invented thousands of years before this situation ever happened. Isn’t that an interesting observation? How would you describe what’s going on there?
Ariel: That’s a great question, and when we look at the history of meditation, it often comes out of spiritual practice and the idea of being able to purify oneself or be with a thought or pay attention to a scripture or a prayer to God. Meditation as a secular practice is actually quite new. It previously has always been embedded in a religious philosophy. When I look at meditation in today’s world, I would say in many ways perhaps meditation has become harder to do because we have so much distraction, because we have such high incidences now of ADHD, so neurochemical, structurally based distraction, in addition to the distraction that we have in our world.
Although it’s this ancient technology that it’s an antidote, we’re almost in a position where it is even harder to do the thing that’s good for you because so many of us feel like, oh no, my brain just bounces all over the place, I can’t be in control of it. I can’t let go for one minute because there is so many things. Being in nature is something that can bring on meditative states and that’s been demonstrated, but how often do many of us get to be in nature? We’re missing the contexts that make that ancient solution powerful and viable for so many of us.
The Muse device
Ari: Let’s talk about standard meditation practice, and then you are the inventor or co-inventor, you tell me, you correct me.
Ariel: Co-inventor, yes. It’s team effort, co-inventor.
Ari: Of the Muse device, which has now been around for close to a decade, I want to say?
Ariel: Yes, just over a decade.
Ari: I know you’ve gone through multiple generations of device. You’ve made a number of successive improvements. You’ve had enormous success. You’ve even conducted some clinical studies, but take listeners through standard meditation practice, and then what is unique about the Muse device and practicing with that?
Ariel: Sure. There are many different forms of meditation. The first form that most people learn is a focused attention practice. In a focused attention meditation, you focus your attention on one thing, and it’s usually your breath because your breath is always there, we hope. You focus your attention on your breath, and very quickly after doing that, your attention is going to wander. You’re going to have a thought about the grocery store or Facebook or how boring this is or whatever, and it’s going to grab your attention.
It’s your job as a meditator to notice that your mind has wandered and then say, “Hey, I’m not going to have that thought. I’m going to be disciplined and return my attention back to my breath.” Then you’re going to have another thought. It’s okay. All of us have thoughts. That’s the process. Thought’s going to happen. Eventually, you’re going to realize that you’re thinking and then say, “Nope, I’m meditating. Back to my breath.” That core activity, that is the attentional training of meditation. Your mind wanders. You notice and you return. Your mind wanders. You notice and you return. Many people who are meditating are like, “Oh, no, I can’t do this because my mind is just wandering all the time.” Yes, that happens. That’s cool. That’s part of meditation.
Ari: Essentially, a sign that you stand to benefit even more from that practice.
Ariel: Yes, and that you’re good at it because, hey, you just noticed your mind was wandering. That’s one of the core tenets. What we do with Muse is we make this process much more understandable because so many people sit down and they’re like, “Oh, my God, my mind is just wandering. I don’t know what to do.” There’s no little coach or guru sitting inside your head saying, “Yes, your mind just wandered. Great job. Bring it back. You’re focused on your breath. You’re doing great.” Most people are just like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. This sucks. Get me out of here.” We built Muse to literally solve that problem. This is a Muse device. We have two different versions. It is a clinical-grade EEG. My background is in neuroscience. This is a device that’s actually tracking your brain activity, just like your Fitbit might track your heart rate or your steps. It’s able to give you real-time feedback on what your brain is doing during your meditation. It lets you know when your mind is wandering and then you’re like, “All right, mind wandering.” Then as you bring yourself back to your focused attention on your breath, it quiets the sounds that you’re hearing, which reinforce you to be like, “Hey, you’re in the right state, focusing on your breath, yes, stay here.”
It’s not actually a little voice, it’s a soundscape. The metaphor is your mind is like the weather. You’re wearing the Muse device, connects to an app on your phone, and you’re actually hearing the sounds while you meditate. When your mind moves into distraction, you’re going to hear it be stormy. Then you’re like, “Oh, okay.” Then as you bring your attention back to your breath, it quiets the storms. Then we use neurofeedback so that when you remain in your focused attention state, you start hearing little birds and things that reinforce you for being in the state. It starts to train your brain to know, yes, this is where you want to be. This is the meditation state. Yes, stay here.
It is incredibly effective. It’s helped almost half a million people either start or enhance their meditation practice.
Ari: I am excited to try this out. I just got the device that you sent me, which I’m really excited to try out. Before I release this episode, I am going to do actually several weeks of practice with it to give my personal thoughts on this. I’m going to do that after we record this episode and before we publish it. I’ve been meaning to try it out for years and years and years. I’ve seen it around and I just haven’t gotten around to it. I do practice meditation. I’ve had a bit of resistance to incorporating technology but I’ve really been impressed with you and I’ve been impressed with the research on this device as well. Can you tell listeners a bit about some of the studies that you’ve done on this?
Ariel: Sure. We’ve been very fortunate over the last decade to have over 200 third-party research papers and good journals published using this. It ranges from Mayo Clinic who’s done a lot of studies on Muse. They started their first study in 2015 on breast cancer patients awaiting surgery. They used Muse to help them manage the stress of the cancer care process. That was really successful. Mayo demonstrated a decrease in stress and fatigue during the cancer care process and increase in quality of life. They’ve gone on to now do probably seven or eight different studies in Muse using it in diseases like Cushing syndrome, fibromyalgia.
They’re just publishing a study on long COVID that demonstrates that Muse has a very positive impact on people with long COVID. So much so that it’s actually now part of their long COVID protocol recommendations for anyone who comes into Mayo. We’ve been really lucky to have been embraced by the clinical and research community who’s gone out and validated Muse and its effectiveness as both a meditation tool and a sleep device.
Ari: Let’s talk about that, the aspect of sleep as well. You have a separate device that is involved in helping improve sleep. How does that work?
Ariel: We have two versions of Muse. This is the Muse 2 and this one does meditation, neurofeedback. Focused attention training and also meditations for your heart, your breath, your body. Then this device Muse S is a soft version of the device that you wear during sleep. This does all of the meditation applications that the Muse 2 does, but it also does sleep. Muse S has been demonstrated to track sleep as effectively as a sleep lab. There’s lots of researchers that use this to do at-home sleep research and we have interventions with it that help you fall asleep.
One of them is called the digital sleeping pill and as you’re wearing the Muse, as you fall asleep, you’re listening to audio. You can choose whatever audio you’d like to listen to. As your brain starts to go from wide awake, spinning with a thousand thoughts, as the audio starts to move you into stage one sleep, we then adjust parameters of the audio in a way that’s designed to help you fall asleep faster. Then once you’ve moved from wakefulness through to N1 and into stage two sleep, we actually turn off the audio. You fall asleep to audio that’s personally morphed to you, it’s bio and neurofeedback, and then it turns off.
Then if you continue to wear the Muse throughout the night to track your sleep as efficiently as a sleep lab, if you wake up at the night, it’ll bring back the same audio that helped you fall asleep the first time. It’ll bring it back automatically and then really act again as a cue for your brain to go back to sleep. It is super effective. A study by Dr. Adrian Owen demonstrated that it improved sleep quality by 20%.
Ari: That’s pretty phenomenal. I think that’s amazing technology to modify how the technology is working in accordance with sleep cycles and if somebody wakes up. That’s very impressive. What are the details around the accuracy of tracking what’s going on in the brain? Obviously, in clinical neurofeedback settings, we have multiple attachment points with electrodes on the different parts of the brain. It’s difficult to replicate that in a home setting. You have a device that’s not quite– it doesn’t have electrodes in quite as many spots. How does it compare in terms of accuracy of tracking what’s going on in the brain to, I don’t know what the proper term is, but clinical grade neurofeedback?
Ariel: Sure. This is a clinical-grade EEG and it’s widely used actually for neurofeedback and neuroscience research. There’s one study that demonstrated that they were able to detect stroke in the emergency room in three minutes or less and do it as effectively as the gold standard of an MRI or a CAT scan. Although it only has four points on the head, here, here, here and here, it turns out that EEG is a signal that moves throughout the head. If you’re reading from two hemispheres and then four quadrants, here, here, here, here, you’re able to see basically most of the signals that travel across the head.
You can get them from one of the four quadrants and then look at the differential between the different sensors to be able to see and map what was going on inside the brain. More modern approaches to data analysis have allowed us to use this lower sensor number montage, but to get significant amounts of data out of it.
Ari: What are some of the different modes of training with the Muse meditation device? Apart from sleep, are there different modes that a person can experiment with of different practices, different guided meditations? How does that work?
Ariel: We have quite a lot of different meditation types. What I’ve been describing so far is our mind meditation. When you focus on something, your mind wanders, you hear it, and then you come back. We also have meditation practices for the heart, the breath, and the body. In the heart meditation, we actually have a PPG sensor. It’s tracking your heart rate, your heartbeat in real time. It translates the sound of your heart into the beating of a drum. You’re literally hearing the beating of your heart. You’re hearing as your heart rises and falls and learning how to relate to, understand, and manage your own heart rate. It’s quite amazing.
Then we have breath exercises. We’re able to track your breath. We have a wide range of breathwork practices inside the app. We have body meditation. There’s sensors to detect when you’re in stillness, when you’re swaying evenly. Then we have over 500 different guided meditations in a variety of types, yoga nidra, secular mindfulness, basically any zen meditations, meditation specific for pain, for caregivers, relationships. Basically, most of the meditation types and the different issues that come up in your life that you may want a meditation for to help you process are there inside the app.
Ari: Let’s say someone’s doing a guided meditation, how does the Muse device come into play during that? Is it still tracking brain waves during the guided meditation? How does that work?
Ariel: Exactly. The Muse’s sensors, the brain, the heart, the breath, the body sensors are tracking you during your meditation. In every meditation that you do with Muse, after the fact, you see your data. You see what your brain was doing moment by moment, your relative levels of focus and calm. You see your heart rate. It’s not just like a number on the screen. You’re actually seeing moment by moment what your heart rate is doing. You can visually see your heart rate variability when you have these nice, broad up and downs with your breath on your heartbeat.
Ari: Does it actually track HRV?
Ariel: We don’t give you an HRV metric. We will in future, but we currently don’t. What we actually give you is the ability to see your HRV. HRV, heart rate variability, is the difference in your breath– let me start that explanation again. There’s this cool phenomenon called our sinusoidal arrhythmia. When you breathe in, your heart rate increases. When you breathe out, your heart rate decreases. That’s why we do long exhales in meditation so that you’re spending more time in this out breath and more time in this decreasing heart rate, which is triggering your physiology to further relax and release.
Your HRV is the difference in your highest heart rate on your in-breath and your lowest heart rate on your out-breath. It’s actually a measure of your vagal tone. When you breathe in and your heart rate is increasing, increasing, increasing. When it gets to the top, your baroreceptors, the pressure receptors in your musculature send a message that says, “Whoa, it’s getting really intense in here. Blood pressure’s up, we’re beating really fast. Vagus nerve, come on in and chill us out. Vagus nerve, we need you.” The responsiveness, the vagal tone, the ability for your vagus nerve to come in and say, “Oh, I’m here, man, I can slow you right down.: Then bring your heart rate to a nice low rate. That is your HRV.
A big HRV means your vagus nerve is really responsive. It’s able to come in and slow you down and you can very quickly get a nice slow heart rate. For those of us that are stressed, older, depressed, not in good health, our vagus nerve doesn’t work quite as efficiently and effectively to breast and digest us to make us calm down. You’re at your high and you’re in breath, your heart’s beating, your blood pressure’s increasing, and your vagus nerve is not really able to do much, or you’re breathing really shallowly, and so you don’t have very high HRV. It only just drops down a very little bit. You have low HRV when that happens.
This metric that we hear, HRV, that’s what it’s measuring. That’s why a high HRV is an indicator of somebody who is well-slept, who is in great health, whose systems and nerves respond appropriately to bring in that relaxation response and down-regulate our system. In the Muse, you don’t just get a number, you’re actually able to see your sinusoidal arrhythmia. You’re actually able to see the dips and falls of your heart rate and how different aspects of the meditation, different points in time, you can see changes in that HRV when the dips are very shallow, or when they’re nice and deep sinusoidal rhythms with your deep breath, with your beautifully functioning vagus nerve.
Long explanation, that’s why we don’t have a number.
Ari: It was a great explanation. Ariel, let me ask you this. You have these two different devices. One obviously has all the sleep functions built into it, but you said that one also can do, my understanding is, all the other stuff that the other device can. Is there any reason to buy the other device, I should say, the one that’s not the Muse S?
Ariel: We try to be accessible for everybody. EEG technology is obviously incredibly expensive to build, but we try to offer it as very reasonably priced as we can. The Muse 2, because it has less technology in it, the one that just does the meditation is less expensive, and it’s at a very accessible price point. The Muse S, which has a few more bells and whistles, is at a higher price point, but still quite reasonable, given that most EEG technology is never this cheap while being this good.
Ari: I would imagine you’ve probably been able to bring the cost down as you’ve been building this in subsequent generations over the last decade, right?
Ariel: Exactly, we’ve been able to do a lot of optimization. Because there are so many Muses out there, then we really get to benefit from the economy of scale, and we pass that along to the users.
Ari: I know that in recent years, maybe especially the last year or two, there have been a number of other brain-related training devices that have come onto the market, and they perform different functions in many cases. They have different technologies, they leverage different technologies, and they’re designed, I think, to achieve different types of goals in many cases. How would you compare Muse to some of the other technologies that exist on the market?
Ariel: Sure. We’ve been lucky enough to have been around for a decade, so a lot of the technologies that have come out are, shall we say, inspired by what we’ve created. They look and they act quite similarly. We’ve been lucky to have a decade of use and incredibly deep research relationships and research backing behind it. A lot of people seek to emulate what we’ve done, but it turns out that it’s really hard to do that effectively. I’m quite honored to have been able to build this and to have inspired so many other people to follow.
Ari: Hopefully you haven’t had any issues with people actively plagiarizing your work or copying technology.
Ariel: Of course we have.
Ari: Huh?
Ariel: Oh, of course, we have. All open websites, and they have our copy word for word, app layout. Go to CES and you look at somebody’s new device, and you’re like, “Oh, look, your app layout is a carbon copy of ours.”
Ari: Oh, geez.
Ariel: [crosstalk] are made out of the same materials that ours were, but we innovated that because we made up these sensors.
Ari: Some of them have actually copied the technology, the engineering side of things.
Ariel: Of course, yes.
Ari: I would imagine you’ve had to get into legal messes, legal battles dealing with that as well. I don’t want to get too bogged down with this, but I can sense how difficult something like that would be if you’re the originator and original inventor of some of this unique technology, and then other devices come out and start copying some of the stuff that you’ve created.
Ariel: I’ve even seen papers, like a white paper or something that’s put out by somebody else where they have used parts of our technology in building their thing.
Ari: Oh, wow.
Ariel: Anyways, my general perspective on all of this, totally honestly, is it takes a village. It takes a community. Nobody has exclusive rights on making something. We’re really lucky that we’ve been able to do really well, and we make something that’s awesome and people love. I see everybody else who is also entering into this market as just other people who are trying to do something cool and educate the world around it. Hopefully, we’re all just trying to do good. We haven’t actively sent out legal threatening letters to anybody particularly that I can think of. It is what it is, and consumers choose the technology that they trust or they want to use.
Ari: Are there any key distinctions or advantages that you feel the Muse is really head and shoulders above the competition?
Ariel: Oh, in many ways. Because we’ve been doing this over a decade for half a million people, we’ve really been able to hone the user experience. We’ve been able to hone the clinical-grade technology. You can use the same fabric to get an EEG signal, but that EEG signal is not going to be quite as clean when it goes through all of your amplifiers. Then the algorithms that we’ve been able to build because we have so much data of people doing this practice, we’ve been able to take the algorithm that we built 10 years ago on 100 people doing this and really hone it for all sorts of different meditation types and all sorts of different brain types.
Then we’ve been able to build a whole set of metrics around performance and brain health. We have alpha peak frequency. We have scores of brain health. We have a recharge score. We have all of the sleep technology, and we have 200 research labs that we work with, literally, keeping us abreast of the latest and working with us to improve our applications, our experiences, our algorithms, the whole thing. To me, there’s no question.
Ari: Ariel, tell people one more time what the key benefits are that they would get from using this device and let people know where they can get it.
Ariel: Sure. The first key benefit you get is being able to either learn to meditate for the first time if you’ve never done it before. That’s something that we hear over and over again. Like, “I tried to meditate for years and I couldn’t do it till Muse.” You’ll really start your meditation practice. If you have an existing practice, you’ll have new metrics and new ways to see inside your mind and deepen and enhance your practice. You’ll also be able to improve your go-to-sleep experiences and track your sleep. Then you will have a tool that helps you monitor your brain and body in order to help you understand and improve your brain health.
Ari: Beautiful. Where can people get it? I believe that you’re offering a discount to my audience. Is that correct?
Ariel: Yes.
Ari: Grateful for that, by the way. Thank you very much for doing that.
Ariel: Oh, my pleasure. Yes, you get a discount above and beyond what is available to the average consumer through Ari’s link. He will have to tell you what that is because I don’t know.
Ari: [laughs] I don’t know either. I guess we’re going to have to chat about it afterwards and set up a unique link so people can get that discount. Ariel, any final words you want to leave people with before we sign off?
Ariel: Yes, that we are all amazing, capable people who are just trying to do our best. We are all here to support each other. The road of life can be bumpy and distracting and anxiety-provoking. Our purpose on earth should really be to have each other’s back and to be here to make it a little bit easier and give you a hug, whether in reality or metaphorically or technologically, whatever it is. To help you find your way and find joy and peace. I’m wishing everybody joy and peace. Thank you, Ari, for this chat.
Ari: Thank you so much for coming on and cheers to that message. I would just like to add to it, let’s develop our brains so that we can get even better at doing that. Ariel, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was an absolute pleasure, just like last time. I was very impressed. I loved this conversation. I loved how you explained the evolutionary context of what the modern world is doing to our brain and how meditation can help bring our brains back into balance. I love the work that you’ve done with Muse. I’m really excited to try it out.
We’re going to sign off right now, but I’m going to then go and use the Muse device for several weeks. Then I’m going to record a clip after this, which listeners are about to hear in a few seconds. I’m going to tell people about their experience. We’re going to also tell them this link where they can get the discount. Thank you again, Ariel. Really a pleasure as always. I look forward to our next conversation.
Ariel: Likewise, thank you so much.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
00:41 – Guest Intro – Ariel Garten
06:43 – Why meditation is helpful
11:56 – The sense of self
15:51 – Meditation in an evolutionary context
31:58 – How meditation affects the brain
36:17 – The real cause of cognitive decline
43:27 – The Muse device
Links
Claim your 20% discount of Muse here: https://choosemuse.com/energyblueprint
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