They discovered that the brain emits oscillating signals of variable frequency, and the frequency of the oscillations indicates what’s happening-at a high level-in one’s mind. Seemed a little good to be true, but I was willing to test it.Įlectroencephalography (EEG-the recording of electrical activity emitted from the brain) has come a long way in the last 100 years, since doctors drilled holes in monkeys heads to attach sensors, and eventually glued contacts with cathode ray tubes to intact human skulls to map brain activity. I’d been planning on acquiring a Muse after having caught wind of its development nearly two years before, but who knew it would finally be released during the most anxious time of my adult life? Two weeks was plenty of time, Muse inventor Ariel Garten told me, for the Muse focus training exercises “to reduce perception of pain, improve memory, improve affect, reduce anxiety, and also improve emotional intelligence.” Thus began my two week experiment in brain therapy. When calm and focused, I enjoyed the sound of lapping waves and birds tweeting when my mind wandered, sturdy winds picked up and the birds flew away.Īt the end of five minutes, the app confirmed: I am not very calm. After Muse calibrated to my brain’s “active” state-by making me brainstorm items in a series of topics-I was given five minutes of nature sounds to breathe to. Simply pay attention, the female voice in my headphones told me. I donned my white Audio-Technica DJ headphones and fired up the app, which in a soothing voice instructed me to sit up straight, and breeeeeeeathe.Ĭalm is a simple meditation exercise: Count your breaths. I placed the band’s centimeter-wide contact strip of electrodes against my forehead and rested the plastic against the top of my ears, fiddling with the fit until my phone finally registered a solid connection for each of the sensors, two on my temples, two behind my ears. Seemed like as good a time as any to try out my new gadget: a brainwave-sensing headband called the Muse, and its companion app, Calm. Meanwhile, a platoon of military helicopters had decided to play what appeared to be a game of “who can hover the longest over the neighborhood”. My calendar had just alerted me that I’d missed the Skype call start time for my company board meeting, right before the movers unplugged the Internet. As luck would have it, the anti-anxiety pills my shrink had prescribed for me to take “as needed” were back in New York in my friend Simon’s living room. I had been sleeping on said couch due to the abrupt ending of an 8-year relationship, which had left me stunned and homeless for the preceding three weeks. The house was in shambles movers were busily trucking everything away to my friend’s soon-to-be new home in New Mexico. Inside the house, my friend’s two-year-old was jumping violently on the sofa-the same sofa that the shedding 15-pound cat named Endai and I had shared for the past week. The purple box on my screen kept blinking in and out of sync. humidity, on a midsummer’s morning at Bolling Air Force Base, trying to get a quartet of EEG sensors to connect my brain to my Samsung Galaxy. I was sitting on a porch in palpable D.C. The electrodes needed to be adjusted to fit my sweaty head, which was apparently the largest size the product could accommodate. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Shane’s experimentation!… Enter Shane Snow If you’d like to read more on these topics, please let me know in the comments. This includes homemade brain stim ( tDCS) devices (I wouldn’t recommend without supervision) and other cutting-edge tools. It’s received a lot of PR love, but does it stand up to the hype? Can it make you a calmer, more effective person in two weeks? This post tackles these questions and much more.Īs many of your know, I’m a long-time experimenter with “smart drugs,” which I think are both more valuable and more dangerous that most people realize. In this post, Shane tests the “brain-sensing headband” called Muse. Last year, he wrote about his two-week Soylent experiment, which went viral and racked up 500+ comments. The following is a guest post by Shane Snow, frequent contributor to Wired and Fast Company and author of the new book SMARTCUTS: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success. Can you rewire your brain in two weeks? The answer appears to be - at least partially - yes.
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