Trying Muse2 Headband

I ordered the Muse2 headband a week ago from Ireland and it has arrived in Singapore.

So this is how it looks like.

Since Muse is marketed as a tool to help people focus on meditating, I tried Muse for meditating as well. I don't really have any experience of meditating before this because my definition of meditating is sitting cross-legged, closing your eyes, straightened your back and breathe calmly. I didn't know there are more scientific or psychological things that needed to be added to it.

With this headband, the first thing it will do when you turn it on and use it is to calibrate your brain activities in its default state. You are told to sit in a comfortable position and think of anything or nothing. Just try to make your mind as its default state as possible.

Once the app calibrated your brain, it will allow you to start meditating. There are several themes you can choose from the app to accompany you meditate, but let's pick one of the default options which is the rainforest option.

The meditating instructions are pretty simple. All you need to do is sit or find a comfortable position for you to meditate, then close your eyes and breathe normally and calmly. Try to make your mind as calm as possible. The headband can censor whether your brain is being calm, has any activities or it's being neutral.

As you can see here, this is one of my first attempts meditating with the Muse2 headset. I meditate for just 1 minute, and it shows that my brain is active for 17secs, mostly neutral (41secs) and is only calm for 2secs.

If we see the 'Stats', it collects muse points when you meditate and I haven't figure out what are points for. Then the recoveries mean how many times you recovered during your meditation from being active back to neutral or calm. Now when you meditate and achieved calmness, you might hear birds chirping. That indicates that your brain is its most calm state.

Unfortunately on this particular meditation, I only heard 3 bird chirps.










Then I asked my friend to try it out, so I can take pictures of how you wear it and what will you see.

Make sure that no hair is covering your forehead and the back of your ears, therefore tying your hair is recommended. Connect your phone to an earphone if necessary so you can sit comfortably and not hold your phone close. It will also help the user to feel emerged with the surrounding sound and be more focused.

Now when she was meditating, the first thing you hear is the instructions were repeated to you. After the instructions are told, the timer will start counting down according to the time you set for your meditation. If you see the small icon on the bottom of the screen, that icon indicates whether the headband is connected and having a clear scan on your brain activity. The full-colored bars means it is clearly scanned and connected, if the colors are not present or not full, it will tell you to recalibrate and adjust your headband.

After meditating according to your set time, the result will your meditation progress.

Her 1-minute meditation is better compared to mine in the 'calmness' case. She is mostly calm throughout her meditation. She was active for the first 4 seconds before she recovered back to her calm state and received 9 bird chirps until the end of her meditation.

Although it seems great, we also have to factor what she was doing during the calibration of the headband. For example, when you are calibrating your headband and your brain activity was being active, and once you meditate and bring yourself to be calm, by default the headband should sense the huge difference and therefore will record your mind to be 'very calm'.

For now, that has been the only thing I played around with the headband. In the near future, I will try to do other things.