EvolutionFM Transcript: Muse Founder Reveals How Brain Technology Is Creating A New Era Of Mental Fitness (Ariel Garten)

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Ariel Garten isn’t just decoding the mind she’s redesigning how we train it. In this electric episode, the Muse co-founder takes us behind the scenes of the brain-sensing headband that changed meditation forever and unveils Athena.

It is their newest device that combines EEG and near-infrared spectroscopy to reveal how your brain thinks, focuses, and even breathes. Ariel unpacks what monks in the Himalayas are discovering about consciousness, how meditation rewires attention and emotion, and why real change starts with understanding your own mind.

From psychedelic research to sleep science, she’s not just tracking brain waves she’s leading a revolution in mental clarity, self-awareness, and transformation. And just when you think you’ve grasped it all, Ariel hints at a future where you upgrade your brain in ways we've barely begun to imagine.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 1+ hour, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Scott Britton (00:00.9)

Ariel, it's wonderful to see you.

Ariel Garten (00:03.352)

Thank you, it's an awesome pleasure to be here.

Scott Britton (00:06.876)

Well, I'm, I'm excited to talk about meditation, neurofeedback, Muse, maybe to ground the conversation for people that aren't familiar. What is Muse?

Ariel Garten (00:18.19)

So Muse is a clinical grade EEG that tracks your brain and it can give you real time feedback on your meditation, real time feedback to help you fall asleep and generally helps you track and train your brain's activity. So it's a total brain health tool.

Scott Britton (00:35.538)

So is neurofeedback paired with meditation? Was that something that existed prior to Muse?

Ariel Garten (00:44.846)

That's a great question. So we first came out with the Muse device. Let's see, I've got Muse devices here. this is the second Muse we came out with, Muse 2. This is the latest Muse. We'll talk all about them. We first came out in 2014, and we were definitely the first brain sensing headband to help you meditate that you could easily get commercially or that you could even buy in Best Buy. I launched in Best Buy Canada in 2014, and that was certainly ahead of its time.

prior to that, there were kind of clunky systems that you could use to do neurofeedback during meditation that you could do not in an easy smartphone kind of slick at home way. so I'd say, you know, our first inner innovation was making it a slick and easy and usable and dry sensor. and there we've, you know, expanded the multiple ways that you can do neurofeedback, train.

Your brain, train your sleep, train all the things with Muse.

Scott Britton (01:46.311)

That's awesome. Yeah, the story I tell myself is that, you know, everyone's a lot of people, at least who've learned about meditation have heard, we studied some ancient monk in some mountaintop, right? When they probably had to sit in this room in a hospital for a couple of days with like all these nodes and contraptions. And you guys made a similar type of experience available to anybody, not just for study, but to actually improve their capacity to meditate.

Ariel Garten (02:13.784)

Totally. And also currently used by monks and researchers to study this. Yeah, there's a few different groups. So, Olav Krigolson at University of Victoria actually took early muses up into the Himalayas to study the consciousness of monks using muse devices. And now, monks themselves, there's at least one school that I'm aware of.

Scott Britton (02:18.982)

There we go.

Ariel Garten (02:41.57)

that trains monks to be scientists with scientific inquiry. And they are now using muse in their own experiments to track their own EEG and discover insights.

Scott Britton (02:57.35)

Wow, so cool. The old and the new coming together. I love it.

Ariel Garten (03:02.51)

I was quite shocked when I heard that one. So we have a collaborator at kind of in the Chicago area who does lucid dreaming research. And he was collaborating with a different group, like guy by the name of Robin. And he works with these Tibetan monks that live basically in exile in India who he's been working on this curriculum with.

through their training group and they brought Muse into it. So I was totally shocked. He's like, let me present you a paper and some posters crafted by monks in Dharmasala.

Scott Britton (03:43.642)

Wow, well I definitely want to get into that a little bit more, but maybe just to give people just a better idea. So how does Muse actually help me meditate?

Ariel Garten (03:55.982)

Sure. So for those of you who are watching the video, Muse is an EEG device. So there are two sensors on the forehead and two behind the ears. And it tracks your brain activity and then is able to give you real-time audio feedback to let you know what's going on inside your mind. So in the context of a meditation session,

We all know that meditation is good for us, but it's hard to do. It's hard to know exactly when your mind is wandering and to catch each and every wander. And so Muse gives you real-time feedback that lets you know when you're in focused attention on your breath and when your mind is wandering. And it does this by translating your brain activity into guiding sounds. So as you're focused on your breath, you hear...

quiet, gentle sounds. If you remain focused, you hear little trips of birds that become very reinforcing for your brain. So your brain intuitively learns that this is the state to stay in. And as your mind wanders off into thought, you hear the sounds get louder, which is an indication to you that you're now mind wandering, which both allows you to increase your metacognition, your ability to monitor your own mind, and becomes a notification for you to say, hey, mind wandering, let's come on

back to my meditation. And this actually allows you to not only in real time have a better understanding of your own mental space and catch all your mind wanderings, but also to have a more efficient, quote unquote, meditation session, because you're able to more rapidly train your attentional loop.

Scott Britton (05:30.287)

Yeah, and think, mean, I can't tell you how many people I've introduced meditation to, they're like, I don't know if I'm doing it right. You know, it's like the classic, like, but am I doing it right? I feel like I'm just sitting here, right? And that's one of the challenges with teaching something that's so subjective is that we can't be inside of someone else's head. And so for me, you know, the muse essentially providing that feedback loop to what has happened.

what does your brain indicate is happening in your consciousness is pretty groundbreaking and pretty amazing. And I think is very supportive for a lot of people that have that type of question, whether they're doing something right or whether they're, how they can improve.

Ariel Garten (06:14.296)

Totally. So we've heard both from novices who've never meditated before that this is a very easy on-road. It actually teaches you what to do to start your practice. It's kind of like having a little coach or guru in your head. And then for people with existing practices, it really helps you hone and strengthen it and do it in a really efficient way.

Scott Britton (06:37.004)

One, one thing I've been curious about, you know, I had, a woman by the name of Katie Devaney on the show. She was a head of the meditation lab at, UCLA and we were talking about different meditation, different types of meditations, right? Have it, they do different things. It shows up differently in our brain. I believe you guys are pioneering a study with ions that measures these different

essentially neural signatures of different styles of meditation. Have any of that data come back yet?

Ariel Garten (07:13.838)

So what you're talking about is a study that we currently have running with ions. I think was first opened up to a thousand people. We're now opening it up to maybe 4,000 more people with news devices. And there they're looking at four or five different styles of meditation. So non-dual, compassion, focused attention. And we're asking participants or they're asking participants to do the meditation style for a number of weeks to look at

the EEG characteristics of that particular style and then be able to compare and contrast. The data has not yet been analyzed. We don't want to be introducing any bias into it yet. So at the end of the data collection, then the data analysis will begin with the focus of ions led by Dr. Arnaud DeLorme.

Scott Britton (08:04.403)

nice. Arnaud's been a guest on the show as well.

Ariel Garten (08:08.105)

Amazing. Yeah, so we're, it's, you know, quite obvious that there are going to be differences there. As we were building Muse, at first we built Muse with a focused attention meditation. So the Muse mind is a focused attention meditation algorithm. And then as we went on to expand meditation for heart, breath, body, with different sensor types, it's very clear that the physiological signals are quite different. And

actually in one of the studies that Olaf did looking at the monks in the Himalayas using muse to track their attention, he had them do a or requested a focused attention meditation practice and then looked at a neural signature afterwards called an ERP, event related potential, and then had them do a compassion based practice and looked at the same neural signature and it was

quite obvious that there is both a difference in the EEG in real time, as well as after the meditation, you could see a difference in the brain characteristics of the ERP. So when they did an ERP task, so in an ERP task, you're looking at a stimulus and you have a response to the stimulus, their response to the individuals participating in this.

responded more strongly to stimulus after focused attention meditation than during a or after a compassion meditation.

Scott Britton (09:50.733)

Wow, sounds like you might've been doing focused awareness meditation this morning. So just to understand that, so people were more reactive on the attention afterwards, like in the minutes, hours, whatever, afterwards, on the attention-oriented meditation than they were on the heart-based meditation.

Ariel Garten (10:14.22)

Yep. They were, they performed with greater focus and attention on a attention task.

Scott Britton (10:21.534)

I see. Okay, cool. You know, it's something that I, I've, it's really, it's really obvious to me that different styles lead you to different places. and it was one of the things that I'm curious about because a lot of the paths, or more oriented towards heart than just purely working at the level of consciousness. And, I'm just so fascinated about what that show, how that shows up in the brain, you know, like, what do we know about, people?

that consistently practice things oriented towards opening the heart and emotional healing and things like that versus people that are, you know, non-dual, advice to Vedanta, different things that are less focused on that. And it sounds like you guys have some, some indications, some.

Ariel Garten (11:10.862)

Starting to see the indications. What's interesting about looking at the EEG in these different states is, you know, in many ways, you're trying to find proof for something that is already intuitively obvious to the practitioner. I mean, when you do a heart-focused meditation, when you're doing a tongwen, when you're sending compassion to the world, you know what that feels like. You know what you feel like afterwards.

You know the level of generosity and the sense of abundance and expansiveness that you have. And to then go and say, hey, well, what's the EEG or the EKG signature of that is just trying to prove something that you are already aware exists. And so part of the question is like, why do we even care about what the EKG signature looks like or the EEG signature looks like? Because we as practitioners already know that it's different.

You know, clearly there's a difference in physiology and an experiential difference. Are we trying to, in the case of science, like are we, we trying to identify these so that we can prove it to the world to say that, Hey, you know, this is different. and sometimes that is the case. when you're doing, focused attention meditation with news, for example, there's this super cool study from the Catholic university of Milan and they looked at focused attention training.

with Muse versus standard meditation intervention that they created, basically focused attention without Muse. And they had participants doing it for one month. And then they looked at the EEG pre and post of these participants, as well as the EKG, or rather, I PPG in the study. And they were able to demonstrate that those that had meditated with Muse had persistent changes in their EEG that demonstrated more focus and calm throughout the day.

so, you know, super fascinating study totally, you know, points to the fact that meditation works, points to the fact that meditation refuses, it's effective and all these things. 

Scott Britton (13:20.469)

I mean, I think it's an interesting question, right? It's like, if you know it works and why the hell does science have to prove it? And I think, I think the reality is we are in the era where the science is a religion for a lot of people and for something to be culturally accepted, for something to spread, know, Andrew Huberman needs to talk about it. And I think, I think like much love to all those people, but it's, is just the reality that we're in. And as someone for me that was very scientific,

Ariel Garten (13:24.654)

Why are we trying to it?

Scott Britton (13:50.239)

and has moved much more into a direct experience kind of way of needing evidence to discern truth. Like, you know, it's wonderful for me, but it doesn't help my mom get excited about meditation, right? Then when she hears that this scientifically lowers her, blah, blah, blah. And so, you know, I think to me, that's a core function of why this work with science is really important.

But it seems to matter less the deeper that someone goes on their journey.

Ariel Garten (14:21.9)

I was getting philosophical for a moment. I mean, I'm a scientist. work with hundreds of research scientists. There have been hundreds and hundreds of papers published with Muse. It was just interesting when you believe very deeply in science and the role that it plays in society and the decisions that we make in our lives, et cetera. It's just funny sometimes when people ask, you know, well, like,

What's the difference versus a compassion meditation versus a focused meditation? And if you are actually a practitioner, your own interceptive observational experience can quite clearly tell you. And then sometimes we're looking for biomarkers, which are sort of the pale shadows of the indicators of what's going on, as opposed to the...

inherent truth of how it affects us and affects our interactions and our lives from that moment forward.

Scott Britton (15:22.271)

Totally, and I think both are really important, right?

Ariel Garten (15:26.328)

both critically important, yes. And sometimes those empirical truths, quote unquote, that we're experiencing are nothing more than chimera themselves, are nothing more than our desire to feel a particular way and a thing that we've done where we're supposed to feel a particular way and then we do. And so it was less the activity that made us feel that way than the desire to have gotten to that state in the first place that directed our mind body there.

The both the empirical experiences that we have as well as the scientific experiences that we have are both imperfect ways at understanding truth.

Scott Britton (16:17.418)

And I think ultimately that is for me from a fundamental perspective, what awareness is it really about, which is a deepening our understanding of a portion of truth, which is impossible to know completely. You know, it's, it's the journey and it's, I think it's the best, I think it's the best personally.

So I feel like you were going to say something, we got a little pause with the internet quality here.

Ariel Garten (16:51.968)

Yeah, yeah. So I'm in a very philosophical moment here. Yes, they're both highly, highly imperfect, but in many ways the best that we have. And as curious individuals who are trying to make our lives better and the lives of other people better, kind of all you can do is query and run these experiments of if I do this, does that get better? If I do this, does life improve for myself for those around me?

And we don't always have perfect mechanisms of querying. And the conscious arts give us a number of pathways that we can use to explore and attempt to deepen our understanding and attempt to create clarity through the murky experiences that we humans have.

Scott Britton (17:50.707)

Well said. Now, I know, speaking of better understanding, I know recently Muse launched a functional near infrared spectroscopy, wow, that is a mouthful, headset that is kind of a new dimension to beyond simply EEG. And I'm curious what that unlocks for your users and the potential that you see.

Ariel Garten (18:18.062)

Yeah, so it's incredibly cool. So this is our latest device for those of you who can see the video. This is the MuseS Athena and it like actually really is revolutionary. I've been talking to lots of my science colleagues over the last couple of weeks and they're crazy excited about the fact that we have both FNIRS, functional near infrared spectroscopy, as well as EEG, as well as SP02 and PPG all on the same, you know.

Low cost, easy to use, sensor acquisition device. It's super cool. So for those of you who don't know what FNIRS is, it's kind of like a mini FMRI on your forehead. So FMRI is tracking your bold response, the oxygenation response in the part of your brain that is working during a task. So when you use a part of your brain in a task, it demands oxygen and your body response in kind by

flowing more blood and flowing more oxygen to that region. And so you can see the region's oxygen consumption and therefore its energy production. What FNIRS does is instead of using magnets, it is using light, near and infrared light, order to send near and infrared light through the skin and actually through the skull.

and is sampling the blood right at the blood brain barrier. And we have two sensors, so a central emitter, short channels right on other side of the emitter, and then long channels kind of above your butt eyes so that we are separately sampling your left and right prefrontal cortex. We're sampling the blood flow to that area and looking at the hemodynamic response. So we're looking at how much

oxygen is being sent to your left and right prefrontal cortex, how much oxygen is being consumed through the activity of your prefrontal cortex, and then how much additional oxygen is being demanded. And it's amazingly cool because we're able to now see not only your EEG, which is looking at the electrical activity of your brain, but simultaneously see the blood flow to

Ariel Garten (20:37.986)

these two different regions of your brain, your left and right prefrontal cortex, see how they're utilizing oxygen, see how active they are, and see how they change through a range of experiences, which is an entirely novel insight into the brain to be able to look at these two things simultaneously in real time, and then be able to use that data to track and train and improve your brain.

Scott Britton (21:03.718)

Wow. Sounds like a game changer. mean, this, there's nothing really like on the market that's consumer grade that can, can do this new functionality. Is that correct?

Ariel Garten (21:13.646)

There is one device. So the Mendy device does do prefrontal neurofeedback from independently people who have tested the device. Ours is much higher quality FNIRs. It's really, really research grade data. And ours is the only device that also has the EEG and the FNIRs integrated together. So you get a whole lot more bang for your buck. A whole lot more bang for your brain training, I should say.

Scott Britton (21:40.252)

You know, one thing that's coming up for me.

Nice. one thing that's coming up for me is like, I mean, have we even, like, is there a correlate between those two data sets that it currently exists? I, you know, I think about someone, okay, we're to look at a brain in an MRI. Okay. Now we're to look at a brain in EEG. Right. And it's like, but what are those two things mean together?

Ariel Garten (22:05.132)

Yeah, so that's a great question because there's not a lot of good science that has been done that look at those two questions simultaneously because frankly, it's really hard to put an EEG into an fMRI because it's hard to put electronics of the EEG system into an MRI machine with a huge big magnet rolling around it. So that's why so many scientists are so excited about the device because for most, it's the first time to look at these two phenomena simultaneously.

Scott Britton (22:36.308)

I sense that one of the, from what I read about the press release, like one of the capabilities of this is like not just closed meditation, but really kind of like helping someone to focus with their eyes open and provide the neurofeedback while they do that. And that's a very interesting use case for me.

Ariel Garten (22:55.736)

Totally. So with our existing, with our original amuse meditations using EEG, there were always eyes closed experiences. EEG is highly, highly sensitive. So you want to be reducing all of the noise and all of the variables. So moving your eyes around, taking in information visually, all effects are EEG. So our focused attention meditation was always a nice closed experience so that we're sure that we're doing neurofeedback on your focused attention, not

your eye movements or you know what's distracting in the landscape, et cetera. With FNIRS, you can do it eyes open. And we have a beautiful FNIRS neurofeedback experience that is encouraging you to bring new blood flow to your prefrontal cortex. So when you go to the gym and you use your muscles, as you work your muscle, you are asking your body to then

demand more oxygen to that muscle, there's more blood flow to that muscle, bringing nutrients to it, allowing it to work longer and more efficiently, and then ultimately have the nutrient load that it needs to build and grow. With our brain, we don't tend to think about oxygen regulation in the brain in real time or, you know, vascular regulation in your brain, but it's very important to have sufficient blood flow to the parts of your brain that are working. And indeed, when you bring additional oxygen blood flow to a part of your brain, it can increase its functions and capabilities. So prefrontal cortex, FNIR's neurofeedback, I know that's a mouthful, has been demonstrated to improve cognitive function, to improve attention. And what you're really doing is you're strengthening your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain associated with, you know, so much of our attention, our inhibition, our decision making, et cetera.

Scott Britton (24:52.571)

Do you see, you know, where my mind goes, I remember there was a company like Lumiosity where essentially a lot of people, older people, you know, as they're aging, they did brain training to basically keep themselves sharp. However, there was no, there was no scale they could step on for their brain, right? There was no way they could track their weights. And so this seems like it kind of closes the loop with actually providing that type of data alongside those type of activities that someone could perform.

Ariel Garten (25:20.696)

Totally. And what you saw with Lumosity, and this was sort of the big scandal that was generated in the brain training community for a while, what you saw with Lumosity is that people were only getting better at doing the Lumosity game, like doing the reaction time task or making a train go at the right time through a tunnel, whatever the game was. And they weren't seeing a transfer effect from that game into real life.

there is only one task that actually showed a transfer effect, which was essentially the dual end back. It's a memory task. And so, you one of the things that's really important as we're doing brain training is to make sure that the brain training that you're doing actually demonstrates a transfer effect. So a lot of the studies using Muse have been focused on that transfer effect. So for example, Mayo Clinic has done a ton of studies with Muse.

And they have showed that using Muse in cancer care patients, they don't just get better at meditating. It also has improved their quality of life, reduced their stress, improved their fatigue. Mayo Clinic did a big study with their own doctors in the emergency room, and they demonstrated that using Muse decreased burnout by 54%, improved their cognitive function, decreased their stress, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, the question of

What is the transfer effect? Am I just getting better at this game or actually am I improving in my life is really key. And hopefully using devices like, like Muse actually allows you both to train, to track, and then to engage in the transfer effects.

Scott Britton (27:03.481)

It's a really good point. Something I've heard you say in another interview, you were talking about, um, essentially kind of slowing down or even reversing brain regression as people age and that it's not, she can't just do meditation. You have to do a lot of other things as well. And maybe you could talk about them, but by meditating, you're actually better at complying with all those other things that are supporting you.

Ariel Garten (27:32.746)

Yes. So some the research around meditation does demonstrate that when you start a meditation practice, you get better at doing other things in your life. So you improve your ability to make healthy choices because you become less impulsive. So, know, if you're somebody who has wanted to make changes in your life around the way that you eat and it just hasn't stuck and you just don't have the motivation,

If you're able to actually start a meditation practice, you're more able to withstand your cravings. You're more able to have top-down control and will around your decisions and therefore stick to food change habits or other habits in your life. So yeah, meditating alone is not going to save you, but it really does help. And then when we talk about just since we're on brain health for half a second, the kind of

Big steps that you want to take for your brain health are meditation, sleeping well. It's incredibly important for both your current and long-term brain health, appropriate diet, and lots of exercise. And then the fifth pillar is loving connection and support, which meditation, of course, can also help you engender, particularly if you're doing heart-focused meditations.

Scott Britton (28:53.484)

Is there any research that you've come across in regards to meditation and sleep that demonstrates you need less sleep as a meditator or as you meditate?

Ariel Garten (29:03.982)

This is an interesting one. is it just a myth? So I mean, we've all heard people say, oh yeah, you'd need less sleep if you're a meditator. You could just sleep for four hours and meditate for the rest of the time. Meditation and sleep are two very different brain states. When we're in sleep, it's critical that we get our deep, deep sleep, which you do not enter. It's like deep delta. You don't enter into that necessarily as you're meditating, particularly not in a standard focused attention meditation practice where

what you're trying to do is not get your brain to be sleepy. You're creating a restful state of your brain in which there is clarity as opposed to laxity. So you don't want to be sleepy at all. And in REM sleep, you're actively working through the memories that you have and the emotional experiences that you've had to create new neural connections.

So although I have not seen any research that says, yeah, meditation can take the place of sleep. I personally would not recommend replacing meditation sleep with meditation. Even though I'm a huge proponent of meditation because they truly do serve separate functions. Now for somebody who in their life does not relax a lot and therefore is not a good sleeper to begin with because your body's rushing with cortisol and

you know, the you're in light sleep for a long period of time before you're dropping into sleep because you're you're not actually progressing through your stages of sleep properly because you are too hyper aroused. Certainly in those cases, an hour of rolling around in light sleep, I would recommend an hour of meditation instead, because it's going to be doing a significant amount for your body and mind in terms of regulating your your heart rate and, you know, staying in and

lovely alpha state, which also is the beginning stages of sleep. So, you know, there could be edge cases in which meditation may be a better substitute than poor sleep. And certainly if you're somebody who wakes up in the middle of the night and rather than staring up the sky says, hey, I'm going to meditate, also much better use of your time and much less likely that you'll have ruminative thoughts during that time, which will keep you from sleeping. But I wouldn't

Ariel Garten (31:22.782)

know, suggest swapping out good quality sleep for meditation.

Scott Britton (31:27.096)

Fair assessment. You know, one question that came up for me is AI. you know, I mean, AI, I'm sure you guys have, know it's built into some of your applications, but do you think this is gonna change our capacity to understand the data that we're getting from EEG and other sources and make sense of things that perhaps previously were dismissed?

Ariel Garten (31:52.782)

100%. So AI definitely has its pitfalls and downfalls. But one thing it's extremely good at is being able to look at massive amounts of data and make sense of it. Not necessarily because it knows what sense it's wanting to make, but because the patterns in the data pop out patterns that we can't describe or identify using conventional means.

So one example is our sleep staging algorithm. We were able to train a machine learning data set with MuSleep EEG. And then it came out with an algorithm that could stage sleep more effectively than an expert. So when you go to a sleep lab, there's a readout. And then you have a sleep technician manually looking at that readout and scoring it, saying this part is deep sleep. I see sleep spindles here. You're in,

and to sleep. And there's always going to be disagreement between any two technicians and how they score that data. And our automated sleep staging algorithm built by AI through our machine learning pipeline is actually more effective than experts at staging that data and identifying markers of sleep. And so now that's something that's widely used by research labs for sleep research.

So sleep researchers give out muses to participants to study sleep in their own homes, to look at what happens in the brain of somebody with autism while they sleep, with Parkinson's patients, with older adults while they're sleeping. How does cannabis affect sleep? So Muse has multiple studies running with different researchers looking at the impact of cannabis on sleep. And they're able to look at this data in people's own homes using our automated sleep staging algorithm because it's

actually better than having somebody come into a traditional sleep lab, which is super cool.

Scott Britton (33:48.832)

Sounds way more comfortable too, could be in your own bed.

Ariel Garten (33:50.606)

And actually the same sleep staging algorithm that the researchers use is available to consumers. So anybody who has a MuseS or MuseS Athena and uses our sleep feature, the graphs that you get at the end are research grade data. And the insights that you're able to derive, like we can show you the depth of your deep sleep. These are all like gold standard EEG sleep lab.

standard insights, which is amazing.

Scott Britton (34:24.756)

what is the next frontier of neurofeedback look like? And I guess I would layer in that question. Does it seem like there's any kind of breakthrough technology or innovation on the horizon, on the near horizon that has the Muse team excited?

Ariel Garten (34:44.53)

okay. That's very, very loaded question. So for us, we're excited about so many things. I think the next, the next piece from the consumer side is bringing more of the research tools into the consumer app. so we now have a really effective system where we're able to get ERPs, event related potentials, which is a characteristic of the brain that, is able to analyze, how attentive you are at any moment.

and can be an effective marker for cognitive decline. So, you know, bringing in the tools that we're offering to researchers more and more, bringing them to consumers so that you can use them yourselves to query your own brain. I think the prefrontal cortex neurofeedback is just in its infancy and is going to significantly improve over time and also

the multimodal neurofeedback with both EEG and FNIRS is also going to open up massive new frontiers of possibility. When I look at the industry overall from a neurofeedback perspective, electrical stimulation has been proving to be quite effective at being able to change brain activity over time. I think it's not somewhere that

we would go as a company because we're very focused on, you know, press a button to zap your brain to be better. We're very much focused on tools and technologies that really allow you to understand your brain and allow you to learn the techniques to improve it. Just like in, in a meditation, what you're doing is not like magically making your mind and life better. You are learning about the process of your own mental state. You're a

applying tools and techniques to be able to self-regulate more effectively. So I think, you know, we're very much staying in the self-regulation domain where you give people the tools for self-understanding that they can then apply. But certainly, you know, electrical stimulation, magnetic stimulation, when applied properly and like people are not

Ariel Garten (37:04.642)

The consensus is not out on what is proper and what's effective and what doesn't have long-term side effects. But I would say that that's the next frontier of neurofeedback.

Scott Britton (37:14.235)

is is the ultrasound stuff that's happening with meditation in that category or is that in a separate category?

Ariel Garten (37:22.354)

That's a separate category. some of my awesome buddies are doing that kind of research. I was about to name them, but then I realized that I think, no, J. Sanguinetti. When I met J a year ago, he's like, shh, don't tell anybody. So was like, you know, can I tell anyone yet? I've known J for years. He's wonderful. So yeah, certainly the work that J is doing and Tim Mullen and you know, they're

Scott Britton (37:33.214)

We've had Jay on the podcast.

Ariel Garten (37:51.65)

Their teams are awesome. is ultrasound is yet another category of neurofeedback stim. And I trust that group because they're very lab based and very much focused on protocols that are going to be safe and efficacious. So I just get concerned.

with others in the industry who are not as science focused and, you know, come forward with protocols because they're DIY and cool and like research demonstrates they work, but they haven't necessarily explored the edges of cases in which there could be adverse effects.

Scott Britton (38:37.972)

One of the questions I had for you is you guys have probably seen some crazy things testing the software on the technology rather on deep, deep meditators, monks, like just people that have really gone for it in their lifetimes. Has there been anything that's been like profound or perplexing or we've never seen readings like this type of thing before?

Ariel Garten (39:04.238)

that's a great question. Yeah, we've had some amazing experiences with people using Muse and jumping from JANA to JANA and being able to track those. I don't want to misquote because it's not off the top of my head what the EEG differences were like, but certainly, you know, those data are in our database and the database of our collaborators and are worth going back and analyzing and understanding more deeply.

Scott Britton (39:33.62)

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's really curious. There was a guy that we had on the show who's done neurotic semipati. I don't know if you are familiar with that. It's where it's basically like human hibernation where he system can his name is Delson arm some completely shuts off and he basically blacks out and wakes up like seven days later. Um, and it's a super rare state and he's been studied by Harvard and a number of other places and um,

Yeah, these just kind of like emergent altered states of consciousness that a lot of people can get into. It just seems like we're at a really exciting time where we can start to try to understand the mechanism. You know, what's actually, what is the brain actually showing us that these people are doing?

Ariel Garten (40:18.59)

Absolutely, and we're at a really exciting state because you can also explore and understand it yourself. You can actually, you know, in your own home hooked up to your smartphone for not very much money, play and experiment yourself and start to understand your own personal changes and shifts and proclivities.

Scott Britton (40:37.363)

Now I know this isn't a core component of the Muse's business or competency, but is anybody using Muse for psychedelic research?

Ariel Garten (40:48.43)

A ton. Yeah, so there are lots of clinics who are interested in using Muse both for psychedelics research as well as for psychedelics intervention, both on the set and settings side. So using meditation to set and then also on the integration side using meditation. And then during ketamine, there's a very characteristic delta scale that emerges as you get deeper into your ketamine state.

And so there are number of groups using Muse to track the EEG geranketamine usage and to have that be involved in the titration and dosaging process.

Scott Britton (41:31.251)

Yeah, I mean, the notion of real time feedback of what's happening in the brain and dosing. mean, it's a very, it's a very interesting thing that could, that could happen with a lot of this stuff. What is, how has your practice evolved over the years? And I'm curious, what does it look like now?

Ariel Garten (41:52.536)

That's a great question. So at the very beginning, I was somebody who was trained in neuroscience. I was a psychotherapist. I was an entrepreneur, been an entrepreneur my whole life and always will be. And I was really curious and interested in meditation and unable to do it. You know, I had a real estate business and I had a clothing line and I worked in two research labs, hand in hand, like, you know, just.

Scott Britton (42:17.423)

You're prolific.

Ariel Garten (42:19.36)

hyper prolific and the idea of slowing down and making your mind do nothing was terrifying to me. Utterly terrifying to me. It's actually funny because now in retrospect, I look back at my old EEGs and even some of my more recent EEGs and I can see the hallmarks of an ADD brain. It was very, very clear when you look at like a QEG of my brain, because I took my data from...

12, 14 years ago and like ran a QEG and it's like so obvious that that was an ADD brain. And so meditation was incredibly hard and it was really through the process of building Muse, kind of 2010, 11, 12, building it into a meditation tool that 2013, 14 when it finally came out, that I learned to meditate. So I was a non-meditator prior to that, only a meditation wannabe. And then I started

using our first basic focused attention meditation and then I finally got it. Then it was like, this is what it's supposed to be. And I joke, it was kind of like my first kiss moment. Like I remember when I was four, probably 14 or 15, I was listening to the radio and there were all these songs about love. And like, I just couldn't understand why so many people were singing about love. And then I had my first kiss and I fell in love. Well, I mean,

That is a very early teenager. I listened to the first song in the car, it's in the front seat of the car with my parents. And I listened to the first song on the radio about love. And I was just like, oh my God, I get it. Yes, they're singing my language. And so finally like the meditation clicking, it was like, it felt like that. was like, oh, okay, all of the 2000 years of wisdom that I've been reading, all these books finally make sense to me. Like now I-

Scott Britton (43:48.622)

It all clicked.

Ariel Garten (44:16.642)

get what they're talking about. And so from there, from the basic focused attention practice, it kind of broadened into a range of exploring and tasting different practices into reiki, exploring and tasting reiki and energy practices. And now like at this very moment, I am back into a more traditional focused attention meditation, kind of feel a little full circle.

and as I'm now like really testing the new tools that we're building. I'm back in the prefrontal cortex neurofeedback piece. and it's been super powerful. So, you know, over the last decade, my practice has also grown, as all the tools in Muse have grown, have hundreds and hundreds of different guided meditations from Zen practices to inspirational practices.

to like MBSR style. So there have been lots of different pathways to go down as we work with different practitioners and different styles to also build this content. So it's been, it's been wonderful. And I'm also super excited about the ION study, as like a little, little mini retreat in multiple different styles.

and spending the time focusing for a few weeks on one style, then a second, then a third.

Scott Britton (45:46.842)

Hmm. So you're going to do it. Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. And is there, do you have a sense of the longevity of that study? Because that's another thing that's interesting to me is like, how do these people's brains change with prolonged over a prolonged period of time doing these practices versus just kind of like a couple of weeks or whatever it is.

Ariel Garten (45:50.146)

Yes, of course.

Yeah.

Ariel Garten (46:14.626)

Yeah, so that study was not necessarily designed to look at long-term changes. But we have, you know, in our database, the ability to go back and generate those kinds of insights around long-term practices. And we also have a lot of researchers who now take Muse out into the wild for meditation research. And we help them to make sense of that data. So, you know, that we continue to learn more.

there's also another, Mark Madonna has an app called go deeper, where he's also wanting to classify different meditation styles, and the EEG associated with them. So, you know, there's, there's lots of ways to be, to, to both, you know, do formal science as well as to join as citizen scientists. When you have the device, we, you know, commonly set out.send out invitations for different kinds of studies to help contribute to greater understanding of the mind and how it impacts our life.

Scott Britton (47:22.031)

It's amazing work that you're doing and I'm grateful you're doing it. you know, thank you so much for coming on. This was really fun and fun to hear about where you're heading. And it's just lots of it's an exciting time to be in the mindfulness consciousness space. It feels like a really exciting time. And I want to give you the opportunity to just share if people are interested in trying Muse or learning more about it, what's the best place they can do that.

Ariel Garten (47:49.656)

Totally. You can go to choosemuse.com, C-H-O-O-S-E-M-U-S-E dot com. And there you can find the Muse 2 that is mainly for meditation. And then the Athena device, which helps you both with neurofeedback during meditation, has the F-MIRS technology that we talked about, and also tracks your sleep like a sleep lab and comes with bio and neurofeedback that actually helps you fall asleep. So all of those things can be found at choose news.com.

Scott Britton (48:22.893)

It rhymes, so easy to remember everyone. And we'll also link it out so that you guys can just make that simple connection. Thank you, Ariel. It was really, really fun to have this conversation and just super grateful for you.

Ariel Garten (48:37.122)

Thank you. I also want to just circle back for one second to the idea of efficiency. Because earlier on in the conversation, we were talking about sort of like using music and how it helps. And twice I use the idea of efficiency. And as the words were coming out of my mouth, you know, I was like, okay, that's interesting. Why did we choose this word at this moment? Because a lot of the conversation around using technology for conscious enhancing tools for conscious enhancing practices is like, okay, well, what is the role of technology? What are the goals? Is this supposed to be a goal directed practice or is it not goal directed? And sometimes as humans, we fall into the trap of what is efficient. And so, in that moment, the human trap of efficiency seemed to be an important thing to comment on, but it's not necessarily the...

the guiding principle or the guiding goal. So just, yeah, lots of different, we could go on for a really long time geeking out about the different ways to think about these practices and how they interact with our human experience.

Scott Britton (49:48.207)

So, mean, you know, just to zoom in on that a little bit, I mean, I could see, I could see both, I see the both sides of it, right? I mean, it ultimately muses providing awareness of how something, how you're doing in something and how you might be better. But it does seem like there is a ceiling with practice when it's used as a mean to an end, when you're constantly, I need to get better, I need to get better, I need to get better kind of in that efficiency orientation. Yeah, how do you think about it?

Ariel Garten (50:25.654)

Okay, so anybody who's a muser will know about the birds and people often talk about like, my God, I got 12 birds or 27 birds and they're super proud about how many birds they got, which is great. So a bird is what happens when you are able to maintain focused attention on your breath for five seconds or more. You hear the little tweeting of the bird and the bird is also a mechanism to teach about the ephemeral nature to really.

start to do a little bit of non-dual work. So when you're meditating with muse, when your mind wanders, you hear the sound pick up, it becomes a cue to bring your attention back to your breath. Lots of people become very frustrated by the sound getting louder. And of course, if you're frustrated by it, it's just gonna get louder and louder. And so you really have to learn to like let go of the goal-directed nature of this. I'm not trying to make the sound go away. I'm just gonna be, and that goes away. And the birds are the same way.

So when you focus on your breath and then you get a bird the first time, you're like, okay, there was a sound, whatever. When you know that the bird is a reward and it starts to tweet, then you're like, my God, I got a bird, I'm so good at this. And then the bird flies away. And so it becomes this amazing way to sort of undermine the potentially goal-directed nature of like gamified meditation.

And so you have to be just as equally uninvested in your rewards as you are in your failures. You have to exist or you have the opportunity to exist in a state of non-striving in order to allow the birds to emerge. So yeah, that kind of deals with that question of the plateau or the question of the competitive goal-oriented nature of it.

Scott Britton (52:12.716)

Hmm. Very cool. I did not know that about the design of the system. I appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into that.

Ariel Garten (52:19.5)

Yeah, it's fun. We've had a lot of fun being able to think about ways to allow us to think about our own selves.

Scott Britton (52:29.26)

Well, I'm excited for the future of Muse and everything that your team is doing. thanks again, Ariel. This was really, really fun.

Ariel Garten (52:39.931)

my joy and pleasure. Totally fun. Really fun to jam with you.