Your Personal Meditation Assistant is Here

Ariel Garten – Cofounder of Muse, explains what a Muse headband is – a brain sensing headset that helps anyone easily mediate. She believes what you can measure you can change.  Meditation can actually change your physiology.  Can it help the world get out of scarcity thinking?

Ariel Garten is both an artist, a technologist and entrepreneur. She walks us through her earliest experiment with Steve Mann and her quest to light up the Canadian Olympics with thought controlled computing.

She believes what you can measure you can change.  Thousands of studies are being done using Muse’s research grade EEG headsets, today.  Meditation can actually change your physiology and perhaps even help the world get out of scarcity thinking and move toward global peace.

This interview between Ariel and Zenka and will continue next year in virtual reality – on Mars!

Bonus Track
This interview also includes a special bonus geek track where Ariel tells us how to build a thought-powered levitating chair! She’s also going to tell us about glass mind and experience in virtual reality that lets you fly through someone’s brain paths. Plus the lowdown on the low down focus glasses (glasses that actually read your brainwaves). The future of citizen driven science is here.

Highlights
[00:01:37] Ariel: Everybody knows that meditation is good for you but meditation can be really hard to do. So Muse gives you real time feedback on your brain. And the metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you’re thinking distracted your brains bouncing all over the place you actually hear your mind as windy and as your brain comes to quiet focused attention you hear the winds get quiet.

[00:02:57] Ariel: So yeah we tried we tried very hard to make it incredibly inviting so that anybody can use it literally any grandma can slip it on and in a few minutes using technology to meditate.

I became particularly interested in neuroscience as a way to understand how we perceive the world. – Ariel Garten

[00:04:00] Ariel – So we proposed a project where people in Vancouver could control the lights on the sea and Tower the Canadian powered buildings and Niagara Falls with their brain from across the country. And this was in 2010 we proposed that average individuals were going to control the lighting on these massive massive icons two thousand miles away directly with their brain and by the way our country’s government hired us to do this to be the future showcase at the Olympics.

[00:07:02] Ariel – As we go inside we started to create this because I was fascinated by the brain and frustrated by the fact that this was the organ that literally controls the entire experience of life or entire perceptual experience of life. Everything about you, if you’re a materialist, is controlled by the brain and we have no way to access it. Very limited ways to engage it.

And so I was fascinated by this notion of creating a window into your own mind by taking the intangible workings of the brain and actually making them tangible the invisible things that go on inside and making them in some small way visible. – Ariel

[00:07:40] And then once you’re able to interact with them understand them and then manage them change them moderate them improve with them control them. So part of the interest with meditation was here’s this ancient technology that we have for being able to control the brain. And here we can merge it with modern technology that actually gives you real time insight into what’s going on in your brain so that you can improve that process of understanding managing measuring controlling you know as they say what you measure you can change.

“We work with our research partners to start to look at that data and do large scale neuroscience like we’ve never seen before.” – Ariel

“We have the choice to be able to manage what goes on in our own mind.” – Ariel

[00:15:02] Ariel:  We have the choice to be able to manage what goes on in our own mind. Its not like in the future we’re gonna take a pill and the pain’s going to go away. No we actually right now have the ability using really old technology it’s called meditation to to learn to disengage from the discomfort of thoughts and the discomfort of sensation and to re-engage in things that we do find pleasant and comfortable and enhance those and enhance our experience of them by simply paying more attention to them by simply actually being engaged in the activity which are doing. And it’s a very simple concept but no. When you start applying it consistently you feel an a shift in your experience that’s quite positive.

[00:16:21] Zenka – You know I saw a quote you said “Don’t believe everything you think”.

I often talk about the fake news that’s in our head. There is so much fake news in our head that we generate. You don’t have to listen to it. It’s not real. – Ariel

[00:16:57] It’s an incredible honor to be working in this space. And you know we only dreamed when we started. You know we could get more people meditating we’d probably make the world a better place.

Ariel Garten
https://www.facebook.com/ariel.garten
https://twitter.com/ariel_garten
https://www.instagram.com/ariels_musings
http://www.arielgarten.com

Muse
http://choosemuse.com
15% OFF Muse Headset Purchase for Stack Cast Listeners
https://mbsy.co/muse/39165532

Interviewed by Stack Caster: 
Zenka

 

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