Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Summary The process of learning requires feedback. A headband that provides immediate feedback on the quality of your meditation practice would help you rapidly improve your meditation skills. I truly wished that Muse offered such a headband. It is easy to trick yourself into believing that the headband works, but a little experimentation will make you realize it does not work as advertised. If you believe it works, try some of the experiments discussed below. Details (long). I had been meditating for a year prior to buying this headband, so I still had room for improvement but could definitely recognize good disciplined meditation. The headband provides feedback in the form of sounds that supposedly grow louder when your mind is active, quieter when you mind is calm, and the sounds of birds when your mind has been calm for an extended period. During my first month using the headband, I thought the feedback seemed uncorrelated with the quality of my attention and calmness of my mind. I suspected that the headband provides little more than random feedback. Just as we can see faces and animals in clouds when none truly exist, you can trick yourself into thinking the headband works. When I knew my mediation was poor and unfocused, I sometimes received a lot of “birds” and my ego wanted to take credit and pat myself on the back. When I had excellent focus yet received negative feedback I searched for how to blame myself. Frustrated with the seeming lack of correlation between the quality of my mediation sessions and the feedback from the headset, I did a series of experiments. I started a session and then removed the earbuds and watched Netflix, or read a book, or listened to music, or actually mediated. None of these other activities should ring up as a calm mind anything close to mediation. The results were apparently random, with mediation no better on average than any activity. The only consistency I noticed was that mediation with focus on the center of the forehead produced better results than my usual focus on the breath at the tip of the nose. Further investigation indicated that during focus on the forehead I was subtly contracting forehead muscles and this was affecting the headset. One day I had to instill an eyedrop near the start of a long session. I leaned by head back, and for some reason opened my mouth, and heard a string of birds. That surprised me so I returned my head to a forward position, closed my mouth, and the birds stopped. I could make the birds sing again nonstop each time I tilted my head back a little and opened my mouth. Clearly this has nothing to do with the quality of mediation. I will upload a screenshot of a particularly bizarre thirty minute session. Five minutes into the session, the feedback noise went near silent and a series of birds started chirping non-stop. I had not moved or done anything to trigger the change, but knew that if I did move at all the birds would stop. For ten minutes I held perfectly still as over 100 birds sang and I mentally planned out this review. But then my nose itched terribly and when I scratched it the birds grew silent. While the active-to-calm feedback varies throughout any session, the overall average quality of a session appears to depend on the physical placement of the headband and physical orientation of your head, not on the quality of mediation. After six months I still use the headset sometimes simply for the timer function. Beginning mediators might also find some value in the few choices of guided mediations. Of course, you can find timers and excellent guided mediations for free.