Muse: The Brain Sensing Headband

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Product Specifications

Muse is your personal meditation assistant
Sometimes your mind is calm and sometimes it’s active. Muse will guide you to a calm mind
Put on the Muse headband, put on your earbuds, start the app, and close your eyes. Immerse yourself within the sounds of a beach or rainforest.
While you meditate, Muse measures whether your mind is calm or active, and translates that data into weathers sounds.
When you’re calm, you’ll hear peaceful weather sounds. When your mind wanders, the weather will intensify, guiding you back to a calm state.
After each session, review your data, set goals, and build a deeply rewarding meditation practice that gets better every time.
Kindly refer to the User Manual, FAQs, and Tech Specs for more information.

Product Description

Muse is your personal meditation assistant. While you meditate, Muse measures whether your mind is calm or active, and translates that data into weather sounds. When you’re calm, you’ll hear peaceful weather sounds. When your mind wanders, the weather will intensify, guiding you back to a calm state. After each session, review your data, set goals, and build a deeply rewarding meditation practice that gets better every time.

Product Reviews

Quality EEG for a reasonable price

I’m writing this review after having completed 50 sessions with the product. First I’ll say that overall I am very pleased with it. I have minor critiques, but they are just that - minor. Since the product includes hardware and software, I’ll review both.The hardware:The headset has a difficult task in reading brainwaves but it does it quite well for the price. Patience is required to ensure a proper connection with all the sensors. Many people will not have that patience. Ironically, those without patience are the ones who could benefit from Muse the most. With that said, proper use should be within the capability of most people. Although the built in batteries last a reasonable amount of time between recharges, I find that accuracy suffers as they lose their charge. This is no surprise, but the charge indicator function seems to give a slightly optimistic appraisal. Plan on recharging at 50% or earlier if you want accurate feedback. For anyone thinking this is too much money for a neurofeedback device, keep in mind that professional devices are well over $1000. Bluetooth connection is simple to setup and seems to work fine. The worst issue with the hardware is that you may have to put a fair amount of time into each session to ensure you get good contact. If that bothers you, then neurofeedback probably isn’t for you.The software (the app):The app is very well thought out. I particularly liked that it “unlocked” new features after you accumulated a certain amount of success. Ample settings are provided to suit your needs. My favorite features are the tracking of data. These are all time and date stamped and kept online associated to your account. This is accessed on the app itself. I would love it if the data could be exported or at least be reviewed on a computer. Maybe they will add that in the future. My next favorite feature is the bird feedback. After a certain amount of time spent in the “calm” mental state, you are rewarded with the sound of birds chirping. Personally I find this more helpful in terms of feedback than the wave sounds. This opinion may change if I can improve my meditation skills from their current state. The app has had a couple of minor bugs, but they are not deal breakers. It allows you to set weekly goals. After setting a weekly goal, the setting stayed on the default value when it was supposed to have changed at the beginning of the week. The next week, it changed to the value I set - a minor annoyance. Another bug which remains currently is that the audio sometimes drops out for a couple of seconds right at the end of a session. Again, not a deal breaker - just a minor flaw. When the app was updated I was optimistic that bug would be fixed, but it was not. If it never gets fixed, it won’t affect my usage. Overall I rate the app highly for what Muse says it will do.Overall opinion:The Muse headband and Calm app do what they claim very well. I only rate this 4 instead of 5 because I would love to have the option for more advanced feedback. I’ve been interested in meditation and neurofeedback for almost 30 years. I’ve done a lot of research into professional EEG equipment for meditation usage and the price has always been prohibitive. Muse has been the first company I’ve seen to offer a quality product for a price I can justify. Ideally though, the app would offer feedback and/or data regarding the specific brainwave patterns it reads (Alpha, Beta, Theta etc…). Also, a computer interface would be the icing on the cake - as more expensive EEG units offer.

I wanted to love this, and it is a promising idea

I wanted to love this, and it is a promising idea, but unfortunately there are two essential problems with the headband that prompt me to return it for a refund.First, the device and software just aren’t stable enough - they feel like beta products. The app (I use the one on Android) is a system hog and often takes minutes to load. On several occasions when trying to look at my ‘insights’ it said I had no internet connection, even though every other app on my phone (including Twitter, FB, Chrome) was able to reach the internet fine. The device, too, is very finicky - while I was consistently able to get a good scalp connection for all five touch points, the Bluetooth connectivity was terrible: almost every time I was so frustrated by the need to turn the device and my phone’s bluetooth off and on repeatedly before getting them to sync that it felt as if I needed a good meditation session before using the Muse.Second and perhaps more crucially: if you are interested in the Muse as a device to support and enhance your existing meditation practice, be aware that there are differences between both concentration and mindfulness versus the “calm” that the Muse helps cultivate. I have been an insight/Vipassana meditator for about a decade, and have reached some of the preliminary levels of concentration and mindfulness. But the Muse headband seems to track low brain activity, rather than whatever neuroscientific markers are directly correlated with concentration or mindfulness. Some examples: the headband measured me as “calm” when my mind was entirely elsewhere (rather than mindful of the present moment), and when I was experiencing some of the markers of concentration (arising of nimitta, etc.), it indicated that my mind was active and not calm.On my first concerns, perhaps further development of the device and app will make the combination work better. On my second, I don’t know the neuroscience of Buddhism & meditation well enough to know whether they are compatible with the Muse’s methodology for defining and encouraging “calm.” Again this is a great idea that I really wanted to work, but my experience was disappointing enough that I reluctantly returned the product.

Great buy!!

This has been very helpful in both improving the effectiveness of my daily practice as well keeping me consistent in my practice. I have been practicing Mindfulness for a couple of years. The weather change sounds in the app really help reduce the amount of times my mind has been drifting away. It’s not always accurately detecting whether or not my mind has wondered, but it’s a lot more effective than trying to do it on your own!

Fantastic; you get out of it what you put in

It really is all on you. I personally love the device, and find that it’s something that I look forward to most out of the day.Things to knowNeeds charging maybe once a week (if you use it every day)If it doesn’t sync up immediately, simply mess around with turning Bluetooth on/off, turning Muse device on/off, hitting the resync button. Does not happen often but it is avoidableI dabble with using headphones, and I find that it helps with the whole process if you do wear headphones.If you use it often (3-5 times a week) it really is great. Ultimately it’s up to you, especially since it’s not a cheap device to purchase.

SEVERE BLUETOOTH ISSUES. DO NOT BUY.

SEVERE BLUETOOTH ISSUES. DO NOT BUY. It’s unclear why muse decided to reinvent the wheel, but clearly SNAFU’d this one.

Good product, bad marketing.

Writing this because I ordered the headband with the case which was listed as $288.99. When shipped they shipped both separately and charged full price on both, as if I didn’t…

Meditation made fun

A definite tool for learning how to focus your attention to reach a calm state of mind.

Muse does nothing without access to my files and photos?

It doesn’t do anything and won’t even start unless you give it full access to all the content on your phone, including photos and files and everything.

I love the idea of affordable biofeedback in the comfort of …

I love the idea of affordable biofeedback in the comfort of your own home. I have completed over 1,000 minutes of meditation with muse.

Not Impressed

-Not easy to use.-Not for everyone.

Works as advertised, no complaints!

This device works great! Unlike some reviewers, I have not had any trouble with either the sensors or the bluetooth.

Great for meditation enthusiasts !

The new revised model that is it works flawlessly for my Android phone. Anyone claiming issues with connectivity issues are usually technologically inept folks as I found no…