FAQ

Muse Athena is available at choosemuse.com for ~$500. You can use the “GoDeeper” discount code for 15% off. Muse Athena is the latest and greatest Muse headband. It has a heart beat sensor that is useful for heart-based meditations, a soft cloth headband for sleep monitoring, and an fNIRS sensor for concentration exercises that are only available with the Athena model.

Muse 2 is available at choosemuse.com for ~$300. You can use the “GoDeeper” discount code for 15% off or get a used one on eBay for ~$200. It has a heart beat sensor that is useful for heart-based meditations but can’t access the sleep monitoring functions of the Muse app. We find that Muse 2 gets a stronger signal from the back electrodes than the Athena or Muse S, so we recommend using it for the GoDeeper research study.

Muse S has been discontinued but is available on eBay for ~$250-$300. If you buy one used, make sure the back sensors are in great shape. The back sensors are foil covered fabric. If you get one that has cracked foil, you can buy replacement headbands at choosemuse.com.

Muse 1 has been discontinued but is available on eBay for ~$100. Muse 1 is the original Muse. It lacks a heart rate monitor, which is especially important for heart-based meditations. The Muse 1 headsets on eBay can be a bit flaky. If you buy one on eBay, we recommend that you do a signal check with it as soon as you receive it, so you can return it for a refund if it is old and cranky. 

There are multiple ways to get access to a loaner Muse headset.

Part of a meditation training center?

1. We can send the center a loaner headset when five people from your center are accepted into the study.
2. If you would like us to deliver our Deepening Your Practice through Brain-based Coaching training program we ask that you have a minimum of 10 people. We will send each person a loaner Muse. This is a 3-part virtual series.

Don’t belong to a meditation center?

If you have two nearby friends who meditate regularly and are willing to share the Muse headband and donate their brainwaves to science, you can still participate!

Here’s how it works: Designate one person as the group leader. When all three of you apply and list the same leader, we’ll ship the headset to that person. Please note: Each participant must qualify as an experienced meditator and commit to completing 10 brainwave sessions within 30 days of activating the GoDeeper app. You’ll receive additional guidance and tips for managing this process once you indicate that you want a loaner headset to share with your friends.

You can also rent a Muse for $25/month or buy one used on eBay.

When you donate your brainwaves to meditation science under the auspices of a meditation training center, IMBR will donate $1 per session in your name to the meditation training center you designate in your application. Our research requires a maximum of ten sessions for each type of meditation for up to three meditations types per person, so the maximum donation is $30.

You may find it harder to pass the signal check on the GoDeeper app than on the regular Muse app. We set a higher bar for signal quality because we are a research app.

We encourage you to wet the electrode before you start. The water helps conduct EEG electricity from your head into the Muse headband. Spit is a better wetting agent because salt water conducts electricity better than plain water. And every human has a convenient, built-in applicator!

Homer Simpson tip:
D’oh! Make sure that your hair is not between the electrodes and your skin.

Pro tip:
Put the Muse on first and give it time to build up some sweat before loading the app.

Depth is much harder to notice than distraction. Shinzen Young, a renowned meditation teacher, emphasizes three core qualities of depth that work for most meditation styles: concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity.

When you are meditating with the GoDeeper app, you are asked to tap once when you realize that you’ve just emerged from depth and twice when you realize that you’ve been distracted. Notice that we said emerged from depth – not while deep. Tapping while deep would be distracting.

What constitutes depth and distraction is different depending on the type of meditation you’ve selected. Once you have put on the headset, loaded the app, are ready to meditate and have completed a signal check, information about the TAP Zone will appear. Read this information carefully so that your taps reflect the nature of depth and distraction for that meditation type.

Here are the specific markers for depth and distraction for each meditation family.

Noting practice is a common tool for increasing engagement and clarity in meditation. It keeps you from zoning out – which is not the goal for most styles of meditation. Only level 1 has a focus on relaxation, but it is alert relaxation.

Generally, it is distraction that gets us out of depth, so we expect some distraction before the single tap. That’s why we ignore the 5 seconds before the tap. If you think you were distracted for much more than five seconds, then either don’t tap – or tap twice.

It can be. Mindfulness meditation involves extra attentiveness — without evaluation. Just as It’s raining hard is not the same as It’s a terrible day, I am noticing lots of thoughts is not the same as I’m terrible at meditation. Awareness without judging is key to ending suffering. As one wag said, Meditation is the only sport where you get points for noticing (with equanimity) that you are losing.

The Muse headband produces clinical grade EEG output by sampling the raw EEG signal at 4,000 times per second and then downsampling that data to 256 times per second. To get this level of quality, you must use the latest models of the Muse and the Muse software development kit (SDK). Comma-delimited files from the Mind Monitor do not have this level of precision.

Three peer-reviewed articles have investigated the quality of the Muse headband data for EEG research:

Krigolson et al. (2017) compared Muse data to that of a ~$75,000, 64-channel Brain Vision ActiChamp system across 60 subjects. His conclusion: A resampling analysis implemented post-hoc (see Figure 6) clearly demonstrates that one can measure reliable ERP components with Muse (especially the N200 and reward positivity).

Krigolson et al. (2021) replicated previous work on measuring chronic fatigue in 1,000 participants using the Muse headband. He concluded, Our work here affirms the validity of mEEG (mobile EEG) as a means for measuring brain health and performance in real-world environments.

Delorme & Martin (2021) compared the performance of various automated EEG data cleaning algorithms to the performance of three human raters in doing artifact rejection in 89 twelve-minute sessions of Muse data. Delorme found automated data rejection methods that were not significantly worse than human manual rejections. If different, the performance of these algorithms was likely better than human raters, because their rejections were closer to all human raters than raters’ rejections were with each other.

Arnold Delorme has great authority in the world of EEG research. He is probably best known as the co-author of EEGLAB, the preeminent MATLAB plug-in for EEG analysis. Google Scholar shows 44k citations to his 49 academic articles, including several on meditation and cleaning EEG. He was one of the peer reviewers for the two Krigolson papers.

No, we ask you to do your regular meditation practice and use taps to indicate depth and mind wandering as instructed in the GoDeeper app. If you use guided meditation in your regular practice, please use it with your GoDeeper sessions.

We have eight white papers at IMBR White Papers that distill what we learned from reading 500+ academic articles on EEG and meditation. No comparable source of information on the Internet is as deep and brief. These white papers are 8-10 pages long, written for intelligent people who don’t know brain science, and are free.

We are building an IMBR Academy to teach what we have learned about EEG and meditation. The Academy will present the information in a tiered sequence that goes deeper with each layer. The first two modules will center on how to understand and use the information on the apps summary screen and in its Brainwave Analyzer. Subsequent modules will delve deeper into the science of EEG and meditation. Each module will include several lessons and a test to ensure you understand the material.

We will launch the Academy with cohorts that learn together and participate in Zoom sessions for discussion and Q&A. The Academy will be free for the first 25 people who sign up. 

Click here to Request to Join a Cohort.

IMBR is a Public Benefit Corporation, which is midway between a for-profit company and a nonprofit organization. As a Public Benefit Corporation, we are legally required to consider the impact of our decisions on society and the environment and to publicly report on our social and environmental performance. This ensures that we hold ourselves accountable to balancing profit with purpose.

Currently, we are using the GoDeeper app to conduct a citizen science research project. During this research project, the app is free to those willing to donate their meditation brainwaves to science. Once this research project is complete, its anonymized data will be made available to skilled meditation researchers and so should benefit many. At that point, we will revise the app based on these new, more reliable data.

Once the GoDeeper app is revised to reflect these new findings, it will have three subscription levels:

Basic user license for $5/month includes:

• Support for 40 different meditation practices at four levels of expertise
• A session summary screen after each session that gives personalized coaching for going deeper based on the brainwaves in your session, your style, and level of practice.
• Progress graphs
• Basic user access to IMBR Academy to learn how to get the most out of the app

Super user license for $10/month includes:

• All the features of the basic user level
• Access to the brainwave analyzer to deeply explore what your brainwaves look like:
  • When deep and distracted
  • At the beginning, middle, and end of your session
  • As key metrics or standard frequency bands
  • As a timeline graph or as bar charts
• Access to deeper topics in the IMBR Academy

Coach License for $20/month includes:

• All the features of the super user level
• Access to the EEG of students or clients who give you permission to see their data
• Overview bar charts of client data ranked from best to worst
• The capacity to combine session data to look for trends across sessions
• Access to even deeper topics in the IMBR Academy

Even after the commercial launch of GoDeeper, you will always be able to donate your brainwaves to science anytime you choose.

Yes, we store your personal identifying information (PII) in a separate file. When we release our data to other scientists, your PII is replaced by a number. Scientists get access to your type of practice and level of experience, but not your PII. We will never share your PII.

This study is conducted under the auspices of Nicco Reggente, PhD, principal Investigator at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies. He has secured IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval to certify that our procedure conforms to scientific best practices and our data storage protects anonymity.