How 500,000+ People Are Hacking Stress, Focus, & Sleep Using EEG, Neurofeedback, HRV & More

Ariel Garten [00:00:00]:
There is absolutely nothing that can actually tell you what your brain is doing.

Nick Urban [00:00:05]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week we decode the tools, tactics and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body and performance span things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. It’s very difficult to measure changes in brain chemical levels, AKA neurotransmitters in the brain. Luckily, before these chemical changes occur, there are electrical changes that occur and these are much easier to quantify. Gone are the days of meditating blindly, just hoping that you get results. Our guest this week is Ariel Garten.

Nick Urban [00:01:17]:
She’s a neuroscientist and former psychotherapist who co founded Muse, the brain sensing EEG and FNEARS headset that so far helped over 500,000 users reduce stress, sleep better, improve meditation, and enhance their focus. As you’re about to find out, she’s excellent at bridging science, technology and human potential. If you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll recall that I’ve mentioned neurofeedback in a bunch of different episodes and I’ve recorded other episodes on the subject, such as the one with Paula from Sensei and yes, I still use the Sensei. It has a lot of features and modes built into it, it’s not quite as portable as Muse and it’s a bit more expensive. So this is really a good entry point device or for those who are constantly on the road. I’ve also written a review of this, so if you want to check out that, see how it compares and contrasts to what else is out there, I’ll put a link to that article in the show notes for this episode and also the benefits that I’ve come across of neurofeedback from my own research. If you want to try Muse specifically, you can use the code urban for 15% off@choose muse.com those links and codes and everything I’ve mentioned so far will be in the show notes which you can [email protected] 215 one of the other things I love about this device and I mentioned in the episode is that it’s the same device used in some clinical research, so you’re not wondering if you’re getting something that actually works. And Muse’s latest device, their Athena product, has multiple different technologies built into it, EEG and fnirs, and it accurately measures sleep more accurately than the wearable devices do.

Nick Urban [00:03:04]:
Plus, digital sleeping pill technology helps you fall asleep faster. So if you have trouble sleeping or you want to upgrade your meditation routine, or you’re just on the fence and have never been able to make it a habit, check it out and let me know your comments. Again, you can get 15% [email protected] all right, let’s bring in Ariel. Ariel, welcome to the podcast.

Ariel Garten [00:03:25]:
Thank you so much. It’s a joy and pleasure to be here.

Nick Urban [00:03:28]:
One of my favorite topics to discuss is the brain and the mind. So, before we get started, what are the unusual non negotiables you’ve done for your brain health so far today?

Ariel Garten [00:03:40]:
Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. I slept well. I woke up nicely after a good night’s sleep. I stuck my face into the sunshine, I ate well, and I meditated and gave my kids a hug. Also important for your brain.

Nick Urban [00:03:56]:
None of that’s too unusual. Nothing very fringe there, but they’re all foundational, so good reminder to focus on those things before going on to the other stuff. How did you get interested in the brain to begin with and involved in this whole world?

Ariel Garten [00:04:12]:
So first I want to just point out, you said non negotiables. And so, yes, these foundational things that we do in our life are not negotiable and they’re there for a reason. Like the pillars of brain health. Sleeping well, loving connection, exercise, circadian rhythms. These are the basics and you gotta nail them. So with that out of the way, my fascination with the brain started at a very early age when I wondered, like, how. How is it that we have an experience of life from this thing that we have inside of our head that is doing the processing and is aware of itself? And this is crazy. And so I was fascinated by the brain and how it creates our experience of life.

Ariel Garten [00:04:52]:
How we perceive. A color is red, a table is hard. Like, how does all this happen? So I went to school for neuroscience and along the way started working with an early brain computer interface system and experiencing the ability to actually translate my brain activity into sound and light and create feedback. And from there went on the long and exciting path to the creation of Muse.

Nick Urban [00:05:19]:
For people who are not familiar with neurofeedback or brain training or Any of this. How would you describe what it is that Muse helps people accomplish?

Ariel Garten [00:05:30]:
So Muse is a clinical grade eeg. So it’s the same thing that you would go into a lab to use, but it’s in a super slim, friendly, easy to use form factor. And it allows you to track your brain activity and train your brain to improve your brain health across multiple dimensions. You used words like neurofeedback. So it trains your brain using neurofeedback, meditation, sleep support, and more.

Nick Urban [00:05:59]:
Yeah, and so most devices that I’ve previously used either aren’t clinical grade or they don’t have multiple technologies in one. And so when I started testing your Muse Athena product, I was delighted to find that you guys incorporated multiple different technologies into it. Before we go into the nitty gritty of what you have in this device, help people understand, like, the basics of brainwaves. I’m sure you’ve articulated this many, many times.

Ariel Garten [00:06:27]:
Sure. So Muse uses multiple technologies, one of them using EEG electroencephalogram. And it tracks your brain wave activity. So our brains communicate with our neurons electrochemically, so they have little electrical signals communicating from neuron to neuron. And the sum total of that electrical activity can be read on the surface of your head with a device called an EEG Electroencephalography. I’ve got one in my hands right here and another one in my hands right here. These devices are able to track your brainwave activity. Your brainwaves are generally thought of as broken into five categories.

Ariel Garten [00:07:11]:
Delta, very, very slow wave activity, that happens when you sleep. Theta, activity that happens when you are in a sort of more dreamlike state. Alpha, which is 8-12 Hz, slightly higher, but still slow. And that’s activity that happens when you’re super focused, when you’re relaxed, when you’re calm. Beta, when you are actively thinking, reading, mentally stimulated. High Beta, which can be a sign of a highly thinking, overthinking mind. And Gamma, whose specific activity has yet to be totally defined, but shows up across multiple different activities of the brain. So the sum total of our neuronal activity can be read within the context of our brain waves.

Nick Urban [00:07:58]:
And so when you are in a so called alpha dominant state, that wouldn’t mean that your brain is only outputting alpha waves. It would mean that you’re like. That’s the dominant power band that the brain is entrained to.

Ariel Garten [00:08:11]:
Yep. So our brains are kind of like a symphony. They have multiple different organs, different parts of our brain. We have the prefrontal cortex, we have Our hippocampus, we have our thalamus, we have our hypothalamus. There’s many, many different organs inside the brain, organs being a cluster of cells that work together to do a specific function. Each of these organs in our brain and each of these clusters of neurons have different frequencies of communication. Those sum totals sum into this orchestra, the song that we hear, but it’s composed of the violins playing one thing, the trumpets playing another. We have a variety of different brainwaves happening at any point in time in different brainwave generators in each of these different organs.

Ariel Garten [00:09:03]:
That sum total can be read as having more alpha or less alpha, high beta from one region, delta from another region. What that gives us insight into is the health and the functioning of various parts of our brain and how effectively our brain is working together in different tasks.

Nick Urban [00:09:25]:
So the way that I think most people have come across MUSE and this technology is like a tech assisted meditation to enhance and quantify your session so that you’re not no longer wondering, was this a good session or was I distracted the whole time? What do you think are the main use cases for neurofeedback and brain training as a whole?

Ariel Garten [00:09:45]:
Sure. So as Muse, as you pointed out, we started out as a meditation tool, and it’s a very effective one. You focus your attention during meditation. Most people have no idea what’s going on in their minds when they meditate. So MUSE would translate your brain activity into guiding sounds. And when your mind wandered off onto a distracted thought, you’d hear the sound pick up. And as you came back to focused attention on your breath, the sound would quiet. And this is an incredibly effective form of neurofeedback, giving you feedback on your brain’s activity to train you into the activity of meditation.

Ariel Garten [00:10:22]:
And so that was sort of our first use case. The second use case for MUSE became a sleep tool. So people would tell us that they were using MUSE to help them fall asleep. And as we started to create further versions of the Muse, we created the MUSE s that you can actually wear as you are falling asleep. And it turned out that we could actually track your brain activity as effectively as a sleep lab. So the MUSE s really became a portable sleep lab. And then we developed neurofeedback and biofeedback experiences that helped you fall asleep. We created something called the digital sleeping pill that would track your brain activity from wakefulness into sleep and adjust the audio that you’re looking to in such a way that it was designed to walk your brain into sleep.

Ariel Garten [00:11:07]:
And if you Woke up in the middle of the night, the audio would come back on again and bring your brain back into sleep. And then once you’re asleep, the audio turns off. That was another example of neurofeedback and biofeedback, helping you to shape your brain’s activity and teach your brain to do something really key, which is get better sleep. Now we have new forms of neurofeedback with fnir. It’s a whole other kind of neurofeedback technology which we can get into in a moment.

Nick Urban [00:11:35]:
Absolutely. Before we do, I’m curious because a lot of people are going to be like, I already have one of these things. And for those listening in, it’s a smart ring or there’s smart watches, different ways of tracking sleep and recovery. But there’s a downside to these as compared to actually using something like the muse.

Ariel Garten [00:11:54]:
Yeah. So there is absolutely nothing that can actually tell you what your brain is doing, except during sleep. Except for something that’s tracking your brain during sleep. So sleep happens not in your fingertip or in your wrist. The driver of sleep is not the shift in your HRV or temperature, which is what finger trackers or wrist trackers are tracking. The drivers of sleep are in your brain. They’re your brain moving from wake through to N1 into deep sleep, as represented by delta, into light sleep, et cetera. And so only MUSE can actually track your sleep as effectively as a sleep lab.

Ariel Garten [00:12:35]:
And we can tell you not just how much deep sleep you had, but even how deep your deep sleep was. So what’s the amplitude of your delta? So you can get incredibly detailed data. And then because we have this real time interaction tracking your brain as you sleep, we can create cool things like the digital sleeping pill that give you bioneurofeedback to help you ultimately, according to one study, improve your sleep quality by over 20%, which is impressive.

Nick Urban [00:13:02]:
So if someone, say, uses their aura ring and it says they are getting just four minutes of REM or deep sleep, which obviously is not gonna be possible over the long term, or they probably wouldn’t be alive. But if they’re concerned about those numbers, could they use something like MUSE and get, like a more accurate snapshot of what they’re probably experiencing?

Ariel Garten [00:13:23]:
Yep. So REM sleep is something that is notoriously hard to track because it’s very difficult to tell whether somebody is awake or in rem. Our ability to track REM sleep is incredibly precise. So there have been muses widely used in sleep research studies. So sleep researchers, instead of sending Their participants to a sleep lab, send them home a MUSE to use for three, four, seven nights. And as a result, researchers have done a lot of studies collecting muse data simultaneously in a PSG in a sleep lab. They’ve been able to identify relative to the signal that the sleep lab is telling them that our ability to rate deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, particularly REM sleep, is really, really high. And in some case, even better than an expert in a sleep lab would be able to tell which state you’re.

Nick Urban [00:14:15]:
In, which is really helpful. You mentioned a metric earlier, actually a suite of metrics. But for example, what would peak alpha during your sleep be able to tell you?

Ariel Garten [00:14:25]:
So peak alpha is actually something that we measure in meditation. So with muse, we have quite a number of different tools that we use to track your brain activity, and one of them is your peak alpha frequency. So when you’re meditating, what you’re looking, one of the aspects that we’re looking at is your alpha wave activity. And when you meditate, you increase your alpha waves. And not only are you increasing the. Not only is one of the things you can look at the amount of alpha. I’m meditating really hard, I’m in the zone. I have a lot of alpha activity.

Ariel Garten [00:15:03]:
My whole brain is starting to synchronize into alpha. And so you can look at the amount of alpha. We also look at the frequency of alpha. Alpha is generally between 8 to 12 hertz. And as it turns out, your alpha peak frequency shifts throughout the day, and it also shifts over the course of your life. Research using our database has shown that your brainwaves actually change decade by decade. And as you age, your alpha peak frequency slows down. We have a tool called alpha peak that actually tracks your alpha peak frequency.

Ariel Garten [00:15:44]:
You can start to use it to see the things in your daily life life that shift your personal alpha peak day to day, and also use it to track your alpha peak over time.

Nick Urban [00:15:53]:
So one of my frustrations with brain training in general, especially neurofeedback, is that it’s hard to, like, just put more effort into it, focus harder, and then get a better outcome. To me, it seems like other factors play a big role in how good my session is. For example, if I sleep poorly the night before, it’s going to be pretty hard to overcome that and a bunch of other factors as well. Are there things that we can do during our meditation sessions or other, like going about our day that’ll help us get better results and be more effective?

Ariel Garten [00:16:26]:
Totally. There’s things that you can do as you go throughout your day. Okay, so it’s funny, this idea that, you know, neurofeedback, you can’t try harder. What you’re doing in neurofeedback is you are giving feedback to your brain. So you don’t need to put in a ton of effort, but you do need to let your brain learn. So when your brain hears the feedback, your brain is like, oh, right, that’s what I should be doing. Oh, right, that’s what I should be doing. So in the context of a meditation session, things that you can be doing to improve are noticing when your mind is wandering and then bringing your attention back to your breath, reducing your frustration.

Ariel Garten [00:17:06]:
So one of the things that we learn in meditation is to not get frustrated and distracted when there are thoughts or sounds or emotions that come up. So we learn to become resilient to those emotions. And as you sit in your meditation session and you have, like, you know, the sound of the rain come up, if you’re meditating with Muse and you hear the sounds get louder, instead of going like, oh, no, the sounds are getting louder. This is awful. You go like, oh, okay, there’s a sound. I accept. That’s a sound. That’s cool.

Ariel Garten [00:17:35]:
Bring my attention back to my breath. Let it go. Bring in the quality of acceptance. And as you go throughout your daily life, you practice the same things. So, you know, you’re having a conversation like this or you’re listening to a podcast, your mind gets distracted, you’re driving, your mind gets distracted, and you say, hey, I’m noticing that I’m distracted, and I’m choosing to bring my attention back to the thing that’s in front of me. Your mind gets distracted with an emotionally challenging thought. And rather than ruminating on that emotionally challenging thought, you can say, okay, that’s a thought. I have some feelings that come up about it.

Ariel Garten [00:18:09]:
Instead of making more stories about it, I’m going to let that go and just come on back to the present moment and practice acceptance. So the same things that we want to practice in the neurofeedback to make it better are also the things that we want to practice in our life. The overarching theme is actually an attitude of being able to learn, an attitude of openness and curiosity that takes us from being entrenched in one way of thinking and doing to constantly saying, like, hey, that’s a cool thing that I could do that I could try, and I can try doing it that way, and, hey, that’s easier, or I might be wrong. About this and the way that I was staying in anxious wrongness isn’t serving me. I can let all of that go and see from a new perspective and not be mad at myself from being wrong, but just to see from a new perspective. So all of these things that allow us to lightly go through our life and learn and shift and change and grow are the things that make us good at neurofeedback and good at life?

Nick Urban [00:19:08]:
Yeah. So would this be helpful for training and developing, say, cognitive flexibility?

Ariel Garten [00:19:14]:
Totally part of what I just described? Yes. Cognitive flexibility is an incredibly important aspect of mental fitness. Not staying focused and fixed in one way of doing things, but being able to be cognitively flexible, see a situation or problem from multiple sides sides and be open to new ideas and possibilities.

Nick Urban [00:19:35]:
Sounds like this would really help the world as a whole go out of the polarized black or white thinking.

Ariel Garten [00:19:42]:
Oh my God. So when we started doing this, I was like, if only more people would meditate, the world would be a better place. I don’t know if since we started a decade ago, the world has gotten to be any better, any better of a place. Half a million people have used muse to meditate. You know, lots of people have learned meditation through other facets. Millions of people meditate. And I pray for the day in which these learnings and teachings from meditation allow us to be more open, flexible and adaptable to one another into the situations that we’re in.

Nick Urban [00:20:16]:
So there’s a well known company in the neurofeedback brain training space that their tagline is that you get 40 years of this type of experience in a weekend or a very short amount of time. Do you see that this type of training can help people, I guess, master meditation faster?

Ariel Garten [00:20:35]:
Yeah, so I mean, we’ve definitely, we’ve definitely seen that and, and heard it. So I commonly hear people saying, oh, you know, I meditated for years before this and then now I’ve used Muse. And it’s like, you know, I learned more in six weeks than I’ve learned in the last six months or, you know, five years. So it’s definitely something that gives you a new perspective on it and gives you training. So it’s like trying to go to the grocery store and carry heavy things as part of your training to your gym versus going to a gym and having a trainer and having them train you in what to do. So meditation is not the key to enlightenment and muse is, or rather muse is not the key to enlightenment. But training with muse is one of the things that teaches you the skills to get there and teaches you in a, in a very specific and targeted way that makes it really efficient and effective.

Nick Urban [00:21:31]:
Because it’s one thing to commit to a 20, 30, 40 minute practice every day, and it’s another to actually feel like you’re getting somewhere. And like, if you’re getting started with this, it’s hard to know where you are along that journey. Or if you just wasted those 40 minutes, you probably didn’t waste them. But it can be nice to have that little technological assistance to make sure that you’re actually progressing.

Ariel Garten [00:21:50]:
Yeah. And in studies with Muse, actually we see progress with a very short number of minutes. So there have been over 200 published studies using MUSE both as a clinical grade EEG and interventionally as a meditation tool or a sleep tool. And so like, the Mayo Clinic has published, they’ve run like seven studies using Muse demonstrating its improvement with breast cancer patients, long COVID patients, Cushing’s syndrome, fibromyalgia, and more. And in those studies, the instructions to the participants are to use MUSE for a minimum of five minutes a day. And with a minimum of five minutes a day, over the course of six weeks, we see significant improvements. So, like one of the studies that they did with their doctors, so doctors at the Mayo Clinic who are super stressed and burnt out used Muse. They’re super busy.

Ariel Garten [00:22:41]:
So, you know, some of them, it was just two minutes a day, five minutes a day, and they saw on average a 54% decrease in burnout, an improvement in sleep, a reduction in stress, and even an improvement in cognitive function that’s even from just a short dose. It’s not to say that more isn’t better, but even a small amount can considerably help.

Nick Urban [00:23:05]:
Yeah, that’s really cool. You already alluded to some of the topics I want to cover with you today, such as the impact on Covid and long Covid and other things, perhaps infections that people have, some clinical infections, if you can see any differences in the data. But before we go on to that, what are you actually training? Which brain waves? Because as I understand it, the trainings have to be calibrated to reward your brain when you enter a certain dominant state, say alpha or alpha, theta or theta or delta or whatever.

Ariel Garten [00:23:36]:
So with Muse, there’s lots of different ways that you can use it. So in the MUSE meditation, we have multiple meditation types. So in Muse mind meditation, where you’re doing the focused attention training on the breath, what we’re predominantly looking at is alpha, but there’s a number of different aspects to it. As well. It is looking at your whole brain and it is based on your own calibration. So you do a session, it sees where your brain is at and then looks for the variants. We have heart meditation that is actually looking at the beating of your heart and training you to improve your interoception, your ability to sensitively understand your internal state. You can actually hear the beating of your heart translated into guiding sounds.

Ariel Garten [00:24:14]:
It’s beautiful. We have body meditation where you find stillness in your body. We have the sleep experiences, which is a totally different form where we’re looking at your level of wakefulness and giving you neuro and biofeedback based on your level of wakefulness and your ability to transition from wakefulness into N1 into the first stage of sleep. And then there are other tools like Mindlift is a company that makes more classical neurofeedback training based on muse, which can be programmed by a clinician to do say beta theta ratio training or other training paradigms. So from a neurofeedback perspective, there’s lots of different things that you can train with MUSE in your mind and your body.

Nick Urban [00:25:02]:
So that heart setting or group of programs is that using like heart coherence or hrv, biofeedback training or something else?

Ariel Garten [00:25:11]:
Yeah, so what we’re on the Muses. So on the Muse 2, the muses and the Muses, Athena, there’s a PPG signal. So we’re tracking your heartbeat. So we’re looking at the heartbeat as read from before head and we’re able to translate that into the sound of your beating heart. It’s beautiful. As I’ve mentioned. And at the end what you’re looking at is actually your sinusoidal arrhythmia. So hrv, the concept of HRV is looking at your heart rate variability.

Ariel Garten [00:25:43]:
When you breathe in, your heart rate increases. When you breathe out, your heart rate decreases, which is why meditations in which we have extended long exhales are slowing down our heart rate and therefore signaling to our body that we should be in rest and digest. When you have high hrv, high heart rate variability, you have a greater variability between how high your heartbeat is on your in breath and how low your heartbeat is on the bottom of your out breath. So people who are stressed, their heartbeat doesn’t decrease a lot in their out breath. People who are relaxed, healthy fit, et cetera, your vagus nerve is better at recovering and so you have a very nice slow heart rate on your exhale and you have greater heart rate variab all of this to say in the Muse app, what you’re actually hearing is your heart rate variability. You’re hearing how your heart speeds up on your in breath and how your heart slows down on your out breath. And afterwards, you’re seeing a graph that actually shows you what your heart rate does during each of your breaths, going up and down and up and down. Or if you’re stressed, you’ll see it in just a small squiggly line.

Ariel Garten [00:26:52]:
So we are teaching you your own heart rate variability through the exercise.

Nick Urban [00:26:56]:
Ah, okay. And then does that correlate at all to brain coherence? Like if, when you’re working on your, like optimizing your heart rate variability. Like that.

Ariel Garten [00:27:07]:
So when you’re optimizing your heart rate variability, what you are doing in large parts is you’re training your body to go into rest and digest. You’re training your vagus nerve to improve its vagal tone. So when you breathe in, you have an increase in your blood pressure because your heartbeat is going faster. That becomes then a trigger to your vagus nerve to say, oh, your blood pressure is increasing. Vagus nerve, come in. Slow this puppy down. Slow down your heart rate, lower your blood pressure, dilate your blood vessels. That creates this really amazing cardiovascular experience that you have of your blood vessels dilating, your heart rate slowing and your whole system shifting.

Ariel Garten [00:27:53]:
That vagal response is related to your brainwave response because your vagus nerve comes from your brain, down your neck into your gut. It’s a huge, big vagus, means wandering. It wanders throughout your torso and your head. And increase in vagus activity is also correlated with increase in alpha wave activity. So as you’re going through that experience of breathing deeply down, regulating your body down, regulating your heart rate, you are also shifting your brain waves into a slower, more relaxed state. That’s part of the coherence that happens in the brain and the heart as you shift from more anxious fight or flight state into a more relaxed rest and digest. Greater heart rate variability. Lower, lower brainwave frequency, increase in alpha.

Nick Urban [00:28:48]:
Wow. There’s a lot of ways of using this, and that’s why it’s nice to hear from you the different ways that we can approach it. Because you guys have a ton of different tracks and programs in the Muse app that really lets people customize the experience to what they’re looking for.

Ariel Garten [00:29:01]:
Yeah, if there’s one problem, it’s there’s too many things in there because we keep having ideas of new ways to train your brain and body. And so we, we Are like, okay, focused attention, meditation. Well, now we should add tracks on Zen meditation and, like, meditations for being frustrated if you’re a college student and for all these places in your life. So we have hundreds of meditations for all the stuff that comes up in your life. We have all these different biofeedback meditation types. We have the sleep. Then we started to bring in questionnaires. We have like the Gad 7 and the PhQ 9 to track anxiety and depression.

Ariel Garten [00:29:40]:
Not that Muse diagnoses or treats any conditions. Then we brought in the prefrontal cortex neurofeedback, a whole other mechanism which we can talk about in a minute. And then we have more cognitive tasks and we can start to get erp. So, yeah, it really is this incredibly full brain health system to track and to train. It’s super exciting.

Nick Urban [00:30:03]:
Yeah. So I didn’t hear you, I don’t think, mention that there’s any way of training gamma specifically. That’s one that I find really fascinating. And I want to train it somehow. And I’ve been using a tacs device, and that requires putting electrodes in the head and making sure they’re in the exact right place and using the right power. I’ve kind of moved away from that because it doesn’t seem like it’s the safest in the hands of someone who doesn’t do this professionally.

Ariel Garten [00:30:29]:
I would agree. Yeah, I think that’s. Yeah. Stimulation is not something that we do because it’s not something that can be done sleeping safely. We just passively read and then give you feedback.

Nick Urban [00:30:38]:
Yes, exactly. It seems like a better way of working with the body than against it. Do you have any modes to train Gamma specifically?

Ariel Garten [00:30:46]:
Um, so if that’s something that you’re interested in, I would actually download the Mind Lift app. Because through Mind Lift, you can do that kind of specific targeted neurofeedback.

Nick Urban [00:30:55]:
Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah, I know. It’s more complicated than that too. Like, there’s like, the concept of, like, sequencing or training. You want to just go from no experience straight into training gamma. You want to, like, get a nice solid base of alpha alpha theta and then go to that. So, yeah, I think it makes sense that you wouldn’t expose that to the average user.

Ariel Garten [00:31:13]:
Another fun way that you can potentially train it is using 40 Hz sound and light, which is something that we’ve also explored putting in the app. But we have too many things in the app. Someday you might magically discover that we’ve put in 40 Hz sound and light. But There is good research that demonstrates that simultaneous sound and light, 40 Hz is able to facilitate a gamma like signal in the brain and even able to create a rhythmic glymph movement that seems to clear amyloid beta. So far, it’s all mouse model research. Their friend of mine from MIT has a company focused on commercializing it, so has promise.

Nick Urban [00:31:54]:
Yeah, I have a device that does that. I can’t say. The first handful of times I did it, I noticed a big state shift. But now it doesn’t create a very noticeable effect. But it is interesting.

Ariel Garten [00:32:05]:
Yeah, it’s fascinating the range of technologies that we have coming out to help us train our mind. It’s really a new frontier.

Nick Urban [00:32:13]:
All right, so you’ve now mentioned several times another technology that is baked into this device. That was part of what really sold me on choosing this, specifically choosing muse. If you will tell me about F NERS or FNIRS technology.

Ariel Garten [00:32:29]:
Yes, it is functional near infrared spectroscopy. So MUSE is the only device that has both EEG that’s been validated in hundreds and hundreds of research papers with the MES itself, as well as a brand new technology that we’ve integrated, FNIRS functional near infrared spectroscopy. So FNIRS is incredibly cool. So you’ve probably heard of an FMRI and what an FMRI does is it is tracking the blood oxygenation in various parts of your brain to see which parts of your brain are working. In an FMRI machine, they might have you imagine something and then they would see the amount of blood flow and oxygen, specifically in that part of your brain, which would indicate the part of your brain that is working during that activity. FNIRS is functionally like a little FMRI machine, but it is tiny. It’s these sensors here. It’s using not a huge big magnet like an FMRI machine does, but instead it’s using light, near infrared spectroscopy.

Ariel Garten [00:33:34]:
It shines red and infrared light into your prefrontal cortex. And the light is actually able to penetrate through the skull and right to the edge of the blood brain barrier. We are able to look at your level of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood in your prefrontal cortex, the front of your head. And we can look at it separately in the left and right hemisphere. So we’re actually able to see the amount of oxygen coming to your prefrontal cortex and the amount of oxygen that is used by the activity of your prefrontal cortex. So we can actually see when your prefrontal cortex is working, how much oxygen is being sent to it. How much oxygen is being used up by it. And then we can also train your prefrontal cortex to demand more oxygen and more nutrients to be able to build its functionality and endurance.

Nick Urban [00:34:29]:
So to actually build its functionality, its strength and endurance. How are you doing that?

Ariel Garten [00:34:36]:
So we have an amazing new exercise inside of Muse. We call it Athena’s Owl, and it’s a neurofeedback exercise where you’re looking at an owl, and as you are able to increase the blood flow to your prefrontal cortex, the OWL flies. The more oxygen you bring to your prefrontal cortex, the faster and further the OWL flies. It turns out that this is a really effective form of neurofeedback training and has been demonstrated to be able to improve attention, focus, and the overall function of your prefrontal cortex.

Nick Urban [00:35:13]:
Have you or any researchers looked into the combined synergistic effect of training EEG and then also the heart coherence, or PPG, and then also using FNIRs at the same time? Because it seems to me like they would probably have some beneficial overlap. But I don’t know if I’ve seen.

Ariel Garten [00:35:32]:
Anything about that specifically exactly, because there are not a lot of easily accessible devices that have FNIRs, TBG, and EEG all in one. So we have lots and lots of researchers who have purchased Muses, both to use as pure research tools, as well as to do neurofeedback research and studies on it. The device just came out, so there’s nothing that’s been published yet, but these are exactly the kinds of studies that are now underway because this device finally exists.

Nick Urban [00:36:04]:
And so I know when I did my first Athena OWL session using fnears, it was very hard. I struggled. But then it started to get easier with time, and I kind of just figured out, and it seems like breathing, which makes sense because you’re measuring brain oxygenation of the prefrontal cortex, Actual deliberate breathing made a big difference. What are some other ways that people can enhance the blood flow and oxygenation of their prefrontal cortex if breathing has a close second or third exercise?

Ariel Garten [00:36:36]:
So there are cool studies demonstrating that people who have better overall cardiovascular fitness. There’s one study that looked at amateur runners versus sedentary college students, and those people who were amateur runners, a had better cardiovascular blood perfusion of their prefrontal cortex, so more oxygen developed there, and they performed faster on things like a stroop task. So exercise really not only improves your blood and your vasculature, but in your body, but also improves the nutrient and Energy resource delivery to your brain, which allows your brain to work better. And with Athena, you can both track that and do training to improve how your brain demands oxygen and requests its nutrients.

Nick Urban [00:37:25]:
One thing I noticed is after I went for a long morning walk and then I came back, not only did I get the signal faster because of obviously the slight moisture on my skin, but then also that mode seemed easier. Was that my imagination or is it because my blood was already flowing and I’d already increased my circulation that it was actually easier?

Ariel Garten [00:37:42]:
It could well be because you’d already increased your circulation.

Nick Urban [00:37:46]:
Gotcha. So if you were to design a minimalist, minimum effective Muse protocol, probably incorporating the different elements, what would you say belongs in that?

Ariel Garten [00:37:58]:
Okay, so I would say for sure you’d want to do a meditation session, five minute meditation session, mind, at any time in the day. So people are always like, when should I meditate? Should I meditate in the morning? Should I? The answer is meditate. Whenever it’s going to be good for you. Whenever it’s going to fit into your schedule and you can do it regularly. So five minute mind meditation, and that’s going to teach you the skill of focused attention meditation. That’s going to teach you the skill of observing your mind, being able to put your attention on one thing, notice when your mind is wandered and intentionally bring your attention back to the task at hand. And that’s going to flow out into your life by increasing your endurance at attending to things, being able to observe your internal state, be able to notice when you’re distracted and bring your attention back. And being able to overcome the urges that we have in our life.

Ariel Garten [00:38:47]:
Because when you sit there and meditate, you have all these urges and your job is to say, yep, that’s an urge. Cool. Come, go. Stay at the task at hand. So for sure, minimum. If this is minimum five minutes, if this is like optimum, 10’s great, 15’s awesome, 10’s fine. Minimum five. The next thing I would do is a Athena session.

Ariel Garten [00:39:07]:
And I would do that minimum of three minutes. Five minutes is good. Even three minutes is okay. You can fit it in anywhere in the day when it’s gonna work for you. And that’s going to, again, train your attention and train your brain’s endurance, your ability to stick with the task and train your brain to demand more oxygen, to be able to maintain its attention on the task. And then I would do some form of news before I went to bed to improve sleep. So sleep. You asked me at the very beginning, what’s like the non negotiable for my brain health.

Ariel Garten [00:39:40]:
Sleep. Sleep is so incredibly important and many of us don’t sleep because we’re too anxious, because we’re going through perimenopause, because our, you know, because we just have insomnia and don’t know how to sleep. And so Muse has a variety of tools to help you sleep. Meditations to help you calm your mind before bed and let go of your troubles and worries. The skill that you learned in focused attention meditation helps you move your mind away and let go of your consciousness and, you know, come into a sleep state. And our digital sleeping pill specifically helps you with bio neurofeedback to walk your brain into sleep. So there’s lots of different, we have guided journeys, we have soundscapes, we have so many different things to help you sleep because sleep is critical for your brain health. So, you know, my, my minimum viable news usage would be 5 minute meditation, 5 minute Athena and make sure you sleep.

Ariel Garten [00:40:34]:
News can help.

Nick Urban [00:40:36]:
Yeah, that’s a really good one. And for the digital sleeping pill specifically, I think you mentioned that it helps you get into the first stage of sleep more efficiently, more effectively. What about amplifying like the deep sleep or the REM sleep? Have you guys looked into that at all?

Ariel Garten [00:40:54]:
Totally. So we have lots of fun researchers that use Muse to enhance delta waves to look at targeted memory reactivation. These features are not yet available in the Muse app. They’re still in the research phase, but over time, if you’re a MUSE user, you know that we innovate things and we roll them out to you pretty quickly. So as you have your device, as we come up and really validate these innovations are effective and validate them through large scale science experiments, we then bring them into the app for your usage. One of the things that we have several research collaborators do is deep sleep stimulation by using an audio tone during delta waves. There’s lots of research that’s demonstrated that when you play a tone at Delftra frequency, usually 1200 to 1500 hertz, you can increase the quality of deep sleep when you do that, particularly phase locked to the upswing of the delta, your delta waves go up and down and up and down, basically in this beautiful slow 1200 millisecond path. When you stimulate the audio on the upswing of the delta, it seems to be particularly effective at helping to enhance deep sleep.

Ariel Garten [00:42:20]:
We have several research partners that are currently doing studies, are about to start their studies with Muse stimulating during delta. We will over the next, you know, year or so see the effects and the outcomes of that. And the tools that we’ve built for research will hopefully soon become tools available to the consumers too.

Nick Urban [00:42:41]:
Yeah, I love that you guys roll that out to consumers. Assuming it passes through research safely and.

Ariel Garten [00:42:46]:
Effectively, it’s got to pass the research muster first. But when it does be lied to consumers.

Nick Urban [00:42:51]:
Yes. And that’s something that I wanted to discuss with you as well is safety. Because it seems like these technologies could be totally benign and harmless. Worst comes to worst, they don’t do anything. But like a lot of experts in this field warn against using any old device because like, you don’t want to trust your average person, your average thing with your brain, because you don’t want to in train and train the wrong things. It gives me a little bit of levity and confidence to see that Muse is used widely, not just across consumers, but also in clinical research.

Ariel Garten [00:43:28]:
Yeah. So for us, it’s incredibly important that we just don’t give you any old brain hack. And the stuff that we do deliver has been strongly validated. I think I literally spend my day on call with neuroscience researchers talking about different tools and techniques. So, you know, when you ask the question about gamma stimulation, that’s not in the Muse app, because I don’t think that that’s like a thing that we want to be doing every day. Willy nilly. What is in the Muse app is proven, well, well validated techniques that have been demonstrated throughout time and throughout science to be really efficacious. So you know, you mentioned brain stimulation and electrical.

Ariel Garten [00:44:12]:
Nope, we don’t go there. Because it has not yet been demonstrated to be safe and effective. And I think that’s quite an important standard for everybody in the neurotech industry to take on and to be incredibly transparent about the methodologies that are involved and the level of evidence that’s available for the training because you want to make sure that what you’re doing is effective for your brain. And so we choose only those things that have very validated efficacy across multiple different populations too. So Muse researchers use Muse interventionally with Parkinson’s patients. There’s three studies going on currently using Muse’s meditation interventions with Parkinson’s patients to see if it can help improve Parkinson’s symptoms. It’s the same thing in Alzheimer’s and older adults. So it’s important that intervention works not just for the average individual, but also works effectively across multiple populations.

Ariel Garten [00:45:23]:
And that’s something that takes really rigorous testing and is like a non stop. The testing and the validation never ends. Because there’s always new innovations and populations to make sure that you continue to test with and to validate and to see the efficacy.

Nick Urban [00:45:42]:
Yeah. For those individuals, are they using one of the normal modes that’s in the app or is it a special program designed for them?

Ariel Garten [00:45:51]:
Three studies. There’s one at the University of Rhode island and they’re just using the basic Muse app and patients come into the lab several times a week to use just basic, as is what all the consumers have available to them. There’s a second study that’s going to be starting at Baycrest Hospital and the center for Aging and Brain Health Innovation that’s a study with caregivers and Parkinson’s patients. Baycrest has done multiple studies with Muse. The last one was a study on loneliness and using Muse’s meditation for older adults experiencing loneliness. For the Parkinson’s study, they have curated a set of the meditations from the Muse app. So they’re just giving them a highly selected subset and we for our research studies are able to customize what the subjects in the study have access to and what the protocol is. And then I believe they’re going to be making one sort of overall guided meditation around using this in the context of Parkinson’s.

Ariel Garten [00:46:59]:
So, you know, we have the ability to customize it for studies and then if that bears out, well, that then again can roll into the Muse app. There is a pain study using muse and Dr. Ron Siegel created this amazing, amazing six week meditation course on pain that was first validated through a study and now is available in the Muse app, but only through clinicians. There’s lots of different aspects of the Muse app that if you’re a clinician, you can give your patients access to condition specific modules. For example, if you’re a general consumer, you have access to all sorts of things, but not some of the things that you get through a clinician. If you are a researcher, we again customize it specifically for your study. We can do ERP analysis, all the cool neuroscience research backend that one Muse app is actually an incredibly flexible place depending on who’s using it.

Nick Urban [00:48:03]:
So for the ERP analysis, are you guys able to do like quantification of like brain processing speed, efficiency, the different things that people might be interested to see, like where is their current baseline on like a, I don’t know, scoring a scoring scale to help see, after four months of training, six months of training, a year of training, this is how things have changed versus looking at like, here’s one session, here’s how like my Brain power bands and then here’s the next one and it looks a little different, but I can’t tell if it’s an improvement or if it’s a worse session.

Ariel Garten [00:48:34]:
Yeah, so with ERPs, for anybody who doesn’t know what an ERP is, it is an event related potential. So when your brain sees a stimulus that is salient to it, like a flash of light, you have a targeted response in your brain that is very predictable. And the most common ERP is called the P300, a positive spike 300 milliseconds after the stimulus. And the height and the shape of the ERP response is characteristic and characteristic of your cognitive processing abilities. So with people who are sharp and on the ball, you’re going to have a really nice high peak. 300 milliseconds after stimulus. It’s going to be textbook for people. As you begin to age or have cognitive decline or brain fog, your brain doesn’t work together as effectively.

Ariel Garten [00:49:26]:
And so that big brainwave spike instead is more of a kind of wider brainwave mush. So your brain waves are not all spiking simultaneously, your neurons are not all communicating the same way simultaneously. And so you see a spike that’s often more than 300 milliseconds, it’s delayed, the peak is not as high because everything’s not working together as effectively. And long story short, with Muse, we can see all these things. We have a timing chip on the Athena, on the new device that gives you really precise, beautiful ERPs, and that’s something that is currently available to researchers and being used for quite a number of research studies and again, over time will also be available to consumers probably pretty quickly because we already have built the infrastructure into the app.

Nick Urban [00:50:13]:
Oh, that’s really exciting. I had no idea. And that unlocks so many doors for the consumers like us.

Ariel Garten [00:50:18]:
Yeah, and I also hate this word, consumers. It’s like it’s, you know, a word that you use to shift the identity between a researcher, a clinician or a consumer. But it’s like just for people, for people who are curious about their brain.

Nick Urban [00:50:32]:
Yeah, you’re right. It’s much better for people, not just for researchers. You already mentioned the ERPs. When you look at people’s Muse results. Of course it’s going to vary depending on their circumstances and from one session to the next. But are there any things you can tell by just looking at the overall session results? You mentioned peak alpha earlier from the brain power graph or from the other stuff there? Can you see, okay, this person probably has an Infection. Perhaps they’re dealing with long Covid. Perhaps there’s just some kind of issue in their biology somewhere.

Nick Urban [00:51:06]:
Like, what can you tell from just looking at the overall results?

Ariel Garten [00:51:09]:
So the long Covid one is interesting. So again, MU’s can’t diagnose it, can’t detect infection. But for long Covid, we did a study with the Mayo Clinic, where that was actually recently published, where they brought patients with long Covid use MUSE for three months, and they saw improvement in their brain fog, in their mood, in their cognition. And like May, I was thrilled. It’s now part of their baseline recommendation for long Covid treatment, which is amazing. And then we did a study with Mayo, looking at that data and analyzing what the brain of somebody with long Covid looks like versus the brain of just a normal person in the normal population who uses muse. We were able to come up with a classifier that looks like it’s about 90% accurate at identifying the brain characteristics of long Covid. Now, it’s a machine learning classifier, so I can’t tell you.

Ariel Garten [00:52:06]:
We don’t know exactly which characteristics it’s pointing to. We’re at the beginning of this work. But all to say, yes, the holy grail here is to be able to look at a brain’s characteristics and then be able to identify disease or biomarkers for your brain’s health or ill health. We’re still far away from that. Yes, it’s still early research, but ultimately, hopefully, this becomes a tool that becomes better and better at decoding our underlying brain health to help us make better decisions.

Nick Urban [00:52:45]:
So one of my favorite features of the app is the ability to see what your brain is doing in real time and then see how different interventions you’re perhaps implementing affect your brain waves. So I was using the Musathena yesterday, and I have an Apollo neuro wearable, was using that, and I put it on sleep mode, and I saw a big spike in my delta brain waves, which I found surprising because usually you don’t see that during the daytime, but it actually registered on the Athena.

Ariel Garten [00:53:17]:
Oh, that’s awesome. So I wonder if. So, first of all, Apollo is great. It’s a very cool tool. I wonder if they’re actually stimming at delta. And so you saw an entrainment effect in your brain of that delta activity being stimmed with Apollo.

Nick Urban [00:53:36]:
Yeah, and so I’ve been going around playing around with different devices. I have. I have like a vagus nerve stimulator here. I’m not sure if that’s going to interfere with it because obviously it’s putting electrical current through the body, so it might mess with the brainwave readings. Is it possible to get accurate readings on these types of things?

Ariel Garten [00:53:53]:
Yeah, so I would just say do the stim. What is it stimming at? Is it stimming at alpha frequency? What is their stim parameter? So there’s lots of different ways to stim vagal nerve stim, depending on again, where it is, is this going to be like are you stimming the auricular? In which case you might really be interfering. Are you stimming down your chest? In which case we probably won’t have electrical interference. Anything that you’re see is probably like a signal transmission through the body. You can try. What is it like when the stim is on versus the stim is off? Do I see an immediate effect Right after that there’s elevated alpha activity or other activity that even after I turn the device off is remaining elevated. In which case as soon as you turn it off, you’re no longer having electrical interference with the electrical devices. You do have to wonder is, is it simply electrical interference? And so the way to test that is to see what the long tail of it is once you turn it off.

Nick Urban [00:54:53]:
Yeah. And I always do a baseline of a few minutes before I apply the intervention just to make sure that it’s not my current baseline. Just to see. Okay, at four minutes in, this is what happened. And then, yeah, it’s probably ideal to turn it off and then see what happens after I disable the device.

Ariel Garten [00:55:12]:
Very cool. Those are very, very fun experiments to do. I’m curious about the outcomes there.

Nick Urban [00:55:17]:
Yeah. And so I’m publishing a review of the Musathena and I will outline some of my experiments there. Definitely n equals 1. Not super scientific. To be more credible it would have to be large scale, would have to have better controls. But it’s fun nonetheless. Just to see what these different things do to brain state.

Ariel Garten [00:55:35]:
Yeah. And that’s part of the fun of these devices, that you get to experiment with them and make it your own.

Nick Urban [00:55:40]:
Exactly. For the health optimizers, the advanced ones, or maybe biohackers, what would you say they can do any like nutrients they can add or remove or perhaps not actually do this, but research this to get better results. Maybe enhance neuroplasticity or synaptogenesis, different parts of the whole growth experience of using museum.

Ariel Garten [00:56:05]:
Great question, important thing to say. I’m not a doctor, I’m not treating you as your doctor. Please go and check out These recommendations yourself. What I do and love is omega 3s. Your brain, the myelin sheath around your neuronal bundles are made out of fat, which is actually composed of DHA, which is the stuff inside your Omega 3 fatty acid pills. So Omega 3s are incredibly important vitamin D, highly anti inflammatory key for the brain. You know, those are basics that you know. The other things that start to get a little bit fancier, vitamin B2 and a lot of the B vitamins increase the mitochondrial output in your brain.

Ariel Garten [00:56:56]:
So B vitamins can be very healthy for your brain. Nicotinamide, riboside, Tru Nagen, any of the things M and ms, anything that’s going to upregulate your nad is really, really good for your brain function as it is for your general cellular function. So it seems curcumin is great for the brain because it can decrease inflammation, but it’s hard for it to get into the brain. So there’s substances like long Vita curcumin that have been adjusted with lipid tails to help permeate the blood brain barrier. I am a big fan of polyphenols in all forms, particularly in the fruit forms that you find them in. Blueberries, cherries, anthocyanins can be excellent for the brain. You ask specifically about neurogenesis, building new neurons or new dendrites. There’s evidence that demonstrates that lithium, lithium, orotate or is can be effective at increasing dendritic growth.

Ariel Garten [00:57:59]:
Again, that’s one to research on your own. And I also like the biggest brain hack which is exercise. I used to work exercise is a massive brain hack. Hiit. Exercise really important stimulates neurogenesis. I used to work in a research lab where my job was to count the number of new neurons that were born in a rat’s brain. And so we’re looking at neurogenesis specifically. How did we stimulate this neurogenesis? Not with fancy chemicals, but simply by putting the rat on a running wheel.

Ariel Garten [00:58:34]:
And when it ran on the running wheel, it stimulated the growth of neurons and it’s hippocampus. So exercise is one of my biggest brain hacks.

Nick Urban [00:58:43]:
Yeah, you can never go wrong by adding the right dose of exercise, the right amount of sleep.

Ariel Garten [00:58:50]:
Correct. Non negotiables.

Nick Urban [00:58:52]:
The way I do it, I’m curious your thoughts is I will use things, take things, eat things, move in a way that supports neurogenesis and stuff like that. I’ll even take some supplements that help with that. And on my heavy train days especially, but and then afterward after the session I will spend a Little extra time in recovery to help my body adjust and acclimate because that’s the brain. Also, like the body grows and improves in different ways during the rest periods. But like, for me, it’s like on the days that I’m gonna have a especially large muse session or multiple muse sessions, that’s when I do things to help my body adapt to the training stimulus more effectively.

Ariel Garten [00:59:38]:
Absolutely. So to me, the pillars of brain training are work on your focus, your clarity, your cognitive performance, work on your endurance and work on your recovery. All of these things are key to how you train and improve your brain and support that with good nutrition, recovery. So sleep is a huge piece of recovery. Support it with exercise and of course, support it with the loving connection of the people around you. And you know, those are some key ingredients for a healthy and happy brain.

Nick Urban [01:00:13]:
When you do your training, are you doing it seven days a week, the same amount of time each day, or the total amount of time you have available, or are you varying it, say 5 minutes, then 20 minutes, then 10 minutes? What’s your optimal?

Ariel Garten [01:00:25]:
I have kids. That’s my answer. I have children, I have two of them.

Nick Urban [01:00:29]:
What would be your optimal?

Ariel Garten [01:00:30]:
I should say one of them is younger and one of them is older. So, you know, my, my schedule varies dramatically depending on what’s going on with my kids and how, you know, because I optimize for time with them and I try to bring them into my training workouts, my brain training workouts, my meditation, my physical fitness. You know, my best physical fitness is throwing my 3 year old up in the air. She squeals and delight and sometimes that can be for 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 8 minutes, depending on what you can bear and how much crying is ensuing because, you know, milk is desired next. So, you know, part of, part of training is also being able to, to flow with the punches and be adaptable and flexible. Um, so it varies day by day.

Nick Urban [01:01:14]:
For someone who has a little more time or energy availability, do you think it’s better to keep it or to try and keep it at a certain length or to have more variability if they have the ability for it?

Ariel Garten [01:01:27]:
I think variability is key. You of course want to try to achieve some minimum threshold. You know, seven minutes of exercise is good, 12 minutes of hit is better. You know, there’s there, each exercise has its own appropriate dose. You don’t want to overdo it. I was going to say you don’t want to underdo it, but underdoing it is also fine because a little bit is better than None. And I think we want to be able to have our lives be flexible and responsive and our training be flexible and responsive to our life. We don’t want to be too rigid about anything because it causes its own form of problems, but we want to be sufficiently disciplined to stick to our training and stick to our goals.

Ariel Garten [01:02:10]:
So it’s a balance.

Nick Urban [01:02:11]:
What a balanced approach. Seems like you’ve been getting your brain training in and you have that cognitive flexibility.

Ariel Garten [01:02:17]:
That’s the goal.

Nick Urban [01:02:18]:
Okay, so we’ve been going for a while now. Are there any myths or misconceptions that you think are important to address before we start to wind this one down?

Ariel Garten [01:02:26]:
Oh, that’s a great question. So cognitive training, you know, people think about doing things like crossword puzzles or playing lumosity. And when you’re doing your cognitive training, you really want to think about the transfer effect. Not just, am I getting better at doing this thing, but how is this thing applying to my real world life? And there’s research on crossword puzzles, which is now looking at, okay, is crossword puzzle really good? Is it just people who are already cognitively flexible and able to think of words like doing crossword puzzles? But in any training that you’re doing, you can make it meaningful to you and you can do the work to increase your ability through it. If you’re a crossword puzzle doer, try to do harder crossword puzzles. Try to think about, you know, multiple words that it could be. Try. Try to expand your capabilities.

Ariel Garten [01:03:20]:
If you’re going through your daily life and you’re starting to find yourself, be forgetful. Don’t get frustrated and be like, oh, I’m forgetful. You know, I’m getting old. This is awful. Have it. First of all, be okay, I’m forgetful. What’s going on in my life? What could this be? How could I train? What could I shift? Am I sleeping? And then work on actually trying to remember the word. As we all age, our cognitive function is going to change, but we can put effort into maintaining our function as we age by putting our attention to it and continuing to work the muscles of our brain.

Ariel Garten [01:03:58]:
Our brain doesn’t have muscles, but continuing to work the skills and capabilities so that we can maintain them as we get older. If you find yourself being forgetful, stop and think about what the word is. Don’t get frustrated. That’s only going to make it worse. You know, practice managing your frustration and your expectations. It’s also a skill. And eventually find the word. And that’s going to strengthen your brain’s.

Ariel Garten [01:04:18]:
Ability to find the word the next time. So, you know, always, always be aware of how you can work what’s going on in your life to make that training. And every moment of our life is a moment of training, a moment of learning, a moment of skills, a moment of being more skillful than we were a month before. Find how we can use the moments in our life to actually have benefit for us and make not only our skills better, but our life more meaningful. So why does it matter that you can remember more? Well, not being frustrated at yourself is nice. You can remember your friends birthdays. Social skills are a whole other set of cognitive emotional abilities that we can, that we can train. And when we train them and improve them, when we reach out to friends more often, when we remember people’s birthdays and strengthen those connections and strengthens our quality of life and their quality of life, I think we also have to think about brain training and physical training not just in the context of getting better at this one thing, but in the context of how is this really improving my overall quality of life and the quality of life of people around me.

Ariel Garten [01:05:28]:
And to, you know, make the right choices. Don’t over train if it’s no longer serving your purpose of living a rich life. So train the things that matter to you.

Nick Urban [01:05:38]:
Beautiful. Well, that’s a good note to start wrapping up on. If people want to try Muse or to connect with you, how do they go about that?

Ariel Garten [01:05:47]:
Oh, so if you want to try Muse, it’s super easy. You just go to choosemuse.com and and we have Athena’s there as well as Muse 2, our last device. And you get access to the app and all the fun innovations that we continue to create and an awesome community of engaged people. And if you want to shout out to me specifically, you can reach me on all the socials.

Nick Urban [01:06:12]:
Thanks for tuning in to high performance longevity. It was very kind and they value the audience to support the show that will leave a review or share it with someone, use products, upgrade their products. Personally, I’ve been using the Athena episodes. Pretty cool tool to have and resources mentioned.

Ariel Garten [01:06:29]:
Yeah, it’s incredibly exciting that it exists and you know we have these abilities.

Nick Urban [01:06:33]:
Stay energized, stay bioharmonized. It’s nice that it’s so portable too. I need to like check a whole bag just to carry this around with me.

Ariel Garten [01:06:40]:
Awesome. Well, this has been a joy and a pleasure.

Nick Urban [01:06:42]:
I was about to say the same thing. Thanks for so much for joining me on the podcast today. Great hosting you and picking your brain about some of these really cool and important technologies of the future.

Ariel Garten [01:06:52]:
Wonderful. Have an awesome day.

Nick Urban [01:06:55]:
You too. Thanks.