The Neuroscience of Mindfulness - Ariel Garten

You know, the little micro frustrations that we have in our lives. These are things that are caused by really fear. These are things that are caused by anxiety and concerns that we're not going to be able to succeed. And meditation is a skill that teaches us to manage our mental state, accept what is, and move forward more productively and effectively.

We're back. This is the Future of Fitness Podcast Interview Series, and this is your host, Eric Malzone. And this is episode number 135. I talked to Arielle Gartin. So she is out of uh Toronto area. She's a TED speaker. Uh, she is the founder of ChooseMews.com, which is the news headband. And she's smart. Uh she's smart. She's down to earth. She's cool. Uh the great conversation about the neuroscience of mindfulness. So, what actually happens, right, uh when in our brains when we we practice mindfulness. So, meditation, things like that. It's fascinating. And what I really enjoyed about this too is uh the story leaning up to it. Like they found this technology and all the things they tried before they they settled upon uh the current rendition of of how they're using the tech. And it's just a great story, and it was really interesting. Um man, I I just learned a lot. I I did my best to stay at her level. She's so smart, right? And uh hopefully I did. So hopefully it was a great show. Hopefully you enjoyed it as much as I did. Uh before we get into it, a couple things. So, first of all, I want to uh I want to read out a um a review. So from Prime to Move uh on iTunes, five stars says the future of fitness rocks. Eric Malzone has put together a fantastic podcast. He has gathered quite a list of top-notch experts across the spectrum of the fitness industry. Eric does a great job exploring topics that weigh on the future of fitness. Thank you, sir. I actually know that is. Uh I really appreciate you writing that review. And if you guys go to iTunes and you leave a review just like that, I'll read it uh on air. So uh next thing, Elite Gym Insiders. If you are a gym owner, uh, it doesn't matter what you are, it could be CrossFit, could be boutique, could be uh health club, could be uh yoga, could be spin, whatever it is. If you want to join an online community uh where people speak your language, understand what you're uh what you're doing and what you're working on and can help, uh go to EliteGymInsiders.com, join the community, it's free, and uh we're about to roll out uh our very first partnership. Um so you'll get discounts on things like digital marketing, uh softwares, uh, let's see, education. Uh you name it, you'll get uh mentorship, uh, you'll get discounts on that as well. So join the group, it's worth your while. It's a Slack community. If you're not familiar with what Slack is, it's great. Uh it's the anti-Facebook. There are no cat videos. Uh, you won't get sucked into the vortex, you're just there to communicate and network with people and learn. So go check it out. Uh also, if you haven't yet, go check out certifiedcoursecreation.com. So if you have a very specific knowledge set, right? Something that you know can become a uh a certification, think about this. Are you are you thinking about writing a book? You have a topic that you feel so strongly about that you want to write a book. Well, books are great. They're awesome. I read them, you read them, right? But is there a better way? There is. Online accredited certifications. And the team at certifiedcoursecreation.com can help you uh tease out the topic, where find out where it lands in the market, and then help you build it out and become a partner in that with you. So go to certifiedcoursecreation.com and check that out. And finally, let's get to the episode. This is number 135 with Ariel Garten of Choose Muse.com. Enjoy the show. All right, and we're live. Ariel, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited. This is uh we're literally gonna blow some people's minds today. Well, not literally. I don't know. Can you do that? Can you have that power? Okay.

I I can let people blow things with their minds.

Okay.

Awesome. Um let's start off with a little bit of a story. Give us a little bit of your background, how you got to where you are now with Muse. Uh give us the quick bio.

Sure. Uh so my own background comes from neuroscience, psychotherapy, art, design, clothing design, you know, all over the place. Um I was always fascinated with the world and how it worked. In high school, I had a job in a research lab where I did embryonic stem cell research with knockout mice uh as a super, super, super junior researcher in a lab. And at the same time, had a small line of clothing that I sold to stores across North America. Um and I was really fascinated, particularly by the brain. When I got to university, I was always exploring the world in art and science and sort of finding the relationships between the two. And I began to collaborate with Dr. Steve Mann. He's one of the guys who is the accredited inventor of a wearable computer. And he was uh he had an early brain computer interface system. So it was literally an EEG that you would put on the back of your head, and by modulating your brain state, by focusing and relaxing, you could interact with stuff in the world. So we started to do these concerts where 48 people at a time could make music with their mind. So you'd have an EEG on the back of your head, and you would just close your eyes and relax. And when you did so, we could change parameters of the sound. So your brain was literally controlling what was going on in the world. You stood back and we said, Oh my god, this is like mind-blowing, literally. Um we kind of said, How can we take this out to the world? What can we do with it, and what's its highest good? So the first thing we experimented with was literally letting you control stuff with your brain. Um, you couldn't blow out a candle, but you could turn on a light. Uh so you could, by focusing and increasing your focus, increase the intensity of a light bulb, for example. And so we did this crazy project at the Olympics where people in Vancouver could control the lights in the CN Tower, Canadian Primo Buildings, and Niagara Falls with their brain from across the country. What? And yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

Okay.

I have a million questions. Keep going. Yeah.

You can ask them all if you want to jump in.

No, no, I want to hear their full story. Yeah. Then we'll get into it.

Um, so we let people control the lights on the CN Tower, the Canadian Primo Buildings and Niagara Falls with their brain from across the country. So you'd sit in Vancouver, you'd put on an EEG, you'd focus, you'd relax, and the changes in brain state would be interpreted by the lighting on the CN Tower, by these huge lights on Niagara Falls, or by the lighting system of the Parliament buildings. So from there we stood back and we're like, oh my God, we just let people control stuff with their brain at the Olympics, and we can do anything. And so we experimented in the world of thought-controlled stuff. We made like thought-controlled toasters, which, when you focused on it, it would make the toast broil. Um, turns out it's actually really hard to do and not more effective than just putting in a piece of toast with your hand and pressing the lever and waiting for the timer to burn your toast rather than your brain doing it. Um, and so we were really trying to find the right fit for this incredible technology. And along the way, um, I was a psychotherapist and I would be teaching my patients to meditate, and they'd never do it. And it became really clear that we had this incredible window inside the brain, and the best value of this window to the brain was not letting you control stuff outside the world, but letting you understand and ultimately learn to control what goes on inside your own mind. And hence, Muse was born.

Yeah.

So what is Muse exactly for people who don't know yet?

So Muse is a brain sensing headband that helps you meditate. It's an EEG, the same thing you have in a hospital, and there's sensors on your forehead and behind your ears, tracks your brain activity and gives you real-time feedback to know what's going on in your mind while we meditate.

Yeah, interesting. Because that's that's a big challenge with meditation to get people on it, right? I have done hours, hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of meditation. Um, but to quantify it. And you hear, I can't remember who's the author's an author who says, well, your life becomes 10% better if you meditate. Have you heard this before? Yes.

Yeah, well, Dan Harris's book, 10 10% happier.

Yes, that's it. Right, right. Thank you. And uh, you know, the the need for people to quantify things is always there. And it's interesting, it seems like your device now has semi provided a window into how to quantify meditation. Would you say that's appropriate? Yeah.

No, that's appropriate. Um, one specific form of meditation. So there's many, many forms of meditation. We look at the most basic form, the thing that you're typically taught first, which is focused attention at the breath. And so what we're able to do is know when you're focused and know when your mind is wandering. And the metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you're thinking distracted, you actually hear it as stormy. And as you bring yourself to quiet focused attention, you quiet the storm. So most people, when they start meditating, are like, what am I supposed to be doing? You just sit there and your mind just is happening. You're like, is it supposed to go blank? It's not going blank. I have all these thoughts. What am I supposed to do? So with Muse, we make that process really obvious and tangible and practical. And we let you actually hear what's going on in your brain when you're when you're wandering and when you're focused. And we help you come to quiet focus to get into that focused attention meditation state. And so you can actually know what's going on. Um, have somebody like literally inside your brain coaching you and holding your hand. And then after the fact, we provide you with data, charts, graphs, stuff that shows you what was going on, and the motivational architecture to keep you meditating.

Oh, so cool. So I, you know, your story is fascinating as well. I mean, I know you've been on the 10x stage, right? Uh and at such an early age, you got involved in brain science. Like tell me a little bit how'd that start? Like, how did you end up in that position? Was it just something that you followed? It's something you've always been interested in. Like when you're a little kid, you're like, you know, I want to be into brain science. How did that happen?

So for me as a little kid, it wasn't about the brain. It was about a curiosity and how the world works. So I was, you know, curious about why a table was hard, why something is the color red, why do we perceive it as red? Um, my mother was an artist, so the idea of making stuff and creating stuff was always like first and foremost, I thought that was the highest best thing you could do. And the artist's job is to really shift your perception of the world. You know, the artist creates a work of art, you see that work of art, and in looking at it, you then see the world in a new way. And so I was really fascinated by perception and by science, and I guess the science of perception. And that ultimately led me down the path into neuroscience. You know, if if I could figure out how the world worked, an even far more fascinating thing to do is to be figured out how the brain worked. So I started, you know, curiosity in the world of consciousness. How do we generate free will? How do we create an us that is, you know, a person that is me? How am I a brain that is trying to analyze the brain? All these questions were super fascinating. So I went to school for neuroscience and then was always looking for ways to bring my art career and my art predilection into it. And when I met Steve Mann, that was like the ultimate pairing. Um a magnificent man who's a mad scientist and an amazing artist, and you know, an incredible inventor of the kinds of things that we use regularly in our lives. Um and so that was that was a huge inspiration and a jumping off point to be able to do what I do.

Yeah, interesting. I mean, I intuitively I don't put art and science together. But there seems to be, at least for you, and maybe you can see, because you're you're in that world far more than I am, obviously, but is there is there a strong connection between art and science in your mind?

So I mean, the human to me is the place where art and science overlap. Um, and both art and science are a methodology of trying to understand, categorize, explain, dissect, you know, reconstruct the world. In one way, you're doing it through the rigors of a science experiment and theories, and in the other way you're doing it through form and color and human experience. But in some ways, the the aim of both and the inquiry in both is in many ways the same. And so I guess in Muse, they really come together for me because we have this device that is a you know incredible piece of technology based on hard neuroscience created by engineers that's reading your brain. Um and it's also a beautiful human experience. You know, you're you're touching parts of yourself that you didn't recognize you could. You're doing it through sound, you're doing it through human experience. And so I think the marriage of these two things, when science and art are successfully married, you create something really transformational.

Yeah. Yeah. It's great insights. And you know, as you developed, as you found this technology early on, and then you started, you know, on the path to finally releasing, you know, what Muse is now, what other options were you guys looking at? I'm curious. Like, where else were you looking at applying this science?

Oh man. So, you know, early on it was far from a science. It was like, okay, we have this incredible technology, how are we going to create human experience out of it? And we first thing we actually thought we were gonna do was use it in nightclubs because one of my partners, Trevor Coleman, one of the business partners, the founders, um, he actually was working at a like nightclub at the time, and we're like, okay, well, we can create these amazing experiences where people can come together, where people can come together in a space and create something, you know, change the lighting, create a content on screen, change the music. And um, from there, we made silly things like a levitating chair. So when you focused, the chair would when he relaxed, the chair would actually rise to the ceiling.

Yeah, I want a levitating chair.

Totally. We had a winch in the ceiling, and the winch would be triggered by uh a shift in brain state, and that would cause it to rise. And it was the noisiest thing you could ever imagine. I picked it up at the hardware store down the street for $66, and we mounted it inside the ceiling. Um, and so you were having this incredibly magical experience of rising to the sky, and the winch would go like, oh, but it was it was amazing. Like it was transpirational. Um, we've tried all sorts of thought-controlled video games. Um we partnered with a company who had a game called Zenbound, um, where you would focus and it would be like a cognitive training game. Um we made a thought-controlled slot curr machine, uh, thought-controlled Star Wars games. Like we really oh, thought controlled beer tap?

Yes.

You focus on it. You guys are a lot of fun. Yeah. Totally, totally. You focus on it, and that would cause the there was a solenoid that was hooked up to the tap, um, like the beer tap itself, the mechanical tap. Um so when you focused on it, it would become the trigger for the little motor to push the tap forward and pour you the beer. And then when you got towards the top, you could either relax or just clench your jaw, which would create a bunch of interference noise from your focus signal and would immediately cut out the tap. Um, it was awesome. Christmas parties at our company. Super awesome.

I bet. I imagine your household is full of a lot of fun toys too. Like just you can just mind control everything, like your coffee maker, no?

Well, it actually turns out, I mean, this stuff is super clergy and the mind control is really very, very early on. It doesn't yet work. Amazing at parties, it's literally a party trick. And we didn't want to create something that was a party trick. We wanted to create something that was gonna have lasting impact in people's lives and move the needle. And when we moved into the space of meditation, it was this recognition that even if our technology doesn't work, if we can just get more people to meditate, we will be doing good in the world.

Yes.

Now it turns out that the technology really works, and now hundreds of thousands of people use it in Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, NASA, and Harvard, and blah, blah, blah. Um, it almost feels like a fluke that it works so well. Um, but but we knew going in that so long as you get people to meditate, all will be good in the world.

Yeah. Awesome. What's what's surprised you? What applications, like once you've created it, what applications have people taken your, you know, your technology and then run with it in a direction you didn't see coming? Is there anything like that?

Yeah, there's there's tons of them. There's the obvious stuff like thought control drones, and there are universities that actually do thought control drone races. Um, I just saw on Twitter the results of one university, like some uh some woman wearing a news student being like she she is the winner of the you know first, second annual thought control drone race. Um we have nothing to do with it. Um then there's much more touching applications. Uh, like there's a sailing school for um for people with disability, and they actually use our system to shift the sails in the rudder to help people with uh difficulties like ALS who can't use their muscles, who can't necessarily interact properly to learn to sail. So, I mean, it's very, very difficult to do, and it's you know it's very, very niche, but incredibly touching.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So, you know, I kind of want to take a big step back and look at, you know, just like the the state of the world, the human race, right? Um, and why meditation may be so important because you know, uh, not to bring the mood down, but I was just having a conversation with two other entrepreneurs uh right before this call, and we had talked about, you know, uh someone had just committed suicide, right? Close to them. And it just seems like maybe in and you know, I try not to watch a lot of media, but I do make observations from what I see. And it does seem like in this in today's world, it's so busy, right? There's so much information, there's so much social media, there's so much pressure. We're all interconnected, yet we're we're all still kind of alone in some ways, right? We're almost more lonely in in in different ways. You know, I'm just wondering, you know, from your global perspective and you know, where where does meditation play in uh helping the general human condition at this point?

Oh, in so many ways. I mean, our human condition is to experience our feelings and be able to be resilient and move forward from them. And so often we get caught in these, you know, we get caught in fear, we get caught in anxiety, we get caught in these negative loops that really hold us back and keep us from being resilient. I mean, certainly the passing of someone you know is is upsetting and terrifying and something that um, you know, we as a human need to process and should feel and should experience. And meditation is a tool that helps you experience that without being drowned out by it. Helps you experience that, you know, feel it, let it pass, let it move through, see it wisely, you know, see it, see it in a way that lets you understand the human condition and the role that we all play with it in it and gracefully move on and move through. So, you know, that's an extreme example of a death, but in an everyday example, you know, the little micro frustrations that we have in our lives, these are things that are caused by really fear. These are things that are caused by anxiety and concerns that we're not going to be able to succeed. And meditation is a skill that teaches us to manage our mental state, accept what is, and move forward more productively and effectively. You know, to me, meditation is literally if everybody in the world meditated, we would probably have world peace.

Yeah, yeah, I would agree. And it's it's a tough, you know, I I constantly, you know, from my personal experience, I'm always trying to live in the moment, right? I'm a naturally anxious person because I'm always looking forward, right? I think anxiety is is what is caused is essentially the manifestation of living in the future, right? Depression's like living in the past or something like that. I don't know. Maybe you you know better than I. But it's a tough thing to do. You know, it's a constantly um, you know, I read the power of now like 10 years ago. Now is my like my like, oh my God, everybody's a little crazy. And meditation and living in the moment, it's extremely powerful, but it's so hard to do. And I feel like, you know, a tool like what you guys have with Muse is is very is a because people like physical things, right? If you just say, hey, it's a it's a feeling, it's a state of mind, a lot of people are having a tough time grasping, but when you use a tool like what you guys have developed with Muse, right, you can actually show people how to get into that state on a regular basis. Is that right?

Exactly. So we're kind of at the point where everybody knows they should be meditating. And, you know, some people have tried it and have a regular practice. More people have kind of sort of attempted to try it and don't really know and haven't been able to pick up a practice, and there's all sorts of people who just have no idea what it is and no idea how to get on board. So use as a tool that actually speaks to each of those groups to help you understand what meditation is, make it okay, make it a thing that you do regularly. Or if you are somebody who already has an existing practice, it really helps you sharpen and hone your own perception of your internal self. Because as a meditator, we are in many ways consciousness explorers. You know, the job of a meditator is to have metacognition, cognition about your cognition, the ability to inquire within your own state. And this is kind of holding up a mirror to your mind and showing you new sides or new angles that you may not have seen.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And you know, knowing that my audience is mostly fitness, health, and wellness professionals too, you know, what what part uh does meditation play in overall physical health, right? And all of all those components. I mean, I, you know, when I was uh coaching people more one-on-one and doing you know things like that when I was more in the trenches in the fitness industry, I would assign meditation to my clients. And, you know, every, you know, like, hey, start with five minutes on a Monday morning, right? And we'll we'll try that. The the compliance rate was so drastically low, right? Like, yeah, okay, man, just give me my, you know, how many times should I back squat? Right? That's what people wanted. They just wanted that because they thought maybe that. Was a better, um, that was a more direct, you know, uh road to their goals of physical, you know, improvement. But most of the time, we all know as fitness coaches too, is that you're we're kind of unlicensed therapists, right? We're always helping people the problems. We have the greatest access, um, maybe yeah, I would say the most consistent and greatest access to people's lives than most professions do on like a weekly basis. You know, if you're a trainer, you're seeing someone two times a week, that's more than they'll see the therapist, that's more than they'll see any kind of licensed professional. Um, so when you talk about in relevance to our industry, you know, how does meditation play and how do we get it more incorporated into our clients' lives?

Cool. So meditation plays on so many different levels. So, on one, you're talking about the psychotherapy aspect, it helps you regulate the emotional aspect of your life. Um, it also helps you regulate the stress that's in your life, and certainly we all have stress. When you look at the studies on the, you know, on the effect of stress on the body, it's quite obvious that spike in cortisol goes and can create damage in multiple systems in your gut, in your skin, in your organs, in your brain. Um, and so when you apply a meditation practice, there's the opportunity to reduce the kind of chronic spiking of cortisol, and in doing so, reduce cortisol's negative effects on the body. Um, when you look at the research, it's pretty astounding. So, looking at just the brain, there's a study from Dr. Sarah Lazar at Harvard. She looks at the prefrontal cortex. Now, your prefrontal cortex, the attentional control center of your brain, the higher order processing, the thing that kind of makes us human, as you age, it thins. Good news if you're able to maintain a long-term meditation practice, you can improve the thickness or maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex even as you age. So there was one 50-year-old in her study that had a prefrontal cortex thickness of somebody you expect from a 23 or 25-year-old. You can also look at other parts of the brain and see the impact. The hippocampus, for example, is something that's highly impacted by stress. As we age, the hippocampus tends to shrink, particularly when you get into stages of cognitive decline. Um, part of that shrinkage is due to the effect of cortisol on the hippocampus. Um when you look at studies of long-term meditators, what you see is maintenance or an increase in the size of the hippocampus. Like you can literally see the impact of meditation and how it can potentially impact physical organs in the body.

What about you? How how often do you meditate? How long?

Every single day.

Every single day.

Absolutely. How long depends on the day.

Okay.

So I'm always going to be meditating. So actually, here's an interesting difference. So there's meditation, which is the practice of sitting, um, which is the practice or training that you do for a period of time. Then there's mindfulness, and mindfulness is the skill that emerges from the practice of meditation.

Okay.

And that's that's a distinction most people don't make. So I am throughout the day mindful as often as I can be. So I'm putting into practice what I've learnt in my meditation. Um, I will also take frequent breaks whenever I feel like my physiology is getting a little jacked or I'm feeling kind of disconnected, and I'll just sit and I'll just drop in. Just take a few deep breaths, connect with my body, connect with my breath, let my physiology relax, let all the muscles go, and reset myself. I'll also do, um, depending on the day, a morning and or evening meditation. Sometimes that can be just while I'm lying in bed. Sometimes that's a more formal sit on the couch, on the edge of my bed, you know, wherever I have the space to do it.

And you mentioned earlier too, in the interview here, that uh there's many forms of meditation. What what are what are they? I mean, the only one I know, I I've you know experimented, experimented, I've worked with a bunch of them. I mean, there's the breathing, like a listening meditation, um, guided meditations, of course, and all that. But what what other ones are there? There's some of the major Sure.

So the most the most basic one that most people learn is a focused attention on the breath. And when you do that, you focus your attention on your breath, your mind wanders, you notice that it wanders, and you return. And you just do that repeatedly. And it's a very powerful process, and I'll I can get into why. Um, you can also, once you move from focused attention, and focused attention, you're honing your attention. So meditation is not about letting your mind go blank. In this form of meditation, you are really tightly honing your attention. And so your attention becomes so strong. Once your attention becomes strong, you can then do something called open monitoring. And that's when you can move your attention around the room to experience, you know, sights, sounds, the sort of spectrum of things that are happening inside of the room. And that room could be the inside of your mind, the physical environment, any room. So it's open monitoring versus focused attention. Then you have other forms of meditation like body scan. And body scan is another form of attention meditation where you're moving your attention throughout your body. You're often looking for areas of tension. Sometimes you might choose to release those areas of tension. Sometimes you might choose to simply put your attention on it and rest there with it. And when you rest with something that is a difficulty for you that you tend to be, you know, resisting, like, oh, there's a part of my body I don't want to focus on, when you actually put your attention on it, it begins to dissipate and begins to resolve on its own. Um, then you have walking meditation or moving meditations where you may be focusing on the bottom of your feet and the sensation of your feet on the ground or the way that your body moves. Um, you have zen meditations, and you have the whole range of like freaky meditations where you're bringing the energy of the universe through you. Um you can have there's obviously transcendental. So you know, the forms from there go on and on, and some of them get you know strange and fascinating. Um, but it's yeah, there's meditation is a massive world. And once you kind of get it and you get into it, then you can start to experiment with all these other forms.

Yeah, interesting. I mean, would you say like I find that, you know, in my I'm the most present during movement, right? So um, you know, like a trail run or even like something that takes an incredible amount of attention, you know, the flow state, right? How does what what's the ratio between meditation and physical activity? Like how does that, how do those things equate? Do they do they cross over at all?

They do. So a lot of people say, oh, well, my meditation is when I run. And there's you know, debate, is that really meditation or are you just running and in a flow state? Um, and the I actually did a I have a podcast on Tangle and I did a cool episode with Dr. Shama Rahman. She's um she's a flow neuroscientist, neuroscientist who looks at flow, and we looked at the brain states associated with flow neuros and meditation. And they are different, it is not the same state. You know, flow is this hyper-creative state where things are coming together and you are both at peace and engaged. Um, and you're typically like at the edge of a challenge level. Meditation is a different state than that. However, when you're doing something like running or doing physical exercise, what you're doing is often shutting down your internal dialogue. You're shutting down that part of yourself that is, you know, constantly thinking, talking to you, judging because you are so physically engaged, you are in the moment, and you have to be attentive in that moment because you know the weight might drop on you, um, or you might fall off the climbing wall. And so it demands so much of your attentional resource that you are hyper-focused and engaged in being present in the now. You know, you you're it's all about your finger on that rock and finding the next one. It's all about just lifting the physicality of it and can you do it? And so everything else just drops away. Um, and in that in that sense, it is definitely a form of meditation.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. I mean, it seems to be, especially for you know physical people like myself, you know, I've been playing sports since forever, really. And uh it's just it's an easier way for me to tap into that. But it's also it's like there's nothing if if I have to sit in the room by myself uh and I need to quiet my mind, I better not meditate or on a plane or something like that, right? Like it's it's a skill you need to have. Um you don't always like exercise, you don't have access to the tools you need. But in meditation, you have it wherever you go.

Yeah, and there's also a different set of skills that's built when you're not doing it while moving. So part of what we learn in meditation is to accept what is. And definitely when you're doing a tough physical, physical exercise, you are you are learning that. I mean, you're lifting those weights and it burns, and you are just accepting and moving through and accepting and moving through. Um, for somebody who's used to moving, sitting meditation is an amazing challenge and something that's gonna build new skills for you because the act of sitting quietly means that all sorts of stuff is gonna come up in your body, and you're gonna want to like shift and move, and you have to learn to accept those sensations and move through them. You need to learn to accept what's arising and to not follow it. And that ability to train your urges and to be able to disconnect from them in a certain sense, change your relationship to them, let them happen and move through is huge.

Yeah. You know, there is a great, and you've probably heard this before, I don't know what book I read it in. Um, but understanding the difference between like the thinking mind and the conscious mind. I know those those two things have multiple names depending on who you ask. But my favorite line was uh, okay, you know, try not to imagine a pink elephant holding a yellow umbrella, right? And as soon as your mind thinks of that, that's your thinking mind. And the conscious mind and aware mind is one that actually recognizes that you thought of it.

Yeah.

That that one blew that was like one of the first time, like, oh, now I kind of get it. Yeah. Like what is explain that a little bit more, like what just happened there. People are listening, like, well, no, I try not to think about it, but I did. It's there. It's that elephant's in my head, right? Yeah. What happened?

So there's cognition and then there's metacognition.

Okay.

So cognition is, you know, the thoughts that are rolling around in your brain. Um, and then there's metacognition, the ability to rise up and rise above and see them. And for most of us, our brain just thinks us all the time. Like we're just on the thought train. We just have these thoughts, and we're like, that's what's going on in my brain. That's what's going on in my mind. That's just what it is. And you don't realize that you can change that relationship. So, in a focused attention practice, what you're doing is you're focusing your attention on your breath, your mind wanders, you notice your mind has wandered, and then you choose to take your attention not on your thought, but back to your breath. So you might be in focused attention on your breath, and then you're like, oh, right, that pink elephant, that, oh geez, I can't stop thinking of that, and you're all the pink elephant. And then you can say, Nope, you know what? I'm gonna release myself from this pink elephant thought, and I'll let that go. I'm gonna let it just slide by like a cloud, and I'm gonna put my attention back on my breath. You may need to do it two or three or five times, but eventually, as you put your attention back on your breath, your breath will be the all-consuming thing, and that thought will have dissipated. And so when you do that, you're exerting your metacognition. And actually, the prefrontal cortex has a massive role to play in it. Your prefrontal cortex is part of the system that's saying, okay, I can rise above and I can see what's going on here. We are in a thought, but we can choose to let go of the thought and bring our thinking somewhere else.

So I feel like we've given a pretty good explanation of like what basic meditation is. I mean, I know there's a ton of science behind it. So now that people may understand a little bit better what meditation is. So let's let's bring back like your technology with Muse. So when someone's sitting with with a headpiece like that, right, and they're using it at what like what's the state, you know, from I guess from an inward perspective, what's the state that we're reaching for? And how does your tech help people understand that it's that they're there?

So uh our tech is built specifically for a focused attention on the breath practice.

Okay.

And the metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So there's different soundtracks, um, and they're all weather soundtracks. So you might be in a desert listening to the wind, you might be on a beach listening to the rolling waves and the thunder, you might be in a rainforest listening to drops of the rain. And it's a really easy metaphor to understand because when your brain is stormy, when you're thinking, when your mind's going all over the place, you actually hear the sound of the rain. And that becomes your cue to know that you are having a thought. That is your cue to know that you are distracted. And from there, it's your cue to say, okay, I'm just gonna come back to my neutral object, my breath. And then when you come back to your breath and put your attention fully on this neutral object, the sound actually starts to wane. And then you're just in with your breath, and the sound is quiet. And then as soon as you have a thought and your mind begins to wander again, the sound picks up. And that again is your cue of like, oh, I'm having a thought that's bringing in the metacognition. Having a thought, okay, I can choose to let go of that thought and come back to my breath. And it's a super simple, beautiful paradigm. It's literally showing you, letting you hear what's going on inside your own brain and cueing you for every time you have a thought. So this is super cool because that act of noticing that your mind is wandered and then returning, that's like doing the bench press rep at the gym. That's like literally the work of meditation. It's called the attentional loop. And so the more you're able to notice and return, the stronger your muscle of your attention becomes. And in a regular meditation, like a 10-minute meditation, you might, your mind might begin to wander, you're on the grocery list, and it's like, oh, one, three minutes before you're like, right, I'm supposed to be meditating, my mind's wandering, come on back. And so in a 10-minute meditation, maybe you'll catch like five wanderings and return it. Whereas with Muse, within one second, you know your mind has wandered. And so you can return. So in a 10-minute meditation, you can get in like a hundred of those reps at the gym with the noticing and returning.

That's a great analogy that you just made for us, for us business folks, too. I appreciate that. So, you know, looking at uh all the technology in the in the area of neuroscience, I'm just dying to know, you know, what what excites you about the future of neuroscience and and like this type of technology? Like, where is it going in your mind?

So brain health is something that's been very difficult to analyze. You know, we all know how to go to the doctor and get a blood test if there's something wrong, or get an X-ray, or an MRI of your knee, or a you know, ultrasound if it's if it's in pain. Um, you can see the inflammation. But there's very little that can be done for the brain to really help you understand what's going on inside of it. And so ultimately where this is going is to a whole new standard of brain health and a whole new way to actually analyze what goes on inside the brain and then be able to understand and give feedback in a way that's going to help and support people's both mental health, the health of the mind, and brain health, the the health of the organ itself.

Yeah. I'm curious, you know, because I look at my personal family history, right? A ton of um Alzheimer's, dementia, things like that as my family ages. How does this play into that? I mean, is there I would imagine there's a there's applications for that and hope that you know we can help prevent that type of thing as well.

Yeah, that's not something I can comment on because Muse is not a medical device. Okay. So as soon as I start talking about a medical condition like Alzheimer's, we get into very gray FDA territory. Um what I can tell you is that Muse helps you meditate, and you know, you can you can Google yourself the benefits of meditation for cognitive health.

Yeah, yeah. Um I mean, outside of that, you know, outside of your technology, you know, it's kind of released you from that that binding.

From that FDA bubble, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. That was good. Um where do you see, do you see, you know, applications for this type of technology, right? Um, understanding, you know, what's going on in the brain for that type of thing and long-term medical applications and and even like um, you know, I think mental health is so, you know, like you said, you know, if someone has a a hurt ankle or you know, a bad hip or even heart disease or things like that, we can see it, right? We can get in and see it. But you know, with mental health, which is obviously, and if you look at the state of at least in the United States, Europe, and Canada, I'm sure it's you know, we're basically kind of the same thing. Um, you know, mental health is a big issue here. It's a really big issue. I mean, you see all the shootings, you see things, and it's all, you know, people can blame guns, and obviously that's a whole nother conversation, but really it comes down to mental health. And it's becoming something so prevalent, but we don't have, you know, we don't have that diagnosis. We can't you can't look at someone and they don't look different because they're they have mental health issues, right? It's really hard to diagnose from the exterior. You know, do you see applications for that coming down the road of how we can, you know, maybe get ahead of that type of thing?

So it's a it's a really hard one, and it also comes down to a health system access. I mean, yeah, we have the ability to diagnose interesting things. You know, friends of mine have a company that can look at the level of amyloid beta in the brain from scanning the eye. Um other friends of mine have you know, Silicon Valley technology that's able to do some really interesting early cancer detection. So, like there's there's a number of things that are that are on the edge of being available and a number of technologies that are really going to help us understand the brain and the body in new ways. But it then becomes a question of access and like how do these things get to market? Um, how do they flow into the health system? How does the health system pick them up? And how do people who are tend to be at the margins, particularly when you're talking about mental health, you're often talking about people who are at the margins of society and who don't regularly access or have access to even good physical health facilities, much less mental health facilities, and you know, cutting-edge technologies. So, you know, as much as there is there is a lot that's coming down the pipeline that we have to be optimistic for, there's a real political battle around how do we really get broad-scale societal access to these things.

Yeah, interesting.

Which is part of what makes a meditate meditation so amazing. Um, because meditation is a free school, like free tool, you're starting to see it come into schools. It's not going to help somebody with significant mental health issues. That's it's a different bucket, but it can help the average individual to you know monitor and manage the the anger and the distress and the scarcity feelings that we all have going through our mind and lives that cause us to act in inappropriate ways.

Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's the thing, is like, you know, you ask, we all have defaults now, you know, and especially in Western society, of like you ask someone, hey, how you been? Busy, right? Stressed, right? And it just seems like it's become almost commonplace that that's just the state of things. But I know when you and I had talked even um you know, weeks before this recording, you mentioned that, you know, that one of the messages you like to get out is that people can people can control what goes on, right? There, there's there's freedom in this in some ways.

Yes.

Send that message out there.

It's a real message. So I mean, we all have these thoughts that are barraging our brain that tell us that things are not okay. That, like, you know, your hair looks stupid, or you should have ironed your pants or something to the dry cleaner, or no, no, there's an email from my boss, like, what's it gonna say? Or oh, I'm five minutes late for this client, you know, am I gonna get fired, or is the world gonna end? You know, we all have these internal dialogues that make life much harder for us than they need to be. We all have these internal dialogues that are constantly making us feel just kind of shitty about ourselves, and we don't need to. And so, you know, I'm so deeply in support of tools and technologies that teach you that you have the choice about what goes on in your mind. You have a choice about the dialogue that is being constantly spewed in your head. You know, when you look at the inner critic, that little voice in your head that's constantly telling you not nice things about you, if you had a friend who was saying those things, you just wouldn't call them again. You know, they wouldn't be a part of your life. You would eventually get mad at them and tell them to get lost. Um, but we don't recognize that we actually have the option to do that with the voice in our own head. We do not need it, that it's not useful, and it's just making our day kind of bad all the time.

Yeah.

You know, and all those thoughts, I mean, I don't know, I can't put a percentage on it, but I will, just for fun. Like 98% of those thoughts, those negative thoughts about what happened, what's gonna happen, what's gonna do this, it never happens. It's just those things never happen. You know, I I think uh, you know, my most anxious thoughts happen at two or three in the morning. And I'm like, oh my God. And then you wake up in the morning, you're like, Wow, that one how was I worried about that? That's ridiculous, you know. But that's kind of a small template of like what goes on in our minds. Yeah. And it's and I think if people are listening to, I I think the big thing is that you're not alone. Everybody has these thoughts, right? Everybody has these anxious, and we're always battling against ourselves, and it's so unnecessary, but it's just an interesting thing about humans. No other animal on the planet does this, right? It's just us.

Maybe don't so that's an interesting question. Um the in the Bronx zoo, one of the New York zoos, there was a polar bear who apparently got depressed. So even other mammals can get depressed. Uh dogs, you can see them worried and anxious. You know, there's a question of are they having this internal loop? You know, the idea is that that level of self-reflection is a human experience to be able to have this internal, constant internal dialogue with themselves, with ourselves. Um, but you know, it's it's happening across the planet, and there are truly, truly ways to shift it. You know, even with a simple practice like a focused attention on the breath practice, what happens is your mind wanders onto that thought, you recognize that you can take your brain off that thought and onto a neutral object, the thought comes up again, and you recognize you can shift it. And as soon as you've done that, You have changed the relationship to your thoughts. You are no longer a brain that is simply just thinking and a human that's simply accepting all the crap that your mind is viewing. You are taking the step to shift that relationship and say, actually, I don't need that school of thinking right now. I don't need that line of thinking, and I can move my mind onto something else. And I can take control of the situation. And then once you do that, you eventually recognize that all of those stories about you that your brain has been making up are equally as not relevant. You know, or something that you can actually take your mind off of and put them somewhere else because they are not true. They are not real, they're just a product of our you know, inspiring neurons that have been telling us the same story that we seem to accept over and over again. And just like you can work out to shift your body, and you can sculpt the body that you want to have, and you can feel how good it is, you can do the same thing for your brain.

Awesome. Awesome. That that I want to leave it there because that's a really powerful message, and I think that's really where I was uh I knew that you would get to with this, and I was trying to lead you to that powerful like punch because it's so true. And I think um, you know, if people okay, people start resonating with this, let's let's give them a little bit about the Muse product. Like where they go to, is it chooseMuse.com, right?

You got it, chooseMuse.com.

Yeah. And uh what's what's like a price point for this, just so people know too.

Um so there's two Muse. Muse one, which gives you real-time feedback on your brain, and that's like 199 US. And then there's Muse 2, which has a heart rate sensor on it. So it also gives you real-time feedback on your heart, your breath, and your body. Um, and that's 249.

Awesome. Awesome. Um, and then if people want to get a hold of you or your company, is there a place they can go and kind of follow you?

Sure. On Instagram, I'm Ariel's Musings, uh, Twitter, Riel Docgarten, um, and my podcast on Tangle.

Yeah, awesome. Well, this has been really cool. And uh I appreciate your messaging and it's really interesting story. And uh I just I I hope I if this changes one person's perception, right, of what they can do and maybe they can get them out of a rut uh mentally, uh, and therefore in their life, I think it was well worth the time. So I appreciate you coming on. It was it was really cool. You're a great guest.

Thank you. My joy and my pleasure and my honor.

Yeah, mine too. Hey fitness fans, don't leave yet. It's your host, Eric Malzone, and I have a quick favor to ask. Actually, three favors. So, number one, if you're a fan of our show, I asked you to do something that takes under three minutes. Go to iTunes, please, and subscribe to our show. Please, please, please. It means so much to us. It's so important. And then give us a favorable review. We would really, really appreciate it. And uh, I can't tell you how much it means and helps us out. So I know it takes two minutes of your day, and uh it means a lot to us. So please do that. Number two, go to our YouTube channel, our fitness marketing alliance, and uh please subscribe to our YouTube channel there. Number three, if you like this episode or any of the episodes that we've released, share it on social. That's huge. That's a big deal for us. And where we put a lot of work into these episodes, uh, trying to give you great actionable content uh for the fitness industry. So that would mean a lot. And that's it. So we have some big plans coming up for this show. I'll be talking about that in the next couple episodes. But thank you so much for listening. It means so much. And uh, if you have any questions, please reach out to me. I'd love to hear from everybody. Eric, E R I C at Fitness MarketingAliance.com