Does the Muse headband really detect "meditation"?

I’ve been using the Muse meditation headband for years (bought the 2017 version, still works), and was somewhat skeptical about it, but it did seem to correlate its noise and birds chirping with periods of me thinking actively vs. being calmly focused on my breath.

However, I did notice that sometimes sessions were hopelessly noisy, but if I re-adjusted the band and restarted, I had “great” focus. Muse blames that on the fit and tension in the neck. OK.

Today for some reason I decided to open my eyes during a session, and just look around the room. I was lying back, so I raised my neck, kept it tense, and looked around the room, while noticing the birds started chirping. And they kept chirping. I was puzzled. My neck was tense, I was thinking “What the heck is going on”, but the birds kept chirping. After a minute, the birds stopped and I put my head back down. Then I did the exercise again, for another minute. Tense neck, looking around the room, thinking about writing this post. The birds kept chirping.

This is a screenshot of the session.

And here’s zooming into those tense-neck looking-around-the-room “meditation” moments (apologies for the lousy stick figures):

image

Muse thought I was very calm during those session. I think I was far more meditative before that 6 minute mark at which I started this experiment.

Has anyone else had any similar experiences with Muse? Do you still trust it?

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Using face muscles or even moving your eyes around overwhelms the EEG signal. Would be nice if devices gave you some indication when they are unable to get good readings, instead of confidently producing garbage data…

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I have been a meditator for the past 10 years and achieved this in the first few days of using Muse S. I had Muse 2 earlier, which I returned due to connectivity issues.


I have observed that during an hour-long silent session, my mind was active for nearly half the time however I did not make an attempt to silence it nor thought it was an obstruction in my meditation.

What I deduce from this is, it measures, signals that are directly proportional to how engaged we are with what is being played on the screen of awareness.
AND/OR
The calibration was done with a jumpy mind and movements or thoughts followed were minor compared to what was it calibrated against. If this true, then what it shows is relative to individual sessions and not periodic progress. I am glad I come across this post as there seems to be no discussion around this, except few comments on Amazon by users complaining about the same.

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I’ve been testing one for 1-2 months and honestly have a hard time finding a correlation between the birds chirping and me being focused on my breath

When I start the meditation session, the app tells me a mix of these statements:

Close your eyes, relax, and let your mind flow naturally… take a deep breath. Whatever you’re experiencing right now is perfect. No need to control or change anything… think of this as a time to just be

If their goal is to calibrate on a calm mind, shouldn’t the app say to calm down, instead of letting your mind “flow naturally”? It would seem like sabotaging the entire session with a misleading result if your mind flows to some big problem you’re dealing with, then during the session, you keep thinking about that same problem and get a high score.

Seems unlikely they’d want to calibrate with a jumpy mind. Maybe the calibration isn’t about the state of the mind, but about the device receiving any signals?

To test, I’ve just let it calibrate while I was typing this reply, then continued typing while the app was going on with the session (side note: it displays an animation, e.g. wind over a desert, which I find odd (and battery-consuming) given you’re supposed to keep your eyes closed). The desert sound kept playing for the few minutes during which I typed up to this point.

Then I relaxed back in my chair and focused on my breath. The birds started chirping within 15 seconds. I repeated this 3 times. It was reliable. The birds continued chirping for a few seconds after I opened my eyes and resumed type. It’s understandable that there’s a lag.

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There is a lag of about a second or two