 What's going on everybody? This is Dave with AlexFergus.com, back again today with another product review and product overview of a device that can either help you start a meditation practice or help you take your meditation practice possibly to the next level. What I'm talking about is the Muse 2 meditation headband. I picked up the Muse 2 headband back in February and I've been using it fairly consistently and currently I'm on 123-day streak using the Muse 2. So I've had a lot of experience using the hardware and the accompanying app. So today we're going to take a look at the hardware, how it works, then take a look at the app that goes along with the hardware, then come back here for some pros, some cons, and some final thoughts on whether the Muse 2 is a good product either help you establish or help take your meditation practice even further. So without any further ado, let's take it down to the table and take a look at the Muse 2. Okay so this is how the Muse 2 comes when you get it comes in this box just like this and it's got this nice little pull tab right here that you just open and there is the headband itself inside there with a quick start guide. So let's take the headband out and take a look at this a little bit more closely here, put this off to the side. So as you can see there those kind of copper things right there those are the EEG or Electroencephalograph sensors and then let's see if we can see it on the side there actually it's going to be right there between those two last on the right that is the PPG pulse oximeter sensor that reads your pulse rate and your respiration rate. Now to turn the device on you simply just press that button there and it lights up it'll automatically pair with your phone I haven't had to actually go into my Bluetooth settings to find it to pair it with the app it just automatically does it and when you're ready to turn it off you just press it once for about a second device powers off to charge the device there is a micro USB port right there you just plug it in and I just leave mine plugged in overnight and it's good for about a week of 20 minute sessions and to adjust the head band you just pull like that kind of like a pair of headphones on each side but as you can see the little sensors are attached to this little springy thing that goes against your forehead it does feel rather fragile and I'm kind of afraid that possibly this might pull away at some point so it is lightweight and it is fragile and I should also point out these rubber things that go behind your ear also contain sensors as well so it's real important to have a nice snug fit not too tight but you want to get those around the backs of your ears and the front here those sensors nice nice on the center of your forehead so also in the box you get a quick start guide let's go ahead and take a look at that and it is so you basically make sure your headband is charged make sure you got Bluetooth enabled download the app and create an account pretty standard fare connect your muse tap start session put on your muse and headphones calibrate meditate and review so there's not a whole lot to the quick start guide it's literally a quick start guide and then inside the box the last thing you're going to get is a micro USB cable with a nice little velcro strap there so that is everything that comes in the box for the muse to there's not a whole lot going on there it's very simple very straightforward just like the device and the application itself so that's it let's go ahead and take a look at the muse meditation app itself and all the different meditation modes because there's a lot more to this product if you go and take a look at the app itself so with that let's take a look at the app okay so here we are at the home screen for the muse meditation app itself so on your on the home screen you can see you know when you first started using muse you can see your current streak and you can see all of the different types of meditations they have now the first one a little multicolored wheel there is all you got mind heart body breath guided and just timed meditation and then right below that you got your meditation history and you can go back through and scroll back through the days here going back back back back back back back back back and then if you want a more detailed look at your meditation history you can open that up and it goes day by day and so let me see here so on Friday June 28th I had a 15 minute session and I scored 96% calm and there it is it can pull up the actual session itself and I can see that I had zero active minutes 34 seconds in neutral and 14 minutes in 26 seconds calm I can expand the graph and you can see a more detailed view and scroll through looks like I was pretty calm between 1050 and 13 minutes or so it was really nice and calm there and all that those blue things across the bottom those are the the birds chirping that you can that you hear when your mind is in a calm state as you can see I earned 166 birds with 2,632 muse points now I can click on that and it'll give me some details about what those points mean with those recoveries I don't have any recoveries on this session then you can see gives you an explanation of the birds there okay so those are the awards that I got and the stats you can also have a journal entry optional if you want to enter one of those in the okay here's a guided session so a guided session is just like the heart session the breath session or the mind session it also lets you see a graph of how active or calm your mind is and let's see what award I got an award there two birds per minute okay so that's your meditation history screen so let's go back to the beginning here click on me so here's your all meditations so we can see that I've spent 2,838 total minutes I've got almost half a million muse points and 26,000 some odd birds 275 recoveries and then here down here below that are your goals and your challenges so I'm not doing so hot this week on my goal of getting to almost two and a half hours of meditating in I've been pretty busy but you know maybe I'll do a longer session tonight and try and reach that goal I don't know that's a almost a 35 minute meditation session to make that up and then you got you can open that up and you can see the purple ones are the ones are the weeks that I made my goal and the blue one are the kind of greenish ones I did not meet my goal and challenges okay so my next challenge is to do a 40 minute session that is a bit of a stretch and I've been stuck on that challenge for quite a while now so you can see I've already completed these challenges here and they start you off pretty easy like the very first one is do four sessions in one week and each session has a little breakdown of what that session and challenge entails okay and go back and then you've got your milestones underneath your challenges so my last milestone was 150 calm sessions I got that last week and 150 sessions period I got that two weeks ago so we can scroll all the way back all the way back to the very beginning of time of using the muse five months ago comma session 25 minutes wow that's pretty good actually from way back then okay so when you want to meditate you click on the middle button and there you go so you can select your length you so you can select from predetermined you know 15 20 25 or you can actually select an individual minute how many minutes you actually want like 19 or 21 minutes if you want to do a time that's not already listed there you can select your soundscape you've got beach rainforest desert and city park along with ambient music I prefer the rainforest one it's actually the one that you know you start off using when you very first get the app open and you start meditating with this so I kind of go back to rainforest quite a bit city parks an interesting one that I like a lot too it actually does kind of sound like a city park it's kind of kind of a neat neat to soundscape you got buses kind of going by and then exercise now I'm progressed far enough through the muse app that I'm no longer using the exercise that's why I have no exercise instructions selected but when you first get the muse device you're probably want to kind of want to click on the first one muse essentials and they walk you through sort of an introduction training sensation of breath and all of these muse essentials these little mini lessons as I like to call them they don't run during the session itself they all are presentations that you watch and listen to before starting your session so they all each one of them introduces a new concept or new skill or new technique that you can use in your meditation to take with you into the the session that you're about to do and they do teach you quite a few fundamentals of meditation so if you're new to meditating I think that's that this is a great great option there heart centered mindfulness so you can I haven't bothered going through all the rest of these but they they work a lot they work a lot the same way that the introduction to muse or the the muse essentials do so they introduce a topic or a you know a technique and then they let you practice that in a session um Deepak Chopra's got a few kind of you know introductory kind of guides before you start a session i've listened to all three of them they're usually about a minute and a half to two minutes long they're not that long um e-mindful life life I I did the first two I haven't done the last one yet but maybe I'll get around to it so that's what those are and then when you hit start session um I don't have the device on me right now because I'm not actually going to be meditating what'll happen is that the sensors will all try to get a good signal and you'll see the bars for each sensor as a different color and then when actually you know what I can just go ahead and turn the device on and put it on my head and I'll show you because I don't think I can adequately describe the the calibration process without okay so here we go so as you can see each one of the sensors is light lit up okay oh here we go for this calibration find a comfortable position and close your eyes yep here we go okay so now it's going to try and calibrate and establish a baseline anyway so as you can see that's what happens during the calibration is it's trying to set a baseline for your mental state to compare how your brain changes during the session itself so ideally you want your mind to be as just normal just meh as possible you don't want to overthink or have too much mental activity and you also don't want to already start meditating ahead of time during the calibration you just want a nice baseline um and then under settings you can your name email about session settings so yeah what i've done actually is i've turned off the birds you can see that right there i've turned off the birds i've actually found after using the muse for over a hundred and some days just straight that the birds actually became a distraction and i kept thinking oh i'm calm i'm calm or i'm not calm i'm not calm and so i just turned the birds off but in the beginning the bird thing was actually pretty helpful so you can go down here feedback you can sync this with your health if you've got an ios device so it'll show up as mindful minutes in your health app um and that is pretty much it um let's take a look at some of the guided meditations here um so when you want to choose a different meditation you just click on the associated icon from the meditate the middle meditate button so i want to do heart or i want to do body lungs or breath or guided so yeah under under guided there's different courses there's a starter series and then there's uncovering happiness there's all these different guided sessions and then if you want to do just a one-off guided session there's collections and you've got be healthy oh yep i'm doing a beta test right now for the the guided sessions so that's what that was so you can do sleep be awesome with happiness work performance confidence day to night travel quick breaks long breaks and just for you or just for entrepreneurs so there's all of those as you can see stress has 18 different different guided sessions so there we go i've done the calm the mind one it seemed like a pretty decently put together good recording good audio quality so let's take a look at the different god beyond just the brain meditation or the mind meditation so heart meditation is interesting what it will do is it'll use the ppg or pulse oximeter sensor on the muse two device and it'll read your heart beats and play your heart beats back as if they were a drumbeat in your ears so you hear your heart beats as a drum and the idea is to slow your heart rate down by hearing your own heart beat being played back to you through your ears so that's a pretty neat meditation method the body meditation uses an accelerometer built into the muse two and the idea behind this meditation is to see if you can keep your body in a calm still position without too much movement of the body the breath meditation you have to sync your breathing rate because the ppg or the pulse oximeter will also read your respiration rate so the idea is you want to sync your breath i think it's a four seven something four on the inhale seven on the exhale you want to match the the the rate that the soundscape is trying to get you to follow so when you're in sync with the breath rate that the app wants you to do the noise written the noise level is quieter and when you get out of that that's synced breathing it gets louder same thing with all the other meditation modes when you're in a calm state with the mind meditation when you're calm the sound the sound levels drop dramatically and the birds start chirping same thing with the heart when you slow your heart rate down the ambient sounds in the background also get quieter so that's how you know that you're getting into that calm state is when the sounds get quieter so it's kind of an interesting way they call it biofeedback because you're training your body to behave differently based on feedback you're getting from your own body so in a way with the mind meditation you're actually listening to your the sounds of your brain in a way the more active your brain is the the more noise it's going to make so yeah that is pretty much it for the Muse meditation app itself it's really a simple app i haven't had any problems with crashing or it being buggy at all um there's not really a whole lot to it it's pretty straightforward and i think almost anybody could figure out how to use this app um uh yeah so anyway let's go back up top and take a look at some pros some cons and some final thoughts on the device okay so we've had an up close look at the Muse 2 headband and what comes in the box we've also taken a look at the app and all of the different meditation modes that go along with the Muse 2 meditation headband so what are some pros what are some cons well i think i like the fact that it's very easy to operate there really is only one button on the device you just hit the button put it on and you're good to go um there's no fiddling around it just works at least for me right out of the box i haven't had any connectivity issues um i think the app is very responsive it's not glitchy it doesn't freeze or crash so that's also another pro it's easy to use it's very simple and streamlined i think that's a pro um i like the guides uh the the goals the milestones and the achievements those kind of help keep the meditation practice feeling fresh i think the battery life on the device is excellent you know i charge this guy about once a week and i get about seven 20 minute sessions so you know i charge it once a week and it's good to go for a 20 minute session every morning so that's pretty darn good um i like the fact that there are third-party apps that you can use with the Muse 1 and Muse 2 headbands such as Muse Monitor um you know that can help take your meditation just to that next level you know you can play a musical instrument or maybe do some stretching or try alternate styles of meditation and find out you know what's going on up in your up in your head with the Muse Monitor software um i think that the inclusion of guided sessions that Muse is working on integrating right now is a good positive thing i think there's a lot of people that are already currently using guided meditations that would love to use a Muse meditation headband that reads their brain waves um i think that it's comfortable and it's not bulky to wear um that's a pro but it's also a con and we'll get to that in a second and i think that the robust online community as far as the facebook group at least is concerned is very responsive very active and the company seems to participate quite a bit in the facebook group itself so you know let's look at some of the cons um i'd say because the device is so light it does feel fragile and i think that you know Muse should include a case when you buy the the headband you know i kind of scrounged around and i found you know a headphone case and i've been using that to store my Muse to headband in and for the price which is also a con of 199 for Muse one or 249 for Muse two i kind of think that you should get a case i think the default soundscapes are nice but i also think that they should be rotated out and new ones added um because after using the Muse device for you know a couple of months now i have to say that the stock default soundscapes kind of get kind of stale after a while so i'd like to see Muse try to come up with some new ones and possibly rotate those through so that's a con um once again like i said the cost 199 249 both of those are pretty expensive and you know a lot of people might not be able to justify spending that kind of money when meditation itself is basically free so that's a con um you can't use your own music or your own soundscapes with the Muse app um some people might consider that a con i do is i do as well i i would love to be able to use some of my own nature background music or some chanting or some Tibetan bowls or just wherever you know you want to help get you in the meditative kind of mindset and i also think that the ability to export your your session graphs out of the app would be an awesome feature but it's not there so that's also a con so we've taken a look at the pros we've taken a look at the cons and overall i think it's a really good device the hardware and the software both just work and they work seamlessly um if you want to learn more and get a more detailed look at the Muse 2 there's going to be a write-up on Alex's blog at alexfurgus.com so with that said this is Dave for alexfurgus.com i hope you have a wonderful day wherever you are see you around