Ariel's Musings

I’m Ariel Garten, one of the founders of Muse: The Brain Sensing Headband — the first wearable device to help you meditate and manage emotions. Welcome to this first ARIEL’S MUSINGS, a series of blogs that will share with readers my life lessons and the brain expanding inspirations from my work as a neuroscience geek, a psychotherapist, fashion designer, entrepreneur, and new mom.

So what’s Muse? It’s an actual discrete headband that detects and gives you real time feedback on the state of your brain waves while you’re meditating. It helps you track and nudge your brain’s emotional states into a greater state of calm. It’s got a unique software app that translates hard science and EEG data (ie, your brain waves) into a set of beauitful, metaphoric images and sound scapes so you can “see” and “hear” your own mind.

Through the effort of bringing this powerful tool to the world, I’ll share with you what I’ve learned meditating with, and getting advice from, some of the globe’s greatest minds. I’ll share as a woman the enormous and often rewarding challenges co-developing and leading a tech company, while becoming a first-time mom to a now 22 month old. I’ll distil some dishy travelogues from my amazing visits with institutions like Google and MIT (who are using Muse in their research), and with famous MUSErs from the field of research, the arts, medicine and meditation, like Prof Steve Mann, Dr. Deepak Chopra, Goldie Hawn, Drs. Dean Ornish, Norman Doidge and Patrick Kennedy.

I’ll peak into the white-hot developments behind current brain research and human-computer interface, and tease out for you the new and promising ways anxiety and depression, low self-esteem, and self-limiting beliefs can be tackled now and in the future. I’ll answer all of the questions I commonly get asked about the brain and meditation. Together, Ariel’s Musings will be a fulsome and much needed indispensable tonic of optimism to chase down with your twitter feed, hopefully inspiring you to discover more about yourself and your potential to live a richer, more engaged life.