(Image source: Muse)

This essay was produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Ideas podcast for their “Illuminations” series.

Unboxing

“If I’m ever going to have a spiritual unboxing experience, this will be it,” I joked to my wife last summer, gripping the pull tab of a white package that had arrived on our porch. Inside was the Muse S, a consumer-grade brain measurement device that creates immersive meditation soundscapes based on the user’s mental activity. This thing was going to turn my brain waves into music.

Created by the Toronto-based company InteraXon, the Muse S is advertised as a “comfy brain sensing headband that helps you understand and track how well you focus, sleep, and recharge so you can refocus during the day and recover each night.” The soft headband is fitted with four electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that measure electrical activity on your scalp. Muse sends this data to a smartphone app that can play guided meditation sessions, track sleep, and award motivational points.

What sets Muse apart from other wearable devices, like the Apple Watch or Fitbit, is that it doesn’t just measure your health—it also guides your thoughts, in real-time, using “soundscapes” of music and nature noises that are supposed to represent your mental state. While you meditate with Muse, the device records your brain data and converts it into ambient sounds, using a proprietary algorithm. You might hear thunder while getting distracted and then hear calm rain when your mind is clearer.

If this seems like a mere novelty to you, consider these numbers: Muse has more than 500,000 users globally, and its parent company InteraXon generates an estimated $13.48 million in annual sales, as reported by the business analytics company Dun & Bradstreet. According to a 2021 press release, InteraXon has saved over 100 million minutes of users’ meditation data, which amounts to one of the largest brain data collections in the world. This puts Muse at the forefront of the “biofeedback” industry, where smart devices generate real-time data for ongoing self-improvement.

When I first learned about Muse, through a targeted advertisement on Twitter, I wanted one. My first thought was that making music with my mind would be extremely cool and fun at parties. It also seemed to be in keeping with other technology that I own: I use a smart scale to record my weight and a smartwatch to measure my heartbeat, so why not a smart headband to track my mental states? As a scholar of religion and science, I was also interested in this strange new hybrid of technology and spirituality. People are using science helmets for daily rituals? Yes, please.

Then, on second thought, I worried that this new wisdom-wearable might portend some dystopia. Will we soon live in a world where consumer tech is constantly measuring our minds, intervening in our thoughts, and harvesting our brain data, all while promising to make us feel better? Has TikTok already made me a consumer cyborg, anyway? Or am I catastrophizing again, due to some underlying anxiety disorder that this thing is ironically supposed to help cure? I was torn.

So when I joined Harvard Divinity School’s Ministry of Ideas podcast last year as a producer, my first pitch was on a story about Muse. (“Let me get one and wear it,” I said, “it will be great tape!”) Along with co-producer Atéha Bailly, I spent the summer diving into the world of Muse, religion, and neuroscience. We listened to the sounds of my brain, interviewed scholars, neuroscientists, and the company’s CEO, and researched the intellectual and racial history of brain measurement. I experienced brief technological immanence followed by a full-blown panic attack. This is that story. (InteraXon sent me a free device for review, but has had no influence in the writing of this article.)

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“The brain communicates electrochemically. We have all these little electrical signals shuffling back and forth, sending electrical and chemical signals to one another. And the sum total of that electrical activity can actually be read on the surface of your head. That’s your brain wave,” said Ariel Garten, the co-founder and “Chief Evangelism Officer” of InteraXon. Garten is many things: an artist, an executive, a TED-talk visionary, and a student of the brain, with graduate training in psychotherapy, neuroscience, and neuro-linguistic programming. When Atéha Bailly and I interviewed Garten last July on Zoom, she moved fluidly between topics ranging from meditation to neuroscience to cyborgs. The segments of our interview transcribed here are lightly edited for clarity.

“Muse has four channels of EEG electrodes: two in your forehead and two behind the ears. It tracks your brain activity during meditation, and it’s able to give you real-time feedback to know when you’re focused and when your mind is wandering,” Garten said. “The problem that most of us have when we sit down to meditate is you sit there [and] there’s no little coach or a little guru sitting inside your brain telling you when you’re ‘doing it.’ With Muse, we’re able to do just that. Track when you’re in focused attention. And when your mind is wandering, then we can translate that brain activity to guiding sounds. So you’re literally able to hear the sound of your mind to hear when you’re focused [or] wandering, and to become cued to come back to your meditative focus. We’re able to track brainwave activity and know when you are in the brain waves associated with focused attention.”

(Image source: foreverfitscience.com)

Electroencephalography dates as far back as the late 1800s. Put very simply, the premise is this: we have sensors that measure electrical activity, and we know brains work with electrical signals, so let’s see what we can learn by measuring the signals coming off of people’s heads. EEG sensors measure voltage fluctuations on the scalp and translate them into waveforms, resembling the squiggly lines you might see on a lie detector test. EEG is still used today in scientific research and clinical medicine, including diagnostic tests for epilepsy. It has even been used to study religion, perhaps most famously in a partnership between the Dalai Lama and MIT.

Yet EEG also has serious limitations and has been eclipsed by other neuroimaging technologies like PET and fMRI. EEG sensors can only measure gross electrical activity from the surface of the skull, so even the best EEG sensors cannot measure the deep interior of the brain like an fMRI can. Among the scientists I know and within the scientific history I’ve studied, EEG has something of a fringe status because it can only make broad measurements and requires much speculative interpretation. Nonetheless, scientists have found correlations between electrical frequencies and mental activity. High-frequency gamma waves are associated with being alert, while low-frequency delta waves are found in people who are in deep sleep.

Garten acknowledges these limitations. “Now with brainwaves,” she said, “you can’t see any details. You can’t see somebody’s thoughts. You can’t see… what’s going on inside, but you can see gross changes in state.”

“We’re able to generate an algorithm that could know when you’re in focused attention and when your mind is wandering. And we did this by looking at first hundreds of meditators, then thousands of meditators, now millions of hours of meditation,” Garten said. “We had to create an audio experience that was going to feel very natural in terms of indicating to you when you’re focused and when your mind is well,” she continued, and “we came up with the metaphor that your mind is like the weather.”

“We created an audio landscape where you can hear your brain as storming when you’ve got lots of thoughts and you can hear it as peaceful and calm when your mind is calm,” Garten explained, “and it became this very intuitive way to understand what your mind was doing. And it doesn’t sound like you’re listening to a soundscape. It actually feels like you’re listening to your own words.”

By turning mental states into sounds, Muse offers to answer the question that every beginning meditator asks themselves at some point: “Am I even doing this right?” What Muse promises, I thought while listening to Garten, is to bring scientific measurement into the once-private place of your inner mind. An anatomy of the soul.

Calibration

“It is Monday, June 14^th, this is Andrew Aghapour, and I’m about to set up this Muse headset for the first time,” I said into my voice recorder, one eye on the sound levels. “The white box looks very much like an Apple product,” I added.

The device inside was surprisingly light. The Muse S consists of a soft headband and a small puck containing the brains of the device, which magnetically attaches to the front. After putting it on I felt like I was wearing a posh headlamp.

I opened the Muse app and initiated my first meditation, choosing the default “Rainforest” soundscape over other options like “Beach,” “Campfire,” and “Ambient Music.” Soon Muse spoke to me through my phone speakers. “Muse will guide you to a deeper understanding of yourself and your meditation practice through powerful real-time feedback,” it said, before instructing me on how to fit the device so that the sensors remained snug against my skull.

Over the coming weeks I would become used to these fittings. Muse has to dial itself in at the beginning of each session. “For this calibration, find a comfortable position and close your eyes,” Muse would say, “Take a deep breath.” After a pause, uplifting synthesizer tones would then kick in and start building. And then, louder, “Muse is now listening to your brain signals. Relax, and let your mind flow naturally.” Like the THX sound effect at movie theaters, it straps you in.

Meditating with Muse’s “EEG-powered” rainforest soundscape begins with the sound of light rain, and an image on your phone of a green leaf getting dripped with water. Beneath that, a head-shaped icon indicates the status of the sensors. As with other guided meditation apps, each session opens with an instructor giving a few tips and directions for the day’s session. That voice recedes, and then there you are, in a forest where the rain is actually your consciousness.

(Image source: Kevin Whipple)

The first thing you notice is how the sounds stop and start. You’ll hear heavy rain, and then all of a sudden the air is silent save for a few drips and a distant bird. “What did I do right?” you ask yourself, microscopically turning your head, and then the storm is back again and it’s time to trial-and-error your way back to serenity. With practice I found that the best way to achieve quiet was to sit perfectly still, breathe normally, and concentrate on not moving. Rapid eye movements always brought thunder, as did moving around. Making my mind race with negative thoughts didn’t seem to change anything, but hyperventilating did. It was fun. (When asked about which brainwave patterns corresponded to which sounds, an InteraXon representative said that this is done using the company’s proprietary algorithms.)

I meditated with Muse daily. I screen-recorded each session and taped audio diaries afterwards. Atéha and I fell into a rhythm trading audio back and forth, interpreting Muse on the fly as we conducted research into the history of EEG and other technologies that have promised to locate religion in the brain. In addition to being a student at Harvard Divinity School, Atéha is also a talented musician, so we were soon speculating on how to isolate Muse’s sounds and turn them into something new. Looking back on our conversations, they remind me of the contagious excitement that Ariel Garten would use to describe her own discovery of brain-computer interface systems while working with Steve Mann, a computer engineer at the University of Toronto. One of InteraXon’s early projects was a “thought-controlled” light show at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

There is something electric about creating a loop between yourself and the world. Most days, it feels like there is an “inside” to me that stands apart from the “outside” world. The two might interact, but they are separate. Today’s philosophers and theorists will tell you that we are, of course, much more porous than that. We are imbricated with the world, our bodies so shot through with history and materiality that it would be senseless to posit some transcendent human subject. To which I would say, “Yes, but it doesn’t feel like that every day, you know?” I have had experiences on drugs, love, and improv where my self dissolved into the world and I could seemingly channel the “outside” through myself without the filter of my own ego, but this mode of being isn’t something I’ve been able to induce instantly for Muse’s retail price of $259.99.

But to meditate with Muse is to encounter your inner-self as a thing out in the world. On day three I opted for the “ambient music” soundscape and found a good groove. I felt something that was quite unlike anything I had experienced before. It was like my inner soul had become my soundtrack. The inside of my mind was outside and then in again. I was a closed loop. My thinking self was silent, and I felt a certain tingle that I have come to call duende—that fleeting experience that one can have, while making art, where rationality breaks down and your gut wrenches with that thrilling truth that all things are possible, including your own annihilation. There’s immanence to be found in these soundscapes, this I can tell you.

Crisis

Day four was when things started to get weird. In my audio diary I spent a lot of time grasping at how meditating with Muse contrasted with the other meditation practices I’ve tried. In mindfulness meditation, for example, I had been taught to focus on the sensations of my breath, return to focus when my mind inevitably got distracted, and take note of where my mind went during those wanderings. It might come as no surprise that cognitive psychologists have found that this form of meditation can improve metacognition.

“Mindfulness is self-analytical,” I said, “but this… is just vibes.” With Muse I found myself listening to music and then trying to change that music, ad infinitem, in a feedback loop that worked best when I turned off the very part of me that meditation helps cultivate. “I need to get over some hang-ups I have about focus,” I said before ending the session early.

My other concern was that I was a rube. “I want it to be real,” I said the next day, “and yet there’s a part of me that feels like a fool saving my progress and being told that I can ‘Give $30 and Get $30’ if I send an invite to a friend.” It seemed like Muse would work best if I could stop resisting and go with the flow, but what kind of flow were we talking about here?

It was time to get some context. Atéha and I needed something to compare Muse to, and we found it in another popular science that measured the surface of the skull: phrenology, the nineteenth-century pseudoscience that took America by storm. Phrenologists infamously believed that a person’s personality and aptitude could be measured on the bumps on their skull, which they believed corresponded to regions for things like humor, selfishness, reasoning, and adaptiveness.

Phrenology was a cultural phenomenon among the American upper-middle class and an important beginning of the modern self-help movement. Everyone from Walt Whitman to Brigham Young to P.T. Barnum sat for readings, their heads measured with calipers while a phrenologist called out values for their various traits and aptitudes. After the reading, the patient would be given a chart of their scores with instructions for how to increase the size of any mental organs that fell short. (Religion, one popular phrenological text argued, could be cultivated by “admiring the divine in nature.”)

But as we now know, those surface measurements had nothing to do with the brains beneath. Phrenologists were infamously wrong. And while its bourgeois patients sat in armchairs, phrenology was simultaneously growing into a brutal science of empire. Atéha and I read James Poskett’s Materials of the Mind and saw how colonial powers across the globe used phrenology to objectify, racialize, and control displaced and enslaved peoples. Scientists in the United States used phrenology to justify slavery and the conquest of Native American lands, claiming that Africans had large “veneration” regions that made them mentally suited for servitude. As historian Kyla Schuller argues in The Biopolitics of Feeling, “impressibility” became a new value: white Europeans considered themselves superior because their brains, they believed, were more plastic.

Muse, too, measures the mind’s surface and promises self-improvement. But maybe phrenology wasn’t the best example. The science behind Muse is more persuasive, its ethics more fine-tuned. I decided to keep going.

On the fifth day I wanted to hear birds again, so I went back to Muse’s default “Rainforest” soundscape. While Muse calibrated, I listened to a voice message from Atéha. “I see Muse as this thing that takes meditation, a practice we associate as religion, and posits that you’ll be a better person, more focused, more in control, more in touch with your own brain states. And they use science to bolster their claims, with a website citing how Gamma frequencies can be observed in high amounts in Buddhist monks,” he said in the grainy recording, “but I think that in doing that, your phone becomes a device that gives you feedback on your religiosity, and… it’s not telling you to be rebellious, it’s telling you to be chill where you are, a good subject in the system. So, our phone becomes a way of enforcing ‘good’ religion.”

“Muse is now listening to your brain waves,” the device said.

Things were stormy from the beginning. As the meditation session began, I started worrying about my own interest in Muse and phrenology. Here I was sitting in the suburbs, fiddling with my brain waves, daydreaming of how I’d impress my friends and improve myself. Was I that different from a phrenology patient, wishing for someone to show me my soul and tell me it is good? At what cost? And why was I so bent on recording my mind and “getting good tape?” I heard thunder and downpour. I tried to refocus and make my mind more receptive, but what I heard was rushing waves. I was getting pulled under. I ripped Muse off my head and threw it down on the couch.

Neuromatic

We needed an expert on this topic, so Atéha and I turned to John Modern, author of the new book Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain. Modern is a professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College and a scholar of American religious history. I knew him from the academic conference circuit, where he has a larger-than-life reputation as a punk rock discipline builder: the tall guy in the vintage suit who’s talking secularism and vinyl records to a packed room at 10 a.m., and why does it smell like weed in here? This is a Marriott.

Atéha and I ordered copies of Neuromatic and scheduled an interview with Modern a month out, then dove into the text. (Atéha would later write a review of Neuromatic for Reading Religion, which can be found here.) What we found was a zig-zagging tale of religion and the brain in American history. Neuromatic is kind of gonzo genealogy of the brain as we know it– that is, our idea of the brain, and our conception of it as an information processor that bridges the inner energies of the mind with the empirical outside world.

Modern argues that, since the Enlightenment, the “explanatory allure of the brain” has made it a “site of interpretive struggle as the politics of secular differentiation took hold. As the quest for the seat of the soul became ever more empirical, the very concept of soul was rearticulated in order to address new, pressing questions about the self and world.” Modern then traces the tangled history of American religion and science to show how this “rearticulation of the soul” has played out across a diverse network of ideas, rituals, concepts, arts, and technologies.

Reading Modern weave between eighteenth-century religious revivals, cybernetics, cognitive theories of religion, “electric love therapy,” the EEG biofeedback movement, Scientology, and more, it struck me that over the last two hundred years, so many sciences and religions have focused on the brain and tried to harness its strange energy. For twentieth-century pharmacologist and biofeedback pioneer Barbara Brown, for example, brain waves reflected a deeper physiology and believed frequencies could be used to improve your brain. Brown thought EEG biofeedback would hasten the development of a “new state of consciousness.” Modern also describes how, within the field of Religious Studies, the cognitive science of religion has gained popularity in part due to its promise to cross the brain-barrier between culture and nature. There’s something electric about that loop, I kept thinking, between self and world.

When Atéha and I interviewed Modern about his book on Zoom, we told him about Muse and our reservations about what happens when religion is collapsed into data on our phones. Modern averred, “Religion is being constantly made up, all the time, and those constructions have real effects in the real world. Those constructions kill people, [they] heal people, they give people solace and a sense of how to understand tragedy… Maybe it’s romantic or humanistic, [but] there’s something being lost if it’s being actively extracted from us and commodified and someone is making money.”

At the same time, though, Modern recognized the appeal of the device. “I have no problem with, you know, having a party on a Friday night with a few drinks and the Muse and seeing what we can do with it, and reflecting and learning from one another.” There was a spark in Modern’s eyes, which came out every time he retrieved items from his collection of brain wave charts and phrenology manuals. This guy loops, I thought.

I told Modern that Neuromatic had helped me make sense of my own struggle with Muse and the uncanny experience of having your brain turned into data. He lit up as he shared his own experience of having his brain measured. “I went up to Boston and was a test subject in this [MRI] experiment where they were studying religion and subjects who have been diagnosed with left-onset Parkinson’s disease,” he said. “I had never had an MRI before. It was an incredibly intense experience because it’s not only the physical intensity—the discipline that you are performing in there to keep yourself still and follow all the rules, and it’s not just the waves of magnetism that I felt sweeping across my body, and not only my tattoo heating up just a little bit…What was spooky about it was I felt 400 years of history being just, like, mainlined into me in that moment…How did I end up here inside the latest, greatest cutting edge scientific instrument that is extracting data from me?”

After the interview was over, I uploaded the audio files and sat on my office floor. My heart was beating fast. Residual nerves. I focused for a moment on my breath. It’s certainly alarming, I thought, that wearables had crossed into the domain, often associated with religion, of ritual self-work. As the history of phrenology and other brain sciences had taught me, knowledge is always imbricated in social power, and so the metrics we use to study ourselves will always bring ideologies and assumptions with them.

But the work of looping is never over. There was audio to edit, a voicemail to transcribe. I wasn’t sure yet what I thought about Muse, but I knew that the best way to find out was to make something and put it out into the world. To see myself as a character. I was, for better or worse, living in the neuromatic.

As I worked on this story over the months that followed, I kept coming back to one piece of tape. At the very end of our interview with Ariel Garten, the InteraXon CEO, I asked if Muse would turn us into cyborgs or become its own religion. Her answer was illuminating, so I will reproduce it here.

Andrew Aghapour: Does Muse make us into cyborgs?

Ariel Garten: We’ve been augmenting ourselves with technology for a very long time. We put glasses on our eyes to sharpen the way that the light goes into them so we can see more effectively… We are constantly enhancing ourselves with technology, becoming a kind of cyborg if it were so in this sense, yes, we’re using a digital mirror to track your mind.

AA: But Muse fascinates me in a way that glasses don’t because it’s… a fold in the universe, like a Mobius strip. [Glasses] bring light that’s far away closer. Muse is taking something that’s behind me and changing it for me to re-experience. So I guess that is where the cyborg question comes in. The future of Muse, to me, seems like the future of a new type of human. How does that strike you?

AG: Yes and no. I’m not sure that I agree, because a mirror does the same thing, reflecting back light. I play the violin. You know, I take these strings [and make] sound that then hits my ear. I then have an emotional reaction, which then changes the music that I create. We are often in feedback loops, in concert with what we’re working with. This [Zoom] setup that we’ve got here, it’s taking information [back and forth] and we’re able to have this two-way discourse. So yes, there’s something inherently beautiful about being able to have a transformative experience. And in this case, the technology adds to a piece of that transformation. But I’m loath to put the weight into the technology and far more interested in putting the weight into the human who is doing the transformation themselves.

AA: Is Muse a religion?

AG: If I use the definition of religion that was in my mind, which is a set of practices or beliefs which help you frame your experience of life, that is also done by a group of other people in a shared experience, would I define Muse as a religion? No, because Muse is just the tool.

AA: So you’re not a prophet, I guess you’re something else? A tool maker?

AG: A shoemaker.

AA: Well if these are shoes, they’re really quite something to traverse the world with.

Andrew Ali Aghapour is a storyteller and scholar of religion and science. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill and is consulting scholar of religion and science at the National Museum of American History. He is the co-author (with Peter Manseau) of Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Making Sense of Things. His one-person show Zara is about growing up Muslim in the American South. 

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 The author would like to thank the Ministry of Ideas team who helped with the reporting of this piece. Zachary Davis and Liya Rechtman shepherded this story with insight and patience. Rachel Carbonara and Michael Schulson were crucial conversation partners. Nick Andersen, Galen Beebe, Maria Devlin, and Shaina Shealy gave sage advice about how to get good tape and tell stories with it. Atéha Bailly co-produced the podcast episode on which this story is based and shaped it at every step along the way. I have tried to do justice here to the work that we did together.