There are lots of games that it can be used with to train yourself to be more naturally calm, and people like @Ninjastar(here) and @szsam(here) have reported stellar success with similar devices (though they paid huge amounts for medical grade ones.) The linked device supposedly has 96% similarity to the super expensive ones.
I’ll get it in 15-30 days and will report on my progress.
I’d like to hear your success stories if you’ve used neurofeedback!
I had a faulty one that I bought off ebay that I had to return. The momentary time I got it working showed that my meditation practice really pumped those scales to high. I didn’t buy another one as it seems that the meditation I do is really similar to the neurofeedback measurements that it recorded while I had it working.
I just can’t record it while I meditate now, which is a loss.
Looking at the muse 2 meditation neurofeedback device. It helps you meditate and measures everything but you can’t connect it to another app to play games with it.
The device comes with a download link to 10 apps, which I imagine are mostly games.
I’m not sure about the connectivity to other apps but it is open sourced, so some sufficiently motivated person could connect it to any EEG app that allows it.
Okay, I am on day 2 of using the Muse. It kind of helps me figure out how to think to reduce the pressure in my brain, and I was able to get into the “calm” state for 1 out of 5 minutes, but it’s not causing the kind of dramatic reduction of symptoms that would compel me to recommend it to others, yet.
This isn’t a broad-based neurofeedback method like the more expensive machines deliver, like @Ninjastar’s machine. Those machines probably focus on the brain waves of the entire head, rather than just the forehead, like the Muse does. Parts of your brain might be relaxed while others are stressed, but the Muse only measures whether your frontal lobes are relaxed.
It is teaching me to be calmer though, but I haven’t had any particular breakthroughs yet.
I bought some conductive gel to make the contact to my forehead consistently better, though. There’s a lot of fussing needed to get a good connection every time you want to use it, otherwise.
Part of me wants to make a third party app that will let you see Youtube videos, but with the perk that your mental state controls how visible and loud the video is. If you’re in a stressed state, the video would fade out and quiet down, but if you are in the relaxed state, it would become visible and audible. This would reward calmness, and if there were videos of crowd noise, that would be extremely useful for schizophrenics to get used to being calm in the middle of all that stimulation.
Hello naturallycured. I hope you’re having success with neurofeedback!
This is just my opinion. I don’t think you can get the full benefits of neurofeedback with the muse device since the sensors can’t cover the whole head.
Most of the protocols listed in the schizophrenia/neurofeedback research study can’t be done with the muse, since some of the sites trained are at the top of the head or close to it. If you look at the pic the muse only covers the prefrontal and temporal sites, which are only a very small percentage of the standard 19 sites trained with neurofeedback.
If you want to be able to train the whole brain, the most affordable yet effective set up i can recommend would be a 2 channel amplifier called u-wiz and as for the software either bioexplorer or bioera (I’d prefer the latter). That setup should cost you around $1k.
If you can afford it(for an extra $500) I would get a 4 channel amp called q-wiz. Not only can you train 4 sites at the same time, but you can also do HEG (train to increase bloodflow to frontal lobes), and train infra low frequency neurofeedback using bioera.
There are other neurofeedback systems but those cost over $5k and are fda cleared so one would have to be a health professional to be able to procure them
There is a pretty steep learning curve to using the u-wiz and q-wiz amps and bioexplorer/bioera, so I’d highly recommend to check out peter van deusen’s neurofeedback forum. He provides free support to people using the system I mentioned above.
If you have any questions feel free to ask here or send me a pm.
Yeah, I’m suspecting the Muse is like a toy but @Ninjastar managed to attain therapeutic results with something that looks similar. You need a skull cap full of electrodes for the full neurofeedback treatment I imagine.
