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The Hardware
Free add-on software from Myndlift is available for the MUSE brain training headset. This free add-on makes the MUSE headset more useful, but the offer is not widely known and may not last for long.
To use the Myndlift software you still need the MUSE headband hardware, but you can get the hardware used, for half price, on ebay under the names MUSE 2 or MUSE S. “S” is for sleep.
The reason you can get near perfect hardware for half price is because most people who buy the headsets new don’t know how to use them, or don’t know what to expect. They’re easy to use. In this post I’ll tell you what to expect.
The MUSE S is more comfortable than the MUSE 2. It’s easier to use and is more reliable. Aside from your being able to wear it while you asleep, the MUSE 2 and the MUSE S function in the same way.
I encourage everyone to learn about brain training. It’s an untaught and poorly understood yet critical means of getting your life in order. If you’re not ready to invest in the technology, at least you can understand what you’re missing!
Your Brains
Our nervous systems do not operate at their best because of the habits we’ve learned and our over-reactive tendencies. These learned distortions affect our physical, cognitive, and emotional skills. Brain training is readjusting your nervous system to operate effectively in all circumstances. Neurological training affects your whole body.
I’ve been doing, researching, encouraging, and offering brain training for 20 years. This kind of training involves a subtle combination psychology, neurology, and technology. Few people know about it largely because few practitioners understand it or are prepared to understand it.
To gain full access to your brain’s habits and behaviors requires an investment in knowledge and technology that most people don’t have. It’s not taught in any psychotherapy or general medical program. I am lucky to have a background in physics, psychology, therapy, neurology, hardware, and computer software. And while brain training involves all of these things, it is possible to explain it in simple terms.
Think of your mind as an engine that can be tuned in the way that we once tuned our carburetors. We wanted those engines to idle as slowly as possible, and we want our brains to do something similar.
To be more accurate, our minds are a collection of engines all of which operate at their best when they are idling as slowly as possible. In this case, “slow” means calm and “as possible” means relaxed. We want to calm our neurology to be as relaxed as possible. Being relaxed does not mean dull witted—the state that alcohol or marijuana creates—it means alert, aware, and uncommitted.
There are many things in your life that will excite your neurology. Being in an excited state becomes habitual. It is our perpetual state of hyper-vigilance that causes us to overlook what other people are trying to say, and miss opportunities that require our engagement.
There are few things that will calm you down, and most occur during “vacations” from normal events. Becoming relaxed during the normal events of life is the real goal, not taking repeated vacations. Teaching you to relax without taking a vacation is the object of brain training.
Meditation and Mindfulness
Meditation is the closest you’ll come to brain training under normal circumstances. It is an innocuous and rudimentary first step, and it is something you can do without taking a vacation. Meditation makes you less reactive and more receptive. Meditation lowers your anxiety, but makes little change in your neurology. It does not change your memory. The same disturbances still trigger you.
If you practice meditation for 10 or 20 years and integrate the practice into your life and work, it will percolate into the environment you create for yourself and affect the people you associate with. At that point, meditation changes your life. It takes a long time, and the Eastern schools of meditation never claimed otherwise.
Mindfulness is a rebranding of meditation in the context of self-improvement, counseling, medical healing, and psychotherapy. It is a version of meditation taken from Eastern religions that’s more culturally appropriate. Unfortunately, it has no tradition and doesn’t go far. For most people, if they practice mindfulness at all, it slows them down while drinking the morning coffee to speed themselves up.
The Myndlift Software
If you want more information or direction, or if you want to better understand how this kind of training will improve your situation, schedule a free call with me using this link:
I found the link to download the free Myndlift smartphone app on this page:
where I read:
The Access to Myndlift’s Brain Training Toolbox Is Free
If you have a Muse headband, you can download the free version of the Myndlift app for iOS or Android and try out the brain training experience.
The free app version allows you to:
- Do 12 peak-performance brain training sessions while streaming shows, watching videos, listening to music, or playing video games.
- Do digital exercises that can help you build habits and stick to them as well as exercises that help you actively crush any thinking processes that may be interfering with focus and concentration. cognitive distortions you might be having.
- Listen to guided meditations and feel yourself relax, focus, and unwind.
- Do digital journaling to clarify your thoughts and reduce stress.
It’s important to note that if you don’t have a Muse yet, you can still benefit from using the Myndlift app by journaling, doing mindfulness exercises, and completing lessons that will teach you strategies to achieve peak performance.
I’ve installed this app on my smartphone and I’m using it.
They mention that the MUSE software only trains alpha brainwaves. They train other EEG bands, notably beta, which is associated with vigilance and anxiety.
Their software is more sensitive than the MUSE software, at least the feedback is more responsive. I find it quite different and I like it better.
NOTE: I ran the AUDIO session. Starting it was confusing because it threw me into a system setting screen that listed all the apps on the phone and whether they had permission to run on top of the system. It turned out that all that was required was for me to set the Myndlift app to run over the system. The other apps on the phone were presented, but only the Myndlift app needed resetting.
I don’t find this offer for the free app on the Myndlift website. I found the page because I wanted to know more about their software. If you’ve got the MUSE, then download the Myndlift app before they take this page down.
Here is the direct link to downloading the Myndlift smartphone app:
What To Expect
People don’t know what to make of brain training. Clients don’t recognize its importance so they don’t ask for it. Mental health practitioners don’t understand the brain, so they don’t learn about it. We’re in similar situations with other problems such as regulating emotions, performance, or sleep.
Our medical models and our cognitive models are interventionist and reductive. In holistic areas the interventionist approach works poorly or not at all. These are situations where the persons experiencing the problems must make the changes themselves.
Neurofeedback works at a level below understanding. It is a mind-body training similar to learning to ride a bicycle. You engage your awareness, you attend to the feedback, and you adjust accordingly. There is no need to conceptualize or reduce, and outside interference rarely helps. The same things happen when we train our brains to oscillate in new ways.
The process is called operant conditioning, but the term is poorly defined. It means you react to new situations, develop new patterns, and learn new habits. It’s similar to how a hungry person “learns” to salivate at the thought of food. This is a simple description of a subtle patterning experience, but you get the idea.
There is an essential difference. If you learn to salivate at the thought of food, you’ll end up with a mouth full of saliva, but you won’t get any food. You’ll want food, but that will require another step. With brain training, you not only redirect your attention, but you achieve a new state. The reward of brain training is a change in mood, and it develops into an enduring pattern.
It’s difficult to notice a change in mood unless your circumstances changes. If you have experienced waking up in an unsettled mood, you’ll know unsettled moods can be fragile. If there is nothing supporting the mood, you can change it. In contrast, good or bad moods caused by good or bad circumstances are difficult to change.
Neurofeedback training changes your mood at a deeper level, something less like meditation and more like a vacation. When you train your brain repetitively, your neurology changes, and the changes are enduring. As the neurophysiologist’s expression goes: “What fires together, wires together.”
It’s similar to how your body changes when you train in the gym. Once you become fit, you can stay fit more easily. Brain training is even easier than this, as your neural habits require little encouragement. The ill benefits of trauma are enduring through the same mechanisms as the good benefits of brain training.
Brain training creates changes in sensitivity, reactivity, focus, alertness, memory, creativity, and thoughtfulness, but none of these are directly noticeable! You must engage in some act of sense, reaction, focus, memory, creativity, or thought in order to notice a change. Even then, if you have no metric and no one to point out the change to you, you may not notice you’ve changed.
The easiest measure of the effect of brain training is its effect on those processes you don’t control. These are processes you take for granted. They include mood, balance, hearing, aim, insight, creativity, digestion, and sleep. You will notice the relaxing effects in your body that accompany a relaxed brain.
Do It!
I encourage everyone to do this kind of training, whether you’re dealing with stressful situations or not. You can read about these and other brain training products here:
https://www.diygenius.com/home-neurofeedback-devices-for-brain-training/
I recommend the MUSE because it’s less expensive than the products like the BrainBit, which I’m told is more effective but which I have not tried. You can learn more about the MUSE here:
https://www.alexfergus.com/blog/muse-2-review
The technology is improving, as this free Myndlift application demonstrates. You still will not find mental health practitioners who know much about them, but don’t wait for the slow-moving field of mental health to catch up. At this rate, you’ll have to wait another 50 years!
InteraXon, the makers of the MUSE, say they are going to incorporate some of the Myndlift features into their application this year. You can get it now for free, and you can get a used MUSE for under US$150 (CAD$200) or better, if you’re patient. Buy the MUSE now and then explore it as you have time.
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