← The Neuro Experience
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- [00:00]
Ariel Garten
Our mind can torture us in so many ways. Thoughts of I'm not good enough. Thoughts of depression, of life is miserable. When we think about the things that can build cognitive reserve, meditation is one of them. There's amazing study which is long term meditators have brains that look on average 7.5 years younger than non meditators.
- [00:18]
Louise Nicola
Oh my God, that's amazing. ARIEL, back in 2003, you were working on neurogenesis and Parkinson's disease. You're also a psychotherapist. What's your mission?
- [00:28]
Ariel Garten
Oh, my mission in life is for people to not be jailed by the prison of their own mind.
- [00:34]
Louise Nicola
I want to talk about your digital sleeping pill. What is that?
- [00:37]
Ariel Garten
Oh, it's totally, totally amazing. You slip on the muse and you choose an audio track to help you fall asleep. We have so many people who are just like, oh my God, I could not sleep. And then I use muse and it helps me fall right asleep.
- [00:48]
Louise Nicola
You've recently announced a foundation brain model trained on the world's largest EEG data set. What have you found?
- [00:54]
Ariel Garten
We're seeing really amazing patterns in brain data that haven't been found previously. Biomarkers for, for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. But I can't say here what some of those novel metrics are.
- [01:04]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
I'm Louise Nicola and this is the neuro experience.
- [01:10]
Louise Nicola
Ariel, I want to start at the start back in 2003 when you were working on neurogenesis and hippocampal neurogenesis and Parkinson's disease, and you were really at the forefront of brain interfaces, brain computer interfaces. I want to know what got you into that, into this whole world of neuroscience, because that's so interesting as a starting point.
- [01:35]
Ariel Garten
Well, I was fascinated by the brain even from a young age. I mean, we can walk, we can talk, we can think, we can do all those things. And what allows us to do that? Our brain. And we have this organ inside of our head that creates our entire experience, our experience of life, the things that we emote about, that we think about, that we see. Yet we have very little mechanism to interact with it. So I went to school for neuroscience. I worked in neuroscience labs, I volunteered in neuroscience. I did everything I could to try to understand what was going on in the brain. And then ultimately I've been lucky to be able to take that information and turn it into actionable things that we can actually do to interact with and improve our brain.
- [02:17]
Louise Nicola
What did you find back then when it was you? Were you working specifically on Parkinson's disease?
- [02:24]
Ariel Garten
So that specific lab experience was with Dr. Andreas Lozano at the Toronto Western Research Institute. And way back then, we were stimulating rats in their hippocampus in order to enhance hippocampal neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons. To do that, we'd put the rat on a running wheel. Then we'd send them through mazes and see if their maze performance improved. It turned out it did. And then my job was to look at the rat sections, brains and count the new neurons that had been born and correlate it with the improvement in their task performance.
- [02:57]
Louise Nicola
You could count the new neurons totally.
- [03:00]
Ariel Garten
So you take the rat brain, it section, slice very, very finely, put on a piece of glass, and then stain with a particular stain that's going to enhance the new neurons. And you literally just sit there under a microscope, painstakingly counting each and every one.
- [03:16]
Louise Nicola
That's beautiful. Because we know that the hippocampus is the first sign to go during aging, Alzheimer's disease. We've seen multiple studies that you can also grow new neurons in the hippocampus from exercise alone. That was my first taste at the human brain. That's when I, you know, I think you and I share that in common. The absolute love and fascination by the human brain.
- [03:38]
Ariel Garten
Yes.
- [03:38]
Louise Nicola
And look at the, look at how much it's evolved. Have you. What do you think is happening now? Like, from that starting point, maybe even before 2003. But, like, look at the difference now. Now we've got bci, we've got neural networks, we've got like the brain. And neuroscience as a whole has changed and accelerated so much.
- [03:58]
Ariel Garten
It's changed dramatically. I mean, back then, 25 years ago, we really had no way to interact with our own minds. And now we have the rise of consumer neurotechnologies. We have devices like Muse and many others that have come to the fore that let you stimulate your brain, track your brain, see what goes on in your brain, improve your brain. And then we have the new knowledge that we've discovered about the brain disseminated so much more effectively now. You know, when I was 25 years ago in university, the only place you could learn about the brain was in university.
- [04:31]
Louise Nicola
Literally. Yes.
- [04:32]
Ariel Garten
Now you can simply Google it.
- [04:33]
Louise Nicola
Yes.
- [04:34]
Ariel Garten
You couldn't do that back then. We didn't have Google easily accessible when I was in, by the time I was in university, yes. You could, you know, search on AltaVista to discover some things, but there wasn't much there. You know, now we have the entire world at our fingertips and AI to interpret that information. For us. And that's useful as a consumer, as an average person wanting to learn about the brain. And it's also useful as a brain researcher, because AI can help you uncover deeper and deeper trends in the complex interactions of the brain.
- [05:01]
Louise Nicola
So that was 2003, and then around 2010, you were working on at the Olympics, correct?
- [05:08]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So I actually started in a different lab in 2001 with Dr. Steve Mann. He was the inventor of the wearable computer. He's the guy that created Google Glass before Google did.
- [05:19]
Louise Nicola
What's Google Glass?
- [05:20]
Ariel Garten
Oh, Google Glass came out in 2012, 2013. It was the original pair of glasses with a camera in it connected to a computer.
- [05:27]
Louise Nicola
Oh, wow.
- [05:28]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So Steve Mann at MIT in the late 90s, he had created actually the earlier technology that ultimately became Google Glass, which he called the ITAP system, which was a camera with the computer attached to it. And so we'd walk around, he would have a huge backpack filled with the technology, because the computers would sit in a big backpack while his glasses were hooked up. He had amazing innovations in his lab, including a very early brain computer interface device. And so back in 2001, Chris Amony, who became my co founder, who was Chris's master's student, and Steve and myself and a few people, we were creating experiences where you would use a brain computer interface system to put a single electrode on the back of your head, attach with a little ribbon, and you would shift your brain state by focusing and relaxing. And then we would use that information to control something in the room. So as you focus, the light could get brighter, or as you relaxed, the music would get louder or quieter, you know, whatever would work with the experience we were trying to create. And that was my very first experience understanding that we can actually directly interact with the brain, that you can learn something about your brain through that interaction, and that you can harness it, you can control it, you can improve it with these kinds of technological interventions.
- [06:47]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I think it might be worthwhile just to really explain what an EEG is, how it measures the functionality. You said a single lead, and I'm used to 32 leads. So why don't we just map out what that is for everybody?
- [07:00]
Ariel Garten
Sure. So an EEG is an electroencephalogram. To take an eeg, you take a electrode, a piece of metal, and you put it to your forehead and allows the piece of metal, the electrode, to pick up the electrical activity of your brain. Now, in your brain, you have neurons. Those are the cells in your brain. Your neurons communicate electrochemically, so they're sending electrical signals back and forth that ultimately create a grand electrical signal that can be read on the surface of the head. So if you think of your neurons like an orchestra, you have different instruments, different neurons all playing sounds. And then as you stand back, you can hear the overall music that is being made by your brain. And you can read that from across the room when you're listening to the concert or on the surface of the head when you're measuring the brain. So when we look at your brain waves, we're using an EEG to measure the changes in electrical activity. And we typically reflect those in terms of bands that people have probably heard of, like alpha waves, beta waves, theta waves. And those give us a snapshot of where your brain is at because it's producing overall the kind of electrical activity, of fast activity like beta waves, or slow activity like alpha or theta waves.
- [08:16]
Louise Nicola
What I remember back from, I, I was working in an epilepsy ward and that's where I got my first thirst for EEGs. And then we had this new interface which was the quantitative eeg. So then we could actually map the brain and we could see different areas that would light up and it would be indicative of if somebody had a hypo functioning brain at certain areas or a hyper functioning brain in certain areas. And we could pick up on many things in that point. So when you're talking about brain waves, we've got the alpha and they're got certain hertz. What is the alpha brainwave?
- [08:48]
Ariel Garten
0 to alpha is typically 8 to 12.
- [08:51]
Louise Nicola
8 to 12 hertz? Yes. And they are meant to be oscillating at a certain point of time. Correct. Like gamma waves or maybe when we're relaxing.
- [09:00]
Ariel Garten
So let me take you through the brain waves from the bottom.
- [09:02]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
Let's do that.
- [09:02]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [09:03]
Ariel Garten
So beta activity is high, fast activity. That's usually sort of 25, 23 hertz. We think about as high beta and then lower beta is going to be from 12 to 23 hertz. So beta is high F activity. That's when you're thinking really high. Beta is when you're anxious and overthinking. Okay, alpha activity is from 8 to 12 hertz. That's when you're in a relaxed focus state. It's a prime state to be in. Theta activity is slower. And that is when you are starting to sort of daydream or lose focus. And then when we drop down into delta waves, those are like one and a half to three hertz. That's when you're in deep sleep. So Our brain goes through different brainwave states throughout the day, and those brain wave states are really indicative of our state of mind.
- [09:51]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. And we can change that at any given time, correct?
- [09:55]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. And they naturally change moment to moment. You know, you're in delta waves in deep sleep, you get aroused, you're now awake, and we can willfully change it. So when I'm reading something, I'm going to be in beta activity. If I close my eyes and begin to relax, I will bring myself into elf activity.
- [10:13]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
Guys, I am a big believer in testing instead of guessing, especially when it comes to your health. And for years, we've been told to wait until something goes wrong before looking at our blood work.
- [10:25]
Louise Nicola
I mean, that's what the medical system is right now.
- [10:28]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
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- [12:35]
Louise Nicola
timeline.com neuro and we've heard about alpha brainwaves. You know, it caught on during that flow state era. Yes, I think it was. Was it Mihaly Csiksimni, that is how we say his name, that really coined the, you know, and he brought the flow state to. To is. It's entertainment, I would say. Everyone started to learn about the alpha brainwave activity. Everyone wanted to achieve alpha brainwaves because that is that moment of like you mentioned, deep focus but also relaxation. But it's very hard to achieve.
- [13:07]
Ariel Garten
It's not actually that hard to achieve.
- [13:09]
Louise Nicola
No.
- [13:10]
Ariel Garten
So flow state isn't exactly just alpha waves. Flow state is a little bit of a combination of things. Meditation state, focused attention meditation is actually a great example of alpha wave activity. So in the Muse, for example, when we do our focused attention meditation, what we're teaching you to do is to drop into high levels of alpha waves. So when you close your eyes, you focus, you're in an eternal focus state. Your alpha waves begin to increase. And being in a high alpha wave state is amazing. It's a creative state. It is a state where you are, you know, very focused and very, very relaxed. And it's actually a very healthy state for your brain. It allows it to regenerate and recharge.
- [13:48]
Louise Nicola
So let's go back. We were talking in 2010 and you were talking about y the single electrode. So that's where. And you were also a, you were also a psychotherapist as well, a trained psychotherapist. And you said before that the goal is to help people quiet the conversation in their own heads. That makes life feel unbearable sometimes. So what was happening in that moment when you found out all of this, that you could change the state of someone?
- [14:14]
Ariel Garten
Oh, it was like this extraordinary aha moment. You know, we were putting an electrode on somebody, letting them focus to brighten a light bulb or relax to, you know, quiet music. And what we were really teaching them was what was going on in their own brain. This was neurofeedback. So when they were focused, the light bulb would get brighter. A brighter light bulb meant they were focused, which then reinforced their brain to say, yes, do that more. You know, this is the Right thing. Ding, ding, ding. And so in that moment, Trevor Coleman, Chris Amony and I, really the founders of Muse, we recognized that we had this incredible ability, ability to give people real time, not just insight to, but access to their own mind and to be able to offer neurofeedback that could train people to know when their brain was focused and relaxed and enhance that ability and really help somebody understand the state of focus and lean into it and train the brain directly to know, yes, this is the state you want to be in and reward it for being there.
- [15:15]
Louise Nicola
So it's like non pharmacological therapy.
- [15:18]
Ariel Garten
Totally.
- [15:19]
Louise Nicola
Because I mean, you could. The easy fix to that is, you know, take a pill. But obviously very different modalities. I want to talk about Muse. What does Muse stand for?
- [15:28]
Ariel Garten
So Muse is a beautiful idea of simply two things. One, thinking. The ability to muse on something, to think about something. And the Muses are the muses of the arts. Their ideas, their creativity, their inspiration. And what the Muse device is, is this sweet little device here. It is a brain sensing headband that helps you track and train your brain activity.
- [15:53]
Louise Nicola
So what I'm looking at here, this doesn't look like the EEGs in a hospital setting. Very different. EEG is like got a cap with all these leads coming out of it. But this is a wearable eeg.
- [16:04]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So in the same way that you can have a heart rate monitor on your wrist now in your, you know, Fitbit or your Apple watch, this is a wearable eeg. It's really slick and beautiful. It contains four EEG sensors that track your prefrontal cortex and your frontal lobe. It also contains sensors to track the blood flow to your prefrontal cortex f nears activity. Oh, wow. Along with it, there are, there's an app that really helps you track and train your brain across multiple dimensions. It helps you train your focus, your attention, your relaxation, and it helps you improve your sleep.
- [16:43]
Louise Nicola
Okay, we'll get back to that in a second because I want to talk about something that is just so fascinating, that really drew my attention to you and your company. You have the largest consumer EEG data set in human history. Is that correct?
- [17:00]
Ariel Garten
Probably, yes.
- [17:02]
Louise Nicola
I mean, I've got here, I don't know if these stats are. Is it 5,000 data points since 2015?
- [17:08]
Ariel Garten
Oh, a lot more than that. A lot more than that. So that was just the very first study that was done with museum. So there's now more than half a million people around the world who use Muse regularly to help them improve their Brain and track and train. And along with that, we work widely with researchers all around the world. And as a result, we have the ability to really look at the brain across multiple different dimensions. And the 2015 reference was from a very, very early study that was done with Muse. MUSE actually came out in 2014, a decade ago. And in that study, researchers at McMaster University looked at our database with consent of the participants within this 5,000 person set, and they were able to see changes in the brain that had never been seen before. They were able to see novel insights into the brain because we were able to have such scale of data because people were regularly using the device and with their consent. Not everybody chooses to, but if you consent, you can share your brain waves with accredited researchers from institutions to gain more insights and understanding for science.
- [18:16]
Louise Nicola
So muse started in 2014 out of a need in the market for something like this.
- [18:22]
Ariel Garten
Yeah, so we were just beginning to see the rise of wearables. Sort of from 2010 on, you had the super early wearables like the Nike Fuel band and the jawbone up things that don't really exist anymore. And there was wearables that tracked your steps and they tracked your heart rate, but there was really nothing to track your brain. And so sort of when the light bulb went off and we said, you know, we're using this technology in the lab to help people track and understand their brain. We can take it out of the lab and we can make something that really is a wearable brain sensor. And so we can go beyond simply optimizing for steps. We can really help people understand and improve their own mind.
- [19:05]
Louise Nicola
It is really beautiful when you understand, you know, structurally what the brain is, but also functionally, you know, from FMRI studies to even these EEGs, when you can test it, that's one thing. When you test and measure what's happening in the brain, that's one thing. But when you can do it, to track and measure over time and train it, it's a whole different ball game.
- [19:26]
Ariel Garten
Yes. And as we see the rise of neurodegenerative conditions, as people are living longer and wanting to have more agency in their own life and their own brain function, these kinds of tools become even more relevant.
- [19:39]
Louise Nicola
One thing that I think is interesting is that we've got so much going on now in terms of the brain, etc. That's the, that's the word I was looking for, right? And it's this over exhaustion and this chronic fatigue, mental fatigue that people still don't even know what's happening in Their brain, they can't even coin the term. But you and I know that it's this chronic activation of that dopamine system just going into, you know, chronic drive. Plus the lack of sleep deprivation that we are now starving our brains of the very functions that it needs to perform at its peak.
- [20:08]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So for us, caring for and training your brain is a mix of actual training and performance training and being able to reset and recover. So with the Muse, for example, sleep is incredibly important. So we let you track your sleep and then we have interventions that help you fall asleep, fall back asleep, deepen your deep sleep, and improve how you wake up in the morning. Because when we think about brain training, we typically think about, like, oh, let's do some crossword puzzles, you know, oh, let's stimulate the brain in these really precise ways. But no, you actually have to think about just like in your body when you go to the gym to exercise, you also need your recovery training. Your brain is really about creating resilient brain, is about ensuring you get both the train time and the downtime.
- [20:56]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, absolutely. And you can't obviously perform at your peak unless you're not recovering. Well, that's one of the reasons why I use it. Really trying to calm myself down at night.
- [21:05]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
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- [22:26]
Ariel Garten
Okay.
- [22:26]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
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- [23:23]
Louise Nicola
I really want to go back into peak alpha frequency. I think it's, I think it's, it's worth mentioning because we don't actually focus too much on that on the podcast. But you've used this analogy that I think is brilliant. Peak alpha frequency is like the refresh rate of your brain. So a screen running at 60Hz looks smooth, dropped to 15Hz and everything falls apart. How long can we spend a day in peak alpha brainwave state?
- [23:51]
Ariel Garten
Okay, let's stand back for a second. Explain a little bit about what peak alpha is for the, for the audience. So we talked about your brain is in a variety of different brain states throughout the day. And your brain is kind of like a, an orchestra. And the orchestra can play at different frequencies. And when everything in the orchestra is playing a little bit off, then you're not going to get beautiful brain waves. You're not going to stand back and hear the orchestra coming together in the beautiful music that it can make. So as we age, when we're tired, when our brain is not working so well, the orchestra is not playing together, the pieces of the orchestra are disjointed, and they're not coming together to create a beautiful brain wave.
- [24:34]
Louise Nicola
What makes it not like. What makes it dysfunctional?
- [24:37]
Ariel Garten
Oh, okay, so lack of energy to the brain. Okay, so when you have dysregulated blood flow to the brain, when you have an accumulation of toxins, when you, I mean, toxins is such a buzzword, but all that means is your brain has been doing things all day long. You have a bunch of spent neurotransmitters, you have a bunch of spent. Of spent resources that have not properly been recycled and flushed through your brain. We're not talking about plastics necessarily building up. It's just the biomatter accumulation throughout the day from your brain when you have not slept well and your brain hasn't been able to clear itself through the night and regenerate when you're overstimulated and there are too many processes going on at once. And so your brain's not coordinating. When you have damage to any particular part of your brain, when you concussion like a concussion, when you have inflammation, inflammation, like, just jams the systems in your brain. You can really think about the little inflammatory molecules as getting between the synapses that are trying to communicate with each other and jamming that communication. It can be very disjointed and disheartening. So when somebody has a lot of brain fog, inflammation is at play, and your brain just isn't working while the pieces of it are not working together. The neurons are not singing, the orchestra is not playing. One of the markers of that is alpha frequency. So each of us have our individual alpha frequency, our IAF. Now, alpha frequency, as I said, ranges between 8 and 12 Hertz. When your brain is really sharp and you're young and you're on the ball, your alpha frequency might be like 11.5. It's going nicely, you know, very, very quick. The refresh rate on your brain is fast. The orchestra is playing together, and they can play quickly and in tune and in sync, and it works beautifully. And as a result, the net effect is we have fast reaction times. Our brain can communicate from place to place quickly, like across the brain. We have the ability to, you know, see, hear, think quickly because it's all working together. As you age, that alpha peak frequency decreases reliably decade by decades. That's actually something that was demonstrated in a research paper using the Muse data set very early on, something that had never been seen in any research prior. The actual shift in alpha peak frequency decade by decade.
- [26:57]
Louise Nicola
Wow.
- [26:58]
Ariel Garten
And so alpha peak frequency is a marker that we actually give. In the Muse app, you do 10 focused attention meditation sessions with Muse, and then you're given your own alpha peak frequency.
- [27:10]
Louise Nicola
What could an example of that be for any given individual?
- [27:14]
Ariel Garten
So if you're in your 40s, your alpha peak frequency might be like 9.5. That would be a really. That would be a good alpha peak frequency if you're 75.
- [27:22]
Louise Nicola
Okay.
- [27:23]
Ariel Garten
If you're in your 20s and super sharp, it might be 11.5. If you are in your 70s, it might be like 7.5. So it, you know, reliably decreases.
- [27:34]
Louise Nicola
What do you think Lebron James's would Be,
- [27:38]
Ariel Garten
it's hard to say. He's an athlete, so he works out. So he's got good blood flow to the brain. He's also very tall. And so those kinds of dynamics in height can also change the way that blood shift goes to your brain, which can have effects. And he maybe has been bopped in the head by a basketball more than once.
- [27:55]
Louise Nicola
Okay, I didn't think that.
- [27:56]
Ariel Garten
So there may be some discontinuities. I'm not an alpha peak frequency reader. I can't read the tea leaves.
- [28:05]
Louise Nicola
Okay, so sorry, I interrupted you.
- [28:07]
Ariel Garten
No. So in the app you're able to get this marker, and this marker shifts a little bit throughout the day and can be used as a metric to actually give you insight into your own brain and its functioning.
- [28:17]
Louise Nicola
Is there a red line, like a threshold, like a number below which cognitive performance visibly degrades?
- [28:23]
Ariel Garten
It's a good question. It really varies by age. And also cognitive performance is different for everyone because some people can be very sharp in the way that they communicate and can't see very well and can't hear very well. You know, there's, there's various markers of cognitive performance.
- [28:43]
Louise Nicola
Likely the, the same as when you can get two brains. One's full, you know, they're both full of amyloid, one gets Alzheimer's disease and the other one doesn't. And that theory comes down to cognitive reserve, which is actually why I'm actually loving using the muse. Because, because the notion of cognitive reserve is really comes down to the functioning of your brain cells. And if we can get ourselves to the point where our cognitive reserve is so strong and so built because we've been working on it throughout our lives, then it doesn't actually matter about amyloid beta and tau proteins at the end of our life, because our cognition, our cognitive functions, like thinking, memory, processing speed will still be intact irrespective of the
- [29:25]
Ariel Garten
damage that is occurring to a certain degree. I mean, to a certain degree, you're going to have amyloid jamming your sensors and, you know, jamming your ability. But if you have cognitive reserve, you're going to be in such a better place than if you didn't.
- [29:38]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [29:38]
Ariel Garten
And so when we think about the things that can build cognitive reserve, meditation is one of them. So there's amazing studies, one by Dr. Eileen Lueders where she demonstrates that long term meditators have brains that look on average 7.5 years younger than non meditators.
- [29:55]
Louise Nicola
What? Really?
- [29:56]
Ariel Garten
Yes.
- [29:57]
Louise Nicola
What's the protocol for that?
- [29:59]
Ariel Garten
So, interestingly, she defined a long term Meditator, as somebody who's been meditating for five years or more, and you get 7.5 years on average gain, that's a pretty good investment. And the protocol there is simply maintaining a meditation practice. So with Muse, we have a focused attention meditation practice where you focus your attention on your breath.
- [30:19]
Louise Nicola
Breath.
- [30:20]
Ariel Garten
And as you do that, you are strengthening your prefrontal cortex. So in the research on the impact of meditation, you see improved volume of the prefrontal cortex. You see increased volume of the hippocampus. You see increased connections of the corpus callosum. You see increased gray matter density. Like this little activity that you can do for as little as five minutes a day really has tremendous impact on your not only cognitive function, but your brain's actual structure and volume and its ability to maintain it over time.
- [30:55]
Louise Nicola
That is huge. That is everything. Gray matter volume is very hard to. I mean, it atrophies at an alarming rate as we get older. Right. We can see that on MRI studies. But to preserve the. Both the function and the structure of the brain is huge. And I sure it has an effect on the white matter as well.
- [31:15]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So when you're stressed, you are more likely to have a decrease in your myelin sheath. So focused attention meditation leads to amazing de stressing, as well as increases in focus and cognitive function. And in doing so, reducing those cortisol levels, you also preserve your myelin. Your white matter.
- [31:35]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
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- [31:43]
Louise Nicola
It goes on.
- [31:44]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
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- [32:43]
Louise Nicola
things that I Didn't realize I needed
- [32:45]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
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- [34:53]
Louise Nicola
What I love most is I believe. I don't know if this is true, but can we reverse the alpha or the peak alpha state if it's declining, if we can see, like if it's rapidly declining, let's just say I'm 38 and I get a measure of maybe 7.5, right? Can I bring that up to 9.5?
- [35:18]
Ariel Garten
Yes, of course. There are things that you can do. So one is improving your sleep, which I keep going back to is like a non negotiable for being able to manage and improve and maintain your brain function. So improve your sleep, improve your physical exercise, improve your nutrition, and do things like focused attention training and neurofeedback. That reinforces that alpha peak frequency and you're bound to see an improvement in
- [35:44]
Louise Nicola
all of the data points that you've got. Have you seen a difference amongst men and women?
- [35:49]
Ariel Garten
Oh, okay. So in another awesome studies, there have been over 200 studies published using the Muse. So there's many, many things that have been uncovered about the brain using the Muse device, all by neuroscientists who purchase the devices on our website and go off and do neuroscience with them. It's quite amazing that the exact same devices that consumers are buying are the ones that are bought by neuroscientists, scientists and used to publish in like.
- [36:13]
Louise Nicola
That's how, that's how I got it actually. It was one of our faculty members that introduced me to the product.
- [36:18]
Ariel Garten
Oh, amazing.
- [36:19]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
Yeah.
- [36:20]
Louise Nicola
So that's it. Yeah.
- [36:21]
Ariel Garten
And so in one of the studies they looked at the differences between male and female brainwave activity throughout the day. And what they saw was females tended to have increased high beta and markers that indicated greater anxiety. In those males with self reported anxiety, the anxiety features look different. The anxiety features were more around subtle differences in theta activity. How anxiety presents in the brain looks different in male than it does in female. There's this feature called hemispheric specialization where you look at the difference in alpha activity in the left prefrontal cortex versus the right. And females tend to have more anxiety showing in this alpha a hemispheric specialization. So one side of their brain has more alpha activity than the other in a way that's indicative of anxiety.
- [37:14]
Louise Nicola
Why is that?
- [37:15]
Ariel Garten
We don't know.
- [37:16]
Louise Nicola
That's interesting because I know that there's difference in the orbital prefrontal cortex or even like the lateral prefrontal cortex on both sides when we're talking about like language production for example. But I mean, the differences between the prefrontal cortex on two hemispheres is, is fascinating. I couldn't understand. I can understand it from a brain wave activity and the oscillations. However, I can't understand it as why one would be focused like the focal point would be left to right.
- [37:45]
Ariel Garten
So the idea is that you're, when you're suppressing left frontal activity, it's suggesting you're overall suppressing left cortical activity, which is leading to an increase in right activity. And it's suggesting that you have less sort of calm and Relaxation, that's one theory around it. And why this tends to happen more in females than in males? Completely unknown.
- [38:13]
Louise Nicola
I want to hone in on sleep because you mentioned, you know, sleep is probably one of the best ways to build a high performing brain and that neural architecture, and you've got many functions on here that actually enable us to get into, you know, those deep sleep and, and REM sleep sleep phases that we need. In your 2024 paper, your team found that the single greatest predictor of chronological brain age wasn't peak alpha, it was sleep spindles during N2 stage sleep. So walk me through sleep spindles as the ultimate biomarker.
- [38:50]
Ariel Garten
Oh, sure, that was an incredibly cool paper and was really a surprise to us. You know, we set out to look for a marker that was going to be a predictor of brain age. And there have been markers that had been identified previously prior to our paper. But when we looked at all of the data and we used our machine learning approach and AI to look at the brain, the marker that popped out most strongly was sleep spindles. And this is novel. This had never been published by the
- [39:14]
Louise Nicola
people probably have never heard of sleep spindles. Right. You can explain what that is?
- [39:19]
Ariel Garten
Absolutely. So as you go to sleep, your brain goes through a choreographed set of brainwave activity. It's really cool. So we've talked about alpha and theta and beta. Those are daytime brain waves. When you fall asleep, you move from alpha waves down into theta waves, which are lower. And then when you're in deep sleep, you have delta waves. So before you go into deep sleep, you have stage two sleep. And in stage two you have something called sleep spindles. So sleep spindles are 13-15 Hz spikes of brain activity that happen in these, like little bursts. You have bursts of spindles, and it's not entirely clear why we have them, but it has something to do with the way that our brain is communicating from place to place. It has to do with memory consolidation. And then we end up with these huge big bursts called K complexes of slow wave activity that are meant to quiet the brain so that we are resilient to any external sounds waking us.
- [40:17]
Louise Nicola
Up, up.
- [40:18]
Ariel Garten
Now, sleep spindles are found in N2 sleep, so that's before you get into deep sleep. And the robustness of these sleep spindles, how high they are, how many spindles are in the burst, how much like amplitude you have in your sleep spindles actually is a really reliable predictor of your brain age and therefore how healthy your brain is.
- [40:40]
Louise Nicola
But you're not Exactly. So you're, you know, at stage one, that's when you're falling, falling asleep.
- [40:45]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
Stage two, you're in light sleep.
- [40:48]
Louise Nicola
Still is that stage two?
- [40:50]
Ariel Garten
Stage two, you are in light sleep, but it's not the same as stage one, which is super, super light sleep. Correct. So we go from wakefulness.
- [40:57]
Louise Nicola
Yes.
- [40:57]
Ariel Garten
Into stage one, light sleep, which is quite short.
- [41:00]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
Yes.
- [41:00]
Ariel Garten
And in light sleep, we end up in hypnagogia, which is when you start to have. In hypnagogia, you start to have images, so you're not dreaming yet, but you have all of these just sort of like, like images and thoughts floating around in your brain. And if somebody was to wake you up, then you would say, oh, I wasn't asleep, I wasn't asleep. But you actually were. You were in light sleep. And so once your thoughts start to get kind of weird, that stage one, then you drop down into stage two, which is technically classified as light sleep. So somebody could wake you up, but you are really asleep.
- [41:33]
Louise Nicola
Okay.
- [41:34]
Ariel Garten
And then you move into stage three, which is deep sleep. And there you have delta. Yeah, yeah. In deep sleep, you have delta activity. And you are like, in deep sleep, people can be talking around you, they can be, you know, shaking you, and you are not waking up.
- [41:46]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [41:47]
Ariel Garten
And so throughout the night, you go through cycles. In the first half of the night, you have more deep sleep, and then in the second half of the night you have more REM sleep. So REM sleep is when you're dreaming. And REM sleep also serves a very important function of emotional consolidation and memory consolidation as well.
- [42:03]
Louise Nicola
But why is it that the brain age seems to be younger due to the sleep spindles occurring in N2.
- [42:13]
Ariel Garten
So remember I said that when the orchestra is working together, you're gonna hear the music clearly, beautifully. It's gonna sound like music.
- [42:22]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [42:22]
Ariel Garten
So if you imagine a brain that is starting to age and not work together as effectively, where the parts aren't communicating, the synapses are jammed with inflammation in it, you're not gonna get the whole orchestra singing into sleep spindle. Think of sleep spindles as a song, you know, a 13 Hz burst where everybody's gonna play the same thing at the same time. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You gotta be really like on it. Your reaction times are fast. You're a well tuned orchestra. And as you age, or as your brain has some amount of damage or inflammation or is not sharp because you haven't slept well, then that orchestra is not playing together as well. And you're not gonna get the net effect of those sleep spindles.
- [43:02]
Louise Nicola
Does that mean someone who doesn't get a high net effect of those sleep spindles, do they go from stage one to stage three straight away?
- [43:08]
Ariel Garten
Nope. They're still going to be in slow wave sleep. They're still going to be in light sleep. But the sleep spindles in that light sleep are not going to be very high. They're not going to be a lot of them. They're going to be kind of messy. You know, think about it as a messy hairstyle.
- [43:21]
Louise Nicola
Fuzzy.
- [43:22]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. You could have all your hair nicely pulled back into one beautiful ponytail. Or it can just be kind of all over the place.
- [43:28]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. Like me on a Sunday morning. So. So the idea is to increase the amount of sleep spindles that we have.
- [43:36]
Ariel Garten
So the idea is to keep your brain sharp, and then the net effect is you're going to see an increase in sleep spindles.
- [43:42]
Louise Nicola
Oh, I love that. Yeah, I love that.
- [43:45]
Ariel Garten
Let's talk about deep sleep, because this is important because.
- [43:47]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, the glymphatic system is what I was going to ask.
- [43:49]
Ariel Garten
Perfect. Yeah. We were going to the next phase of sleep. So in the next phase of sleep, it's deep sleep. So in deep sleep, you have delta waves produced. And just like I've been talking about, if your orchestra is not working all tuned together, you're not going to get beautiful delta. Delta is really unique because it is a signature that happens across your whole brain. Like, your whole brain is just throbbing in this beautiful, like, slow wave synchrony that everything's singing together. And it's a fascinating time in your brain because this big slow wave throughout your brain actually allows disparate parts of your brain to communicate together simultaneously. And it also triggers something called. Called glymphatic clearance. Glymphatic clearance is like the holy brain, holy grail of brain restoration. So in glymphatic clearance, we've heard about the lymph systems in our body and how important they are to move out old sludge and toxins and things that have accumulated throughout the day. Well, in your brain, you have your glymph system. So as you sleep and go into deep sleep, the cells in your brain actually shrink back ever so slightly, opening up canals between them. Them and those canals allow cerebrospinal fluid, the fluid that's in your brain, to be able to move between the cells. And it's kind of like the power wash of your brain. It's like, you know, you take out a hose and you hose down the streets, and all the stuff just goes down the drain. That's exactly what happens during deep sleep. So in deep sleep, any accumulated waste throughout the day, which can include amyloid beta, that protein that you mentioned, those plaques that.
- [45:26]
Louise Nicola
Those.
- [45:26]
Ariel Garten
Those, you know, little molecular bits.
- [45:29]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [45:30]
Ariel Garten
That are a hallmarker of Alzheimer's, they can get washed down the drain. So they're not accumulating throughout. Throughout your brain.
- [45:37]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
Yep.
- [45:37]
Ariel Garten
So deep sleep is incredibly important to basically clean out your brain and allow it to be not only prepared for the next day, but to be the right holistic environment for you to have a healthy brain for the next decade
- [45:52]
Louise Nicola
and a dysfunctional brain. What we know is that they can't really clear out the amyloid effectively. They can't activate that glymphatic system, but notably, they can't even get into deep sleep a lot of the times.
- [46:04]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So when we look at. So MUSE is able to track sleep as effectively as a sleep lab. It is the only. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredible.
- [46:12]
Louise Nicola
That's because I've done my. I've done. I did. I did one year doing sleep studies.
- [46:17]
Ariel Garten
I'm so sorry.
- [46:17]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I know. Thank you so much. I know it was, like, traumatizing. But for everyone listening, you know, we've got. You've got all these. You've got EEGs, you've got EKGs, you've got leads even coming off your eyes.
- [46:28]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So MUSE is able to track sleep as effectively as a sleep lab. So this, like, sweet little device is like a sleep lab in your own bed.
- [46:35]
Louise Nicola
And you wear that at night.
- [46:36]
Ariel Garten
You wear it at night.
- [46:37]
Louise Nicola
Okay.
- [46:38]
Ariel Garten
It tracks sleep as effectively as a sleep lab, and we're able to track your delta activity and boost it. So this is, like a super amazing feature. It's called Deep Sleep Boost. When you are in deep sleep, MUSE is able to detect your delta wave activity and actually produce little audio sounds. Right. Timed with your delta waves, like, personalized specifically to your own delta wave. And that little sound is actually able to boost the delta wave activity, giving you longer delta trains and therefore likely more time in deep sleep with your glymphatic clearance happening effectively.
- [47:18]
Louise Nicola
Oh, my God. That's amazing. I think, like, I love the intersection of technology and neuroscience, and the fact that we can do this now in the comfort of our own home, we don't have to go into one of those sleep labs is just phenomenal.
- [47:32]
Ariel Garten
It's totally wild. So when you go into a sleep lab, as we all know, it totally sucks. It's like, not what your sleep is representative of, and a sleep lab also is, isn't doing anything for you. It's, you know, telling your technologist or clinician about your brain. It's not telling you anything, and it's not actually helping your brain.
- [47:49]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [47:50]
Ariel Garten
So with Muse, what we have is beautiful interventions to help you fall asleep, which we'll talk about in a minute, Correct? Yes. Deep sleep boost that actually deepens your deep sleep so that you can enhance the amazing lymphatic clearing function and restorative function of deep sleep. We have features to help you fall back asleep, and then we have smart wake up features that help you wake up at just the right time so that you feel your most alert.
- [48:15]
Louise Nicola
I mean, people know me, so they'll know, like, this is like music to my ears, really. I want to talk about your digital sleeping pill. What is that?
- [48:25]
Ariel Garten
Oh, it's totally, totally amazing. So you slip on the Muse and you choose an audio track to help you fall asleep.
- [48:33]
Louise Nicola
And so there's speakers in the this,
- [48:36]
Ariel Garten
so it connects to your smartphone or tablet and you can just play the sound just on the speaker of your phone. Or if you have a bed partner, you can use headphones. And Muse is actually able to adjust the audio that you're listening to in such a way that it walks your brain into sleep.
- [48:52]
Louise Nicola
This is. I want, I. I just want to pause and tell everyone what we were talking about before. Before we even started the podcast. Everybody. Ariel and I were sharing the latest news in AI and, and neuroscience, and we were talking about how there is, you know, new technology now that if you stimulate both light and sound, well, you can eliminate amyloid beta in the brain. So sound is a really powerful thing for the brain.
- [49:19]
Ariel Garten
Sound is an incredibly powerful cue for your brain. And so what we do is we adjust the parameters of the sound that you're listening to in such a way that, that give your brain permission to just fall asleep. And so for people who have difficulty sleeping, it is like a lifesaver. We have so many people who are just like, oh my God, I could not sleep. And then I use Muse and it helps me fall right asleep. And then if you wear the Muse throughout the night, you can use the deep sleep boost to enhance your deep sleep. And then if you wake up in the middle of the night, the same beautiful sound experience that helps you fall asleep, helps you fall back asleep.
- [49:55]
Louise Nicola
Sleep. Wow. So a lot of huge. Especially for those people. We know that there's a lot of men that wake up at around 4am every morning, but Then also women who are in the menopause stage and they're getting these hot flashes. It's like, how do they get back to sleep? So this is fantastic.
- [50:10]
Ariel Garten
Oh, it's amazing. I'm a perimenopausal woman right here. 46 years old.
- [50:14]
Louise Nicola
Thank you for putting your hand up and saying that.
- [50:16]
Ariel Garten
Yes, yes, yes. I can attest to the value of having something to help you fall back asleep when you've woken up with weird, novel things happening in the middle of night.
- [50:24]
Louise Nicola
I use this in the daytime when I'm, like, at my peak, no pun intended, stress. And the only way for me to get out of this is I will lock myself in a room, and I need to, like, eliminate sensors, like lights, sounds. And the only thing I'll put on is my muse.
- [50:40]
Ariel Garten
Oh, amazing.
- [50:40]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. 10, 15 minutes. Yeah. Sometimes I end up falling asleep, but.
- [50:45]
Ariel Garten
Wonderful. What setting are you using?
- [50:48]
Louise Nicola
The relaxation one. It's on my phone. I mean, we can go through and have a look at all that. That. I don't know what it's called. Is it. And then I'm using the meditation one. Funnily enough. I. I used to only be able to do five minutes, and then I went to around eight minutes, and now I can. I can, like. I'm obsessed with this now. It took me some time, I. I must admit, but now I can do about 20 minutes.
- [51:10]
Ariel Garten
Oh, amazing. Amazing. Yeah. It's like everything you train up there, it's like, you know, starting to play basketball.
- [51:16]
Louise Nicola
Exactly.
- [51:17]
Ariel Garten
Can you get it in the net? Can you bounce? Can you dribble? Well, no, but as you do it, you get better and better and better. You train, you train, you train.
- [51:23]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [51:24]
Ariel Garten
And when we actually look at some of the studies that are done with muse, so we do a lot of work with the Mayo Clinic, and they've done many, many studies with muse. One demonstrating that using MUSE improves. It improves outcome in cancer care, in fibromyalgia, in Cushing syndrome, which is stress syndrome. And then they did a study, actually, with their own doctors in the emergency room using Muse, and they saw insane results, like 54% decrease in burnout, improvement in resilience, cognition, sleep. And those doctors used it average 5.2 minutes per day. So, like, five minutes is all you need to see significant improvement.
- [52:03]
Louise Nicola
Well, now that we're on the Mayo Clinic, there was a burnout study. So the Mayo Clinic ran a trial using MUSE and found a 54% decrease in burnout among the clinicians, which is what you just mentioned. That's maybe that's what the effect is that it's having on me when I use it like. Like during the day at that 2pm when I'm feeling at my. My peak stress.
- [52:25]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. You're getting a beautiful decrease in your cortisol. You're gonna slow your heart rate, you're gonna dilate your blood vessels, you're gonna relax your muscles. You're going to get into a beautiful state of calm in a beautiful state of focus that then resets you for the rest of the day. And the net effect is greater resiliency, better ability to deal with the stress that comes right afterwards. It's not gonna feel like stress. It's not gonna feel as dramatic. Yeah.
- [52:51]
Louise Nicola
And along with these studies, you also have a few Alzheimer's ones. You currently have at least four Alzheimer's studies running people with diagnosed Alzheimer's disease all the way to mild cognitive impairment, and a Canadian group looking at individuals with familial risk who aren't showing any symptoms yet.
- [53:08]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So we're very, very lucky to be part of a large research network. So the. The MU sleep tools are actually built with the Canadian Sleep Research Consortium. So that's a conglomeration of sleep researchers from across Canada who are like, like, we really need tools to study sleep, and we need them to be so good and so easy to use that we can give them to our Alzheimer's patients to study sleep in their own home. And so we needed to make something that was, like, beautiful, super simple, so that somebody with Alzheimer's could put it on and with a click of the button in an app, be able to track their own data. And the Deep Sleep Boost feature that we were talking about was actually built for several different research groups. One in Canada, Spain, and the US because they wanted to do studies on deep sleep enhancement with individuals with Alzheimer's mild cognitive impairment to see if it would improve their cognition the next day. So once we built the tool for them and they tested it and said, yeah, this really works, we were then able to release it to the general public.
- [54:09]
Louise Nicola
Oh, that's insane.
- [54:10]
Ariel Garten
So that everybody gets access to the same technology that's currently being used in Alzheimer's trials.
- [54:15]
Louise Nicola
What was the noticeable improvement in cognitive performance? Was it thinking? Was it memory?
- [54:22]
Ariel Garten
So the studies are still ongoing, so we don't have, like, the. The full results, but it was sufficient enough for the researchers to say, yes, this is, you know, this is the real deal.
- [54:31]
Louise Nicola
Well, it makes sense, right? Because, you know, I'm not MCI yet yet. I don't think I ever will be. That's my. My mission. But what I meant to say is I'm not perimenopausal yet. Right. But there are moments in my time where I forget somebody's name, and that's just due to, like, okay, I've got so much going on in my br. So you're saying that, like, with constant use of this product, it can de. Stress and then stabilize the brain in order for us to have a better output of our cognitive functions. What's. What's your mission?
- [55:07]
Ariel Garten
Oh, my mission in life is for people to not be jailed by the prison of their own mind. I mean, our mind can torture us in so many ways. We can have thoughts of I'm not good enough. You know, thoughts of depression, of life is miserable. And these are generated by our brain. And then as we age, our brain can decline and degrade our ability to just experience life. You know, life feels kind of terrible. And so my mission is to help people improve their brain and therefore improve their life.
- [55:37]
Louise Nicola
And you've done that through. And this is your. This is your vehicle to achieving that mission?
- [55:42]
Ariel Garten
Yeah, my vehicle. And everybody else on the Muse team, you know, there's. There's many, many, many of us at the company. I was one of the founders, but there's tons of people that are required to bring a product like this to fruition across our research and development and customer care and, you know, all the different teams.
- [55:57]
Louise Nicola
You've got studies running with Parkinson's patients, too?
- [55:59]
Ariel Garten
Yes.
- [56:00]
Louise Nicola
And do you think this is going to help with motor unit recruitment or just with tremors? Like, how are you working with Parkinson's patients?
- [56:06]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So there's three different, at least three different Parkinson's studies running. One is a sleep study, actually looking at Parkinson's and patients with their deep brain stimulators on and off to see how it impacts sleep. It's super cool. And then there's two studies actually using MUSE interventionally, so using muse's meditation, muse's focused attention meditation, the very same thing that you were doing for five minutes a day using it with Parkinson's patients to see if it improves outcomes in Parkinsonian symptoms. So there's one study at the University of Rhode island and then a second study that's happening at Baycrest. Both of those studies are in process. They're starting to look at the early data at Rhode island, and at least the early data that we have coming back is that the patients really enjoyed it, anecdotally have found value, and now they're going through the surveys and the actual brain data to see the real results.
- [57:01]
Louise Nicola
I mean, when you understand, as a neuroscientist, you understand how beautiful the term neuroplasticity is. Does it make you marvel thinking our brain, brain is malleable and we can dictate our life because if our life is dictated by our brain and how it's functioning well, we can change that functional architecture to be whatever we want. So really, you can really have any life you want if you really understand the brain. Are you as amazed by neuroplasticity as I am?
- [57:35]
Ariel Garten
Yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, I started my work in a lab generating neuroplasticity in the brain, you know, know, putting rats on a running wheel and showing that, yes, you really can grow new neurons. And these simple activities, these simple behavioral changes that we make. And, you know, as a psychotherapist, understanding these simple shifts of thought, shifts of thought and shifts of habit change how we think, how we feel, and literally how our brain becomes structured for the rest of our lives.
- [58:01]
Louise Nicola
I mentioned at the start that this was non. A non pharmacological approach. But you've actually got pharma companies using EEGs or using Muse, right? Or even like using them in trials.
- [58:14]
Ariel Garten
Yes, Yep. So one of the things that MUSE is used for is large scale clinical trials for pharma companies to say, yes, this drug actually has an impact in the brain or an impact in sleep.
- [58:24]
Louise Nicola
I want to talk about the actionable protocols for everybody. And are you able to define what FNIRS is?
- [58:33]
Ariel Garten
Yeah, yeah. So fnirs, functional near infrared spectroscopy.
- [58:37]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [58:38]
Ariel Garten
Is an amazingly cool technology. So we've talked a lot about EEG. So we have two Muse devices. One is the Muse 2 and Muse 2 is EEG and PPG. And that lets you do the daytime training and then ppg photoplesmograph. So it's reading your heart rate. Okay. So it's the same technology that you have in like an Apple watch that's reading your heart rate from your wrist.
- [59:00]
Louise Nicola
And if everyone's watching on YouTube, this is kind of. This sits on your. They sit behind your ears and. Yeah, you can put it on.
- [59:08]
Ariel Garten
Yeah, it just slips on like this.
- [59:10]
Louise Nicola
Okay, wonderful.
- [59:11]
Ariel Garten
And there are EEG sensors on your forehead and behind your ears, and a PPG sensor here, an accelerometer and gyroscope to get movement as well. And so this one is used for the focused attention training. It can track your cognitive scores, like your alpha peak frequency. And so this does all the daytime training and tracking, and then we have a second device which is the Muses Athena. And this one is meant to be worn at sleep, so it can do all of the daytime training plus all of the sleep interventions. And this one also has a second technology in it or a third technology called fnirs, Functional near infrared spectroscopy. That's those little windows that are in here. So what this does is it shines light into your brain and it samples the blood flow right at the blood brain barrier. And it's able to look at the level of oxygen in your blood flowing into your brain and out of your brain.
- [60:09]
Louise Nicola
Oh, that is just unbelievable. Do you have to get FDA clearance for this?
- [60:15]
Ariel Garten
So this actually exists in the general wellness category of the fda. So the fda, you know, knows who we are. We're in great standing with them. And it's a general wellness device.
- [60:25]
Louise Nicola
Okay.
- [60:25]
Ariel Garten
Yeah.
- [60:25]
Louise Nicola
So it doesn't need like 510k clearance?
- [60:27]
Ariel Garten
No, no.
- [60:28]
Louise Nicola
Okay.
- [60:29]
Ariel Garten
And then for all the research studies, it's used under a research exemption.
- [60:32]
Louise Nicola
Let's talk about the brain recharge score as well.
- [60:36]
Ariel Garten
Sure.
- [60:36]
Louise Nicola
What is it?
- [60:37]
Ariel Garten
So the brain recharge score is a score that you get after you do your focused attention meditation. And it's kind of like a brain readiness score. It shows you how much your brain has been refreshed during that session. So your brain recharge score is something that's a really good indicator of, of how able was I to drop in to increase my alpha activity to really recharge and refresh my brain. And that can let you know how ready you are for activity after that. And also how much you may need to spend on recovery. If your brain recharge is not that great, you might want to spend more time that night deep sleeping, doing all the things to recharge and recover.
- [61:17]
Louise Nicola
I've just had all these thoughts as you're talking and I travel a lot, whether it's nationally or internationally. You know, I thought, I've actually never used this on a plane. Long haul flights, you know, six, 16 hours to Australia and I usually travel at night. I wonder how that would go. Or even like I do LA to New York quite a bit. I'm thinking, wow, I should be doing this on the plane.
- [61:37]
Ariel Garten
Oh yeah. It's really effective.
- [61:39]
Podcast Sponsor/Host
Really?
- [61:39]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, it should be. I've never used it on the plane.
- [61:41]
Ariel Garten
I should, I. I used to pull out my muse on the plane when I traveled a lot and I'd always get the person next to me being like, what's that?
- [61:49]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, what are you doing?
- [61:50]
Ariel Garten
And convert everyone on either Side to muses. So in fnirs, what we're looking at is the blood flow to the brain and we not only track but we also train it. So we have this amazing experience that we call the Athena owl experience where an owl is flying. And as you're able to increase the blood flow to your brain, the owl flies faster. So what's the, what this is doing is giving neurofeedback to your brain, saying, yes, you know, increasing blood flow, increasing oxygen. Increasing oxygen. And as you do that, you're profusing your prefrontal cortex with oxygen, with the raw materials that it needs in order to function more effectively.
- [62:30]
Louise Nicola
How are you doing that? Like, I think, you know, the brain vascular. The brain's the most vascular rich organ in the entire body. How are we sending more? Is it because the, the, the brain is oscillating and like pumping, like with the, with the arteries and the veins? Is that what's happening? Like, what's, how are you getting it to the brain?
- [62:50]
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So there's beautiful veins right above your eyes, veins and arteries up here. And those are the main delivery areas to the brain. We have a number of them, but those are one of them. And that's where we're sampling the blood right. As it reaches the blood brain barrier. And so as we see an increase, I mean, your, your brain and body are able to really subtly give signals. And so if you signal your body to do anything to salivate more, it's going to salivate. If you bring out a lemon, you're. We've learned that association and we're going to salivate. You know, Pavlov's dogs, you ding a bell and the dog's going to salivate in the same way that your brain can actually increase and modulate the blood flow to the brain. And if you give it reinforcement that, that this is what you want it to do, and then it does more and you reinforce it more, you build this association. So over time, when we look at things like vascular dementia or concussion, these are irregularities and disruptions in the ability to properly regulate blood flow to the brain.
- [63:54]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [63:55]
Ariel Garten
And so what we're doing with the muse fnirs, Athena, is training your brain to upregulate that function. Function.
- [64:01]
Louise Nicola
Wow. When did the, when did that function come out?
- [64:05]
Ariel Garten
Just about a year ago.
- [64:06]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [64:07]
Ariel Garten
Athena launch was about one year ago. And so it's been incredibly exciting to see both the use with consumers and people around the world, and also how it's been used in research. As part of our research kit, along with the eeg.
- [64:20]
Louise Nicola
Oh my God, that's phenomenal. I want to talk about the future. The foundation brain model. So you've recently announced a foundation brain model trained on the world's largest EEG data set. What have you found?
- [64:35]
Ariel Garten
Ah, so it's a super fascinating thing to kind of try to understand the brain from multiple dimensions. And you know, as we've mentioned, we have studies in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and with appropriate consent from subjects and participants and the IRBs and like all of these things and the appropriate security protocols, were able to look at the data from different cohorts and be able to pull out novel metrics. So I can't say here what some of those novel metrics that we found for like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's are, but we're seeing really amazing patterns in brain data that haven't been found previously and that could potentially be biomarkers for disease that in the future, not now, but ultimately maybe things that average individuals can use as daily biomarkers to track, track the progress of their brain function.
- [65:28]
Louise Nicola
Ariel, if you were sitting across from a, from a Fortune 500 executive, but also just a, you know, a midlife woman or a midlife man who just wants to optimize their brain using this device, what would be the duration and the protocols for that?
- [65:46]
Ariel Garten
Oh, sure. So at least five minutes of focused attention training. That's what has incredible evidence at improving your brain's cognitive function. That's the thing that made the brains look 7.5 years younger. So minimum of 5 minutes a day,
- [66:02]
Louise Nicola
you can do it in the morning.
- [66:03]
Ariel Garten
Anytime that works for you. There's this myth that like, oh, I need to meditate in the morning, but for a lot of people you just fall asleep. If you do that, it's not your time. So when it can fit into your schedule is the time to do it. That might be in the evening before you go to bed. It might be when you come home from work. Whatever the time is for you, the most important thing is that you're consistent each day. Then you want to do an Athena session. Most people like to do it in their mid afternoon slump. So three to five minutes of Athena training. Start with three minutes because it's tiring to your brain to move all that oxygen initially it's just, it's a lot of work. So start with three minutes and move your way up and then sleep support. So if you're somebody who has any difficulty falling asleep or if you're a good sleeper, but you to want, want to deepen your deep sleep, you can use the go to sleep experiences. You only need to go to sleep experiences if you're not a good sleeper. If you are a good sleeper, you're not a good sleeper. You want to use the deep sleep boost to enhance your deep sleep. And then you can also use the smart wake up features to wake up in the morning.
- [67:07]
Louise Nicola
Oh, my gosh. One more question. You're a neuroscientist. What keeps you up at night?
- [67:15]
Ariel Garten
Well, nothing, because I work very, very hard.
- [67:18]
Louise Nicola
Good, good, good, good. I love that. Well, I mean, I love that we've got the shared mission of democratizing brain health education. So that was a. That was so phenomenal. Thank you for taking me through that. And thank you for being part of the Neuro Experience podcast.
- [67:31]
Ariel Garten
Oh, my joy and pleasure. Thank you.