Anyone have experience they'd like to share about wearing Muse headband device? I was pondering getting one but there's been mixed--or little reviews--about it from the more deep end of the pool crowd.

The last post about this topic seemed to be from 5 years ago.

Has the tech advanced? Does the EEG show anything useful? Do fruitions show?

Shaun

Last time I researched (maybe 6 months go?), the older version of the Muse exposed an API so that the raw data could be read from the device over bluetooth. They've intentionally not implemented that in the newer version. The older version had a pretty rich ecosystem of open source tools to transport the data to various EEG programs.

So, as far as I know there's no official way to really read the data on the newer version, other than through the muse app, which really only operates on a scale of "calm" to "agitated" and doesn't have the kind of granularity to detect much at all (when using it 90% of my practice, regardless of technique, ended up "calm") - or other officially licensed apps doing roughly the same thing. What it's actually measuring is their trade secret I guess, but for me it wasn't useful.

There might be some hacky or paid product way to access the raw data somehow but so far I've not found anything open source.

I guess the question is: do i need a $400 headband that tells me i'm meditating?

No.
It is rather hard to miss when you do meditation properly.
Or in different words: If in doubt then it is not meditation...