Trained Genius wants to teach mindfulness, a popular form of modern meditation, with a scientific approach using state-of-the-art wearables. Through Trained Genius's platform, users will be able see and monitor their physiological responses while practicing exercises designed to teach mental control over a user’s physical body. This type of information could help someone stay calm in times of panic, or rein in ever-mounting stress levels without self-medication.
“It’s [about] attaining a level of control over your autonomic nervous system. Previously, there was no way to look at that as an objective measure and therefore no way to directly train it,” said Martin Adler, co-founder and president at Trained Genius. “What’s interesting is that heart rate variability is a direct measure of your level of activation of your parasympathetic [system] and therefore you can use that to ‘train’ meditation, but what really what you’re doing is training the exact biological, chemical and hormonal response.”
These exercises will be explained and taught to users via online lessons, viewable through the Trained Genius mobile and PC app, Beam. During these lessons, wearables will show users how their body is responding to the breathing exercises and other techniques, helping guide a user through the difficulties inherent in finessing their way to the benefits meditation holds.
“It’s all about empowerment, empowering people to understand more about themselves. We teach you how to take control of the way you feel in each moment for the rest of your lifetime,” Adler said. “We’re obviously throwing a lot technology at the problem, but it’s really about teaching people to be empowered, to control how they feel at any moment. That’s a skill most people [don’t have]. 40 percent of people don’t believe they have the ability to manage stress effectively.”
Beam is being built to track the body’s reaction to thoughts using two physiological signs. Heart rate variability, or the rate your heart changes how fast it’s beating, and brain waves — Alpha waves and beta waves specifically.
“Heart rate variability matters because it is an indication of the state of your nervous system and whether you are stuck in a low grade 'flight or fight,' or can 'relax and restore.' Many people try meditation during periods of stress and find themselves unable to successfully 'meditate,'” said Adler. “This makes sense because if your body and mind are in a state of fear and anxiety, the last thing you're wired to do is sit still. By focusing on increasing HRV and thus regulating the sympathetic nervous system, meditation becomes much more accessible and enjoyable."
Beta waves are your brain’s response to fight or flight situations, when you need intense concentration and focus to untangle a high anxiety problem. Alpha waves occur naturally when a brain is at rest, or relaxed while still awake, and help promote the sort of thinking and decision-making that some people call “being in the zone.”
While useful, beta waves are the part of your brain that keeps you up at night, the guilty party in making your mind race when the lights turn off. By attempting to help you train your autonomic nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system that controls bodily functions not under conscious control, Trained Genius hopes to teach people how to switch the state of their brain waves naturally.
“We started out saying that we want to build the most effective [system for boosting cognitive performance] that’s ever been built. We took a high end EEG device, we took high end heart rate variability monitors, we put all of that into virtual reality with the Oculus and we started training kids to do better on tests,” said Adler. “Now what we learned was one, parents want this as much or more than kids, two, it works really well, and three, it’s not going to scale with ten thousand plus dollars worth of hardware and someone [still] has to go to a center.”
While the functionality hasn’t been built yet, Trained Genius hopes to replace expensive, stationary equipment with third-party wearables that can collect the same sort of data. Some examples include a heart rate variability monitor called the Mio Link and an EEG device called the Muse Headband.
By doing so, Trained Genius expects to democratize (and commercialize) the understanding of the human body and mind, taking it out of the academic research labs and Manhattan doctor's offices and bringing it to the masses.
“We teach people mindfulness with a scientific based approach, and we show them in real time how their body is responding. The most common problem people have when they meditate is ‘I’m not sure if I’m doing it right,’” Adler said. “It can be frustrating and nobody can tell you what you are supposed to be doing, what it’s supposed to feel like. We have the technology to basically say . . . look, right now, you’re absolutely doing it right. And I’m talking about at a sample rate of multiple times a second, so it’s not like five seconds ago you did something right, [it’s] right now you’re doing something perfect, or, right now, you’re kinda sorta starting to lose it, so let’s get it back.”
Trained Genius is hoping to become the flagship for a second wave of wearables, which will take physiological data and quantify it. And by computing this data for users, marrying it with something more, something that has a real world impact on those trying to use technology to change their lives for the better.
Trained Genius is currently hosting an IndieGoGo campaign for Beam, the still-in-beta platform they plan to use to teach mindfulness lessons. These lessons will initially be created by Trained Genius, with the one day of goal of growing the Beam platform into a community that will share knowledge of mindfulness through live meditation events, organized by staff and possibly, even other users.
