The Pineal Meditation App/system is the brainchild of Steffan Iverson and Kaio Shimanski, two experienced meditators who, over recent years, have made it their mission to unlock the full capabilities locked away inside the Muse meditation headbands. In this interview, we gain an insight into the duo’s journeys into meditation and their goals.
When InteraXon launched its Muse meditation headbands, its founders undoubtedly knew they would be game-changers. However, it is unlikely that they foresaw the broader impact its products would have on the world of meditation and the health and wellness sectors.
It is often stated that “timing is everything” in business. With millions searching for a quieter mind, Interaxon couldn’t have timed its relatively recent entry into the world of meditation any better.
Around the world, the number of people turning to meditation has grown exponentially. It doesn’t take the brains of a rocket scientist to understand why. Modern life is fast-paced, stressful, and confusing, and as more and more people embrace meditation to help them cope, the desire to understand how it can benefit them increases.
In response to the desire to learn more, the Muse team has been enhancing its app by introducing new features such as individual brain wave data and, most recently, peak alpha scores. However, as much as they’ve done, practitioners still crave more.
Fortunately, Steffan Iverson and Kaio Shimanski have the vision to expand on what InteraXon has achieved thus far. They’ve combined their skills and experience to produce the Pineal meditation software tools, which cross many things off meditators’ extensive wish lists.
Luxurious Magazine: Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. To start, please enlighten us on your journeys into meditation.
Steffan: My journey into meditation began as a teenager at a Tibetan centre in my hometown, where I attended Sunday open meditation. Here, I learned about the Sakya Tibetan Buddhist tradition and other traditions in the area.
The centre had strong ties to Dharamsala in India, where many Tibetans now live, including the Dalai Lama. I visited there for a few months during college, learning a huge amount from the many teachers there, including some advanced methods, and then practised on my own for years back home.
These methods helped me stay balanced, focused, and happy while struggling to help my hometown. They led me from one job to another, and I eventually developed leadership and tech skills, which brought me to Microsoft, where I now work full-time remotely from my hometown.
I still practice meditation, although my interests are shifting toward helping others with their practice in any way I can.
Kaio: I started meditating when I was 20 years old because of a breakup. I initially learned about the practice of Zen Buddhism, and there, I saw how my mind was completely chaotic and uncontrollable. Many of the certainties I had about myself fell apart.
From then on, I started studying more and became interested in meditation. I took a training course in yoga and meditation in Brazil. In 2018, when I was about to become a father, I started connecting with international technologies such as EEG, Biofeedback, video games, flotation tanks, etc.
Today, I am one of the pioneers in Brazil studying and researching options for tools to help with meditation and spiritual practice in general.
I started posting on HeartMind Alchemy on Facebook, and that’s where I met Stefan. We started talking and exchanging ideas. We have several things in common: age, interest in Buddhism, and passion for technology.
We’ve been collaborating for about three years now, exchanging ideas, creating, and bringing solutions to demystify the world of brain waves and offer more down-to-earth options so people can learn more about their minds.
LM: Steffan, you and I also made contact via the HeartMind Alchemy Lab. Through this, I got involved with the early stages of Pineal and connected with Kaio. What drives you to keep unlocking the secrets and benefits of meditation for the masses?
Steffan: Measuring meditation with brainwaves sparked my interest when affordable tools appeared years ago with the Muse and OpenBCI in 2016. I was already pretty good with coding at the time, so I didn’t find exploring these tools difficult. Through these, I saw that my personal meditation practice had a strong effect on my brainwaves.
I didn’t pursue this, though, as I was busy with my career and helping my community. I assumed that progress would advance quickly with the appearance of many more tools and apps. That did not happen. When I finally had a chance to start working on these projects again two years ago, progress had stalled out and was basically at the same point I had left it.
The only affordable headsets were still the Muse and OpenBCI, and only the Muse had a usable app, which I felt was lacking.
Eager to make serious progress on this work, I searched for communities with the same interests. Through Holly Copeland’s Facebook group HeartMind Alchemy Lab, I soon bumped into Kaio. As we both have similar interests in this technology, we ended up working together. It worked well, as Kaio was happy to test out whatever crude software I had available and get feedback from the students he was teaching.
LM: Tell us about the Pineal Meditation Platform/tools.
Steffan: We named our latest software tools Pineal, also the name of Kaio’s teaching school. It’s a nice, short, easy-to-remember name with a spiritual meaning. Kaio’s students are the main users, and they work closely with him to use this information to help their practice.
Our current direction is to create the world’s first meditation social media app. Users can record their meditation, and then a simple AI matches their style with other users, connecting them and allowing for helpful comparisons and discussion.
This is all easier than you might expect. I’m surprised nobody has done this before, perhaps because to participate, you really have to sit down and meditate for many hours to get results, plus invest in a Muse headset. So far, we have ten active users, including some teachers, and we are hoping to expand on this.
Our target is 25 to 50 active users. Any more than that would be a challenge for Kaio to support properly, but we will deal with that when we get there. Currently, we are looking for anyone of any skill level to participate.
LM: What information/feedback does the Pineal tools provide to users?
Steffan: The Pineal tools allow users to record their brainwaves using the Android app, taking notes by tapping the screen and filling in details at the end (Kaio’s idea, the least obtrusive method we have found for note-taking).
Users can review their data afterward, seeing an AI analysis of their meditation “power” (as compared with “normal” consciousness), and their data is automatically uploaded to the cloud where users can then review in much more detail on our companion Pineal website.
With the larger desktop screen, it is possible to dive deep into each brain wave (Delta waves, Gamma waves, etc.), seeing how much each brainwave changed, where it changed, and how the balance between the left and right hemisphere changes over time.
Extensive AI analysis allows users to “match” their meditation style with other users, suggesting which other user notes might match their personal experience, and now using LLMs to combine all those notes together into a suggestion for what their subjective experience might have felt like (a great feature for beginners who are uncertain in their practice).
Over the last two years, our users have suggested improvements and features, and it is now at a point where it works smoothly and quickly and is incredibly enjoyable. Our most active users upload daily and report that it helps them tremendously learn about their own practice and feel more connected with others. This allows for a ‘social’ meditation experience, as Kaio originally envisioned.
LM: Please elaborate on the type of support available to users.
Steffan: The App and Website are 100% free and open source. We will never gatekeep user’s data behind a paywall, including all the AI models. Kaio also publishes frequent tutorials on YouTube so everyone can learn how to use all the features.
Many users still want a more guided approach and extra help interpreting their brainwaves, so we set up a way to subscribe to Kaio’s teaching services through the website.
Aside from his day jobs hosting retreats, he now works closely with a few users to make sure they get the most out of the app and to understand the broader significance of each brainwave, which is hard to fully encode into the website.
Currently, I’m working on extra tools for Kaio to use to generate extensive custom visuals for users to save, which I think would be very satisfying (imagine a full ‘map’ of your spiritual world). We have a lot of plans like that to help users get the most out of this tremendous technology.
Luxurious Magazine: I’d like to thank you both for your time and the fantastic work you are doing to unlock some of meditation’s mysteries. What is the best way for interested parties to access the Pineal app/tools?
Kaio: For more information, please email me at [email protected].
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