Mendi, a Swedish startup company is offering a solution for training your brain in a fun and easy way. We all know that brain function is essential to mental well-being, performance, and overall health. In the era of information overload, we are constantly looking for new ways to optimize and improve our everyday lives. And as we push ourselves to achieve more, professionally and personally, the limiting factor is not our physical capacity but rather our mental fitness. Our ability to focus, create, process and remember depends on our brain. And while mindfulness apps help to ease our mental state, there are few products readily available for consumers to exercise and enhance brain function.
What is Mendi and how does it work?
Your brain learns from feedback. Through visual feedback of what your brain is doing, Mendi claims to naturally train it to function better. Mendi is a device that measures your brain activity including blood flow and oxygenation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Mendi uses neurofeedback to provide live, visual feedback (e.g. the motion of a wave) through the app based on your brain activity. Proper concentration stimulates activity in the prefrontal cortex, including increased blood flow and oxygenation, which animates the game. With the headset and app software, Mendi uses neurofeedback to indirectly stimulate brain function with exercises to help you focus and relax. This is a natural process to condition the brain to increase blood flow and other nutrients to the prefrontal cortex, which can help to improve brain performance and overall health1. With Mendi, you can focus on the activity and relax by allowing you to have a clear mind.
The Mendi headset uses infrared light to monitor activity in the front of your brain. The app provides exercises to train your brain, requiring focus and calm to control the game, and increase activity in your PFC. Note that Mendi does not use electroencephalography (EEG), so it doesn’t use alpha and beta frequencies. Mendi provides an indicator of brain activity in form of a game to so that it is easier for the user to focus.
First your put on the device around your forehead and then you press the power button. In the app, you press ‘Get Started’ and ‘Start Sensor’. Users can decide the duration of each training session depending on their schedule and needs. Mendi recommends doing its training exercises 2-3 times a week for 5-15 minutes each time. During your training session, you just relax and don’t think. The only goal is to just focus on the figure to make the signal go up. After your session, you can see your score that is saved in the app, so you can follow your progress. Just like the muscles in your body, your brain can be trained. The more your train, the more you can learn to control your brain activity and reach new heights in your brain performance.
You need both the app and headset to use Mendi. The headset measures your brain activity while you focus on training exercises in the app. It is important to note that Mendi does not require internet/WiFi or data. The headset and app connect via Bluetooth or USB cable if preferred.
Why is Mendi or Meditation important?
Much of our past programming is hardwired into our physical system and this can keep us stuck in specific perceptions and behaviors. Our neural pathways are established connections between the brain and they fire according to these programs and stimulation they receive. However, if these connections dictate patterns in our lives that we don’t like, we can change and create new patterns and perceptions and new behavior. By the time we are 35 years old, 95% of our mind is a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitude, beliefs and perceptions that function like a computer program. The remaining 5% of our conscious mind can be used to change your daily life but the body resists that change.
This is where meditation comes in as it allows you to get beyond the analytical mind and you can make changes and improve your life. Through practice, you can change your brainwaves, slow them down. You can start doing it now instead of waiting for a crisis, trauma, loss, disease, or diagnosis to make your mind to change. When you do it properly, you can enter your operating system where you can begin to make important changes. Meditation allows your to have a clear mind so that you can start to examine other things that are going on with your life. You get a finer view of things and you often see beauty in things that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. When you turn your attention to what is inside your mind, that’s when things can get therapeutic. You can start to look at problematic feelings with a calm mind and examine the feeling rather than getting carried away by it. A feeling of anxiety, that might have triggered a train of unpleasant thoughts and disasters, will no longer take place because you are not blindly following your unconscious mind. This gives you the option of changing your relationship to unpleasant feelings by giving you a clear view of the world.
When we are stressed, our body releases cortisol, which impairs memory, increases blood pressure and disrupts your sleep2. Cortisol can also lead to depression and chronic anxiety, which can bring your productive lifestyle to a crashing halt. A 2013 study found that meditation, specifically mindfulness meditation, effectively deals with stress by decreasing the negative side effects of cortisol2. In a study with 1200 participants, Meditation was found to lower stress effectively compared to all medical and psychological treatments3. The results of meditation are consistent for people of all ages and experience levels so no matter who you are, it can be an effective way to reduce stress. With deeper understanding of your senses and emotions, you can also build self-esteem that won’t go away during difficult situations like failure and social rejection. This will also help you avoid Depression and improve your quality of sleep. With improved sleep, you can increase attention and improve memory as the memory regions in the brain can be more developed4.
Mendi vs the traditional methods
Compared to the traditional methods, like Meditation, therapy, and mind exercises, that train the mind to strengthen the brain, Mendi claims to train the brain directly. It remains to be seen if Mendi’s method is any better than Meditation because they both work on the same principle of focusing your mind on particular thought, object or activity. Even though Mendi claims to be different, we think that it is using the same principles of meditation. The main value proposition of Mendi could be that it allows you to meditate consistently by providing real-time feedback about your brain activity through the game app. The limitation of Meditation is that it is difficult to achieve as it requires a lot of practice and concentration, so Mendi definitely has an advantage as it can be used by anyone and everyone in a consistent way.
Pricing and Availability
Mendi is available on Kickstarter, starting at an early-bird rate of $299 USD (MSRP $499 USD) and ships in September 2020, anywhere in the world. In the box, you get the Mendi device, MicroUSB cable, Traning app, and 1 year warranty.
References: 1) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 2) psychologytoday 3) ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 4) healthline
I am officially a tech addict and enjoy providing my views on matters related to this industry. I am always interested in trying out new tech gadgets and I have owned multiple smartphones including the legendary HTC One, SGS2, Nexus 4, iPhone 4, 5S, 6S, XR, Note 9. You can ask me any tech related questions in the comment section or on twitter @hookedNav