I’m lying on a bench that feels soft and bouncy underneath my body. I’m somewhere toward the end of the session when the vibrations come to a halt. By then, the soundscape in my headphones has reached a crescendo, I can feel a constellation of lights flickering behind my closed eyelids, and my body feels a little tingly. For a split second, I feel like I’m hurtling through space like Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar. Then all the stimuli fade and a soft voice beckons me to take a few deep breaths. The most high-tech meditation session I’ve ever experienced is over.
Resonate looks like the kind of sleek lounge chair and ottoman you might find in James Bond’s villa overlooking Hollywood, with the high-tech accessories to match. The version I tried was only a prototype, but it came with all the bells and whistles: a cushy bench that sends an array of vibration patterns from head to toe, a pair of headphones that plays binaural beats (we’ll get to that later), and a padded eye mask that produces flickers of light when your eyes are closed.
Meanwhile, the soundscape in the headphones uses binaural beats, an emerging form of sound-wave therapy that makes use of the fact that the right and left ear each receive a slightly different frequency tone. When played at a certain frequency, binaural beats could help guide the brain into a particular state. “If you present a stimulus to your brain, it’ll start moving toward that stimulus,” says Bush. The light flickers work much the same way.
According to Dr. Audrey Brumback, a pediatric neurologist in UT Health Austin Pediatric Neurosciences at Dell Children’s, the idea that sensory stimuli can influence brain waves is well known. She points to an early feasibility study last month, in which researcher Annabelle Singer used flickering lights and sound to treat mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease (in this case, the flicker stimulated gamma waves, which help improve high-level cognitive functions, like perception and memory). And in a 2015 clinical trial, a team of scientists, engineers, and clinicians from Harvard’s Wyss Institute, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and UMass Chan Medical School showed that subtle vibrations in vibrating pads can help reduce apnea and improve breathing for premature babies.
“Flashing lights at somebody, playing beats to them, or tapping their hand at certain frequency all are going to induce rhythmic activity in the brain,” says Brumback. “The question is, to what effect?”
Brumback herself specializes in child neurology and autism. She is currently researching the impact of rhythmic sensory feedback on people with autism who engage in stereotypical behavior like rocking their body or flapping their hands. “Doing things that are rhythmic is soothing,” she says, and stimuli like vibrations or sound could mimic those benefits, “providing a steady metronome onto which the brain activity can organize itself.” She’s even working with biomedical engineering students at UT Austin to develop a device that would allow a person with autism to dial into their preferred frequency of stimulation and test if it’s beneficial.
So how can we measure if Resonate really works? “The evidence is going to be in the report of people and how they feel, and that’s messy,” she says. “I think to make it something I’d prescribe as treatment, I would want to see a placebo-controlled trial.”
The Resonate team hasn’t done a placebo-controlled trial, but Bush says it’s on their road map. For now, the chair is geared toward consumers, from private customers to hotels, spas, and even workplaces. But exploring the medical route is also part of the plan. Eventually, Bush wants to get the product covered by insurance so it counts as preventative care, but she says that process, which involves countless trials, is very expensive.
Somewhere down the line, Bush also hopes to cut the price of the chair to under $1,000. “This is something we talk about a lot because we understand we are a high price point, and we care about making meditation accessible,” she says. “We started with a higher-ticket item so we can fund the research for lower-ticket items.”
At this price point, it’s hard to say whether Resonate can make a difference for those who really need it. Until more research is done to measure the impact, it’s also hard to say if it really does make meditating easier. When my trial was over, Bush asked if I had lost a sense of time, which she explained is a strong indicator that the meditation worked. I admitted I hadn’t, but as I stood back on my feet, I did feel like I was leaving a short spa session.
The thing is, meditation is a muscle, and Resonate is not a magic chair. “The more you use the system, the better you’ll get at it,” says Bush. Arguably, a good old tech-free meditation requires practice, too, but at least with Resonate, you get a sensory nudge in the right direction.