Ariel Garten (@ariel_garten) is the Founder of InteraXon, makers of Muse: the brain sensing headband. Muse is the award-winning headband that makes meditation easier. During guided exercises, Muse senses your brain activity and sends that information to your phone or tablet, giving you real time audio feedback... Ariel has researched at the Krembil Neuroscience Institute studying hippocampal neurogenesis, displayed work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, DeLeon White Gallery and opened Toronto Fashion Week. The intersections of these diverse interests have culminated into various lectures with topics such as “The Neuroscience of Aesthetics” and “The Neuroscience of Conflict”, featured on TVO’s Big Ideas. Referred to as the “Brain Guru”, Garten has also run a successful real estate business, spent time as the designer of a Canadian fashion boutique, and is a practicing psychotherapist. Garten regularly lectures at MIT, Singularity University and FutureMed. Her lecture on Ted.com has over 400k views and she gave this year’s opening keynote at Le Web (plus numerous times previously), Europe’s biggest tech conference.   You can listen right here on iTunes In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover many things, including: * The science of meditation and how it affects your brain * Why Ariel is passionate about neuroscience and its ability to evolve our species * How IoT and technical enhancements will shape humans of the future * The mental health problem we're facing and how to overcome it * Why elite performers tend to be meditators * The ways to consciously control and hack your brain * How technological innovation will impact our evolution * What brain scientists are just starting to understand * The reason capitalist incentive structures drive many of our most pressing problems * What is really the future for wearables Get 15% OFF Muse when you use this link! “Transcript”   Producing this podcast and transcribing the episode takes tons of time and resources. If you support FringeFM and the work we do, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. If you can’t afford to support us, we completely understand as well, but an iTunes review or share on Twitter can go a long way too!   Ariel: I said this is the work of Dr Elizabeth Blackburn. She's a Nobel Prize winning scientist and she actually talks about and this sounds [Inaudible] which is why reference at this is a Nobel Prize winning scientist and this is her Nobel Prize. In that voice and so her work talks about the fact that negative thoughts actually lead to cellular aging. So, when we have a negative perception of the world in a negative sort of viewpoint what ends up happening is we create cellular stress in one of the ways that you measure the cellular stress is the length of your telomeres. So telomeres are kind of like the shoelaces the little plastic knobs on the end of our DNA. They're there to protect the DNA. When your cells are in a state of cellular stress those little telomeres those names decrease in size and see your DNA is much more readily subjective subjected to a damage through reproduction or through general copying. So when we meditate [Inaudible] work shows that meditators actually have increased length of their telomeres so their processes of cellular aging have actually been slowed.     Matt: The ancients discovered many modernish sciences centuries before they would be rediscovered by Europeans. It turns out that technology thought innovation can oftentimes go backwards losses of information like these can lead to large societal and cultural cautious.