From glitzy meditation courses to psychedelic retreats in the jungle, some people go to astonishing lengths to get out of their minds.
But now, finding inner peace might be as simple as having a nice sit–down.
That is the astonishing promise of the Aiora chair from British designers DavidHugh LTD, which claims to put the sitter in an ‘altered state of mind’ in minutes.
Ranging from £5,700 for the basic model to £9,950 for the leather–clad ‘Signature’ version, tranquillity doesn’t come cheap – but is it worth the cost?
Scientists claim that sitting in this unusual seat creates massive changes in people’s brains, leading to states usually seen in Tibetan monks in deep meditation.
To put these wacky claims to the test, I made my way to the University of Essex, where psychologists have been investigating the Aiora chair’s strange properties since 2018.
To separate fact from fiction, scientists would be carefully watching my brain activity every second I was sitting in the chair.
So, is it worth £9,000? After a tough day of lounging about in the name of science, I’m convinced that it is worth every penny.
The inventors of the Aiora chair claim that this simple–looking recliner can put you in an altered state of consciousness in minutes. But is it worth the price?
The Aiora chair is the brainchild of furniture designer and biomechanics expert Dr David Wickett, whose plan was not to make something that affected the brain.
Having started his career designing clinical seating solutions for patients with mobility issues, the original goal had simply been to make a chair that reduced pressure on the body as much as possible.
It was only when people started reporting strange experiences like altered perceptions of time that Dr Wickett decided to hand over his creation to the psychologists at the University of Essex.
I met Dr Wickett and Dr Helge Gillmeister, a psychologist who has been working with the Aiora chair, in the quiet seclusion of the university’s sleep laboratory.
After hearing so much about what was about to happen to my brain, I’d been expecting to find something that would look at home on the set of Star Trek.
So I was rather surprised to find what appeared to be a normal, albeit rather stylish, recliner looking enormously out of place amongst the piles of scientific equipment.
There are no spinning wheels, flashing lights, or really anything with any moving parts at all – in fact, it doesn’t even need power to work.
Instead, the Aiora chair works by recreating the sensation of floating in zero gravity using a technology Dr Wickett calls ‘pure planar motion mechanics’.
To see just how much the Aiora chair (right) really lives up the hype, the Daily Mail’s Wiliam Hunter travelled to Essex University to see how it would really change his brain
What this creates in practice is a sensation that is monumentally difficult to put into words.
In fact, the chair is so weird that Dr Wickett says that we shouldn’t really think of it as a piece of furniture at all.
‘It represents a new category of wellness innovation that we’re calling embodied neurodesign,’ he said as we set up for the experiment.
To put that in layman’s terms, this is more like a chair–shaped meditation tool than somewhere to sit while you read the paper.
For a start, I had to spend a few minutes ‘learning’ to sit in it before I could hold myself in a balanced position.
The Aiora chair has a mechanism that ensures your body’s centre of gravity only ever moves horizontally, even as you rock back and forth.
That makes it so sensitive that even a deep breath or a wiggle of your fingers can send you tipping one way or another.
But when you do finally get to the perfect balance point, the sheer force of friction simply vanishes, and you are suddenly floating.
The chair simulates the sensation of floating weightlessly. Studies have shown that sitting in the chair produces brain activity similar to that of skilled meditators
The sensation is subtle but extremely strange: on one hand, you know you are very much sat in a chair, but on the other, there is an overwhelming sensation of drifting through space.
Closing my eyes was like being transported from the dimly lit lab onto a moving rollercoaster as my inner ear fought with my brain over where I was going.
For the first trial, Dr Wickett suggested I simply sit in the chair and listen to some relaxing music for 15 minutes to get used to the feeling.
Having used sensory deprivation tanks in the past, I was actually shocked by just how similar the feeling of being adrift really was.
With my eyes closed and the headphones keeping the real world at bay, it felt like the space around me was opening up into an expansive void.
While the experience is subtle at first, I soon found myself drifting into a deep, calm, and blissfully quiet state.
Then, all of a sudden, the music had ended, and Dr Wickett was turning the lights back on.
Although 15 minutes had passed in the real world, I felt like I couldn’t have sat down for more than five minutes in total.
In order to see what effect the chair really has, Dr Helge Gillmeister fitted me with an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap, designed to measure the activity in the outer layers of my brain
As Dr Gillmeister later explained, it was actually this bizarre effect on time perception that first piqued her interest in the Aiora chair.
This effect was something she had also spotted in her research into inducing dissociative states through extended periods of mirror gazing.
While the exact mechanism is still a little unclear, it seems to be a sign that something is disturbing the normal integration of our sensory information.
In the case of the Aiora chair, the researchers think that the lack of normal information about our bodies’ whereabouts somehow interferes with the way we normally put together our picture of the world.
Having now had a taste of what I was getting myself into, it was time for the real science.
Dr Gillmeister fitted my head with an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap, designed to measure the activity in the outer layers of my brain.
When brain cells talk to one another, they produce a tiny electrical charge, but when thousands are chatting away all at once, it creates an electrical field big enough to measure.
Our brains are constantly churning out a low–level electrical fuzz, but what Dr Gillmeister is really looking for are changes in my ‘brain waves’.
The EEG data shows that my brain’s activity actually increased across most bands, including the fast Alpha brain waves. This suggests I was becoming more alert and more aware of my internal sensations
When you plot the voltage in one brain area, you can see that it goes up and down over time, like someone adjusting the brightness on a dimmable bulb – tracing the shape of a wave.
Some of these waves, known as alpha waves, are small and fast and are normally associated with activity in the sensory systems.
Others, known as delta waves, are long, slow oscillations that are typically found in the brains of people in deep sleep.
If Dr Gillmeister can see big changes in my brain waves while I sit in the chair, that should tell us whether I am relaxed, focused, excited, or spinning out into an altered state of consciousness.
So, with a head caked in sticky gel and a thicket of wires protruding from my skull, it was time to see what was really going on inside my brain.
Just as before, I sat down on the Aiora chair, settled back into the frictionless balanced point, closed my eyes, and drifted off into space.
Once again, that strange sensation of quiet and calm slipped over me as the slight floating rock of the chair lulled me away from consciousness.
Following Dr Wickett’s advice, I tried to follow some simple meditation techniques.
The amount of slow Delta brain waves decreased. These are usually associated with sleep so it suggests that I wasn’t dozing off despite the feeling of relaxation
I’d never been a very successful meditator and, despite over a year of stubborn daily practice throughout my short–lived mindfulness phase, I never could quite let my mind truly settle down.
However, after just a few minutes of deep breathing, I soon found myself in what can only be described as a meditative trance.
The half–hour slipped by in what felt like minutes, and soon the lights were back on, and I was rudely deposited back in reality – feeling deeply refreshed and ever so slightly dazed.
Looking at the data gathered by the EEG, it was also clear that something profoundly strange was happening inside my brain during that half an hour.
The activity in my brain had actually increased in every single frequency of brain wave, except for the slow–moving delta waves.
Dr Wickett later told me: ‘Increased delta is associated with sleep, so these data suggest that your state of consciousness gradually shifted away from sleep as the session went on.
‘The data clearly show that you became increasingly cognitively active as time passed in the chair. Given that the lights were out and the environment was quiet, it is safe to assume that your internal awareness increased.’
The only exception was a sudden spike in delta activity at the 11–minute mark, which, while charitably explained as a ‘liminal state’, was probably explained by my briefly dozing off.
The heart rate data suggests I was moving between different nervous system states – changing from ‘fight or flight’ to ‘rest and recover’. This is something often seen in people at the peak of psychedelic trips
At the same time, heart rate data shows that my body had been rapidly switching between ‘fight or flight’ and ‘rest and repair’ nervous system responses.
These changes between the ‘sympathetic’ and ‘parasympathetic’ nervous systems are generally a sign of a profoundly altered state of consciousness, and something often seen in the brains of people at the peak of a psychedelic DMT trip.
Although only anecdotal, this unusual finding echoes Dr Wickett’s account of a powerfully intense meditation experience in the chair, which he described as ‘something between MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms’.
But the strangest thing of all was that the EEG data showed that my cortical activity shifted toward the right hemisphere.
Dr Gillmeister explains: ‘More activity in your right hemisphere means an approach motivation.
‘It’s a kind of motivational state where you want to go towards something. If you translate it in terms of emotions, then it’d be all the ones that will make you move forward – like joy or anger.’
Likewise, studies have suggested that more activity in the right hemisphere is associated with a more diffuse, less focused form of attention.
So, is it worth putting down almost £10,000 for something that can do this to your brain? Strangely, having now tried it out for myself, I almost want to say that it is.
While the Aiora chair might be expensive, the evidence suggests it really does induce enhanced states of alertness and relaxation at the neurological level
Obviously, that is a staggering amount of money to spend on anything – especially a chair.
But considering how much money people are willing to blow chasing inner peace with innumerable wellness trends, classes, and retreats, that might not seem so silly.
While so much of the wellness industry is littered with exaggerations, misinformation, and outright scams, there is hard data to show that the Aiora chair is at least doing something to your brain.
If I were the kind of person with a few thousand pounds to spend on relaxing, I would be sorely tempted to install an Aiora chair in the living room – and possibly never leave it again.