Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• One company claims its specially designed chair generates meditative states of consciousness by mimicking a weightless experience similar to sensory deprivation.
• However, the science behind the chair’s effects is still unproven, though the creator has published a white paper describing EEG patterns and altered states of consciousness in users.
• Experts say peer-reviewed research must be conducted before accepting that the chair can reliably produce true meditative states, especially given its high price.

Quieting the mind can take time and discipline. Some people spend days—even weeks—at intensive retreats sitting in silence; others journey to far-flung locales to study under gurus. But now, one company claims you can simply sit in its chair.

Cambridge, U.K.-based chairmaker DavidHugh has recently unveiled the Aiora chair, which is designed to “make meditation effortless.” At first glance, it looks like a typical mid-century lounge chair, but sit in it, and you experience a sensation of weightlessness, says designer and co-founder David Wickett, who has a background in industrial design and a PhD in biomedical engineering. He says the floating sensation derives from the chair’s ability to evenly distribute pressure across the body and shift the user’s center of mass horizontally rather than vertically. The result is the removal of external sensory input, which feels similar to floating in a sensory deprivation tank.

Meditation has long been shown to decrease anxiety, stress, and depression and has various health benefits, like improving immune function and reducing inflammation. Sensory deprivation tanks appear to induce a similar state. By minimizing external inputs, such as light, sound, and gravity, users can turn their focus inward and improve mindfulness.

The chair, too, was designed to facilitate this state, and Wickett says users often report altered states of consciousness while sitting in it. A white paper on the website claims that the chair produces a distinctive EEG pattern characterized by decreased slow-wave activity and increased fast-frequency activity. This pattern of activity, the paper states, “mirrors EEG patterns found in long-term Buddhist meditators.”

With a price tag between £5,000 and £9,000—at the time of publishing, this was between roughly $6,730 and $12,113—we asked the experts what they thought of these claims.

“Overall, I think the chair is a cool idea, and it deserves some real science behind it. But so far, this is not real science,” said Willoughby Britton, professor of psychiatry and clinical psychologist at Brown University. She strongly cautions that the claims need more rigorous validation. A first step would be to conduct a randomized controlled trial comparing the chair to a similar-looking control, in which neither the subjects nor the scientists would know which is which. Then, they would have to apply statistical methods to the results and publish them in a peer-reviewed journal.

None of this was done in the white paper. Britton says the white paper reads more like marketing than science. She also warns that inferring a mental state solely from a brain state, especially limited EEG measurements, is dubious since similar patterns of neural activity can arise in various psychological states.

Wickett admits that EEG findings are limited in their ability to draw conclusions, but they are nonetheless listed in the white paper.

He says more robust research, with controls and statistics, is currently underway and awaiting review. But research into the chair’s effects is still exploratory, he adds. For now, the chair offers a novel way to relax or even change brain states in ways that feel good to users. Whether it can reliably produce a meditative state remains to be seen—which is another way to say it’s an expensive experiment for those who can afford it.