AI and Your Nervous System | Growth Lab x SABDA (Workshop & Breathwork Session)
A collaboration between GROWTH LAB x SABDA STUDIO
Two talks, a panel, and a breathwork session guided by an AI
A voice tells you when to breathe in. The light on the walls shifts as it speaks. Nobody in the room is talking except the machine.
Wellbeing practice has always run on presence, attention and the body. AI is the technology most of us associate with the exact opposite. And yet the fastest growing corner of wellness is machines built to settle you down. Rings that score your recovery, apps that tell you when to breathe, rooms that read the bodies inside them. The tools are getting genuinely good. Whether they deepen a practice or quietly replace the part that was doing the work is still an open question.
In this one off Growth Lab LIVE session with SABDA, we look at what happens when the tools of calm are built by machines. Then we stop talking about it and try one.
Talk 1: Music that Listens - AI, Brain Signals and Your Mood
Dr. Rafael Ramírez-Meléndez, UPF. Rafael leads the Music and Machine Learning Lab at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he builds systems that read brain activity and reshape music in real time based on a listener's emotional state. His work spans depression, dementia and palliative care, and his recent book Neurocognitive Music Therapy argues that AI is transforming what music-based therapy can do.
Music has always changed how people feel. What's new is that the music can now change in response to you. Rafael's lab builds systems that read a listener's brain activity and adjust the timing, dynamics and expression of a piece in real time, closing the loop between what you hear and what it does to you. He'll cover what the evidence actually shows across depression, dementia and palliative care, where the technology genuinely helps, and what happens when a machine gets better than a musician at choosing what you need to hear.
Talk 2: Building an AI that guides humans to breathe
Marvyn Halfon, Co-Founder, SABDA
SABDA is an immersive wellness studio in Barcelona where the room itself is part of the practice. Over the past year we've built an AI guide that leads our sessions and a system where her voice generates the light on the walls in real time.
This talk is the story of how that got built: the design decisions behind giving an AI a voice people will actually surrender to, what we got wrong along the way, and what it takes to make generated audio feel human enough to guide a nervous system. Then where it goes next, personalisation, and the move into biometrics, where the room responds to the bodies inside it rather than to a fixed score.
Underneath it all, one question: how do you merge a practice that's thousands of years old with the tools of tomorrow, without losing what made it work in the first place.
Panel: From Therapy to Wearables - Will A.I Make Us More Calm or Less Calm? Plus Q&A
Dr. Rafael Ramírez-Meléndez, UPF
Marvyn Halfon, Co-Founder, SABDA
Chaired by Matt Freemantle, plus audience Q&AUnderneath almost every wellbeing device sold in the last five years is a single claim: that a machine can tell how you feel and do something useful about it. Some of that is real and clinically tested. Some of it is a ring with a marketing budget. This panel goes after where the line sits. What a practitioner or a founder should actually adopt and what they should refuse. What happens to a teacher when the software personalises better than they can. And whether a generation that hands its regulation to devices ends up calmer, or just less able to settle itself without help.
Live Meditation: Breathwork Meditation Session, Guided by an A.I
A 30 minute guided breathwork session led entirely by an AI guide created by SABDA. The AI voice guides the breath, and the room responds to it live, with the light on the walls generated by the voice as it speaks.
This is one of the first AI guided breathwork sessions in the world, and this is an exclusive preview for the Growth Lab community ahead of the public launch in October. The people in this room will be among the first to experience it.
No mats, no experience needed. Just sit, close your eyes, and let the week slow down for half an hour.
Agenda:
14.00 | Doors open
14.20 | Talk 1: Music That Listens, AI, Brain Signals and Your Mood
14.40 | Talk 2: Building an AI That Guides Humans to Breathe, Marvyn Halfon, Co-Founder, SABDA
15.00 | Panel: From Therapy to Wearables, chaired by Matt Freemantle, plus Q&A
15.30 | Breathwork session, guided by an AI
16.00 | Coffee, juice and chats
17.00 | Close
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