Meditative States Research

theravadin

Hello Everyone,

I'm an American-born Buddhist monk in rural Sri Lanka. Have a tech background, and am very interested in researching correlations between brainwave activity and meditative states. Want to know more about OpenBCI and how we could use it.

rwsniadach

Hello Nyanasara,
I too am very interested in obtaining and using OpenBCI equipment for EEG neurofeedback to improve meditation and delve deeper into theta/delta brainwave states. We shall stay in touch.
R

theravadin

Hi. The hardware looks good. The only problem is, I can't find any recent research that shows more than a weak correlation between meditative states and brainwaves. I suspect that a lot of whatever meditation is takes place outside the brain. What do you think?

chipaudette

This doesn't address your direct question, but I have used OpenBCI to do some very rudimentary recordings of people while meditating. I found the results to be quite interesting...though I don't really know what the implications are. If you're interested in seeing what I found, you can check out:

http://eeghacker.blogspot.com/2013/12/eeg-while-meditating.html

Also, my favorite journal article on the topic is:

http://www.koepnick.de/Three Typs of Meditation.pdf

This paper speaks more to the EEG signature resulting from different meditative techniques. I have not independently confirmed any of the results, but I found the discussion quite enlightening.

Chip

paulherrin

just saw this article, the researchers here were relying on mri, but it would probably be useful for you to look into all the same.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/18/meditation-brain-activity_n_5338222.html

Lorcan

if anyone can afford it...
recommend buying a Wild Divine Software and Keystone package.
it's design is to learn to meditate.
Got one from a friend after giving a lecture about Alchemy.
She said I needed one.
It does the trick, but it's not open software.
You can buy a license for the SDK
But it's just a biofeedback of your heartbeat.

synja

Hey,

I don't work with OpenBCI's boards at all, so I can't attest to ease of use.

If the designs were open source or I could get my hands on a board, that might change.

They do require an additional MC though, either through arduino or rasp. pi.

Also, check out this website: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/

Sure, OpenBCI is the latest EEG fad website, but that place is an original.

BTW, it will be MUCH easier to monitor meditative states than anything else with an EEG, so kudos for accesibility.

rgardner

Dominant brainwave frequencies are well coordinated with meditative states.

For a good description of different brainwave frequencies:

http://www.infiniteminds.info/Learning-2.0/Brainwave-Entrainment/Brainwave-Entrainment-Full-Brainwave-Frequencies-Table.html

bryanbeus

Hey everyone,

Just tried out my OpenBCI board for the first time this morning.

I'm a daily meditator of five years and am really excited to see how direct EEG feedback integrates with my practice.

I'm not sure where and/or with whom I'll be getting involved in the OpenBCI community, but I surely will.

If
you're a part of any science-based EEG meditation community, feel free
to contact me via my website: bryanbeus dot com , to let me know how we
can get in touch.

Really excited!

wjcroft

Bryan, check out the BrainBay thread. There is a tutorial there showing neurofeedback for training increased alpha.

http://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/90/brainbay-install-neurofeedback-tutorial

You've likely seen these already, but good jumping off points,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_activity_and_meditation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_mechanisms_of_mindfulness_meditation

bryanbeus

Thanks, wjcroft.

Been going through the website all morning finding all kinds of communities, software, and resources.

OpenBCI is way cool. Really excited.

Winslow_Strong

I'd like to breath some life into this thread.  It seems like the tools are now in place to crowd source a citizen-science project of compiling an open EEG database of well-characterized meditative states (e.g. jhanas, metta, etc).  There would be many delicacies to doing this well, so I'd like to start discussing what would be involved.  I guess a starting point would be looking at any existing crowd-sourced EEG databases.  Are there any?

I have access to the following systems, based at the Transformative Technology Lab at Sofia University, in Palo Alto, California.

OpenBCI 8 channel

BrainMaster discovery 19 channel

EGI GES 400 64 channel + GeoScan digitizer

wjcroft

Winslow, hi.

I think you've heard Juan lecture on his meditative / altered states QEEG research. I wonder if he might donate some of his data samples. I believe he's using the Discovery 19 channel system.

http://www.energymedresearch.com/research1.html

I think that same Discovery system at TTLab has been loaned to Grant Rudolph in the past for data collection from meditators at his retreats,

http://echorocktherapy.com/neuroawakening/

Perhaps some of the data could be uploaded to CloudBrain or Syntrogi / Qusp,

http://getcloudbrain.com/

http://qusp.io/

@marion might have some ideas...

Seems like you'd need 19 channels as a minimum, if you want to compare with previous studies. I'll bet that you, Jeffery and TTLab have already done some data collection on the wandering monks and Finders Course participants that visit. Davidson has a raft of data from his work with the Tibetans. Wouldnt this be cool if some of these datasets could be made available for further analysis and comparison with newly gathered data.

https://www.google.com/search?q=eeg+meditation+states+data-set

Some links that Arno put together,

http://sccn.ucsd.edu/~arno/fam2data/publicly_available_EEG_data.html

Here's a related thread over at NeuroBB,

https://neurobb.com/t/meditation-what-changes-should-i-look-for-in-an-eeg/50

---

Isa @brain and @AdamM from NeuroBB are both on the forum here.

Great project!

William

AdamM

@Winslow_Strong, @wjcroft and everyone,

I just noticed this thread
(@mentions don't seem to be working, at least in my case). I'm super
interested in this topic, especially in the neurofeedback end of things.
I think it would be fantastic to participate in a "citizen science"
initiative to pull together the existing research on meditation-EEG
correlations and then possibly come up with some open-source, hardware-
and software-agnostic protocols for meditation training and assessment.

19
channels is more than our hardware can do, but I would be happy to help
setup a DB for aggregating the data and making it available, or help
out in other ways.

What would be the preferred method of
collaboration? If there's interest, I can set up a wiki page on NeuroBB
where we can start to pull together links or descriptions of existing
research (and links to data, where available).  

Winslow_Strong

Thanks for all the helpful links, @wjcroft. @AdamM, I would love to collaborate on this.  However, I'm probably only going to do this if I think it would actually be practically useful for users.  Mainly, I would like users to be able to extract neurofeedback signals from the database that would be helpful for them in progressing in meditative states more quickly.  My concerns are lack of uniformity/control in: 

• Subject selection
• Environment 
• Experimental conditions
  

Well-defined meditative states, like jhanas or brahma-viharas, might be standardized enough, but I think there still needs to be some quality control.

There may be ways to deal with subject selection by attempting to assess mastery level of the meditative state in question, and include that info in a database so it can be used as a filter.  Probably the subject should rate how well they think they nailed the meditative state during each data collection session as well.

I have to say though, I'm a bit dismayed by the fact that I can't really find any crowd-sourced EEG database of anything whatsoever.  Maybe some of the QEEG databases are clinician-crowd-sourced?  That's a bit different though, since that data would have been collected by clinicians under more standardized environments, without concern about subject skill level in a task.  

If anyone thinks these are or are not major problems for the utility of such data, I'd love to hear arguments/evidence both ways.  

Setting up a wiki on NeuroBB would be an awesome way to get the ball rolling!  If/when you do, probably a separate post is warranted on this forum, to make an attention-grabbing headline.

wjcroft

Here's an excellent new review article, March 2018.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2018.00178/full

----

Review of the Neural Oscillations Underlying Meditation

Objective: Meditation is one type of mental training that has been shown to produce many cognitive benefits. Meditation practice is associated with improvement in concentration and reduction of stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms. Furthermore, different forms of meditation training are now being used as interventions for a variety of psychological and somatic illnesses. These benefits are thought to occur as a result of neurophysiologic changes. The most commonly studied specific meditation practices are focused attention (FA), open-monitoring (OM), as well as transcendental meditation (TM), and loving-kindness (LK) meditation. In this review, we compare the neural oscillatory patterns during these forms of meditation.

Method: We performed a systematic review of neural oscillations during FA, OM, TM, and LK meditation practices, comparing meditators to meditation-naïve adults.

Results: FA, OM, TM, and LK meditation are associated with global increases in oscillatory activity in meditators compared to meditation-naïve adults, with larger changes occurring as the length of meditation training increases. While FA and OM are related to increases in anterior theta activity, only FA is associated with changes in posterior theta oscillations. Alpha activity increases in posterior brain regions during both FA and OM. In anterior regions, FA shows a bilateral increase in alpha power, while OM shows a decrease only in left-sided power. Gamma activity in these meditation practices is similar in frontal regions, but increases are variable in parietal and occipital regions.

Conclusions: The current literature suggests distinct differences in neural oscillatory activity among FA, OM, TM, and LK meditation practices. Further characterizing these oscillatory changes may better elucidate the cognitive and therapeutic effects of specific meditation practices, and potentially lead to the development of novel neuromodulation targets to take advantage of their benefits.

KCDTyler

Hi all,

I just thought I'd share some of what I have managed to record with my Cyton board. 

When I meditate, for sometime I have been experiencing  what I guess medical science would call seizure like activity, but which yogic literature classifies as a mula bhanda. This is a completely spontaneous experience for me and occurs completely without wilful intention. This usually happens when I am experiencing some level of flow and subtle euphoria. 

I decided to strap on the Cyton and hope for the best, marking these events with a button press. 

The results were much more than I had hoped for. 

I have attached some pics of 4 second epochs around these 'jumps' as well as a time freq plot. 

One pic shows several epochs over the course of the mediation and the other shows a single epoch, with the meditation recording in orange and an 'sitting eyes closed' recording plotted in blue. 

As you can see, there are huge spikes occurring about a second after the spontaneous mula band.

I thought this a pretty good effort, and I'd be interested in others thoughts. 

I know this looks a lot like some sort of artefact, but I am fairly sure that it is not-for a range of reasons which I am happy to discuss, if anyone is interested. 

Currently I am in the process of trying to get some grant money together to run a more thorough study, hopefully using MEG. 

I know there is a literature out there on mediation leading to a propensity for seizures. I also know there is a yogic understanding of various samadhis leading to what science would call a grand mal seizure. I know people who have witnessed meditators in India having this sort of experience. 

Perhaps there is some relationship here to kundalini. 

I am especially  interested if anyone else out there has any of these sorts of spontaneous physical movements, especially spine straightening, during mediation, as (all gong well) I hope to be looking for participants for a more in-depth study at some point in the future.  

   

Cheers,

Kaelasha

         

KCDTyler

Billh

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.822.9305&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Look at Figure 2 and allow for a big change in the vertical scale of their graph versus yours.

KCDTyler

Hi Bill,

Yes, these figures in the link you gave are K-complexes. Other people also initially wondered if the spikes in my data may have also been K-complexes. However after having a look at this data, colleagues at my university think they are most likely not, as the amplitudes in these spikes are far greater than are seen in the K-comlpex and sleep spindles. 

Perhaps there is a similar underlying mechanism and I think that is worth keeping in mind. But the morphology in the EEG and the experience are quite different. These spikes in the EEG happen with an intense straightening in the spine and what really is a very stereotyped and spontaneous mula bandha. That may seem a bit kooky to people not familiar with yoga, but the experience for me is quite convincing. 

Thanks for that link. I will read the paper in more detail. I think these are different things, but there may be some commonality? I'll read more. 

Cheers

Billh

That paper is from 1959, but was one of the first published papers on these sorts of arousal responses. There are more recent literatures on motor and EEG phenomena during such arousals and such things that can happen normally on occasions during drowsiness, as well as published work on books on EEG and sleep discussing similar motor movements during similar transitions in states of consciousness. Anyway the point is that it is more likelya normal phenomenon and not seizure.

wjcroft

Kaelasha, thanks for your posts and observations.

I have one question on your spikes. Since you say that "These spikes in the EEG happen with an intense straightening in the spine" -- does that also imply that your body and head moved sharply at the same time? If so, then the electrode cables and electrode/skin interface would also be subject to this rapid motion. Which would likely produce some spiking activity, perhaps not the entirety of what you are seeing, but some component of it.

Does that make sense? It might be possible to reduce cable / skin motion artifacts with some type of elastic cap / bands arrangement. But still, motion of EEG cables even if taped down, could result in some voltage produced at microvolt levels.

Could it be that in your third graph, the sharp spike is from body motion, but the preceding 's-shaped' wave, is what you are really referring to. In orange. What is the blue signal?

Regards,

William

wjcroft

Oops, re-reading your previous post, I see now that I had it reversed, the s-wave is your mulaband, so could have motion artifact, but the spike is supposedly when you are not moving, but from the graph is only 100 milliseconds later. So could be like an aftershock.

KCDTyler

Hi all,

Thanks for your thoughts and feedback. 

Bill, 

I'm not sure what the distinction is between 'normal phenomena' and 'seizures'. I thought K-complex were considered small seizures, or 'seizure like'?

Basically, the EEG here is recorded during a 'transition in state of consciousness'. Namely, from mind wandering, to a moment of flow and subtle euphoria accompanied by spontaneous physical movement. These jumps happen when my mind briefly becomes strongly absorbed in the mediation and random thoughts subside to a large extent. 

It is possible that there is a relation to K-Complexs, but the experience is very different to feeling drowsy or falling asleep. Both of which I know very well:)

William, Yes, there is certainly abrupt physical movement, in my spine and neck, and I was expecting to see a lot of movement artefact. I think you can see this in the picture above of the 17 different epochs. This messy high frequency movement artefact occurs around the spike. 

However, you wouldn't expect to see movement artefact show up as such a sharp and clearly defined spike would you? 

And yep, the s-wave is pretty much when the mula bandha happens. There is movement artefact then. The spike occurs just under a second afterwards. But this could correspond to later twitches in my neck, which do happen. What is probably more interesting is what happens in the second or so before the spike. 

Over all, and this is hard to convey convincingly in a text message, the spontaneous mula bandha is a bizarre experience. It is literally as though I am not the one doing it. It just happens. That is why I thought there may be some relationship to seizure- eg involuntary movements and even epileptic aura like experiences- the unusual and even unsettling feeling of flow and euphoria that happens. Plus the emotional intensity of it. 

The blue signal is just an eyes closed resting EEG recording, for comparison. 

Thanks for your thoughts. 

Movement artefact and k-complexes are worth keeping in mind. 

But over all, the whole thing is so intense, unusual, and enjoyable, that I am sure there must be something 'real' in the brain that underlies the experience. 

Cheers,

K

Billh

No, K complexes and the various kinds of seizure wave complexes are different things, one is normal and the others are not.

What you describe, perhaps hynogogic euphoria with hypnic jerks during prolonged meditation, is unusual, and I don't know of anything exactly like it that I have heard, though I've heard something a little like it before..

 I believe that such a phenomenon is indeed very real in both the brain and in experience!  And yes, these EEG changes probably are something similar to K complexes, with something like a vertex wave and some ripples you record, probably sometimes followed by a muscle artifact corresponding to the muscle activation. 

If you can record these things reliably, try to put an electrode on a muscle that you think jerks with such an event to record along with the EEG waves, to see if the muscle activation occurs at the same time as a particular part of the EEG pattern (I'd guess the EMG movement would hit just an instant after the vertex wave part of the K complex, but hey, it could be something else too).

wjcroft

K, yes kundalini phenomena / awakenings are absolutely real and have been documented in some labs. Juan might have a recording of this recent talk, if you contact him. Let me know, I'd be interested in listening or watching if so.

https://www.facebook.com/events/587712858238997/

http://energymedresearch.com/about.html

William