Firstly, I would like to say TMI is a great book and the “interludes” match up well with my subjective experience.
Secondly, the concerns moridinamael mentions are typically not an issue for beginning meditators. Motivation issues usually don’t manifest until one has accumulated a number of “insights” which often requires hundreds or thousands of hours meditating. Flat affect can be mitigated by interleaving metta style meditation into the follow-breath-at-nose routine. Anecdotally from some meditation lineages—and from examining self report data from roughly 200 meditation practitioners—there seems to be a bump in meditation quality that happens after 40 to 45 minutes of sitting on the cushion so I would recommend you aim for 1 hour/day.
As justinpombrio said (for certain types of focused meditation training) attentional blink was shown to decrease:
A simple technique to “objectively” measure focused attention style meditation progress is to use a hand tally counter. During a meditation session whenever you catch yourself mind wandering you simple click the counter. At first remembering to click is hard but after a week or two of daily practice it becomes second nature. For me after a while it became so second nature that I would sometimes have enough awareness to click to register the mind wandering but not enough awareness to actually return to the breath. An upgrade would be to hook up to some sort of arduino and timestamp each click looking for trends (e.g. does your mind quiet down earlier in a session as your cumulative practice time increases).
A step up is to track physiological data (e.g. heart rate variability) and EEG (e.g. using the MUSE)
Anecdotally from some meditation lineages—and from examining self report data from roughly 200 meditation practitioners—there seems to be a bump in meditation quality that happens after 40 to 45 minutes of sitting on the cushion so I would recommend you aim for 1 hour/day.
When reading reports like this it’s worth to be specific about what’s meant with “meditation quality”. Meditating that long gets you into different states. Those states are helpful if the goal is to have spiritual experiences. They also make it more likely to have some negative effects.
My prediction (based on a bunch of informal theory) would be that those states are less valuable when your goal is to train attention and the style in which I train recommends to not go over 20 minutes for beginners who have trouble holding focus anyway.
from examining self report data from roughly 200 meditation practitioners
Is this data available? I’d be interested to see it.
Another task is the psychomotor vigilance (PVT) task
Ah, I may add that task as it seems relevant. Your link is going to the wrong place, though, what did you mean to link to?
A simple technique to “objectively” measure focused attention style meditation progress is to use a hand tally counter. During a meditation session whenever you catch yourself mind wandering you simple click the counter.
I don’t know what to consider a mind wander. Sometimes there’s a big one, and I lose attention and awareness completely until I remember that I’m meditating, and that’s pretty clear. But sometimes there’s a little one, and I maybe lose attention for half a second but after that my attention returns and the thoughts continue “in the background”, and as far as I can tell my attention didn’t wander during a breath/footstep but it’s hard to tell. And sometimes there’s a potential sensory distraction that becomes a little more than that, and either it seems like I’m paying attention to both the distraction and my breath/feet at once, or it seems to jump to the distraction and back, but only briefly.
The issue is that I don’t see any clear dividing line between these different situations, and I don’t see a clear dividing line between attention and awareness. So I don’t know what to consider a mind wander. This isn’t a big deal when labeling, because it probably doesn’t matter how wide I cast my labeling net, but I wouldn’t know how to interpret the counter. Any advice?
For me after a while it became so second nature that I would sometimes have enough awareness to click to register the mind wandering but not enough awareness to actually return to the breath.
Been there, done that :-).
there seems to be a bump in meditation quality that happens after 40 to 45 minutes
I haven’t experienced this myself: subjectively the first 5 minutes seem strong, and everything after that seems messy. But I’ve seen this stated enough places (TMI, MCTB I think, you, other sources that I forget) that I trust it. Yes, I will continue with 1 hour sessions.
OTOH it is likely you will experience changes to well-being before anything more quantifiable shows up:
Yeah, this seems likely. I’m already noticing it chipping away slightly at my neuroses. They’re harder to maintain when you see them.
Firstly, I would like to say TMI is a great book and the “interludes” match up well with my subjective experience.
Secondly, the concerns moridinamael mentions are typically not an issue for beginning meditators. Motivation issues usually don’t manifest until one has accumulated a number of “insights” which often requires hundreds or thousands of hours meditating. Flat affect can be mitigated by interleaving metta style meditation into the follow-breath-at-nose routine. Anecdotally from some meditation lineages—and from examining self report data from roughly 200 meditation practitioners—there seems to be a bump in meditation quality that happens after 40 to 45 minutes of sitting on the cushion so I would recommend you aim for 1 hour/day.
As justinpombrio said (for certain types of focused meditation training) attentional blink was shown to decrease:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050138
Another task is the psychomotor vigilance (PVT) task which has a long history in sleep deprivation research:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050138
A simple technique to “objectively” measure focused attention style meditation progress is to use a hand tally counter. During a meditation session whenever you catch yourself mind wandering you simple click the counter. At first remembering to click is hard but after a week or two of daily practice it becomes second nature. For me after a while it became so second nature that I would sometimes have enough awareness to click to register the mind wandering but not enough awareness to actually return to the breath. An upgrade would be to hook up to some sort of arduino and timestamp each click looking for trends (e.g. does your mind quiet down earlier in a session as your cumulative practice time increases).
A step up is to track physiological data (e.g. heart rate variability) and EEG (e.g. using the MUSE)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5838011/
OTOH it is likely you will experience changes to well-being before anything more quantifiable shows up:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5464416/
When reading reports like this it’s worth to be specific about what’s meant with “meditation quality”. Meditating that long gets you into different states. Those states are helpful if the goal is to have spiritual experiences. They also make it more likely to have some negative effects.
My prediction (based on a bunch of informal theory) would be that those states are less valuable when your goal is to train attention and the style in which I train recommends to not go over 20 minutes for beginners who have trouble holding focus anyway.
Is this data available? I’d be interested to see it.
Ah, I may add that task as it seems relevant. Your link is going to the wrong place, though, what did you mean to link to?
I don’t know what to consider a mind wander. Sometimes there’s a big one, and I lose attention and awareness completely until I remember that I’m meditating, and that’s pretty clear. But sometimes there’s a little one, and I maybe lose attention for half a second but after that my attention returns and the thoughts continue “in the background”, and as far as I can tell my attention didn’t wander during a breath/footstep but it’s hard to tell. And sometimes there’s a potential sensory distraction that becomes a little more than that, and either it seems like I’m paying attention to both the distraction and my breath/feet at once, or it seems to jump to the distraction and back, but only briefly.
The issue is that I don’t see any clear dividing line between these different situations, and I don’t see a clear dividing line between attention and awareness. So I don’t know what to consider a mind wander. This isn’t a big deal when labeling, because it probably doesn’t matter how wide I cast my labeling net, but I wouldn’t know how to interpret the counter. Any advice?
Been there, done that :-).
I haven’t experienced this myself: subjectively the first 5 minutes seem strong, and everything after that seems messy. But I’ve seen this stated enough places (TMI, MCTB I think, you, other sources that I forget) that I trust it. Yes, I will continue with 1 hour sessions.
Yeah, this seems likely. I’m already noticing it chipping away slightly at my neuroses. They’re harder to maintain when you see them.