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.
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.