This is very interesting, and quite different from the “follow your breath, don’t get caught up in thoughts, enlightenment is for after sitting on top of the Himalayas for 30 years” meditation writings I’ve mostly seen thus far.
I’m not sure if meditation is a working solution, but the problem of the human mind having low-level mechanical biases that are better addressed by something akin to mechanical exercise rather than high-level symbolic metacognition is quite likely to be real, and this seems like as good an approach as any I can think of to try to address it.
I wonder if meditation skill would show up as something interesting in the readings from a consumer-grade EEG headset.
I wonder if meditation skill would show up as something interesting in the readings from a consumer-grade EEG headset.
It does show up, but it isn’t really useful. At best, you can read some basic level of attention or “powering down”. Here’s a video of Ken Wilber hooked up to one. (I’m not defending Wilber or his claims, just wanted to show a simple demonstration.) I vaguely remember some material on that topic (I think by Persinger or one of his students), but no actually exciting result.
(I’m getting a Zeo in a few days and will experiment a bit myself.)
That’s interesting, thanks. The worst case scenario for these meditation claims is that there’s nothing much going on except delusions from constant wishful thinking, but being able to dampen brainwave frequencies at will might be some non-subjective evidence indicating that there’s some genuinely nontrivial skill being built here.
This is very interesting, and quite different from the “follow your breath, don’t get caught up in thoughts, enlightenment is for after sitting on top of the Himalayas for 30 years” meditation writings I’ve mostly seen thus far.
I’m not sure if meditation is a working solution, but the problem of the human mind having low-level mechanical biases that are better addressed by something akin to mechanical exercise rather than high-level symbolic metacognition is quite likely to be real, and this seems like as good an approach as any I can think of to try to address it.
I wonder if meditation skill would show up as something interesting in the readings from a consumer-grade EEG headset.
It does show up, but it isn’t really useful. At best, you can read some basic level of attention or “powering down”. Here’s a video of Ken Wilber hooked up to one. (I’m not defending Wilber or his claims, just wanted to show a simple demonstration.) I vaguely remember some material on that topic (I think by Persinger or one of his students), but no actually exciting result.
(I’m getting a Zeo in a few days and will experiment a bit myself.)
That’s interesting, thanks. The worst case scenario for these meditation claims is that there’s nothing much going on except delusions from constant wishful thinking, but being able to dampen brainwave frequencies at will might be some non-subjective evidence indicating that there’s some genuinely nontrivial skill being built here.