Given the Binaural Beats meditation of April 18, I thought this article has interesting elaborations.
From the article:
In this feature, we explore these five mains styles of meditation — mindfulness, guided, mantra, sound, and repetitive tasks — all proven methods to achieve altered states of consciousness, without drugs, fasting or other unhealthy tricks. They are so diverse; one is bound to appeal to you.
Interesting article thanks Barry. It makes me think of the Muse device. You wear it when you meditate and it provides some EEG readings giving feedback on brain activity apparently. I considered trying it for a time but had some concern about focusing on a device for the direction of my mediation practice instead of just pure open awareness. The article seems to be making the connection that the Theta brainwaves might be those moments when you really achieve openness. It would be interesting to try…
Didn’t have much success with the earlier version of Muse but the latest one seems to be better and useful for sleep monitoring. @ArthurG seems to be in tune with this device.
I currently use Muse 6 hours/week (on a good week) for meditation, and find it useful to create an environment for meditation (lately a lot of this is done with box breathing). Not sure if the brainwave biofeedback is helpful per se, but it definitely helps me keep meditating.
I have not been using it for sleep monitoring lately, and not sure how accurate that aspect is – Night Club sleep expert Ed O’Malley had this to say about that in another thread a while back:
Like you Arthur G I was very interested in the MUSE-S given it’s sleep tracking hype. Unfortunately, as of right now, it is still mostly hype. It has not been validated against the gold standard sleep study. I’ve been trying to work with them (since last winter) because I was deciding between the MUSE-S and the DREEM headband for a research study we are conducting. The DREEM headband is the closest to the gold standard, and it’s sleep staging algorithm is as accurate as human staging. The MUSE-S on the other hand is neither validated by the gold standard sleep study nor assessed against human sleep staging. I had bought one to test (which I always do anyway as I have patients/clients asking for recommendations all the time) and find it incredibly inaccurate. At this stage (4 frustrating months) I cannot even state whether I have a faulty headband, their algorithm doesn’t work well, or their algorithm doesn’t work well for the elderly, or anything specific except it doesn’t work for me. (Ed O’Malley)
I consider the Muse S useful for my current purposes. However, I originally bought it for sleep-tracking purposes and based on Ed’s comments have doubts about its accuracy for that purpose.
~ArthurG (they/them)