Meditation tracking devices, are they good?

[Vision]

I’ve been looking at the Muse S headband in particular. It tracks your meditation sessions like an EEG.  

[still_pulsating]

I've got Muse 2, and captured meditation before and after awakening experience:

Overall, it has a lot of false negatives, not very stable. You might be totally comfortable with no thoughts, and then it starts raining (in the app). But it generally captures some quantification of 'calmness' quite well. And all this might be further improved in S version.

Edited February 8, 2021 by still_pulsating

[GreenWoods]

@Vision I have the Muse S. It's good. But I'm not sure how reliable and exact it truly is. Though it is said to be pretty good.

In any case, it gave me some valuable insights. 

You definitely should additionally get the app Mind Monitor. It gives you the different brainwaves. The Muse app has been useless for me. It compares your meditation session to the calibration which you do right before your meditation. Thus you can't really track your performance over time. The performance it shows is always relative to your calibration session.

Edited February 7, 2021 by GreenWoods

[TheSelf]

@GreenWoods maybe it can be used to compare your regular meditation brain waves with waves it captures when you are about to sleep (if you can go to sleep with it) and see if you can get any close to it in your meditations? To check your progress in sleep yoga.

[GreenWoods]

3 hours ago, m0hsen said:

@GreenWoods maybe it can be used to compare your regular meditation brain waves with waves it captures when you are about to sleep (if you can go to sleep with it) and see if you can get any close to it in your meditations? To check your progress in sleep yoga.

That was the main reason why I bought it. I actually intended to make an extra post about it, but never got around doing it. Here you go:

Here are the average values of a couple of sessions:

• image doesn't seem to have the best quality, sorry lol.
• I forgot to add the baseline waves at first. So I had to squeeze them in.
• I connected the dots with a line only so you can better see what are the same points. The connecting line has no actual meaning.
• Baseline is an average of: reading, watching youtube, thinking with eyes closed. It is difficult to determine your baseline levels because if you have your eyes open then that has an impact on your brainwaves. As well as any tiny movement.  My high delta baseline is undoubtedly due to that (because movement has most influnece on delta)
• I never had perfect signal accuracy. But I think it was somewhat ok. Except during sleep. There it was a mess. So that data might not be reliable.

 

I doubt these results. Because:

• My baseline brainwaves shouldn't be that similiar like during trance (and meditation). And definitely not like light sleep, lol. (However, children's baseline brainwaves are similiar to that during their sleep. Even though sleep is a completely different state of consciousness. I'm confused.  I think I don't understand brainwaves at all)
• ,I don't really see a difference when experimenting with different meditation techniques. Not even thoughts vs no thoughts. 

 

Some findings:

• the biggest difference between awake and unconscious sleep are lower gamma waves. Hence my emphasize on gamma and beta in my sleep yoga posts.
• Another big difference is an increase in delta. 
• change in gamma always coincides with the same kind of change (increase or decrease) in beta
• change in alpha, theta and delta coincide.

All the data is from November. I haven't measured my brainwaves since. At first I was very enthusiastic about it but then I got bored. But there was an upgrade recently. Now it calculates your sleep stages as well. I guess I should try it soon. But there is also the issue with stableness. In order to get accurate results, whatever you do should be stable/constant for at least 10 minutes. Currently I have alarm clocks every minute. Pretty stable, lmao.

 

 

Does anyone know some stuff about brainwaves? Do my results make any sense? Or are they bs?

Edited February 7, 2021 by GreenWoods

[GreenWoods]

The image in the last post had shitty resolution quality. Here are the raw numbers. Now you should be able to see them:

 

Consider the number as the strength of the particular brainwave. The higher the number, the more brainwaves im that frequency.

When you measure your brainwaves you don't get a simple result as "10Hz". You always have some brainwaves of all frequencies. 

When people only mention for example "10Hz", thats a simplification. For simplifictaion, it could be considered the average (though I doubt that is true).

Edited February 7, 2021 by GreenWoods

[GreenWoods]

6 hours ago, m0hsen said:

@GreenWoods maybe it can be used to compare your regular meditation brain waves with waves it captures when you are about to sleep (if you can go to sleep with it) and see if you can get any close to it in your meditations? To check your progress in sleep yoga.

I forgot addressing sleep yoga in the previous posts. 

In case the data is actually accurate, the difference between my trance practice and light sleep was gamma, beta and delta. So if I wanted to achieve sleep yoga from trance, then I would need to increase delta during trance while keeping gamma and beta at roughly the same value (otherwise I would lose awareness). The focus would be on increasing delta (and theta probably too), but that approach takes way too long. I prefer the approach of working with sleep deprivation. Thus I basically already have the low brainwaves (delta and theta). Don't need to struggle to get them. They are automatically there. The only job is to remain conscious.

 

 

What I wrote below "some findings" in the first post, had some value for sleep yoga. 

 I don't think the data of the Muse is accurate enough to continuously compare my sleep yoga practice with light sleep and draw conclusions about my progress. That is far too impractical.

And I also don't think I need any brainwave data, subjective experience seems to be all that is necessary. And I believe I'm close to a breakthrough. Therefore I currently don't really care about brainwave data.

 

(On the previous posts: In case someone wonders how I got the brainwaves for the different sleep stages: I wore the Muse and my Fitbit at the same time)