Supercharging Meditation Research through Citizen Science

Chapter 1: Am I Doing It Right?

The Institute for Meditation Brainwave Research (IMBR) founder, Mark McDonough, has been studying various forms of meditation since the 70's. Like so many people, he was frustrated by slow progress. He yearned for objective feedback to know if he was doing the right things and getting to the right places.

When learning to play a musical instrument, a music teacher can hear and see you play to give you very precise feedback. Unfortunately, meditation teachers can't see what is going on inside your mind to give you explicit feedback.

In a search for objective feedback, Mark set out to study EEG-based neurofeedback because it can give second-by-second reports on brain states. Traditional EEG equipment costs thousands of dollars and requires a 5-10 min setup with electrodes covered with sticky paste. Even if you could afford the equipment, having to wash your hair after every use makes traditional EEG equipment a non-starter for daily practice.

Chapter 2: EEG Neurofeedback Becomes Available in Everyday Life

The MUSE is a breakthrough in meditation training because it is not too expensive, set-up is as easy as putting on a pair of sunglasses, and you do not have to wash your hair after every use. It is a great tool for beginners to learn focus meditation, but it does not cover the full range of meditation styles or experience levels.

The Institute for Meditation Brainwave Research set out to create software for Muse's breakthrough hardware to give feedback for a wide variety of meditation styles and levels of expertise. Being a very curious fellow, the founder also wanted to create software that would tell him what was going on when he was not in the zone and what to do about it.

Chapter 3: Meditation Research & the Replication Problem

To craft protocols tuned to different styles and levels of meditation, IMBR delved into extensive academic research on EEG and meditation. After synthesizing the results from over 300 academic research papers, it became painfully apparent that the science of EEG and meditation has not cohered into a reliable body of knowledge.

We believe this is because:

1. There isn't sufficient segmentation of results by meditation type and level. Every meta study on the EEG of meditation comes up with mixed results because they are mixing different types of meditation and levels of training.
2. There isn't enough replication of study results.

Academic research can create very accurate results, but the results are unreliable unless they are replicated. Academic research is rarely replicated because it is expensive and scientists (being entirely human) would rather be known for creating new knowledge than replicating someone else's work.

Even when similar brainwave metrics are used on the same type of meditation, we often see contradictory results (e.g. Alpha goes up in one study and down in another.) Without more replication, it is hard to know which results are reliable and which are statistical anomalies from too much variance in the types of subjects, procedures, or equipment.

Chapter 4: The Institute for Meditation Brainwave Research

The Institute for Meditation Research was established to supercharge meditation research using citizen science. Our goal is to collect millions of samples of meditation brainwaves, segment the data by type of meditation and level of expertise, while using the same low cost equipment. This is where we need your help.

We are calling for experienced meditators from different traditions to help us validate and refine these protocols by donating their meditation brainwaves to science.

Lots of data will give us lots of opportunity to replicate experiments and try new metrics (like complexity and connectivity). Data scientists affiliated with the Institute will look for patterns using traditional and cutting-edge brainwave metrics. We invite other data scientists to join us in this quest.

Our aim is to deepen the scientific understanding of meditation and build more accurate neurofeedback protocols. The more accurate the protocols, the more precisely we can lead people into deeper states, faster.