The brainwave analyzer lets you look under the hood and see what’s going on with your brain waves while you were meditating. The best way to use the brainwave analyzer is to annotate your meditation session by tapping once when you are coming out of a deep time and twice when you are recentering on your practice after a period of being distracted. When you click on the 1 or 2 buttons under the depth chart, we show the metrics for the ten seconds before you tapped once or twice. Then you can look at your scores for each of the metrics when you were in a oneness or twoness state.
You can click on the Trophy button to see the metrics when the protocol scored your meditation as deep and compare them to the metrics in the 1 button state when you felt you were deep. If you see a consistent difference between the metrics when you felt you felt deep vs when the app scored you as deep, please email us so we can get data for tuning this protocol to better fit this style meditation and level of expertise.
If you want to explore your meditation brainwaves more broadly, you can click on the Brain State button to see a z-score of the power changes in five frequency bands in five locations. You can go to the Full Report at the bottom of the brainwave analyzer to find out what it means when each metric goes up and down in each location. If you want to dive even deeper, flip the citations switch and get the reference that you can google to learn even more about the topic.
After you have looked at the metrics from several sessions, you will probably find one that is consistently dragging down your scores more than the others. Just as a gym coach might ask you to spot train a particular muscle to improve your overall performance on a more complex move, we can create a protocol that works on your weakest metric. Click on the problematic metric in the Protocol Metrics Report Card and then click on the Calibrate button. Next time you start to mediate, you will find it in your list of pre-calibrated protocols.
Metrics Report Card
Each of these are metrics that are relevant for your style of mediation and level of expertise. Under each metric, we explain which way they are supposed to go and how they contribute to a deeper meditation. We have gathered tips from several meditation teachers about how to get the brain waves to go in the right direction. If you find something that works well for you, please share it on the IMBR.org forum.
The depth indicators on the right are based on Cohen’s d statistics for effect size:
- Deeper: Large effect size >=.8
- Deep: Medium effect size +.3 – .79
- Baseline: Small Effect size -.3 to +.3
- Shallow: Medium effect size or more in the wrong direction <-.3
Cohen’s d is calculated by (the average during meditation – the average of the baseline)/the pooled standard deviation of your mediation session and baseline session).
Advanced tricks
- You can tap three times during a session to annotate, a special time that you want to investigate later in the brainwave analyzer. You might tap three times when coming out of a VERY deep section or when you are crazy with anxious thoughts, or when you are feeling especially serene.
- You can highlight a section of the depth chart to see what the brain waves metrics are doing in a particular period of time. To create a highlight, click in the depth chart where you want it to start and click again where you want it to end. The window on the bottom right of the depth graph shows the time stamp for the beginning and end of the highlight. N.B. If you have a highlight on, the event buttons (Trophy, !, G, Y, R, 1, 2,3) only show in the metrics for those event INSIDE the highlight.
- There is a timeline button under the metrics graphs that will show second by second results instead of averages for the selected period. You can use the timeline graph to notice more precisely what is happening to metrics around your 1’s and 2’s. Timelines often look like a tangle of spaghetti. You can turn off some of the lines by clicking on the check box to the left of the metric in the Protocol Metrics Report Card.