Background: It is well known that meditation improves the physical and psychological condition of its practitioners. This study investigated the heart rate variability response of meditation practitioners in two Chan master teaching environments, namely face-to-face and video classes. Methods: Experimental sessions were conducted, one featuring face-to-face classes and the other featuring video...
The practice of meditation has become an interesting research issue in recent decades. Meditation is known to be beneficial for health improvement and illness reduction and many studies on meditation have been made, from both the physiological and psychological points of view. It is a fundamental requirement of meditation practice to be able to sit without body motion. In this study, a novel...
This paper firstly reports the visual response to the inner light (a form of qi) and the outside stimulus during Zen meditation. It has been reported literally that inner light perception is the common experience for prayers or Zen-meditation practitioners. In this paper, we propose a method to quantify the EEG (electroencephalograph) and F-VEP (flash visual evoked potential) that characterize...
As the advantages of meditation have been outlined literally, scientific exploration of the meditation phenomena becomes significant. Meditation EEG may provide an access to the mental states beyond normal consciousness. It is the first attempt to score the meditation course by EEG. Wavelet analysis and fuzzy c-means (FCM) are applied in the automatic interpretation algorithm. However, FCM...
A lever-like EEG feature-extraction method based on the Hurst exponent and regression-fitting errors is proposed for identifying beta rhythms. The proposed method is superior to most methods using the time- and frequency-domain feature extraction parameters for identifying beta rhythms.
According to the experimental results and practitioners' subjective experience, we report some hypotheses that may account for meditative phenomena during the practice of Zen-Buddhism. Orthodox Zen-Buddhist practitioners, aiming to prove the most original true-self, discover and uncover the inner energy or light on the way towards their goal. Perception of the inner light can be comprehended as...