Investigation of meditation scenario by quantifying the complexity index of EEG

Abstract

A practitioner in true meditation should already transcend the physiological, mental, subconscious, and Alaya state, and eventually attain the spiritual realm. The scientific approach to the scope of Zen meditation provides insight into the mechanism in addition to the vague sketch of meditation sensation and its multiform benefits to human beings. In meditation research, it is difficult to access changes of the consciousness state during meditation. Meditators once transcending the physiological and mental state cannot convey information outside. As a consequence, quantitative results together with post‐experimental, subjective narration may provide us with a glimpse of the meditation scenario. This paper mainly reports our preliminary results of quantifying the long‐term brain waves, recorded by the electroencephalogram (EEG), for both experimental (meditators) and control groups. Based on the nonlinear dynamic analysis of multi‐channel EEG signals, we found that brain dynamics exhibited high δ (F/ß EEG) in deep meditation. Three different meditation scenarios have been identified from the running 8 (averaged complexity index) chart. Spatial characteristics also deviate from that of the control group. This observation was summarized from the results of analyzing the meditation EEG's collected from 17 Zen‐Buddhist practitioners and 16 control subjects.