Exploring Ancient Meditative Practices: Insights from Psychometric Data for Brain-Computer Interface Enhancement
Kapil Gupta, D. Jain, Amir Hussain
July 3, 2025 DOI: 10.22541/au.175154239.96686724/v1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Observational study |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 99 |
| Population | 27 Himalayan Yoga, 20 Isha Shoonya, and 20 Vipassana practitioners, plus 32 healthy controls |
| Interventions | Himalayan Yoga Isha Shoonya Vipassana |
| Key findings | Isha Shoonya practitioners increased focus by 30.8% when meditating after instructed mind-wandering, whereas Himalayan Yoga and Vipassana practitioners showed contrasting results. Himalayan Yoga had the highest average concentration (0.639) and uneasiness (0.736); Isha Shoonya had higher distraction (0.550), higher comfort (0.688), and lower uneasiness (0.198). |
Abstract
Background: Meditation practices involve training the mind to focus and redirect thoughts, primarily to increase aware- ness, relaxation, and inner peace. The aim of this work is to compare the impact of three traditional meditation prac- tices, namely, Himalayan Yoga (HP), Isha Shoonya (SNY), and Vipassana (VIP), during a meditative (MED) and instructed mind-wandering (IMW) block with a control (CTR) group.
Method: In this work, fourteen psychometric scores obtained from 27 HP, 20 SNY, 20 VIP practitioners, and 32 healthy sub- jects from the CTR group are considered to evaluate the im- pact of meditation. The min-max normalisation technique is employed to eliminate feature dominance. Statistical ex- ploratory data analysis (EDA) is used to draw the heat map of pre-processed scores to segregate the features into four categories, compute and plot the mean value for comparing one feature among all four groups, and compare all features across all the groups. Additionally, we have compared the interplay between MED and IMW blocks.
Results: The ob- tained results depict a 30.8% increase in the focus level of SNY practitioners when they performed MED after IMW, whereas contrasting results are shown by HP and VIP medi- Abbreviations: Meditation, Psychometric study, Exploratory data analysis, AI, R-BL tators. The categorical analysis represented the average high- est concentration and uneasiness levels of 0.639 and 0.736, respectively, in HP, with higher distraction (0.550), higher comfort (0.688), and lower uneasiness (0.198) in SNY prac- titioners.
Conclusion: This research lays the groundwork for the design of a personalized brain-computer interface sys- tem aimed at reducing mental wandering (MW) and increas- ing the depth of meditation.