Using Neurofeedback to Enhance Meditation Part 1: The Neuroscience
Meditation
Meditation has different meanings for everyone. Most people think of it as sitting criss-cross on the ground and focusing on your breathing. This is a very common approach to meditation and helps you get to the main point of it: relaxation.
“The point of meditation is not to turn off your thoughts but to instead observe them. “
A lot of the time in our lives, we don’t have time to think about what we want or take a break from stress; meditation allows us to take that break. Although it does give you a break from your work, people mainly do it for a deep state of relaxation and a tranquil mind. Meditation has amazing benefits for your body and improves your quality of life. It helps you:
- Manage stress
- Increase concentration
- Increase awareness
- Reduce negative emotions
- Increase imagination and creativity
- Increase patience and tolerance
- Increase work efficiency
How?
The autonomous nervous system controls a lot of your bodily functions unconsciously like your respirations, digestion and heart rate. It has two parts, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system.
The sympathetic nervous system provides a response throughout your body gives when handling stress, anxiety, tension, fatigue and depression. Many people recognize the response as “fight or flight”. When you feel these things, your body makes signals to release hormones called adrenalin and cortisol.
Adrenaline increases rates of blood circulation, breathing, and carbohydrate metabolism and preparing muscles for exertion. Cortisol increases sugars, glucose, in the bloodstream by glucose by taking it from the protein stores via gluconeogenesis(the metabolic process by which organisms produce sugars) in the liver.
Doing this enhances your brain’s use of glucose and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues. In other words, the adrenaline prepares your body to “run or fight” and cortisol provides extra energy through sugars to do that.
Once in a while, this system helps us reach deadlines and gives us motivation through things of stress. When this happens a lot, it becomes a problem and there comes the side effects like headaches, low energy and shaking. Those side effects don’t sound the best, and you probably have experienced them before, but what if I told you that meditation could solve all of them?
Meditation activates your parasympathetic nervous system which reverses any effects of the sympathetic nervous system. It’s responsible for the body’s rest and digestion response when the body is relaxed, resting, or feeding. It releases the chemical acetylcholine which slows down your heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, sweating, soothing all other sympathetic nervous system fight or flight functions.
Over time, it helps you ease chronic pain, anxiety, stress, improves your heart health, boosts mood and immunity. Lots of people, including myself, get into meditation and don’t know if they’re meditating properly. So I built a program that gives neurofeedback on your meditation.
What is Neurofeedback?
A few weeks ago, I started saying “Yo” a lot because of one of my friends. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I wanted to stop so, I started yelling “NO!” whenever I realized I said it. I became more aware of the fact and stopped after two days. Let’s look at why that worked.
Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity, or brain plasticity, is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization. These changes range from individual neuron pathways making new connections, to systematic adjustments like cortical remapping.
This means our neurons form new connections all the time which forces growth and change to constantly occur in our brains. We leveraged this ability to train our brains and build new habits using neurofeedback.
Classical Conditioning
In the 1890s, Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, set up an experiment with salivation in dogs in response to being fed. He set up a bell and every time he rang it, he fed the dog. He repeated this action until the dog would start to drool when the bell rang, even without the food. The dog’s brain associated the bell with food and this is what we call classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning puts a new action before a naturally occurring action to train someone to condition them to the new action.
Operant Conditioning
This is another way of conditioning introduced by B.F. Skinner in the early 1900s. The image above, explains Operant Conditioning very well. When the rat voluntarily pulls the lever when the light is green, nuts are given to the rat. When the rat tries again when the light is red, it gets a mild electric shock. Over time, it will use this positive and negative feedback to pull the lever at the right time.
Operant conditioning focuses on associating voluntary actions with positive or negative consequences.
Modern Neurofeedback
Neurofeedback is an evolved version of these types of conditioning, and we still use sensory feedback(ex. audio, visuals).
Today, we use Electroencephalography(EEG) to monitor brain waves using electrodes placed on the scalp. Brainwaves(a.k.a. neural oscillations) are rhythmic or repetitive patterns of brain activity. They are electrical impulses that are measured in voltage. The different frequencies are what differentiate the brainwave types.
Here’s a chart explaining the frequencies each type of brainwave produce.Modern neurofeedback classifies which waves/combination of waves the user omits and then provides positive or negative feedback.
As we are focusing on meditation, we would provide positive feedback on the Alpha and Theta Waves and negative feedback on the other waves.
My Project
I wrote a program that:
- Classifies what type of brainwave is being emitted
- Tells you how much you’re meditating
- Gives you audio feedback while you’re meditating
- Tells you how much time you were in each state at the end(ex. deep meditation, light meditation, etc.)
I wrote an article that explains my code and process, check that out here.
