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Comment by rd108 | Hacker News Reader

You can actually use these electrical signatures to make meditation a trackable, quantifiable "exercise activity". Just like you log running miles with, say, RunKeeper. Really cool to see more people getting excited about it the science! Disclaimer: cofounder at a startup doing this.

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Can you post a small sample of eeg data and a code snippet that shows the transformation of the raw telemetry into the power spectrum? That would be very interesting and would answer doubts.

Mind talking a little bit about the technology that you're using and how it's worked out for you? I've been running EEG studies for years, and those small headband-type readers are notorious for being so finnicky as to be almost useless, especially since they have no way of controlling for eye motion. I've never seen a decent setup for anything less than 5-10 grand, and even then they need Ag-AgCl electrodes with conductive gel, which it looks like you've managed to avoid.

Thanks Itaxpica. I come from an academic cognitive neuro background too and shared a lot of your concerns. We've shown empirically that you can use an active (non-gel) EEG system to do limited things. We are interested in mindfulness and meditation, which often involves sitting still and closing your eyes. These facts make it easier to use our detection algorithms successfully than it might in other realms. Check out neurosky, emotiv, interaxon and other folks to see products in the space--> still in its infancy, but we're practically seeing results for our narrow focus, which is meditation.

Yeah, I could see where removing movement from the equation could help significantly. Thanks for the response - I'll be keeping a curious eye on how you guys do. Should be pretty cool!

I'm really looking forward to track my meditation properly.

I looked into the available devices and so far no decent hardware for a decent price is available without hacking.

All the best to you guys to bring this to the mainstream. The neurosky apps and headset are not my cup of tea.

Does your app only work on a smart phone, or can it work on a macbook?

For now, it'll run on the mobile phone only. We're working to make it available on all devices, though. That won't happen for at least a year.

Will it be iOS 5 and up only? I have a very old iPhone sitting around. :) (iOS4)

Unfortunately the bluetooth protocol got a lot easier to integrate into our app in iOS 5, but we may release on other platforms in the future! Thanks for the +1 for iOS4.

Are you also selling hardware, and if so, which?

Sorry if others don't like this but can you elaborate either by pointing me at your startup, with more science or both? I'm going to go on a Google spree but I'm curious about your take.

This is completely foreign to me, it fails my bs test but to hear not just the words scientific, but quantifiable, piques my interest.

Their startup is http://brainbot.me

I'd love to hear a description about what you're trying to do there though.

Why does the brainwave headset appear to include a pair of headphones?

There's a book called Buddha's Brain that documents several studies of people meditating while being scanned by an fMRI machine. It's quite fascinating. Regular meditation alters connections in the brain, similar to how working out a muscle changes the muscle.

I was on the fence on whether claimed effects of meditation were real, and reading this book clinched it for me. It anchored the claims I'd read elsewhere in something I actually believe - fMRI scans of brain activity.

Rick Hanson's stuff is great. Here's a lecture he did at Google several years ago: http://www.youtube.com/user/BuddhasBrain

Of course, and thank you for reaching out! My previous (pre-startup) job was to do neuroimaging of mindfulness on longterm practitioners in the lab of Sara Lazar. You can check out some of their publications to get going--> http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lazar/

Our startup is bringing those findings from the lab onto our mobile phone (check out www.brainbot.me for some info, although admittedly not much yet!) Right now we're busy prototyping and working on our first release.

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