Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research (대한의용생체공학회:의공학회지)

The Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering (대한의용생체공학회)
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Spatial Focalization of Zen-Meditation Brain Based on EEG

  • Liu, Chuan-Yi (Department of Electrical and Control Engineering National Chiao Tung University) ;
  • Lo, Pei-Chen (Department of Electrical and Control Engineering National Chiao Tung University)
  • Published : 2008.02.29
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to report our preliminary results of investigating the spatial focalization of Zen-meditation EEG (electroencephalograph) in alpha band (8-13 Hz). For comparison, the study involved two groups of subjects, practitioners (experimental group) and non-practitioners (control group). To extract EEG alpha rhythm, wavelet analysis was applied to multi-channel EEG signals. Normalized alpha-power vectors were then constructed from spatial distribution of alpha powers, that were classified by Fuzzy C-means based algorithm to explore various brain spatial characteristics during meditation (or, at rest). Optimal number of clusters was determined by correlation coefficients of the membership-value vectors of each cluster center. Our results show that, in the experimental group, the incidence of frontal alpha activity varied in accordance with the meditation stage. The results demonstrated three different spatiotemporal modules consisting with three distinctive meditation stages normally recognized by meditation practitioners. The frontal alpha activity in two groups decreased in different ways. Particularly, monotonic decline was observed in the control group, and the experimental group showed increasing results. The phenomenon might imply various mechanisms employed by meditation and relaxation in modulating parietal alpha.

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References

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