Seeking advice on hardware, software; biofeedback possible?

[chrisgagne]

Hello fellow neuronauts,

I've practiced various types of biofeedback, including HVR/HR/GSR with the Wild Divine hardware as well as EEG biofeedback for focus/ADD with BrainPaint provided by a practitioner.

Given the high cost of EEG biofeedback services as well as the reduced convenience of scheduling and attending appointments, I am interested in seeing whether I can replicate this at home. I do not have any neuroscience, psychological, or biological training; by trade I am a software product manager. I possess only an intense curiosity and willingness to spend a reasonable amount of money and time.

Recently, three emerging insights have caught my attention. First, there is Matthieu Ricard who has suggested that meditating on one's left prefrontal cortex increases overall happiness. Here is an article (admittedly from a tabloid) that talks about his experiences: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... ation.html. Here is another interesting scholarly article that investigates the neural profiles of experienced practitioners vs a control: http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16369.full.pdf+html. I am curious as to whether I could devise a EEG or even nIR/pIR biofeedback protocol to help me develop this capacity. This is because I find it difficult to know what it means to "meditate" despite many attempts, and thus I hope that by having an mental "inertial point of reference" I may ultimately begin to understand what this means and cultivate it.

Second, I also found this http://www.cell.com/neuron/retrieve/pii ... 7313002304 to be extraordinarily interesting.

Finally, I have been suffering from chronic myofascial tension and pain for quite some time and have found that my best remedy was becoming fully aware of such and simply accepting it. This seems to produce some relief but it would be interesting to have an objective feedback loop available to me. Perhaps there is a protocol I could follow involving the placement of EMG sensors around various known areas of tension in my body.

I have not found the HVR/HR/GSR biofeedback useful except for producing states of relaxation, slightly improving my tension and pain.

Are there practical ways for an individual to explore these effectively? Or are these studies conducted with and reliant upon such sophisticated techniques and/or equipment that their insights are not approachable by the general public? I believe that if these studies are true and it is indeed possible to replicate many of the effects with affordable equipment, we may be entering a very interesting era for explorers such as ourselves.

If you think it is practically possible to pull this off, what do you think is the minimum necessary equipment and software to do so? Given that my goals are to improve my meditative state and increase learning/working potential, have you found in your own personal experience truly effective techniques?

[jtlindgren]

Hello Chris,

some very interesting links there. I'm not too familiar with biofeedback, but I think the question about meditation (when narrowed down to the scope of the links you posted) and EEG boils down to two questions,

1) Is gamma activity reliably measurable with consumer grade EEG devices that have only a few electrodes, possibly low sampling rates, and their level of noise?
2) Are basic visualizations (such as Fourier power spectrum) of these measurements sufficient/useful for practicing/training your 'mental muscle' in this?

Some other people might hazard a guess about 1, and question 2 requires some intuition about what makes an effective biofeedback protocol. If you need something specific or more involved/interactive than basic displays, you might need to develop them yourself or get someone to do it (once you know what you need), possibly as OpenViBE components.

In principle, it is definitely possible and even relatively easy to connect an EEG headset to OpenViBE, connect the acquisition module (box) to epoching and then to an FFT box and spectrum visualizer, and watch what level of gamma activity you achieve. Whether seeing this online is useful is another question.

As an aside, as a practitioner of biofeedback you likely know binaural beats. I'm not sure of their scientific plausibility, but some people believe that these can be used to pull the general brain activity towards some particular frequency or state. Although the method doesn't give you feedback, at least it doesn't cost much either to play with it -- with some free software you only need headphones to try it out. If there's anything to these, an interesting idea would be to combine this kind of signal generator to EEG measurements or visualization and see what happens. Perhaps you could even control the generated signals so that they take the current EEG into account and control the feedback / sound generation in some productive way. Doubtlessly this has been done somewhere, someplace, or is even the daily deal in the biofeedback world. Anyway, as a rather far-fetched analogy, I here imagine the computer being a kind of therapist or hypnotist, with the goal of pulling the mood/state of the patient towards something in particular, and how well this builds up of course partially depends on the therapist/hypnotist being able to home in on the current moods/state of the subject and choose her words/mood/attitude accordingly.

It'd be interesting to hear what kind of experiences people have in using OpenViBE for biofeedback. Anyone?

ps. as an official disclaimer, this is not a recommendation for anyone to perform any sorts of human experiments on yourself or others.


My three (or so) cents,
Jussi

[chrisgagne]

Jussi,

Thank you very much for your kind and thoughtful reply. I wound up getting the Olimex EEG-SMT and plan on playing with it and OpenViBE. It's the least expensive start that I could find that wasn't a pure toy, though I imagine I'm still in for experimentation. As I dive into it, I'll share what I find with others.

Cheers!

-Chris

[jtlindgren]

Great, we'll be interested to hear what turns out.


Cheers,
Jussi

[gderou]

Hello Chris,

I am starting to look for similar things - though still a newbie.
Did you have any success in making Olimex's device work with openvibe ?
How useful is it for your use ?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Regards

Guillaume

[chrisgagne]

Hi Guillaume,

I tried playing with the Olimex Open-EEG product with Brain Bay but was not able to do anything useful with it.

I began to investigate the use of nIR-based HEG biofeedback after seeing an article referencing Matthieu Ricard and pIR-based biofeedback, but have not found this to be particularly interesting either.

Ultimately, I've decided that ramping up my meditation practice would be the most valuable use of my time.