If you actually read the thread, you'll see that at this point it's talking about the effects of different kinds of meditation on the practitioners' EEGs. Bhairitu suggested getting a "personal EEG device" to check what happens with your EEG when you meditate. Lawson is pointing out that such devices are "useless toys" and won't tell you anything at all significant about your meditating EEG. That's a perfectly reasonable comment that isn't even remotely "elitist."
If you're not interested in meditating EEGs, fine. But both Lawson and Bhairitu are, as are many researchers, both TM and non-TM. Don't you have anything more sensible to carp about? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Gawd, you're even elitist about *EEG machines*, which have nothing whatsoever to do with meditation. :-) From: "LEnglish5@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, June 1, 2014 7:21 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Your own personal EEG device They're a useless toy. The ultra-low-end professional-level EEG setup that Fred Travis uses for his demos have 19 EEG electrodes + reference electrodes. This thing has ONE ELECTRODE. You can't even test a single EEG coherence pair (for that you need 2 EEG electrodes). From the product description: The headset’s reference and ground electrodes are on the ear clip and the EEG electrode is on the sensor arm, resting on the forehead above the eye (FP1 position). It uses a single AAA battery with 8 hours of battery life. FP1 refers to the 10-20 EEG electrode placement scheme: http://www.immrama.org/images/eegimages/10-20placement.gif http://www.immrama.org/images/eegimages/10-20placement.gif http://www.immrama.org/images/eegimages/10-20placement.gif http://www.immrama.org/images/eegimages/10-20placement.g... http://www.immrama.org/images/eegimages/10-20placement.gif View on www.immram... http://www.immrama.org/images/eegimages/10-20placement.gif Preview by Yahoo In order to establish the EEG coherence you must compare teh output from two different electrodes simultaneously. Alaric's EEG video I linked to uses 4 separate electrodes, F2, F3, P2, P3 and provides readings for 4 of the 8 possible coherence measures, and that is essentially a promotional demo for his class, not a demo of the actual science involved. A real, low-end system uses all 19 electrodes, and for TM research, compares the 19 x 18 = 342 possible pairs of electrode. Researchers than report the interesting ones where the coherence goes above the average. The system you linked to can't even be used to measure a single coherent pair as there ain't a pair to compare. L
