Actually, you're wrong.
People who try to figure out what the brain is doing use all sorts of different machines, hopefully on the same subjects, maybe even at the same time, or very close to the same time (in the case of EEG + something else ). EEG measures tiny electrical currents in the scalp thought to be related to the activity fo the underlying part of the brain. The drawback is that it looks at ALL electrical activity from every part of the brain (every part of the skin, actually), and all sorts of mathematical analysis is done to try to compensate for distant electrical sources (whether from other parts of the brain, or eye twitches, or whatever). The advantage is that you get 1,000 samples per second to work with and machiens are REALLY cheap compared to every thing else. MEG measure tiny magnetic fields coming from the brain. It is more accurate than EEG in that fields from distant parts of the brain and/or body aren't going to interfere much, if at all, as they are even more weak than the field coming from the part of the brain directly underneath the magnets, and those magnets have to be so sensitive to pick of brain-based fields that they need to be cooled with liquid nitrogen to work at all. They sampling rate is about 500-1000/second, so theyre in the same ballpark as EEG in that regard. The disadvantages are that you only get fields coming from the surface of the brain, and the neurons have to be oriented just the right way, or you don't register a magnetic field at all, if I'm reading things properly. Also, MEG machiens are the most expensive of the brain imaging stuff I have read about. fMRI and other imaging techniques that use BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level Difference) are much more accurate spatially than MEG or EEG. EVen with the best mathematical techniques and the highest-resolution (256 electrode) machines, you still have 1/10 the spatial accuracy from EEG/MEG as you do from BOLD-based imaging. The disadvantages are many: even the best BOLD-based imaging requires 1 second per image, and the machines run from somewhat unhealthy to use to rather unhealthy to use. There's no limit to how often or how much you can use MEG/EEG on a specific subject, but fMRI and other BOLD imaging machines all have limits of days/weeks/month(s) as to how often you can safely run the same test on the same subject. It turns out that BOLD systems have another issue: when dealing with a resting brain, it turns out that the parts of the brain that are supposed to activate the most during rest are also the parts that happen to sit next to major blood vessels. It is difficult to tell how much blood oxygen level is related to the activation of the brain and how much is due to sitting next to a major source of blood in the first place. Even breathing can change oxygen levels in the brain, and so holding one's breath is considered an important thing to do when working with these machines. Of course, unless you're in the TM pure consciousness state, holding yoru breath is an active mental process and would interfere with measuring what your brain is doing when completely allowed to rest, so that's another consideration. The rest of the brain imaging machines take longer to get an image and are even more dangerous, as I understand it. Getting back to the point: there are tradeoffs of what you can determine from any specific imaging technique, and researchers prefer to use 2 or more on the same subjects, if at all possible. It's true that MUM doesn't have anything but EEG, but they can partner with other universities that do, and they have done so in the past, and will in the future, I am sure. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : No serious researcher uses EEG to measure the effects of things on the brain any more. They use fMRI. Only low-rent researchers who can't get grants or afford more up-to-date equipment rely on EEGs, or cite them. 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... 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
