What happens in the brain during meditation?

• Main Author: Goh, Wee How.
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Electronic systems::Signal processing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/49689
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In the modern society, stress is a very common issue for everyone. Even though some amount of stress is good and can increase performance to a certain point, over-stressing is harmful to the body and mind. In order to relief stress, humans have adopted meditation as one of the de-stressing methods. Meditation is a tool to improve a person's emotional, mental, spiritual and even physical health. It used as a medium to handle anxiety, work stress and depression and placed the mind and body to rest. We discuss the use of Bhramari Pranayama yoga/meditation and the relationship between the meditation and the brain. In this project, our objective is to show what happens in the brain during meditation and develop an algorithm, that will identify the high activity regions of the brain. In order to get the desired Electroencephalograph (EEG) signals, we remove the artifacts using Principle component analysis and Independent component analysis. The spikes of the EEG signals are detected and projected back onto a brain topography for display. Throughout this project, we are able to use spikes detection algorithm (morphological filter and K-means clustering), to identify some relationship between the Bhramari Pranayama yoga/meditation and the region of the brain (temporal and occipital lobes).