Measurement of focus practices in the body using EEG NEIRY

A man sat with his eyes closed for forty minutes. Was it practice or was he I just sat for forty minutes - it’s hard to say how it feels. Especially at the beginning when your own scale has not yet been calibrated and any silence seems deep.

EEG answers this question. Not to all questions, but to important ones - and below is exactly what how this is done, with and without promises that the device does not keep.

Directory of metrics: how do you verify it?

Below in the text the same indicators are constantly mentioned - and it is they, not a story about practice is your tool for scientific verification. Body care is not proven sensations, but is fixedshifting these indexes relative to your base. We collected them in one table. All EEG rhythm values are normalized by the manufacturer from 0 to 1 (sum ≈ 1.0): if one stripe grows, others give way to it.

What the device sees and what it doesn’t

This is not a flaw, it is a device of the method. Contact with the body is measured according to the following: when attention really goes into the body, the body lets go, and thinking subsides - and This is clearly visible.

This is what raw data looks like

The device writes a line every 30 seconds. Nothing smoothed out, no interpretation - Here is a fragment of a real recording around the moment when a person went into the depths. Lines after entry are highlighted.

What changes when diving

The same session in its entirety. You can see how in the sixth minute everything shifts at once: alpha goes up, beta and theta go down.

This is one entry. To understand whether this is a pattern or a coincidence, we compared each recording contains two points: the first three minutes (the person just sat down) and the deepest a five-minute segment of the same session.

Alpha is growingalmost one and a half times - the main rhythm of a calm wakefulness with eyes closed rises when attention stops clinging for the external.Beta is falling— the internal commentator leaves.Concentration collapsesthreefold: attention ceases to be directed beam. Separately about theta - when immersed in silence, itfallsdoubled. It will become clear below why this is important.

Trap: the “stress” column that grows with depth

The download contains the Stress Index. When diving hedoubles in size— median shift +108%. Literally reading: the deeper the practice, the greater the stress. Absurd, but the number is real.

We figured out what he thinks. The index is based not on the pulse value, but on itsevenness: The more monotonous the intervals between beats, the higher the number. In ordinary life this works - under tension the rhythm turns to stone.

But in deep practice, the rhythm becomes metronomic in exactly the opposite way. reason: the body is motionless, the breathing is even, nothing twitches outside. In this post the heart rate spread narrowed from 2.6 to 0.7 beats, and the Stress Index increased from 124 to 367. The pulse became smoother and the index increasedsimultaneously in five out of six records.

Three deep states and how they differ

All three walk with their eyes closed, and the device distinguishes them.

Pure Nothingness (MPE) - attention to nothing

Leaving into the void: no object, no body, no thoughts. We count according to seven signs simultaneously every minute: alpha rose, beta fell, relaxation increased, concentration collapsed, the background calmed down, alpha shifted to the front -and theta is silent. Signs are multiplied, not added: failed one - the index falls. A relaxed body with a working mind is not Nothing.

Visceral presence (V-MPE) - attention in the body

The depth is the same, there is one difference: attention does not dissolve in emptiness, but maintains contact with the body. It has gone deep and the regulation signal is holding - contact. Gone deep and the signal fell - slipped into Nothing, that is, I wanted one thing, but it turned out something else.

Hypnagogia (ATS) - the boundary of sleep

Descent to the threshold of falling asleep, from where the images and feeling of falling come. Metrica It is calculated directly from two bands - theta divided by alpha. Crossover starts from 1.0, We consider stable from 1.15, above 2.2 - it’s already a dream or an artifact.

Same axis, but MPE treats theta as interference and ATS as target. Rising theta c Nothing means that a person did not go deeper, but floated into slumber. In ATS it means that the descent is going correctly. That's whyDrema is the main impostor for both practitioner: it feels almost indistinguishable from the depths, both there and there are quiet, heat and time disappears.

What the device doesn’t see - and how we cover it

Above, we honestly said: the device does not distinguish,Whereattention went into the body, into emptiness or to a mantra. MPE (void) and V-MPE (body) look identical according to EEG: alpha rose, beta and theta fell, Relaxation Index rose. The difference between them is - whether attention maintains contact with the body does not lie in raw signals. Equipment wearable hoop (no central leads, no beat ECG) direct interoception doesn't measure. This is not a hole in the method - it is the edge of the device, and we are not hiding it.

The solution is not to “think out” the address of attention from brain rhythms, butenter phenomenology of living as an independent object of measurementand triangulate it with physiology. The scheme we use:

Three streams are combined into a composite indexMNPI(Multidimensional Neuroplasticity / self-regulation Progress Index). Phenomenology enters into it as separate subindexPI (Phenomenological Index)- structured LLM-assessment of self-reports on a fixed 5-criteria scale. Exactlycoincidence independent channels- and not any of them separately - allows us to say, that the person went into the body, and not into the void.

And most importantly: MNPI is built aslongitudinalindex, that is, every day it falls point on one time axis. By the difference between today's and baseline values (ΔMNPI) you see not onlyWhatthe method does to the brain, but alsoat what speed: how many weeks did it take for the Relaxation Index to reach a plateau, when concentration collapsed, how quickly the nocturnal vegetative flow was restored. The speed of restructuring is what distinguishes a working method from random enlightenment.

How the body and organs react to self-focus

A separate layer of the same measurement is what happens when attention does not just “go into body" in general, anddirected to a specific organ: heart, breathing, stomach. The EEG sees little here (frontal electrodes do not pick up visceral signals), but the fitness tracker and PPG sensor show the body's reaction directly. This is not a guess - this is what goes into the metrics heart rate variability (HRV).

The mechanics are simple. When you shift your attentiononorgan - for example, on the heart - the nervous system responds instantly: breathing adjusts to the sensation, heart rate changes the pattern, the periphery responds with an influx. In the data it looks likesplash indicators to the top levelat the moment of capture of attention: growsSDNNAndvariation range (MxdMn)— spread between the longest and shortest cardio interval, comes to liferespiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)- pulse starts “breathe” in rhythm with the chest, jumpsperfusion index(pulsation strength at the sensor location). Perfusion is generally the most sensitive marker of local inflow: when attention actually “turns on” to the organ, the blood flow in the tissue changes, and the device records this.

And then - the main thing that distinguishes contact from simple curiosity. When contactis installedand is maintained, the indicators do not go off scale, butreach a stable upper level and hold: RSA remains flat, SDNN stabilizes in the parasympathetic zone, Baevsky’s SI (stress index) slides down - the body switched to the “calm body, clear mind” mode. That is, the curve is not peak-and-back, and peak-and-plateau. It is the retention of the plateau, and not the jump itself, that says that a person is truly “took” the organ, and did not just jerk attention.

This is the very “phenomenology visible in the body”: your audio self-report (“I hold my heart, it is warm, smooth”) lies next to the HRV curve, and the coincidence of the two channels is phenomenology and physiology - again summarized in MNPI. So focusing on yourself ceases to be a metaphor and becomes measurable event: switching → surge → contact plateau.

What the Science Says: Focus on the Body through the Eyes of Research

Our sample of 631 entries is a pilot, and we write this openly. But the direction in which we measure, not our invention: it relies on established lines of neuroscience of the past years Let’s list the key ones so that it’s clear where our data stands in the field and where it rests into the ceiling of the equipment.

The general conclusion is simple: neuroscience confirms that focusing on the body is a measurable state, but a full measurement requires either laboratory equipment (HEP, central leads, ECG), or - like ours - an honest combination of objective channels with phenomenology. Some consumer rhythms provide depth and relaxation, but not address. This is why all our designs are built around the MNPI, rather than around a single EEG waveform.

Four numbers that make everything up

Each session is broken down into four facets - individually, not with one score. The overall score hides exactly what you need to know.

• Entry speed.How many minutes did it take for a person to reach the plateau? For a beginner it takes 10–15 minutes, with practice it’s compressed to 3–5.
• Depth.To what extent have you gone below your usual level? from the current state, and not from someone else’s standard.
• Hold.How many minutes were you really able to do, but didn’t come in? and fell out. The most honest line: this is what distinguishes a practitioner from a beginner.
• Stability.Did it stay steady or jump? Twenty minutes depth torn and twenty exactly - these are different experiences and different results.

What should you look out for in a recording?

Before reading the numbers, you need to make sure that the record is valid.

• Alpha hasn't grown at all.In normal recording with closed with her eyes she rises. If not, most often there is poor contact of the electrodes or a hoop slid We do not take such a record into analysis.
• Beta is tall and ragged in a calm person.Frontal electrodes stand above the muscles of the forehead and close to the jaw. A clenched jaw looks exactly like intensive thinking - first check the jaw and neck, then draw conclusions about the mind.
• Theta creeps up, and relaxation is smooth.This is a dream not a recess.
• The pulse is metronomic, and the “stress” has skyrocketed.This is depth, not stress - see analysis above.

Practice recording protocol

Level 1 · every session

• 3 minutes calibrationbefore practice: eyes closed, do nothing. Without this, the session is not considered - there will be nothing to compare with.
• Practice unchangedunder the device.
• Three questions right after, until the experience was rewritten by memory: depth from 1 to 10, what was in the way, what was unusual. Thirty seconds, in a voice - this audio self-report is your phenomenology, which then goes into the PI subindex composite index MNPI and is associated with objective brain rhythms.
• Context in one line: sleep, coffee and alcohol per day, time days, which was before practice. Half of the variation between days is explained precisely this.

Level 2 · every day

Night recovery and sleep from the tracker. Practice affects not only those twenty minutes that a person sits, and the next night is the most sensitive indicator.

Level 3 · every week

Summary: how many practices took place, how many were missed, median across four edges.It is necessary to record omissions— their dynamics speak about the program no less than the numbers of the sessions held.

Level 4 · beginning and end of the program

Validated before and after questionnaires. Not homemade scales: if the result should have weight beyond your audience, you need tools that someone already validated.

How to evaluate the effectiveness of a program

1. Remove the base period before the start.Two to three weeks of measurements BEFORE start of the program. Without it, any growth is due to recency effects or returns to the average after a bad period - and it is during the recession that people come to study.
2. Build a timeline for interventions.One axis: program start, change of protocol, intensive, work with a master, illness, vacation, change of sleep pattern. All data channels and the final ΔMNPI are placed on it. The question is not “what is a person’s index”, butwhat moved after a specific event and after how many days— it is the interval between the intervention and the MNPI shift that is the measured rate of brain change.
3. Consider the shift relative to personal spread, not as a percentage. Everyone has their own variation between days; the shift is counted only if it is his exceeds. Otherwise you are measuring the weather.
4. Count people, not the group average.Correct wording: “For 11 of the 18 participants, the shift exceeded their own spread.” The average hides those those who got worse, and those for whom nothing has changed.
5. Count the dropouts.Who stopped walking is part of the result, not data loss. A program where half fell off, but the rest are excellent dynamics, works worse than it looks.
6. Look for a match of independent channels.Entry accelerated, night recovery has increased, the dictionary in the diary has changed - and all this in one window time. This is already the result.
7. Post what hasn't moved.No effect either result, and for trust it is more important than another beautiful number.

Methodological note

Equipment.Wearable EEG NEIRY with frontal location of dry electrodes and stationary capsule from the same manufacturer. There are no central leads There is no ECG for individual strokes.

What kind of indicators?Alpha, beta, theta in unloading - not absolute power in µV², and the values ​​standardized by the manufacturer are 0–1. Relaxation index, concentration index, alpha gravity - proprietary composites, formulas are not disclosed. We work with them as reproducible quantities, and not as physical ones: We compare a person with him using the same device. Indexes of the same name between devices differ by 2–3 times.

Sample.8 recordings of deep sessions; total database - 631 records EEG. The direction of the shifts is unambiguous, but this is a pilot, not a population norm.

Artifacts.Lines that are completely missing are automatically rejected signal and calibration section at the beginning of capsule recordings. Separate rejection no muscle artifacts - this is a limitation: frontal electrodes are voltage sensitive forehead and jaw, and this contribution falls into the beta range.

Which we do not claim.That the device distinguishes the object of attention. That the scores are comparable between people. That this sample is enough for the norm. That proprietary indices have a direct physiological meaning.

How to connect channels.Brain (EEG rhythms and indices), body (HRV according to Baevsky from a fitness tracker) and phenomenology (audio self-report of the participant) are combined into a composite index MNPI. This is not a “neuroplasticity meter” - the relationship of its longitudinal shift with neuroplasticity we test it as a working hypothesis. But it is MNPI that allows you to see the method as a single process: how a shift in phenomenology (PI) coincides with a shift in brain rhythms and autonomic background - and at what rate it accumulates day by day.