Three sessions, read · 1 of 3

Session 01: the meditation that peaked at minute three

Five minutes recorded as a deliberate move from focus into calm. Alpha over the right parietal-occipital site climbed from 6.1% to 29.7%, then eased back, with theta rising behind it.

Meditation · Focus to Calm · 5:00 · 76,832 samples · 254.06 Hz

ConditionOTHERas tagged in the console
Duration5:0076,832 samples
Effective rate254.06 Hznominal 256 Hz
Timing faults4 / 7backwards / gaps

The reading

This session did what its name says. I called the file Focus to Calm, and alpha over my right parietal-occipital site climbs 6.1% to 13.5% to 29.7% across the first three minutes, then eases back through 26.4% and 18.6%.

Alpha is the relaxed-alert rhythm: it rises as you disengage from effortful attention. That curve is the transition I set out to make, and it peaks at minute three rather than at the end, which suggests I reached the calm state well before the recording stopped.

Theta climbed to a peak of 21.7% in minute four, after alpha had already turned over and started easing back. Alpha and theta rising together is the meditation signature; alpha falling away as theta rises is the classic direction of drowsiness. By the end of five minutes I was heading past calm toward sleepy.

Only the posterior pair is usable. On the 1 to 45 Hz band-passed RMS this series uses, PO3 and PO4 come to 71 and 51 while the other six channels sit between 550 and 1,212, eleven to twenty-four times higher. No channel is an outlier against the others, which is why none is flagged individually, but only the back of the head is quiet in absolute terms. The console’s own stricter statistic ranks the channels the same way. Quiet posterior electrodes mean good contact, so this finding rests on the most trustworthy channels in the set.

Electrode quality

CP3 · RMS 551, 11x the posterior pairC3 · RMS 1025, 20x the posterior pairF5 · RMS 859, 17x the posterior pairPO3 · quietest pair, RMS 71PO4 · quietest pair, RMS 51F6 · RMS 1010, 20x the posterior pairC4 · RMS 1212, 24x the posterior pairCP4 · RMS 888, 18x the posterior pair

Alpha and theta, minute by minute

Alpha share at the two parietal-occipital electrodes, with theta at CP4 for comparison.

0%7.5%15%22.5%30%12345minutePO3 alphaPO4 alphaCP4 theta

There is no whole-session band table on this page. An independent reimplementation of my pipeline could not reproduce those figures, so I withdrew them rather than leave them standing. The minute-by-minute reading above is what that independent run did reproduce, and it is the evidence for what this session shows. That reimplementation, and what it did and did not confirm, is written up in what the interpreter found.

What I set out to record

I wanted one recording that moved deliberately between two states rather than holding one, so I could see whether the transition showed up in the signal at all. I named the file for the plan: start engaged, then let go. Five minutes, eyes closed for the second half, nothing else going on in the room.

This is the only one of the three sessions where the name of the file is a hypothesis. The other two are a tag and a date. That makes this the session where the reading can be wrong in an interesting way, because there is something specific to be wrong about.

What the traces showed

Alpha at PO4 more than quadrupled across the first three minutes and then came back down. Read the curve rather than the average: an average over the whole five minutes would have reported about 19%, which is a number that describes neither the beginning nor the peak.

The shape also settles a question I could not answer from the console. The console gives you a live calm score and then discards it, so there is no way to ask afterwards whether calm arrived early or late. Here it arrived at minute three and had started to recede by minute five, which means the useful part of the session was over before the recording was.

What I concluded

The transition is real and it is visible on the two channels I trust most. That matters more than the size of the number, because the quality check is what licenses the reading: PO3 and PO4 are the quietest channels in the file, and quiet posterior electrodes mean the contact was good exactly where posterior alpha is measured.

The theta line is the caution. It kept climbing after alpha turned over, and alpha falling away as theta rose is the classic direction of drowsiness rather than deeper calm. If I ran this again I would stop at four minutes, or keep going and watch for the crossover rather than assume more time is more calm.

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