I'm working on a hardware project to train and measure concentration. I'd like feedback and advice from those of you who are accomplished in concentration practices.

The rough idea is to use a microcontroller and stick-on electrodes (the low current kind used in electrotherapy for pain relief and muscle therapy) to generate tactile patterns on the skin, occasionally introducing aberrations in the pattern which should be detected by the user and logged using a small button. For example, I may cycle through 5 electrodes and occasionally skip an electrode. If the user is paying attention, this skip should be detected and the button pressed. In this way one can measure the degree of concentration over a practice session. I think it is important to have the test avoid using memory ability.

Is this worthwhile? If so, does the skip test I described sound like a good starting point? Can you recommend a better test protocol?

Thanks for any and all advice and criticism.

aac

I think I may have found a protocol for you



(wink)

Ha, nice! Actually, my proposal isn't terribly different from SIMON except that I'm proposing to utilize tactility rather than hearing. Also SIMON is more of a memory game than an attention game. I'm trying to measure attention, not memory.

But thanks for the nostalgia!

aac

Please explain what you mean by concentration and concentration practices to see if we are pointing at the same thing. The jhanas are concentration states....but I like to call them altered states, cause they are not my baseline state. They do not resemble anything like what I use to describe concentration except the 1st jhana and it's really just using sustained effort that gets me into the 1st. So I'm not sure what your trying to test; let alone whether the protocol will accomplish this. Please go into a bit more detail.
Thanks,
~D

Luminosity: Lost in Migration game.

I'm actually practicing concentration with a very similar method: ReWire app. web page

This is not an altered-state-generating test, it's an attentive vigilance test. It's a measurement of "concentration" in its purest sense of "the mind staying with something rather than wandering from it", with the tactile stimulus response serving to quantify concentration. Something like the ratio of "hits : (misses + false positives)" could be used as a scoring formula. A miss would be failing to notice a shift from the baseline tactile stimulus to the altered one within some specified time limit, and a false positive is of course indicating a change when there was none.

It would be something like the concentration training part of the ReWire app, except using touch in the place of sound. There are also formal visual and auditory attention/vigilance testing protocols in experimental psychology, but I've never heard of one that uses touch as the stimulus. Should be interesting. Perhaps even relevant to neuroscience and psychological science, as they move from only studying visual and auditory attention to including other forms of attention.

As for the electrodes... I'm not sure whether or not that would be easier than small vibration-generating motors. Come to think of it, someone could make a smartphone app that uses the phone's vibration to do this, and much like with ReWire, you could touch the screen to indicate when the stimulus changed.

Exactly.



I've experimented with vibration motors. They are much harder to securely attach to the body and the vibration qualities vary a bit much from motor to motor.

aac

Are you familiar with the attentional blink test? Google it. It's a test of rapid concentration. It's been shown to correlate with meditative skill; look up 'attentional blink meditation' on Google Scholar.

the attentional blink test was some of the most fun I had in 2011

what does that say about my life?... ;)