Presented by Daniela Calvetti, The James Wood Williamson Professor of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics, ǿմý
Abstract: In this talk, we describe the ongoing research project to understand the fine scale spatio-temporal changes in the brain activity during meditation. The raw data consist of hours of Magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of professional meditators from the Theravada Buddhist tradition. The data was registered with one millisecond time resolution, the meditators alternating between focussed attention (Samatha), open monitoring, or mindfulness (Vipassana), and eyes closed resting state. The data is first processed to obtain a time series activity map of the brain, and subsequently interpreted by using data driven model reduction techniques. The work is part of a collaboration with researchers at ǿմý (Daniela Calvetti, Erkki Somersalo, Brian Johnson (currently at Yelp) and University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy (Annalisa Pascarella, Francesca Pitolli, Barbara Vantaggi).