Features

The Bliss Meter software has been designed for personal use and for public presentations of brainwave coherence during meditation sessions. Brainwave coherence can rise quite suddenly in the beginning of the session, and is stable during the session. To demonstrate these changes, there are several graphs available. All these graphs are updated in real-time.

For personal use it is also important to be able to record the sessions, and view the graphs later. This program is creating the WAV files from the incoming data, and such sound files can be loaded into any sound editing software. But the Bliss Meter software should be able to cover most of the needs of the users.

There are several panels available to choose from during the data acquisition.

The first panel is showing the Alignment of the two signals, which is a simple way to quickly asses the degree of similarity between the two channels.

Here you can also enable or disable the digital input filter, which is a simple way of assessing the input noise level. Below is a screen shot with noise filtering disabled. The large positive deflections are due to blinking. There was not much noise, because the laptop was running on battery, and all the electricity cables were disconnected from the wall outlets.

The second panel is showing Power Spectrum for the two channels in real time. This is a color-coded graph, with time shown on the vertical axis, and the different frequencies on the horizontal axis.

Such a color-coded display has been made for displaying Coherence in real time as well.

But most people are familiar with the standard coherence graph, which was developed 40 years ago for the original studies on meditation. Such a graph is called COSPAR, which stands for COherence SPectral ARray. This graph only shows coherence above certain threshold, and it usually also removes the transient coherence peaks.

The above graphs are analyzing the data in terms of different frequency components, but one may also want to quantify the similarity of the two channels, as seen on the first panel of Alignment. The formula for this is Correlation, which is shown on the following panel.

This graph clearly shows the rise of correlation in the beginning of the session and it's stability until the end of the session. On the right side panel there is also some statistics to quantify this. The orange and yellow lines represent correlation computed for shorter time intervals, which is a very useful detail for a meditation expert.

But all these graphs may seem to be a bit difficult to understand for a layperson. So another graph was added for the statistics of alpha coherence.

For the public presentations a specialized graph has become popular, which is showing the two channels on the top, and alpha coherence graph below.