What I Learned Tracking My Brainwaves for 6 Months
One biohacker’s quest to change her brain through meditation
We live in an era of big data. We track what we buy, what we eat, the quality of our sleep, how much we exercise, and on and on. So it’s no wonder the data-driven world has found its way into a tradition that goes back thousands of years to yogis in caves searching for enlightenment. That’s right, we now have the means to track our meditation patterns too.
In early 2019, as a scientist and self-professed biohacker, I found myself searching for ways to hack my brain, stop endless recursive mind chatter, improve my overall sense of happiness and contentment, and ultimately support my own path to awakening.
This search led to a year of discovering ways to rewire my brain through the magical, mind-altering benefits of meditation.
The plastic mind
Cutting-edge research has revealed the brain’s phenomenal ability to positively change (in the form of a denser cerebral cortex, thicker prefrontal cortex, and a shrunken amygdala, the brain’s fight-or-flight center) as a result of meditation.
The amygdala was useful in an era when tigers once chased us, but it’s become a detriment in modern life, causing us to overreact to simple…
