Chinese-chi and Kundalini yoga Meditations Effects on the Autonomic Nervous System: Comparative Study

Cardiac disease is one of the major causes for death all over the world. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a significant parameter that used in assessing Autonomous Nervous System (ANS) activity. Generally, the 2D Poincare′ plot and 3D Poincaré plot of the HRV signals reflect the effect of different external stimuli on the ANS. Meditation is one of such external stimulus, which has different techniques with different types of effects on the ANS. Chinese Chi-meditation and Kundalini yoga are two different effective meditation techniques. The current work is interested with the analysis of the HRV signals under the effect of these two based on meditation techniques. The 2D and 3D Poincare′ plots are generally plotted by fitting respectively an ellipse/ellipsoid to the dense region of the constructed Poincare′ plot of HRV signals. However, the 2D and 3D Poincaré plots sometimes fail to describe the proper behaviour of the system. Thus in this study, a three-dimensional frequency-delay plot is proposed to properly distinguish these two famous meditation techniques by analyzing their effects on ANS. This proposed 3D frequency-delay plot is applied on HRV signals of eight persons practicing same Chi-meditation and four other persons practising same Kundalini yoga. To substantiate the result for larger sample of data, statistical Student t-test is applied, which shows a satisfactory result in this context. The experimental results established that the Chi-meditation has large impact on the HRVcompared to the Kundalini yoga

STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF MUSIC ON CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM THROUGH LONG TERM ANALYSIS OF EEG SIGNAL IN TIME DOMAIN

The paper studies the effect of music signal on central nervous system (CNS) through EEG signal analysis of normal healthy subjects. The subjects are all engineering students, ages ranging between 20 and30. The data are taken in two stages- one when they listen to a special type of music selected and the other, when they are in normal stage and not listening to any music. The experiments are done on eight leads, frontal leads being five in number and rest three being central. On the collected signals Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is applied to assist the process for isolating noise components and for providing cues to explain the functions of different brain areas from the view point of neurology. The results obtained through ICA were subjected to the study of long-term dynamics giving rise to three dimensional chaotic attractors. Next the chaotic attractors are subjected to the quantification analysis of three dimensional attractor by ‘ellipsoid fit’. It is found that the effect is most prominent in the frontal leads. However, the central leads also show some changes, but not as significant as frontal leads. Thus the present study also compares the results on the effect of music in the two types of leads separately. To validate the result, topographical scalp maps are constructed with the observed data. Interestingly the results of the scalp map support the results of quantification