Advice on a personal experiment

[Guest guest]

I am a lecturer at CSU, Stanislaus in California and with the end fo Fall

semester I will have

a two month break and I was thinking of doing a pilot study on myself looking at

the

effects of mindfullness training on various behavioral and cognitive variables.

It would be

set up as a basic quasi-experimental single-subject pretest-posttest design.

So far, my dependent measures (Pretest and posttest) are body weight, resting

heart rate,

blood pressure for physiological variables and GSR at rest (I have the Wild

Divine light

stone), the TOVA and CNS vital signs (a set of computerized cognitive tests),

and a TLC

eeg assessment. I would love to do a QEEG but am not willing to shell out that

kind of

money.

For two months I will try to commit to daily mindfulness exercises including

yoga,

mediation, Tai-Chi and prayer. Daily recordings would be subjective ratings of

mood,

cogntive performance, arousal levels, creativity and social relaitonships.

What I would like to get feedback on is if there any other variables that might

be intersting

to record as a pretest-posttest or on a regular basis.

Also, I was thinking of keeping an eeg record of my times in meditation onve a

week. I am

currently using a Brainmaster EEG amp and Bioepxlorer. I am familiar with

neurofeedback

as a treatment device but have not really gotten into using bioepxlorer or eeg

in general

for research purspoes. What kinds of information should I be looking at? Anyone

have any

designs that they would share? I would assume bioreview (sp?) would be what I

use to

analyze the session. Any advice on electrode placement? I was thinking of Pz-A2

with A1

as ground since it seems to be a common placement for Alpha-Theta trianing.

Any feedback would be welcomed. Again, this is just a personal experiment so I

am aware

of the lack of internal validity but if any results jump out at the end I may

continue this in

a more formal research project.