Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need:
The data (currently unpublished) I spoke of regarding the 45min mark is part of a larger ongoing effort to characterize changes that occur to the "mind" as people shift to a different way of experiencing their reality.
In my own experience as well the 40-45 min phase change is often blurred to the point of being unnoticeable. I'm still not 100% convinced it isn't a priming effect though I think it has decent theoretical support. My simplified explanation is the brain cannot switch modes too rapidly. For example it's easy to get HR up to 180 bpm in the blink of an eye if you think a tiger is leaping at you but takes considerably longer for it to go back to normal when you realize it was just the shadow of a harmless bush).
Regarding the tally counter: what you consider mind-wandering can/should change over time. Initially only click for completely losing attention and as improvement occurs you can include more and more subtle attentional deviations. Like any other tool it has a limited range where its use is appropriate. I'm not sure it helps too much with learning meditation; its more of a very simple way to vaguely-objectively track your progress over time.
A key principle to keep in mind is that not every meditation style is right for everyone all the time. TMI is heavily focused on anapanasati but there are a multitude of other styles. You may find your mind is more "in tune" with body scanning (e.g. Goenka) or something a little more wacky like Headless Way:
The research I linked to above found that people progressed much more rapidly if they were practicing a technique that was right for them. This is not an excuse to flail around randomly. At least one week of bona fide dedicated practice should be attempted before trying something else but months/years of painstaking effort with little gain is almost always a needless waste of time. That being said there is a fine line between the right amount of dogged persevering and dogmatic perseveration.
Update: Thank you all for the suggestions, and all of the links to resources!
Here is my plan, which I hope will balance measuring useful things with being easy enough that I'll actually stick with it:
I'll report back in a couple months with some plots and commentary.
When I wrote this post, my mindset was embarrassingly close to "I'm a Bayesian scientist meditating! It's going to be like Harry and Hermione in HPMOR!". Except of course, if there really were magic, a ton of people would already have been studying it, and the best way to start would be by asking about it. Thanks for all the advice.
An Invitation to Measure Meditation
I've begun to meditate regularly, so it seems like a good opportunity to experiment and search for measurable effects of meditation. This is an open invitation to propose easy measurements for me to intermittently perform. I don't have any brilliant ideas for what to measure (beyond looking at Wikipedia's list of research on meditation), but it seems silly to waste the opportunity.
How am I meditating?
For the past ~20 days, I've been meditating while walking for an hour or two, though I intend to switch to primarily breath-following meditation. At least five days a week, one hour a day. I expect to keep this up for a couple months, but it's a big commitment so no promises.
I am following a ~500 page textbook on meditation called The Mind
Illuminated, by John Yates (a.k.a., Culadasa) and others. It is, to quote the cover, "A complete meditation guide", which "integrat[es] Buddhist wisdom and brain science for greater mindfulness". Most of it is organized into instructions and techniques for how to meditate in 10 stages (corresponding roughly to the 9 stages described by Asanga, which I can't find a reference for), but there are also five "interludes" that describe five increasingly complete models of the mind.
The book is full of gears. If they're accurate, this is fantastic, but if they're not I'm likely to find out the hard way. Fortunately, there are some good signs: it has already given me a couple pieces of useful advice, and its models seem to be consistent with Bernard Barrs' global workspace theory, the leading scientific theory of consciousness. Though take that with a grain of salt, as it's a pretty new field. (While I haven't done a detailed comparison, I have read Bernard Baars' book In the Theater of Consciousness, and the models at least generally agree.)
What will I Measure?
Anyways, to quote the book, the two main objectives of this kind of meditation are:
For context, "attention" is when you focus on one thing in particular. It tends to isolate that thing, be analytical, and be more “self” centered. On the other hand, "peripheral awareness", or "awareness" for short, tends to take in a whole sensory field at once (e.g. everything you’re seeing), is more contextual and involves less analysis, and is less personal and more objective.
So I would like to find tasks that will plausibly measure something related to attention or awareness. I am willing to spend up to one hour each week doing these tasks. Some possible tasks are:
You'll notice that there's no control, so how can the results be interpreted? Well, if I improve a lot on some task, then hopefully that will interest someone else to be a control by doing the task over the same time-frame without meditating.
Questions for You: