Hello there!
I saw there is no introductory topic and I thought to start one.
Please introduce yourself, what do you do for a living, where do you live and what sort of projects you are involved in, or how you use / intend to use EEG.
I am currently working as a web developer in Greece, I recently discovered my enthusiasm for neuroscience and just purchased a Ganglion board. I was involved in reiki and meditation and with the use of the Ganglion board I want to experiment with myself when doing reiki / meditation, listening to binaural beats or ASMR.
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Great idea @celtic_harp, and good to meet you!
I’m an amateur scientist, professional programmer, musician, and writer from a remote island on the west coast of Canada. I’ve been interested in neuroscience for a while, but only really started experimenting with EEG when OpenBCI ran their first Kickstarter.
Some of my current projects in the field include EEGrunt (a collection of open-source Python EEG + ECG analysis utilities for OpenBCI and Muse), the BCIBox (an open source enclosure for OpenBCI), various experiments and tutorials on The Autodidacts, and this forum.
Right now I’m excited about studying the effects of reading and listening to music with EEG, as well as experimenting with neurofeedback and meditation. (A huge number of people are interested in this, and @AdamM is working on an article on the topic.)
Wow! Such a pleasure to meet you! What kind of music do you play?
The effects of listening to music are very interesting indeed. I would also like to experiment on it one day too, especially when listening to harp, that seems to have a huge effect on me emotionally.
Keep up the good work!
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That’s wonderful!
How about you, wjcroft?
Hi Celtic and Isa, I’m a musician also, improvisational music. You can read about that on this page,
http://lightfield.com/iii.htm
And that site in general covers many of my interests.
William Croft
Hi all.
I started my career as a builder, then became a building inspector and now I do software testing and support. I was passionate about martial arts for many years until I became too busy with family and business commitments.
Martial arts introduced me to the value of controlled breathing and I sought to develop my breathing further by playing the flute. I have only played wooden flutes with my focus for the last 7, or so, years being on playing the Native American style flute.
Martial arts also introduced me to meditation, which I have practiced daily for around 10 years. For several years I found it really difficult to get into a meditative state, but persistence slowly paid off. I have found that playing the flute in a particular way puts me into a deep meditative state quicker than the usual meditation techniques.
I don’t have any EEG equipment yet, but when I do, I hope to experiment with meditating using the flute. I still have a lot of reading to do, but I’m thinking to stretch my budget and go for an OpenBCI Cyton Daisy setup. I’d like to get as big a picture as possible, but am still unsure if more channels is the answer.
Oh yea, I nearly forgot to mention, I’m from New Zealand.
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@wjcroft, you are in involved in many interesting stuff!
@backspace Nice to meet you. I myself play the recorder, mostly tenor and alto. Really like the sound of native american too.
Could you please try to explain how playing the flute puts you in a deep meditative state? Not sure if it’s possible for explanations though 
Hey celtic_harp. I have found that I have 2 playing styles. One way focuses on the sound and the other focuses on my breath. When focusing on the sound, my breathing will be through my mouth so that I can fill my lungs quicker in order to move smoothly through the music.
When focusing on my breath, I breath in slowly and deeply through my nose, filling my lungs with each breath and then play a slow piece of music that will last a full exhalation. Doing this for only a short period of time seems to help me reach a deep meditative state more quickly than meditation alone.
I know that breathing like this without playing the flute can put people into a deep relaxed state, but I believe that the sound of the flute adds a special ingredient to the mix.
My curiosity led me to look into the world of open source EEG and now I want to experiment with an EEG setup and compare different approaches to meditation and flute playing.
I splashed out today and got an OpenBCI Cyton Biosensing board. OpenBCI have 15% off all of their products until the end of today (15/03/17). Now I just need to read up on and choose some software to use.
Thanks @celtic_harp — likewise! I play a bit of everything, but mostly folk & traditional. Funny coincidence that all we’re all musicians
@backspace Congratulations on taking the plunge, and welcome to the forum!
Well, I would never consider myself a musician, I play very rarely, do not read notes and just play for fun what my ear catches, but yes it’s funny if you put it that way!
Hello!
I am currently a part time computer science student, and part time STEM educator. I am taking a computational/Data Science approach to neuroscience as opposed to a biological approach, hence the reason I am majoring in CS and not neuroscience.
I recently took the plunge into my bank and bought the cyton R&D kit and ultracortex iv (I recently printed out my ultracortex at my college all I have left to wait for is the ultracortex kit and then assemble it all).
I am so new to all of this, and pretty much just have knowledge in python and data analysis( two classes I took from Udemy.com, I haven’t even taken programming courses at my school yet) but I am so excited to finally have something to really learn with. I am especially interested in altered states such as flow, and playing music (i play guitar).
The learning curve is going to be tough, but I’m still really eager to learn what I can with these tools 
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Hello!
Just few words to introduce myself in this new-discovered and really nice forum.
Giovanni, 27yo, italian, BSc in Psychology. Currently engaged in an international master (Italy and France) in Cognitive Psychology and Psychophisiology.
My research topics and interests are related to the human and artificial cognition, cognitive and behavioural psychology and neurobiology.
I’m a Computer Science passionate especially as regards the areas of Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, HCI, Web & Software Development and Cybernetic.
I’m waiting for a Ganglion Board in order to start some experiments at home and it will a pleasure to share some results and suggestions with you.
The only places where I generally made experiments are university labs with BioPac hw and sw, so the “low-cost scenario” for eeg, erp studies and bci is totally new for me.
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Great to have you on the forum, Giovanni! What are your plans for the Ganglion when it arrives?
Hey curiositry (what’s your name?)!
First of all I’ll start a comparative study regarding sensibility and accuracy using the BioPac of our lab as a term of comparison.
Then, I’ll move to “play” with it with some experiments regarding objects perception, affordances and sensorimotor system.
Finally, I hope to integrate it into my upcoming opensource and free psychophysiology research platform (but this is a project located in the future).
Did you tried Ganglion?
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Nice! Does your blog have an RSS feed by any chance? (Aside from the fact that I would subscribe to it if I could find it, it would also let you syndicate your OpenBCI-related posts on the OpenBCI community page if you want to.)
My Ganglion only recently arrived; I’m about to start experimenting 
— Isa
Hey Isa,
Nice suggestion to have an RSS feed on my website.
During the development of the blog engine I have completely neglected it! 
So, I quickly implemented one: http://www.giovannifederico.net/rss.php
Thanks!
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