Effect of short-term chanting on electroencephalographic microstates

Introduction: chanting in meditation reduces stress and it is reported to have a relaxation effect during both verbal "OM" chanting (VOM) and listening to "OM" chanting (LOM). There is paucity of literature on EEG microstates information after VOM and LOM using qEEG compared to the resting condition. Methods: therefore, to examine the effect of these actions on the brain using qEEG, it is required to compare the EEG microstates among the baseline, VOM, and LOM. In the present work, 23 adult male subjects were examined and given a paradigm designed using E-prime for both VOM and LOM chanting each of 5 min duration. A 128-channel geodesic sensor net was used to obtain the experimental data, which was later pre-processed, segmented, and analysed. Results: the present work is the first to report the three scalp maps topographies, i.e. microstates obtained utilizing k-means cluster analysis for the response of the VOM and LOM. Also, the number of time frames, Global Explained Variance (GEV), time coverage, and mean duration parameters for the three maps were analysed statistically. Conclusion: the study revealed three microstate topographies as markers and reported no significant effect/changes for the short-term chanting.