iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App

iAm enables highly structured measurement of subjective experience, as its happening, with a focus on supporting meditators and researchers alike!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

What is the cause and effect relationship between meditation and our conscious experience? Does meditation really calm the mind? How can it be proven? What hidden subjective variables determine whether someone response to particular techniques? iAm's new feature is a big step towards helping to explore these topics!

Introducing Sequences!
Sequences allow you chain different measurement sessions together. Why do this? It now allows you to measure someone's subjective experience, conduct some type of intervention (say, a specific meditation technique), then conduct the same measurement after the meditation practice to see how the practice (potentially) changed the state of your conscious experience.

Here is an example:
Self Report on the stream of verbal thoughts arising spontaneously, with associated felt valence also tagged for 5 minutes.

Conduct a 20 minute concentration practice (in this case, at the top of the nose)

Finally, self report on the stream of verbal thoughts again for another 5 minutes.

Below is the first ever real experiment using this methodology, the graph network of the data is below. From left to right, the first pink node is the 5 minute verbal thought session, followed by 20 minute meditation, followed by another 5 minutes of verbal thought tracking.
Here is a timeline view of the pre and post, with valence colored

Here is a spider web chart grouped by reported valence, you see a decrease in the number of thoughts, as well as change from highly valenced thoughts, to more neutrally valenced thoughts between pre and post.

What can we conclude from this data? Well, this is a single sequence measurement, so if I'm being rigorously honest, probably nothing...yet 🤓... Conducting this made me see there are many potential confounders, such as, what if you're in a meditation position that grows more uncomfortable overtime. This is just one example....

HOWEVER, This DOES lay the groundwork to conduct experiments using this methodology, and that's exactly what iAm is focused on next. I'll be conducting a 7 day experiment where this sequence will be repeated once a day (with maybe a control session where no meditation is done, if I have the time). This should be an exciting proof of concept!

If you're a researcher that thinks this approach might be interesting, I'd love to hear from you! @mindandlife @MindandLifeEU @dave_vago @QualiaRI

#Meditation #MeditationResearch #Consciousness #ContemplativeScience

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

It is with great honor to announce that the iAm consciousness research platform is officially open source under the AGPL-3.0 License! Beyond enabling unique new ways of measuring subjective experience, the broader vision of iAm is to support "structurally open" research, where the whole research project & protocol all the way down to the wording of the survey questions become forkable entities like code repositories. We believe to do that right, you have to have an open standard.

You can learn more at https://t.co/fPzLD3KdGj

And of course, source code now available at
https://t.co/KmN7zkuwG1 😉

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

We're very happy to announce that we're conducting our first ever study, CRAWL!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@AndrewHemingway Where do we sign up!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@bryan_johnson @bryan_johnson You're very passionate about the physical side of things, I'm curious if you're interested in applying that same data driven approach for understanding your subjective experience, we should chat!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@nadiainthought Do you do UX/UI? iAm is still in beta and we could really use someone that has an eye for interface design, if you’re interested send me a dm!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@RubenLaukkonen @trentmc0 What is your take on Claude as a proto-ESI?

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@SterlingCooley @EssentiaFounda1 @Marco_A_Galvan Why are you making the claim that this science is garbage?

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

What is iAm? A podcast by the name of NotebookLM recently reviewed iAm and created and put together this "Deep Dive" to explain it. Enjoy!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

What comes first? Thought, emotion, body sensations?

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@reedbndr Oddly enough programmers aren’t saying this about their own work being used for training, although the same argument could in theory apply. What makes creative art more special than someone’s code I wonder

[Ruben Laukkonen @RubenLaukkonen]

Our new preprint lead by @JonasHMago is a promising step towards formally modelling pure awareness using active inference. A brief 🧵

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@thea_the_brave @healthyminds @UWMadison What was your score? It should tell you on the review page

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

📊🧘‍♂️ Measuring meditation objectively? It's possible with Breath Counting, now on iAm!

Count breaths 1-9 for 15 mins. So Simple!

Based on Daniel Levinson's work @healthyminds @UWMadison

I scored 76.9% (My wife distracted me I swear!). What's your score?

Try it by creating an account or logging in anonymously, then going to https://t.co/lFwTySnA4i and post with #iAmBreathCount (Also available on Mobile!)

Need more instruction? tutorial here: https://t.co/who1s5JNrK

@MatthewSacchet @RogerThisdell @danielmingram @OortCloudAtlas @thea_the_brave @KennethFolk @Plus3Happiness @LouisVArge @shawnprest @antianticamper @dave_vago @mindandlife @tasshinfogleman @WystanTBS @RubenLaukkonen @algekalipso

I'd love to know what your accuracy score is!

Let's explore the science of measuring meditation together!

#MeditationScience #CognitiveScience

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

Fitness models really love iAm, just look at our followers 🤔!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@zach_haigney @shamilch @TheTripReport1 Really loved this podcast!!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@RogerThisdell Definitely the most unique pointer I’ve ever seen.

[Roger This @RogerThisdell]

1⃣ Some body-mind tensions can't be examined head-on.

(For those that have played Super Mario 64, defeating the ghosts is a favourite metaphor I've come up with on how to tackle sneaky expressions of dukkha, which otherwise escape the scrutiny of full focused attention).

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

@ThinkingBone I make no revenue, just dealt with similar issues at a certain point!

[iAm: The Subjective Experience Research App @iAmResearchApp]

This is pretty clear evidence of a very lonely part of your psyche feeling validated by the perception of being desired, there is nothing wrong with this part, it clearly needs love. It sounds there is also a part that rejects this lonely part. I had the same thing. First disidentify with the rejector, then love the rejector, then you can try to connect with the lonely part of yourself. Self compassion is the game here.