Will an electronic gadget designed on reward/punishment mechanism of brain help improve meditation?

Question

The most challenging part of meditation is to keep our wandering mind aware of persent moment and mindful of thoughts.

Our brain has some thing called 'Default Mode Network' which is nothing but our ordinary mind full of worries and past and future etc. This mode is converted into something called as 'Executive Mode' in states of meditation and states of what people called flow.

Now, scientists for ages have trained animals to behave in certain way through reward/ punishment mechanism which gets our brain trained to do particular task or behave in particular way.

If I designed an electronic gadget, something similar to this. With an added mechanism that whenever your mind will wonder a small tingiling shock will be given to your skin and otherwise nothing will happen.

Using dry electrodes and signal processing techniques we can now detect when the mind wanders off.

My queation is,

1. Will this kind of technology be accepted by serious meditators or otherwise will it be helpful to people who are new to meditation.
2. Or will it prove to be nuisance.
3. Do you think we can train our brains to be mindful all the times through such reward/punishment exercise.

Answer 1

I have a Muse. They are not serious meditation devices. There is simply too much noise and thus too many false negatives and false positives to make an actually useful meditation training aid. If such devices could be improved in the future to provide a higher quality signal without so much noise, then perhaps they could be useful. From my experience with the Muse the fidelity would need to be near 99.9999% to have a chance of helping though.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Perhaps others have had different experiences.

Answer 2

First only puthujjanas who are materialists care about the brain.

Second, the word mindful for sati or satipatthana is really used by people lacking vocabulary. Same situation for the word mind, but even worse, since is there no mind in pali, but a declination into 3 words. THere is ''citta'', there is ''mano'' and there are the 6 ''Vinnana'', ie the consciousness aggregate (viññāṇakkhandha). THe wandering of the mind is the ''papanca'' of the mano.

Third, the way to be concentrated on something is to be relaxed and have joy, piti. Once you are concentrated, you have joy and once you have joy your citta is not dispersed to the point of not being disturbed by little pains, sounds, or worries . In other words, you cannot be concentrated without having joy.

Your fantasy of naggering the person filled with papanca and struggling to reduce the papanca has nothing to do with this joy.

"Furthermore, the disciple of the noble ones is endowed with verified confidence in the Dhamma... verified confidence in the Sangha... virtues that are appealing to the noble ones: untorn, unbroken, unspotted, unsplattered, liberating, praised by the wise, untarnished, leading to concentration. Not content with those virtues pleasing to the noble ones, he exerts himself further in solitude by day or seclusion by night. For him, living thus heedfully, joy arises. In one who has joy, rapture arises. In one who has rapture, the body becomes serene. When the body is serene, one feels pleasure. Feeling pleasure, the mind becomes centered. When the mind is centered, phenomena become manifest. When phenomena are manifest, he is reckoned as one who dwells heedfully.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn55/sn55.040.than.html

Since you care about papanca, here is the method to avoid it: first you become a disciple, you do satipaṭṭhānaṃ , you have confidence in the buddha and when you are around people you do satipaṭṭhānaṃ , confidence in the buddha and you are ''nice guy'' which means you show''Khantiyā, avihiṃsāya, mettacittatāya, anudayatāya'' ie patience, harmlessness, friendliness and sympathy. https://suttacentral.net/sn47.19/en/bodhi

THen you go to a place alone. Then your mano has Pīti, then your body has passambhati, then has sukhaṃ vediyati, which is pleasant vedana, then the citta has sukhha, and once it has sukkha it has samādhi, which is centered or ''not dispersed''. Once you live like that, you are a person who ''lives diligently'' and ''knows phenomena when they manifest''.