Astral Codex Ten

alpha waves

4 min read

alpha waves

Article

alpha waves is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 26, 2022 and November 10, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “preregistered to examine only alpha, theta, and gamma waves”; “hoping that I see something which looks like alpha waves”. It most often appears alongside Substack, Twitter, EEGManyLabs.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 26, 2022
  • Last seen: November 10, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Against That Poverty And Infant EEGs Study
January 26, 2022 · Original source
Here’s the relevant table. Think of the eight different kinds of EEG the same way you think of the twenty different jellybean colors. In order to trust their positive results, the researchers had to correct for multiple comparisons. The simplest method for this is something called Bonferroni correction, which would have forced them to get a p-value of 0.05/8 = 0.00625. But that would be really harsh; in cases like these where hypotheses are correlated (ie if poor people have different alpha waves, that makes it more likely they also have different beta waves) you can use a gentler method called Westfall-Young adjustment. The researchers did this here and it told them that none of their results were significant anymore, which they chose to . . . ignore? I don’t know, the abstract sure does say "infants in the high-cash gift group showed more power in high frequency bands", which sounds like a claim of a positive result.
Heath Henderson says that the study was preregistered to examine only alpha, theta, and gamma waves. But the strongest result (one of the ones that was significant before multiple-hypothesis adjustment) was for beta waves! Usually it’s a big red flag to have your strongest result be something you didn’t pre-register; it means you kept rooting around until you found something. Here I’m on the fence about how much to worry, because why wouldn’t you study beta waves if you were doing an EEG? But the paper was based on previous research finding differences mainly in alpha and theta waves, whereas this paper “found” “differences” in beta and gamma waves, so I guess this counts as bad.
Inline links: says
Followup: Quests And Requests
November 10, 2023 · Original source
However, I have not the first clue about EEG. My idea would be to use one of these ~10$ breakout boards for one channel ECG (yes, I know) chips, wire them up to the analog digital converter input of the microcontroller, put both electrodes on my head somewhere (under my naive assumption that the main difference between EEG and ECG is simply where the electrodes are placed on the body) and plot the resulting signal, hoping that I see something which looks like alpha waves.