They are ascribing a hell of a lot to the placebo effect of transendental meditation. But whatever floats your boat.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/252763.php
selected passages.
"We hypothesized that reducing stress by managing the mind-body
connection would help improve rates of this epidemic disease," said
Robert Schneider, M.D., lead researcher and director of the Institute
for Natural Medicine and Prevention in Fairfield, Iowa. "It appears that
Transcendental Meditation is a technique that turns on the body's own
pharmacy - to repair and maintain itself." Wow
TM's effects are pretty wide-ranging, and many cannot qualify as "placebo" because they are most strongly found in TM practice and TM practitioners.
ReplyDeleteIronically, the old alpha EEG power/coherence increases which everyone claimed was a common factor in all meditation techniques, not just TM, has been found to become less and less apparent over time in most other forms of meditation. In fact, the long-term effect of most forms of meditation is to reduce coherence and communication between the various parts of the brain, rather than strengthen them.
Insomuch as coherent alpha can be seen as a marker of general relaxation, most meditation techniques become less relaxing, at least as measured by brain waves, the longer you have been practicing.
Consider the EEG patterns of long-term TMers shown in this figure,
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=4124680926078&set=a.2219338093698.2126866.1555020826&type=1&theater&_fb_noscript=1
where in-phase coherence appears to be 100% briefly across all leads.
Contrast it with the findings on other forms of meditation, where coherence between parts of the brain become less over time:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811912000596
The thing that all meditation techniques have in common is that the activity most found during a specific technique starts to become a trait outside of the technique.
So the global relaxed functioning of the brain during TM becomes a common baseline during normal activity in TM meditators, while the enhanced brain activity in certain areas, at the expense of global relaxation, becomes the common baseline during normal activity in practitioners of other forms of meditation.
If there is a correlation between relaxed activity in the brain and reduction of stress and illness related to stress, then it shouldn't be a surprise that TM practice, over time, will show more and more differences in affect on these measures, compared to most other forms of meditation, where the relaxation effects become less and less over time, as the meditators become more proficient in performing the specific mental activity associated with their meditation practice.