The Scientific Literature On Transcendental Meditation

Systematic research solidly supports claims made for health (and other) benefits of Transcendental Meditation. These benefits range from reductions in anxiety and depression, enhancements in memory, IQ, ADHD, mental health and moral reasoning to reductions in coronary disease and stroke and improvements in overall health and even the health of society.

I first heard this at an introductory lecture in 1975. Later I learned more on my teachers training course in 1978.

I was fascinated that an easy behaviour change might have such a broad and positive effect on my life and wanted to know why. So I (and my new wife, Vicki) enrolled at the University of South Africa for three years of psychology. In due course I added a psychology major to my engineering degree.

Having an MBA and psychology credits I then launched into a doctoral program at the University of Cape Town. In the next 10 years I plunged into the scientific research. I read loads of studies on stress, anxiety control and the consequences of Transcendental Meditation practice on mind, body, behaviour and the environment surrounding the meditator.

Since graduating from UCT, hundreds more papers have been added to the literature on Transcendental Meditation and other techniques. My conclusion is that Transcendental Meditation has the biggest research base of any meditation technique on earth. The literature on TM is said to run to over 600 studies from over 200 institutions published in scores of journals.

There are good studies and there are not-so good studies. And there are quite large numbers of very good studies. “Very good” means the analysts are understood to be neutral towards TM, they have used good research design and accepted statistics tools, they have published their work in reputable scientific journals and it has been the subject of review by their peers.

Furthermore their work is replicable by other scientists and their discoveries are explainable by a plausible theory. And in a few cases their systematic modern findings are supported by the testimony of the vedic literature millenia old. So any person saying that TM’s claims are not supported by research either does not know what they are talking about or has a hidden (usually fundamentalist) agenda.

Finally, there are some very Very good studies: “studies of studies” essentially : meta analyses that compare TM results with those from other forms of meditation.

The conclusions of these studies seem extraordinarily clear: TM is different. Effect sizes are generally seen to be bigger than for different kinds of meditation, which in numerous cases demonstrate effect sizes which don’t differ significantly from those seen during simple eyes-closed rest. Which is not a bad thing at all “but TM is obviously better.

If this is right why should this be so?

Possibly because TM is “transcendental”. This implies it is a technique that involves neither active thinking nor any artificial manipulation of the mind-body by external sensory inputs. Somehow TM re-sets the mind-body to a condition of ideal balance “which may have been disturbed by external lifestyle factors.

Richard Broome has a PhD in Business Administration from the GSB at UCT. His scientific research was on stress reduction at the worksite using Transcendental Meditation.