Has Transcendental Meditation Produced Human Excellence?

One of our many wonderful readers, Tanemon, made the following suggestion for a posting. Thank you, Tanemon, for coming up with this excellent idea for a new essay when I was too busy doing my income taxes to think up a new article!

(Quote from Tanemon's comment of April 9, 2010):

"In the past week or so - due to the encouraging fact that we had Fred Travis's attention over at MUM - it occurred to me that a good focussed discussion might be evoked by the question: "Has TM produced human excellence?" In his early talks and writings for Westerners (such as the Science of Being and Art of Living), MMY stressed that excellence would be an outcome of TM. The fullfillment of psychology, the fulfillment of sociology, the discovery of the wealth within, the support of Almighty Nature etc. The implication, or explicit message, was always that these should produce people of great fulfillment, wisdom, finesse, and accomplishment.

I realize there would be very many ideas and/or measures of excellence - academic achievements, artistic recognition, innovation and invention, notable social leadership, among many others. Maybe we could share our observations about how this has worked out for committed TMers. And it could be of interest to the folks over at MUM."

Excellent Article Questions Significance of Transcendental Meditation Research

A fine, critical blog, "The Honest Truth about TM," recently posted a discussion of an article by Travis, et al., on "alpha power" measured for newly instructed TM meditators and a control group of non-meditators.

You may be able to read the Travis article published in Cognitive Processing for yourself, if you have access to an online article-search database (available through most universities and some libraries). It's also possible that Dr. Travis will send you a copy, as he has been extremely generous about sharing his research with interested parties.

The Wikipedia page on "TM-Sidhi Program" contains similar criticisms of coherence studies, noting, "Scientists now consider EEG 'coherence' to be an obsolete measurement since it does not separate the effects of amplitude and phase in the interrelations between two EEG signals. [source: Jean-Philippe Lachaux, Eugenio Rodriguez, Jacques Martinerie, and Francisco J. Varela; ; Measuring phase synchrony in brain signals; Human Brain Mapping, 1999]."

Some relevant quotes from the blog post:

A recent study published in the low-impact journal "Cognitive Processing" by TM Org employees Fred Travis, David A. F. Haaga , John Hagelin, Melissa Tanner, Alaric Arenander, Sanford Nidich, Carolyn Gaylord-King, Sarina Grosswald, Maxwell Rainforth and Robert H. Schneider claims to (once again) establish significance for that which is well known to be insignificant....

Alpha EEG waves (or more commonly simply "alpha") is a common artifact of everyday human life. Coherent alpha is needed for everyday function of our brains and in no way represents anything extraordinary.... No one else seems to buy it except these guys, as they still keep talking about it long after their scientific peers have called such speculations "exaggerated" or "premature" [2007, The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness]....

As the great pioneer in EEG interpretation, Barbara Brown, states "Concluding anything about alpha is perilous"....

Classic TM researcher manipulation of baseline. An old TM Org trick. Didn't fool me. The real question is how many people will they fool?

J.

Kudos to Dr. Fred Travis of Maharishi U's Transcendental Meditation Research

Fred Travis, Ph.D., professor of Maharishi Vedic Science at Maharishi University of Management, has been participating in discussion on TMFreeblog about his recently published research on Transcendental Meditation and brain functioning.

A couple of scientists, Maharishi's biographer, and other former TMers who are educated about TM's promotional methods are having an interesting discussion with Fred about TM research. We hope this discussion will continue.
We are grateful and honored that Dr. Fred Travis joined us to discuss research on Transcendental Meditation.

We honor Fred's integrity to openly discuss TM research!

Fred, I always liked you, even though I never fully agreed with your conclusions. It's truly an honor to have you here.

You may read Fred's University bio here.
Fred is offering to provide copies of published research so that individuals may intelligently discuss his studies.

In the course of discussion, Fred acknowledged negative side effects seen by long TM rounding programs; he wrote "I am also concerned about the issues you bring up about long rounding. Thank you for bringing these to my attention again."
He also humbly acknowledged, "There are no studies on Yagya, and one on MVVT. Yes, they need to be investigated."

For our TMFreeblogspot readers who are not following this discussion, you might find it of interest - stop by to read comments to the following blog post :
More Doubtful Transcendental Meditation "Research" Clogging the Intertubes by John Knapp.

For more information on Dr. Fred Travis, a google search provides oodles of background about Fred's research and work promoting Transcendental Meditation with brain research, click :
"fred travis" "transcendental meditation"

Again, to Fred, Thank you for stopping by! We hope you stay a while!

Again, the conversation with Dr. Travis can be read in comments to this post:

More Doubtful Transcendental Meditation "Research" Clogging the Intertubes by John Knapp.