--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "shempmcgurk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I meant to comment on this post when it first appeared but I was > unable to as I was over that week (or banned for overposting, can't > remember which). > > I was a student at MIU when Nova ran this show. MIU faculty taped > the show and then showed it to us in the Learning Center (that big, > round building, I think). > > What struck me was something that no one else seemed to notice -- not > faculty, not students -- was that the TM SUBJECTS THAT WERE BEING > STUDIED WERE INSTRUCTED TO BE SUPINE, that is half-vertical, when > they hooked them up to the monitoring devices. > > Well, I don't know about anyone else but those aren't the > instructions for TM; TM is done in the sitting up position and if > they were studying the effects of TM on people practising TM in that > position, they weren't researching TM but something else. > > No wonder they got different results. > > Anyway, I tried to point that out but no one thought it very > important. >
It may or may not be important. However, Vaj either deliberately or unconsciously put out ad-copy rhetoric concerning the contrast between TM EEG and Buddhist compassion meditation EEG (Perhaps I do too, so this was a parody?). One thing to note is that the TM focus has been on distinctions between TM and normal states of consciousness. However, researchers learned over the years that TM wasn't any one state, but myriad states, the most striking of which is the TC state. More recently, Travis has noted that there is a ceiling effect on global EEG coherence *during* TM that occurs within a few months but that the coherence outside TM continues to trend upwards for many decades, which goes along with MMY's analogy (Shankara's actually) of dying a cloth gold and letting it fade in the sun. One interesting thing to note is that the TM folk, for all their blatant True Believerism in advertising, tend to present the actualy *Science* in a carefully neutral way. However, Vaj's favorite Buddhist researchers tend to conflate their belief system and their findings in rather obvious ways. FOr example, the first study on Buddhist COmpassion Meditation touted the extreme levels of gamma EEG coherence that were related literearly to the level of experience of the subject. A subsequent study found that even more experienced subjects actualy showed that the trend *reversed* itself "as expected." I admit to not having read the first paper carefully, but I dont' recall ANY discussion of how they expected this strking linear relationship to suddenly reverse itself with even more experienced meditators, though it no doubt IS predictable from a purely physiological POV, assuming that the Buddhist meditation changes follow the pattern of other learned/trained behavior: when you get better at something, your brain becomes more efficient at accomplishing the same task with less resources. My point is NOT that the TM researchers aren't biased, but only that they DO admit to being biased, and DO admit to having their pet theories changed, while the BUddhist meditation researchers seem more inclined to push their theories as never having changed. Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if you could see the same pattern in TM research from 35 years ago when it was first starting out. The earliest studies were all full of hype and certainty about what they were seeing, and the researchers no doubt had blinders on any research that drew their original findings into question. That changed gradually over the years. Kesterson's findig that the "breath suspension" state during TM wasn't really breath suspension and that it was NOT a sign of extremely reduced metabolism, was a bit of a shock to everyone. Kieth Wallace acknowledged that in his book, The Physiology of Enlightenment, though he didn't discuss the philosophical/emotional/political issues behind the scenes that no doubt accompanied the public change in TM theory. TM theory is STILL evolving. Travis is contributing a chapter to a book where he notes, contradicting earlier research and theory by ALexander, that the TM signs of enlightenment don't dovetail nearly as nicely as they used to think with conventional signs of ego-maturity. No doubt Buddhist meditation research will show the same kind of changes over the years as well, as the Believers start to learn that they don't really understand too much about what they are seeing with the currently crude instruments. With brain-research, the instruments are ALWAYS going to be crude, until such time as we can simulate a real brain, which is many decades, if not centuries, off. Lawson
