On May 4, 2009, at 10:15 PM, Peter wrote:
The physiological/neurological research on TM has always been interesting and legit because its just a straight measure of brain wave activity. The problem has come in when there is an attempt to correlate these measure with complex psychological traits. The worst is when you see a degree of hemispheric coherence at some frequency and someone claims that this "means" that TM allows you to use more of your brain and therefore you are "better" at something than someone who doesn't have this coherence. The politics of consciousness enter when the non-scientists or the either deceptive/naive scientists make very self-serving statements regarding the research. This was non-physiological, but it is like the latest research that, according to the TMO, shows that TM reduces the symptoms of ADHD. Even the TM "scientist" David Orme- Johnson claimed this and it is just patently false. The design of the study does not allow you to conclude this at all, primarily because there was no control group and each subject functioned as there own control. If you know anything about research design, such a study essentially tells you nothing other than a bunch of students over x amount of time had a lessening of their ADHD symptoms. Why this lessening occurred, which is the most important question, can not be concluded because no variables have been controlled. I would love to ask David, why he believes you can conclude that TM is the one variable that "caused" these results when not a single variable has been controlled.
They seem to be operating on the premise that "you can fool some of the people most of the time". Make no mistake, ADHD and meditation has a potential to make some big $$$ for the TMO, so they will no doubt continue to attempt to get into school districts with there "science" and they will try to get it used for cardiac patients, another mistake.
There has been some validated success with ADHD and other forms of meditation, so I suspect they'll try to ride on the backs of them.
