--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradh...@...> wrote: > > On Nov 11, 2009, at 11:44 AM, WillyTex wrote: > > > Robert Keith Wallace's study, using the TM bija > > mantras, was published in JAMA in 1972. > > Unfortunately most of the claims of these early Wallace > studies were later admitted to be fallacious by Wallace.
Note Vaj's casual use of the highly misleading term "fallacious," suggesting that Wallace "admitted" that he had made intentionally false claims. As Vaj knows, that isn't the case. What Wallace acknowledged was that some of his original results didn't hold up. That tends to happen quite often in science--especially when one is studying something that hasn't previously been researched and one has to create novel protocols. Wallace and other TM researchers subsequently refined their methods and came up with a host of new findings. <snip> > Perhaps the most important idea that was shown to be > incorrect was the idea that TM produced a single, unique, > restfully alert, hypometabolic state. Nobody ever made this claim, not even in Wallace's original study. Another casual lie from Vaj. It's always been known that TM produces *periods* of "restful alertness" interspersed with periods of other types of states. > It actually turned out that during TM the average > meditator investigated spent 39.2% in waking state, 19.2% > in Stage 1 EEG sleep activity, 23.0% in stage 2 and 16.8% > in stage 3 and 4 sleep! When compared to controls who > napped, there ended up being little difference. > > Wallace, responding in a letter to the journal Science, > agreed that this was in fact the case. Later studies using more refined methodology demonstrated subtle but distinct differences that were not evident in the earliest studies. (Notice that Vaj rarely refers to any of the later studies, preferring to focus on the early, crude ones that are now long out of date, as if those were the only ones that TM had ever done.)
