--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Richard J. Williams" <richard@...> wrote: > >>> I'm surprised they didn't include TM >>> on the list. >>> > Xenophaneros Anartaxius: >> Not every researcher is familiar with TM... >> > So, I wonder why the researchers didn't > include many Hindu meditation techniques? > Who knows? Maybe mostly Buddhist meditation groups were in their area. They don't include Buddhist meditators in research done at MUM. There may have been a reason they chose these types, perhaps they do the same kinds themselves, and were familiar with it, or perhaps earlier research indicated these kinds of meditation were a good bet to get a publishable positive result. This is, as at MUM, one of the sources of bias in research - researchers tend to prefer a positive finding to finding nothing.
What often happens is when a positive finding is published, researchers doing replications also find the same thing but the effect is less, maybe half as much as in the initial studies. This is indicative of a normalising of the bias of original researchers looking for a good outcome - researchers less attached to the result redo the experiment, sometimes with better controls, or a larger group etc., and find that the effect reported is not so great as found previously. That a lot of what Wallace did was overturned is at least partially due to this effect. I suspect Wallace wrote his paper on TM giving TM the best light he could. I recall his paper on reversal of aging - the original paper was rather weak but TM etc., looked good - compared to norms used, meditator-sidhas came in 12 years 'younger' than the norms and meditators alone came in something like half that. But the final published paper required he control for change of diet and perhaps other factors (I don't remember), and if you compare the meditator-sidhas to the control group he used, and not the norms from other research, they were about 5 years 'younger' than the controls, and the meditators alone were no different than the controls. There are many confounding factors in research like this; in this one meditators tendency to adopt a vegetarian diet had a strong effect on the results. If subjects were living at MIU at the time, while chicken etc., was still available then, there would have been peer pressure to just eat vegetables, and of course you could not get a hamburger there. In the research discussed in this thread, researchers were comparing changes in the brain as imaged with MRI with years of practice of meditation. I suspect the sample size was too small to distinguish between the type of meditation used. The range of years of practice was 4 to 50 years.
