The party's over, most of the guests have gone home but a few drunken
revelers are trying to keep it alive at 4 AM. :-D
On 11/21/2013 09:46 PM, lengli...@cox.net wrote:
I watched that autism "webinar" that was put on by the David Lynch and
Joey Lowenstein foundations,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhK6PVp2AjI. and it was nice, but I
heard a lot of people claiming, as usual, that TM was no different
than any other form of meditation, was too expensive, and that the
webinar was merely an infomertial, etc.
So, I did a scholar.google.com search, and came across a new research
review on the EEG of autism.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but, after checking further,
on just about every measure I could find, TM's effects on normal
people reverses what you find in an autistic person --brainwave power,
brain activity, brain connections-- they all appear to be /exactly the
opposite/ from what is typical for an autistic person.
Also, /mindfulness/ and /concentration/ meditation techniques show
measures that are similar to what autistic people already show, which
implies they are NOT good for autistic people to practice.
If research on autistic people doing TM shows the same kinds of
changes that normal people show when they do TM, this implies that TM
is a direct treatment for autism, not just an anti-stress technique
that might be good for autistic people to practice.
Here's my original reddit.com message I put up, which includes the
links to the various studies that I use to justify what I say above:
A recent review of all studies on EEG and autism showed that the main
pattern of EEG found in people with ASD actually resembles the changes
that take place DURING mindfulness and concentration practices. This
suggests that such practices are completely inappropriate for
individuals with autism.
[Resting state EEG abnormalities in autism spectrum disorders (full
text, pdf
file)]ttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3058935/pdf/nihms210802.pdf
Mindfulness and concentration-based meditation practices tend to show
higher levels of Gamma EEG or higher levels of theta EEG while showing
lower levels of Alpha EEG
[Focused attention, open monitoring and automatic self-transcending:
Categories to organize meditations from Vedic, Buddhist and Chinese
traditions -Table 1 (full text, pdf
file)]http://drfredtravis.com/downloads/Travis_preprint.pdf
while Transcendental Meditation tends to show higher levels of Alpha
EEG power and lower power levels in other EEG frequency bands.
[A self-referential default brain state: patterns of coherence, power,
and eLORETA sources during eyes-closed rest and Transcendental
Meditation
practice]http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10339-009-0343-2
The first study above also mentions that people with Autism Spectrum
Disorder show a markedly reduced level of long-distance connectivity
in the brain. Recently published research on many forms of meditation
_other than_ TM also found that most forms of meditation reduce the
level of long-distance connectivity in the brain, making their effect
similar to that which is considered abnormal when found in patients
with ASD:
[Reduced functional connectivity between cortical sources in five
meditation traditions detected with lagged coherence using EEG
tomography (full text, pdf
file)]http://www.amaye.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/med-connectivity-EEG-tomog.pdf
The above researchers were recently given a live demo of how fast and
how effectively TM establishes long-distance connectivity in the
brain, and are conducting their study again, this time using TM
practitioners, so that they can compare the results. Based on
published research on EEG, researchers on TM expect that this new
study will show that TM has exactly the opposite effect from other
forms of meditation with respect to long-distance connectivity.
Research on ASD and the resting network of the brain –the so-called
“default mode network”– has found that there is a marked abnormality
in how the DMN functions in patients with ASD, especially the
connectivity to and activity of, the medial Prefrontal Cortex:
[Abnormal functional connectivity of default mode sub-networks in
autism spectrum disorder patients (full text, pdf
file)]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3058935/pdf/nihms210802.pdf
This turns out to be exactly the same area mostly like to show reduced
activity and connectivity due to the practice of mindfulness and
concentrative practices:
[Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct
neural modes of
self-reference]http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/2/4/313.abstract
[Impact of meditation training on the default mode network during a
restful state (full text, pdf
file)]http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/1/4.full.pdf
[Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode
network activity and connectivity (full text, pdf
file)]http://www.pnas.org/content/108/50/20254.full.pdf
and yet, this is the same area most likely to show enhanced activity
during TM practice:
[Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Anterior Cingulate Cortex in the
Generation of Alpha Activity Induced by Transcendental Meditation: A
Magnetoencephalographic Study (full text, pdf
file)]http://www.lib.okayama-u.ac.jp/www/acta/pdf/60_1_51.pdf
The ability to directly correlate the physical activity of the brain
in specific illnesses with the effects of different kinds of
meditation practices opens up an entirely new avenue of research on
the effects of meditation and will help guide how such practices are
evaluated and prescribed in the future.
This is potentially *huge* --both for the TM organization and for the
potential benefit for people with autism. Obviously, many studies need
to be done (there's not even a single TM + autism study that has been
done yet) to find out whether or not TM has the same effect on people
with autism as it has on normal people, but there's obviously
justification, at last to me, for doing very large and detailed
studies, right off the bat.
