fMRI is not used by the TMO for several reasons: 1) the equipment is darned expensive (a single state-of-the-art fMRI machine would cost almost as much as MIU cost when it was bought, and the overhead for running/maintaining it would be a substantial fraction of the entire MUM operating budget -several $100,000 per year -there's a reason why an fMRI costs thousands per session).
2) the temporal resolution of BOLD (Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent Imaging) based imaging is much less than from EEG -seconds and minutes versus milliseconds. 3) fMRI is intrusive and even dangerous. It is known to change the operation of the brain it is used to examine. If you're trying to investigate teh subtle changes in brain function of someone growing towards enlightenment, its probably not the best route to go. As Fred Travis once said to me, the TMO organization considers the enlightened members of the TM community to be precious treasures, not lab rats. L
