Stanford research paper? Do you mean the recent AHRQ meta-analysis of the effects of meditation on anxiety?
I responded in the comment section to the Scientific American blog entry about it: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-meditation-overrated/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-meditation-overrated/ David Orme-Johnson wrote his own response in a Letter to the Editor in the journal where the meta-analysis itself was published. He was a consultant for the team that wrote the paper, but was obviously not pleased with the outcome. Another point about the metanalysis that I didn't go into in my comment, but David may: it only looked at clinical populations that were anxious and avoided looking at juvenile or non-clinical populations, which is the population that most of the TM research on anxiety has been drawn from. While I agree that TM studies need to have better control groups ("active control group" mentioned in the Scientific American blog is just the tip of the iceberg), there's an issue that you are not aware of: Out of the 16,000+ studies on meditation and anxiety examined in the meta-analysis, only 47 were deemed worth of of inclusion, or about 3 percent. There's only 350 studies on TM available, and 8 out of that 350 qualified, or about 17%. By the numbers, TM studies were nearly 6 times as likely to qualify as other meditation practices, putting the lie to the claim that TM studies are low quality when compared to studies on other forms of meditation. The flipside is that there ARE about 50 times as many non-TM studies to look at as TM studies, so there's an issue of sheer numbers. In any arbitrary meta-analysis, unless it is in an area where TM researchers have focused their attention consistently (such as heart disease where the AHA gives TM the nod), the fact that there are 50 times as many studies on other forms of meditation means that TM is likely going to lose due to not having enough studies to qualify for evaluation. I've pointed this out to John Hagelin and Michael Dillbeck, as well as the active group of TM researchers around the world: there will likely be more studies on mindfulness practice published in 2014 than have been published in the entire history of publishing research on TM. It's a huge issue, IMHO, and will require a multi-year (probably at least a decade of work) to address. This little graphic illustrates the issue: the number of studies published on mindfulness has been growing exponentially for the past 7 years, while the number of studies published on TM has remained flat: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10203006996966605&set=pb.1555020826.-2207520000.1399207555.&type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10203006996966605&set=pb.1555020826.-2207520000.1399207555.&type=3&theater That last data point drops down because the others are for the entire year, while that last is only the first month of data in 2014, even so the ratio remains pretty much as it was last year: 25x as many studies on mindfulness as on TM. My own belief, and I've made it clear to John and Michael and anyone else willing to listen, is that TM researchers need to perform head-to-head studies of TM vs whatever (especially mindfulness practices like MBSR) in order to leverage the landslide of researchers jumping on the mindfulness research bandwagon. The prototype for how that research would work is this study published by Charles Alexander of MIU and Ellen Langer of Harvard that compared TM and mindfulness and the Relaxation Response ("low mindful relaxation") on a number of parameters. Each meditation practice had its own advocate on the team, and the study was jointly designed to make sure that all meditation practices were treated equally and that subjects had equal expectations for each practice (a major criticism of even "active control group" research): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2693686 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2693686 The only way in which enough TM studies can be published to match the mindfulness onslaught is for TM researchers to participate in studies where mindfulness might prove to be superior to TM on one or more variables. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Speaking purely for myself, TM is different to other forms of meditation but the effects of the other types my be be more useful if you have the sort of health issues that TM claims (but fails) to address. And may be more useful anyway.. Mindfulness can be highly beneficial for anxiety and depression states where TM is patently not. But if you're just going to judge everything by the EEGs what are you going to find out about it? Not much I would have thought. Here's the shocking truth; different types of meditation can affect and enhance the way you react to things that happen in your life, or because of things that happened previously, in different ways. The immediacy of experience that mindfulness gives you can help you live more spontaneously by freeing you from negative reaction patterns you may have picked up. It can also target things that bother you rather than let you sit around hoping that some "stress" is going to be released at some point in the future and you'll suddenly be able to cope better with problems. This approach can be of enormous value and it's something that EEG research isn't going to be able to help you with. You are way too fixated on this stuff Lawson. Did you read the Stanford research paper MJ posted about how they tested TM claims about stress release and anxiety reduction and found the TMO was exaggerating, mistaken or lying about the long term effects? We all know many people that don't fit the TM model of "perfect functioning" and would undoubtably all know many more if a large majority didn't quit the practise in the first few months, regardless of what their EEGs might be telling us. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : Former TMers enjoy claiming that TM has the same effects as all other practices, but anyone who looks at the EEG signature of various practices instantly realizes that such people are either speaking from ignorance (willful or otherwise) or deliberately lying. Here's a discussion of no-self and American Buddhism in the context of a course on Buddhist philosophy and how it fits in with the research on Buddhist meditation (mindfulness, though focussed attention practices such as Benson's Relaxation Response, Samatha and Metta, all have teh same overall effect): http://www.patheos.com/blogs/americanbuddhist/2014/05/buddhism-and-modern-psychology-week-five-looking-at-meditation.html http://www.patheos.com/blogs/americanbuddhist/2014/05/buddhism-and-modern-psychology-week-five-looking-at-meditation.html "Now that we’ve seen it suggested that the modular theory of the mind dovetails with the Buddhist theory of not-self, we look at how meditation might fit in to our picture. The first way this is discussed comes by looking at the Default Mode Network, which is the part of the brain that is active when our mind isn’t focused on anything. Brain scans have shown that meditation quiets this network. " The activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN) becomes greater during TM. Coincidentally, activation of teh DMN is associated with "sense of self," so the fact practice of meditation techniques that quiet the DMN also quiet "sense of self" is, well, a no-brainer. Likewise, the fact that TM, a mind-wandering practice, enhances teh activity of the DMN (including strengthening the activity of the brain associated with "sense of self") is a no surprising, either. People who insist that all meditation practices eventually lead to the "same place" are fooling themselves. Mindfulness and concentrative practices, in the long run, distort the functioning of the Default Mode Network. Maharishi called this "subtle damage" to the nervous system. TM enhances the normal restful functioning of the brain, aka the "Default Mode Network," which becomes active whenever the mind is allowed to wander. There's no reconciling the two approaches to spirituality.
