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Are you tempted by the prospect of a reversal of ageing, increased intelligence,
improved relationships or irreversible world peace? These are just some
of the benefits of meditation promised by the Transcendental Meditation
organisation. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem very plausible. Such claims imply
that sitting still silently repeating a phrase – one form of meditation
practised by the followers of the TM movement – can have profound physical,
psychological and even sociological effects. Indeed, it sounds so implausible
that many people simply dismiss meditation out of hand.

Sceptics may also note that selling meditation can be very lucrative.
The Transcendental Meditation movement, led by The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,
once the Beatles’ guru, owns multimillion pound mansions all over the world.
It is now establishing special towns, such as the one near Skelmersdale
in Lancashire, where devotees can achieve ‘Heaven on Earth’ – at a price.

Nevertheless, various forms of meditation have been practised for centuries,
and most of its practioners are anything but commercially minded. They are
more likely to claim that meditation reduces stress or increases awareness
than that it produces the wide-ranging effects claimed for TM. So are there
really any benefits from meditating?

In answering this, we should keep two distinct questions in mind. First,
are the claims of those with special techniques and vested interests valid?
Secondly, and more important from a scientific point of view, does any form
of meditation have any effects – harmful or beneficial?

Scientific research on meditation began nearly 40 years ago but is fraught
with problems, not least because there are almost as many methods of meditation
as people who meditate. One simple classification divides meditation into
concentrative and mindfulness forms. In concentrative approaches, the meditator
attends to one object in view or one idea or problem or, as in the case
of TM, to a mantra – a phrase or word repeated silently. This can lead to
a state of feeling oneness with the object of concentration, to the exclusion
of worries, stray thoughts or external events.

In open or mindfulness meditation the whole of experience is the object
of attention. The meditator sits, often with eyes open, and does not discriminate
between thoughts, sights and sounds. In this kind of meditation, there arises
a sense of a flow of experience – undifferentiated, undescribed and not
commented on. Rather than disappearing, the world seems fresh, new and as
though never seen before.

In both concentrative and mindfulness meditation, stray thoughts are
not repressed or pushed away but simply let go. The aim, at least in the
short term, is to calm the mind by letting it settle down. Thoughts and
feelings, which might otherwise become overwhelming or distracting, simply
come and go. Eventually they may not come at all.

Increasing skill is said to lead to a series of experiences described,
perhaps, as feelings of joy, floating, flying or ‘acceptance of things as
they are’ – the descriptions vary enormously from one system to another.
Further blissful states, often known as samadhi or nirvana, may then happen.
In some systems of meditation, these ‘higher states’ are religiously cultivated.
In others, they are simply accepted as natural by-products, not to be taken
too seriously, and certainly not to be clung to or seen as an achievement.
The forms of meditation that are run on commercial lines tend to pay particular
heed to achieving the higher states, whereas in Japanese Zen Buddhist training,
for example, a good meditation might be described as ‘just sitting’.

This leads to a paradox in meditation. Aiming to progress along ‘the
path’ of experiences is counterproductive. And yet there must be a path
if changes occur through practice. But what changes? Does a special state
of consciousness arise, is a measurable skill learnt, is there some kind
of insight, or what?

Some of the earliest research assumed that meditation involved a special
state and set out to find out what it was. In the 1950s, scientists had
established that dreaming is associated with a certain pattern of electrical
activity in the brain which could be recorded on an electroencephalograph
(EEG) machine. They hoped that the EEG would provide a kind of window into
a person’s mental state.

In the waking brain, the frequency of the electrical activity varies,
with lower frequencies – typically less than 14 cycles per second – happening
more often during relaxed states than when the brain is alert and active.
One of the most distinctive patterns is the alpha rhythm – electrical activity
between 8 and 13 cycles per second – which is normally present when a person
is resting with eyes closed. Early experiments showed that people meditating
produce a lot of alpha waves even with their eyes open.

The alpha rhythm is normally blocked – that is, replaced by higher frequency
brain waves – if there is a sudden noise or other unexpected stimulus. For
normal people, no amount of trying to ignore something will prevent the
alpha waves from disappearing. But if the person is repeatedly exposed to
the same noise or stimulus, alpha waves eventually persist, despite the
disturbance. The blocking of alpha waves seems to be a response to unexpected
events. Could meditation also affect this blocking response?

In 1957, EEG machines were becoming small enough to carry around, and
two researchers – B. K. Bagchi and S. Wenger of the State University of
Iowa – took their apparatus into the mountain caves of Indian yogis. The
yogis calmly meditated while the experimenters, with frozen fingers despite
their Western winter clothes, banged cymbals behind the yogis, flashed lights
in their eyes and even plunged their feet into cold water. Apparently, the
alpha rhythm did not disappear in the face of these onslaughts. The findings
suggested that the yogis managed sensory withdrawal during meditation.

In 1966, two researchers from Tokyo, Akira Kasamatsu and Tomo Hirai,
tested 48 Zen Buddhist priests and their students who had been meditating
for between 1 and 20 years. They practised zazen, a passive mindfulness
meditation with eyes open. First, the meditators produced fast alpha activity
which gradually increased in amplitude and decreased in frequency until,
sometimes, waves of between 6 and 7 cycles per second (classed as theta
waves) began to appear.

Interestingly, it was the most advanced meditators whose EEG showed
the most theta waves. Perhaps even more important, the Zen master classified
the students as low, middle or high in advancement, and his classification
was a better predictor of the EEG than the years of meditation they had
done. This does not answer the question of what is being learnt, but it
does at least indicate that measurable progress was taking place.

The researchers also tried blocking the alpha waves. In this case, unlike
the Indian yogis, the alpha waves were blocked but the meditators did not
habituate to the disturbance. The Japanese Zen Buddhists seemed to be responsive
to the stimuli but did not come to expect more. In other words, each stimulus
was perceived as new.

This seemed to fit perfectly with the subjective experiences of the
two forms of meditation – one excluding the sensory world, the other observing
it without comment as though endlessly new and fresh. This neat explanation,
however, was not to be sustained. Some later studies, all using TM meditators
also found blocking and no habituation, but others reported no blocking
or increased blocking – leaving the conclusion totally confused.

More recently, research on the EEG has taken different directions. For
example, some investigators have looked to see whether meditation makes
the EEG patterns in the left and right hemispheres of the brain more similar
– a phenomenon known as EEG coherence. Here we meet a persistent problem
in meditation research. Much of the research is now done by members of the
TM organisation, often at their own Maharishi International University (MIU)
in Fairfield, Iowa. Most of it is published in their own publications, where
it is not subject to the normal peer review system of scientific journals.
A strong motivation to ‘prove’ the efficacy of TM could bias the findings.

As far as EEG coherence is concerned, the TM researchers claim that
meditation leads to a greater coherence in the electrical activity recorded
from the two hemispheres. This spawned the appealing idea that greater coherence
could somehow lead to increased creativity and personal growth. However,
Peter Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist at The Maudsley Hospital in London, and
also a meditation researcher, points out that increased coherence can happen
in many states, including epileptic seizure, coma and death – not such a
good advertisement for TM.

Nevertheless, in 1982, David Orme-Johnson and his colleagues at MIU
tried to determine whether EEG coherence in subjects was influenced by a
group of 2500 students meditating a thousand miles away. The researchers
found greater coherence on days when the group was meditating. It is not
clear, however, whether the subjects knew which days were which, so the
effect may have been due to expectation. As Fenwick says: ‘If this . . .
proved to be a real effect . . . then the laws of physics would need rewriting.’
It would also be of great interest to parapsychologists, who have long hoped
that meditation would provide a state conducive to psychic abilities. But
Orme-Johnson’s work has not been repli-cated, and the laws of physics seem
relatively safe.

They would not be safe, however, if the ‘Maharishi effect’ were real.
The Maharishi effect, according to the TM movement, is that wherever 1 per
cent of people regularly meditate, there will be more peace and less crime
– a claim regularly challenged by sceptics who have studied crime statistics.
Moreover, there are alternative explanations in places such as Fairfield,
Iowa. When the MIU and its mass of inward-looking, disciplined, early-to-bed
devotees replaced an ailing college full of car-driving, drug-taking young
students, it would be surprising if crime rates did not fall.

Another TM claim is that meditation produced warm weather for the pouring
of concrete to build a new meditation dome in Fairfield. A little investigation
by a maths teacher in Iowa revealed that suppliers of the concrete consult
the National Weather Service before preparing a load of concrete, and will
not supply concrete if a frost is predicted.

The most famous claim by the TM movement is levitation. Meditators will
have spent hundreds of pounds before they are even eligible to take the
Sidhi Program, which allegedly trains them first to hover and finally to
attain ‘complete mastery of the skies’. Photographs show meditators airborne
in lotus positions, but leave much to be desired as evidence if they conveniently
omit to show the ground below. In any case the same effect can be duplicated
on film by taking photos, at very fast speeds, of athletes rising by muscular
effort alone, as James Randi, magician and arch critic, has shown in his
book Flim-Flam. Beyond photographs, however, the successful graduates of
the Sidhi Program have not been available for testing. Randi concludes that
the Maharishi ‘has turned unproved and outdated notions of Eastern mysticism
into a pseudoscientific mess’.

We must not, however, allow the excesses of one cult organisation to
cloud the basic question whether meditation does have any effects. So let
us return to the simpler claim: does meditation, in any form, reduce stress?
This must be the most common claim for meditation. It is because of this
that meditation has been used to treat hypertension, asthma, gum inflammation,
drug abuse, alcohol abuse, insomnia and stuttering.

Early research seemed to show that meditation did indeed reduce physiological
arousal as measured by heart rate, sweating palms, breathing rate and blood
pressure. Then in 1983, David Holmes, a psychologist at the University of
Kansas, pointed out that most of the experiments had simply measured stress
before and after meditation and found it lowered. There were no control
groups. In his own experiments, he asked one group of experienced TM teachers
to meditate for 20 minutes and another simply to rest. In both groups, levels
of arousal fell to the same extent. In other words, meditation reduced stress
but only as much as rest did. And who would recommend resting twice a day
as a cure for asthma or drug abuse?

Holmes’s review raised a storm of protest from meditators and teachers
of meditation, but subsequent research has confirmed his conclusion. The
standard of experiments has also improved, with more sophisticated control
conditions to provide a comparison for the meditators. For example, one
method uses ‘anti-meditation’, where the control subjects have to walk up
and down, thinking about problems.

Even if meditation does not reduce arousal more than resting does, it
might help people to control their response to threatening situations. So
experiments have involved such devices as showing subjects films of varying
goryness, or giving them IQ tests and telling them they scored badly. In
one study, Daniel Goleman and Gary Schwartz, psychologists at Harvard University,
found that arousal levels in meditators dropped more than that of non-meditators
after watching a gory film. However, Holmes points out, the meditators had,
for reasons that are not clear, a higher arousal level before the film.
They also reported feeling less anxious, but it is hard to rule out the
effects of expectation on subjective measures.

Paul Lehrer, a psychiatrist at the State University of New Jersey, carried
out an experiment with his colleagues in which they played loud tones and
compared the effects for three groups: subjects in two groups had trained
for four weeks in either meditation or progressive muscular relaxation,
while those in a third group had had no training. Compared with the control
groups, the meditators showed higher arousal while waiting for the tones
and a faster drop in heart rate after the tones. The relaxation group reported
more muscular relaxation, but the meditators more reduction in anxiety.

All this seems to show that while meditation may reduce feelings of
anxiety, it does not reduce bodily responses to stress. In other words,
if you want to reduce your physio-logical stress levels, do not turn to
meditation. This is an interesting conclusion, which contradicts some of
the claims made for meditation, and yet it fits rather well with a more
Buddhist idea of meditation. Buddhists teach that meditation is a means
of training the attention to be open and direct, so that the world is seen
‘as it is’ rather than through the confused illusion created by our normally
muddled minds.

What does this mean, though, to say that the world is seen ‘as it is’?
Psychologists’ understanding of perception is that it is a constructive
process – a human brain builds models or representations of the world on
the basis of the information it receives from the senses. Surely there can
be no ‘as it is’. Perhaps what it means is constructing less complex illusions
or being less influenced by expectations and desires. In one of the few
studies on perceptual changes in meditators, an American psychiatrist, Daniel
Brown, and his colleagues at the University of Chicago found increased visual
sensitivity in people who had meditated 16 hours a day during a three-month
retreat. The heavy meditators could detect briefer flashes of light and
distinguish flashes closer together than a group of people who meditated
only two hours a day.

At Bristol, Jane Salmon and I tried to get more directly at the idea
of seeing the world ‘as it is’. What people see is always biased by what
they think they are seeing. So we tried to devise a test which would measure
the bias. The task was to copy a perspective drawing of a street with houses.
If you ask subjects to copy the lines of the windows, roof or pavement,
they make large errors in the angle, but turn the picture upside down, so
that it no longer looks so much like a street in depth, and they make much
smaller errors. Presumably the errors happen because people do not see the
lines ‘as they are’ but as they think they ought to be.

The question we asked was whether meditation would reduce the errors
for the upright picture – in other words allow people to see the design
more accurately. We compared a group of experienced Ch’an (Chinese Zen)
meditators, who practise open or mindfulness meditation, with a group of
novice meditators and with a group of people who had received one lesson
in muscular relaxation. A session of meditation or relaxation before the
test did not affect the number of errors in copying the lines, but the more
experienced meditators did better than the other two groups. Did years of
training help them to see the world more ‘as it is’?

Maybe, but any study of this kind raises yet another methodological
problem. If you compare meditators with non-meditators you cannot be sure
that they are comparable in other ways. To begin with, Westerners who want
to learn meditation are not typical of the rest of the population. They
tend to be more anxious and neurotic than average, to report more problems
in general and to have taken twice as many drugs as non-meditators.

A way to avoid this problem may be to compare experienced meditators
with beginners, as we did, but this raises another problem: only a small
proportion of those who begin meditation carry on with it. So again, there
will be differences between the groups that are nothing to do with the direct
effect of meditation itself. Michael Delmonte, a clinical psychologist in
Dublin, found that discontinuing meditation was related to an ‘unhealthy
psychological profile’. People who dropped out were more introverted, had
low expectations of medi-tation, high arousal during rest and a more external
locus of control – that is, they tend to attribute things to external rather
than internal causes.

Other studies have found that those who respond well to meditation tend
to be high on ‘absorption’ – a measure of how easily a person can become
totally absorbed in something like a book, film or fantasy world. Delmonte
says that those with a history of psychosis and depression respond very
negatively to meditation, and it may even trigger suicidal and psychotic
behaviour. It is the relatively more stable people who continue. And does
it make them any happier? Delmonte says not; meditation is not a hedonistic
technique, but that ‘living at a higher level of awareness has its multitude
of rewards’.

This makes one wonder about the relationship between meditation and
therapy. Some psychotherapists have thought that meditation could be a useful
technique. In view of Delmonte’s research, however, it seems more likely
that it is harmful for people with serious problems. Delmonte suggested
that they may be confronted with suppressed thoughts and emotion at a rate
they cannot cope with, and so become overwhelmed. For the psychologically
stable, meditation is obviously more positive. But we still do not know,
and cannot measure, just what effects it is having on whom.

All this makes the empirical scientist want to despair. Designing well-controlled
experiments to test the effects of meditation seems to be too hard. So do
we give up? Certainly these problems are no justification for concluding
that there are no effects. Perhaps there are effects that are just not measurable
in these ways? If so, what could they be? I would suggest that meditation
can, at its best, clear the mind of much of its confusion.

With clarity can come insights which science is only gradually revealing
in its particular way. The most obvious is the constructed nature of the
world. Most of us assume that there is a real world out there and that we
see it in some sense directly. Psychology reveals this to be an illusion
– what we perceive is a mental construction. In its different way, meditation
can reveal subjectively the extent of our own biases in seeing the world.

Most of us, for example, assume that we are some kind of solid self
– a real, acting, deciding, powerful entity which goes on and on through
an entire lifetime and perhaps beyond. Psychology is now revealing more
and more of the constructed nature of self. The self we value so much is
a mental model we have developed through a lifetime and which perhaps has
no persistence beyond its similarity (but definitely not identity) from
one day to the next.

Recent experiments have shown that even apparently conscious, deliberate
acts begin unconsciously, so that the feeling that ‘we’ decided to act may
be an illusion. Fenwick has remarked that through meditation a person is
freed from ‘the illusion that he is ‘doing’. Perhaps this is what the Buddha
meant when he said: ‘Actions do exist, and also their consequences, but
the person that acts does not.’

Of course it is hard to accept that there is no persistent self, whether
you are a psychologist dealing with experimental results, or a meditator
struggling with experience. Indeed, some people say that scientists never
fully accept in their own lives the consequences of their discoveries. And
perhaps the training in meditation is so long and hard because we all resist
so strongly the idea of our own impermanence.

If these comparisons have any validity, we are wise not to dismiss meditation
altogether. Experiments have disproved many of the more extravagant claims,
but there may be more to meditation than this. Perhaps the subjective approach
of arduous training in meditation and the objective approach of scientific
experimentation both lead to the same place. If so, each system must surely
have a lot to teach the other.

Susan Blackmore is in the Department of Psychology of the University
of Bristol and the Department of Social Sciences, University of Bath.