Linda Egenes: And the third category, Automatic Self-Transcending, would include the Transcendental Meditation technique.

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Yes, TM is the primary example of Automatic Self-Transcending. The TM technique allows your mind to easily and effortlessly settle inward, through quieter levels of thought, until you experience the most silent and peaceful level of your own awareness—pure consciousness.

The purpose of Automatic Self-Transcending is to enliven a state of consciousness that has beneficial effects for the mind and body. Research shows that when you transcend, when you go to quieter and quieter levels of your mind, the level of biochemical and physiological stress decreases.

Essentially, TM creates the opposite effect of the stress response, the classic fight-or-flight response. In the fight-or-flight reflex, your heart rate goes up, your respiration rate goes up, major stress hormones, such as cortisol, increase. Research shows that TM has the opposite effect: heart rate decreases, respiratory rate decreases, levels of cortisol decrease, and so forth.

Linda Egenes: What about brainwave activity in these three categories of techniques. Has that been studied?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: One of the ways to measure the differences between meditation techniques is to look at the electrical activity in someone’s brain at the time they are meditating. The electrical activity of millions of neurons in the brain create brainwaves, called the electroencephalogram or “EEG” for short. These waves rise and fall at different frequencies, depending on our state of consciousness and what we are doing.

For example, during deep sleep, the EEG has a slow frequency, rising and falling only once every second. In Travis and Shear’s review of current research we can see that the three different meditation procedures produced three distinctly different EEG frequencies.

In Focused Attention meditation the EEG is fast, rising and falling 20 to 30 times a second, which is called beta EEG, or even faster at 30 to 50 times per second, which is called gamma EEG. High frequency (think of a high-pitched tone) is not a restful or calm state, but an active state, and is commonly seen in someone concentrating in a highly focused manner.

Open Monitoring is characterized by a slower EEG, oscillating 5 to 8 times a second, called theta. Theta EEG occurs when someone is inwardly preoccupied, such as while reading a novel or solving a mathematical problem, and is no longer aware of the noises or people around them. The thalamus is the central switching area for incoming sensory information, and theta is associated with the thalamus reducing awareness of incoming information.

Linda Egenes: What about research on brainwave activity during TM?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: During Automatic Self-Transcending, as in the Transcendental Meditation technique, you see a middle frequency EEG, 7 to 9 cycles per second, called alpha1, which is characteristic of reduced mental activity and relaxation.

Frontal alpha-wave activity was first discovered by Keith Wallace, Ph.D., and published in Science magazine in 1970. Many subsequent studies have found that frontal alpha-wave activity becomes very coherent or orderly during the TM technique.

For instance, a meta-analysis published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin in 2006 reviewed the EEG research on different types of meditation and cited seven studies showing that alpha EEG coherence increases between the left and right sides of the front of the brain during TM practice, and continues spreading until the whole brain becomes synchronized and coherent.