It’s All in the Brain

How Meditation Changes the Brain

Through cutting edge EEG technologies, neuroscientists can watch in real time the coherence that spreads across the whole brain during Transcendental Meditation. Here David Lynch and physicist John Hagelin join neuroscientist Fred Travis for a recent national symposium on “TM, Creativity, and the Brain.”

Doctors used to tell us, “It’s all in the mind.” But now they tell us, “It’s all in the brain.”
This is because every experience changes the brain.

Sleep, study physics, pray, meditate, shoot a free throw, listen to classical/country/punk music, watch a sad/scary/chickflick movie…

… Every unique experience changes the brain in a unique way…

So how is meditation different from daydreaming? How is one meditation different from another meditation? Forget the intellectual debates and philosophizing, you can look at the brain through EEG and brain imaging techniques to get the story…

The first-ever long-term, randomized control study of meditating college students to be published later this month in a top, peer-reviewed scientific journal shows that the process of transcending during the TM technique:

• produces a unique state of “restful alertness” (This was seen in the markedly higher alpha power and lower beta and gamma waves during TM practice.)

• creates coherence between the left and right hemispheres of the brain

• enhances an individual’s sense of “self” by activating what neuroscientists call the “default mode network” in the brain. (This is considered the natural ground state of the brain, glimpsed by neuroscientists in people during eyes-closed rest but activated in a unique and far more profound way during Transcendental Meditation.)

It’s a new time when medieval myths, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations about meditation in general, and Transcendental Meditation in particular, are being dissipated like a fog by the bright light of scientific inquiry.

It’s about time.

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