There are still people who do Transcendental Meditation? That’s SO 1967!
Agree.
Do not agree.
Become unstuck? What, scientifically speaking, is that, exactly?
Agreed. It is also easy to accept blindly “science” about mediatation, especially if you are an adherent from the outset.
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, Researchuse, glad to have you with us. You’ll notice that this is a generally skeptical crowd, we’re pretty much skeptical about everything. But we have some interesting discussions nonetheless. So, welcome.
Also, since there was already a thread on this topic, I’ve merged your thread into the existing one – just housekeeping, trying to keep one thread per topic.
One thing we do know for sure about meditation: It sure takes up a lot of your time!
I plan to try meditation and yoga once the weather gets cold where I live, and I am unable to walk outside. I’ll try it for a while, and if I notice improvements then I will continue. It sounds great and I’m all for lifestyle improvements.
For what it’s worth James Randi has commented somewhere (I don’t remember which book I read it in, it might have been Flim-Flam) that studies have shown that brain-waves from people meditating are indistinguishable from people asleep.
So if somebody spends 2 hours a day meditating, that’s 2 hours of extra sleep. Which presumably means less stress, and lower blood pressure than the average person, since most people don’t sleep during the day. And anybody who sets up his daily routine to include 2 hours of quiet time is probably already a calm person.
Which makes me wonder—are there many TM practitioners among the classic “type A” personality: super high-pressure people, always-on-the-go. Say, the floor traders at the stock market, or the “stage mothers” who put their 4 year old girls in beauty pageants and speak of nothing else in life. Or the yuppie parents who plan their kid’s careers starting from kindergarten, with constant, life-long pressure( to get accepted at the right schools, join the right clubs, etc.)
I have great respect for Jame Randi but I think there are plenty of studies showing that that is not the case. For example:
http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/02/14/controlling-brain-waves-may-be-key-to-meditations-benefits/51591.html
To take things on a little bit of a tangent (This was part of the original question I posed to Cecil), check out this talk by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist turned author/advocate.
Topic of discussion: Doesn’t that sound a whole lot like what Buddhism, Zen, and that general way of thinking is after?
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
That’s a 19 minute video-could you boil it down for us, please?
She starts by describing the physical structure of the brain, how it is two separate hemispheres. She even shows a real brain and how the hemispheres pull apart, except for a small bit in the brainstem.
She talks about the two halves experience the world differently. The right side is the immediate now, it experiences the world as senses. It is a “parallel processor” that everything is now and all of it is interconnected, we are one with the world and each other and everything. The left side, meanwhile, is a “serial processor”, that is linear and analytical, it looks at everything in the past and future. It is the internal monologue of “pick up the milk”.
Then she walks us through the experience she had when she suffered a stroke in her left brain. Step by step, as she went through the experience, waking up with pulsing head pain, attempting her daily routine and suddenly experiencing the world around her very differently. She’s on the elliptical and studying herself as an external viewer and how things look weird. Then her right arm goes paralyzed, and she realizes she’s in trouble. But she can’t figure out what to do. Finally she tries to call her office, but she cannot remember the number, so she goes to her desk and is thumbing through business cards to find hers. Except she cannot recognize the numbers, she just sees the jumble of pixels.
And then she goes through moments of clarity, followed by moments of lost in bizarre la-la land of being interconnected with the beauty and energy of the universe. How she could not sense where her body ended and the walls around her began.
Finally she manages to call the office, get help, gets shipped to the hospital. When she wakes, she realizes she’s had this beautiful experience of the right side of the brain without the left side intruding, how it was nirvana. And so she thinks that would be a wonderful lesson for the rest of the world, to be able to shift from left side thought to right side experience, the beautiful peaceful all of the right side experience.
She’s a dynamic speaker involving her whole body in a very expressive manner. And she gets very emotional by the end. It’s a powerful talk.