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Quantifying
the field effects of consciousness:
From
increased EEG coherence to reduced international terrorism
Paper prepared for November 29-December 4, 2001
Today I will reviews
the methodology and results of a few key studies from a body of 50 studies
demonstrating field effects of consciousness through the Transcendental
Meditation technique (TM). These studies have found reduced crime rate and
decreased crime rate trend in cities after 1% of their population learned the
TM technique, controlling for demographic correlates of crime. Causal analyses
of random samples of 160 US cities and 40 Standard Metropolitan Statistical
Areas over a seven-year period found stable causal structures in which the
percent of the population practicing the TM technique predicted reduced crime
in subsequent years. The greater the number of meditators in a city, the
greater the reduction of crime in the cities in subsequent years, controlling
for 13 crime-correlated demographics.
Other studies have shown that groups of the TM and TM-sidhi
program including Yogic Flying (the TM-Sidhi program is an advanced variant of
Transcendental Meditation) that groups
of the square root of 1% of the world population (approximately 7,000 in the
mid 1980’s) predicted decreased international conflicts and terrorism on a
global scale, using data bases from independent scholars who are in no way
connected with this research program. The paper concludes that there is strong cross-validating evidence from
a wide variety of sources that the TM and TM-Sidhi program is an effective
technology for reducing and preventing international conflicts and terrorism.
A physiological
study suggested that during Yogic Flying by a group of 2,500, EEG coherence
increased between three individuals at a distance of over 1,000 miles away.
Increased EEG coherence in a single Yogic Flier predicted increased EEG
coherence in a non-meditator in the next room. The size of a group practicing
the TM and TM-Sidhi techniques predicted changes in the stress hormone cortisol
and in 5-HIAA, the main metabolite of serotonin in non-meditators working
within a 20-mile radius of the group.
When we started our
research on field effects of consciousness 27 years ago, the biggest barrier
was conceptual—how could we understand people interacting with each other at a
distance? Of all the research on meditation,
this posed the biggest threat to most scientists’ world-view. Today there is a
wide range of converging evidence for the phenomenon, much of it by people at
this conference. But it still remains a
threat to many, and with good reason. None of the four basic physical fields—electromagnetism, weak
interaction, strong interaction, or the gravitational field— seem plausible
candidates for mediating the effect. The electromagnetic field generated by the
nervous system is many orders of magnitude too small to plausibly explain how
people on opposite sides of the world could directly affect each other. The
strong and weak forces operate within the atomic nucleus, and the force of
gravity between two individuals is too weak to have a measurable effect.
Our view is that the phenomenon takes place
on the level of the unified field underlying the four fundamental forces.1
The hypothesis guiding our research program posits a
field of “pure consciousness”, which
links all individuals and everything in the universe. This is the perennial philosophy, whose
theoretical and practical ramifications are perhaps most completely elaborated
in the Vedic tradition of
“Veda” is the Sanskrit word for “knowledge”
and its deepest meaning is the field of pure knowledge, the total potential of
natural law at the basis of the universe. The Vedic literature is a sequentially expanded elaboration of natural
law expressed in the Veda. Quantum physicist John Hagelin has shown detailed
parallels between the structure of natural law in the Vedic description and the
structure of natural law in modern super-symmetric unified field theory.6
Physician and neurophysiologist Tony Nader has shown
that the human physiology is a perfect replica of the structures and functions
of natural law described in the Veda and Vedic literature. 7
As is the macrocosm, so too is the microcosm. Nader
has mapped all of the branches of the Veda and Vedic literature onto the
various structures of the brain and nervous system. A practical implication of
this knowledge for medicine is that the specific sounds of the Veda and Vedic
literature can be used to create balance and health in their corresponding
physiological counterparts.8 9
This field-theoretic view of
consciousness has a long tradition and profound practical implications. In the
Vedic tradition of India, five thousand years ago Maharishi Patanjali’s Yog Sutras, stated“tat-sannidhau vaira-tyagah” (Yoga
Sutra, 2.35)10
, “In the vicinity of Yogic influence — unifying
influence, integrating influence, coherent and harmonious influence —
conflicting tendencies do not arise” For Patanjali, the word “Yoga” means the
“union” of the localized individual mind with the cosmic mind, pure
consciousness. Where is pure consciousness
located and how can the individual mind experience it? Patanjali is clear on
this point: “yogas chitta-vrtti-nirodhah”— “Yoga is the least excited state of
mind” (2:1). Pure consciousness is no
further away than the silent basis of every individual’s mind, the Self,
capital “S”, of all beings, the knower within all of us who looks out onto the
world. Yet, in ordinary active states of consciousness, such as those involved
in thinking, perception, and feeling, the objects of awareness dominate
attention and the silent inner knower is missed, just as one misses seeing
one’s own glasses when looking through them.
Maharishi explains that to gain union of
the individual mind with the cosmic mind, one must let the individual mind
transcend its own activity to experience its own non-active state of restful
alertness.3
Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique
effortlessly leads the mind to progressively finer levels of thought until it
transcends the finest level and attains the self-referral state, transcendental
pure consciousness. Techniques that require contemplation or concentration keep
the mind “object-referral”, i.e., localized on the object of attention. Because
they require mental activity, they are counterproductive to transcending
thought. They are like stirring up waves on the ocean of consciousness. In
contrast, the Transcendental Meditation technique allows the mind to transcend
activity to experience self-referral consciousness, which is unbounded
awareness. It is like the waves of the ocean of consciousness settling down to
a flat, unbounded, still surface. Unbounded awareness is experienced as infinite and eternal, because that
is the fundamental nature of consciousness.11
Bringing
conscious awareness back onto itself, the unified field of natural law
holistically integrates all aspects of the mind and body in the individual.
Consequently, the individual’s behavioral and abstract, unmanifest
contributions to the collective consciousness of society become more coherent.12
In accordance with a general principle in
science that the coherent elements of a system have a more powerful effect than
the incoherent elements, as early as 1960 Maharishi predicted that
approximately one percent of a population practicing the Transcendental Meditation
technique would be enough have a measurable increase in the coherence in the
larger society. In the mid 1970’s Maharishi introduced the more advanced
TM-Sidhi program in which one exercises various mind-body systems from within
transcendental consciousness. The most powerful of these techniques is Yogic
Flying. He estimated that as little as the square root of one percent of a
population practicing the TM and TM-Sidhi program in a group would be enough to create a measurable influence of
harmony in society. This smaller
requirement of advanced meditators needed to create an effect made the
phenomenon easier to study. Both predictions have been experimentally
supported, as we will summarized below (also see reviews13
14
). Social scientists named this phenomenon the
Maharishi Effect to honor Maharishi who predicted it and provided the
technology for its implementation, and by implication, to honor all the
Maharishi’s of the Vedic tradition who have preserved the purity of this knowledge
of enlightenment throughout the centuries.15
Over 600 research studies conducted in
200 universities and research universities in 33 countries demonstrate that the
practice of the TM and TM-Sidhi program creates coherence in the individual,
and approximately 50 studies on the field effects of consciousness have found
beneficial effects on the larger society.16-20
Most studies
of field effects have directly tested the hypothesis of reduced hostility in
the environment, as indicated by sociological measures such as decreased crime
rate, reduced war intensity, and decreased international terrorism. Three studies have observed “mediating”
physiological effects using EEG coherence and biochemical stress markers
(cortisol and serotonin). The following is a summary of nine key studies, in
more or less historical order.
1)
Crime Rate in forty-eight
This study included
all twenty-four cities with populations 10,000 to 25,000 in which 1% of their
population learned the TM technique by 1972. These experimental cities were
compared to twenty-four control cities, which were selected by an independent
investigator prior to collection of the last several years of data. Matching variables were total population,
college population, and geographic region.21
The study examined change in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation total crime index in 1973, the year after the 1% cities reached
1%, and studied the change in crime rate trend for six post-intervention years
from 1972–1977. Change in crime rate in
1973 was assessed by the difference in the actual 1973 crime rate from the
level predicted by linear regression on the six-year pre-intervention baseline
period from 1967–72. Change in crime rate trend was assessed by comparing the
slope of regression on the post-intervention period with the slope for the
pre-intervention period.
In 1973 there was a
significant decrease in crime rate by 18% (p<.002) in 1% cities relative to
controls. In addition, the post-intervention slope of the crime trend for the
1% cities decreased compared to an increase in the slope in the control cities
(p<.002, see Figure 1). This demonstrates that the Maharishi Effect is
immediately apparent as well as apparent as a long-term effect that persists
over many years.
Figure 1: Twenty-four cities in which 1% of the
population began Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation program by 1972
displayed significant decreases in crime rate during the next year (1973) and a
decreased crime rate trend during the subsequent five years (1972-1977 in
comparison to 1967-1972). In contrast, crime rate increased in 24 matched
control cities.
Methodological considerations: A strength of this and
most of the subsequent research on sociological variables is that the data are
public and available to everyone. Also,
the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting system has standardized the definitions of the
categories of crimes nationwide. A
source of error is that only about half of crimes committed are ever reported.
However, it can be assumed that this source of error is randomly distributed
throughout experimental and control cities. Another problem is that many
changes in the reporting procedures, such as computerization, affect the
data. Because this study took place in a
period when cities of this size were increasingly complying with FBI standards
for reporting to the Uniform Crime Report index, a second analysis was
conducted on a reduced sample of 20 1% and 20 control cities, which eliminated
all cities which showed a sudden increase in crime that might have been an
artifact due to a change in police reporting procedures. The results for this
reduced sample were similar to the whole sample; a 22% decrease in crime in 1%
cities in 1973 compared to an increase by 2% in control cities (p<.005), and
a reduction in crime rate trend in the 1% cities by 89% compared to an increase
of 53% in control cities (p<.05). In
addition, a significant correlation was found between percentage of TM
participation in each city in 1972 and crime rate change in 1973 (r=-.53,
p<.001) and change in slope (r=-.41, p<.01).
With regard to the
independent variable, the number of people learning the TM technique in the
cities was collected by the TM organization independently of the hypothesis of
the experiment or knowledge of crime rates in the cities. Local records were
updated when people moved.
The main
methodological issue is whether a third possible variable may have caused both
increased TM numbers and decreased crime. The study attempted to address this
problem by statistically taking into account the effects of the major
demographic variables known to be correlated with crime rates. Stepwise
discriminant analysis showed that 1% cities and control cities were similar on
per capita income, percentage of persons aged 15 to 29, stability of residence,
percentage unemployed, and percentage of families with incomes below poverty
level, all known to be correlates of crime. Analysis of covariance was used to
control for the effects of two crime-related variables on which the two groups
of cities did differ, median years education and pre-intervention crime rate
slope.
However, a causal
interpretation would certainly be strengthened by a randomized experiment.
Randomization in this case would mean either randomizing which cities had
meditators and which cities did not, by pre-selecting cities and then teaching
meditation only in randomly selected experimental cities, or by taking all the
1% cities and having the people in randomly selected experimental cities
meditate and then having the controls not meditate for a year. It would be very expensive to teach 1% in
several cities, but not impossible. With regard to the second suggestion, given
that the practice has wide ranging benefits, it would be unethical to ask
people not to meditate. In any event, to our knowledge there has never been a
true randomized study on this scale in the history of the social sciences.22
In the context of current events, we could randomly
assign cities at risk for terrorist attacks, stratified for degree of risk, and
assign them to experimental and control groups and see whether TM participation
reduces the incidence of risk of terrorism over a five-year period. But as we shall see, the more powerful
TM-Sidhi technique would be easier to implement in such an experiment.
2) Crime in 160
Crime data is only
readily available for cities on a yearly basis, so only relatively slowly
evolving processes can be studied using this data. However, yearly data should
be expected to capture the dynamics of the prediction that rising numbers of TM
participants would cause a decline in crime rate in subsequent years. This
prediction was tested in a stratified random sample of 160
For each city, a
trend line was calculated that represented changes in crime rate from 1964 to
1971, before significantly large numbers began practicing the TM program in the
All but one of the
crossed-lagged differences were in the direction that would be predicted by the
hypothesis of TM program causality (p's
ranged from <.01 to .05).
Methodological
considerations: Was the effect due to a third unknown variable?
Partial correlations were used to control ten specific social variables known
to influence crime—median years education, percent unemployed, per capita
income, percent of families in poverty, stability of residency over five years,
median age, percent over age 65, population size, population density, and ratio
of police per population. However, the
possibility of a third causal variable, however remote it may seem, can not be
completely ruled out without true randomization.
Because some of the
smaller cities in the random sample could have been part of a larger
metropolitan area, a second cross-lagged panel analysis was conducted using
Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSA).
3) 80
Figure 2: This figure shows an example of
the correlation structure between percent TM participation in a city and crime
change. In this case, the results are for 80 Standard Statistical Metropolitan
Areas for 1973 predicting 1979. It can
be seen that the level of TM program participation in 1973 significantly
predicted decreased crime rate in 1979 (-.257). On the other hand, the crime
rate in 1973 did not significantly predict TM participation in 1979 (-.033). A similar causal structure was for other
comparisons, 1973 with 1974, 1973 with 1975, etc.
4) Intersubject EEG
Coherence: 1979. This was the first of a series of studies that attempted to
look at possible physiological mediating variables of the Maharishi Effect. The
general rationale for these studies is that if the Maharishi Effect were
influencing behavior, it must also have an effect on the physiology. We elected
to study the Yogic Flying technique because it is practiced in a group at
specific times, thus providing a discrete time frame for looking for effects,
and an exact count of the number of people participating, as compared to the
crime studies of many people scattered throughout the population practicing the
TM technique on different schedules and with varying degrees of regularity.27
We studied EEG coherence because previous research
found that a Yogic Flyer’s EEG coherence maximizes immediately prior to lift
off.28
(It is difficult to tell what happens during Yogic Flying because of movement artifacts.)
The possible
relevance to crime and other violent behavior is that high EEG coherence
increases during the TM technique,29-31
especially during periods of transcendental
consciousness,32-34
35
and is positively correlated with principled moral
reasoning, intelligence, and creativity.28 36-42
These
correlations range from .3 to .7, indicating that coherence is only an
imperfect measure of overall integration. In this experiment we studied changes
in EEG coherence between subjects
during Yogic Flying practice of a large group at a distance.
The study was
conducted in 1979 when a group of 2500 individuals was assembled in
Intersubject EEG
coherence was measured between frontal (F3 and F4) and
central leads (C3 and C4) because the frontal regions of
the brain are where EEG changes occur during TM practice. That is, coherence
was measured between F3 of subject 1 and F3 of subject 2, between F3 of subject
1 and F3 of subject 3, and between F3 between of subject 2 and F3 of subject 3.
The average of the three coherences between subjects was the data used. In a
similar manner, coherence between subjects was measured for F4, C3, and C4 EEG
leads.
Intersubject EEG coherence was generally low,
between .35 and .4, compared to coherence values on the order of .8 within
subjects’ brains using similar measurement parameters. However, coherence is analogous to
correlation squared. It gives the amount of variance in one EEG lead that can
be linearly predicted from knowledge of the activity in the other lead. A
coherence level of .4 means that 40% of the variance in one lead could be
predicted by the other, equivalent to a correlation of .63, which is not
trivial. It means that 40% of the activity in one person’s brain can be
predicted by another person’s brain. This may be due simply to the fact that
different people’s EEGs are quite similar in spectral characteristics. Most
people show an alpha wave, for example. Interestingly, on both experimental and
control days, intersubject EEG coherence in the alpha (8.2—11.95 Hz) and beta 2
(15.7—19.92 Hz, a harmonic of alpha) range was five standard errors of the mean
higher than coherence in the delta (1.17-4.45 Hz) or beta 1 (11.95—15.7 Hz)
frequencies. Perhaps this means that people are more similar in alpha than in
delta.
Analysis of variance showed that during the
Yogic Flying at
Figure 3: This figure shows the mean
change in coherence from the 15 minute baseline to the 15 minute experimental
period between three subjects in three different rooms in the EEG laboratory in
One argument that the increased EEG
coherence between people was not just an artifact due to everyone having a
relatively strong alpha generator in their brains is that alpha power across derivations actually decreased significantly (p = .001) during the experimental period relative to baseline on
experimental days compared to control days during those periods.
Table 1 shows change in coherence
averaged across subjects and experimental and control days for each frequency
and derivation. The greatest change
(.91%) was for left frontal alpha. Also, it appears that the change in the
frontal was greater that in the central. Table 2 shows the mean alpha change in
the two frontal derivations was greater than the mean of the two central
derivations. The mean in alpha coherence between the two frontal derivations (.82%)
was approximately twice the change in central alpha (.46%).
TABLE 1:
Mean Change in EEG Coherence* Between The Three subjects on the
Six Experimental Days and the Six Control Days.
EEG Freq.
Band
Experimental Days
Control Days
F3
F4
C3
C4
Mean E
F3
F4
C3
C4
Mean C
0.13%
0.55%
-0.03%
-0.07%
0.15%
0.07%
-0.17%
0.10%
0.21%
0.05%
Theta
0.15%
0.73%
0.30%
0.54%
0.43%
0.50%
0.05%
-0.09%
0.12%
0.15%
Alpha
0.91%
0.73%
0.31%
0.61%
0.64%
0.16%
0.12%
0.05%
-0.35%
-0.01%
Beta1
0.62%
0.30%
0.65%
0.60%
0.54%
0.58%
0.41%
0.04%
0.10%
0.28%
Beta2
0.50%
0.40%
-0.03%
0.55%
0.36%
-0.11%
0.03%
-0.30%
-0.18%
-0.14%
* Coherence is here expressed as percent coherence, which
ranges from 0 to 100%. A .9% increase
indicates that the variance in the EEG of one subject increases the ability to
predict the variance in another subject’s EEG by .9%.
TABLE 2:
Mean Change in EEG Coherence between
Subjects
On Experimental and Control Days for
Frontal
and Central Derivations
Frontal
(F3, F4)
Central
(C3, C4)
Frequency
Experimental
Control
Experimental
Control
0.34%
-0.05%
-0.05%
0.16%
Theta
0.44%
0.28%
0.42%
0.02%
Alpha
0.82%
0.14%
0.46%
-0.15%
Beta1
0.46%
0.50%
0.63%
0.07%
Beta2
0.45%
-0.04%
0.26%
-0.24%
The 15 minute
experimental period of Yogic Flying by the group in Amherst always occurred at
the same time of day period (3:55—4:10 PM CST). To control for how long the subjects were in the EEG lab before the
experimental period occurred, the one-hour EEG session was started at different
times on different days, so that the experimental period began at different
times relative to the start of the session. This controlled for changes over
the duration of the experimental session, such as a fatigue effects.
Since the control
days were all after the experimental
days, we looked to see if there was a progressive decrease in change in
coherence over the six experimental days that might account for the lesser
change during the control days. Day to day results did not show any evidence of
progressive changes in coherence that could account for the results.
Methodological considerations: As noted earlier, one possible confound
is that three separate oscillators may be spuriously correlated simply because
they are of similar spectral composition, not because they are directly
interacting. However, this does not appear to explain why coherence increased on experimental days, and specifically in frontal alpha. Alpha is not as common
in frontal brain areas as it is in occipital areas. Frontal alpha is where the
EEG changes most during the TM technique, centered around 8 Hz. In contrast,
occipital alpha does not change much during TM practice, and it tends to be
around 10 Hz.20 43
Mathematically, increased coherence means increased
stability of the phase angle of the EEGs being compared. That is, the brain
waves being compared have become more similar in frequency, or they have become
more similar in how they change in frequency —coherence measures both. On a
purely descriptive level, then, the brain waves of the three EEG subjects
became more in phase during the experimental period. And they became more in
phase in the frequency band (alpha) that is associated with restful alertness,
the state of “Yoga”, Maharishi’s transcendental consciousness. Moreover, they became more in phase in the
highest executive association area of the brain (frontal).
We would like to think that increased
intersubject EEG coherence has something to do with increased harmony between
people reflected in the sociological experiments. Were the subjects becoming
more in tune with the unified field of natural law? Is there some preferred EEG
frequency that we settle into when we come in tune with the integrative basis
of natural law? Our interpretation of this data is that we were able to
demonstrate the effects of the unmanifest unified level of natural law on the
manifest level of human physiology. In this view, the common factor that
influenced the brain functioning of the different test subjects was the unified
field, the infinite organizing power of natural law that alone is
capable of organizing all the different tendencies in society in a mutually
supportive way. However, we are not aware of any other studies of intersubject
EEG coherence. Such information might make its behavioral implications easier
to interpret.
As always,
randomization of the independent variable would have been ideal, but was not
practically feasible. Other researchers have independently been studying EEG
and evoked potential coherences between subjects, and like the present study,
have found small but statistically significant effects.44-46
5) Transfer Function
of Intrasubject EEG Coherence:1987. This second
experiment on field effects using EEG coherence studied the relationship of the
EEG coherence within the brain of a single Yogic Flier in one room in the
laboratory at MUM and EEG coherence of non-meditating test subjects performing
a computer task in another room.47
A pilot study had shown that Yogic Flying by a single
subject improved the performance of
acquisition of concepts in a concept-learning task in another subject in
another building. In this study the computer task was well learned and the
study focused on EEG effects.
There were ten test
sessions total, with five non-meditator test subjects, each tested one at a
time on two sessions. The subjects were blind to the purpose of the experiment.
The same Yogic Flier was used in all sessions. He may have guessed the general
purpose of the experiment, because he was prepped first and could have heard
the other subject come in, but he was blind to the experimental design.
Time series transfer
function analysis showed that in six of the ten sessions, increases in the
coherence of the Yogic Flyer led increases in EEG coherence in the test subject
in another room but not vice versa. The effects were stronger for sessions in
which the Yogic Flier had subjectively deeper experiences.
Methodological issues: Time series analysis provides a powerful means of studying
the relationship between two processes, but there are some technical issues to
keep in mind. In a transfer function
analysis, the two data series being compared are modeled (pre whitened) to
remove any time correlated structure within each series. Time dependencies
include cycles (autocorrelated components), drifts (integrated components) and
periodic spikes in the data (moving average components). Once the residuals of
the modeled series are random (indicating that all time-correlated structure
has been successfully removed), the correlation structure between the two
series is studied at different lags. If one series is hypothesized to be causal
to another, then the correlation structure should show that changes in the
causal series would lead by some reasonable amount of time changes in dependent
variable. The logic is similar to cross-lagged panel analysis discussed
previously. Because the data is pre whitened, any cross correlation between the
two series cannot be attributed to artifacts arising from the time dependencies
within the individual data sets. This is conservative because the causal
variable may in fact have a periodic influence on the dependent variable, which
would be removed by the prewhitening process and not seen in the resulting
transfer function model.
An issue in modeling
and causal interpretation is that it is often the case that there are different
possible models choices in the prewhitening process that give adequate
residuals which are free of auto-correlation structure. And with long data
series, many statistically significant autocorrelations may arise by chance and
it may be difficult to model all of them adequately. The caution is that different models may give
different outcomes in the transfer functions and cross correlations. To provide
an objective choice of which model to use, this study employed the Akaike
Information Criterion (AIC).48
The model used
was the one with the smallest AIC, which is the one that gives the most
predictive power with the least number of parameters.49
The AIC was used in all our studies employing time
series analysis.
One possible
confound in these field-effect studies of single subjects is to control for the
effects of large groups meditating together at that same time that might create
an influence that would obscure the results of individual meditators. At MUM in
An interesting
finding is that the leading relationship of the Yogic Flier’s EEG to the test
subjects’ was maintained even in cases in which the test subject had
numerically higher coherence values. This suggests that EEG coherence is a
relative measure, not an absolute one. A number of different studies indicate
that increased coherence within a subject indicates greater wakeful
integration. But other studies show that higher coherence in one subject
compared to another does not necessarily mean that the higher subject is more
integrated. It may seem contradictory
that EEG coherence is positively correlated with moral reasoning, intelligence,
and creativity, but these correlations are low, in the .4 to .7 range,
accounting for only 20% to 50% of the variance. That means that there are many subjects with high coherence who do not
score high on tests of moral reasoning, etc., and vice versa. Our best guess is
that EEG coherence does respond to some deeper underlying processes, such as
during the experience of transcendental consciousness, but that it is only an
imperfect reflection of what is going on. Perhaps functional neuroimaging will elucidate the situation.
Another issue in
action-at-a-distance studies in which the subjects are near each other is to
rule out other classical sensory means of communication, i.e., “sensory leaks”.
Many studies in the literature have done this very well. In this study, the subjects were in
sound-attenuated rooms, but the test subject might have conceivably heard the
Yogic Flier thump as he landed. However,
S’s did not report hearing anything. Moreover, if the test S oriented to the
sound, orienting would have produced low frequency desynchronized low coherence
EEG, not increased coherence.
Finally, the finding
that the effect was strongest when the subject subjectively felt that the
effect was strongest is similar to what other studies of field effects have
reported in quite different contexts. This suggests that, as a general rule,
subjective experience should not be ignored, but should be measured and
studied.
6) Biochemical Stress Markers of Field Effects
of Consciousness: 1990. Randomized
and cross-sectional experiments on individuals have found that TM practice
decreases cortisol excretion and increases serotonin, a biochemical pattern
that has been associated with decreased aggression and hostility.50
Dynamic
regression analysis of time series observations over the 73-day experimental
period found that day-to-day changes in the size of a TM-Sidhi group (mean 1400
people) was a significant predictor of immediate mean (natural log) overnight
excretions of cortisol (a stress-related hormone) and 5-HIAA (main metabolite
of the neurotransmitter serotonin), as well as the ratio of the excretion rates
for 5-HIAA and cortisol, in 6 non-meditators living and working up to 20 miles
from the group. The study supports the hypothesis that group practice of the TM
and TM-Sidhi program reduces societal stress by producing beneficial
neuroendocrine effects in non-meditators outside the group. These effects are
similar to the neuroendocrine effects documented to occur in individuals who
practice the TM program and could be due to the hypothesized field effect of
group practice lowering the stress level in the surrounding population.51
Methodological issues: Reverse causality was tested by using 5-HIAA and cortisol
levels as the independent variable and group participation in the TM program as
the dependent variable. No significant
effect of reverse causality was found. Moreover, additional analyses that
specifically modeled and removed the effects of weekends and daily temperature
showed that weekend and temperature could not account for the effects. Direct
behavioral interactions between the non-meditators and meditators in the
community were not a plausible explanation of the effects because they reported
limited interaction. Randomization of the TM group size would have allowed
stronger inference of causality, but was not practical under the conditions of
this quasi-experiment.
Although these
physiological studies were interesting, as researchers we preferred to evaluate
the effects of large groups of TM and TM-Sidhi practice on a global scale,
always with the hope that this research would demonstrate practical means of
reducing conflicts in society and between nations.
7)
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