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¶ Blood pressure drops. Working with 22 hypertensive patients for 63 weeks, two researchers from Harvard and U.C.L.A. found a significant drop in systolic and diastolic blood pressure after the patients began meditating.
¶ Oxygen consumption is as much as 18% lower during meditation, according to a study by the same researchers. This denotes a marked slowing of the metabolism.
¶ Alpha waves, produced by electrical activity in the brain and generally associated with a feeling of relaxation, become denser and more widespread in the brain during meditation.
This has been established in studies by a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and by two psychiatrists at Hartford's Institute of Living.
¶ Other studies show meditators becoming less dependent on cigarettes, liquor and drugs or hallucinogens of any kind.
The Federal Government has so far funded 17 TM research projects, ranging from the effects of meditation on the body to its ability to help rehabilitate convicts and fight alcoholism. Some companies even think that TM can improve corporate efficiency. TM courses have been given at, among others, AT&T, General Foods, Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Chicago, and the Crocker National Bank of San Francisco.
The chief scientific challenge to TM is not that it is wrong but rather that it is not the only meditative technique to benefit the body. Says Dr. John Laragh, director of the cardiovascular unit at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan and perhaps the leading expert on hypertension in the U.S. (TIME cover, Jan. 13):
"I'm not sure that meditating has had any different effect on blood pressure than relaxing and sitting on a couch and reading a book." To find out, Laragh will soon conduct his own study of the effects of TM on a group of hypertension patients. Cardiologist Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School, who collaborated on much of the original scientific research on TM, now says that he has a method that gives the same results; anybody can learn it in a minute, he says, without a fee and without going to TM classes. "To say there is really only one way to get the relaxation response is silly," says Benson, whose book The Relaxation Response has just been published (Morrow; $5.95). Simply stated, Benson recommends that the meditator sit down and, with eyes closed, relax his muscles, beginning with his feet and working up to his face. He then breathes only through his nose, and as he breathes out, he says the word one silently to himself. With every breath out he silently repeats "one," continuing for ten to 20 minutes.
"Anyone who claims exclusivity is immediately suspect," says Psychiatrist Stanley Dean, summing up the chief scientific complaint against TM. "The TM people's claim that theirs is the best of all possible worlds is nonsense. It is a sales gimmick. Meditation has been a way of achieving mental serenity through the ages, and they have no patent on it. TM is an important addition to our medical armamentarium, but it is not exclusive."