Transcendental Meditation uses a mantra -- the repetition of a single sound -- to settle the mind into its least-excited state. The TM folks, through the years, have consistently asserted their superiority over other disciplines.

Wellness Benefits

The website of the nonprofit Maharishi Foundation USA, for example, has variously claimed that “only TM has been found in hundreds of studies to produce immediate and long-term wellness benefits of mind and body” and that “no other program for personal development has received this level of attention and respect from the scientific community.”

Transcendental Meditation was developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (née Mahesh Prasad Varma). Born near Jabalpur, India, around 1918, the Maharishi, or Great Seer, started teaching his method in 1955 and became a guru to the Beatles, who famously traveled to Rishikesh, India, in 1968 to study with him.

Despite Transcendental Meditation’s claims of superiority, John Denninger, director of research at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, isn’t so sure.

“I’m not convinced that any difference in outcome is big enough to say you need to do one type of meditation over another,” Denninger says. “Getting people to do it in the first place is what matters.”

Perceptive Monks

Some of the most-striking research has come from the University of California at Davis. Clifford Saron, a neuroscientist there who speaks with the slow, gentle tone of a holy man, went to the foothills of the Himalayas in the 1990s to study Buddhist monks. Their serene focus inspired him to organize the Shamatha Project. With his friend and former monk B. Alan Wallace, Saron selected 60 people and tested their attention and cognition. Thirty of them then attended a meditation retreat in Colorado. (The other 30 went later.)

After three months, Saron re-examined the initial group and discovered any number of striking changes. For one, the meditators were literally more perceptive: They could discern smaller differences between long and short lines flashed on a screen.

“How much does an infant learn when it is alert and relaxed?” Saron asks rhetorically. “That works for us, as well.”