The state effects of meditation appear to include decreased electrocortical arousal. There is also evidence that meditators more readily demonstrate alpha and theta activity than nonmeditators, even when not meditating. It is not clear whether prospective meditators as a group already possessed this characteristic, or whether the state effects of meditation practice eventually generalize to become traits. However, certain individuals, namely the psychologically "healthy" and those with a capacity for relaxed absorbed attention, appear to be more favourably disposed to meditation. Meditators appear to show both stronger orienting and recovery responses to stressors while meditating than controls. Meditation practice may begin with left hemisphere type activity, which gives way to functioning more characteristic of the right hemisphere. However, it appears that during advanced meditation ("no thought") both left and right hemisphere activity are largely inhibited or suspended. Depending on the individual, inexperienced meditators may report sleep, hypnogogic reverie, trance or abreaction during practice. The evidence to date does not support the notion of unique state effects associated with the practice of meditation.
Forty nonmeditators and 12 experienced transcendental meditators were randomly assigned to four experimental cells devised to control for order and expectation effects. All 52 (female) subjects were continuously monitored on seven physiological measures during both meditation and rest. Each subject was her own control in an abab experimental paradigm comparing meditation to rest. Analyses of variance on change scores calculated from both initial and running (intertrial) baselines revealed small but significant conditions effects for all variables except diastolic BP. The same subjects (both experienced meditators and those meditating for the first time) showed lower psychophysiological arousal during the meditation than during the rest condition for systolic BP, HR, SCL, digital BV, digital ST, and frontalis EMG. The experienced meditators showed only marginally more conditions effects than the novices practicing "noncultic" meditation. For the nonmeditators, deliberately fostering positive expectations of meditations was associated with lower physiological arousal in terms of diastolic BP, HR, and SCL. These findings suggest that both cultic and noncultic meditation are associated with lower physiological activation than eyes-closed rest. The meditators, however, tended to become more relaxed over meditation trials, whereas the nonmeditators showed the opposite trend.
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