A lot of things have changed. The first point is the metabolic effects of meditation. At that time there was great enthusiasm for the metabolic rate being reduced below the basal level - it looked as if the meditation periods had artificially suppressed the metabolic rate when in fact it was just a slow drift down. And what you find is that if you meditate first thing in the morning then you can't drop your metabolic rate any more. So this then leads us to the position that meditation certainly relaxes you, it's a very good method of relaxing, but it doesn't produce a lower than basal metabolic rate, indeed it would be very unusual if it had done. But most important, although it was originally thought that it would be helpful for patients with psychiatric illness, it became apparent fairly quickly that one of the difficulties with psychiatric illness is that you show a disorder of attention - now, one of the things you require to meditate effectively is an intact attentional mechanism, and so without that you probably don't get the benefits from meditation that you would otherwise have got...

An important point about the nature of the universe which is illustrated by quantum mechanics is that it is highly interconnected, and this seems to be reflected in the way that meditation between people seems to connect them. Now this has been shown by the way that the brain waves between meditators at a distance that can be brought into synchrony, but there is also some new work that is about to be published this year which indicates that if you stimulate the brain of a meditating subject and measure at a distance the brain of a another meditating subject, and the two are somehow related in their meditation, then you can produce telepathically a transfer of information between the two brains. Now if this is repeated by other laboratories, then there is the possibility that we may be looking at macroscopic quantum-mechanical effects - there may be some way that mind is a distributed function and not just a local function to a brain. The cutting edge of meditation research now must be the different states of consciousness that can be produced by the use of meditation techniques. Consciousness is very high on the list of research priorities as far as the neurophysiology of the brain is concerned, but also as far as psychiatry is concerned. There is at present no comprehensive theory as to how brain activity is transformed into conscious experience - that is the major question for the end of the twentieth century, and until we resolve that we really will not be able to understand the nature of man.

Last updated 11 May 1999

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