Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [53]
Series of tests that were done to compare the effects of plain drowsiness with meditation states, using alpha and theta brain waves, showed the two states to be indistinguishable. Are we paying the TM people simply to put us to sleep? It begins to look like it. To quote authority Dr. Peter Fenwick, who has examined the TM claims of physiological changes, "Both the changes in oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide output and the EEG changes [brain-wave studies] can all be explained by accepted physiological explanations of how the brain and body work."
Okay. So far we're left with nothing but the mantra sound and the secret initiation as possible benefits of TM. But even they fail the test. Medical researchers have shown again and again that the same quality and degree of physiological change are brought on in a subject who simply relaxes completely, and that the use of the word "one"—or any other simple word—is just as effective as any mystical and secret mantra sound. Again, what are we paying for?
Concerning the alleviation of stress and anxiety, the TM experimenters have shown that meditators are better able to ignore noises—for example, the sound of a fork scraping an enamel saucepan—than are non-meditators. Wow! But the tests have been done by highly motivated experimenters and subjects, in which often the person conducting the test is a TM advocate and therefore prone to see positive results. You don't put the accused person's family on the jury. And besides, their own tests showed that yoga students did even better in ignoring nasty noises.
A word about this experimenter's-motivation factor. Such bias and expectation fulfillment is clearly shown by a test wherein students are asked to record the results of a maze experiment involving rats. When told, for example, that white rats do better than brown rats in such tests, the noted tendency is for the students to arrive at this very conclusion by biased recording of the times the rats require to find their way from A to B in the maze, even though there is actually no real difference in the I.Q.'s of the rats. The apparent difference is the result of the experimenter's expectations. Similar results were obtained in I.Q. tests in the California school system, in which students who had been pointed out as exceptional were given higher ratings by teachers who expected higher performance from them and rated them accordingly. Actually, they were not exceptional. It's an old story.
There have been experiments designed to show this and related effects in tests of claimed TM capabilities. Told that a series of tests was something which expert TMers usually did poorly, the TM subjects accordingly did poorly. But another group of expert TMers, told that they would probably do well on the same tests, produced better results. TM testers had reported that short-term memory improved among meditators, but the tests were done without tight controls and without the use of automated recording devices to eliminate recording errors due to bias. When the tests were repeated under the supervision of scientists at Cardiff University in Wales, with tight controls and automated recording, the conclusion was that (a) meditation had no effect on short-term memory and (b) the length of time the subjects had been involved in TM had no effect on the results, either—though this had been a firm claim of the Maharishi.
Ever since the sensitive galvanometer was developed, some questionable group or other has decided to apply it to their particular craziness. The scientologists use it as a sort of electronic Ouija board; chiropractors, making no bones about it at all, simply describe it as one of their enigmatic "black box" diagnostic devices and do not claim to