Physiological responses during meditation and rest

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.