Physiological responses during meditation and rest

Forty nonmeditators and twelve experienced Transcendental Meditators were randomly assigned to four experimental cells devised to control for order and expectation effects. All fifty-two (female) subjects were continuously monitored in seven physiological measures during both meditation and rest. Each subject was her own control in an experiment comparing meditation to rest. Analysis of variance on change scores calculated from both initial and running (intertrial) baselines revealed small but significant condition effects for all variables except diastolic BP. With respect to systolic BP, the nonmeditators showed a significantly larger drop from initial baseline during meditation than during rest. With respect to running baseline, the meditators demonstrated a significantly smaller increase in systolic blood pressure with the complete trial data and a greater decrease with the end-of-trial data during meditation than during rest.