L.A. Eliseeva, Dr. of biology, Institute of Medical and Biological Kibernetics, Siberian Department, Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia

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See full-text paper for more details.

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The study recorded electroencephalographic maps of brain activity and stress levels of subjects undergoing a specific training process. One can see from the figures below that the barin of Sahaja Yoga meditators is working in much more correlated way and the stress level is much lower (and further decreases in the course of training) compared to the control group.

 

 

Fig. 1. Brain activity map for Sahaja Yoga meditators (left) and control group (right). One can see much more correlated activity (concentrated in the front part of both hemispheres) for Sahaja Yoga meditators compared to quite chaotic pattern in the case of control group.



Fig. 2a. Stress level as a function of attempt number before and after Biological Feedback (BFB) traning for Sahaja Yoga meditators.

 

Fig. 2b. Stress level as a function of attempt number before and after Biological Feedback (BFB) traning for control group.

One can see that Sahaja Yoga meditators have lower initial stress level, and it decreases even more after a few attempts, compared to the control group. Morover, BFB training results in a further decrease of stress level for Sahaja Yoga meditators, while it has no effect in the case of the control group. This shows that Sahaja Yoga meditators not only have a lower stress level, but thay are much more susceptible to traning compared to non-meditators.