The Effect of the Transcendental Meditation Program on the Organization of Thinking and Recall (secondary Organization)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the possible enhancement of conceptual organization of thought (secondary organization) by the Transcendental Meditation program. A sample was divided into a Transcendental Meditation group (N = 60) who practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique twice a day and a nonmeditation group (N = 60) who rested twice a day with eyes closed as a control procedure. Both groups were tested with two types of word lists (random and clustered) and three recall delays (two, four, and six minutes) before and after 40 days of the TM technique or the control procedure. The Index of Clustering, a measure of the degree to which the subject organizes the words in a list into conceptual categories, was used to measure secondary organization. It was found that (a) secondary organization increased more in meditators than in controls, (b) on posttesting meditators demonstrated less clustering variability, (c) the greater secondary organization shown by meditators was both strong and continuous, and (d) meditators performed significantly better than controls on an arithmetic filler task. These results indicate that the Transcendental Meditation program enhances the organizational ability of the mind, a quality important to memory and abstract thinking.