Meditation

BACKGROUND: Various physiologic and biochemical shifts can follow meditation. Meditation has been implicated in impacting free radical activity. Ultraweak photon emission (UPE, biophoton emission) is a constituent of the metabolic processes in a living system. Spectral analysis showed the characteristics of radical reactions. OBJECTIVES: Recording and analysing photon emission in 5 subjects before, during and after meditation. METHODS: UPE in 5 subjects who meditated in sitting or supine positions was recorded in a darkroom utilising a photomultiplier designed for manipulation in three directions. RESULTS: Data indicated that UPE changes after meditation. In 1 subject with high pre-meditation values, UPE decreased during meditation and remained low in the postmeditation phase. In the other subjects, only a slight decrease in photon emission was found, but commonly a decrease was observed in the kurtosis and skewness values of the photon count distribution. A second set of data on photon emission from the hands before and after meditation was collected from 2 subjects. These data were characterised by the Fano factor, F(T), i.e. variance over mean of the number of photoelectrons observed within observation time T. All data were compared to surrogate data sets which were constructed by random shuffling of the data sets. In the pre-meditation period, F(T) increased with observation time, significantly at time windows>6 s. No such effect was found after meditation, when F(T) was in the range of the surrogate data set. CONCLUSIONS: The data support the hypothesis that human photon emission can be influenced by meditation. Data from time series recordings suggest that this non-invasive tool for monitoring radical reactions during meditation is useful to characterise the effect of meditation. Fano factor analysis demonstrated that the time series before meditation do not represent a simple Poisson process. Instead, UPE has characteristics of a fractal process, showing long-range correlations. The effect of meditation waives out this coherence phenomenon, suggesting a weaker and less ordered structure of UPE. In general, meditation seems to influence the complex interactions of oxidative and anti-oxidative reactions which regulate photon emission. The reason for the statistical changes between pre- and post-meditation measurements remains unclear and demands further examination.