Does Meditation Increase Intelligence?

Meditation is without question the most widely practised self-improvement technique in the entire world. With more than one billions regular practitioners worldwide, the techniques rooted in Hinduism, have over a period of more than two thousand years diversified into countless religious, cultural and secular practices.

In the last six decades huge numbers of research studies looking into the benefits of meditation have shown it to be effective for everything from reducing stress, improving cardiovascular health and immune function, increasing sensory perception, self-awareness, and emotional control, and enhancing learning and memory.

But, can it also help to increase intelligence?

First of all, perhaps it is slightly unfair to simply group the many different types of mediation together under one heading. Just as if we asked, “what are the benefits of doing sport?”, while we would surely find some general improvements from the active lifestyles, there would also likely be specific gains in certain areas, depending on the particular sports examined.

Here we will take a closer look at one particular form of meditation; Transcendental Meditation, although we will come back to other popular mediation style in future articles.

Transcendental Meditation and Intelligence

Transcendental Meditation is one of the most widely researched forms of meditation, with hundreds of peer reviewed scientific studies published. The practice was started by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India in the 1950s and over the last 60 years has been taught to more than 5 million people from countries all over the world. The basic technique involves sitting with your eyes closed for 15-20 minutes, twice a day, while focusing on a mantra (a repeated phrase or sound).

There are some encouraging results. In the study, ‘Transcendental meditation and improved performance on intelligence-related measures: A longitudinal study’, researchers followed 100 students from two Iowa Universities for a period of two years. In addition to their regular university curriculum, the participants in the study practiced a 20 minute Transcendental Meditation session twice a day.

When compared to a control group, who had followed the regular curriculum but with no meditation, the research participants showed significant improvements on tests measuring general intelligence. (Cattell's Culture Fair Intelligence Test, Hick's reaction time)

In a second study, this time on high school students in Taiwan, researchers Kam-Tim So and David Orme-Johnson, compared the performance of 362 students across 3 schools on 7 different cognitive performance tests, including those known to correlate with general intelligence.

Again the twice daily Transcendental Meditation sessions gave significant improvements over the control groups. Importantly this study also compared the test performances against groups who had replaced these sessions with short naps, and with a different form of meditation, ‘Contemplation Meditation’. This contemplation form showed the greatest improvement on two out of the seven tests, with Transcendental Meditation outperforming it on the other five, including those tests which relate directly to intelligence.

Criticisms and Objections

Not all researchers agree with these findings of these studies. Although more than twenty peer-reviewed papers have put forward a confirmed link between daily Transcendental Meditation practice and increases in general measures of intelligence, critics argue that the studies are subject to bias and lack rigor, as often the researchers involved are connected to the Transcendental Meditation organisation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, independent reviews of the research material have come down somewhere in the middle of these two viewpoints. While early studies were generally low quality, in recent years the quality has significantly improved as Transcendental Meditation affiliated researchers have teamed up with independent universities.

The 2012 review, 'The Psychological Effects of Meditation: A Meta-Analysis', found that despite having to eliminate nearly three quarters of the available studies due to ‘methodological problems’, the analysis of the remaining studies showed ‘comparatively strong effects’ on a wide range of psychological and cognitive measures.

So, for the time being at least, the jury is still out as far as incontrovertible proof of the ability to Transcendental Meditation to improve intelligence. However there are reliable indications that the practice does offer tangible cognitive benefits, and there are certainly some early signs that an improvement in general intelligence may be among these.

Research Studies

Kam-Tim So, David W Orme-Johnson, Three randomized experiments on the longitudinal effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique on cognition, Intelligence, Volume 29, Issue 5, September–October 2001, Pages 419–440

 Peter Sedlmeier, Juliane Eberth, Marcus Schwarz, Doreen Zimmermann, Frederik Haarig; Sonia Jaeger, Sonja Kunze, The psychological effects of meditation: A meta-analysis, Psychological Bulletin, Vol 138(6), Nov 2012, 1139-1171

Robert W. Cranson, David W. Orme-Johnson, Jayne Gackenbach, Michael C. Dillbeck, Christopher H. Jones, Charles N. Alexander, Transcendental meditation and improved performance on intelligence-related measures: A longitudinal study, Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 12, Issue 10, 1991, Pages 1105–1116