I’m going to turn now to talk about a second tier of study, which again are at the higher quality range within this field, and this deals with the area of mind-body medicine. We’ve known from physiologic studies for decades that various forms of meditation can slow the pulse and respiration, and as Herb Benson of Harvard called, “induce the relaxation response.”

The question exists is whether these physiologic changes are clinically useful and how they are mediated. And I’m going to illustrate the beginning answers to those questions with a couple of sets of experiments.