![\"fred-athlete\"](\"https:\/\/www.tm.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/fred-athlete.jpg\" "\\"fred-athlete\\"")
Dr. Fred Travis<\/p><\/div>\n
The study was conducted by Dr. Harold Harung<\/a>, associate professor at Oslo University in Norway and Dr. Frederick Travis, director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition<\/a> at Maharishi University of Management<\/a> in Fairfield, Iowa. The study compared 33 athletes who placed among the 10 best performers in competitions such as the Olympics<\/a> and World Championships<\/a> and compared them with 33 athletes who actively train and compete at a senior level but don’t normally place among the top 50% in the Norwegian Championships.<\/p>\n The world-class athletes also scored higher on measures of self and moral development, and rate of habituation to stressors.<\/p>\n Dr. Harold Harung<\/p><\/div>\n “These results are very interesting to us, as they show a clear correlation between mind-brain development and peak performance,” Dr. Harung said. “As has been long hypothesized, achieving one’s full potential is intimately related to developing more integrated brain functioning.”<\/p>\n Dr. Harung also indicated that the findings show that the level of brain integration in world-class athletes is similar to that seen in individuals who had practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique<\/a> for an average of seven years.<\/p>\n “These results are also consistent with those that we’ve found in world-class managers,” Dr. Harung said. “This scale actually may show how the brains of top performers in any field are different from those of others.”<\/p>\n He said that there are interesting applications of this, such as helping to identify potential top athletes or managerial candidates, or using a method such as the Transcendental Meditation technique to culture that style of functioning in the brain to reach one’s full potential.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Peak performers have significantly higher degrees of brain and psychological development than the average population, according to a new study of brain functioning and measures of psychological development. Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[100,301],"class_list":["post-3774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-athletes","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3774"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13479,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3774\/revisions\/13479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usa.tm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"harold-athlete\"](\"https:\/\/www.tm.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/harold-athlete.jpg\" "\\"harold-athlete\\"")
![\"athletes\"](\"https:\/\/www.tm.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/athletes.jpg\" "\\"athletes\\"")
The Brain Integration Scale<\/a> used in the study was first developed by Dr. Travis to measure the long-term effects of the practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique. The scale looks at three brain measures: 1) broadband frontal EEG coherence, a measure of coordinated functioning of frontal executive brain areas; 2) higher alpha and lower gamma frontal and central EEG power<\/a>, a processing style characterized by inner directedness and less absorption in outer boundaries; and 3) contingent negative variation during reaction time tests, which is a measure of efficiency of applying mental and motor resources to the task.<\/p>\n