A colleague and I looked at this briefly. We noticed some points that we would have called out if we had been reviewers.

First, there is limited discussion of the training regime. Our suspicion is that these practitioners are not very experienced. This is often a surprise to many westerners, but many occupants of Buddhist monasteries are not very experienced meditators. We have experience working with one of the cited monasteries (Shechen), which has a very good reputation, but the facts remain that responsibilities of most of the inhabitants don’t include doing a lot of meditation. Of course we could be wrong in this intuition, which is why more discussion about the training and experience level would have been helpful.

Second, we would not have conducted the coherence analysis as described. As computed, these coherence results may just largely reflect volume condition. In English, one would expect that a single current source would produce coherences at these effect sizes. It is not very interesting to report cross-hemispheric phase locking if it is simply a byproduct of one circumscribed area of the brain. Most people have an inherent intuition that EEG electrodes simply reflects the activity of the neurons right under the electrode, but the biophysics strongly refutes that. It is probably the case the with EEG (or MEG) coherence one should always first filter by any of the available methods that derive an estimate of so called “dura potential”. This is essentially the second spatial derivative. A number of methods have been developed to do this. Nunez and Srinivasan have done a lot of work demonstrating the necessity of this.

As is so often is the case, it is easier to list negatives and not positives.