In addition another modality, a meditative technique popularly known as Transcendental Meditation (TM) was
learned and practiced by many students at Neotel in South Africa, at MUM in the U.S.A., and at HELP University in
Malaysia. This was not a random assignment of subjects to meditation as a treatment variable, such as would have
been the case in a formal comparative study with pre-test and post-test evaluations. The experiential comments
below, which were reported by these meditating students, are explored in the context of unfreezing prior schemas to
facilitate higher order thinking in the cognitive literacy value chain and creativity, to enable insight, transparent
thought processes, and deeper and wider thinking. They effectively capture fluid intelligence, the far transfer of
applications, self-exploration and transcendence via active discussion. Historically, there have been several
controlled studies on research in TM that have shown increased creativity and wisdom, or ‘thinking out-of-the-box’.
What emerges as salient is the ability to process information as opposed to just recalling and recognizing learned
data or information. However TM was also found to improve lower level perceptual cognitive tasks such as these.
More importantly however is the ability to learn new content through fluid intelligence. Processing data into
information then into higher order cognitive activity results in knowledge and wisdom