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Herbert Benson, a Harvard-trained cardiologist whose research demonstrating the power of the mind over the body helped bring meditation into the mainstream, died February 3 in a Boston hospital. He was 86 years old.

His wife, Marilyn Benson, said the cause was heart disease and kidney failure.

Dr. Benson did not set out to advocate meditation; in fact, even after his early pioneering work, he remained skeptical and took up the practice himself only decades later.

However, he was open to the possibility that the state of mind could affect a person’s health – common sense today, but when he began researching it in the mid-1960s it was a radical, even heretical, idea.

During a stint with the U.S. Public Health Service in Puerto Rico, she noticed that island residents often have significantly lower blood pressure than their mainland counterparts, all else being equal. He began to wonder if part of the reason was outside of the usual explanations of diet and exercise, asking this question when he returned to Harvard as a researcher in 1965.

While working in a lab at Boston City Hospital (now Boston Medical Center), he and his colleagues devised a way to train monkeys to raise and lower their blood pressure based on a reward system. The work was humble; Many medical researchers believe that a stressful situation, Dr. He accepted the fact that he could increase his heart rate thanks to the fight-or-flight response, which was discovered by chance in the same lab where Benson worked.

However, news spread, and one day several followers of the founder of transcendental meditation, a technique that claimed to allow practitioners to enter a higher state of consciousness by repeating a mantra, approached him. Why teach the monkeys, they said, when they had already perfected the app.

Dr. “I didn’t want to deal with them at first,” Benson said. In The New York Times in 1975, referring to meditation practitioners. “Everything seemed a bit remote and somewhat peripheral to the study of conventional medicine. But they were persistent and I finally agreed to study them.”

He insisted that they come hours later and through a side door to avoid attracting attention. He put sensors on their chests and masks on their faces to measure their breathing, then had them alternate between periods of normal thinking and focused meditation.

The meditators were right: Dr. They showed a sudden and significant drop in a number of metrics (heart rate, oxygen uptake) during meditation, Benson said, entering a state of sleep while still awake.

“I wasn’t as shocked as I was cautious because I knew what was in front of me because the negative mind-body bias was so strong,” he told Brainworld magazine in 2019. “I remained a cardiologist and was also the head of cardiovascular faculty. I was at Harvard Medical School but led two professional lives. I maintained my reputation in cardiology while also working in the mind-body field.”

Working with Robert Keith Wallace, a young physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, he published his first findings in the early 1970s. Media reports described him as renegade and maverick, and many in his profession dismissed him.

Others, however, were impressed by the strength and objectivity of his research. At that time Dr. Unlike some researchers, including Wallace, Dr. Benson was not an advocate of transcendental meditation; In fact, when he insisted that there was nothing special about the practice or use of mantras, Dr. She broke up with Wallace—any word or phrase repeated over and over that would work.

Dr. Benson called his approach the relaxation response—the opposite of the fight-or-flight response. However, while a stressful situation causes the body to automatically increase the heart rate and release adrenaline, the relaxation response must be consciously revealed.

He showed how to do this in his 1975 book The Relaxation Response. It hit at the right time: In the same year, the transcendental meditation movement claimed more than 400,000 adherents, who were training at more than 300 centers in the United States alone.

While skeptical of alternative medicine and Eastern spirituality, millions of Americans were more meditative, and Dr. Benson allowed them to indulge in his Ivy League pedigree and clinical approach to research. The book has sold over four million copies and became a New York Times bestseller.

Over time, Dr. Benson’s insistence on the connection between mind and body was even considered standard among institution researchers. He founded the Mind-Body Institute in 1992 and moved to Massachusetts General Hospital in 2006, renamed the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine with money from investor John W. Henry, and Dr. Benson as director honorary.

Herbert Benson was born on April 24, 1935, in Yonkers, NY. His father, Charles, ran a number of wholesale businesses, and his mother, Hannah (Schiller) Benson, was a homemaker.

He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1957 with a degree in biology and earned his medical degree from Harvard in 1961.

Along with his wife, he was survived by a son, Gregory; daughter Jennifer Benson; and four grandchildren.

Dr. After “The Relaxation Response,” Benson wrote 11 books, many of which explored the physiological effects of spirituality and belief in more detail. He was the first Western doctor to be allowed to interview Tibetan monks about their practices, and befriended the Dalai Lama during the Buddhist spiritual leader’s 1979 visit to Boston.

Dr. Among other things, Benson found that Buddhist monks could raise their body temperature during meditation to such an extent that they completely dried the damp sheets draped over their bodies.

Such findings were discussed later, and Dr. Benson rarely lacked his critics. But he was not discouraged by comparing himself to William James, Harvard’s predecessor and another pioneer in the intersection of mind and body.

Dr. Benson himself was not a praying man, but in the 1990s he was convinced that prayer, and faith in general, had a physiological effect. For her, the explanation lies in a version of the placebo effect: If we believe something is helping us, our bodies will work harder to heal.

In 1996, with a $2.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he conducted a decade of research on the healing power of prayer—specifically, whether one person’s prayers can help another.

The results, announced in 2006, were conclusive and disappointing (for believers, at least): The intercessory prayer not only had an effect, but was exacerbated in some cases where people believed they were being prayed for—the result, Dr. Benson said they believe that if someone is praying for them, they must be very sick as their bodies get sick trying to fit that impression.

Still, Dr. Benson believed that prayer could at least help a sick person pray. And he was always careful to say that even if his research was 100 percent accurate, meditation and prayer could never completely replace drugs and surgery.

He said both medical treatment and spiritual care are necessary—a fact that Western medicine has long tried to ignore and try to fix his career.