Deepinder Goyal’s Temple Is Testing Whether Meditation Can Be Measured

Deepinder Goyal is taking his wearable startup Temple into meditation research. Temple has partnered with the Sri Sri Institute for Advanced Research (SSIAR), the research arm of Art of Living, to study the physiological effects of different meditation practices. The study will use Temple’s Entropy metric to track changes in the body in real time.

What Is Temple Studying?

Experienced meditators will wear the Temple device while practising different forms of meditation. The researchers will track their physiological responses and compare how the body reacts across different practices. Goyal said the collaboration aims to measure meditation’s effects through Entropy. The study is particularly focused on whether different meditation techniques produce different physiological responses.

What Is Entropy?

Entropy is a new metric developed for Temple. According to Goyal, it reflects the body’s metabolic activity and sympathetic/parasympathetic state. Temple presents the metric as a real-time number that changes with activities such as exercise, sleep, stress and meditation. Goyal has also said that Temple observed Entropy falling during meditation while heart rate remained relatively stable. The upcoming research will examine this pattern more systematically.

Why Does Heart Rate Not Tell The Whole Story?

Heart rate is already widely used to track changes in the body during exercise, rest and recovery. But Goyal argues that it may not capture every physiological change happening during meditation. His claim is that Entropy can show changes that remain less obvious when looking only at heart rate. In his own posts, Goyal has shared examples where his Entropy score changed during meditation while his heart rate stayed comparatively steady. The new study will test whether those observations hold up across experienced meditators and different meditation practices.

But Is Entropy Scientifically Validated Yet?

Entropy is still a new metric, and its wider health significance has not yet been independently established.

Goyal has said Temple has benchmarked Entropy against a standard metabolic cart across more than 100 cardio sessions, reporting a correlation of r=0.93. However, those claims come from Temple and have not yet established the metric as a broadly accepted clinical biomarker. Independent validation, larger studies and peer-reviewed research will be important before conclusions can be drawn about what Entropy means for health or meditation.

What Happens Next?

Temple says the results from its work with Art of Living will be published soon. For now, the collaboration is less about proving that meditation can be reduced to a number and more about testing whether measurable physiological patterns can be consistently detected during meditation. If the research finds repeatable differences between practices, it could give researchers another way to study what happens inside the body during meditation.