Putting meditation to the test (2011)
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
If you read the HN threads you will find countless people talking about how meditation has helped them from their personal experiences.
Meditation has a lot of benefits and the results have been scientifically validated by different groups of researchers: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005789407... http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00845519 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361002/ http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...
A recent research even showed that meditation is more powerful than a placebo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789738
If you are still skeptical, watch this video by Dan Harris, a skeptical news reporter turned meditation evangelist, it convinced me to meditate everyday and I think it'll convince you too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAcTIrA2Qhk
>Headed by Katherine MacLean at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, the study measured the volunteers’ attention skills by showing them a succession of vertical lines flashed up on a computer screen. They then had to indicate, by clicking a mouse, whenever there was a line shorter than the rest. As the retreat progressed, MacLean and her colleagues noted that the volunteers became progressively more accurate and found it increasingly easy to stay focused on the task for long periods.
I feel like I could also get better at it just by practicing... At least I think they should have benchmarked the experiment by comparing to people not meditating 5 hours a day, this is just inductive reasoning to me.
This being said, I love meditating and have found it to bring lots of good benefits to me. I find that focus can be trained in better ways, but meditation is great at making me enjoy the present moment, and take my time more.
Such as?
>> Putting meditation to the test
>> “Training allows us to transform the mind, to overcome destructive emotions and to dispel suffering,” says Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard.
>> and tested the effects of different meditative practices on cognition, behaviour, physical and emotional health and brain plasticity.
>> It suggests that meditation can indeed change aspects of your psychology, temperament and physical health in dramatic ways.
>> watching for changes in their mental abilities, psychological health and physiology.
>> at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore,
>> meditation seems to have an effect on emotional well-being. A second study from researchers with the Shamatha project, to appear in the journal Emotion, concluded that meditation improves general social and emotional functioning, making study participants less anxious, and more aware of and better able to manage their emotions.
>> The ability to manage one’s emotions could also be key to why meditation can improve physical health. Studies have shown it to be an effective treatment for eating disorders, substance abuse, psoriasis and in particular for recurrent depression and chronic pain.
etc etc.
If you're doing something for fun, relaxation, and/or enjoyment - do you require randomized clinical trials establishing that said activity has provided these types of experiences for other people? Or can you trust your own appetite for fun, relaxation, and enjoyment?
But this is really true for any activity. You don't know you'll like it until you try it. If you tried it and didn't like you wasted your time.
The only problem I see is if you continue to do meditation even if you don't enjoy it because you believe in benefits. But like with working out, I doubt that really happens. If people can't find enjoyment in it, they drop it sooner or later.
Working out, at least if done correctly - which can be assessed by others - will provide some benefits even if you never get to enjoy it.
And the loss is not just wasted time - it's the feelings of frustration and low self-esteem that come from the perception that you're failing without having idea how to improve.
But this is also true for most activities (playing a violin, playing tennis, or programming). Still, we decide whether any of it is for us by trying it. People who get into it, stay in it for long enough to really learn it and get benefits of it, people who don't get into it, and don't enjoy it on some level drop it quickly. I'm not saying that this is theoretically the best way to explore new activities, it's more of an observation that this is how people generally do it and that meditation is no different. You try it, and it either does something for you (enough to keep doing it), or it doesn't and you drop it.
Article isn't about whether you enjoy it or not; article is about whether it has benefits or not.
In that specific context "I think it brings me benefits" is not good enough even though "I enjoy it" is.
If you don't like it, even if there are benefits (like there are from working out) and even if you know there are, you likely won't stick to it anyways (like most people don't stick to exercise regimes).
If you enjoy meditating, or think there's a sufficiently high chance of benefits from it, you won't mind. But if you remain sufficiently unconvinced, why spend time on it when you could enjoy more free time instead, just because someone else is convinced there is value in it? To me it seems less an interesting thing I'm eager to try, and more a new chore or exercise I'd have to take up, so the time spent wouldn't be taken straight out of the activities with the least utility - more likely out of "daily/weekly maintenance habits" time. So it would really need to be more effective than whatever I usually would have done instead. If I'm going to spend an extra 10 minutes/day on a new habit, is meditation going to be the most effective one?
It's a similar argument to why I wouldn't spend an hour a week going to church, just because someone else thought it would benefit me with little downside risk. Sure, it might, but I'd need more convincing before I decided to put the time in.
"I keep hearing people talk about how lime is so tasty, but why should I spend my hard-earned money on a citrus fruit until I've seen convincing evidence that it's actually tasty?"
I'm interested in how people make decisions about what to do. Especially considering how the frontiers of science are so difficult to keep track of. Like, if you were to base your diet on recent nutrition research, you'd have to spend hours every day just reviewing the literature, and you'd probably have to change your diet every week to accomodate for new findings, contradictions, etc.
To me it seems like people are most likely to just go by their own intuitive desires and preferences, using science at most to validate and confirm what they already wanted based on other factors. So, bluntly speaking, someone who is really fascinated by "spiritual" stuff will google for "meditation benefits pdf" and someone who wants to do other things with their time will look out for criticisms and "FUD."
Mostly I'd just make the point that if you try and sit quietly for ten minutes on three consecutive days, that's a negliglible time spent to try for yourself something that a lot of people say is significantly nice in some way—and that's probably a more efficient use of time than to try and look through the available scientific evidence.
Thinking like this kills people.
Also, am I the only one who sees a massive conflict of interest in a practitioner saying their field doesn't need to be investigated?
https://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=1809...
1. Samadhi/samatha or single pointed focus that calms or concentrates the mind.
2. vipashana/mindfullness/awareness that is looking inside the functioning mind and gains insight.
These two are not completely orthogonal. Even those who do pure awareness meditation develop the ability to keep their mind focused in this moment. In many traditions practitioners start with concentrative practice until they gain the so called 'access concentration' where they have the ability to stay in present moment without mind wandering too much. This access concentration is what I would call 'the flow'. You can go much deeper in concentration or use the flow to look into your mind. The flow itself is not the task. It's the first step.
In many/most Buddhist meditation traditions dedicated concentration practices are seen as tools and insight meditation seen as being more directly towards the goal of Buddhist meditation.
In Mahayana tradition developing deep concentration states is called Sharpening Manjusri’s sword. Using the sword is different than sharpening it.
In the case of mindfulness that is triggering some dismissiveness on your part, there is also abstract, settled, or awareness typed meditation. The latter, focusing on abstract, awareness of awareness (being a witness to your thoughts) without directing them can be just as useful to unlock creativity in day to day life.
Some meditative experiences are very similar to flow and allows the ability to slip into flow that much easier. Some folks can slip into meditation just sitting at their desk by closing their eyes and come out a few minutes later settled and focus in hand for something.
I don't think the quiet mind phase is flow however. It is just that time disappears.
Meditation makes me peaceful and can provide me with more energy reserves for the rest of the day. Flow makes me satisfied but usually tired and at the same time wanting more flow.
So how do you HN participants see these different states?
For an obvious example, consider the kasina practice of old-school Theravada Buddhism.
http://web.archive.org/web/20031230220324/http://www.birken....
Breath concentration is done in a similar way, but with the sensation of the breath as the object of fixation rather than a colored disc.