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Comment by loblollyboy | Hacker News Reader

There were only forty something controls and forty something meditators, and if you look at the variance within each group it is way more than the "increase" of the average due to meditation AND some of the brain regions are thicker on average in the non-meditators group. I haven't taken bio since highschool, but it seems like you can't draw a conclusion from this. Am I missing something here?

Also, this is something I've always wondered, and I guess the only way to get a real answer would be to try meditating. But as a distance runner, I have always wondered if that is a form of meditation. It seems like I have all of the effects described by meditators, and in this study, they described a form of meditation which was movement and paying attention to the physical sensations - which is basically most sports. Any endurance athlete meditators out there who can explain the difference?

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> But as a distance runner, I have always wondered if that is a form of meditation.

The way I think about this is that there's an important difference between meditation (as a noun) vs. meditative (as an adjective).

Meditation, when you're doing it, is the only thing you're doing, or at least attempting to do.

I've gone on multiple-day camping trips on my motorcycle, when it's just me and my bike out in the middle of nowhere. I find that very meditative, in what I imagine is similar to what you feel with long-distance running. There's a part of my brain engaged with controlling my body and four limbs, but also a part of my brain that's not really engaged at all and is free to wander.

That's meditative, but that's not meditation. If I closed my eyes for a few minutes while riding my motorcycle, my happiness would decrease significantly.

This isn't to say that one is better than the other. You could meditate and never do any meditative activities, or you could do meditative activities without ever once meditating. The best option, as usual, is probably a moderate mix of both of them.

Anybody ever noticed running a lot better when your mind is fully away, as in totally immersed into an idea or a memory. I realized that in those times, my rhythm is stable, my movements are smoother, my heartrate is a bit lower..

But the minute I sense it, the bubble breaks

I think a big difference is that in sports, although you are aware of internal processes, a large amount of your attention is on external things, as it must be so you don't run off a cliff, for example. When meditating you turn your attention inwards, perhaps at first observing bodily sensations, but continuing inward until the body fades away and only mental processes are observed and there is no attention given to the external senses.

But you are often focused on the present moment, not thinking about the future or the past - which is one thing that most mindfulness training seems to teach.

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