Dangers of Meditation

lorinroche.com

2 pointswillemmerson3 comments

Give me a good study satisfying scientific standards and I might consider thinking about it. But so far, everything I read about meditation/Yoga has been hearsay and/or a collection of anecdotes.

Genome-wide expression changes in a higher state of consciousness.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22742996

They observed two (2!) subjects. Furthermore, their analysis of the second subject starts like this (p. 1328):

> 3.2.3. Meditator 2

> […] In a period of few months he came twice for monitoring EEG and taken of blood sample during higher states of consciousness. He generated higher state of consciousness during 25 min meditations. Blood samples taken for gene expression analysis each time before meditation were control samples and samples taken during higher state of consciousness were test samples.

I am not a biologist, but

a) two experiments over the course of a few months on meditator 2

b) Changes in blood within 25 minutes of meditating? I have a very hard time believing this.

c) Two meditators in total.

Above I wrote something about ‘scientific standards’. This study is not the sort of ‘scientific standard’ I expect. Let’s just hope people working on drugs are a little more rigorous ☺.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com