The Long Marriage of Mindfulness and Money | Hacker News Reader

The Long Marriage of Mindfulness and Money

newyorker.com

39 pointsnether33 comments

Interesting that they mention mindfulness as we know it today is been gutted of theological meaning. I would say that is largely true of modern mindfulness, but it doesn't have to be the case. Christianity, for example, has a form of prayer called "centering prayer," in which one mindfully meditates on God while letting distracting thoughts flow away [1]. The parallels between westernized mindfulness and centering prayer are notable, and I find it encourages an opportunity for deeper spirituality than the more ubiquitous conversant prayer ("God, please forgive me for lying and oh can you please let the Patriots win the Super Bowl"). I have been practicing both for a couple weeks now and I find I am much better able to concentrate on focus-driven tasks like reading literature, something I have always struggled with due to a history of ADHD.

[1] http://cct.biola.edu/blog/2014/aug/04/when-strivings-cease/

A funny error in the article: "The Varieties of Religious Experience" was written by William James, not Henry James—it'd be a very different book if his brother had written it.

The article tries to give the impression that mindfulness meditation as it appears in the U.S. is more of a money making gimmick than an effectively distilled version of the Eastern tradition. Undoubtedly people will try to make money off of it and you'll have plenty of books/teachers who present it in a disconnected fashion whose only efficacy derives from the placebo effect (which will probably be enough for it to spread with good reputation through corporate culture). That said, there's a pretty long tradition of smart people who've been trying in earnest to interpret meditation practice and Eastern philosophical concepts in a Western framework. There's a lot of variety in the results, sure—but at the same time there's a core set of ideas and practices that have an internal consistency, and—in my opinion—which fill an important gap in the typical U.S. life philosophy. In particular, it offers a solution to the problem of, "what greater ultimate goal can I have for life than obtaining positive experiences and avoiding negative ones, if I'm basically an experience machine who will cease to exist after X years?"—without asking people to have faith in some positive metaphysical system. Additionally, meditation can be powerfully instructive in letting people see/remember certain aspects of being human that it's easy to lose after spending years feeling driven to accomplish some goals.

> Brendel’s fear is that meditation might make executives too mellow and compassionate

Won't someone please think of the shareholders!

Both of these things lead to indecision

"I don't know right from wrong all the time, I wish I did, but one thing I cannot be is indecisive." - Frank Underwood to an Arab in a wheelchair, justifying his choice to blow that man's legs off via drone strike.

Deepak Chopra. First sentence. Next!

The article neither about him, nor is mindfullness a quack method unverified by science.

And even if it was, a report on how this method is embraced by Wall Street can still be worthy of your time.

> nor is mindfullness a quack method unverified by science

What specific benefits had mindfulness been verified to provide, in comparison to placebo meditation? I'd be very grateful for any references to peer-reviewed study.

A simple google for "mindfulness study" brings up some interesting material. At the top is this review of a couple dozen studies:

http://marc.ucla.edu/workfiles/pdfs/MARC-mindfulness-researc...

I haven't attempted to look at the studies in detail, but it should be pretty easy to pull up peer-reviewed work if you're really interested.

That's a very specific question, and I'm no expert on the matter. Although I think that comparing it to "placebo meditation" is like comparing two types of exercise to each other, within the larger debate of whether exercising in general is useful or not.

Here's a visualisation by Information Is Beautiful, along with the list of sources used:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/what-is...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m_tiYlDIyNpp6WGUgKd5...

Excellent. The list of articles is interesting. More has been done than I thought had been done, and it is interesting stuff. The visualisation I find a problem, because it masks the nuances of thed studies and verges on the misrepresentation. But the underlying studies definitely feed my concern.

There is the issue of whether mindfulness meditation is anything more than a coincidental piggyback on meditation. But there are several studies in the list that, while not directly controlling for that, certainly provide strong circumstantial evidence (most of the linked research is not about mindfulness at all).

So I definitely take back the more extreme tone of my skepticism, (for whatever that is worth!)

There are no studies like that since there is no such thing as placebo meditation.

Meditation, in general, for the usual western mind, can be seen as mental hygiene.

I could guess you never read a study about the benefits of oral hygiene but you probably never doubt its benefits - because of culture (parents/school). "Our" culture is very advance in many "sciences" but is a child in others.

Give it some decades - your grandchildren will teach their children about meditation, in the same manner any parent, nowadays, teach their kids to brush their teeth before bed.

Answering your question, even though I don't know (and care) about peer-reviewed studies about this, I can tell you that mindfulness has many benefits (verified by myself) and I've experienced most benefits given by the first link of [vanderZwan] reply.

By the way, one can reach a state of "being in the zone" with much more ease (which is a requirement to excel at any sports): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Quite a diferrent claim from "it works for me" to "it is verified by science".

Google scholar shows over 2 million results for published articles on oral health. Pubmed has several thousand of them. You really want to pretend that's a cultural thing?

It is quite clear you don't care about peer-reviewed science. That's your prerogative. I wouldn't have commented if the OP hadn't implied that mindfulness specifically (not meditation generally) had scientific verification.

> Give it some decades - your grandchildren will teach their children about meditation

That is an easy claim "in a few years, you'll all be scientologists" is just as simple. And, even if true, would have no bearing on whether mindfulness meditation is verified or not.

> flow

Can you show scientific evidence that meditation improves the achievement of flow? That's a new claim I've not seen before. Again, easy to say. I don't think it impossible, but I'd like to see that it is more than something you're making up.

Google Scholar shows 54,600 results for mindful meditation. Not nearly as many as for oral health, but if you're using the number of results as an indicator of anything other than the number of papers published about a topic, you're just cargo culting the scientific method.

Clearly it is beyond either of our interest to even read 1 page of papers from these results, but if you are genuinely curious about the scientific research into the efficacy of mindful meditation, may I direct you to peruse https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=mindful+meditatio....

My understanding of what's supported by research is that mindful meditation is effective at reducing the magnitude of specific mental events (anxiety, etc.) as well as reducing chronic pain. It may also help people with sociological subjective scores like life happiness and contentment measures. It does not seem to have a significantly stronger effect than other relaxation techniques, so it appears that the benefit comes from the mental housekeeping rather than "mindfulness" in particular.

It's a technique that is shown to be effective. There's nothing magical about it compared to other similar techniques.

Thanks - vanderZwan provided a curated list of pubmed articles elsewhere that directly answered my original skeptical request.

You make several wrong assumptions from what I've written.

- You asked for verification, I gave you my own, if more 9 people do the same, you have a statistic. Yes, I'm kidding here, but first hand "investigation" also have its merits. Never did I want to imply this prove (scientifically) any benefits for everyone. But I can do that now if you are into it - logical reasoning can be a powerful tool.

- I said "I could guess you never read a study about the benefits of oral hygiene". Never did I say that there were no studies about this. Your response makes me think my assumption was correct. Moreover, I may have failed to make my point clear: you do things that are what science recommends in order to be healthy, but you learn it, not from peer-reviewed articles but from people near you.

> It is quite clear you don't care about peer-reviewed science. That's your prerogative. "Ad Hominem" argument and we don't need this. I, specifically, said I didn't care about "peer-reviewed studies about this", this referring to Mindfulness. Though I don't support my own attitude for people that are curious and want to learn more about Mindfulness.

> That is an easy claim "in a few years, you'll all be scientologists" is just as simple. True, my bad. At that point I was digressing.

> Can you show scientific evidence that meditation improves the achievement of flow? What I said was, again, from my personal experience (I play(ed) a lot competitive sports). But a quick search lead me here: http://mrsmindfulness.com/how-you-can-enter-mindfulness-in-4... (cannot attest for the site credibility or the studies it mentioned, but I found the explanation quite interesting and clear)

PS - I hope you take this in a good way but you could use some Mindfulness in order to help you see what it is instead of seeing what you think it is (honestly, we could all use some).

You assume I've not meditated over many years.

I'm generally a little touchy about western misappropriation of and imperialism towards eastern religion under the service of capitalism. As such the original article resounded with me, and 'mindfulness' meditation in some of its rhetoric strikes me as deeply bigoted and colonial.

Thank you for the other clarification. I'm sorry that I read your article as trying to respond to what I was saying. I didn't realise you were just trying to make your own points.

E.g. "- You asked for verification, I gave you my own" - I didn't ask for verification, I asked for scientific studies that demonstrated the claims were verified, because I was responding to a claim about science. If you weren't interested in demonstrating the point scientifically, so be it, but then your response was irrelevant afaict, since that was the topic, before and during my post.

If science is your only and absolute god, you're as fundamentalist, blind and prone to being deceived as a diehard religious person.

Nonsense. Science is defined as skepticism and empiricism. Its the opposite of blind. The "science is another religion" is a common meme and its lazy, mean and wrong.

"Science is another religion" used to seriously bother me, it seemed like the most backward thing possible: science is basically defined as anti-faith, while religion exists solely by means of faith. I've more recently come to realize, though, that there's a certain truth in it (which the 'fighting words' form of 'science is another religion' unfortunately disguises). Namely, everyone has fundamental beliefs on the nature of reality and self, which are largely formed implicitly; and while science claims to have nothing to say on the matter (it doesn't deal with philosophical subjects, after all), in practice, people very often form their fundamental beliefs with scientific concepts, even though science admits it has nothing to say on the matter. So in this sense, people often USE science for the same thing that religion is USED for. So while they differ in internal structure, they're often used for the same thing—often without people realizing it. And, this is unfortunately, because it often leaves people with fundamental beliefs like, "reality is equations," which is mistaking a system of description for the thing being described. Anyway.

But you can't do all empiricism yourself so you introduce a human element middle-man between your skepticism and truth. There's no science in a vacuum.

Why would it be my god? It was a claim that the OP made that I was disputing.

Did you ignore the bit where I said "That's your prerogative. I wouldn't have commented if the OP hadn't implied that mindfulness specifically (not meditation generally) had scientific verification." ?

Science isn't a god, you're misusing both words. Science is how we stop lying to ourselves, it's a method of disproving claims to arrive at knowledge; it's not a religion and its practitioner’s are not fundamentalists. Those who practice science are not being blind, they are in the fact the only ones trying to find the actual truth which is why everything is falsifiable and skepticism is the norm.

The body of research might still be small, but it's growing. Here is one researcher at Mass General/Harvard that has published on it: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Y0qQluMAAAAJ&hl=en...

There is a group at UMass medical that has been doing work in the area for a few decades: http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/

Of course more research needs to be done. Maybe a limiting factor in the past was the technology available to investigate neurobiology. As we understand the brain more I'm sure we'll see an increase in data on meditation.

How would you define "placebo meditation"?

To verify a method scientifically, one must compare it to something with the same structure but different content. To verify a tablet, one compares it to another tablet without the purported active ingredient, to verify traditional acupressure, you would compare it to pressure applied in arbitrary places, to verify mindfulness meditation, you would have to compare it against things with a meditative form, but without the mindfulness content.

I think that hasn't been done. At best investigations are general and barely scientific. It is very dubious to claim that science has demonstrated this is not a quack technique.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted without anyone challenging your argument. I completely agree that the parent comment about being "unverified by science" is bogus(is it? where? citations, links?). However, I wouldn't dismiss this meditation effect outright - after all, even placebo medication can have effects compared to no medication. As long as it doesn't try to wear the trappings of "scientifically tested", it might be a neat "works for me" trick.

> (is it? where? citations, links?)

I posted an excel sheet full of links, which you apparently didn't bother to check out. And before someone tries to pull an ad-hominem of me being a floaty alternative person: I studied physics and am the son of two doctors of the mainstream I-hate-alternative-medicine bullshit kind. The only reason I know anything about mindfulness is because I have a sister (with a master degree in biology, so natural sciences again), who is currently doing her PhD on mindfulness as a stress reduction method at the University of Amsterdam.

Sorry - I have no idea how I missed your post(the non-chronological order of HN is a bit confusing to me) - but your first post certainly did make a statement without providing any evidence.

I agree, in fact, my intuition is that meditation is probably beneficial. And I suspect that might be demonstrable scientifically, though it would be tough, and probably quite vague at best. I was only reacting to the over-hyped claims about this modality. The downvotes I think are because the people who are reading are more likely to be invested in it enough to trawl through the comments, and anything that suggests disbelief, even if not read properly, is automatically anathema.

Your comparison to medicine is flawed, because in that case we ingest an active ingredient that affects our body chemistry.

Mindfulness and meditation are both active engagements with the mind - which is like a mental exercise. The mental health benefits are therefore more comparable to the physical health benefits of doing exercise.

So to repeat myself: at that point, comparing mindfulness to a "placebo" meditation is like comparing the health benefits of upper body strength training to endurance running.

The only "placebo" would be to not do any meditation or mindfulness exercises, just like how the health benefits of exercise are compared to what happens if we do nothing. And that has been extensively researched, with measurable differences in stress levels, and structural changes in the brain.

Controls in science are relative to something. If you want to verify mindfulness meditation, you have to compare it against something else, something as similar as possible.

I used the phrase 'placebo' informally for the process of controlling against something as similar as possible which lacks the specific content you want to verify. I gave an example of acupressure (which has been done). You gave your own example of how to control against benefits being from meditation rather than the mindfulness modality of meditation.

Ruling out placebos for pills is easy. I'm struggling in what a placebo with the "meditative form" looks like. You could tell one group to focus on something unusual but practicing focus is a part of meditation.

There are plenty of studies that show benefits in specific tasks (around empathy or focus) and there are others around changes to the brain. Here's one from Harvard that showed 8 weeks of medititatoin corelated with significant changes in the brain: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugio_Cent

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