Comment by rikibro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rikibro | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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

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." ?

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.

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.

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.

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