Hello, new to the community, so please forgive / correct me if I’m making obvious missteps here.
I think you’re viewing this the wrong way, evidenced by the fact that you have actually asked two separate but related questions. First, is there scientific evidence for benefits of meditation? And then second, are there good reasons for a typical reader to invest time and effort into practice?
The first question is asking for scientific evidence, and you seem like you’ve set a pretty high bar here. This leads me to believe that you’ve pretty much decided that meditation is fraudulent and want to be convinced otherwise. I don’t think this will happen. Because you’re starting from a point of doubt, you’re always going to be fighting a really uphill journey with meditation. Not that skepticism is bad, but when you sit for a meditation session and just spend 20 minutes thinking “this is horseshit”—you’re not going to make progress.
The evidence for meditation comes out of meditation. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Luckily, meditation is not asking for much. There’s no “lower bound” of the practice: many meditators say a difference can be made with just 1 minute a day. Unless you think you are so optimized that you can’t waste 1 minute of your day—you can run your own n=1 experiment and find your own results. It’s actually about inquiry, so you shouldn’t have trouble. Meditation is about noticing your own thoughts and recognizing them as thoughts. This brings me to your second question.
Are there benefits for the typical reader? I’d argue yes. Being able to recognize your thoughts as thoughts is an important skill for responding to your life in an effective way. Otherwise we get stuck in patterned and cyclic thinking, or waste time rehashing old mistakes endlessly, or worrying about things we can’t control.
Welcome! Your answer is nice, but it is the usual answer one gets when asking about the benefits of meditation. (Okay, the part about “a difference can be made with just 1 minute a day” was new for me.)
The most obvious problem, in my opinion, is that it sounds a bit like: “if this method works for you, it is an evidence that this method works; but if it doesn’t work for you, you are doing it wrong”.
To illustrate, imagine that someone promotes a method: “if you do every day ten squats while thinking positive thoughts about the universe, your life will dramatically improve.” Then someone asks whether there is scientific evidence in favor of this method, and the author replies: “of course, if you are skeptical, you are probably unable to think positive thoughts while doing ten squats.”
Or imagine that there is a method that works for 10% of people, but does nothing for 90% of people, no matter how hard they try. So the lucky 10% will try it and spread the word. And the unlucky 90%, when they complain, will be told: “you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t have the proper attitude” etc. Having a research that says: “when people try this for 2 months, 80% of them succeed” is more valuable than merely being told: “here are a few people who succeeded, and they believe it is possible for everyone”. A method that only works for 1% of people could still have millions of happy users.
Maybe it’s true that everyone who tries meditation will get the results. Or maybe it’s true that some people get the results, and they will be motivated to continue; and some people don’t get the results, so they will gradually give up. From outside, these two situations look almost the same, unless you do the controlled experiment.
Or maybe (some of) the benefits of meditation can also be gained using some different method. So the people who already gained them using the other method will report no benefits gained from meditation. (But they won’t be able to communicate “I already know this”, because they don’t know the Buddhist lingo. Or maybe they will be unaware that what feels normal to them, is a surprise for someone else. For example this “recognizing thoughts as thoughts”, maybe I already do it, dunno.)
Things would be sooo much easier if we could just say “if you achieve enlightenment, this brain scanner will beep” and “among 1000 randomly selected people who trained meditation using this method for 6 months, 793 of them achieved enlightenment, as confirmed by the brain scanner”. Obviously, we are not there. But have we made at least a small move in that direction?
Hello, new to the community, so please forgive / correct me if I’m making obvious missteps here.
I think you’re viewing this the wrong way, evidenced by the fact that you have actually asked two separate but related questions. First, is there scientific evidence for benefits of meditation? And then second, are there good reasons for a typical reader to invest time and effort into practice?
The first question is asking for scientific evidence, and you seem like you’ve set a pretty high bar here. This leads me to believe that you’ve pretty much decided that meditation is fraudulent and want to be convinced otherwise. I don’t think this will happen. Because you’re starting from a point of doubt, you’re always going to be fighting a really uphill journey with meditation. Not that skepticism is bad, but when you sit for a meditation session and just spend 20 minutes thinking “this is horseshit”—you’re not going to make progress.
The evidence for meditation comes out of meditation. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Luckily, meditation is not asking for much. There’s no “lower bound” of the practice: many meditators say a difference can be made with just 1 minute a day. Unless you think you are so optimized that you can’t waste 1 minute of your day—you can run your own n=1 experiment and find your own results. It’s actually about inquiry, so you shouldn’t have trouble. Meditation is about noticing your own thoughts and recognizing them as thoughts. This brings me to your second question.
Are there benefits for the typical reader? I’d argue yes. Being able to recognize your thoughts as thoughts is an important skill for responding to your life in an effective way. Otherwise we get stuck in patterned and cyclic thinking, or waste time rehashing old mistakes endlessly, or worrying about things we can’t control.
For me this is self-evident.
Science replicates. (I would expect that ‘soccer makes (some) people happier’ to be findable via science.)
Welcome! Your answer is nice, but it is the usual answer one gets when asking about the benefits of meditation. (Okay, the part about “a difference can be made with just 1 minute a day” was new for me.)
The most obvious problem, in my opinion, is that it sounds a bit like: “if this method works for you, it is an evidence that this method works; but if it doesn’t work for you, you are doing it wrong”.
To illustrate, imagine that someone promotes a method: “if you do every day ten squats while thinking positive thoughts about the universe, your life will dramatically improve.” Then someone asks whether there is scientific evidence in favor of this method, and the author replies: “of course, if you are skeptical, you are probably unable to think positive thoughts while doing ten squats.”
Or imagine that there is a method that works for 10% of people, but does nothing for 90% of people, no matter how hard they try. So the lucky 10% will try it and spread the word. And the unlucky 90%, when they complain, will be told: “you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t have the proper attitude” etc. Having a research that says: “when people try this for 2 months, 80% of them succeed” is more valuable than merely being told: “here are a few people who succeeded, and they believe it is possible for everyone”. A method that only works for 1% of people could still have millions of happy users.
Maybe it’s true that everyone who tries meditation will get the results. Or maybe it’s true that some people get the results, and they will be motivated to continue; and some people don’t get the results, so they will gradually give up. From outside, these two situations look almost the same, unless you do the controlled experiment.
Or maybe (some of) the benefits of meditation can also be gained using some different method. So the people who already gained them using the other method will report no benefits gained from meditation. (But they won’t be able to communicate “I already know this”, because they don’t know the Buddhist lingo. Or maybe they will be unaware that what feels normal to them, is a surprise for someone else. For example this “recognizing thoughts as thoughts”, maybe I already do it, dunno.)
Things would be sooo much easier if we could just say “if you achieve enlightenment, this brain scanner will beep” and “among 1000 randomly selected people who trained meditation using this method for 6 months, 793 of them achieved enlightenment, as confirmed by the brain scanner”. Obviously, we are not there. But have we made at least a small move in that direction?