The article is full of examples of meditation being used to treat mental and physical ill-health.
>> Putting meditation to the test
>> “Training allows us to transform the mind, to overcome destructive emotions and to dispel suffering,” says Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard.
>> and tested the effects of different meditative practices on cognition, behaviour, physical and emotional health and brain plasticity.
>> It suggests that meditation can indeed change aspects of your psychology, temperament and physical health in dramatic ways.
>> watching for changes in their mental abilities, psychological health and physiology.
>> at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore,
>> meditation seems to have an effect on emotional well-being. A second study from researchers with the Shamatha project, to appear in the journal Emotion, concluded that meditation improves general social and emotional functioning, making study participants less anxious, and more aware of and better able to manage their emotions.
>> The ability to manage one’s emotions could also be key to why meditation can improve physical health. Studies have shown it to be an effective treatment for eating disorders, substance abuse, psoriasis and in particular for recurrent depression and chronic pain.
Sure, because they are looking at meditation as a treatment modality, while that's not all that it can be used for.
If you're doing something for fun, relaxation, and/or enjoyment - do you require randomized clinical trials establishing that said activity has provided these types of experiences for other people? Or can you trust your own appetite for fun, relaxation, and enjoyment?
> It's not really "no harm done" - the opportunity cost of wasting time that could be spent on other activities is a deterrent, for me at least.
But this is really true for any activity. You don't know you'll like it until you try it. If you tried it and didn't like you wasted your time.
The only problem I see is if you continue to do meditation even if you don't enjoy it because you believe in benefits. But like with working out, I doubt that really happens. If people can't find enjoyment in it, they drop it sooner or later.
The problem with meditation, and similar "experiences that can't be described", is that you never know if you tried it long enough or well enough to actually enjoy it, or if it simply doesn't work for you.
Working out, at least if done correctly - which can be assessed by others - will provide some benefits even if you never get to enjoy it.
And the loss is not just wasted time - it's the feelings of frustration and low self-esteem that come from the perception that you're failing without having idea how to improve.
> The problem with meditation, and similar "experiences that can't be described", is that you never know if you tried it long enough or well enough to actually enjoy it
But this is also true for most activities (playing a violin, playing tennis, or programming). Still, we decide whether any of it is for us by trying it. People who get into it, stay in it for long enough to really learn it and get benefits of it, people who don't get into it, and don't enjoy it on some level drop it quickly. I'm not saying that this is theoretically the best way to explore new activities, it's more of an observation that this is how people generally do it and that meditation is no different. You try it, and it either does something for you (enough to keep doing it), or it doesn't and you drop it.
I was responding to a guy/gal that was wondering whether to try it if there is no hard evidence that it is beneficial. My answer to that is: try it, if you like it, it doesn't matter whether there are all those claimed benefits. The fact that you like it is enough a reason to do it.
If you don't like it, even if there are benefits (like there are from working out) and even if you know there are, you likely won't stick to it anyways (like most people don't stick to exercise regimes).
No disrespect intended, but somehow I doubt you're minimizing your opportunity cost every minute of every day. You've got ten minutes to spare. It takes repeated practice, but after a time I think you'll notice results.
True, but spending time meditating would inevitably be reducing something else - even if it's just an equivalent of goofing off on HN.
If you enjoy meditating, or think there's a sufficiently high chance of benefits from it, you won't mind. But if you remain sufficiently unconvinced, why spend time on it when you could enjoy more free time instead, just because someone else is convinced there is value in it? To me it seems less an interesting thing I'm eager to try, and more a new chore or exercise I'd have to take up, so the time spent wouldn't be taken straight out of the activities with the least utility - more likely out of "daily/weekly maintenance habits" time. So it would really need to be more effective than whatever I usually would have done instead. If I'm going to spend an extra 10 minutes/day on a new habit, is meditation going to be the most effective one?
It's a similar argument to why I wouldn't spend an hour a week going to church, just because someone else thought it would benefit me with little downside risk. Sure, it might, but I'd need more convincing before I decided to put the time in.
The tricky thing is that it's such a personal, subjective, experiential activity that it seems likely that any amount of scientific PDFs would remain unconvincing.
"I keep hearing people talk about how lime is so tasty, but why should I spend my hard-earned money on a citrus fruit until I've seen convincing evidence that it's actually tasty?"
I'm interested in how people make decisions about what to do. Especially considering how the frontiers of science are so difficult to keep track of. Like, if you were to base your diet on recent nutrition research, you'd have to spend hours every day just reviewing the literature, and you'd probably have to change your diet every week to accomodate for new findings, contradictions, etc.
To me it seems like people are most likely to just go by their own intuitive desires and preferences, using science at most to validate and confirm what they already wanted based on other factors. So, bluntly speaking, someone who is really fascinated by "spiritual" stuff will google for "meditation benefits pdf" and someone who wants to do other things with their time will look out for criticisms and "FUD."
Mostly I'd just make the point that if you try and sit quietly for ten minutes on three consecutive days, that's a negliglible time spent to try for yourself something that a lot of people say is significantly nice in some way—and that's probably a more efficient use of time than to try and look through the available scientific evidence.
Sure, but aren't there more effective ways of getting vitamin C? A lime is like half a dollar. I don't want to spend my life eating a suboptimal vitamin C source!
Can confirm, I worry about where I might have gone if it hadn't been for meditation pulling me out. It's impossible to put into words what it does for you, you're right, you just have to try it without any pre-conceived notion of what you want to get from it which for some, is too wild an idea.
Devil's advocate here. Lots people say the same thing about religion. In fact, you could almost replace meditation with religion in your comment. Quite illuminating.
And it's probably true for religion too. That doesn't constitute a counterargument. The negative aspects of religion (for example, you can argue that religious faith is exclusionary and confusing, and so on) don't carry over to meditation just because they have something in common.
Its also how science fails to take root: by discouraging people from trying things, just because it hasn't been rubber-stamped by the authorities yet ..
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation." - William Paley
This is the same William Paley (1743–1805) who proposed the watchmaker analogy arguing that complexity in nature was teleological evidence of a creator or intelligent designer.
I have always loved that quote, now I find I have been mis-attributing it for close to 30 years...
For quite some time it had been attributed to Herbert Spencer
exactly. science is sad sometimes, just like any other religion, it creates walls that some people get stuck inside of... waiting for some kind of "approval" by its priests
It seems that you get BOTH science and religion wrong. People are free and influence each other. That's a basic assumption we should take into account when understanding social phenomena. Start of story.