[adorton]

Meditation is the focused practice of resisting distraction.

Have you ever tried sitting still for 15-30 minutes, doing nothing but breathing? Distractions come easily in this state. Sometimes it's your thoughts. Other times, it's very hard to resist the urge to get up and start moving. In order to successfully meditate, you need to deal with a wide variety of distractions and other obstacles.

[KirinDave]

> Meditation is the focused practice of resisting distraction.

Are we defining it this way? Because this does not jive with my experience of meditation, focusing, or resisting distraction.

> Have you ever tried sitting still for 15-30 minutes, doing nothing but breathing?

Yes. As a matter of fact, meditation was part of a martial arts practice I participated in for 2 years. In all that time I tried very hard to do this, but never found much value in it. Eventually I settled on quietly and methodically reflecting on the day, which is something that seemed to have a lot more value than chasing a vague notion of emptiness.

And honestly I'm not convinced this is _any different_ from the "benefits" of meditation.

[hooande]

Are you familiar with the 10,000 Hour Rule? It says that the mastery of any skill requires 10k hours of deliberate practice of that skill. Meditation is the act of deliberately practicing and developing one's ability to resist distraction.

The hypothesis is as simple as "Telling jokes is a good way to become funny". Would you demand empirical evidence to support that claim as well? It might be difficult to find research to back it up, as it's so obvious that no one took the time to do a study.

There's no guarantee that meditation will work for you, just like some people might tell a lot of jokes and not get any funnier. If someone was forced to tell jokes like you were forced to meditate, they probably wouldn't like it either. But the value of the meditation seems to be obvious - if you want to get better at resisting distraction, then sit down and practice resisting distraction.

[notJim]

> The hypothesis is as simple as "Telling jokes is a good way to become funny"

Right. So practicing meditation is a good way to become better at meditation. There's no guarantee that that skill transfers over to very different situations.

I'm not saying your intuition is wrong, however, I actually suspect it's right. But to claim that you can definitively say that it's right is not scientific.

[shock-value]

Basically you are arguing that being able to resist distractions isn't a great value in and of itself, at least compared to some other values. Fine. I think a lot of people would disagree, but it's a legitimate viewpoint.

But you also claim that taking a period of time in a day to train oneself to resist distractions does not lead to a more focused mindset throughout the day. I think most of us who have practiced meditation (and actually put real effort in, rather than reflecting on other thoughts during the practice) would disagree.

At the moment I don't have any actual studies on hand to back that up (I'm on my phone) but I would be very surprised if they don't exist, and even more surprised if there were studies disproving positive effects of meditation.

[KirinDave]

> But you also claim that taking a period of time in a day to train oneself to resist distractions does not lead to a more focused mindset throughout the day. I think most of us who have practiced meditation (and actually put real effort in, rather than reflecting on other thoughts during the practice) would disagree.

Not to put too fine a point on this, because I'm not trying t pick a fight here, but... Homeopaths would disagree when you say that Avagadros Limit rules out any possibility of their cures working save by pure magic.

> At the moment I don't have any actual studies on hand to back that up (I'm on my phone) but I would be very surprised if they don't exist, and even more surprised if there were studies disproving positive effects of meditation.

I'm not arguing that meditation has no positive effects. I'm arguing other things may have similar positive effects and meditation is not unique in this. For example, how is meditation any different from strenuous exercise in forcing your mind to focus?

The article in question suggests that there is science behind the link between meditation and willpower. I don't see that. I also don't see unique properties of meditation in this. Meditation devotees spring up out of the woodwork in response saying, "If you did it you'd understand..." like that's somehow a response to this contention.

By all means, continue to meditate. By all means, feel that it helps make you a better person. By all means, recommend it to your friends. But please do not suggest there is concrete evidence that there is a causal link unless you have _something_ to back that up.

[shock-value]

Here's a study... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22363278/?i=10&from...

It may have been mentioned already, I just did a simple pubmed search.

I would guess that exercise would have some of the same benefits, especially if it's exercise that one forces oneself to do, rather than just a fun activity. I don't have a study for that hypothesis though.

[KirinDave]

So that's a good start. Is that all we have? I see some credible studies on pubmed (and plenty of studies with all the markers of being useless, some outright mentioning "CAM"-friendly goals in the abstract), but most of them involve things like mindfulness meditation as a method of improving performance on X, where X is some sort of motor-coordination task.

What the study you cited suggests interesting research could be done. My big question is that is any sort of hard focus activity of the same quality as meditation?

[shmageggy]

Here's one study that I'm familiar with- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19773563

They correlated mindfulness study with improvements in several aspects of mental well-being.

[clbrook]

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a scientific research group studying this area. The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds: http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/cihmWhat.html

"The Center is embarking on a series of research programs in both long-term meditation practitioners as well as more novice practitioners to examine how such training affects the brain and body, and also to provide critical information on how to structure interventions to make them more successful."

This is a 2010 New York Times article describing that: "The center’s mission was inspired by a meeting between Dr. Davidson and the Dalai Lama in 1992 in the Himalayas." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27happy.html?_r=4&t...;

[notJim]

> Meditation is the focused practice of resisting distraction.

So is actually practicing resisting distraction in vivo, except that it's directly applicable. You're argument is exactly the “of course it does!” argument that your parent was referring to.

Without studies, we don't actually know whether the skills in resisting distraction during meditation actually transfer to other situations.

To quote your parent:

One cannot just say things over and over to make them true.

[disgruntledphd2]

OK, I would think (based on years of on off practice) that the effects of meditation do generalise to other situations.

Here's an RCT that suggests that meditation is effective over and above relaxation in producing positive states of mind. http://www.springerlink.com/content/720772266xj33972/ Here's a more directly related study which showed that meditators showed greater ability to focus attention than did controls: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13674679908406332 Finally - a randomised controlled trial of the effects of mindfulness meditation on attention showing that mindfulness is more effective than progressive relaxation training in building up the four components of attention: http://www.springerlink.com/content/617t1648164627q4/

This was extremely trivial to find (two google scholar searches, one on meditation and distraction (first link) and the second on meditation and attention (second and third links). The first and third links have open access papers linked from Google Scholar if you would like to know more.

[acous]

> Without studies, we don't actually know whether the skills in resisting distraction during meditation actually transfer to other situations.

From my own limited experience it does indeed generalise to all situations, the scientific evidence for that hypothesis is building (some links to studies can be found above). It does become self-evident if you meditate regularly for a while though. It shouldn't take long to at least get a feel for how it works if not a clear demonstration of the principle that the studies can only hint at.

[mikeash]

How do you know that resisting distraction while meditating makes it easier for you to resist urges otherwise? Maybe we actually have a finite store of urge-resistance to go through each day, and spending it on meditation actually makes things worse.

I'm not saying that's true, but I think GP's point is that we should really have some kind of evidence that meditation helps with this, rather than simply assuming that it helps because it makes you practice it.

[loup-vaillant]

Short term, it probably does make things worse. There are studies about limited willpower, like when you measure the patience of people by having them performing a chore, the control group have more patience than the group that where explicitly forbidden to eat that cookie over there.

But doing it every morning is different. First, by making it a habit, you don't need as much willpower as you did the first times. And if it trains willpower, then the long term result will likely be better than doing nothing.

Similarly, when you exercise in the morning, it leaves you more tired for the rest of the day. Your muscles may even ache the following morning. But do it every (other) day, and it (i) won't be that tiring, and (ii) you'll be in better shape anyway.

[mikeash]

"And if it trains willpower, then the long term result will likely be better than doing nothing."

This is the key. Does it train willpower? Is it like physical exercise? Or does it just deplete, with no benefit?

I can see the reason for thinking it might be a benefit, but without actually showing that it is, it seems wrong to just assume.