Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

newsweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 147 posts

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#101

Post by danielbarla »

mercer wrote: post #47
lukev wrote: post #32

I normally wouldn't weigh in here, since I am the furthest thing possible from an expert, but after even a little dabbling in meditation I can see some major misconceptions in the other comments. It isn't about being bored, or about any of the benefits that may or may not occur. Meditation is a useful discipline because it is about training the mind to (a) become conscious of and "reify" individual thoughts and sensa…

In regards to (a), isn't it more about not reifying your thoughts and sensations? This might be semantics though; I do agree that the path of not becoming a slave to thoughts and sensations starts with acknowledging them.

Semantics or not, that's actually a very important topic. From my limited understanding, the meditation approach would be to firstly notice the thought or sensation, but then to neither repress nor necessarily express the emotion further or get carried away with it.

The rationale being that repression is a short term band-aid that does not allow for resolution of the issue, and can also be a way to conveniently trick yourself into ignoring important things (which you might want to be considering / processing). On the other hand, you also don't want to get further into the emotion, as it may add fuel to the fire (like getting carried away with stories in your mind about what you should have responded with during an argument, etc). So, there's some kind of balancing act there.

So reify might actually be a good word, although it may go to far, as you pointed out.

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#102

Post by wu-ikkyu »

Sandorie wrote: post #9

Between being a placebo and a straight up pseudoscience(if I even were to call it a “science”) in my opinion “mindfulness” is a type of pavlovian conditioning design to establish a self-empathy defense mechanism within our minds. I’ve been to “mindfulness events” for executives and corporate, where people claim to let go of their ego only to look down on anyone who is not as “open minded “ as they are. Overall is ano…

>I’ve been to “mindfulness events” for executives and corporate, where people claim to let go of their ego only to look down on anyone who is not as “open minded “ as they are.

They're doing it wrong. Gloating about supposedly getting rid of one's ego is pure irony. As Alan Watts once said, "getting rid of your ego is the biggest ego trip going"

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#103

Post by jamesrcole »

sevensor wrote: post #96
jamesrcole wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's an industry devoted to meditation. For such a thing to exist, you have to start by convincing people that they're not meditating right The second sentence does not follow from the first. Why do you think it does?

Well, I think I'm meditating just fine, thank you very much, and I don't need a meditation industry to help me. This is a problem for the meditation industry, because it means they can't sell me meditation products. They need me to believe that I could be meditating better if I had their product or service, so there's a huge incentive for them to try to convince me that I'm meditating wrong.

Good for you.

Just because a person can do something fine by themselves doesn't mean that a service can't help other people. Some people can work out fine by themselves. Personal trainers help others. The existence of personal trainers doesn't stop anyone from working out themselves, and they do provide a benefit to some people.

Why does a, say, app have to be telling you're doing it sub-optimally?? Why can't it be something that provides things like convenience or assistance?

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#104

Post by petra »

visarga wrote: post #94

I have practiced meditation for 20 years but I still don't understand what is the purpose of emptiness (I mean I used to think I did but now I'm not so sure). What would be the purpose from a reinforcement learning point of view? A state where I have no likes or dislikes, no goal, no reward signals, where I feel no attraction or repulsion, where the distinction between self and other disappears. An uprooted agent dri…

It's an interesting question, too rarely asked.

I think that emptiness is sort of brain hacking, not something we evolved into. but on the other hand, evolution might not optimized us for happiness either.

As for what the experience is , while living in a modern context, this interview with Gary Weber, who once led big r&d organizations, and is now "enlightened", is great:

https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/14840

As for you colleagues' being unsecsseful, sadly, one of the bigest lies told/implied by some parts of buddhism, is that "if you're dedicated, you will become englithened". But if you look at the statistics, this is not the case at all, and rarely few get enlightened.

What are they missing ? my guess is that:

(a) our training technology isn't good enough, yet, but there's a lot of hope in that front in recent science/tech

(b) Enlightenment may require certain level of psychological development. so maybe certain types of psychological work might be better at the early stages.

(c) Genetics play a role too. For example, if you're someone with bipolar disorder, meditation may trigger mania(and than comes depression). maybe.

Personally, i wonder if another type of brain hacking, instead of enlightenment, is better for happiness, for the masses: teaching people how to achieve a flow state at will, combined with helping them with standard tool of ego based psychology.

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#105

Post by sevensor »

bitexploder wrote: post #79
sevensor wrote: post #62

> Major commercial players in the meditation space The sheer insanity of this phrase astounds me. There's an industry devoted to meditation. For such a thing to exist, you have to start by convincing people that they're not meditating right. Which means some people are better at it than others and you should worry about not being as good. What's next, competitive meditation?

Guided meditation is a big deal. I know a number of people who use Headspace. Also, obviously, some people are better at meditating. I think most meditation practitioners tend to sort of remove ego, not add to it. So I don't see anyone being competitive about it. But I do see people desperate for the benefits and looking to those good at it to show them the way. There are worse things people could be trying really ha…

> obviously, some people are better at meditating

This is not obvious to me. This is the message the meditation industry is trying to sell, and I'm not buying it. We have a long history in the West of selling pre-packaged individually-wrapped enlightenment products and claiming they come from the East, where enlightenment was invented. But that's marketing, not reality.

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#106

Post by p-funk »

visarga wrote: post #94

I have practiced meditation for 20 years but I still don't understand what is the purpose of emptiness (I mean I used to think I did but now I'm not so sure). What would be the purpose from a reinforcement learning point of view? A state where I have no likes or dislikes, no goal, no reward signals, where I feel no attraction or repulsion, where the distinction between self and other disappears. An uprooted agent dri…

I think emptiness can serve as a sort of reference to keep things in perspective, but I'm just as unsure as you are how capable emptiness is as a philosophy. I think, mainly, it can be a tool to help you get closer to detached awareness of the present moment. If you aim to go from "a self who is being aware of the present moment" to "some poorly defined state of emptiness who is exists in the present moment", you sort of get closer to "being more aware of the present with less impulsive reactions" by default. But, like many things, you can take it too far and the idea kind of falls apart somewhere.

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#107

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

titzer wrote: post #66
Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OP is correct, it just wasn't stated as well as it could've been. Meditation (at least some practice forms) is an act of forcing boredom upon yourself AND exploring how your mind's default settings react in that environment. There is a reason why focusing on something like your breath is recommended vs. focusing on the television (breath is boring!). “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to si…

Boredom is an emotional state, it is not the absence of stimulation.

And sitting down in a quiet, non-stimulated environment typically produces all sorts of emotions, does it not?

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#108

Post by vanderZwan »

DanBC wrote: post #86
vanderZwan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I know people who are being denied any other option. Am I correct in guessing you are talking about a work setting, where the situation is similar to something like: "if you're overworked we're not going to address the root problem by lowering the amount of work to a sensible load, we're going to make you do more work in the form of mental exercises to strengthen your resilience, so we can burden you with more…

No. I'm talking about an English NHS health settting.

Oh wow, I would expect a situation with proper health care professionals to be better than that. That sounds pretty bad.

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#109

Post by sevensor »

jamesrcole wrote: post #103
sevensor wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I think I'm meditating just fine, thank you very much, and I don't need a meditation industry to help me. This is a problem for the meditation industry, because it means they can't sell me meditation products. They need me to believe that I could be meditating better if I had their product or service, so there's a huge incentive for them to try to convince me that I'm meditating wrong.

Good for you. Just because a person can do something fine by themselves doesn't mean that a service can't help other people. Some people can work out fine by themselves. Personal trainers help others. The existence of personal trainers doesn't stop anyone from working out themselves, and they do provide a benefit to some people. Why does a, say, app have to be telling you're doing it sub-optimally?? Why can't it be s…

> Why can't it be something that provides things like convenience or assistance

Because the experience and practice of meditation is so entirely subjective as to make these claims absurd. What does convenience mean to meditation, when all that meditation requires is for you to be present?

Re: Much of the research around meditation and mindfulness has serious flaws

#110

Post by vanderZwan »

richk449 wrote: post #95
SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #90

People should be aware that this does not mean you shouldn't meditate. At least give it a shot. The risk/reward ratio is so heavily skewed toward reward (what are the risks, really?) that you'd be foolish not to try it.

So like Pascal's Wager for meditation?

Eh.. no? Mindfulness is something for which the results of trying it are testable. Pascal's Wager is a gamble about what happens beyond the verifiable. They are fundamentally different.
Post reply on HN