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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
"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."
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don't know, I thought he explained it pretty well: during meditation, you practice resisting urges.
I'll admit that falls rather short of a doubleblindrandomlyassignedcontrolgrouplargesamplesizepeerreviewed study, but it does seem to be common sense that practicing something would make you better at it.
"during meditation, you practice resisting urges."
Saying this does not make it true thought. Is that actually what people do during meditation? The only experience I have with meditation is sitting in seiza position after 2 hours of Ki Aikido, slowly feeling my muscles cramp, listening to someone hit a drum periodically, and not feeling anything good at all.
Eventually I just learned to devote that time to reviewing things I had learned that day. I found this self-reflective practice far more refreshing and pleasant than any search for metaphorical emptiness.
I think when most people say 'meditation' what they mean is 'mindfulness meditation' (and that seems to be the case here). During mindfulness meditation, yes, resisting urges is part of what you're supposed to do.
The basic process goes something like:
1) Sit down in a comfortable position that you can stay in without moving.
2) Take deep breaths through your nose and focus your attention on the sensation of air moving over your nasal passages and into/out of your lungs.
3) When other thoughts come into your head or you find yourself thinking about anything other than your breathing, gently direct your attention back to your breathing.
The subject of meditation isn't all that important, the focus is. Breathing just happens to be a great subject: it's simple and repetitive, it's always with you, it's something you can feel (you're supposed to pay attention to the sensation), etc.
I recently read Mindfulness in Plain English and really enjoyed it. If you're looking for an explanation and how-to (but not necessarily data to back it up), it's a great book.
Edit: Regarding cats specifically, breathing does not demand your attention (the way cats do) and it does not leave on a whim once it has received your attention (the way cats do). It's up to you, and only you, to focus and continue focusing.
I think it is about breathing because it is probably one of the unconscious processes of the body that one can also control consciously with ease. And probably focusing on this has something to do with connecting the two minds.
Probably one can do meditation by using Biofeedback (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofeedback -> http://www.ccjm.org/content/75/Suppl_2/S35.full.pdf) but this technique of focusing on physiological functions is new. Probably mediation was practiced for at least 2000 years (Buddha teaching are dated somewhere around 500BC) or more (indian scriptures called “tantras” mentioned meditation techniques 5000 years ago). So in that time the most viable way to control consciously an automatic body function was to do it with breathing.
I never practiced constantly meditation, but I has tried once different forms. So just take this as a simple deduction based on my own observations and few readings on the subject :)
> If you are "breathing" you are only "breathing".
And sitting, and your heart is beating, and you're swallowing, and your eyes are moving reflexively, and you're probably digesting. And what about people with tinnitis? They're often "hearing" something.
Sorry, I just don't understand why focusing on a specific topic to the exclusion of everything else is somehow inferior to focusing on breathing. Because your higher functioning mind can take over your breathing, but your reflexive breathing is plenty good at it nearly all the time. Woudln't the same distraction-free mindset be attainable by contemplating the central limit theorem, or Euler's formula, or focusing on doing more situps than your body is comfortable with?
I think the point is to train your ability to focus on things that you don't naturally focus on. If you like thinking about math and you can easily focus on it without effort, presumably it doesn't have the same training effect. I think the idea of mindfulness is to learn to build up "reflexes" in your mind that cause you to notice certain thoughts at the conscious level. Focusing on your breathing is something so boring that random thoughts will continually enter your mind. Sometimes it will take a significant period of time to consciously notice that you're no longer focusing on breathing. Over time you train yourself to recognize those thoughts as soon as the enter your mind. In other words you train yourself to lift unconscious thoughts to conscious meta thoughts, i.e. feeling angry v.s. thinking "hey, I'm feeling angry".
For example if somebody does something annoying, you might reflexively think or say something bad to that person. The idea of mindfulness is to train your mind to process thoughts on a conscious level before acting on them. You will have the conscious thought "oh, I feel annoyed by this" and then be able to make a conscious decision about your reaction, instead of a reflexive one. Or instead of randomly browsing the web, you consciously notice "hey, I'm browsing the web, lets get back to work" ;) I'm certainly not an expert on the subject, but this is my understanding of it. If you've never tried it and want to get a clearer understanding, try it now. Try focusing on your breath for 2 minutes (or heartbeat, or the number 5, or whatever, as long as it's the same simple boring thing over those 2 minutes).
This is something that I don't think you will be able to understand until you have tried it enough to see what others see in it. There are many activities like that.
The point of focusing on breathing is not to do the breathing in place of your automatic breathing. It is to pay attention to that automatic breathing.
Contemplating the central limit theorem is a complex activity. Where does contemplation of that truly end? It is easy to follow the mind's natural tendency to become distracted. You think about related math. You think about your math professor that first talked about it. You think about unrelated math. You think about practical applications.
The breath is simple. You observe the breath going in and out. When your mind it on something else, you return it to the breath. Over and over. You don't have to consider anything: if you attend to something other than the sensation of the breath, you've wandered off.
You can be mindful of all of those things, but it's not necessarily the thing they start you off with with. Breath is easy to explain and locate... not everyone can isolate their heartbeat or eye movements easily.
I think everyone's forgetting that there's a thousand different activities that people call "meditation". Vipassana meditation seems to be what the original article and most of the responses are referring to.
I'd like to actually see some evidence that Meditation helps people sustain that state of mind. Because I hear people trot it out a lot but I've never seen it backed up by hard data.
I think meditation may have benefits, but the idea that it helps you "build up willpower" has always been one I thought we could actually measure, and yet I've never seen a good study of it.
I used to also wait for all the data before I tried things like this. Then due to "reasons" I actually started meditation, daily, for just 10 minutes. I've now been doing it for 3 years and I have no data to give you, but the effects on me are subtle yet profound. If you can spare 10 minutes a day you still won't have any data, but you'll have an answer.
I am here to tell you the placebo effect is nearly impossible to spot from the inside out. Your brain is just not wired to pierce the veil of selection bias without a lot of effort.
You are saying, "Doing X made me feel good." But I am saying that nearly anything in that X spot might do the same. It's just the way the human mind works.
In testing out Piracetam on myself I've been especially aware of this, because even though I _know_ it can happen I still perceive effects that my testing strategy eliminates as just flights of fancy and imagination.
If meditation really is an amazing wonder practice you claim it is then it should hold up to scrutiny no problem. You can keep doing it, and I might even try it. That doesn't mean we should just pretend all the things this article are saying are true.
Placebo effect has no meaning in this context. Placebo effects are caused by mind rather than a substance. In this case, the entire treatment is in the mind.
There are many, many, many studies on the benefits and effects of meditation. If you haven't found any, it's because you are not looking.
"Placebo effect has no meaning in this context. Placebo effects are caused by mind rather than a substance. In this case, the entire treatment is in the mind."
If you're a dualist, then okay. But I'm not. And since the mot compelling evidence of the effect of meditation so far presented involves structural changes to the brain, I think you just talked yourself out of a case.
"There are many, many, many studies on the benefits and effects of meditation. If you haven't found any, it's because you are not looking."
Within the context of improving your ability to withstand distraction? Most everything linked here is almost invariably about structural alterations which are surely significant, but not tied to any specific effect.
You may not be a dualist, but you sound like a negativist. It's nobody's job here to convince you of the benefits of meditation beyond the reams of research out there that for some reason you question.
Regardless, the structural changes to the brain are one of the effects, not the cause. The cause is of those structural changes is mental.
The goal here is changes that are highly subjective and personal. If meditation helps people, that is its goal, so to complain there is no evidence is nonsensical.
I guarantee you if you learn to meditate and master a form successfully, you will not be in HN forums demanding evidence.
Transcendental Meditation, as cultish as it is, is one of the most researched forms of meditation and there is a massive amount of research on its benefits. Go have a ball with that.
> You may not be a dualist, but you sound like a negativist. It's nobody's job here to convince you of the benefits of meditation beyond the reams of research out there that for some reason you question.
"Negativist." Ha.
Likewise, no one gets a free pass on claiming scientific backing on National Skeptics Day without at least something to back it up. You can believe whatever you like! I'm just pointing out that the article does little to source its claims while making a lot of prescriptive suggestions.
> The goal here is changes that are highly subjective and personal. If meditation helps people, that is its goal, so to complain there is no evidence is nonsensical.
> I guarantee you if you learn to meditate and master a form successfully, you will not be in HN forums demanding evidence.
Yes I suppose I might be more prone to selection bias and personal investment if I sink years of my life into something. I'm pretty touchy about coffee that way, I suppose.
When you say stuff like, "You have to try it to understand," it's a huge red flag that suggests you're about to try and sucker someone.
Meditations influence is covered in depth in The Willpower Instinct, but here's a short summary.
""Meditation requires you to tap all the self-regulation systems in your brain as well as the self-monitoring mechanism," says Kelly McGonigal, PhD, a health psychologist at Stanford University and author of the forthcoming The Willpower Instinct. Every time you meditate, you use two important parts of your brain: the prefrontal cortex, which helps you make smart choices, and the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps you be aware of when you make such choices and when you don't. The more you activate these systems, the more powerful they become, so in the future it will feel easier to do the right thing. "Eventually you will start to notice whenever you are doing something that is inconsistent with your goals," McGonigal says."
But these studies are on noticing structural changes, not changes in the subject's capability.
What makes meditation better at this than, say, sitting down and doing math homework or going out and doing exercise? There's a lot of research to strongly correlate regular physical activity with intelligence (random googled summary with many citations here: http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/brainandex.htm...).
Right, I'm pretty sold on meditation having benefits, but this "practice resisting" mechanism seems like a flippant guess. Then there's the "willpower is a finite resource" studies argue that the opposite effect is more likely for people merely restraining themselves.
Article is not wrong about this. It is hard to measure what meditation is doing on a subjective level, which is very specific and easy to talk about amongst people who have spent even an hour meditating.
The key here, which for you might be a leap of faith, is that when one tries to simply focus on their breath (or the dishes), completely without our permission thoughts continue to pop into our head. The 'natural' thing to do is follow these thoughts; and there is a will of resistance to go back to your breath again and again. It is hard to do, and get easier with practice.
Anyone who has spent say, >3 hours of their life meditating will recognize it as a fact that meditation strengthens your will.
> Anyone who has spent say, >3 hours of their life meditating will recognize it as a fact that meditation strengthens your will.
Do you realize how unsupportable this line of thought is? Do I even need to go into this?
How do you know meditation does not actually make this worse? If "willpower" is finite and predicated on physical endurance (as studies suggest), then perhaps sitting here trying to hold your mind "empty" is actually making you less capable of carrying on with the rest of your day!
Why wouldn't 8 hours of sleep, famously known for its ability to inspire ideas, be even more effective?
There's definitely evidence that meditation alters your brain in positive ways [1]. The phrase "impulse control" isn't used in the list of benefits, but they list improvements in traits I'd associate with impulse control, e.g. increased self-awareness and reduced anxiety.
I don't think anyone is arguing that physically exercising wouldn't provide some of the same mental benefits of meditation. I for one think that it would. (Especially the act of forcing oneself to go to the gym, rather than just having fun playing basketball with friends--even if the exercise content is the same).
But in your original post you are doubting that meditation has these benefits at all. I think that is what most people are arguing against.
> But in your original post you are doubting that meditation has these benefits at all.
I am arguing there is no basis for the claims of specific benefits. I never disputed that meditation clearly does something. It's just not clear that something is at all meaningful, or lines up with the article's motivations.
I think you are taking an extreme position on this issue. Meditation may not have everything to do with this but it does play a significant part. In my experience, meditation helps you analyze, hold and channel your thought process better. If your thought process is better, you have better control over your impulses.
You didn't ask for evidence in any of this posts' ancestery. If all you had said was "A scientific study regarding the connection between meditation and the ability to resist urges would be interesting and helpful to the authors assertions" you would have gotten a wholly different response.
Meditation is resisting your urges. So it's practice for resisting your urges, which makes you better at resisting your urges when it actually matters (like while working). Why not just practice resisting your urges while working and avoid the extra time required for dedicated meditation?
Exactly. There are so many things where a large number of people have claimed that "if you try it, then it will work", while later research found it to be nothing but the placebo effect. This includes acupuncture, chiropractic, etc.
> Research shows that an ability to resist urges will improve your relationships, increase your dependability, and raise your performance...
Great. Yes. Impulse control is key. Delayed gratification is part of how we define higher intelligence.
Meditation has what do with this, exactly?
> How [does meditation help]? By increasing your capacity to resist distracting urges.
This entire article is predicated by this leap of faith, which as far as I can see has little to no justification besides, "Of course it does!"
> Meditation teaches us to resist the urge of that counterproductive follow through.
One cannot just say things over and over to make them true.