> 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."
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.