Most of you know that I am generally skeptical of first order functional explanations of religion (I am more open to second order explanations which posit religion as one of the manifold social glues which bind together communities and facilitate sociality). That being said, I did find this interesting, from PLOS Biology, Mental Training Affects Distribution of Limited Brain Resources:
...We found that three months of intensive meditation reduced brain-resource allocation to the first target, enabling practitioners to more often detect the second target with no compromise in their ability to detect the first target. These findings demonstrate that meditative training can improve performance on a novel task that requires the trained attentional abilities.
Specifically we're talking Vipassana (Buddhist) meditation. Of course, some of you will say that this is philosophy (or psychology), not religion, and that's a fair enough response in this case. That being said, I do find it interesting that novel and useful mental techniques like this have been absorbed and perpetuated within the matrix of a religious social structure.
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Why do you find it interesting that meditation was "absorbed and perpetuated" within a religious framework? Before the last several centuries everything was perpetuated by religion. As science increases understanding of the universe, various disciplines have been moving steadily away from religion and into the secular world. Astrology yielded astronomy, alchemy yielded chemistry, herbal shamanism yielded to medicine, and antiquated psychology yielded modern psychology and neurology. Meditation and Qi are now being reformulated as "brain-resource allocation". No big surprise, just glad its being answered in a scientific manner.
Do you title it "Religion makes a sharp mind!" in order to get more page hits? I can't think of any other reason that you would not say the much more direct "Meditation makes a sharp mind!", especially since the paper you reference is titled 'Mental training ...' and not 'Religion ...'.
If there was a study that showed fasting has similar effects, would you also say, "Religion makes a sharp mind!" again and not fasting?
Mediation is independent of religion and is practiced by millions of people who have nothing to do with religion.
Do you title it "Religion makes a sharp mind!" in order to get more page hits?
no shit.
Okay. I guess I'll stop reading your blog if you think it's okay to misrepresent in order to get page hits.
If I wanted that kind of blatant dishonesty and misrepresentation, I'd be reading the discovery institute instead.
Okay. I guess I'll stop reading your blog if you think it's okay to misrepresent in order to get page hits.
LOL. great. you need to take a fucking chill pill dude.
LOL. I take it you think that everybody misrepresents headlines in order to get page hits?
You're wrong. Most other scibloggers have a lot more integrity.
You sound like the one that needs to chill.
seriously, i'm happy to lose you as a reader. peace.
I'll miss your quality 14-yr old AOLer responses like "no shit" and "lol great, chill the fuck out", but adios...
only online could you see an exchange like that. frickin' hilarious.
I would have called it science, but whatever.
Nice find, Razib. A few years ago a lot of people were investigating the measurable effects of meditation, but I hadn't seen anything for a while. Wading through all the warm fuzzy touchy feely junk to find the occasional objective discussion of it gets really tiresome.
I started it about 4-5 years ago with no preconceptions just for the hell of it, to see what would happen, and was astonished by the results after about 3 months of fairly diligent practice. But when I tried to discuss the M word with other people, they all recoiled as if I was raising some really taboo, distasteful subject. For reasons I don't fully understand, most people don't seem to want to talk about it or even think about it. Maybe it's the usual way it is presented.
As usual, the rough and tumble of life intrudes and I don't practise, but this post is a timely reminder to get back to it.
I did like your phrasing "absorbed and perpetuated within the matrix of a religious social structure" because one of the great open questions about religion vs science is the degree to which one can remove "technologies" like this from their social structure and still have them work or expect the same effects.
This seems to me a more general problem with social science and psychology: in the "hard" sciences it appears much easier to practice reductionism and to make experiments which really do break complex things down to their fundamentals.
People using the 'technology' within the matrix of a religion may perceive, interpret or describe the effects differently from those who are not, or may use it for different purposes, so trying to arrive at an agreed set of 'same effects' is always going to be difficult.
What I find reassuring is that it can be separated from the matrix, explained, learned and practised outside of the matrix, and at least some of the effects are real, good and can be measured.
"if you are theistically inclined, you will likely perceive these states of tranquility, particularly the deeper ones, as special graces conferred by God" - Shinzen Young.
If not, you will likely perceive them to be a consequence of deliberately altering your own brain activity through the practise of a particular discipline.
Either way, you can do the drill and get some of the good stuff. Or you can spend the time thinking about having sex with Miss Kazakhstan.
Religions are unlikely to be wrong about everything. Throw enough darts, and it's not surprising if you eventually get a bullseye.
Intriguing, but the effect sizes are pretty weak here. Check out figure 1 to see the task description and then figure 2.
Figure 2 is a really bad figure, but if you look at it for a bit:
The 23 non-meditators are represented on the left and the 17 meditators on the right. Performance during the first session (confusingly called "time 1") is represented by the black bar and improvement during the second session (aka "time 2") is represented by the red bar (not all people improved, which is confusingly indicated by a blue bar *below* the axis. Would have been much better to use a line graph here w/ one line for each session & dots for individual performance levels.
Anyway, the longer the red bars are in the upper right corner relative to the upper left corner, the more support for the hypothesis of the paper. There seems to be an effect, but it's not enormous by any means. The biggest single improvement is not from a practicioner but from a novice, for ex.
More worryingly, the distribution of practicioner scores has a lower *mean* than the distribution of novice scores at session 1 (as you can see from averaging the heights of the black bars in the upper left and right panels). Hence the improvements may only have been b/c the practicioners had more room to improve.
Bear in mind it takes some people longer than 3 months to 'get' meditation, and some never do. It's not exactly a quick fix for anything, and the effects are reported to be very variable - to what extent that is subjective experience described within a framework of belief I can't really tell, but subject descriptions like oneness with the Universe or marriage to God are probably a bit of a clue. I'm pleasantly surprised that they identified an effect they could measure, I think it's a creditable effort by the researchers.