The science of "woo"
- sciart0
- Mar 10
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "Between the 70s and 90s, there was a small group of people looking at how meditation changed behavior. There were a few studies which used EEG to measure brain waves, but most of the research was on attention. Dan Brown did a lot of early research on this theme. There’s also a well-known paper by Valentine and Sweet, which looked at sustained attention.
And then, in the late 90s, Sarah Lazar at Harvard and Richie Davidson in Wisconsin were some of the first people to put meditators — often monks — into brain scanners. Most of that work was cross-sectional.
Around the 2010s, people started doing more active fMRI research on meditators. A lot of this was enabled by the Mind & Life Institute, which provided funding and drew public awareness to be able to do research. Some well known researchers during this time, in addition to Sara Lazar, include Judson Brewer, Cathy Kerr, and Dave Vago. In 2016, for instance, Fadel Zaidan published a paper on meditation-based pain relief in the Journal of Neuroscience. When I wrote my own grant in 2011, I used the word “meditation” just once. Otherwise, I emphasized “attention training.” That was what you had to do back then in order to get funding.
But then, recently, there’s been a fork in the road. One way to get funding — the easier way — is doing mindfulness-based stress reduction research. MBSR is an amenable technique for researchers because it’s a concrete, 8-week intervention. You take your measurement, run the program, and take your measurement again. And you can apply that to whatever your area of interest is — say PTSD.
But there’s a smaller, weirder fork looking at the deep end of meditation practice. That research is trying to get at what meditation is changing in the brain or the mind. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to take the weird fork.
But there’s still this giant, unexplored middle. For example, when someone starts meditating, what changes happen in the first six weeks? Six months? Two years? Are these trajectories standard and predictable? How many are there?"