Science of Meditation part I

The More You Know The More You Realise You Don’t Know -Aristotle

It has always intrigued me how ancient humans knew so much about the mind, body, and health in absence of modern technology we see today.

While on one hand, ancient knowledge is valued when they support or supplement scientific evidence, if they challenge scientific truths then they are questioned and dismissed as myths.

Science is promoted as objective, quantifiable, and the foundation of genuine knowledge whereas ancient knowledge is largely seen as anecdotal, imprecise, and unfamiliar in form.

Being trained in the rigour of evidence-based research and critical thinking myself, I can see why one would resist to keep an open mind. However, we have no insight into the minds of our ancient humans to dismiss their understanding. What if there are multiple points of entry into the knowledge of the world? While we sought to enter it with science today, the ancients had developed their own methods and technologies. Some of what we are discovering today is a rediscovery of what had been known to a more prehistoric civilization. Like in the case of meditation, modern science is just catching up with ancient knowledge.

The earliest written records on meditation belong to Hindu traditions, in India, of Vendatism from around 1500 BCE. Vendatism represent a school of philosophy and is one of the earliest known Indian paths for spiritual enlightenment.Other forms of meditation are then cited around the 6th and 5th centuries BCE within Taoist China and Buddhist India. Today, the life-long work of the world’s most eminent psychological scientists Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman demystify meditation in their book The Science of meditation.

This book cites numerous studies some of which were conducted by the authors themselves in understanding meditation from a scientific point of view. The book at the beginning reflects on the journey of Richard and Daniel since the 1970s when they met at Harvard Graduate school. They take us through the days where they had to convince their academic mentors of their interest in meditation research (seen as a career-ending move) to learning the varied meditation practices travelling through India in the company of Tibetan meditation masters and yogis. As quoted from their book,

Despite our academic mentors’ seeing our meditation research like a blind alley, we conceived a big idea: beyond the pleasant states meditation can produce, the real payoffs are the lasting traits that can result. For much of this time, we had to pursue a scientific hunch with few supporting data. But we were comforted by the dictum that “an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” The roots of our conviction lay in our own experiences in meditation.

They distill the latest scientific research on meditation and clearly explain what the evidence shows that it can, or cannot, do for us. The authors only take into account the most rigorous evidence, with the most robust methodology.

They do an exhaustive literature review of 6000 or more studies of which only 47 made the cut given the standard of scientific rigour considered by them. They rely on the studies that capture data based on hard measures like brain activity with the likes of fMRI, SPECT, and fine-grained computerized analysis of EEG compared to those highly subjective, more easily biased self-reported measures of how one feels during and after the meditations.

They examine each of the studies on the problems, including their own with the methods used; to sort out fluff from the fact. They document how meditation can help to develop positive attributes and the more we practice meditation, the more profound and lasting the benefits will be, resulting in changes in our very nature. They also show how different types of meditations produce diverse effects.

Importantly the book brings to the forefront, the fact that an intensely private, inner experience is being measured by machines that can yield objective measures of biological reality but nothing about the inner one, as the measurements are at best a third person report.

The findings are also more to do with the measures available to assess the array of human experience. Hence, one cannot limit the quality of being happy to be reduced to what we are able to measure. We don’t need scientific measures to prove that we are happy :) hope Richard Dawkins will approve! Furthermore, they caution about meditation not being an answer to all problems.

Like when the Dalai Lama was asked if meditation helps medical conditions, he said “If meditation was good for all health problems, I’d be free of pain in my knees.”

This work is an exemplary example of Science and ancient wisdom talking the same language even if they arrived through different entry points. I have described the findings on the meditation benefits presented in the book in part 2 of this article read on if interested