On Dec 22, 2007, at 2:34 PM, ruthsimplicity wrote:
People are prone to justification. For example, if a person is charged $5000 to learn meditation, with so much skin in the game the practitioner may justify that cost by developing a belief in good effects.
Wonderful example. You'll find that a lot of that here, believe me! BTW, welcome to our fine list. :-)
Now, if you took the example from the video you might get somewhere. You simply ask randomly selected people to think about their breathing for so many minutes a day and do that for 5 years. Nothing more. Five years later you ask about their experiences and acquire data. (If they didn't all drop out). You may find that many people had the same experiences. If so, that may be interesting and lead to further inquiry. There is still a chance your study is poisoned by outside influences for example, people might poke around on the internet to figure out why they might be focusing on their breathing. And it would be interesting to learn about the dropouts.
Yeah that's one of the main problems with double-blinding in meditation research is that the degree of casual knowledge of meditation, esp. in people volunteering for such a study, is such that it's next to impossible to give one the authentic technique and another the placebo. With easy internet access so pervasive, it would be nigh on impossible.
Nonetheless some recent research on meditation is finding ways to randomize and control more authentically. The preliminary findings of the most detailed meditation research project in history, the Shamatha Project were just recently announced. In a little while I'm sure we'll see it trickle out onto the web.
