No doubt they are good studies in that these individuals are demonstrating changes in their eeg during or following their meditation practice.The problems is in interpreting what these changes mean i.e people who become "advanced meditators" may be different genetically or developmentally(from those who are not advanced) and it these factors which primarily explain the changes seen in their eeg.For example adolescents who have used marijuana are more likely to develop schizophrenia.Of course marijuana use does NOT BY ITSELF cause schizophrenia.It is just that apparently using marijuana or something related to using marijuana serves to increase the chances of developing schizophrenia in individuals who are otherwise already susceptible to developing schizophrenia.The best way to see whether meditation is the primary reason for significant changes in eeg readings is to conduct a longitudinal study with two randomly selected groups one of which meditates and one of does something else and use eeg as the dependent variable.Just as an aside I have always been impressed the wide range of differences there is in how individuals respond to meditation practice.Non meditation factors almost certainly are involved in how meditation affects people.
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradhatu@...> wrote: > > > On Feb 21, 2011, at 6:48 PM, shanti2218411 wrote: > > > what we don't know about how the brain relates to the mind is a domain many > > orders of magnitude larger than the domain of what we do know.As Restak has > > said"it will take a larger brain than ours to understand our > > brain",Research on studying the benefits of meditation would be more useful > > if it concentrated on the measurable changes in behavior /health that > > result from meditation practice.In any case I don't think I have ever seen > > well conducted studies of how having coherent brain waves affects anything > > other than self reported > > changes in subjective awareness(and I'm not sure how well done though > > studies were). > > > There are actually some great recent, replicated studies on EEG and samadhi > in advanced meditators that is quite good. >
