If nothing else, I could see meditation helping with history work in that it sort of forces you to be more honest with yourself. I say 'sort of,' because that w

If nothing else, I could see meditation helping with history work in that it sort of forces you to be more honest with yourself. I say 'sort of,' because that way of writing it may give the wrong impression. It's like, you can see your alternate motivations at play more readily and decide against following up, whereas ordinarily we trick ourselves into thinking we have only pure motivations. To give an example, consider how this might affect authors of literature. Hemingway among others has made a big deal about writing that is 'truly honest'. Part of the difficulty there is that when you're writing, you have competing motivations in constructing all aspects from high level plot and characters to individual sentences. Some of those motivations have to do with vanity, career goals, laziness, etc. (e.g. writing in a style that establishes your intelligence, rather than because it serves communication). After enough time practicing meditation of a certain style (excellent description in the article), you start seeing the presence of these other factors as you work on things and can more easily choose to let them go.