4 ms·

It makes me really wonder about the "hacker" community that such obvious bunk keeps showing up here. Hackers are skeptical.

• IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  What makes you say it is bunk? There is mounting scientific evidence in favor of meditation and its benefits.
• dsernst 12y ago
  Yeah would love to hear more about what you mean :-)
• jonstewart 12y ago
  To the best of my understanding, meditation is a mental activity. You sit still and... do what, exactly? Think of nothing? How does one think of nothing? Is meditation another word for daydreaming? How can we be sure that any two people are "meditating" in the same way, since it's an unobservable mental state? And are proponents of meditation simply saying that sitting still, being calm, and focusing one's attention (or _not_ focusing one's attention? which is it?) has benefits over running around like a chicken with its head cut off? Doesn't that fall into the "no shit, Sherlock" realm of common sense? Any "science" on meditation faces the same problems that "psychology" faced ~100 years ago, when practitioners simply described their mental states. It was only when psychology embraced empiricism and left self-descriptions of mental state behind that it was able to advance as a science.
  • dsernst 12y ago
    Ah, like you say, there are many different techniques. The type I'm describing in the OP is Vipassana[1], which is a systematic scan of physical sensations, part by part throughout the body. Not 'thinking of nothing', nor 'daydreaming'. Of course, some other people do use those sorts of techniques, so confusion abounds. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassanā https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassanā
    • jonstewart 12y ago
      Like an MRI scan?