Based on most of the people I know who meditate, they don't seem to be any different from a random sample. Are there studies that show that meditate is good for X? Perhaps the causation is actually that people with X tend to be good at meditating? Just wondering...
I know several people who have taken up meditation and they each have changed significantly through their experiences. Perhaps it's more useful to compare someone who meditates to their former selves rather than some nebulous concept of an "average" person.
Yea, it's quite true about that seeing improvement longitudinally would be better than the "average person". The study cited in the below BBC article studied people (Buddhist monks) that don't pass the self-selection filter though.
This study shows brief mediation gives improvement, however I'm not sure how they controlled for those who didn't complete the experiment. Could those people be self-selecting out of it due to difficulties - ADD perhaps?
Overall - I'm love to try a simple form of meditation to see if it'd work for my ADD self.
I'm ADD, and I found it to be helpful during a period when I was sitting regularly.
I prefer just vipassana, watching the breath and watching thoughts as they arise and fade. No chanting or 'OMMM'.
An interesting book is "Zen and the Brain" by an emeritus professor of neurology, published by MIT Press. The author started doing zen while in Japan in the late 60s. Over about 1000 pages, he tries to come up with testable hypotheses explaining the phenomena and results of long-term meditation practice.
It's very detailed and dense. There are a few chapters that describe his subjective experiences, but the rest is pretty scientific. There are few illustrations, it's a massive block of text.
