Category: critical mindfulness

How Psychology Misunderstood Mindfulness and What We Do Now

Part 2: Evolution, not Revolution

This is part 2; part 1 can be found here.

Part 1 describes the processes through which mindfulness has been converted from a religious to a scientifically validated practice. On this page, I outline the implications of treating religious and scientific knowledge as congruent. This ‘congruence’ is an ‘imaginary’, an illusion created where scientific communities abandon rational thinking in favour of other motivations. Once the imagined form of mindfulness is created, it can be absorbed into psychology. The evidence suggests that the psychological sciences may need to reevaluate their underlying theoretical frameworks and reconsider how non-scientific knowledge is treated, particularly concepts and techniques originating in religious traditions.

If science and religion, in general, have incompatible theoretical frameworks, how was Buddhist mindfulness ‘transformed’ into a Western medicalised practice? The reality is that a few scientists and clinicians simply claimed that religious meditation and psychology were complementary. They provided no evidence or scientific explanation to support this position. They also appeared to lack the knowledge and experience necessary to make reliable generalisations about religious thought and practice. By focusing on meditation methods, not the underlying cognitive processes, psychologists could not evaluate the innate value of the traditional approaches for health benefits. In this way, psychology appropriated and relocated meditation techniques they never understood.

Western psychologists avoided meaningful, rational investigation of traditional meditation, preferring to ‘imagine ‘ what the techniques were from Western dualistic perspectives.

Why is this important? Science can measure the physiological effects of meditation, such as how it affects heart rate and blood pressure. However, because of the uncertainty regarding the boundaries between belief and science, early meditation and mindfulness experiments rarely progressed beyond a preliminary stage. Further, some psychologists overreached themselves by claiming they understood the essence of Buddhist meditation. These errors were compounded because the wider scientific community accepted unevidenced claims about the congruence between belief and science. These problems mean that much of the £5bn invested in researching meditation and mindfulness added little meaningful scientific value. Secondly, the actual curative potential of traditional meditation has been ignored. Primarily because researchers focused on meditation methods rather than the underlying mental processes engaged with by traditional meditators.

Before 2000, many scientists believed that they ‘instinctively’ understood traditional meditation without needing any meaningful training or research. Perhaps being part of elite academic institutions allowed them to feel they had the right or ability to subordinate religious thought and practice to dualistic scientific understanding. In relocating mindfulness, they stripped it of its most important cognitive components. Still today, many Western forms of meditation lack mental processes such as compassion, intention, and other concepts central to traditional meditations. Even where scientists attempted to ‘evolve’ mindfulness into a more compassionate or focused practice, the meditation nearly always remained dualistic and, therefore, distant from its original form.

Compassion for oneself and others is central to most Buddhist practices.

The fate of Western mindfulness, to have become a stripped-down dualistic version of a traditional practice, is not unusual. We have seen such approaches in relocating acupuncture, yoga and other traditional healing technologies. A subtle but observable pattern is documented in the History of Science of scientists reconfiguring nondual knowledge to sit within dualistic frameworks. As with mindfulness, this approach can lead to the original technique being misunderstood, mistranslated or distorted.

The problems evidenced in the ‘mindfulness revolution’ have complex causes, not least of which are decades of low-quality and often unreplicated research. However, the failure of scientists to recognise the presence of nondual thought and practice is also a significant concern. As a case study, mindfulness reveals a profound limitation in the psychological sciences and our understanding of the human mind. We experience life through a number of different mental states, including dual and nondual awareness. Science tends to privilege duality, which is adequate for most scientific disciplines but fails to fully explain human consciousness and experience. Duality became the default theoretical model for descriptions of human mental states, the ‘lingua franca’ of the psychological sciences. As such, non-dual concepts and practices are abstract to most psychologists and often considered superstitious or childlike. This worldview relies on evaluating nondual phenomena with dualistic instruments.

The presumption that dualistic approaches deliver ‘truth’ while nondual insights are irrelevant or inferior is possibly a continuation of the colonial mindset. Western ways of knowing are frequently assumed to be the ‘gold standard’ against which non-scientific thought and practice can be measured. There is little evidence that scientists thought Buddhist meditation methods were worth studying in their own right. Analysis indicates that the psychological sciences reduced Buddhist meditation to the terms they understood and could measure. In this way, the opportunity for scientists to identify different forms of consciousness, mental processes and health treatments in meditation was lost.

I’m sure many meditation scientists acted in good faith, but their inability to realise they were encountering different rather than inferior knowledge systems has been a costly mistake. This limitation was only possible because of a phenomenon called incommensurability. Incommensurability is the belief that one’s perspective of the world is an objective reality. The scientists first encountering Buddhist meditation may have been entirely unaware of nonduality. Presuming that their dualistic outsider view of Eastern religious practices was complete and informed. This is not simply an issue rooted in cultural misunderstandings; incommensurability likely limits encounters between science and Western spiritual practices. For example, the value of early esoteric Christian teachings was judged against the dualistic values of science and evaluated accordingly. Today, dualistic science is held to be the dominant knowledge system, and many alternative ways of understanding and experiencing the world have been subordinated without any systematic study or rational evaluation. There are almost no signs that the scientific community are aware of the potential value of non-scientific knowledge being lost.

This is part two of a six-part series. The Introduction is here.

Why the ‘Mindfulness Revolution’ Failed: Understanding the Boundaries Between Science and Religion

Part 1: Going Back to Basics: Dual and Nondual

Perhaps as much as $5 bn has been spent by scientists investigating the benefits of meditation and mindfulness over the last 50 years. Over 30,000 scholarly studies, primarily scientific, have been published in the peer-reviewed literature. In 2010, mindfulness enthusiasts and entrepreneurs announced the arrival of a new age of understanding through the ‘mindfulness revolution’. However, credible reviews of meditation research demonstrate that Western scientific understanding of mindfulness practices is, at best, preliminary. Further, almost no progress has been made in understanding what traditional Buddhist forms of meditation are, let alone how they work on the psychological level.

Scientists and clinicians initially appropriated religious meditation methods because of evidence that, in their original forms, they could provide profound health benefits. In the 1950s, long before the ‘Mindfulness Revolution’, psychologists were using Buddhist meditation to treat intractable mental health conditions. Since the early 1980s, Western scientists and clinicians developed hundreds of new versions of mindfulness. The best of these diverse forms can provide a degree of relaxation, often equivalent to or slightly more significant than a placebo effect. Unfortunately, the hope that mindfulness could be a powerful technique to treat and cure problematic mental health has evaporated.

Scientists gambling on a mindfulness miracle
Has the £5 bn mindfulness gamble paid off?

Today, the scientific understanding of mindfulness is fragmented, with growing scepticism about its benefits from many sections of society. Mindfulness is most frequently seen as a ‘welbeing’ intervention and is often taught by trained volunteers rather than psychologists or therapists. However, hyped claims of mindfulness’s benefits, supported by big business, politicians, and social policy, have ensured mindfulness’s popularity and longevity. Mindfulness has even been earmarked as a tool to keep people working and consuming when their material conditions are being eroded, a dramatic departure from the original purpose of Buddhist meditation.

The scientific history of mindfulness raises many problems. The most crucial issue is to consider how scientific engagement with religious meditation led to less rather than more understanding of the practices. By researching this question, we have started to gain much more insight into the fundamental nature of Buddhist thought and practice and the problems that arise when the boundaries between religion and science are altered.

No one factor can explain why thousands of scientists, spending a vast fortune in research funding, have made so little progress. Many studies have been critical of the scientific investigation of meditation. However, they often see the solution to the ‘mindfulness crisis’ as producing more, better-quality experiments. Fortunately, several academics have begun to question the nature of the relationship between science and religion, especially Buddhism.

In essence, the scientific method is part of a dualistic knowledge system based on certain principles, such as empiricism (all ‘true’ knowledge comes from sensory experience and empirical evidence) and reductionism (complex behaviours can be understood by isolating and understanding individual elements of the behaviours). Buddhism is divided into very different knowledge systems, most of which are explicitly and implicitly nondual. For example, Mahayana Buddhism is set in a theoretical framework where emptiness (all things are empty of intrinsic nature or existence) is held to be the underlying nature of reality. So, in any meaningful way, experimental psychology cannot understand Buddhism because they do not share the same frames of reference (ontology and epistemology). Psychology can see the effect of meditation but is unable to understand what it is.

Just to be clear, psychological science can measure the psychological and physiological effects of meditation. But it cannot currently understand what spiritual meditators do, the underlying cognitive processes, or what their spiritual goals are. Similarly a spiritual practice is unable to calculate the speed of light or the atomic weight of an element. By definition, different knowledge systems are incompatible because they address different human needs in different ways.

Dr Stephen Gene Morris

The second part of this article can be found here.

What does the replication crisis mean for the science of meditation and mindfulness?

The scientific study of meditation has been limited by a replication crisis and a mindfulness crisis. What does this mean and what is the way forward for contemplative science?

Replication, an important element of the scientific method

For at least the last 20 years psychological science has been facing a replication crisis.1 For those who don’t know, the replication crisis reflects a deep-seated problem in how psychology carries out scientific investigations. In essence, it means that many psychological studies from the past may not be as reliable as we thought they were. This uncertainty has implications for the way psychology is conducted, and it may accelerate the declining public confidence in science more generally.

The replication crisis is visible in social sciences and medicine, but not all disciplines have been affected to the same extent. Although social psychology is regarded as having the most significant replication problem, the phenomenon is present in other areas such as the science of meditation. For an experimental study to be scientifically reliable, it generally has to be repeated, repeated by other scientists in alternative locations. If the results are the same, or at least very similar on each of these occasions, the scientific findings are much more likely to be reliable. However, if scientific claims cannot be replicated, it raises questions about how they were initially established, and the extent to which they can be generalised across populations. So if one scientific study found that regular meditation reduced the effects of hay fever, we’d expect to see the same results in other studies carried out in the same way. If not it could mean that there was an unusual characteristic in the first study or some problem in the method. It is for these reasons meditation scientists, teachers and practitioners are reevaluating what they know about the health benefits of meditation.

A failure to replicate doesn’t necessarily prove that scientific findings in the original study were not reliable, but it raises questions over the extent to which the claims are robust. So any isolated evidence for the health and wellbeing benefits of meditation has to be seen as a pilot study, preliminary in nature. In most cases, without replication, we cannot assume that findings from any individual study could apply to the general population.

For those of us working with meditation, the replication crisis is compounded because we are also facing a ‘mindfulness crisis’. The mindfulness crisis describes systemic problems in meditation research that go back 50 years. At least half a dozen studies published since 2015 have identified and described the meditation and mindfulness research crisis. Its main characteristics are conflicting theoretical understandings of meditation and methodological limitations which include low levels of replication. Although many, perhaps most scientific studies of meditation have been impacted by problems linked to the replication and mindfulness crises. The scientific enthusiasm for meditation technologies since the 1970s has been so great that one-off unreplicated claims for the benefits of meditation have not always been critically evaluated by the scientific community. As Van Dam and colleagues have demonstrated, this has led to the ‘hyping’ of preliminary evidence as robust scientific findings.2

Measures are being taken to address the replication crisis within psychology more generally. These initiatives have had a limited effect so far, and their impact will have to be evaluated over the longer term. To overcome the problems being experienced in Contemplative Science, there are three issues that need to be considered by the scientific and practice communities. Firstly the development of a system where unreplicated, preliminary findings are not treated in the same way as robust, replicated work. Secondly, address the pressing need to understand and resolve the known theoretical and methodological limitations. And finally, to review the procession of the scientific understanding of meditation since the 1930s to make sense of the current crisis and diagnose its underlying causes.

Notes

1 Maxwell, S. E., Lau, M. Y., & Howard, G. S. (2015). Is psychology suffering from a replication crisis? What does “failure to replicate” really mean?. American Psychologist, 70(6), 487.

2 Van Dam, N. T., van Vugt, M. K., Vago, D. R., Schmalzl, L., Saron, C. D., Olendzki, A., … & Meyer, D. E. (2018). Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation. Perspectives on psychological science, 13(1), 36-61.

Some critical thoughts on mindfulness?

The scientific study of meditation has produced 7,000 peer reviewed studies, but our understanding is still described as preliminary. Has the time come for a more critical approach to mindfulness?

Reliable measurement is a central tenet of experimental psychology, but deciding what to measure is a much more complex question.
Accurate measurement is crucial to science, but deciding what to measure is a challenging question in mindfulness research

So broad has the field of mindfulness become that we find conflicting, coexisting and complementary perspectives among practices. Traditional mindfulness methods include explicitly and implicitly nondual understandings that appear abstract (incommensurable) to positivist scientific enquiry. However, the exponential growth in the modern forms of mindfulness sits primarily within the positivist ontology of experimental psychology. Positivism creates understandings linked to established tenets. In particular, it (a) assumes psychological phenomena follow deterministic (causal) patterns, (b) that explanations for behaviour can be generalised beyond narrow experimental settings and (c) elaborate explanations are rejected in favour of parsimonious accounts. Also, (d) that reductive investigations can offer understandings of complex human behaviours and cognitive states and (e) experiments produce events which can be reliably measured. In many respects, the positivist approach has successfully contributed a great deal to our understandings of human behaviour. However, its ability to explain and evaluate traditional and medicalised mindfulness and meditation is facing challenges from within the scientific community1.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Wilhelm_Wundt.jpg
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt – Founder of experimental psychology

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was the architect of experimental psychology. Towards the end of the 19th century, Wundt became one of the first researchers to conceptualise and investigate psychology as a field of science rather than philosophy2. But Wundt was also very clear about the limitations of the experimental approach, that nuanced human behaviours were not accessible to methodologies rooted in positivism3. After all, we humans are replete with agency, we can take for or against an idea with little rational justification. Given the spectrum of human experience, Wundt’s position seems to hold some merit. How can experiments be created that fully explain and generalise highly individualised behaviour? Behaviour created and maintained within abstract inner worlds, which is supported by unique environmental conditions? Consider that meditation is the mediation of consciousness, of which psychology only has a rudimentary understanding. One of the issues that Wundt’s concerns highlight is ‘fitness for purpose’. That experimental psychology requires (among other things) the reliable measurement of at least two fixed points to meet the requirements of empiricism. Criticisms of the science of mindfulness include the contention that establishing ‘fixed points’ when dealing with universal human consciousness is problematic. That is not to say that individual studies cannot identify their own fixed points to generate data. But the extent to which different studies use the same, constructs, scales and understandings is highly variable.1

Reviews of the scientific literature have indicated that there are multiple understandings of the mental states and traits described as mindfulness. That congruence between contemporary and traditional forms of mindfulness have not been established at operational or theoretical levels. There are widespread methodological problems in how mindfulness is observed by and integrates with the scientific method. But the uncertainty surrounding mindfulness is not a new issue. The term mindfulness in the context of contemplative science was first translated into English in 1881. Since which time understandings have been continually proposed, developed, corrected and reconsidered4. Today, contemplative science appears no closer to a clear definition of precisely what mindfulness might be or how interventions can meditate it. The pressing questions asked by critical mindfulness are, how can positivism alone make sense of behaviour that defies an authoritative description at the theoretical and operational level? And how can psychology develop a more rigorous approach to testing the findings and claims produced by 7,000 published meditation studies over the last eight decades?

The traditional Buddhist account of mindfulness plays on aspects of remembering, recalling, reminding and presence of mind that can seem underplayed or even lost in the context of MBSR and MBCT.

Rupert Gethin 4

References

1 Van Dam, Nicholas T., Marieke K. van Vugt, David R. Vago, Laura Schmalzl, Clifford D. Saron, Andrew Olendzki, Ted Meissner et al. “Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 13, no. 1 (2018): 36-61.

2 Danziger, Kurt. “The positivist repudiation of Wundt.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 15, no. 3 (1979): 205-230.

3 Wundt, Wilhelm. “Über Ausfrageexperimente und über die Methoden zur Psychologie des Denkens.” Psychologische Studien 3 (1907): 301-360.

4 Gethin, Rupert. “On some definitions of mindfulness.” Contemporary Buddhism 12, no. 01 (2011): 263-279.

Notes

Image of Wundt – Weltrundschau zu Reclams Universum 1902 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Meditation, mindfulness, quantum physics and duality

Mindfulness meditation finds itself under sustained scientific criticism, could quantum physics explain why?

Meditation and quantum physics
How far can a reductive mechanistic scientific ontology measure organic processes?

Experimental psychology has been the main object of The Science of Meditation project. The scientific papers featured in this blog are recent, generally published after 2010. But yesterday evening I came across a study from 1975 that addresses many of the issues which are currently limiting the research and practice of contemporary meditation. Fritjof Capra’s paper, Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism describes the world views of Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism, comparing them with Western equivalents.1 In doing so, Capra highlights more than a dozen problems manifest in the contemporary (positivist) scientific understanding of Buddhist meditation. One of which I’m going to discuss here briefly; world views as either organic or mechanistic.

person walks towards temple

Having experienced the benefits of meditation first hand, I find the failure of psychology to demonstrate the potential of meditation both wasteful and confusing. As many as ten thousand meditation and mindfulness experiments have been conducted over the last forty years. Yet cognitive psychology describes research in this area as preliminary! Over time two questions have shaped my academic and scientific work; i) how does a spiritual practice become a secular (scientific) practice and ii) what is lost and gained in this transition? Put concisely, how well has the West understood traditional meditation systems?

Strategic reviews of research published since 2016 generally identify two limitations in the science of meditation. An absence of theoretical frameworks and widespread methodological flaws. The lack of a cohesive ontology (framework) is the greater of the two problems. Without a guiding rationale, the scientific method can become directionless, entangling the means with the ends. Capra’s paper sets out his interpretation of the characteristics of ‘Eastern’ spiritual understandings, thus offering signposts to how the West could shape meditation research.2 

high angle photo of robot

So what are these organic and mechanistic world views that could alter the trajectory of research? Capra’s paper is 45 years old; much has changed in physics, psychology and our understandings of meditation.3 But as a theoretical study, Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism deals with overarching concerns that are timeless. Capra argues that the view of ‘reality’ developed in the West rests on certain principles, such as those set out by the anatomist Democritus. It was the progression of this view that led to the creation of classical physics and established dualism as the ‘Western’ way of understanding almost everything.

Conversely Eastern understandings see nature as much more interconnected, that the categories and laws of nature are constructs, built by mental processes rather than absolute ‘truths’. Capra offers a deal of evidence from quantum physics to demonstrate how this proposition might work with the inanimate. But for the psychological sciences, the value of this insight is self-evident, humans rarely respond to complex phenomena in a universally predictable manner. And where experiments reveal ‘universality’ in complex human behaviours, there are generally several factors influencing the data, including society and the experimental method.

So what does this piece of ‘dated’ quantum physics mean for our contemporary understanding of meditation? The essence of this work highlights fundamental differences between ontologies (theories of being) between the societies where meditation was created and is now investigated. That the West follows a culturally relevant mechanistic presumption of causality, even when considering human nature.4  Not to suggest that Newtonian physics doesn’t ‘work’, rather that it is part of a much more sophisticated understanding of nature. Psychology’s failure to recognise that different ontologies exist in different cultures, even when appropriating their technologies has implications to the study of meditation and mindfulness.5

 

Notes:

1 Capra, F. (1976). Modern physics and eastern mysticism. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 8(1).

2 Capra also discusses Hinduism and Taoism in this paper. Although grouping ideas from different Buddhist schools or diverse religio-philosophical systems can lead to over-generalisations, each of the points made needs to considerer on its individual merit.

3 I’m unfamiliar with Capra’s later studies; his views may have changed radically since this paper was published. I’d be delighted to hear from you if you are familiar with his recent work, feel free to email me or post comments in the text box below.

4 Capra’s thinking embraces physics generally, the emphasis on human behaviour here is my focus rather than a reflection of the paper under discussion.

5 While the existing positivist ontologies present in cognitive psychology offer investigatory potential, there are two problems if traditional meditation is based on a Western world view.  Firstly without cognisance of the spiritual frameworks, the contemporary interpretation of the original practices may lack elements foundational to its understanding. Secondly, while positivist approaches will produce data, what is being measured, and how it is understood may be unrelated to the spiritual meditation.

Mindfulness study retracted: Problems with MBSR/MBCT paper

Earlier this year Plos One took the step of retracting a well known and widely cited mindfulness related study.

It's getting harder to make sense of mindfulness research
Is it getting harder to make sense of mindfulness research?

This particular study is a first for the Science of Meditation blog. Whilst we have featured a number of papers that have highlighted methodological problems in meditation and mindfulness research, this is the first time that we have drawn attention to a retraction of a peer-reviewed study.

The basis for the retraction is outlined in detail on the Plos One website, but we have paraphrased the three main points.

  • The handling Academic Editor shared an affiliation with three of the authors, although this didn’t emerge until post-publication.
  • Two of the authors hold or had held positions at an institute offering mindfulness related products and services in clinical contexts.
  • The paper has a number of errors including pooling of results which led to double counting and incorrect effect estimates in figures contained in the study.

There’s not a lot more we need to add to the identified issues, they speak for themselves. However, when considered as part of the ongoing crisis in mindfulness research they make troubling reading.

A general defence used in cognitive psychology when the findings of mindfulness studies are criticised is, the peer review system is self-regulating. That when studies are found to be below the expected standard, they are usually rejected during review. Or at the very least other experts working in the field have the opportunity to raise concerns in print. This retraction challenges this basic notion. Significant issues with both the methodology and the editorial process can endure, thus, have the ability to influence the scientific and popular understanding of mindfulness. According to Google Scholar, this Gotink et al. study has been cited over 400 times, the citing publications, in turn, used by thousands more papers. The details provided on the Plos One website indicate the study has received 50,000 views.

Rather than simply criticize this study or the journal, I would like to ask what this retraction show us about the way that meditation technologies are being treated by clinical and scientific institutions?

Authors: Gotink, R. A., Chu, P., Busschbach, J. J., Benson, H., Fricchione, G. L., & Hunink, M. M.

Year: 2015

Title: Standardised mindfulness-based interventions in healthcare: an overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses of RCTs

Summary: This is a research paper that (at the time of writing) had been retracted by PLOS ONE.

“In light of the methodological issue and concerns about the validity of the study’s results, the PLOS ONE Editors retract this article. We regret that these issues were not fully addressed prior to the article’s publication.”

An extensive explanation of the reasons behind the retraction are published on the Plos One website which can be reached by following the link below.

Link: https://journals.plos.org