[Buddha-l] Volume 54 Issue 52

[Weng-Fai Wong]

I showed the stuff to a medical doctor/researcher and a Buddhist friend of
mine. Here is his response:

> fMRI is in widespread use, being the new toy of neurological sciences, 
> with a broad range of correlates with outcomes (i.e. male brain/female 
> brain, sleep deprivation etc ), but in these studies of meditators, I 
> wonder if confounding has been adequately accounted for i.e. expert 
> meditators are fundamentally different from novice meditators not just in 
> meditation practice, but in multiple other aspects of 
> character/personality etc which may account for the differences in brain 
> pathway activation. (i.e. the changes are due to expert meditators being 
> on average inherently more focused etc, rather than attributing the 
> differences to meditation). Multiple testing has also not apparently been 
> accounted for.
>
> So without a serial assessment (pre- and post-10,000 hours of meditation 
> practice), some of these so-called correlates may not be entirely 
> generalizable, but of course I am open to being corrected.

W.F. Wong