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Speaking as a social scientist who has modest but growing experience with mediation, the methods used in the research in this review seemed strangely at odds with the realities of meditative practice.

The experiments in the review claim to have administered meditation interventions (let’s call them “meditation pills”) to randomly assigned research participants in a uniform way. Studying meditation by randomly assigning dosages of meditation pills ignores and fails to understand the experience of meditation as a voluntary, deeply personal, internal, challenging though worthwhile practice.  Meditation is not a pill.

The studies discussed in the review applied meditation pill interventions, over long periods of time.  For example, in one study (Rani and Rao, 2000), students in the experimental condition were assigned to practice Transcendental Meditation for 20 minutes twice a day for 18 months. Extending the pill analogy, did each student really take the prescribed 1080 meditation pills?  How did individuals experience, internalize, and adopt this new habit of mind?

In another pre-test post-test study, one of two experimental groups completed a month-long residential mindfulness mediation retreat with a 10-12 hour per day practice schedule (what!?).   Another experimental group participated in an 8 week MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) program consisting of one 3 hour class per week and a recommended 30 minutes per day of meditation practice (Jha et al 2006).  How many took the prescribed 56 meditation pills?  How many internalized the concepts and practices? In what way?

In a third study (So and Orme-Johnson, 1991), vocational training students in Taiwan  randomly assigned to the experimental condition experienced transcendental meditation training and then 15-20 minutes twice per day for 12 months. They took the equivalent of 720 transcendental meditation pills.  A control group took 15-20 minute naps twice per day for 12 months (720 sleeping pills). I can’t imagine my students agreeing to take naps twice a day for one week. What was compliance like? Did the nappers fall asleep twice a day, on schedule?

The studies included in Shapiro et al.’s review were “good science” in several ways. They used standardized psychological and physiological measurements as dependent variables. They painstakingly set up control and experimental conditions, often using randomization to assign participants to experimental and control conditions.

Note that assigning someone to meditate twice a day for 18 months may sound like good science, but it does not sound like good meditation. It is actually a very messy intervention. Despite the intention of experimental treatment uniformity, the “uniformity” of a treatment condition of that nature will in no way resemble that neat little gold standard pill.

All of the empirical studies reviewed assume that effects occur when meditation is practiced repeatedly over months, years, or more.  What is the mechanism for over time effects?  Who rejects and who adopts or internalizes regular meditative practice? Science needs to better understand what happens DURING mediation for an individual.

Shapiro, S., Brown, K.W. & Astin, J. (2011). Toward the integration of meditation into higher education: A review of research evidence. Teachers College Record 11:3:493-528.

So, K. & and Orme-Johnson, D. (2001). Three randomized experiments on the longitudinal effects of the transcendental meditation technique on cognition. Intelligence, 29, 419-440.