One more thing that to me makes a majority of meditation research almost useless (actually, as someone who went into a doctoral program thinking I would become a researcher, and then rapidly was disenchanted) it makes much of psychological research deeply programmatic.

When we examine some activity that requires self report, we face the challenge that the vast majority of people have little if any training in reporting subtleties of inner experience.

To me, the #1 very deep problem with meditation research (and it’s amazing to me the defensive mechanisms employed by meditation researchers with whom I’ve spoken about this - a problem, by the way, I think Loch’s research brilliantly avoids) is that there’s no wya to know, when you have a group of subjects “meditating,” if they are actually meditating!

Most likely, the way most meditation is taught, they’re engaged with an ongoing struggle with control of their minds. Given this likelihood, it’s rather amazing anyone EVER finds positive effects of so-called “meditation” since it is quite possible that very few people are actually meditating when they’re being studied!!