Hacker News Reader

Comment by goldfeld | Hacker News Reader

So is that a name doctors, after much painstaking research, slapped on top of what has been known for millenia as meditation? Because that's exactly describing something like vipassana, or mindfulness meditation. Sometimes it's funny to watch the west's child-prodigy "scientific method" take so long to come around full circle at age-old wisdom, in this case something that's probably been known from before Civilization.

View on HN

Fortunately, there is more to this than meets the eye. It is unlikely that a patient will come to a halt during a panic attack, say "Wait. I just need to breathe, slowly."

If you haven't experienced a panic attack, it could be difficult understand why some people are unable to act rationally and control their anxiety. However, this is one of the symptoms. Immense fear is disabling. Depending on the severity, one may just need to remove themselves from the situation, fast. I have left meetings, presentations, and other importance face-to-face appointments, because of anxiety. Sometimes, it's just not worth the internal torture.

CBT is not syntactic sugar for meditation. Well trained therapists work carefully to control the stimulus, testing slight attitude changes vs. physical response. Think optimization in the presence of singularities. The average meditation coach is not required to steer a client away from paths to delusion, expose akrasia, or recognize more serious mental illnesses. Insufficient treatment frequently results in depression, mania, schizophrenia, and suicide. These are important problems, and presently, state of the art is well beyond a 'reinventing of the wheel', despite the simplified view of that Wikipedia article.

Yes, but no one talks about the 99 other snake-oil, age-old wisdoms that the scientific method debunked :)

Well, some people still do. Examples include homeopathy, intercessory prayer, and those guys who make YouTube videos of themselves chanting at you to cure diseases somehow.

(Caveat: I assume those chanting videos are part of an age-old tradition, because the people in them say so, but they may not be the most reliable source of information.)

Haha, to a certain degree you're right. There is more to it that is different from meditation. But I've been a semi-regular practitioner of meditation for a couple of years now. In fact, the big attack I had earlier this year was while I was at a meditation class!

Had I followed what is taught in meditation I'm sure I would have eventually had the same result. But as a very technical, science-oriented person its nice to know that there is research behind what our ancestors realized a few thousand years ago.

From wikipedia:

  > A basic concept in some CBT treatments... a technique 
  > where the patient is gradually exposed to the actual, 
  > feared stimulus.

This is not merely "describing something like meditation." The subject may be taught meditation techniques to help them learn to stay relaxed when exposed to the anxiety-causing stimulus, however, the therapy is not meditation alone.

For example, the military has been experimenting with using virtual reality to "expose" soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to a combat-like experience, since it's too dangerous to expose them to actual combat during therapy: http://www.nami.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Top_Story/Using_V...

No need to be so contemptuous of science. Science is a tool that can reveal truths which neither mysticism nor the Socratic method can approach. Similarly, there are many truths which are intractable to science for various reasons. Only the foolish put all their eggs in one basket of knowledge.

Science is the new excuse for close-mindedness in the modern world. "I don't believe it before I see it" has been replaced by "I don't believe it before I see peer reviewed research papers about it, which I can easily digest through a news outlet". Who needs curiosity or open-mindedness when you can just wait for others to do the heavy lifting for you.

DISCLAIMER; OF COURSE the scientific method is great. But if you swear by not believing anything that hasn't been peer reviewed, you might come late to the party. In this case, a millennia or two late to the practice of meditation because there wasn't enough research on it, and because it was "too mystical", shivers. Who would have thought that sitting and quieting the mind could be so scary?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com