It will be up next Monday on http://www.vssystem.com My column is called Risk Vs. Reward. Thanks for being part of the invisible connections that make live so blissful.

And that is, I’m not saying meditation has no effect (since I teach meditation). I am saying, though, that the effects are non-linear. We don’t know what, specifically, will or won’t change, how much things will change, or, more importantly, what the long-term effects of any changes will actually be (in other words, we may want to meditate to “become more compassionate”… and that becoming more compassionate leads to effects we don’t actually want).

There are some studies of long-term meditators — specifically, old Tibetan monks from a particular lineage — showing that they have unusually high amounts of brain activity associated with compassionate feelings/thoughts. The inference is that the 100,000 hours of meditation caused the effect in both the brain and feeling-tone.

There are some problems with this conclusion, though.

First, if you ever meet a bunch of monks, you discover that over time more and more of them leave the monastery and/or stop meditating. Just like how in elementary school, everyone took math, but by college there were fewer math majors, and in graduate school even fewer mathematicians, and even fewer who stay in the field until their 70’s and 80’s (teaching mathematics, btw, is not the same as remaining a mathematician).

So, judging the effects of meditation based on the ones who are still at it after 7 decades is tainted by what’s called “survivorship bias.” If you only study the ones who stuck out the whole program, you’re ignoring relevant data, like, why did the others leave and why did these stay?

Perhaps there’s something intrinsic about those meditators — and mathematicians — something inherent in their personality, something they walked in the door with, that not only led to their propensity for long-term practice, but for the effects seen by the brain studies.

To know for sure would take one of two events:

1) A study where a group of random people are examined over 100,000 hours of meditation to see if a significant number of them got the same effects (trust me, there would be debate over what a “significant number” would equal).

2) Finding a “black swan”. In the same way that finding additional white swans does not prove the non-existence of a black swan, but finding just ONE black swan proves that not all swans are white, finding just ONE person who didn’t meditate for 100,000 hours but has the same brain function as a long-term meditator would call into question the premise that meditation “produces” this specific compassion-effect.