I liked the post and have a follow up question.
In a lot of nutrition and supplement studies one will see a pattern where most people get minimal to no benefit, but some people with a deficiency get a large benefit. Once aggregated, the study shows a small but significant overall benefit. However if you try to action a change based on nutrition studies you will often get no personal benefit because you were not deficient to start with.
I'm not sure in how much detail you dug into the data when writing this, but do you know what the improvement pattern looked like? Did everyone improve a small amount, or were a lot of people showing no change and a few people showing large gains?
This obviously makes a big difference in how likely meditation is to be an effective intervention in our own lives.
This is a great succinct explanation of why you need to delve into study details. You'd think there would be better standards regarding clinical applicability, but there really aren't. You have to look at the characteristics of the sample and distribution of effect yourself as a general rule.
AFAIK this is the value proposition of Metamed, meaning the value of their services is higher than intuitively assumed at first glance.
There are any number of reasons why the Less Wrong crowd might be interested in mindfulness meditation. Cultivating an ability to observe thoughts without being swept away in them could help in noticing when you're confused, looking into the dark, and, if you are skilled enough, actually changing your mind. I've been on a couple of retreats myself, and I value meditation because it's a useful technique with a lot of field testing that can be studied free of the religious context it generally comes packaged in. The results have been positive -- I've learned what a mess my mind really is and my metacognitive awareness has improved noticeably.
Recent research suggests that we can add improved cognitive functioning to the list (Mrazek et al., 2013).
There is no shortage of researchers and individuals interested in better thinking, and perhaps the most effective way of doing so is to "target a cognitive process underlying performance in a variety of contexts". A great example of such a process is "the ability to attend to a task without distraction", as unrelated thoughts compete with the job at hand for limited working memory. Based on this it makes sense to hypothesize that, if mindfulness training can reduce mind-wandering and distractedness, it ought to boost mental performance.
Psychologists at the University of California Santa Barbara examined this hypothesis using a test of reading comprehension and a test of working memory capacity. Forty eight subjects, all undergraduates, were given two tasks: one, a modified version of the GRE verbal section and two, a test of working memory called the operation span task. The verbal section simply had all the vocabulary questions removed, while the operation span task alternates something that must be memorized (like a letter) with something irrelevant (like an equation which must be evaluated as true or false). If compared to someone else you can hold a longer string of memorized letters in your mind while also accurately evaluating equations, then you have a better working memory.
Importantly, during these tasks a couple of different techniques were used to assess mind-wandering, including asking subjects to assess themselves after the fact and asking them semi-randomly during the task.
Then the subjects were divided into a group which attended a two-week class on nutrition and a group which attended a two-week class on mindfulness meditation. Meditation instruction was pretty straightforward:
Two-weeks later, the groups were tested again and it was found that:
I couldn't help but wonder about how much of a positive effect could be had by someone who didn't actually do the meditation. An interesting additional experiment to have done would've been explaining (b) and (c) (in the first block quote) to participants, asking them how much their minds wandered semi-randomly during a task and then after a task, and testing them again two weeks later. Is noticing the problem enough to get a partial solution, or does flexing your attention add something that you can't get any other way?
This is good news for those of us who would like to get the most out of our brains in an age before really high-octane cognitive enhancements are available.