Is Mindfulness Effective?

Abstract

This chapter asks whether mindfulness is as broadly effective and powerful as proponents claim and considers methodological and other critiques of clinical research on mindfulness. Neuroscientists have produced vivid images of meditators’ brains, using functional MRI and PET scans, which seem to show clear, positive changes attributed to meditation. Such images are effective rhetorically but are produced in a “black box” of assumptions, technological constraints, and human factors that make them less definitive than they may appear. Other types of studies rely on meditators’ self-reports, which are not always reliable. A major issue in clinical research is that mindfulness is inconsistently defined and may be measured by scientists unfamiliar with the ways that meditation is described in canonical texts and understood by experienced Buddhist teachers and yogis. While research data do suggest that mindfulness can be beneficial, it is not the panacea that some advocates seem to suggest it is.