I came across this disturbing article (as one following the brain research related to meditation/mindfulness):
I am hoping that CFM and other research centers give a formal reply to this article. I hope also that neuroscientists involved in this research will respond to this with their assessment of whether or not this ‘bug’ significantly impacts the findings about brain changes of meditators etc so far. Thank you.
Hi, Kenneth. Thank you for reaching out; I also had some questions about the findings, and am checking in with much wiser and knowledgeable minds here at the Center for Mindfulness for their input. One thing to consider is that this is one of many tools used to measure activity in the brain, nor does this automatically invalidate existing research. It does indicate further improvements to be made in future studies, and for those replicating existing work.
I’m actually glad to see this kind of article, as it’s a step forward towards greater learning and rigor, much as that step may be a difficult one.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I wanted to avoid a knee-jerk reaction to the news, as the article made it sound like over 40,000 research papers had been invalidated. I see it’s not so black and white. So, I am reassured :}, thank you.
Hi @obtuse1. Briefly, the PNAS article talks about some specific caveats with a certain type of analysis (cluster level) and recommends using one that is not susceptible to potential errors that come with the cluster level statistics: voxel-level statistics or permutation statistics. So, it depends on what analysis someone was using to determine whether or not to call into question their results. That being said, in general, it is helpful to look for studies that have been replicated, as well as brain regions that have also been identified in meta-analyses (which brings together a bunch of different studies -and hopefully these take into account the caveats that have now been identified). Additionally, finding multi-modal approaches that converge on specific brain regions help. I’m attaching a few of our papers as an example, where we started with group level analysis, and then followed up with real-time neurofeedback (both fMRI and EEG) as a way to test regions of interest in real time, in real subjects (not at the group level).
Brewer PNAS-2011.pdf (691.2 KB)
Garrison 2013 NeuroImage real-time fMRI neurofeedback paper.pdf (864.0 KB)
van lutterveld 2016 NeuroImage Source-space EEG neurofeedback links subjective experience with brain activity during effortless awareness meditation.pdf (781.7 KB)
Garrison et al. - 2013 - Effortless awareness using real time neurofeedbac.pdf (1.8 MB)
Thank you so much Dr. Brewer! This is very helpful and especially tnx for the links.