Sam Harris is Lying: Cognitive Science, Buddhism & Meditation.

some things in the sciences are
difficult to prove talking about certain areas of theoretical physics if you're talking about getting precise dates for geological events we're dealing with hundreds of thousands of years very hard to pin down some things are going to be difficult for us the claim that meditation the claim that Buddhist meditation improves cognitive function why would that be difficult proof why why would it be mysterious why do people like sam harris who are self-styled skeptics and at the same time self-styled buddhist gurus very real sense he's a buddhist guru go ahead and read his PhD thesis who don't believe me go ahead and read the book that was adapted from his PhD it is if you don't believe me he's a true believer and he wants you to be a true believer in put us in meditation too why would that be difficult the proof it's not a mysterious claim if i claim that i have a set of visualization exercises that will help you perform arithmetic functions more rapidly there have been many claims that kind of many of them have improvement there's certain exercises where they teach children to use an abacus and then walk them through a series of mental exercises where they're visualizing how to compute certain types of equations in their head there are mental visualization exercises that help people process numbers better in their own mind that help people do things in their minds eye that otherwise they might require a pen and paper to to figure out that kind of numerical operation it's not hard to prove it's not her to prove it's not a disparate there's a type of cognitive function we can measure why is it that for sam harris a specialist in this field someone who wrote his PhD thesis on this precise topic why is it hard for sam harris to prove that buddhist meditation improves cognitive he provides a footnote in an article Sam heiress to the very simple claim quote cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to improve cognitive function that's that's the quote from his status his claim to being in the sciences to being an extra The Guardian says his claim to being a skeptic and so on it's all built on his research on Buddhism and Buddhist meditation and he cites a study he cites a lab report that is from my perspective deeply troubling very obviously flawed laughable and that he's either lying to his readers about or that he's lying to himself about so approximately 60 university students who are positively interested in meditation compared to a group of university students who instead sit for the same amount of time and listen to audio books listen to a book on tape and in this study if you read all the footnotes the book on tape that was played to the control group was the Hobbit by JRR tolkien and it was the BBC radio version of Tolkien stop that's that's the basis for this claim Sam Harris is making and he's an expert we have to treat him as an expert we have to criticize myself but if anyone in the world should be able to back up this incredibly simple claim this is like you know if you know about cults built on faith healing when they make a Reiki as an example of a failing they make very simple fundamental claims that the human body has an invisible field around it and this can be detected through touch prove that come where's your sighted source for that when did you even prove that there is this field that can be detected by human touch then we got to move for us this is the most fundamental claim and yet he doesn't have even one good source on it the only source he can reach for and this is not at the beginning of his PhD thesis this is many years after he's finished his PhD thesis and come a supposedly respectable expert in this field on the basis of that PhD work this is this is the best you can do what were the tests that they performed with these 60 students well the most fundamental one for the claim of cognitive function improving again that should show up um you know if you give people certain drugs like adderall you can measure the change in cognitive function for better and for worse for better or for worse you tell me give people adderall this isn't hard to prove does adderall change cognitive function it does it's not mysterious it shouldn't be a religious concept this should be science right well they had the meditators attempt to memorize a sequence of sixteen numbers so somebody reads the numbers to the person and then they try to recall as many the numbers as possible okay and then they assign a score for how well you did in memorizing and repeating back the numbers okay now the score assigned to the meditating group was ten point eight eight and the score assigned to the non meditating group was ten point eight four this is not even a rounding error this is the same number and we're talking about an average here of only sixty odd people okay these are not such enormous numbers of people on the test that this could possibly be scientifically significant so I've heard me statistically significant more scientifically significant now there are many other avenues along which I have to criticize this why would meditation why would the cognitive difference be in your ability to memorize repeat back the score however there's a part B to this same test which is that they then also measured the same sequence of numbers backwards how good or bad were you at memorizing 16 numbers this is referred to as the backward digits fan okay so the same test it's time with a different set of numbers apparently it's the same numbers in Reverse so these are two it's basically two versions of the same quiz same test of talkative cognitive ability all right if you believe this is a meaningful test of cognitive ability and that one the the meditators did worse so you have one test you have two tests that are basically identical in terms of testing cognitive ability and it's a tie between meditators and non-meditators one and the second case the scores were six point five eight versus six point seven two the people who didn't meditate had better or cognitive function if you believe this is a meaningful measure of cognitive function and now again obvious question is the Ximena full measure in general of cognitive function you know maybe it is for some things maybe if you're measuring how people have recovered brain function after a car accident maybe this is an important meaningful measure I'm not gonna say this has no significance in cognitive science field there are some important research that kind that the degree of mental functionality someone has after you know they've had a traumatic brain injury or something maybe their ability to memorize a sequence of 60 numbers maybe that matters but the type of cognitive function you're supposedly gaining through Buddhist meditation why would this be meaningful and if it is meaningful Sam Harris you're a charlatan you cited this study as proof that Buddhist meditation improves cognitive function and you're lying just read the study just read the study you cited as your source it proves the opposite the study involved approximately 60 University students University students who expressed that they were interested in learning meditation now that's already very different from testing the cognitive effects of meditation with a group of people who don't believe in it or group people some of whom may be hostile to right what's the difference do you think again keep in mind all of these tests could also be done with Christian prayer what if you get a bunch of devout Catholics and try to see whether or not certain forms of Prayer improve their cognitive function using these same tests that if you're use to measure incredibly minor differences in cognitive function for college students who want meditation that positive they're already motivated they're already incentivized and they're being paid for their time to come in and try to try to do better on these tests that are done before and after they a minute 860 University students positively inclined towards learning meditation who want it to work don't you think they'd be different than say middle-aged Muslims who regard Buddhist meditation really negatively really skeptically but also with hostility you know the religious concepts they feel are you know something something like the devil what if you add some conservative Muslims some conservative Protestants being put through this same Buddhist meditation experiment do you think you'd get the same outcomes and let me tell you the outcomes just wait we'll get to those outcomes get to what it is they test it change it what if what if you had some nihilistic atheists score does not positively inclined to don't take this kind of thing you don't think you're already biasing the study with the selection of this sample deeply flawed source now when I first discovered this and I read all the fine print in this lab report this peer-reviewed study he relies upon I said further the implications of the nut of the other of the other numbers in the study seem baffling if they have any validity at all the score assigned for anger dropped from 4.0 to one point nine one for the meditating students however for the non-meditators the control group it dropped from three point eight to one point two what really does this prove indicate or even insinuate is meditation actually less effective at reducing anger then listening to junior are talking as an audio book that's not a joke the control group listen to The Hobbit instead of meditating so again that's the evidence presented in the study now if you think that reducing anger improves cognitive function it doesn't clearly his claim must rest on this test of memorizing numbers that have already discussed the dish length which doesn't support its claim being less angry after you meditate doesn't really prove anything I mean you've been sitting still it may prove that it's just as effective City so but this found it was actually less effective at reducing anger then sitting and listening to an audio book sitting Alyssa Jo Tolkien you know now how anger is actually defined and measured relies on the so called Fryeburg mindfulness inventory you can google that you can look it up you can decide for yourself if that is charlatanism or not many of these tests are kind of meaningful in some specific limited context and not in others just like I was suggesting with traumatic brain injury and certain tests of intelligence I don't think you know I mean if you measure an apple with a meter stick it may not tell you what you want to know are we really using meaningful measurements here to begin with I doubt it the score assigned for confusion another interesting thing to quantify drop from 6.9 to 25.46 for the meditators but for the non-meditators the change was from 6.6 to only four point eight eight again if these numbers prove anything should we take these as indications of the value of not meditating for the meditators attention however that may be quantified dropped from eight point five to two point nine one for the non-meditators the change was from six point two eight to only two point six the implications would be baffling if we really wanted to take this seriously as evidence of well anything at all and why would we right even if all of these tests did support sam Harris's claim that buddhist meditation improves cognitive function like if the if the scores if the numbers I just quoted to you were very different with their they showed a stark improvement a stark difference would anyone look at this and say wow this test shows a big increase in a cognitive function that's his claims about cognitive function no neither memorizing a series of numbers nor having suddenly less anger in these circumstances none of that shows improve cognitive function and on the issue of memorizing numbers as mentioned there are some mental exercises there arts there's math training there's mathematical practice and teaching you know you could have you could spend the same amount of time giving people kind of training that would really improve their ability to remember and make use of numbers in their own head nobody's going to be impressed by this there's no meaningful connection between these exercises of sitting and focusing on the sensation of the air entering and exiting your nostrils it's basically it's so-called breathing meditation it's what it is that they tested and these measures of cognitive function but sam harris lied to you sam harris is a charlatan who even after years of specialized research could not back up this simple and fundamental claim if you want to know more there's an earlier 22 minute video I made the link is below I made it over a year ago I was quite sick at the time it takes couple minutes to get rolling but I watched that video again before recording this one if you give it a chance that still was an excellent video that's full of meaningful reflections on this and why it matters I say again this matters a lot to me it matters a lot to Sam Harris in some ways I think it should matter to both modern Buddhism and modern skepticism to a virus Yin