Film 01 · 17 min
The Settled Mind
A plain account of what two decades of imaging and behavioural work can and cannot claim about contemplative practice, filmed between a laboratory and a hall in Gelephu.
Who appears
Dr Liane Hofmann
Head of Research, Awaris
Tshering Yangzom
Faculty, BGLI
The thinking behind it
Most public accounts of meditation research are either promotional or dismissive. Both are easier to make than an accurate one, because accuracy requires stating effect sizes and the film has to hold an audience while it does.
The reliable findings are narrower than the market suggests: changes in sustained attention and in reactivity to stressors, measurable within eight weeks of daily practice, with effect sizes that are real and modest. Claims about structural brain change from short interventions rest on small samples and have not replicated cleanly.
The film argues that the modest version is the useful one. A leader does not need a transformed brain. They need a reliable half-second before a reply.
It also states the ethical problem directly: practice is being sold to organisations as a productivity instrument, which is a category error, and it invites the burnout-as-personal-failure reading that film 04 takes apart.
Sources
Tang, Hölzel & Posner (2015), Nature Reviews Neuroscience
The standing review of the neuroscience of mindfulness meditation.
Goyal et al. (2014), JAMA Internal Medicine
Meta-analysis of meditation programmes for psychological stress.
Van Dam et al. (2018), Perspectives on Psychological Science
The methodological critique the film takes seriously.
Transcript
HOFMANN: The question people ask is whether it works. The question we can answer is what changes, by how much, and for how long.
HOFMANN: Attention lapse rate moves within eight weeks. That result is stable. It is also small, and it decays if the practice stops.
YANGZOM: In the tradition nobody promised a changed brain. They promised that you would notice sooner.