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.
“Given that only participants whose minds had wandered at pretesting could measurably improve their focus, we next examined whether improvement in WMC and GRE performance following mindfulness training was mediated by reduced mind wandering specifically among participants who were prone to mind wandering at pretesting. Following Preacher, Rucker, and Hayes (2007), we ran a test of moderated mediation examining whether the effect of condition on change in performance (an average of changes in the proportion of correct responses on the WMC and GRE measures) was mediated by change in mind wandering (an average of z-score-standardized changes in probe-caught and retrospectively self-reported mind wandering) specifically for participants with high levels of baseline mind wandering (an average of z-score standardized probe-caught and retrospectively self reported mind wandering at pretesting; see Table 1)....Change in mind wandering therefore significantly mediated the effect of mindfulness training on change in performance among participants
who exhibited a tendency to mind-wander at pretesting.”
So it seems that the effect will probably be best for those who have the most mind-wandering at baseline.
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.
An excellent question. From the article:
“Given that only participants whose minds had wandered at pretesting could measurably improve their focus, we next examined whether improvement in WMC and GRE performance following mindfulness training was mediated by reduced mind wandering specifically among participants who were prone to mind wandering at pretesting. Following Preacher, Rucker, and Hayes (2007), we ran a test of moderated mediation examining whether the effect of condition on change in performance (an average of changes in the proportion of correct responses on the WMC and GRE measures) was mediated by change in mind wandering (an average of z-score-standardized changes in probe-caught and retrospectively self-reported mind wandering) specifically for participants with high levels of baseline mind wandering (an average of z-score standardized probe-caught and retrospectively self reported mind wandering at pretesting; see Table 1)....Change in mind wandering therefore significantly mediated the effect of mindfulness training on change in performance among participants who exhibited a tendency to mind-wander at pretesting.”
So it seems that the effect will probably be best for those who have the most mind-wandering at baseline.