Not Buddhism and Not Science

Dr. O'Leary provides a critical analysis of increasingly popular claims that modern neuroscience confirms the teaching of Buddhist philosophy, and questions whether many of these claims are even consistent with Buddhist teaching.  He also explores whether the increasing number of claims that mindfulness meditation has strong neuroscientific backing and clear neuroanatomical correlates are supported by the evidence.

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References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcript, located at psydactic.buzzsprout.com.  All opinions expressed in this podcast are exclusively those of the person speaking and should not be confused with the opinions of anyone else.  We reserve the right to be wrong.  Nothing in this podcast should be treated as individual medical advice.

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Welcome to PsyDactic. Today is Saturday, August 3rd, 2026, and I am your host, Dr. O'Leary. In my day job, I do psychiatry, but in my spare time, I make this podcast because I'm really interested in pretty much all things neuroscience, psychology, and sometimes philosophy and religion even come in there too, especially when they can inform my clinical practice. One of the ways in which my clinical practice has been informed quite a bit in the last few years has been in techniques based on what have been called like mindfulness and meditation techniques. Some of these have been shown to have particular benefits, although, to be honest, the evidence sometimes can be pretty hard to interpret, because what one person means by mindfulness and meditation might not be the same as what someone else means. But today I'm not going to discuss the implications of mindfulness and meditation in clinical practice. I'm going to put that off for the future. But instead, I want to address some feelings that I had the other day. So a couple days ago, I was listening to a presentation in this neuroscience-based online forum. The presenter was trying to explain basically how things like mindfulness meditation practices can help human beings basically experience less stress. But not just that, it was also claiming that it can help our children to perform better in school if their teachers are trained in doing it. It talked about a lot of uh changes in the brain that can happen because of it. And the speaker also happened to be a proponent of kind of more population-level interventions. He was very convinced that we can treat what we see in the world today. We do see in the world today a lot of problems, and some things appear to be getting worse. For example, there's a lot of social isolation in the world. Our children seem to be more anxious than they've ever been. People are disconnected from other human beings. And there are also reports that basically people are feeling kind of negative emotional states more frequently than they have before. Now, I'm not going to directly talk about the claims that mindfulness can treat these, but what I want to talk about first is more fundamental. I want to talk about how neuroscience is used to explain mindfulness-based therapies, and why I become more than just a little bit uncomfortable and even a bit angry when I see people present the neuroscientific findings of mindfulness and meditation in a way that basically ignores a huge amount of the evidence. Because the evidence about these things is not clear. And some of the claims that are still going around out there by people who should know better are actually not supported by the data. So in general, I don't think the data supports that mindfulness meditation is going to be broadly helpful for everyone, especially people who are already suffering, and it might be harmful to them. But we have to start with the neurology in the neuroscience in order to understand whether or not what people are claiming about mindfulness and meditation is actually supported. Are there really neuroanatomical correlates of mindfulness and meditation? Now, in order to explore some of what I'm going to be calling like the logical fallacies inherent in applying neuroscience to uh Buddhist or Eastern philosophers, I'm going to talk about Chris Niebauer's book, No Self, No Pro Problem. And it was published in 2019. And I can remember when listening to it having similar experiences to when I was listening to that neuroscience forum I was just talking about, because I think the book is really misleading and in fact misses like most of the advances that we've had in neuroscience in the last 10 years. So I want to talk about some of the most advanced sorts of peer-reviewed literature and cognitive neuroscience and neuroanatomy and neurophilosophy, and basically show how thinkers like Niebauer, as a single case, but more generally how anybody who makes arguments like he does have been adapting their ideas about mindfulness meditation in Buddhism and Taoism and Eastern philosophies to modern neuroscience in order to justify them. Not that neuroscience justifies them, but there's this ex post facto way that people look at it and saying, okay, I'm gonna find some neuroscience findings and I'm going to show that they're consistent with Buddhism, or at least my idea of what Buddhism is. There's other writers out there who have written books. For example, like Robert Wright has written a book called Why Buddhism is true. And I have not actually read that book, but I've read other things by Robert Wright, and he extensively references his arguments in that book. So stuff like this is out there that tries to show how we have basically proven Buddhism to be true. And I'm going to show you today why that is not the case. And then we'll get to why even arguing that might itself create a paradox. So the reason I chose Chris Niebauer to talk about is because his book focuses on trying to show that we have basically two different sides of our brain that are functionally different. You know, we have a left brain and we have a right brain. We know anatomically this is true. We have two sides of our brain, one is left and one is right, and they're kind of joined together by things called commochures. Now, the biggest of these commochures is the corpus collossum. It's a big track of white fibers right between the brain that kind of connects the uh the right and left sides of the brain, and I'll get into that later. But we do anatomically have lateralization. So some of our brain seems to be more specialized for certain kinds of functions. For example, a lot of our spatial awareness and how we are able to like locate things in space and map the world are often on the right side of our brain and what we call like the parietal parts of our brain. Um, and then the parts of our brain that make sense more of language and specially our ability to produce speech in a neurotypical person that's usually more on the left side of the brain. So the brain does specialize in certain things, but more and more we're finding that like this this local specialization is not as important as functional connectivity within the brain. But Niebauer really doubles down on this idea of sort of lateralization and how different parts of the brain function fundamentally independent from each other. So it's basically his central thesis of the book that there is a right side of the brain and a left side of the brain, and the left side of the brain has a kind of self in it that we don't want, and the right side of the brain has a kind of self in it that we strive for that I'm gonna argue against. Because, first of all, I'm gonna argue that it's not even neuroanatomically correct. Um, and I think that's probably as far as I need to go because I can understand the neuroanatomy, whether or not we want to have a kind of a self, whether we want the no-self kind of self, um, or the individualistic narrative kind of self, uh I can't say. That's that's more philosophical. But I can say that there is no such thing as a self in the left side of the brain and a self in the right side of the brain. So let's start with some of the basis of his arguments. And I think the experimental basis of his arguments started in the 1960s and went into the 1990s. There were patients uh who had epilepsy and underwent a procedure where they cut the corpus callosum that I was talking about before. Now, just by way of reminder, if you don't know what that is, the corpus callosum contains lots of little white matter tracts that act as pathways that the two sides of the brain can share information. Now, it was exciting to have patients like this. You cannot ethically just cut someone's corpus callosum unless it's helping them with something. And it was, it was helping them with their epilepsy. So people were like, okay, let's study these people to see what happens if you basically sever most of the ties between the left and the right side of the brain. Do you end up with two people? Does someone then have like two cells or two personalities? So experiments like this can be helpful to answer questions like that. And also to kind of see, you know, what happens if what's happening the left side of the brain is not as understood by the right side of the brain, and vice versa. Are there in fact two people now housed in the same body? Niebauer's explanation of this is basically, yes. We have two selves at that point. You have the left brain self, which is, according to him, the self that you are trying to tone down, the self that you don't really want so much, the defective self. And that self is defective because it takes what is basically our true and right sensory information about the world and distorts it into a narrative. So this narrative is a way of explaining that information so that it makes sense to us, so that it can be so that it can justify our wants and our desires. He then argues that the right side of the brain houses a self that is more in touch with just pure sensory experience of the world. The right side of the brain apparently gives us an experience of what he calls the no-self, which he draws from this Buddhist-type Eastern philosophy. One way to kind of describe this is that the left side of the brain is a crude map of the world. It's like a topographical map, one of those two-dimensional ones that you lay out on the table, whereas the right side of the brain is a rich uh map. It contains actually not a map at all, it is the world. It is our experience of the world, unadulterated by the left side. So if we can tone down that left side, which is trying to get us to basically like ignore true experience and listen to this motivated type uh experience that it wants us to have, then we can get closer to actual reality, the reality you can experience without yourself getting in the way. So an argument like this assumes that humans are born kind of wrong. Normal is not good. Normal is an illusion. Normal results in suffering. But if we can get rid of the way that we were made, our normal self, and we can find the no-self, we can get to a state at which we can relieve ourselves of most or all of this world's suffering. If you're really good at this, you can achieve nirvana. But if you're, you know, only a little less good, you can get to a better state. You don't have to get all the way to the nirvana state in order to benefit, apparently. But we are fundamentally flawed. We have this almost sin of the flesh, and Niebauer describes that as the left side of our brain. Now, I'm not saying there's no empirical evidence to show that the left side of the brain does some of the things that Niebauer says. Some of his claims are actually consistent with neuropsychology and contemporary cognitive neuroscience. However, this strict boundary in his book that he draws between the left side and the right side, I don't think it has much support at all, and it's based on really kind of an old way of thinking that we need to abandon. So, what parts of it are, you know, supported? Well, it's correct sort of to think about the left part of the brain as being a kind of interpreter. Um, it's not that the right side isn't, but the left side does help us to interpret the world. And one of the ways that it does that is by using language, and this language helps us to construct a reality of the world. So it's useful to think about the brain that that way, that the left side is doing certain types of interpretation. So the left side of the brain also is more concerned with certain things like task switching and being able to uh plan things out. So our left dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex has a lot of working memory in it, um, and it helps us to be able to uh plan things, to be basically like in the future, to be effectively goal-oriented. And it also helps us to adjust what kind of goals do we want. So the left side of the brain can sort of put the brakes on certain things, saying, well, that's not the next thing to do. If uh our executive centers are functioning well, then they can sort of control our motivated centers and they're like, the thing we're motivated for right now is not going to get us what we need to get. We need to be motivated towards something else. So it does have some influence over the rest of the brain, but it is not a clear left-right boundary. According to Niebauer, the left is constructing some sort of cohesive identity, and that identity, that self, is the thing that we're trying to get rid of. And this identity is just an illusion. I also believe that humans are engaged in a kind of continuous sort of post-hoc rationalization, that we're trying to reduce basically our cognitive dissonance, sort of justify our pre-existing beliefs. I think that's all true. And I'll get more into more detail about some of the ways that more modern neuroscientific ideas are addressing that, by trying to match basically the sensory information that we're getting in with models that we have about the world. But all parts of our brains actually do that. It's not just the left side. The left side's not the only one that is constructing reality for us. Now, Niebauer describes the left side of the brain as kind of like the elephant, and uh the right side of the brain as like the rider of the elephant. Usually we think, or the rider might think, that he's the one directing the elephant, but the elephant, if it wants to go right or left, um, is going to go right or left. And so the left side of the brain basically is the part of our brain that convinces the rider of the elephant that the he's in charge when really it's the elephant that's in charge. So that's sort of a metaphor that Niebauer uses. And I think it can be a useful metaphor, um, but it certainly is not uh at all correlated with any sort of real lateralization in the brain. There's also no evidence that there is one seat of kind of a self in the brain, where if you can get rid of that self, then you can let your right brain take over. The self, as far as like anyone else defines it in neuroscience, is not just like one thing made in one part of the brain. Uh, it has many different definitions. Um, and one of them includes some sort of like narrative definition like Niebauer uses, where there's this uh idea that we are consistent through time and that we did things like for a reason, and that the things that we are doing were doing for a reason, and that in the future we'll be the same person. There is that kind of uh self going on in the brain, but it's not like lateralized to the left side. I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever. In fact, there's lots of parts of our experience of ourselves uh that we know uh probably come from more from like right-sided regions, for example, our sense of ourself in space. Um, and uh more of our sense of ourself in social context might come from more of the right side or the right medial frontal cortex. There's no reason to think our general self is entirely constructed by the left side of our brain, or that there is a correct self on the right side and an incorrect self on the left side, and we need to shut off the incorrect self. What we do know is that our brain does have certain networks, so networks that are more broadly distributed than just left and right. Some of these networks have been named, like the executive network, the salience network, the default mode network. But if you get into the neuroscience literature, there's a lot more than just those three that have been named, and this tripartite network model that we have right now is one of the most popular ones to be used, but it by far is not the only way that people have talked about how uh the brain networks. But this networking is not a lateralized function, and it's important that we know that. It's also important that we don't think of these networks as something that are functioning like independently, like the right side and the left side of the brain function. For example, uh you will often hear people talking about, especially people who don't really know uh neuroscience very well, uh, about like how one network sort of turns on or turns off another network. And this is just entirely wrong. That's not how the brain works. Now, each network can function to influence the activity of the other network. And if they're working together well, this little dance of what is called like correlation and anti-correlation, when uh the functioning of one network seems to dampen down another network, um, helps us to be able to put resources in the brain where we need them and to focus on the kinds of thoughts you might say that we need to be having at the moment. Sometimes you might need to be more self-referential, and so sometimes the default mode network, it's very helpful to be in that network. And that's the kind of network you sort of start out in. If you if you turn off all the sensory output to the world, sort of sit down and relax, you're gonna start having this sort of rambling self-um-referential kind of thought. But if you're more task-oriented and you're you have a goal you need to complete, then you need the executive part of your network to be more active. And you also need to be paying attention to what is the most salient information in the world. For example, like, what is the state of my body right now? You know, am I hungry? Or is there something I need to deal with right in the moment? Where should my attention be? And so the salience network helps to coordinate that. And sometimes these networks have to like tell another network to slow down a bit. So the um salience network is thought to uh regulate some of the activity between the default mode network and the central executive network. And uh the central executive network uh might suppress or even call up the uh default mode network if it needs to get something done because the salience network is saying like this thing right here is very important. But the default mode network might attempt to take over in times and be the most like resource-hungry thing in the brain at times when um someone's feeling particularly ruminative and they need to or want to think about something, the the default mode network might be the thing that's that's the most active. And it might uh inhibit the executive network uh a bit. But there's no time, absolutely no time, when one of these brain networks shuts off the other one. That's just not a thing. But you hear people saying that it does all the time. All we know from fMRI data is that one network in our brain has some influence over the other, and the fMRI is measuring blood flow, which is a proxy for neural activity. So we're not even directly measuring neural activity with an fMRI, we're measuring where blood is flowing from one place to another. We don't know the exact neural activity. We can't measure that with an fMRI. But people talk about it as if that's what we're measuring. It's just not true. Let's move away now from Niebauer and talk about other claims that researchers have made and the different types of neuroscience evidence that supposedly supports these claims. Uh, one of those is that functional connectivity changes between different brain regions in a kind of predictable way that is caused by someone practicing mindfulness type meditations over the course of years. So it's basically claiming that you're going to change your brain by doing meditation. Now, I'm absolutely certain that the brain changes in in response to meditation because like meditation does a lot for people, but do we know and is it clear how the brain changes? And um, do the studies that have come out actually support any consistent changes? One of the first studies to look at this was Brewer et al. And it was published in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences in 2011, and it was titled Meditation Experiences Associated with Differences in Default Mode, Network Activity and Connectivity. And it basically showed that you take and compare people who don't meditate at all to people who do. Does there seem to be functional connectivity changes? Without getting into too much detail, they report that there are differences in default mode network that are consistent with decreased mind wandering, so more cognitive control. And they found differences in how the posterior cingulate and dorsal anterior cingulate and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are connected. Basically, that there's stronger connectivity in these areas for people. Who have a 10-year history of meditation versus people who don't. Now let me remind you, this is 12 patients. Let me also remind you that this was during a time in which people didn't really pre-register their trials. So what does that mean? Didn't pre-register their trials. Well, what it means is that when you do a study like this and you only have 12 people, and it's an expensive study, and you want to be able to publish something cool, you don't necessarily approach the study with strong prior expectations. You kind of approach the study with some vague expectations of what might happen, and you measure lots of things. And then you might just find some correlations in the data when you look at lots and lots of different things. And then you can say, oh look, there's those correlations that we're looking for. When in fact, maybe maybe you weren't really looking for them. You were just sort of like looking through data for something that would tell you something you wanted to hear. I'm not saying this is how it was done, we just don't know because the trial was not pre-registered, so we don't know what their hypotheses supposedly were before the trial was done. Now, why do I make a big deal about this? Well, if you go through a bunch of data and then you find positive correlations in your data, then you can create hypotheses ex post facto that are seem very specific in their nature, and you can say that we tested this hypothesis and found that there is data to support the hypothesis. We could not reject this hypothesis. But you maybe did not ex design your experiment exactly to look for that thing that you found in your data. You looked for lots of things in your data, and then you pulled out the things that seemed to agree with something that you could say. And so then you can say something. Now, this kind of science results in huge numbers of false positives. And I mean like it's it's basically like notorious for false positives. And the study, uh this Brewer study, was like 12 people. So it was not pre-registered. It's like 12 people. It really can't say much about anything. What it can say is that we need to do more studies. And more studies were done. So in 2022, Ra-rigadal, that's R-A-H-R-I-G, published a meta-analysis of studies similar to Brewer's study in scientific reports. If you go to the end of their abstract and just kind of read the results, it says, in support of our hypothesis, results suggests that MT targets inter-network SNDMN connectivity, implicated in the flexible control of internally oriented attention. Whew, that's a lot. So they're basically saying, yeah, our hypothesis is that it worked and it worked. But if you stop there, you might not discover a sentence later on in their discussion that says results did not support our first hypothesis, which predicted enhanced cross-network connectivity between the FPCN and the DMN as a mechanism of cognitive control. Now I just did a lot of word salad, you know, or letter salad there. So what they're basically saying is that therapies seem to affect the salience network connections to the default mode network, but not our central executive network with the default mode network. Now, why did I have to read to find that? If you failed to support your primary hypothesis, which was that mindfulness training should result in a relative increase in functional connectivity between executive networks and the default mode network, that should be in the abstract, if not even in the title. They did find one thing that seemed to be consistent. And so they concluded that their hypothesis was supported. That's pretty sad, to tell you the truth. Now let's switch over to some even more unimpressive findings. These include numerous studies that have attempted to correlate changes in volumes of different brain regions, comparing people who do mindfulness and meditation somehow to people who don't. So, similar to the fMRI studies, these studies measure lots of things, lots of the brain, and they have pretty vague hypotheses, something to the effect of, we hypothesize that there would be some difference somewhere in the brain. Therefore, these studies fit the profile of the kinds of studies that are highly likely to get a lot of false positive results, because they don't even know what they're looking for, and they're measuring lots of different things. So Fox et al. in 2014 published a meta-analysis called Is Meditation Associated with Altered Brain Structure in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. So this review included 21 studies up to that time in 2014. And it noted that given kind of all the data, uh, there is some likelihood of some they called measurable global effects. But it was really hard to say for sure because the data wasn't consistent and there was a really a high likelihood of bias in the publishing. So what we need in situations like these are not more studies with vague hypotheses, but studies that do the right thing. And what is the right thing? Well, a study by Kral et al. in 2022 seems to have done better than just about anybody else. They got 218 participants. And they were specifically looking for changes in gray matter volumes and cortical thickness. And they followed people through an eight-week course of mindfulness-based interventions. This is kind of stress reduction type treatments, very similar to treatments that other people had got. And it went for eight weeks, so it was far beyond what is being a minimum amount of time in order to actually have some demonstrable changes. Probably the best thing that they did was they also had active controls. So they had two control groups. One was just a wait list, which means that the people waited for eight weeks and didn't really do anything. The other was uh an active control, where they were assigned to get a kind of therapy, but the therapy is designed to be nonspecific and not to mimic mindfulness-based therapies. So people get something, they get about the same amount of it and the same amount of attention, but they don't get anything that supposedly overlaps with what they're getting in their mindfulness-based treatments. Now, this is very important because comparing things to a wait list is not very informative. But if you compare it to just like doing anything else and something else, especially that is not the same and designed to not be the same, then you uh can see, you know, if the treatment actually has any effect. And spoil alert here, no effect whatsoever in this study. So the study that was well designed, that had a large number of people in appropriate groups, and was pre-registered, so they couldn't change the outcomes after measuring lots of different things. You know, this study found nothing. Which is exactly what you would expect. The better designed a study is when you have lots of kind of results from poorly designed studies, you expect the effect size to go down and quite often just to disappear. And that's exactly what happened here. There really doesn't seem to be much evidence at all that uh any mindfulness-based treatments have direct effects on our neuroanatomy in the structure. Now there's some evidence, like I said before, that there might be some functional connectivity changes, but those are not nearly as robust as people expected, and it's very hard to interpret what they might mean, and also the causality associated with them has not really been well established. One of the reasons I think I keep harping on this point is because I've been part of a research group where I was given a project, and this project's basic design was, well, we have a bunch of data, so let's ask a very vague question about the data, like what happens if we try to correlate all these different things that we got in the data together? What pops up as significant? So we just did a whole bunch of analysis, went through tables, and I had a highlighter and I highlighted the positive correlations. Then we sat down after the fact, and we came up with our hypotheses. I think I've made it clear so far that this is the wrong way to do it, and it is, in fact, in my opinion, a form of scientific fraud. It's not the worst kind of fraud because at least you didn't make up the data. But ex post facto making a hypothesis to fit the data is only okay if you are reporting that you did that. Like, for example, you did a study that was negative, but you found in the data some correlations you didn't expect. In the discussion, then you would say something to the effect of, well, you know, we need to look into this apparent correlation in more detail and actually design a study to test that question, instead of just to report that we had hypotheses and then we got our data, and our data supported or did not support our hypotheses. But far too often, I don't think people even realize that they're committing that kind of fraud. They just think they're reporting results in a format that they're supposed to report them in. I had originally prepared quite a bit more to add right here, but I don't think that I should do that simply because I'm not adding things in order to get you to know specific details about the neuroscience. I'm adding things in order to get you to understand how things are done, to understand as a process type of way, why findings so often don't hold up once you make studies that are more rigorous. And also how a lot of the reports on things, and this does not include just mindfulness type meditations, this is all sorts of other things, uh, especially in psychology, which is rife with this sort of research, that you know, uses a lot of preliminary findings to either support or build a rather like thick theoretical framework when there's really no good data out there to do it, and they don't replicate things. So that's what I want you to take away from this. Not that mindfulness meditation is doing this, but that everyone kind of does this, and so do they. Now, to get back to a little bit of more specific things about like what mindfulness and meditative um proponents do that I think is just logically inconsistent and somewhat specific to them, uh, has to do with the arguments that they make. So I came across this idea um called the scientific Buddha, and it basically states that a lot of people are looking for Buddha, and instead of looking for the actual Buddha, the one that exists and was apparently chosen to be Buddha by a process that Buddhists say is true. Now there's some apparently two Buddhas. One was the the communist government in China made, and the other one is uh more of a anyway. If you want to get into that debate, you can. But I think that's irrelevant. There are there is at least one Buddha in the world. Um, and the scientific Buddha is kind of like an idol. It's this thing that some people build because they want to believe that science must support Buddhism somehow. And so they start to twist the idea of the Buddha as being something that can be scientifically confirmed. But that's not really what religion is, is it? So it's kind of very contradictory in that way. Another thing that is very contradictory, and I think Niebauer in the book No Self, No Problem, really suffers from this sort of logical fallacy is that he's using narrative reason to tell us that the part of our brain that uses narrative reason to explain the world to us is faulty and we need to kind of get rid of it. So this creates like, I don't know if you caught that, but it's basically like a huge paradox. It's like, I'm gonna convince you using the misleading part of your brain that the misleading part of your brain is misleading you? I mean, I'm if you if you really get down to it, it doesn't really make that much sense to make the arguments like he does, and they're very paradoxical and um and conflict with even with themselves. He basically tries to use narrative reasoning to explain that we shouldn't use narrative reasoning. It's not a very Buddhist thing to do, I don't think. I think that's a very Western thing to do, that Westerners do once they try to adopt a more Eastern mindset, once they try to understand Buddhism because they feel like it has value for them. They try to use Western means of arguing and understanding the world in order to justify their Buddhism. And then finally, there is this strong desire for a lot of people to take what is ultimately a phenomenological experience and try to make sense of it scientifically. And I think this is actually okay. A lot of people say no, subjective experience shouldn't be scientifically studied, and I disagree with that. I think it should be. But when you approach phenomenological things, such as what happens to you when you when you are experienced at meditation, and you learn how to, for example, effortlessly place your attention in certain places, or you learn how to exist in a world in which there seems like this dissolution of the self. You know, these these things require certain skills that not everybody has, and it's hard to understand and it's hard to explain. So when we're approaching any kind of scientific research that uh deals with these things, it has to try like extremely hard to be more objective, to define its terms very precisely in a certain context, to not do what mindfulness and meditation does in general, which is like have a whole bunch of different things they call mindfulness and meditative techniques, and then lump them all together and try to say something about them as a group. You know, that's exactly the wrong way to approach these phenomenological type things. I think we can do better. I think we can do science, and you can even do science about Buddhism. But if it's science that's trying to show something, that's that's attempting to prove that Buddhism is scientifically valid or something like that, then you've immediately, number one, committed a logical fallacy, and number two, just invalidated all of your science. Because science doesn't work that way, and Buddhism doesn't work that way. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I I don't want anybody to leave here thinking that like I'm criticizing people who choose to do mindfulness or meditated practices. I'm not at all. I know lots of people who think that these things are very helpful for their lives. I also know people who think that they are not, and people who think that they are either distressed or harmed by them, and so I'm not making judgment about the the the practices. I'm making judgment about the way people try to use science to justify them. I am Dr. O'Leary, and this has been an episode of PsyDactic.