Gay Watson

While a good book, it's somewhat disapointing. There's a fairly large amount of direct experimental research out there touching, or directly on, aspects of Buddhism. I was hoping that this book would be a nice collection, and commentary on them. Instead, I get the impression of people without much scientific background who tossed some terms into pubmed. Not all, but a lot of the articles here felt tacked on. I'd rate them as hovering around a C in a second year research oriented class. Pasable, but with enough flaws that one should approach them with heavy skepticism. In particular, I was amazed at how often I found authors using meta-analysis, relying on secondary sources, or only using a single study or single researcher as the cornerstone of their point. All mistakes that I'd find understandable in a first year student, but, again, I was hoping for more here. The vast majority of articles are also coming more from social sciences, the kind of soft outer shell that makes the hard researchers in that field cringe. I don't want to sound too hard on this book. It actually is worth buying for the good articles, and even the worst are enjoyable and thought provoking, but this book had the potential to be so much more.… (mehr)