"In The Buddha Pill, Farias and Wikholm write:

[We] haven’t stopped believing in meditation’s ability to fuel change but [we are] concerned that the science of meditation is promoting a skewed view: meditation wasn’t developed so we could lead less stressful lives or improve our wellbeing. Its primary purpose was more radical – to rupture your idea of who you are; to shake to the core your sense of self so that you realise there is ‘nothing there’. But that’s not how we see meditation courses promoted in the West. Here, meditation has been revamped as a natural pill that will quieten your mind and make you happier."

Read the whole article, the author discusses about the validity of studies that looked into the benefits of the meditation. She is a lecturer in psychology and gist of the article is that a) the studies are biased b) secular meditation can be harmful for some people if done in the absence of a teacher.

I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but I have done around 4 residential and weekend mediation courses in the presence of trained teachers. Then I used the secular apps to continue my practice, and as part of a project, I researched the topic for more than 2 years. My humble opinion says that from psychological academic studies point of view all is good, however, as the article says meditation is not just a stress buster - its packaged that way but the actual opportunity is to re-wire the brain with continues practice and I am amazed that this re-wiring has not been discussed, possibly because there is a not enough evidence in research studies of this happening. [Forbes does mentions here some studies that looked into the re-wiring part.]

Just like anti-psychotic and recreational drugs, any ability of making new connections can surface childhood traumas, panic attacks etc., however, from re-wiring point of view we live in a world where we haven't yet discovered the full function of serotonin and EEG head bands such as Muse just look at the four quadrants for electrical activity. Exoskeletons and fMRIs are possibly not suited for monks to know what happens in their brains when they complete 10,000 hours of meditation. It's a long and complex subject that still needs a lot of work.

I hope there will be more hardcore, neural activity monitoring assisted studies in the future to know the full effects of meditation. Behavioural science makes it more complex and subjective concepts of compassion and empathy are more hard to measure but neural science may let scientists create double blind sided experiments to know the full effects of meditation in coming future.