Is Meditation Bogus?

How trustworthy _is_ this neurological research?

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/acad/psyb/2010/00000050/F0020003/art00007 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation gives an idea of how large the corpus of research is now) (Most of my knowledge about meditation research, though, came from this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tRdDqXgsJ0).

Is working memory research purely a Hawthorne effect?

Is the research on meditation complete bogus and motivated completely from a desire to back up Buddhist meditation (look at who funds most of these studies...)?

I tried meditation for a month about a year back. I noticed no effect, but I don't know if it's because I wasn't doing it right, it did have an effect but I didn't notice, or if these studies really are bogus (it's not like I can have my own fMRI machine).

Another possible explanation, given the link you provided, is that most of the research is done on pathological cases. Knock on wood, I'm pretty sure I'm not one of those cases. Therefore, it could be the case that the marginal effect provided by meditation is so much significantly smaller for myself as it is for someone with ADHD that I get very little cognitive benefit (the same way that athletes hit plateaus in their training).

.....

I'm also tempted to link to the Skeptic's Dictionary's page on Transcendental Meditation here...(http://www.skepdic.com/tm.html)