Study Suggests Meditation Can Help Train Attention

From the NY Times, "Vital Signs" May 8,2007

According to a study published today in the online edition of the journal PloS Biology, three months of rigorous training in this kind of meditation leads to a profound shift in how the brain allocates attention.

It appears that the ability to release thoughts that pop into mind frees the brain to attend to more rapidly changing things and events in the world at large, said the study’s lead author, Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Expert meditators, he said, are better than other people at detecting such fast-changing stimuli, like emotional facial expressions.

Dr. Ron Mangun, director of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, called the finding exciting. “It provides neuroscience evidence for changes in the workings of the brain with mental training, in this case meditation,” he said. “We know we can learn and improve abilities of all sorts with practice, everything from driving to playing the piano. But demonstrating this in the context of meditation is interesting and novel.”

Recent research has shown that meditation is good for the brain. It appears to increase gray matter, improve the immune system, reduce stress and promote a sense of well-being. But Dr. Davidson said this was the first study to examine how meditation affects attention.