According to a study published 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 studys
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. The study
exploited a brain phenomenon called the attentional blink. Say pictures of a
St. Bernard and a Scottish terrier are flashed before ones eyes half a second
apart, embedded in a series of 20 pictures of cats. In that
sequence, most people fail to see the second dog. Their brains have blinked.
Scientists explain this blindness as a misallocation of attention. Things are
happening too fast for the brain to detect the second stimulus. Consciousness
is somehow suppressed.
But the blink is not an inevitable bottleneck, Dr. Davidson said. Most people
can identify the second target some of the time. Thus it may be possible to
exert some control, which need not be voluntary, over the allocation of
attention.In the study, 17 volunteers with no meditation experience spent three
months at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., meditating 10 to 12
hours a day. A novice control group meditated for 20 minutes a day over the
same period. Both groups were then given attentional blink tests with two
numbers embedded in a series of letters. As both groups looked for the numbers,
their brain activity was recorded with electrodes placed on the scalp.Everyone
could detect the first number, Dr. Davidson said. But the brain recordings
showed that the less experienced meditators tended to grasp the first number
and hang onto it, so they missed the second number. Those with more experience
invested less attention to the first number, as if letting it
go. This led to an increased ability to grasp the second number. The
attentional blink was thought to be a fixed property of the nervous system, Dr.
Davidson said. But this study shows that it can change with practice. Attention
is a flexible, trainable skill.Just ask Daniel Levison, a staff researcher in
the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin who meditated for
three months as part of the study. Im a much better listener, he said. I
dont get lost in my own personal reaction to what people are saying.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/health/psychology/08medi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050138
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