Meditate boosts attention span
By ANIWednesday, July 14, 2010
WASHINGTON - Daily meditation not only gives us a peaceful life, it also boosts attention spans, says a new study.
Katherine MacLean at the University of California Davis and her co-advisor, Clifford Saron conducted a study, wherein thirty people went on a Buddhist meditation retreat with B. Alan Wallace, another researcher and Buddhist scholar.
Participants took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention.
They got better at discriminating the short lines as the training went on. Sustaining attention became easier with meditation so they also improved their task performance over a long period of time.
“Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it’s kind of a perfect index of meditation training,” says MacLean.
“You realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted,” she added.
The results are published in Psychological Science. (ANI)
