Meditation Helps Increase Attention Span

July 15, 2010

A new study by psychologists at University of California, Davis has found that Buddhist meditation can improve a person’s ability to be attentive and helps people do better at focusing for a long time on a task that requires them to distinguish small differences between things they see.

A group of 60 people took part in several experiments. At three points during a retreat, each participant took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention. They watched a screen intently as lines flashed on it; most were of the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to click the mouse in response.

Participants got better at discriminating the short lines as the training went on. This improvement in perception made it easier to sustain attention, so they also improved their task performance over a long period of time. This improvement persisted five months after the retreat, particularly for people who continued to meditate every day.

This experiment is one of many that were done by a team of nearly 30 researchers with the same group of participants. It’s the most comprehensive study of intensive meditation to date, using methods drawn from fields as diverse as molecular biology, neuroscience, and anthropology. Future analyses of these same volunteers will look at other mental abilities, such as how well people can regulate their emotions and their general well-being.

More info: Association for Psychological Science