"The previous practice of meditation improves performance on this task," Davidson says. "Attention capabilities can be enhanced through learning."
His team studied 17 volunteers, ages 22 to 64, who attended a
3-month-long meditation retreat. They spent most of each day practicing
Vipassana meditation, which focuses on reducing mental distractions and heightening sensory awareness.
Before and after the retreat, participants performed a task in which they looked for one or two numbers mixed into a series of letters flashed on a computer screen. Electrodes placed on each person's scalp measured neural activity on the brain's surface during the task. In some trials, two numbers appeared less than one-half second apart.
Before meditation training, volunteers reported seeing the second of two rapidly presented numbers about 60 percent of the time. After training, they detected the second number, on average, 80 percent of the time, Davidson's group reports in the June PLoS Biology.
