Learning to focus with meditation

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Everyone has trouble focusing sometimes. It’s often easiest to lose focus when you need to concentrate the most, but there’s good news for students daydreaming instead of studying and adults drifting off at their desks at work-you can train yourself to focus.

A study of individuals interested in meditation, led by UW-Madison scientist Antoine Lutz, focused on whether voluntary mental training can affect attention span. Subjects were presented with a series of frequent standard and periodic irregular tones in both ears, but asked to only pay attention to sounds in one ear and to press a button whenever they heard an irregular tone. By using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures the electrical activity of the brain, scientists studied the subject’s reaction time and variability in brain response. Individuals with Attention Hyperactivity Attention Disorder (ADHD) have a high degree of variability between individual responses, which is thought to contribute to being easily distracted and poor attention span. Researchers hypothesized that meditation would help reduce the variability in reaction time.

After three months of intense training in Vipassana meditation, participants’ brain response became more consistent and the variability in reaction time decreased, with those starting with the largest variability in reaction time showing the greatest improvement. The discovery that attention is a flexible skill had important implications for a wide range of people, from students who want to study more effectively and employees who need help focusing at work, to those suffering from attention deficit disorders. Add this discovery to its well-known stress-reducing qualities of meditation and it seems we should all take a little time out of our day to say “Om”. [UW-Madison News]