Meditation and attention

Buddhist meditation can help people to be more attentive. Katherine MacLean, a graduate student from the University of California, Davis studied 60 people who were already involved in meditation. Half of them studied meditation for three months at a retreat in Colorado while the other half went onto a waiting list for the retreat. During the retreat the participants took a test on a computer where they had to identify the occasional shorter line displayed on the screen after a series of other ones which were of the same length. The participants who were practising meditation at the retreat got better as time went on whereas those on the waiting list stayed the same.

You can find out more about this study by clicking on the title of this post.