14 DAY TRIAL // If you think that just the muscles can be trained, you're wrong! Brain can be trained also. A new research shows how three months of intense training in a form of 2,500 year old Buddhist mediation known as Vipassana ("insight" in Sanskrit) can sharpen significantly the brain ability, especially attention to details.These discoveries could be employed in the treatment of conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) found in children. "Certain mental characteristics that were previously regarded as relatively fixed can actually be changed by mental training. People know physical exercise can improve the body, but our research and that of others holds out the prospects that mental exercise can improve minds," said lead-researcher neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin.
Attention requires time and energy, and because our brainpower is limited, we can miss many details. E.g., when two images are flashed on a video screen, 0.5 seconds apart, most people miss the second one. "Your attention gets stuck on the first target, then you miss the second one," Davidson said. The phenomenon is called "attentional blink". But people can be trained to catch the second image by attention training through meditation, as the new research found. "Meditation is a family of methods designed to facilitate regulation of emotion and attention," said Davidson.
Recently, researchers have discovered that meditation changes brain functions. Trained Tibetan monks could concentrate on just one image much longer than normal when presented two different images at each eye. People who meditated on average 40 minutes each day were found to present hypertrophied brain areas connected to attention and sensory functions. "Certain kinds of mental characteristics such as attention or certain emotions such as happiness can best be regarded as skills that can be trained." said Davidson.
Vipassana focuses on decreasing mental distraction and improving sensory awareness. The team analyzed 17 volunteers before and after three months of rigorous Vipassana training, for 10-12 hours daily, but also 23 novices that meditated 20 minutes daily for a week. While their brain activity was monitored, the volunteers watched numbers flashed on a video screen amongst distracting letters. The brains of the trained volunteers needed less time to detect details than at the beginning of the research but also improved their ability to detect the second number of the "attentional blink", while the novices did not experience a significant improvement.
"This attentional blink finding shows a little wedge of what might be a much larger dimension of experience that could be opened up by meditation techniques," said neuroscientist Clifford Saron at the University of California-Davis Center for Mind and Brain. "You can imagine that life is a series of attentional blinks, and we might be missing an awful lot of what's going on. Applications of this work include treatment of attention-related conditions," Davidson explained.
This could be a start in analyzing meditation "because it is beginning to be recognized as something that takes advantage of the plasticity of the brain, has relatively few if any side-effects and has potentially very beneficial effects, the impact of which can be documented using the most rigorous scientific methods." Davidson's team is also aiming to see the meditation impact on pain, inflammation regulation, and emotions and affective brain circuits.