Regular meditation sessions can have a long-lasting effect on a person’s attention span and other cognitive abilities, says an extensive study.
Regular and intensive meditation sessions over the course of a
lifetime could help a person remain attentive and focused well into old age, the study has found.
This is according to the most extensive longitudinal study to date
examining a group of meditation practitioners. Published in Springer’sJournal
of Cognitive Enhancement, the research evaluates the benefits that people
gained after three months of full-time meditation training and whether these
benefits are maintained seven years later.
Lead author Anthony Zanesco, now at the University of Miami in the
US, however, cautions that further research is needed before meditation can be
advocated as a sure-fire method for countering the effects of aging on the
brain.
This
study follows up on previous work by the same group of researchers at the
University of California, Davis in 2011, which assessed the cognitive abilities
of 30 people who regularly meditated before and after they went on a
three-month-long retreat at the Shambhala Mountain meditation center in the US.
At the center, they meditated daily using techniques designed to foster calm
sustained attention on a chosen object and to generate aspirations such as
compassion, loving-kindness, emphatic joy and equanimity among participants,
for others and themselves.
During this time, another group of 30 people who
regularly meditated were also monitored. Other than traveling to the meditation
center for a week-long assessment period, they carried on with their lives as
normal. After the first group’s initial retreat was over, the second
group received similar intensive training at the Shambhala Mountain Center.
As
part of this study, follow-up assessments were conducted six months, eighteen
months and seven years after completion of the retreats. During the last
appraisal, participants were asked to estimate how much time over the course of
seven years they had spent meditating outside of formal retreat settings, such
as through daily or non-intensive practice. The forty participants who had
remained in the study all reported some form of continued meditation practice:
85 per cent attended at least one meditation retreat, and they practiced
amounts on average that were comparable to an hour a day for seven years.
The
participants again completed assessments designed to measure their reaction
time and ability to pay attention to a task. Although these did not improve,
the cognitive gains accrued after the 2011 training and assessment were
partially maintained many years later. This was especially true for older
participants who practiced a lot of meditation over the seven years. Compared
to those who practiced less, they maintained cognitive gains and did not show
typical patterns of age-related decline in sustained attention.
“This
study is the first to offer evidence that intensive and continued meditation
practice is associated with enduring improvements in sustained attention and
response inhibition, with the potential to alter longitudinal trajectories of
cognitive change across a person’s life,” says Zanesco.
He
is aware that participants’ lifestyle or personality might have contributed to
the observations. Zanesco therefore calls for further research into meditation
as an intervention to improve brain functioning among older people.
He
says the current findings also provide a sobering appraisal of whether
short-term or non-intensive mindfulness interventions are helpful to improve
sustained attention in a lasting manner. Participants practiced far more
meditation than is feasible for shorter-term programs that might aim to help
with cognitive aging, and despite practicing that much meditation, participants
did not generally improve over years; these benefits instead plateaued. Zanesco
believes this has broad implications for meditation and mindfulness-based
approaches to cognitive training and raises important questions regarding how
much meditation can, in fact, influence human cognition and the workings of the
brain.
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