Meditation Helps Brain Focus: could Help with Attention Deficits

By Anastacia Mott Austin

Researchers from Emory University’s School of Medicine have published a study in this month’s Public Library of Science One (PLOS One), , in which they argue that zen meditation may sharpen the brain’s focus.

Guiseppe Pagnoni, Ph. D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and his colleagues studied 12 long-time zen meditation practitioners (over three years of regular meditation practice) and compared their brains to non-practitioners.

The team, whose study was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine blood flow in the regions of the brain associated with focus and calm in all of the study’s participants.

The subjects were told to focus on their breathing, and then given an assignment in which two words flashed on a screen, a real word and a nonsense word, and they had to distinguish between the two at random intervals. They were then told to return to their focus on their breathing in between these flashes. The random flashes were designed to mimic regular thought interruptions that occur daily.

The scans showed that the experienced meditation group members were able to return to a calm, alert state much more quickly than the inexperienced group in between flashes.

The differences between the two groups were noted in areas of the brain identified as "the default mode network," which is connected to spontaneous thoughts which arise randomly. This is just the type of distraction that practitioners of zen meditation are trained to focus away from.

"This suggests that the regular practice of meditation may enhance the capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts," said Pagnoni to reporters. "This skill could be important in conditions such as attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, and major depression, characterized by excessive rumination or an abnormal production of task-unrelated thoughts."

Zen meditation is a conscious focusing, often on one’s breathing, and it is this focused attention that aids the mind in letting go of other random thoughts and "noise" that try to enter in. Ideally, the mediator is able to completely lose him- or herself in the focused breathing and allow everything else to fall away.

Pagnoni himself admitted to flaws in the study. For example, he pointed out that the experienced mediators may always have had brains that were able to reach that calmed, alert state, and were perhaps drawn to meditation because it suited qualities they already possessed. There was no way to test whether the meditation practice itself was responsible for developing that ability.

In addition, the small subject pool – 12 people in each group – is an unusually small number of subjects for an experiment to produce scientifically legitimate results (though the small subject pool was not mentioned by Pagnoni).

But Pagnoni says that questioning is a normal part of the scientific analysis of experiments, and told reporters he felt confident that the study’s results would hold up.

"It is important that this type of research be conducted with high scientific standards because it carries a long-standing stigma, perhaps well-deserved, of being ‘wishy-washy,’" said Pagnoni to reporters. "Constructive skepticism should always be welcomed as a great sparring partner."