A study has found no differences in accuracy on an attentional blink task between individuals skilled in mindfulness meditation and individuals without those skills. There were also no differences in general neural activity between these groups. However, the group of mindfulness meditators did show some neural activity patterns indicative of enhanced attention at certain points. The paper was published in Mindfulness.
Mindfulness meditation is a mental training practice that involves focusing one’s attention on the present moment, often using the breath as a point of focus. It encourages awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations without judgment or reaction, fostering a state of calm observation. Originating from Buddhist traditions, mindfulness meditation has been adapted into various secular programs to reduce stress, anxiety, and promote overall well-being. The practice typically involves sitting quietly, paying attention to the breath, the body, thoughts, sounds, and the surrounding environment, and bringing the mind back to the present whenever it wanders.
In modern times, mindfulness meditation is often taught as part of mindfulness-based interventions, psychotherapeutic procedures aimed at alleviating symptoms of depression, pain, or addiction. However, in spite of its widespread use, the neuropsychological mechanisms through which mindfulness meditation achieves it effects are not fully understood. One proposed potential mechanism might be that these practices improve attention. If that is the case, then brain activity measures should show different brain activity in areas responsible for regulating attention in individuals skilled in mindfulness meditation.
Study author Neil W. Bailey and his colleagues wanted to compare brain activity of experienced mindfulness meditators and healthy individuals not experienced in mindfulness meditation while they perform an attention task.
The study involved 31 experienced meditators from the general public and 30 healthy individuals lacking experience in mindfulness meditation. To qualify as a meditator, participants needed at least two years of meditation experience and a practice routine of a minimum of two hours per week over the past three months. Participant ages ranged from 20 to 64 years. Exclusion criteria included current use of psychoactive medication, brain injury, or a diagnosis of neurological or psychiatric conditions.
In the scope of the study, participants underwent electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of brain activity while they performed various cognitive tasks. In this study, the authors of the paper analyzed their activity while performing the attentional blink task.
The attentional blink task is a cognitive psychology tool used to investigate how the brain processes rapidly presented information. Participants view a quick sequence of letters or numbers on a screen, including two targets they must identify. The challenge arises because these targets are presented very close together in time, usually within a few hundred milliseconds. When the second target appears in close time proximity to the first target (typically within 200-500 milliseconds) participants often fail to detect it, even though they identified the first target correctly. This failure is known as the “attentional blink,” suggesting a temporary decrease in the brain’s ability to capture new visual information immediately after processing a previous piece of information.
In this study, the attentional blink task involved a sequence of 19 letters and numbers, each displayed for 66 milliseconds with a 33-ms pause between them. Two numbers served as targets amidst the letter sequence, and participants were tasked with entering these numbers on a keypad. Researchers assessed their accuracy in this task.
The researchers expected that meditators would utilize less attention-related neural resources for the first target, reflected in their neural activity (lower P3b neural response amplitude to the first number). However, the results showed no difference in neural activity between meditators and the control group.
There were also no differences between the two groups in the accuracy of their answers to the task. Further analysis of neural activity did seem to show that meditators prioritized attention to the second stimulus. They also showed somewhat altered neural activity when processing the second stimulus (the second number in the letter-number stream) compared to the control group.
“Our results showed multiple differences in neural activity that suggested enhanced attention in meditators. The neural activity patterns in meditators aligned with theoretical perspectives on activity associated with enhanced cognitive performance. These include enhanced alpha “gating” mechanisms (where alpha activity acts as a filter between sensory and higher order neural processes), increased oscillatory synchronization to stimuli, and more equal allocation of neural activity across stimuli. However, meditators did not show higher task accuracy, nor were the effects consistent with our primary hypotheses or previous research,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on the neural activity specificities of individuals who practice mindfulness meditation. However, the study also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Notably, the number of study participants was very small and researchers compared neural activity only during a single attention task. There might be differences in neural activity between these groups when processing other types of tasks.
The paper, “Experienced Meditators Show Multifaceted Attention‑Related Differences in Neural Activity”, was authored by Neil W. Bailey, Oliver Baell, Jake Elijah Payne, Gregory Humble, Harry Geddes, Isabella Chill, Aron T. hill, Sung Wook Chung, Melanie Emonson, Oscar W. Murphy, and Paul B. Fitzgerald.
