Meditation 101: Remain calm, see clearly

UC DAVIS (US)—Visual perception and sustained attention can be improved through intensive mental training and meditation, new research shows.
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The visual attention experiments were based on tests traditionally used to assess vigilance in radar operators and other professions requiring long durations of uninterrupted attention: participants had to watch lines appearing on a screen and click a mouse when they saw lines that were shorter than others.
By midway through the retreat, meditators had become better at making fine visual distinctions. They were able to identify a smaller difference between “long” and “short” lines, and were better able to sustain attention during the half-hour test. Those findings are consistent with Buddhist claims that meditation cultivates “attentional vividness.”

People who continued practicing meditation after the retreat still showed improvements in perception when they were retested about five months later.