Three months of intense training in a form of meditation known as "insight" in Sanskrit can sharpen a person's brain enough to help them notice details they might otherwise miss. These new findings add to a growing body of research showing that millennia-old mental disciplines can help control and improve the mind, possibly to help treat conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)."Certain mental characteristics that were previously regarded as relatively fixed can actually be changed by mental training," University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson said. "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."Paying attention to facts requires time and effort, and since everyone only has a limited amount of brainpower to go around, details can get overlooked.

For instance, when two pictures are flashed on a video screen a half-second apart, people often miss the second image."Your attention gets stuck on the first target, then you miss the second one," Davidson said. This is called "attentional blink," an effect akin to how you might overlook something when you blink your eyes.Still, the fact that people can occasionally catch the second picture suggests it's possible to sharpen one's attention with training, which is just what the new meditation study found.

View: Full Article | Source: Live Science

When objects are shown at a half second apart people often miss them?!?! This seems like astoundingly bad performance. When I was in my 20s and working in television I could not only detect but often identify a mistake that was only half a frame long. Say during editing the editor accidentally leaves in a frame or half a frame of video that does not belong. I could see that and often tell, "Its not right. You have a shot of the reporter in between the two segments". Television runs at 30 frames per second. So in seeing that I was detecting a discrepency that lasted 1/60th of a second. I have never meditated. My abilility was a bit unusual and I was often called to preview pieces prior to broadcast. But still on their worst day I would think a person was brain damaged of just not concentrating if they missed a change in a half second. I don't know if I am still as sharp in my 40's (I no longer work in the field) but I constantly see the same sort of mistakes in local news coverage that are broadcast and very occasionally on Network Broadcast.

I have heard tales of film animators in the old days that spent too many hours in the editing bay and could no longer watch a cartoon and see it as smooth movement but rather as a series of pictures. Film runs at 24 fps. I don't know if this is true or just a story.

BTW longtime reader but my first post. Great Site!

Cheers,
RWB64

I'm sure meditation sharpens the mind, but I dought "mediation" does any such thing. Now, I'm going back to the meditative state so I can be a further pain in the a*** over other people's typos (my mind's so sharp I gotta wear padding under my hat)