Among several cognitive advantages, meditation is thought to enhance practitioners' capacity for sustained attention. In the present study, we explored this question by testing meditation practitioners (meditators) and nonpractitioners (nonmeditators) on a task that requires sustained attention, the Stroop Word-Color Task (SWCT), while using functional MRI. Participants were all right-handed...
Meditation as a cognitive enhancement technique is of growing interest in the field of health and research on brain function. The Stroop Word-Color Task (SWCT) has been adapted for neuroimaging studies as an interesting paradigm for the understanding of cognitive control mechanisms. Performance in the SWCT requires both attention and impulse control, which is trained in meditation practices. We...
FOR MANY CENTURIES, Asian philosophers have affirmed that there are different states of awareness to be developed through meditation.1 Meditation results in changes in cognition, sensory perception, affect, hormones, and autonomic activity. Until today, there have been very few imaging studies of the neural correlates of meditation. Most of them study the act of meditation by experienced...