Plasticity of visual attention in Isha yoga meditation practitioners before and after a 3-month retreat.
Frontiers in Psychology January 1, 2013 Claire Braboszcz, B Rael Cahn, Bhavani Balakrishnan et al.
After a 3-month intensive meditation retreat, 82 Isha yoga practitioners showed increased correct responses to incongruent stimuli in the Stroop task and a reduction of the attentional blink. A positive correlation between previous meditation experience and accuracy to incongruent Stroop stimuli was observed at baseline, while a negative correlation between previous meditation experience and attentional blink performance was also found. Participants showed a bias toward local processing in the global-local letter task, with only slight performance differences pre- vs. post-retreat. The results do not clearly support or reject the hypothesis of meditation-driven neuronal plasticity in the attentional system for Isha yoga practice, given small effect sizes and no control group.