Study: Meditating Can Help You Focus And Keep Your Brain Young

If you're worried about your dwindling attention span or what might happen to your brain as you get older, consider picking up meditation.

The most extensive longitudinal study to date on how meditation improves your ability to focus was just published last month in Springer's Journal of Cognitive Enhancement and suggests that meditating has "the potential to alter longitudinal trajectories of cognitive change across a person's life."

In other words, it could prevent age-related mental decline.

"This study is the first to offer evidence that intensive and continued meditation practice is associated with enduring improvements in sustained attention," lead author Anthony Zanesco, a psychologist at the University of Miami, and his colleagues report in the seven-year study.

The experiment began in 2011 when Zanesco, then at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues assessed participants, who ranged from from 22 to 69-years-old, before and after they attended a three-month retreat at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado. The participants underwent various types of meditation training, such as sustaining focus on objects, practicing mindful breathing techniques and generating positive feelings of compassion, loving-kindness, empathetic joy and equanimity for others and themselves. (MORE)

Source: CNBC