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Untrained minds can't focus 30 seconds
The 30-second test
Picture a stopwatch on a table and the task of watching the breath, the sight of a hand, or a clock for 30 seconds without drifting into a conversation with yourself. Some people who try it will believe they succeeded, because they are so distracted by thought that they miss their own lapses.
What a retreat involves
A meditation retreat shows the effect. The days are spent in silence for 12 hours, with seated breath watching alternating with walking meditation focused on the sensations of lifting, moving, and placing the feet, and sounds and sights are added once the practice is going. The faculty being built is mindfulness, very careful attention to the contents of consciousness. Thoughts are not blocked; they are noticed as thoughts, whether they arrive as language or as images.
Ten days in
On the first day, someone might stay with the breath for five solid minutes, get lost in thought, come back, and get lost again. Ten days into a silent retreat, the experience is more and more distraction, to the point that it seems impossible to attend to anything for more than five seconds, because what they are discovering is just how distractible they are.
Why do people miss their own lapses?
Psychologist Jonathan Schooler and colleagues have studied this gap, which they call a lack of meta-awareness. In their reading experiments, they sometimes interrupted participants at random to ask whether they were zoning out, and compared those answers with the times participants caught themselves. Many people were found to be mind-wandering when interrupted without having noticed it. The same research linked these unnoticed lapses to worse comprehension of the text.
How does a retreat begin training attention?
Many ten-day retreats in the Theravada Buddhist tradition start with a narrow object. In the style taught by S. N. Goenka, the first three days are spent watching the breath at the nostrils before the practice widens to sensations across the body. The narrow start is meant to steady the mind before it observes anything broader. The English word mindfulness is a translation of the Pali word sati, which carries the sense of remembering.
Can attention training change the brain?
In a 2011 study in Psychiatry Research, Britta Hölzel and colleagues scanned participants before and after an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course. The scans showed an increase in gray matter concentration in the hippocampus, a region involved in learning and memory. Another region, the amygdala, showed a decrease in the same measure among participants who reported lower stress. The study compared the changes against a control group that did not take the course.
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