Figure 1.
Latent variable composite of self-reported scores of psychological adaptive functioning improves for both
retreats and improvements are maintained 5 months after training
Figure 2.
Change in a sense of purpose in life
between the start and end of the first retreat shows a relationship
with telomerase levels in retreatants but not controls
What other changes did we expect to find in our participants after a three-month intensive
meditation retreat? Well, it makes intuitive sense for one of our hypotheses to be: the more you
meditate, the more stable your attentional capacity grows. Indeed, if you perform an average of
500 hours of attention training via a meditation practice, it would surprising if
no changes
were
found in your ability to sustain your attention over long periods of time. However, it could be argued
that training your attention while meditating only really serves your attentional capacity within that
specific context. In order to test whether or not training your attention on the cushion extended to
other situations (such is the claim of Buddhist training), we devised a task, spearheaded by
Katherine MacLean – who was, at that time, a UC Davis psychology graduate student and is now
an Instructor in Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University – called the continuous performance task
(CPT) for target detectio
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